Bug#926896: sysvinit-utils: pidof is unreliable

[Axel Beckert]

Hi,

Костик Покотиленко wrote:
> > So from what I gather, this means that procps's pidof has the problem
> > described in this bug report?
> >
> > From my point of view the only way to solve this without reopening
> > #719273 is to add a switch which recognizes D processes or not. Or
> > adds some kind of timeout.
>
> I don't think so, because:
> 
> 1. Nowadays Fedora uses pidof from procps, it does not use neither stat()
> not realpath(). Its source code has mention:
> 
> "avoiding stat(2) on NFS volumes doesn't make any sense anymore as this
> reworked solution does not use stat(2) at all"
> https://gitlab.com/procps-ng/procps/-/blob/master/pidof.c#L347
> 
> 2. In Debian the intention was to resolve #719273, but it has next
> statement:
> 
> https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=719273#42
> ===========
> Also, at the current time (and IIRC this wasn't the case when we submitted
> the original patch), start-stop-daemon is a binary not a script, and it
> doesn't call pidof or killall.  Instead it uses its own code, and that code
> is subject to the same issue where it hangs on stuck NFS partitions.
> Therefore, as it stands, applying this patch to 'pidof' will no longer
> resolve the issue; similar changes would have to be made to 'killall'.
> ===========

Thanks for digging up these details!

		Regards, Axel
-- 
 ,''`.  |  Axel Beckert <abe at debian.org>, https://people.debian.org/~abe/
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