On Linux, Pipes, Fork and passing file descriptors to other process.
I found a lonely and weird corner case of Linux IO, file descriptors, Linux processes and, fork calls. Figuring out the problem took me a solid half a day, so I believe is worth writing about it, so others can benefit as well. The discussion will use golang because it is the language in which the original bug was written, but it should apply to every other language. The setting of the problem is rather simple, one producer process needs to send data to a consumer process. The producer is a long-running daemon, while the consumer is created on the spot by the producer itself using something like fork/exec. The producer needs to receive an answer from the consumer as soon as the consumer finish with the input. It was chosen to use Linux pipes to implement the Inter-Process Communication. The algorithm was the following. Create a pipe to send…
Continue Reading On Linux, Pipes, Fork and passing file descriptors to other process.
