clone, __clone2 - create a child process
/* Prototype for the glibc wrapper function */
#define _GNU_SOURCE
#include <sched.h>
int clone(int (*fn)(void *), void *child_stack,
int flags, void *arg, ...
/* pid_t *ptid, void *newtls, pid_t *ctid */ );
/* For the prototype of the raw system call, see NOTES */
clone() creates a new process, in a manner similar to
fork(2).
This page describes both the glibc clone() wrapper function
and the underlying system call on which it is based. The main text describes
the wrapper function; the differences for the raw system call are described
toward the end of this page.
Unlike fork(2), clone() allows the child process to
share parts of its execution context with the calling process, such as the
virtual address space, the table of file descriptors, and the table of
signal handlers. (Note that on this manual page, "calling process"
normally corresponds to "parent process". But see the description
of CLONE_PARENT below.)
One use of clone() is to implement threads: multiple flows
of control in a program that run concurrently in a shared address space.
When the child process is created with clone(), it
commences execution by calling the function pointed to by the argument
fn. (This differs from fork(2), where execution continues in
the child from the point of the fork(2) call.) The arg
argument is passed as the argument of the function fn.
When the fn(arg) function returns, the child process
terminates. The integer returned by fn is the exit status for the
child process. The child process may also terminate explicitly by calling
exit(2) or after receiving a fatal signal.
The child_stack argument specifies the location of the
stack used by the child process. Since the child and calling process may
share memory, it is not possible for the child process to execute in the
same stack as the calling process. The calling process must therefore set up
memory space for the child stack and pass a pointer to this space to
clone(). Stacks grow downward on all processors that run Linux
(except the HP PA processors), so child_stack usually points to the
topmost address of the memory space set up for the child stack.
The low byte of flags contains the number of the
termination signal sent to the parent when the child dies. If this
signal is specified as anything other than SIGCHLD, then the parent
process must specify the __WALL or __WCLONE options when
waiting for the child with wait(2). If no signal is specified, then
the parent process is not signaled when the child terminates.
flags may also be bitwise-ORed with zero or more of the
following constants, in order to specify what is shared between the calling
process and the child process:
- CLONE_CHILD_CLEARTID
(since Linux 2.5.49)
- Clear (zero) the child thread ID at the location ctid in child
memory when the child exits, and do a wakeup on the futex at that address.
The address involved may be changed by the set_tid_address(2)
system call. This is used by threading libraries.
- CLONE_CHILD_SETTID
(since Linux 2.5.49)
- Store the child thread ID at the location ctid in the child's
memory. The store operation completes before clone() returns
control to user space.
- CLONE_FILES
(since Linux 2.0)
- If CLONE_FILES is set, the calling process and the child process
share the same file descriptor table. Any file descriptor created by the
calling process or by the child process is also valid in the other
process. Similarly, if one of the processes closes a file descriptor, or
changes its associated flags (using the fcntl(2) F_SETFD
operation), the other process is also affected. If a process sharing a
file descriptor table calls execve(2), its file descriptor table is
duplicated (unshared).
- If CLONE_FILES is not set, the child process inherits a copy of all
file descriptors opened in the calling process at the time of
clone(). Subsequent operations that open or close file descriptors,
or change file descriptor flags, performed by either the calling process
or the child process do not affect the other process. Note, however, that
the duplicated file descriptors in the child refer to the same open file
descriptions as the corresponding file descriptors in the calling process,
and thus share file offsets and file status flags (see
open(2)).
- CLONE_FS (since
Linux 2.0)
- If CLONE_FS is set, the caller and the child process share the same
filesystem information. This includes the root of the filesystem, the
current working directory, and the umask. Any call to chroot(2),
chdir(2), or umask(2) performed by the calling process or
the child process also affects the other process.
- If CLONE_FS is not set, the child process works on a copy of the
filesystem information of the calling process at the time of the
clone() call. Calls to chroot(2), chdir(2), or
umask(2) performed later by one of the processes do not affect the
other process.
- CLONE_IO (since
Linux 2.6.25)
- If CLONE_IO is set, then the new process shares an I/O context with
the calling process. If this flag is not set, then (as with
fork(2)) the new process has its own I/O context.
