Add a new clone3() flag CLONE_AUTOREAP that makes a child process
auto-reap on exit without ever becoming a zombie. This is a per-process
property in contrast to the existing auto-reap mechanism via
SA_NOCLDWAIT or SIG_IGN for SIGCHLD which applies to all children of a
given parent.
Currently the only way to automatically reap children is to set
SA_NOCLDWAIT or SIG_IGN on SIGCHLD. This is a parent-scoped property
affecting all children which makes it unsuitable for libraries or
applications that need selective auto-reaping of specific children while
still being able to wait() on others.
CLONE_AUTOREAP stores an autoreap flag in the child's signal_struct.
When the child exits do_notify_parent() checks this flag and causes
exit_notify() to transition the task directly to EXIT_DEAD. Since the
flag lives on the child it survives reparenting: if the original parent
exits and the child is reparented to a subreaper or init the child still
auto-reaps when it eventually exits.
CLONE_AUTOREAP can be combined with CLONE_PIDFD to allow the parent to
monitor the child's exit via poll() and retrieve exit status via
PIDFD_GET_INFO. Without CLONE_PIDFD it provides a fire-and-forget
pattern where the parent simply doesn't care about the child's exit
status. No exit signal is delivered so exit_signal must be zero.
CLONE_AUTOREAP is rejected in combination with CLONE_PARENT. If a
CLONE_AUTOREAP child were to clone(CLONE_PARENT) the new grandchild
would inherit exit_signal == 0 from the autoreap parent's group leader
but without signal->autoreap. This grandchild would become a zombie that
never sends a signal and is never autoreaped - confusing and arguably
broken behavior.
The flag is not inherited by the autoreap process's own children. Each
child that should be autoreaped must be explicitly created with
CLONE_AUTOREAP.
Link: https://github.com/uapi-group/kernel-features/issues/45
Link: https://patch.msgid.link/20260226-work-pidfs-autoreap-v5-1-d148b984a989@kernel.org
Reviewed-by: Oleg Nesterov <oleg@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Christian Brauner <brauner@kernel.org>
Christian Brauner
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