pidfd: add PIDFD_SELF* sentinels to refer to own thread/process

It is useful to be able to utilise the pidfd mechanism to reference the
current thread or process (from a userland point of view - thread group
leader from the kernel's point of view).

Therefore introduce PIDFD_SELF_THREAD to refer to the current thread, and
PIDFD_SELF_THREAD_GROUP to refer to the current thread group leader.

For convenience and to avoid confusion from userland's perspective we alias
these:

* PIDFD_SELF is an alias for PIDFD_SELF_THREAD - This is nearly always what
  the user will want to use, as they would find it surprising if for
  instance fd's were unshared()'d and they wanted to invoke pidfd_getfd()
  and that failed.

* PIDFD_SELF_PROCESS is an alias for PIDFD_SELF_THREAD_GROUP - Most users
  have no concept of thread groups or what a thread group leader is, and
  from userland's perspective and nomenclature this is what userland
  considers to be a process.

We adjust pidfd_get_task() and the pidfd_send_signal() system call with
specific handling for this, implementing this functionality for
process_madvise(), process_mrelease() (albeit, using it here wouldn't
really make sense) and pidfd_send_signal().

Signed-off-by: Lorenzo Stoakes <lorenzo.stoakes@oracle.com>
Link: https://lore.kernel.org/r/24315a16a3d01a548dd45c7515f7d51c767e954e.1738268370.git.lorenzo.stoakes@oracle.com
Signed-off-by: Christian Brauner <brauner@kernel.org>

1 files changed, 24 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/include/uapi/linux/pidfd.h b/include/uapi/linux/pidfd.h
index 4540f6301b8c..e0abd0b18841 100644
--- a/include/uapi/linux/pidfd.h
+++ b/include/uapi/linux/pidfd.h
@@ -23,6 +23,30 @@
 
 #define PIDFD_INFO_SIZE_VER0		64 /* sizeof first published struct */
 
+/*
+ * The concept of process and threads in userland and the kernel is a confusing
+ * one - within the kernel every thread is a 'task' with its own individual PID,
+ * however from userland's point of view threads are grouped by a single PID,
+ * which is that of the 'thread group leader', typically the first thread
+ * spawned.
+ *
+ * To cut the Gideon knot, for internal kernel usage, we refer to
+ * PIDFD_SELF_THREAD to refer to the current thread (or task from a kernel
+ * perspective), and PIDFD_SELF_THREAD_GROUP to refer to the current thread
+ * group leader...
+ */
+#define PIDFD_SELF_THREAD		-10000 /* Current thread. */
+#define PIDFD_SELF_THREAD_GROUP		-20000 /* Current thread group leader. */
+
+/*
+ * ...and for userland we make life simpler - PIDFD_SELF refers to the current
+ * thread, PIDFD_SELF_PROCESS refers to the process thread group leader.
+ *
+ * For nearly all practical uses, a user will want to use PIDFD_SELF.
+ */
+#define PIDFD_SELF		PIDFD_SELF_THREAD
+#define PIDFD_SELF_PROCESS	PIDFD_SELF_THREAD_GROUP
+
 struct pidfd_info {
 	/*
 	 * This mask is similar to the request_mask in statx(2).