Linux Kernel – What is a Subreaper Process?

It really comes down to what makes up a process in Unix. A process can come into existence in one of 2 ways. Either via the fork() function or through one of the exec() functions in C.

fork()

fork() basically just makes a copy of the current process, but assigns it a new process ID (PID). It's a child of the original process. You can see this relationship in the output of ps:

$ ps axjf
 PPID   PID  PGID   SID TTY      TPGID STAT   UID   TIME COMMAND
    1  5255  1964  1964 ?           -1 Sl     500   0:39 gnome-terminal
 5255  5259  1964  1964 ?           -1 S      500   0:00  \_ gnome-pty-helper
 5255 18422 18422 18422 pts/1    18422 Ss+    500   0:01  \_ bash
 5255 30473 30473 30473 pts/4    30473 Ss+    500   0:00  \_ bash
30473   782   782 30473 pts/4    30473 Sl     500   1:14  |   \_ evince s.pdf

Here you can see that gnome-terminal is the parent process (PID = 5255) and that bash is it's child (PID = 18422, PPID = 5255).

NOTE: PPID = Parent Process ID.

When a process forks from its parent, it "inherits" certain things, such as copies of all the file descriptors that the parent currently has for open files and the parent's user and group IDs.

NOTE: The last 2 are what identify what file and group permissions this process will have when accessing the file system.

So if a process just inherits its user and group ID from its parent, then why isn't everything just owned by root or a single user? This is where exec() comes in.

exec() Part #1

The exec() family of functions, specifically execve(), "replace" a current process image with a new process image. The terminology "process image" is really just a file, i.e. an executable on disk. So this is how a bash script can execute a program such as /usr/bin/time.

So what about the user ID and group ID? Well to understand that let's first discuss the concept of "Persona".

Persona

At any time, each process has an effective user ID, an effective group ID, and a set of supplementary group IDs. These IDs determine the privileges of the process. They are collectively called the persona of the process, because they determine "who it is" for purposes of access control.

exec() Part #2

So in addition to being able to swap out the "process image", exec() can also change the user & group IDs from the original "real" ones to "effective" ones.

An example

For this demonstration I'm going to show you what happens when we start out in a shell as our default UID/GID, and then spawn a child shell using one of my supplementary GIDs, making it the child shell's effective GID.

To perform this I'm going to make use of the unix command newgrp. newgrp allows you to spawn a new shell passing it the supplementary group that I'd like to make my effective GID.

For starters:

$ id -a
uid=500(saml) gid=501(saml) groups=501(saml),502(vboxusers),503(jupiter)

We can see that this shell is currently configured with my default UID/GID of saml & saml. Touching some files shows that this is the case as well:

$ touch afile1
$ touch afile2
$ ls -l
total 0
-rw-rw-r-- 1 saml saml 0 May 21 23:47 afile1
-rw-rw-r-- 1 saml saml 0 May 21 23:47 afile2

Now we make our supplementary group jupiter the effective GID:

$ newgrp jupiter
$ id -a
uid=500(saml) gid=503(jupiter) groups=501(saml),502(vboxusers),503(jupiter)

Now if we touch some files:

$ touch afile3
$ touch afile4
$ ls -l
total 0
-rw-rw-r-- 1 saml saml    0 May 21 23:47 afile1
-rw-rw-r-- 1 saml saml    0 May 21 23:47 afile2
-rw-r--r-- 1 saml jupiter 0 May 21 23:49 afile3
-rw-r--r-- 1 saml jupiter 0 May 21 23:49 afile4

We see that the shell's effective GID is jupiter, so any interactions with the disk result in files being created with jupiter rather than my normal default group of saml.

References

• fork() man page
• exec() man page
• execve() man page
• credentials man page
• newgrp man page
• The GNU C Library
• The GNU C Library - 26.4 Creating a Process
• The GNU C Library - 26.5 Executing a File
• GID, current, primary, supplementary, effective and real group IDs?

It looks to me as if you are trying to replace a RUNNING process from OUTSIDE the process. That's some radical stuff.

When I first looked at the question, it seemed that you are looking exactly for exec. But exec is called by the program itself. So unless you have coded the process so that you can force it to just exec another process, you can't do that while it is running.

You could potentially create a signal trap in your Program-A to exec a program with predefined name (which you can then set to be whatever you want) and then use kill on this process to force it to exec. From the outside, it will look like the process kept running - it does, it just becomes someone else. However, if you haven't done that and you want to do this on a running process, I don't think you can do anything.

However, if the outer shell is running, but it hasn't started the critical process yet, you can just replace the file of the problematic process.