python-trio / python-trio/trio

Better handling of os.fork from inside trio

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#464 4 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

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design discussion low-level polish subprocesses user happiness
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Description

If you call os.fork from inside a trio context, and then try to use trio in both the parent and the child, you are going to have a bad time. fork is a very powerful tool, and leaves the process in a strange state: the child is just like the parent, except that threads etc. have disappeared, and they share all fd's (including the self-pipe), etc. This seems essentially unsolvable: if you want to start a new process from trio using fork+exec, that's fine, but anything else is probably not going to work. I guess if you fork and then only execute synchronous code in the child then things might be mostly OK (though you've just leaked a bunch of memory in the child, because it will forever keep copies of all the parent process's data, and copy-on-write won't save you because of Python's well-known issues with GC causing un-sharing).

(See also bpo-21998, which is asyncio's version of this issue.)

We should at least document this. It would also be good to actually catch it and provide some error, since nobody reads the documentation.

One approach is to record the pid when we enter trio, and then each time we touch trio state, verify that os.getpid() still gives the same value. I guess "enter trio" here means any of the @_public methods in trio/_core, yielding to the event loop, and TrioToken.run_sync_soon?

In 3.7 there's os.register_at_fork, which could potentially be useful (maybe to reduce overhead?), but I'm not entirely sure how.

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First steps

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  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

Start by reading the Trio entry points mentioned in trio/_core, including @_public methods, event-loop yielding, and TrioToken.run_sync_soon, alongside Python's os.register_at_fork. Determine whether the intended outcome is documentation, PID checks, or both; done should clearly prevent or explain unsafe Trio use after os.fork.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
python
Domain
operating-systems
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Mostly clear
Newbie friendliness
30/100

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