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Is There I/O After Death? What Happens to Io_uring When a Process Dies
- pianom4n 1mo agoThe AI prose is painful.
- collinstevens 1mo agoyou can just feel it in your bones > These are measured results backed by the Linux source, not a portable guarantee for every kernel, filesystem, device, or API called “AIO”. > The interesting race window is there, but hard to see. So I made it larger.
- eivanov89 1mo agoI'm the author and I'm not native speaker, so please bear that in mind. However, I admit I've used AI for grammar and style. IMHO, the post is not fiction, I just wanted to communicate the ideas as clearly and effectively as possible.
- pianom4n 1mo agoJust don't. Your older posts are perfectly fine and much preferable to the most recent two.
- eivanov89 1mo agoFrankly speaking, you are the second (with this thread, the third) one, who says that. So, it looks that I really should write myself again with just grammar checks, not the style.
- magicalhippo 1mo agoWhat I've done a few times is have the AI provide feedback, and then I rewrite myself based on the feedback. So I don't use what the AI suggests directly, just the essence if I agree.
- eivanov89 1mo agoThat's a good approach. My sin is that if I like the sentence, I keep and don't rewrite. Because if I see it is good, I don't feel I should. And probably I don't see that "prose" is bad each time it is indeed bad.
- throw-the-towel 1mo agoMaybe you should just patch a grammar problem instead of rewriting the whole sentence. (I'm not blaming you but just sharing my experience, I suspect your first language might be a Slavic one like mine.)
- eivanov89 1mo agoThanks for sharing. I didn't expect my slavic accent to be so strong to be visible in text and even pass through AI edits :)
- throw-the-towel 1mo agoWell, to be completely honest with you, it is obvious in your comments here. But my point was, keeping your Slavic accent and fixing the most glaring places with the help of AI is probably better than letting AI rewrite large portions of your text into "Better English". People do hate the AI accent these days, you know.
- porridgeraisin 1mo agoTBH, your username gives that part away atleast. My mind went to slavic when I saw the "ov" - it might be factually wrong, but thats waht happened.
- rcxdude 1mo agoTBH I don't think it's that bad: the article is not hard to read and pretty informative (and is not just a copy + paste from a prompt), it's just got a hint of that tone which can grate just because it's rendered so cliche by LLM writing.
- eivanov89 1mo agoThank you, that's actually was my actual attitude: found interesting things -> used AI to polish notes and quick draft -> "Hey folks, here is a cool thing I've found".
- blackoil 1mo agoIs your process Hindu, Buddhist, Christian?
- fooker 1mo agoA process is monotheistic because everyone is created by PID 1.
- eivanov89 1mo agoBut when process dies, might it hope to become init on next reboot?
- MathMonkeyMan 1mo agoI'm a lowly shell, but in another life I aspire to achieve greatness through docker.
- fooker 1mo agoStart a cult with init=/bin/????? in your bootloader ;)
- charcircuit 1mo agoI feel like this is a Linux bug. Linux shouldn't cleanup a process until it has finished execution.
- eivanov89 1mo agoJens Axboe, the io_uring author, promissed to address this on X next week: https://x.com/axboe/status/2095856971912028536?s=20 https://x.com/axboe/status/2095856971912028536?s=20 Stay tuned.
- PeterWhittaker 1mo agoThe asynchronous behaviour raises interesting questions as to whether or not this is a bug or working as intended, and whether or not the io_uring API should offer controls to allow the calling application to decide. With synchronous intra-machine calls we mostly take it for granted that pending modifications die with the caller. But with inter-machine communications we mostly take it for granted that the sending machine and its entire local area can disappear and operations it sent will complete. Of course, there are exceptions, especially when APIs/systems offer atomicity, consistency checks, etc. But without express design intent, or preferably caller intent, one can argue both sides of the asynchronous intra-machine case and be right. I guess my thinking isn't so much that this happens as that it happens implicitly.
- eivanov89 1mo agoThank you very much for a very nice annotation/summary and sharing your thoughts.
- fooker 1mo agoIf it's truly asynchronous, I don't see the issue with IO being decoupled from process lifetime. If you wanted to stop the IO at process death, the mechanism needed for this would introduce an overhead that would likely slow things down in general.
- eivanov89 1mo agoNote, that this also includes retaining process memory related to the I/O. In my experiment I used regular 4 KiB pages, which is smaller or equal to the I/O block size. However, in case of huge pages only a small fraction can be I/O related. And I suppose, that this small part would pin the whole page, which might have some sensitive information. Still protected, however, but who knows.
- charcircuit 1mo agoCan you explain your thinking? From my understanding of the issue as an extreme example you could have a "write a backdoored .bashrc, then wait 5 minutes" repeated a thousand times queued as async i/o. If malware did this you couldn't just kill the process to stop it. You would have to shutdown the machine. Being able to stop this loop by just killing the process is a cleaner abstraction from my perspective.
- fooker 1mo agoSecurity and performance are often have different, contradictory needs. The meltdown+spectre saga showed this for speculative execution. This is no different.
- charcircuit 1mo agoTypically there is also a latency trade off, so you can choose security and performance while losing latency. Systems should not depend on processes being fast to terminate anyways so making it slower in this case is fine.
- DeathIsWeird 1mo agoYou mean the process doesn’t go to heaven? Unrelated: My cat died. Saddest day of my life. I watched the light leave his eyes and still wonder where he went. I looked it up and it said that the last thing to go when dying is probably your hearing. When you die, typically you lose your sight first, then your bodily sensations, and 1-by-1 all your sensory channels turn off: Balance, equilibrium, proprioception, until you are like an empty force flying through infinite darkness, all your thoughts still in tact, knowing what is happening to you, and in the background you can still hear everyone in the room, until the sounds too begin to fade and distort into a light buzzing noise that gets higher and higher pitched like a zipper zipping up your last waking experience in a metaphorical body bag to be tossed off the edge of time.
- LowTechHN 1mo ago[dead]
- a-dub 1mo agoi bet if you mmap'd a big file and then dirtied a ton of pages and then exited and watched the file on disk, you'd see writes occurring after the process exits as well.
- bfrog 1mo agoPlease no llm posts?
- eivanov89 1mo agoBut this is not