Synchronization problem with posix_spawn

[Ken Brown <kbrown@cornell.edu>]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 1179 bytes --]

posix_spawn(p) returns before the spawned process is fully up and running.  As a 
result, the spawned process can fail to receive signals.  The attached test case 
illustrates the problem.  It spawns a sleep process and then tries to kill it. 
On exit, the sleep process is still running.

The following excerpts from the strace output show the issue: The SIGTERM signal 
is sent after the main program has forked a subprocess (and posix_spawnp has 
returned), but before the forked subprocess has exec'd the sleep process:

   559   32069 [main] spawn_test 4125 vfork: stub called
   257   48437 [main] spawn_test 4125 dofork: 4126 = fork()
   754    9511 [main] spawn_test 4126 dofork: 0 = fork()
    66   48503 [main] spawn_test 4125 kill0: kill (4126, 15)
    44    9555 [main] spawn_test 4126 find_exec: find_exec (/usr/bin/sleep)
    42   10835 [main] spawn_test 4126 spawnve: spawnve (/usr/bin/sleep, sleep, 
0x8000281A0)
    45    3149 [main] sleep 4126 child_info::ready: signalled 0x164 that I was ready
  6475   21055 [main] spawn_test 4126! child_info::sync: pid 45028, WFMO 
returned 0, exit_code 0x103, res 1
--- Process 45028 (pid: 4126) thread 41444 created

Ken

[-- Attachment #2: spawn_test.c --]
[-- Type: text/plain, Size: 469 bytes --]

#include <stdlib.h>
#include <stdio.h>
#include <string.h>
#include <spawn.h>
#include <signal.h>

extern char **environ;

pid_t
run_sleep ()
{
  pid_t pid;
  char *argv[] = { "sleep", "3600", NULL };
  int err = posix_spawnp (&pid, "/usr/bin/sleep", NULL, NULL, argv, environ);
  if (err == 0)
    return pid;
  else
    {
      printf ("posix_spawnp: %s\n", strerror (err));
      exit (1);
    }
}

int
main ()
{
  pid_t pid = run_sleep ();
  kill (pid, SIGTERM);
}