PROCDESC(4)

💅 PROCDESC(4) 💅

okay so bestie, we're in the Kernel Interfaces Manual, section 4 — this is the page for PROCDESC, and honestly? it's giving main character energy 🦋

✨ NAME ✨

procdesc — the process descriptor facility 💖

like, it's a whole facility. for process descriptors. iykyk.

🌸 DESCRIPTION 🌸

okay so picture this: procdesc is a file-descriptor-oriented interface to process signalling and control 🎀

the way it works is — it supplements the historic Unix primitives fork(2), kill(2), and wait4(2) by adding shiny new system calls on top, namely pdfork(2), pdkill(2), and pdwait4(2) ✨

it's designed to be used with capsicum(4), and what it does there is replace process identifiers with capability-oriented references. iconic behavior honestly 👑

BUT — and this is the part people miss — it can also be used completely independently of capsicum(4) 💫 and when you do that, it's displacing PIDs, which may otherwise suffer from race conditions 😭 like, PIDs are out here catching strays and procdesc is the friend who shows up with a better plan, no cap.

and the bestie detail: given a process descriptor, it is possible to query its conventional PID using pdgetpid(2) 🫶 so you never lose the thread of who's who.

🦋 SEE ALSO 🦋

go read these next, bestie, they're all connected:

• fork(2)
• kill(2)
• pdfork(2)
• pdgetpid(2)
• pdkill(2)
• pdwait4(2)
• kqueue(2)
• wait4(2)
• capsicum(4)

📜 HISTORY 📜

procdesc first appeared in FreeBSD 9.0 ⭐ and it was developed at the University of Cambridge 🎓 periodt.

👑 AUTHORS 👑

the legends who built procdesc:

• Robert Watson <rwatson@FreeBSD.org> and Jonathan Anderson <jonathan@FreeBSD.org> — at the University of Cambridge 🎓
• Ben Laurie <benl@FreeBSD.org> and Kris Kennaway <kris@FreeBSD.org> — at Google, Inc. 🌈

ok that's the whole page bestie, you now know procdesc better than most of the internet 💖 go forth and descriptor responsibly 🧚

this lil slice of docs comes from the Debian crew, dated October 14, 2018 — mwah 💅✨🌸