BUG/MEDIUM: threads/mworker: fix a race on startup
Marc Fournier reported an interesting case when using threads with the
master-worker mode : sometimes, a listener would have its FD closed
during startup. Sometimes it could even be health checks seeing this.
What happens is that after the threads are created, and the pollers
enabled on each threads, the master-worker pipe is registered, and at
the same time a close() is performed on the write side of this pipe
since the children must not use it.
But since this is replicated in every thread, what happens is that the
first thread closes the pipe, thus releases the FD, and the next thread
starting a listener in parallel gets this FD reassigned. Then another
thread closes the FD again, which this time corresponds to the listener.
It can also happen with the health check sockets if they're started
early enough.
This patch splits the mworker_pipe_register() function in two, so that
the close() of the write side of the FD is performed very early after the
fork() and long before threads are created (we don't need to delay it
anyway). Only the pipe registration is done in the threaded code since
it is important that the pollers are properly allocated for this.
The mworker_pipe_register() function now takes care of registering the
pipe only once, and this is guaranteed by a new surrounding lock.
The call to protocol_enable_all() looks fragile in theory since it
scans the list of proxies and their listeners, though in practice
all threads scan the same list and take the same locks for each
listener so it's not possible that any of them escapes the process
and finishes before all listeners are started. And the operation is
idempotent.
This fix must be backported to 1.8. Thanks to Marc for providing very
detailed traces clearly showing the problem.
diff --git a/include/common/hathreads.h b/include/common/hathreads.h
index f819536..cfcb48e 100644
--- a/include/common/hathreads.h
+++ b/include/common/hathreads.h
@@ -237,6 +237,7 @@
PID_LIST_LOCK,
EMAIL_ALERTS_LOCK,
PIPES_LOCK,
+ START_LOCK,
LOCK_LABELS
};
struct lock_stat {