- The I/O context is the I/O scope of the disk scheduler (i.e., what the I/O
scheduler uses to model scheduling of a process's I/O). If processes share
the same I/O context, they are treated as one by the I/O scheduler. As a
consequence, they get to share disk time. For some I/O schedulers, if two
processes share an I/O context, they will be allowed to interleave their
disk access. If several threads are doing I/O on behalf of the same
process (aio_read(3), for instance), they should employ
CLONE_IO to get better I/O performance.
- If the kernel is not configured with the CONFIG_BLOCK option, this
flag is a no-op.
- CLONE_NEWCGROUP
(since Linux 4.6)
- Create the process in a new cgroup namespace. If this flag is not set,
then (as with fork(2)) the process is created in the same cgroup
namespaces as the calling process. This flag is intended for the
implementation of containers.
- For further information on cgroup namespaces, see
cgroup_namespaces(7).
- Only a privileged process (CAP_SYS_ADMIN) can employ
CLONE_NEWCGROUP.
- CLONE_NEWIPC
(since Linux 2.6.19)
- If CLONE_NEWIPC is set, then create the process in a new IPC
namespace. If this flag is not set, then (as with fork(2)), the
process is created in the same IPC namespace as the calling process. This
flag is intended for the implementation of containers.
- An IPC namespace provides an isolated view of System V IPC objects
(see svipc(7)) and (since Linux 2.6.30) POSIX message queues (see
mq_overview(7)). The common characteristic of these IPC mechanisms
is that IPC objects are identified by mechanisms other than filesystem
pathnames.
- Objects created in an IPC namespace are visible to all other processes
that are members of that namespace, but are not visible to processes in
other IPC namespaces.
- When an IPC namespace is destroyed (i.e., when the last process that is a
member of the namespace terminates), all IPC objects in the namespace are
automatically destroyed.
- Only a privileged process (CAP_SYS_ADMIN) can employ
CLONE_NEWIPC. This flag can't be specified in conjunction with
CLONE_SYSVSEM.
- For further information on IPC namespaces, see namespaces(7).
- CLONE_NEWNET
(since Linux 2.6.24)
- (The implementation of this flag was completed only by about kernel
version 2.6.29.)
- If CLONE_NEWNET is set, then create the process in a new network
namespace. If this flag is not set, then (as with fork(2)) the
process is created in the same network namespace as the calling process.
This flag is intended for the implementation of containers.
- A network namespace provides an isolated view of the networking stack
(network device interfaces, IPv4 and IPv6 protocol stacks, IP routing
tables, firewall rules, the /proc/net and /sys/class/net
directory trees, sockets, etc.). A physical network device can live in
exactly one network namespace. A virtual network (veth(4)) device
pair provides a pipe-like abstraction that can be used to create tunnels
between network namespaces, and can be used to create a bridge to a
physical network device in another namespace.
- When a network namespace is freed (i.e., when the last process in the
namespace terminates), its physical network devices are moved back to the
initial network namespace (not to the parent of the process). For further
information on network namespaces, see namespaces(7).
- Only a privileged process (CAP_SYS_ADMIN) can employ
CLONE_NEWNET.
- CLONE_NEWNS
(since Linux 2.4.19)
- If CLONE_NEWNS is set, the cloned child is started in a new mount
namespace, initialized with a copy of the namespace of the parent. If
CLONE_NEWNS is not set, the child lives in the same mount namespace
as the parent.
- Only a privileged process (CAP_SYS_ADMIN) can employ
CLONE_NEWNS. It is not permitted to specify both CLONE_NEWNS
and CLONE_FS in the same clone() call.
- For further information on mount namespaces, see namespaces(7) and
mount_namespaces(7).
- CLONE_NEWPID
(since Linux 2.6.24)
- If CLONE_NEWPID is set, then create the process in a new PID
namespace. If this flag is not set, then (as with fork(2)) the
process is created in the same PID namespace as the calling process. This
flag is intended for the implementation of containers.
- For further information on PID namespaces, see namespaces(7) and
pid_namespaces(7).
