fs, proc: introduce /proc/<pid>/task/<tid>/children entry

When we do checkpoint of a task we need to know the list of children the
task, has but there is no easy and fast way to generate reverse
parent->children chain from arbitrary <pid> (while a parent pid is
provided in "PPid" field of /proc/<pid>/status).

So instead of walking over all pids in the system (creating one big
process tree in memory, just to figure out which children a task has) --
we add explicit /proc/<pid>/task/<tid>/children entry, because the kernel
already has this kind of information but it is not yet exported.

This is a first level children, not the whole process tree.

Signed-off-by: Cyrill Gorcunov <gorcunov@openvz.org>
Reviewed-by: Oleg Nesterov <oleg@redhat.com>
Reviewed-by: Kees Cook <keescook@chromium.org>
Cc: Pavel Emelyanov <xemul@parallels.com>
Cc: Serge Hallyn <serge.hallyn@canonical.com>
Cc: KAMEZAWA Hiroyuki <kamezawa.hiroyu@jp.fujitsu.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>

1 files changed, 18 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/Documentation/filesystems/proc.txt b/Documentation/filesystems/proc.txt
index 912af6ce5626..d8d3f9a8e5a3 100644
--- a/Documentation/filesystems/proc.txt
+++ b/Documentation/filesystems/proc.txt
@@ -40,6 +40,7 @@ Table of Contents
   3.4	/proc/<pid>/coredump_filter - Core dump filtering settings
   3.5	/proc/<pid>/mountinfo - Information about mounts
   3.6	/proc/<pid>/comm  & /proc/<pid>/task/<tid>/comm
+  3.7   /proc/<pid>/task/<tid>/children - Information about task children
 
   4	Configuring procfs
   4.1	Mount options
@@ -1578,6 +1579,23 @@ then the kernel's TASK_COMM_LEN (currently 16 chars) will result in a truncated
 comm value.
 
 
+3.7	/proc/<pid>/task/<tid>/children - Information about task children
+-------------------------------------------------------------------------
+This file provides a fast way to retrieve first level children pids
+of a task pointed by <pid>/<tid> pair. The format is a space separated
+stream of pids.
+
+Note the "first level" here -- if a child has own children they will
+not be listed here, one needs to read /proc/<children-pid>/task/<tid>/children
+to obtain the descendants.
+
+Since this interface is intended to be fast and cheap it doesn't
+guarantee to provide precise results and some children might be
+skipped, especially if they've exited right after we printed their
+pids, so one need to either stop or freeze processes being inspected
+if precise results are needed.
+
+
 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 Configuring procfs
 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------