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How the devil can gettid() return 1?

DISCUSSION Tom Horsley 2 participants 2 messages Aug 8, 2016

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Every once in a while google-chrome goes into a 100% cpu loop. I got curious and examined the thread that was running at 100% and strace says this over and over again till I interrupt it:

gettid()                                = 1
gettid()                                = 1
gettid()                                = 1
gettid()                                = 1

^Cstrace: Process 18863 detached
<detached ...>

Clearly Process 18863 isn't the init process, how can it have a tid of 1?

This is on a fedora 24 box with a 4.6 kernel:

Linux tomh 4.6.4-301.fc24.x86_64 #1 SMP Tue Jul 12 11:50:00 UTC 2016 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

Just curious...

#1 lore raw
Quoted 8 lines · Tom Horsley

Every once in a while google-chrome goes into a 100% cpu loop. I got curious and examined the thread that was running at 100% and strace says this over and over again till I interrupt it:

gettid()                                = 1
gettid()                                = 1
gettid()                                = 1
gettid()                                = 1
Quoted 5 lines

^Cstrace: Process 18863 detached
<detached ...>

Clearly Process 18863 isn't the init process, how can it have a tid of 1?

If you call clone() with CLONE_NEWPID then the new process will run in a new PID namespace (with new pids/tids starting at 1). The new process still has a pid in the old (containing) namespace, here presumably 18863. Chrome is probably using namespaces to isolate itself from the rest of the system.

You can read more about CLONE_NEWPID in 'man 2 clone'.

Vegard