- Only a privileged process (CAP_SYS_ADMIN) can employ
CLONE_NEWPID. This flag can't be specified in conjunction with
CLONE_THREAD or CLONE_PARENT.
- CLONE_NEWUSER
- (This flag first became meaningful for clone() in Linux 2.6.23, the
current clone() semantics were merged in Linux 3.5, and the final
pieces to make the user namespaces completely usable were merged in Linux
3.8.)
- If CLONE_NEWUSER is set, then create the process in a new user
namespace. If this flag is not set, then (as with fork(2)) the
process is created in the same user namespace as the calling process.
- Before Linux 3.8, use of CLONE_NEWUSER required that the caller
have three capabilities: CAP_SYS_ADMIN, CAP_SETUID, and
CAP_SETGID. Starting with Linux 3.8, no privileges are needed to
create a user namespace.
- This flag can't be specified in conjunction with CLONE_THREAD or
CLONE_PARENT. For security reasons, CLONE_NEWUSER cannot be
specified in conjunction with CLONE_FS.
- For further information on user namespaces, see namespaces(7) and
user_namespaces(7).
- CLONE_NEWUTS
(since Linux 2.6.19)
- If CLONE_NEWUTS is set, then create the process in a new UTS
namespace, whose identifiers are initialized by duplicating the
identifiers from the UTS namespace of the calling process. If this flag is
not set, then (as with fork(2)) the process is created in the same
UTS namespace as the calling process. This flag is intended for the
implementation of containers.
- A UTS namespace is the set of identifiers returned by uname(2);
among these, the domain name and the hostname can be modified by
setdomainname(2) and sethostname(2), respectively. Changes
made to the identifiers in a UTS namespace are visible to all other
processes in the same namespace, but are not visible to processes in other
UTS namespaces.
- Only a privileged process (CAP_SYS_ADMIN) can employ
CLONE_NEWUTS.
- For further information on UTS namespaces, see namespaces(7).
- CLONE_PARENT
(since Linux 2.3.12)
- If CLONE_PARENT is set, then the parent of the new child (as
returned by getppid(2)) will be the same as that of the calling
process.
- If CLONE_PARENT is not set, then (as with fork(2)) the
child's parent is the calling process.
- Note that it is the parent process, as returned by getppid(2),
which is signaled when the child terminates, so that if
CLONE_PARENT is set, then the parent of the calling process, rather
than the calling process itself, will be signaled.
- CLONE_PARENT_SETTID
(since Linux 2.5.49)
- Store the child thread ID at the location ptid in the parent's
memory. (In Linux 2.5.32-2.5.48 there was a flag CLONE_SETTID that
did this.) The store operation completes before clone() returns
control to user space.
- CLONE_PID
(Linux 2.0 to 2.5.15)
- If CLONE_PID is set, the child process is created with the same
process ID as the calling process. This is good for hacking the system,
but otherwise of not much use. From Linux 2.3.21 onward, this flag could
be specified only by the system boot process (PID 0). The flag disappeared
completely from the kernel sources in Linux 2.5.16. Since then, the kernel
silently ignores this bit if it is specified in flags.
- CLONE_PTRACE
(since Linux 2.2)
- If CLONE_PTRACE is specified, and the calling process is being
traced, then trace the child also (see ptrace(2)).
- CLONE_SETTLS
(since Linux 2.5.32)
- The TLS (Thread Local Storage) descriptor is set to newtls.
- The interpretation of newtls and the resulting effect is
architecture dependent. On x86, newtls is interpreted as a
struct user_desc * (see set_thread_area(2)). On
x86-64 it is the new value to be set for the %fs base register (see the
ARCH_SET_FS argument to arch_prctl(2)). On architectures
with a dedicated TLS register, it is the new value of that register.
- CLONE_SIGHAND
(since Linux 2.0)
- If CLONE_SIGHAND is set, the calling process and the child process
share the same table of signal handlers. If the calling process or child
process calls sigaction(2) to change the behavior associated with a
signal, the behavior is changed in the other process as well. However, the
calling process and child processes still have distinct signal masks and
sets of pending signals. So, one of them may block or unblock signals
using sigprocmask(2) without affecting the other process.
