On Sun, Aug 30, 2015 at 9:19 AM Alexander Kjeldaas < alexander.kjeldaas@gmail.com> wrote:
The directory is irrelevant. fork() + exec() is not an atomic operation:
This creates problems for all resources that act as locks. IIRC (it's been a few years since I looked through it thoroughly), it's been shown that there isn't a general fix for this. I.e - that the POSIX threading model & fork() will having timing issues of some sort or another no matter what you do. The work-around is to only fork when no such resources are held. So you do things like fork all your processes before starting a thread, or fork a server that will do all further forks upon request before starting a thread, etc. So the question should not be whether CLO_EXEC "fixes everything", but whether having it as the default is a good enough idea to be worth the pain of changing. I suspect the answer is yes, as most cases where it isn't set are probably because it's the default, so won't need changing.