A program that repeatedly forks and waits is susceptible to having the
same pid repeated, especially when it competes with another instance of
the same program.  This is really bad for bash implementation.
Furthermore, many shell scripts assume that pid numbers will not be used
for some length of time.

Race Description:

A                                    B

// pid == offset == n                // pid == offset == n + 1
test_and_set_bit(offset, map->page)
                                     test_and_set_bit(offset, map->page);
                                     pid_ns->last_pid = pid;
pid_ns->last_pid = pid;
                                     // pid == n + 1 is freed (wait())

                                     // Next fork()...
                                     last = pid_ns->last_pid; // == n
                                     pid = last + 1;

Code to reproduce it (Running multiple instances is more effective):

#include <errno.h>
#include <sys/types.h>
#include <sys/wait.h>
#include <unistd.h>
#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>

// The distance mod 32768 between two pids, where the first pid is expected
// to be smaller than the second.
int PidDistance(pid_t first, pid_t second) {
  return (second + 32768 - first) % 32768;
}

int main(int argc, char* argv[]) {
  int failed = 0;
  pid_t last_pid = 0;
  int i;
  printf("%d\n", sizeof(pid_t));
  for (i = 0; i < 10000000; ++i) {
    if (i % 32786 == 0)
      printf("Iter: %d\n", i/32768);
    int child_exit_code = i % 256;
    pid_t pid = fork();
    if (pid == -1) {
      fprintf(stderr, "fork failed, iteration %d, errno=%d", i, errno);
      exit(1);
    }
    if (pid == 0) {
      // Child
      exit(child_exit_code);
    } else {
      // Parent
      if (i > 0) {
        int distance = PidDistance(last_pid, pid);
        if (distance == 0 || distance > 30000) {
          fprintf(stderr,
                  "Unexpected pid sequence: previous fork: pid=%d, "
                  "current fork: pid=%d for iteration=%d.\n",
                  last_pid, pid, i);
          failed = 1;
        }
      }
      last_pid = pid;
      int status;
      int reaped = wait(&status);
      if (reaped != pid) {
        fprintf(stderr,
                "Wait return value: expected pid=%d, "
                "got %d, iteration %d\n",
                pid, reaped, i);
        failed = 1;
      } else if (WEXITSTATUS(status) != child_exit_code) {
        fprintf(stderr,
                "Unexpected exit status %x, iteration %d\n",
                WEXITSTATUS(status), i);
        failed = 1;
      }
    }
  }
  exit(failed);
}

Thanks to Ted Tso for the key ideas of this implementation.

Signed-off-by: Salman Qazi <sqazi@google.com>
Cc: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
Cc: Theodore Ts'o <tytso@mit.edu>
Cc: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
Cc: Sukadev Bhattiprolu <sukadev@us.ibm.com>
Cc: "Eric W. Biederman" <ebiederm@xmission.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>