- If CLONE_SIGHAND is not set, the child process inherits a copy of
the signal handlers of the calling process at the time clone() is
called. Calls to sigaction(2) performed later by one of the
processes have no effect on the other process.
- Since Linux 2.6.0-test6, flags must also include CLONE_VM if
CLONE_SIGHAND is specified
- CLONE_STOPPED
(since Linux 2.6.0-test2)
- If CLONE_STOPPED is set, then the child is initially stopped (as
though it was sent a SIGSTOP signal), and must be resumed by
sending it a SIGCONT signal.
- This flag was deprecated from Linux 2.6.25 onward, and was
removed altogether in Linux 2.6.38. Since then, the kernel silently
ignores it without error. Starting with Linux 4.6, the same bit was reused
for the CLONE_NEWCGROUP flag.
- CLONE_SYSVSEM
(since Linux 2.5.10)
- If CLONE_SYSVSEM is set, then the child and the calling process
share a single list of System V semaphore adjustment (semadj)
values (see semop(2)). In this case, the shared list accumulates
semadj values across all processes sharing the list, and semaphore
adjustments are performed only when the last process that is sharing the
list terminates (or ceases sharing the list using unshare(2)). If
this flag is not set, then the child has a separate semadj list
that is initially empty.
- CLONE_THREAD
(since Linux 2.4.0-test8)
- If CLONE_THREAD is set, the child is placed in the same thread
group as the calling process. To make the remainder of the discussion of
CLONE_THREAD more readable, the term "thread" is used to
refer to the processes within a thread group.
- Thread groups were a feature added in Linux 2.4 to support the POSIX
threads notion of a set of threads that share a single PID. Internally,
this shared PID is the so-called thread group identifier (TGID) for the
thread group. Since Linux 2.4, calls to getpid(2) return the TGID
of the caller.
- The threads within a group can be distinguished by their (system-wide)
unique thread IDs (TID). A new thread's TID is available as the function
result returned to the caller of clone(), and a thread can obtain
its own TID using gettid(2).
- When a call is made to clone() without specifying
CLONE_THREAD, then the resulting thread is placed in a new thread
group whose TGID is the same as the thread's TID. This thread is the
leader of the new thread group.
- A new thread created with CLONE_THREAD has the same parent process
as the caller of clone() (i.e., like CLONE_PARENT), so that
calls to getppid(2) return the same value for all of the threads in
a thread group. When a CLONE_THREAD thread terminates, the thread
that created it using clone() is not sent a SIGCHLD (or
other termination) signal; nor can the status of such a thread be obtained
using wait(2). (The thread is said to be detached.)
- After all of the threads in a thread group terminate the parent process of
the thread group is sent a SIGCHLD (or other termination)
signal.
- If any of the threads in a thread group performs an execve(2), then
all threads other than the thread group leader are terminated, and the new
program is executed in the thread group leader.
- If one of the threads in a thread group creates a child using
fork(2), then any thread in the group can wait(2) for that
child.
- Since Linux 2.5.35, flags must also include CLONE_SIGHAND if
CLONE_THREAD is specified (and note that, since Linux 2.6.0-test6,
CLONE_SIGHAND also requires CLONE_VM to be included).
- Signals may be sent to a thread group as a whole (i.e., a TGID) using
kill(2), or to a specific thread (i.e., TID) using
tgkill(2).
- Signal dispositions and actions are process-wide: if an unhandled signal
is delivered to a thread, then it will affect (terminate, stop, continue,
be ignored in) all members of the thread group.
- Each thread has its own signal mask, as set by sigprocmask(2), but
signals can be pending either: for the whole process (i.e., deliverable to
any member of the thread group), when sent with kill(2); or for an
individual thread, when sent with tgkill(2). A call to
sigpending(2) returns a signal set that is the union of the signals
pending for the whole process and the signals that are pending for the
calling thread.
- If kill(2) is used to send a signal to a thread group, and the
thread group has installed a handler for the signal, then the handler will
be invoked in exactly one, arbitrarily selected member of the thread group
that has not blocked the signal. If multiple threads in a group are
waiting to accept the same signal using sigwaitinfo(2), the kernel
will arbitrarily select one of these threads to receive a signal sent
using kill(2).
