kern/70708: gcore/procfs not finding /proc/pid/file on repeated invocations when running from NFS

[David Schultz]

The following reply was made to PR kern/70708; it has been noted by GNATS.

From: David Schultz <das at FreeBSD.ORG>
To: Volker Stolz <stolz at i2.informatik.rwth-aachen.de>
Cc: FreeBSD-gnats-submit at FreeBSD.ORG
Subject: Re: kern/70708: gcore/procfs not finding /proc/pid/file on repeated invocations when running from NFS
Date: Tue, 30 Nov 2004 12:14:39 -0500

 This is due to a bug in procfs.  Specifically, procfs uses
 vn_fullpath() to generate the appropriate symbolic link for
 /proc/$pid/file, and vn_fullpath() fails if one or more pathname
 components is missing from the name cache.  We cannot solve this
 problem in procfs without a fully functional getcwd()
 implementation in the kernel.
 
 However, for this particular problem, it may be possible to work
 around the problem in procfs, since the only reason gcore needs
 procfs is to determine if the binary is ELF or not.  Possible
 solutions:
 
 - Extend ptrace(2) to make it possible to open a traced process'
   text file without procfs.  This is generally a good idea anyway,
   because /proc/$pid/file will never work for processes whose text
   files have been unlinked from the file system.
 
 - Don't bother checking whether the binary is ELF or not, since
   gcore no longer supports a.out.  This would result in invalid
   dumps for non-ELF processes, and merely defers the problem until
   someone invents an ELF++ dump format.
 
 I have no time to work on this right now, so it would be great if
 someone could pick this up.