![]() | Figure 2-7
Connection to
a Dedicated
Server Process |
For some reason I was really curios who created that process. It's not about a particular process in detail, mir a well known kind of processes. At least well known for DBAs.
Which process?
It's one of these:
oracle 13096 1 0 20:05 ? 00:00:00 oracleTTT071 (LOCAL=NO)
Yes, it's a simple server process, nothing spectacular. Nevertheless, the
Concepts guide is not very specific, who created that process. So I tried to find out in more detail.
On my linux sandbox the first column of
ps -ef shows the
UID, the second is the
PID, the third is the
PPID. Unfortunately it's
1 here, and I'm quite sure, this process was not created by
init. So this proces is somewhat orphaned, as the direct parent disappeared. Very sad!
I decided to follow
Figure 2-7 from the concepts guide. I used
strace -f -p <PID_of_listener> to see what's going on.
-f follows all forks, so also their actions are traced.
The first 3 lines are
Process 2979 attached with 3 threads - interrupt to quit
[pid 2981] futex(0xae8dee4, FUTEX_WAIT_PRIVATE, 1, NULL <unfinished ...>
[pid 2980] restart_syscall(<... resuming interrupted call ...> <unfinished ...>So we have 3 listener processes - it's good to know and probably worth to investigating this segregation of duties - but not in this post. There are so many interesting lines, but I'm searching for a process, so let's continue with
[pid 2979] clone(Process 27028 attachedchild_stack=0, flags=CLONE_CHILD_CLEARTID|CLONE_CHILD_SETTID|SIGCHLD, child_tidptr=0x2aedd9914b80) = 27028[pid 2979] wait4(27028, Process 2979 suspended <unfinished ...>[pid 27028] clone(Process 27029 attached (waiting for parent)Process 27029 resumed (parent 27028 ready)child_stack=0, flags=CLONE_CHILD_CLEARTID|CLONE_CHILD_SETTID|SIGCHLD, child_tidptr=0x2aedd9914b80) = 27029[pid 27028] exit_group(0) = ?Process 2979 resumedProcess 27028 detached[pid 2979] <... wait4 resumed> [{WIFEXITED(s) && WEXITSTATUS(s) == 0}], 0, NULL) = 27028[pid 27029] close(15 <unfinished ...>[pid 2979] --- SIGCHLD (Child exited) @ 0 (0) ---[pid 27029] <... close resumed> ) = 0[pid 2979] close(14 <unfinished ...>[pid 27029] close(16 <unfinished ...>[pid 2979] <... close resumed> ) = 0[pid 27029] <... close resumed> ) = 0[pid 2979] close(17) = 0Here the listener (
[pid 2979]) creates a new process by the first
clone call. This new Process has the
PID 27028. This new process has only one purpose: again
clone a new Process:
PID 27029 and use
exit_group(0) to terminate directly afterwards. By this trick the listener is not shown as parent process for
PID 27029. Directly after it's creation
PID 27029 closes some file handles. As by the sequence of
clone calls the new process inherited a table of all open file (and network) handles it seems it tries to get rid of any it does not need as early as possible. The next part
[pid 2979] fcntl(16, F_SETFD, FD_CLOEXEC) = 0[pid 27029] setsid( <unfinished ...>[pid 2979] fcntl(15, F_SETFD, FD_CLOEXEC <unfinished ...>[pid 27029] <... setsid resumed> ) = 27029[pid 2979] <... fcntl resumed> ) = 0[pid 27029] geteuid() = 5831[pid 2979] fcntl(13, F_SETFD, FD_CLOEXEC) = 0[pid 27029] setsid() = -1 EPERM (Operation not permitted)[pid 2979] poll([{fd=8, events=POLLIN|POLLRDNORM}, {fd=11, events=POLLIN|POLLRDNORM}, {fd=12, events=POLLIN|POLLRDNORM}, {fd=16, events=POLLIN|POLLRDNORM}, {fd=15, events=0}], 5, -1 <unfinished ...>makes sure the file descriptos 16, 15 and 13 will remain after an
execve(2) call.
And here it goes:
[pid 27029] execve("/appl/oracle/product/rdbms_112022_a/bin/oracle", ["oracleTTT051", "(LOCAL=NO)"], [/* 109 vars */]) = 0from the man page if execve:
execve() executes the program pointed to by filename.
...
execve() does not return on success, and the text, data, bss, and stack of the calling process are overwritten by that of the program loaded. The program invoked inherits the calling process’s PID, and any open file descriptors that are not set to close-on-exec. Signals pending on the calling process are cleared. Any signals set to be caught by the calling process are reset to their default behaviour. The SIGCHLD signal (when set to SIG_IGN) may or may not be reset to SIG_DFL.
If the current program is being ptraced, a SIGTRAP is sent to it after a successful execve().
If the set-user-ID bit is set on the program file pointed to by filename, and the calling process is not being ptraced, then the effective user ID of the calling process is changed to that of the owner of the program file. i Similarly, when the set-group-ID bit of the program file is set the effective group ID of the calling process is set to the group of the program file.
From that point on there you can see how the server process comes to life. It's very interesting in some details, but not scope of this post. After some conversation between listener and server process using file descriptors 15 and 16 (I assume these are just sockets) both close these file descriptors. The listener also closes file descriptor 13 which seems to be the TCP connection to the client. From that point the 2 processes seems to be independent.
Well, now I know (at least on my test-system) the simplest way, the listener creates the process - and it uses
execve to do so. There still are many questions open, like what's going on at this redirection as shown in
Figure 2-8.
In the Oracle DBA World at the moment 