- CLONE_UNTRACED
(since Linux 2.5.46)
- If CLONE_UNTRACED is specified, then a tracing process cannot force
CLONE_PTRACE on this child process.
- CLONE_VFORK
(since Linux 2.2)
- If CLONE_VFORK is set, the execution of the calling process is
suspended until the child releases its virtual memory resources via a call
to execve(2) or _exit(2) (as with vfork(2)).
- If CLONE_VFORK is not set, then both the calling process and the
child are schedulable after the call, and an application should not rely
on execution occurring in any particular order.
- CLONE_VM (since
Linux 2.0)
- If CLONE_VM is set, the calling process and the child process run
in the same memory space. In particular, memory writes performed by the
calling process or by the child process are also visible in the other
process. Moreover, any memory mapping or unmapping performed with
mmap(2) or munmap(2) by the child or calling process also
affects the other process.
- If CLONE_VM is not set, the child process runs in a separate copy
of the memory space of the calling process at the time of clone().
Memory writes or file mappings/unmappings performed by one of the
processes do not affect the other, as with fork(2).
Note that the glibc clone() wrapper function makes some
changes in the memory pointed to by child_stack (changes required to
set the stack up correctly for the child) before invoking the
clone() system call. So, in cases where clone() is used to
recursively create children, do not use the buffer employed for the parent's
stack as the stack of the child.
The raw clone() system call corresponds more closely to
fork(2) in that execution in the child continues from the point of
the call. As such, the fn and arg arguments of the
clone() wrapper function are omitted.
Another difference for the raw clone() system call is that
the child_stack argument may be NULL, in which case the child uses a
duplicate of the parent's stack. (Copy-on-write semantics ensure that the
child gets separate copies of stack pages when either process modifies the
stack.) In this case, for correct operation, the CLONE_VM option
should not be specified. (If the child shares the parent's memory
because of the use of the CLONE_VM flag, then no copy-on-write
duplication occurs and chaos is likely to result.)
The order of the arguments also differs in the raw system call,
and there are variations in the arguments across architectures, as detailed
in the following paragraphs.
The raw system call interface on x86-64 and some other
architectures (including sh, tile, and alpha) is:
long clone(unsigned long flags, void *child_stack,
int *ptid, int *ctid,
unsigned long newtls);
On x86-32, and several other common architectures (including
score, ARM, ARM 64, PA-RISC, arc, Power PC, xtensa, and MIPS), the order of
the last two arguments is reversed:
long clone(unsigned long flags, void *child_stack,
int *ptid, unsigned long newtls,
int *ctid);
On the cris and s390 architectures, the order of the first two
arguments is reversed:
long clone(void *child_stack, unsigned long flags,
int *ptid, int *ctid,
unsigned long newtls);
On the microblaze architecture, an additional argument is
supplied:
long clone(unsigned long flags, void *child_stack,
int stack_size, /* Size of stack */
int *ptid, int *ctid,
unsigned long newtls);
The argument-passing conventions on blackfin, m68k, and sparc are
different from the descriptions above. For details, see the kernel (and
glibc) source.
On ia64, a different interface is used:
int __clone2(int (*fn)(void *),
void *child_stack_base, size_t stack_size,
int flags, void *arg, ...
/* pid_t *ptid, struct user_desc *tls, pid_t *ctid */ );
The prototype shown above is for the glibc wrapper function; the
raw system call interface has no fn or arg argument, and
changes the order of the arguments so that flags is the first
argument, and tls is the last argument.
__clone2() operates in the same way as clone(),
except that child_stack_base points to the lowest address of the
child's stack area, and stack_size specifies the size of the stack
pointed to by child_stack_base.
In Linux 2.4 and earlier, clone() does not take arguments
ptid, tls, and ctid.
On success, the thread ID of the child process is returned in the
caller's thread of execution. On failure, -1 is returned in the caller's
context, no child process will be created, and errno will be set
appropriately.
- EAGAIN
- Too many processes are already running; see fork(2).
- EINVAL
- CLONE_SIGHAND was specified, but CLONE_VM was not. (Since
Linux 2.6.0-test6.)
