Re: Glibc, large PIDs etc (Was: Killing clones)

Richard Henderson (rth@cygnus.com)
Sat, 23 Aug 1997 11:57:07 -0700 (PDT)


Michael Johnson wrote:
> Erik's response was to the question of how long we keep binary
> compatibility for old apps, and suggested a solution (personalities)
> for moving to larger data types without breaking compatibility.
> I would personally suggest new syscalls for this, but it is the
> same problem either way.

Neither one really works in the case of pid's. Once you move to
a 32-bit pid in the kernel, there is nothing sensible one can
return for getppid, when the parent's id is 100001.

One could make a case for using personalities (discovered at exec
time) for controling the pid range that a particular new process
will be allocated to, and for using personalities for determining
the pid range for fork. But the ppid case of new execing old
would seem to be a show-stopper.

r~