[PATCH v5 1/3] Introduce -l/--syscall-limit option

[Sahil Siddiq]

Hi,

On Tuesday, 28 March 2023 17:23:30 IST Dmitry V. Levin wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> On Tue, Mar 28, 2023 at 01:11:50PM +0530, Sahil Siddiq wrote:
> > [...]
> > I was experimenting with the test a bit more and I have a few queries:
> > 
> > 1. I applied your changes and experimented with it a bit. The test now
> >     ends immediately. However, I noticed that in this case, strace terminates
> >     completely and the tracee is reparented. Once this happens, the
> >     process seems to be in the interruptible sleep state. If the tracee
> >     is interactive and requires input from the user, it is unable to do
> >     so because the process no longer remains in the foreground.
> What is the alternative?  When strace is interrupted by signal,
> it forwards the signal to strace_child process, but in this case
> there is no signal to forward.  Also, I suppose --syscall-limit
> would be used together with -p.

In the ideal case, I would expect strace to terminate while the shell (such a bash)
becomes the tracee's parent. I know one can use prctl() with "PR_SET_CHILD_SUBREAPER"
to reparent an orphan process to the nearest living ancestor, but I do not know
how to set this option for the shell.

The options I have thought of are:

1. to simply let "init" become the parent of the orphaned tracee after strace
    terminates. But if the detached tracee is interactive, it may interfere with
    current shell.

2. to stop the tracee after strace terminates (which is probably not desired).

3. to let strace run and remain as the parent of the tracee without tracing more
    syscalls. In this case, strace would have detached from the tracees but it won't
    terminate. (I have understood that "-b execve" is per-tracee and not global.
    However, I noticed that if every child/thread invokes execve and "-b execve"
    detaches from all of those threads, strace still remains the parent and does not
    terminate. In this case, strace would sleep for a minute even after detaching from
    tracee in "strace--syscall-limit.test"

Which approach would you suggest? Or is there another way that I could try out?

Regards,
Sahil