- EINVAL
- CLONE_THREAD was specified, but CLONE_SIGHAND was not.
(Since Linux 2.5.35.)
- EINVAL
- Both CLONE_FS and CLONE_NEWNS were specified in
flags.
- EINVAL (since
Linux 3.9)
- Both CLONE_NEWUSER and CLONE_FS were specified in
flags.
- EINVAL
- Both CLONE_NEWIPC and CLONE_SYSVSEM were specified in
flags.
- EINVAL
- One (or both) of CLONE_NEWPID or CLONE_NEWUSER and one (or
both) of CLONE_THREAD or CLONE_PARENT were specified in
flags.
- EINVAL
- Returned by the glibc clone() wrapper function when fn or
child_stack is specified as NULL.
- EINVAL
- CLONE_NEWIPC was specified in flags, but the kernel was not
configured with the CONFIG_SYSVIPC and CONFIG_IPC_NS
options.
- EINVAL
- CLONE_NEWNET was specified in flags, but the kernel was not
configured with the CONFIG_NET_NS option.
- EINVAL
- CLONE_NEWPID was specified in flags, but the kernel was not
configured with the CONFIG_PID_NS option.
- EINVAL
- CLONE_NEWUTS was specified in flags, but the kernel was not
configured with the CONFIG_UTS option.
- EINVAL
- child_stack is not aligned to a suitable boundary for this
architecture. For example, on aarch64, child_stack must be a
multiple of 16.
- ENOMEM
- Cannot allocate sufficient memory to allocate a task structure for the
child, or to copy those parts of the caller's context that need to be
copied.
- ENOSPC (since Linux
3.7)
- CLONE_NEWPID was specified in flags, but the limit on the nesting
depth of PID namespaces would have been exceeded; see
pid_namespaces(7).
- ENOSPC (since
Linux 4.9; beforehand EUSERS)
- CLONE_NEWUSER was specified in flags, and the call would
cause the limit on the number of nested user namespaces to be exceeded.
See user_namespaces(7).
- From Linux 3.11 to Linux 4.8, the error diagnosed in this case was
EUSERS.
- ENOSPC (since
Linux 4.9)
- One of the values in flags specified the creation of a new user
namespace, but doing so would have caused the limit defined by the
corresponding file in /proc/sys/user to be exceeded. For further
details, see namespaces(7).
- EPERM
- CLONE_NEWCGROUP, CLONE_NEWIPC, CLONE_NEWNET,
CLONE_NEWNS, CLONE_NEWPID, or CLONE_NEWUTS was
specified by an unprivileged process (process without
CAP_SYS_ADMIN).
- EPERM
- CLONE_PID was specified by a process other than process 0. (This
error occurs only on Linux 2.5.15 and earlier.)
- EPERM
- CLONE_NEWUSER was specified in flags, but either the
effective user ID or the effective group ID of the caller does not have a
mapping in the parent namespace (see user_namespaces(7)).
- EPERM (since
Linux 3.9)
- CLONE_NEWUSER was specified in flags and the caller is in a
chroot environment (i.e., the caller's root directory does not match the
root directory of the mount namespace in which it resides).
- ERESTARTNOINTR
(since Linux 2.6.17)
- System call was interrupted by a signal and will be restarted. (This can
be seen only during a trace.)
- EUSERS (Linux 3.11
to Linux 4.8)
- CLONE_NEWUSER was specified in flags, and the limit on the
number of nested user namespaces would be exceeded. See the discussion of
the ENOSPC error above.
clone() is Linux-specific and should not be used in
programs intended to be portable.
The kcmp(2) system call can be used to test whether two
processes share various resources such as a file descriptor table, System V
semaphore undo operations, or a virtual address space.
Handlers registered using pthread_atfork(3) are not
executed during a call to clone().
In the Linux 2.4.x series, CLONE_THREAD generally does not
make the parent of the new thread the same as the parent of the calling
process. However, for kernel versions 2.4.7 to 2.4.18 the
CLONE_THREAD flag implied the CLONE_PARENT flag (as in Linux
2.6.0 and later).
