The old semantics of virFork() violates the priciple of good
usability: it requires the caller to check the pid argument
after use, *even when virFork returned -1*, in order to properly
abort a child process that failed setup done immediately after
fork() - that is, the caller must call _exit() in the child.
While uses in virfile.c did this correctly, uses in 'virsh
lxc-enter-namespace' and 'virt-login-shell' would happily return
from the calling function in both the child and the parent,
leading to very confusing results. [Thankfully, I found the
problem by inspection, and can't actually trigger the double
return on error without an LD_PRELOAD library.]
It is much better if the semantics of virFork are impossible
to abuse. Looking at virFork(), the parent could only ever
return -1 with a non-negative pid if it misused pthread_sigmask,
but this never happens. Up until this patch series, the child
could return -1 with non-negative pid if it fails to set up
signals correctly, but we recently fixed that to make the child
call _exit() at that point instead of forcing the caller to do
it. Thus, the return value and contents of the pid argument are
now redundant (a -1 return now happens only for failure to fork,
a child 0 return only happens for a successful 0 pid, and a
parent 0 return only happens for a successful non-zero pid),
so we might as well return the pid directly rather than an
integer of whether it succeeded or failed; this is also good
from the interface design perspective as users are already
familiar with fork() semantics.
One last change in this patch: before returning the pid directly,
I found cases where using virProcessWait unconditionally on a
cleanup path of a virFork's -1 pid return would be nicer if there
were a way to avoid it overwriting an earlier message. While
such paths are a bit harder to come by with my change to a direct
pid return, I decided to keep the virProcessWait change in this
patch.
* src/util/vircommand.h (virFork): Change signature.
* src/util/vircommand.c (virFork): Guarantee that child will only
return on success, to simplify callers. Return pid rather than
status, now that the situations are always the same.
(virExec): Adjust caller, also avoid open-coding process death.
* src/util/virprocess.c (virProcessWait): Tweak semantics when pid
is -1.
(virProcessRunInMountNamespace): Adjust caller.
* src/util/virfile.c (virFileAccessibleAs, virFileOpenForked)
(virDirCreate): Likewise.
* tools/virt-login-shell.c (main): Likewise.
* tools/virsh-domain.c (cmdLxcEnterNamespace): Likewise.
* tests/commandtest.c (test23): Likewise.
Signed-off-by: Eric Blake <eblake@redhat.com>
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