For a while there was CLONE_DETACHED (introduced in
2.5.32): parent wants no child-exit signal. In Linux 2.6.2, the need to give
this flag together with CLONE_THREAD disappeared. This flag is still
defined, but has no effect.
On i386, clone() should not be called through vsyscall, but
directly through int $0x80.
GNU C library versions 2.3.4 up to and including 2.24 contained a
wrapper function for getpid(2) that performed caching of PIDs. This
caching relied on support in the glibc wrapper for clone(), but
limitations in the implementation meant that the cache was not up to date in
some circumstances. In particular, if a signal was delivered to the child
immediately after the clone() call, then a call to getpid(2)
in a handler for the signal could return the PID of the calling process
("the parent"), if the clone wrapper had not yet had a chance to
update the PID cache in the child. (This discussion ignores the case where
the child was created using CLONE_THREAD, when getpid(2)
should return the same value in the child and in the process that
called clone(), since the caller and the child are in the same thread
group. The stale-cache problem also does not occur if the flags
argument includes CLONE_VM.) To get the truth, it was sometimes
necessary to use code such as the following:
#include <syscall.h>
pid_t mypid;
mypid = syscall(SYS_getpid);
Because of the stale-cache problem, as well as other problems
noted in getpid(2), the PID caching feature was removed in glibc
2.25.
The following program demonstrates the use of clone() to
create a child process that executes in a separate UTS namespace. The child
changes the hostname in its UTS namespace. Both parent and child then
display the system hostname, making it possible to see that the hostname
differs in the UTS namespaces of the parent and child. For an example of the
use of this program, see setns(2).
#define _GNU_SOURCE
#include <sys/wait.h>
#include <sys/utsname.h>
#include <sched.h>
#include <string.h>
#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <unistd.h>
#define errExit(msg) do { perror(msg); exit(EXIT_FAILURE); \
} while (0)
static int /* Start function for cloned child */
childFunc(void *arg)
{
struct utsname uts;
/* Change hostname in UTS namespace of child */
if (sethostname(arg, strlen(arg)) == -1)
errExit("sethostname");
/* Retrieve and display hostname */
if (uname(&uts) == -1)
errExit("uname");
printf("uts.nodename in child: %s\n", uts.nodename);
/* Keep the namespace open for a while, by sleeping.
This allows some experimentation--for example, another
process might join the namespace. */
sleep(200);
return 0; /* Child terminates now */
}
#define STACK_SIZE (1024 * 1024) /* Stack size for cloned child */
int
main(int argc, char *argv[])
{
char *stack; /* Start of stack buffer */
char *stackTop; /* End of stack buffer */
pid_t pid;
struct utsname uts;
if (argc < 2) {
fprintf(stderr, "Usage: %s <child-hostname>\n", argv[0]);
exit(EXIT_SUCCESS);
}
/* Allocate stack for child */
stack = malloc(STACK_SIZE);
if (stack == NULL)
errExit("malloc");
stackTop = stack + STACK_SIZE; /* Assume stack grows downward */
/* Create child that has its own UTS namespace;
child commences execution in childFunc() */
pid = clone(childFunc, stackTop, CLONE_NEWUTS | SIGCHLD, argv[1]);
if (pid == -1)
errExit("clone");
printf("clone() returned %ld\n", (long) pid);
/* Parent falls through to here */
sleep(1); /* Give child time to change its hostname */
/* Display hostname in parent's UTS namespace. This will be
different from hostname in child's UTS namespace. */
if (uname(&uts) == -1)
errExit("uname");
printf("uts.nodename in parent: %s\n", uts.nodename);
if (waitpid(pid, NULL, 0) == -1) /* Wait for child */
errExit("waitpid");
printf("child has terminated\n");
exit(EXIT_SUCCESS);
}
fork(2), futex(2), getpid(2),
gettid(2), kcmp(2), set_thread_area(2),
set_tid_address(2), setns(2), tkill(2),
unshare(2), wait(2), capabilities(7),
namespaces(7), pthreads(7)
This page is part of release 4.16 of the Linux man-pages
project. A description of the project, information about reporting bugs, and
the latest version of this page, can be found at
https://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/.