S6LOCKD-HELPER(8)

📦 version 2.15.1.0, in nixpkgs unstable

💖 NAME 💖

Okay so bestie, welcome to S6LOCKD-HELPER(8) from the System Manager's Manual — this is the whole vibe: s6lockd-helper is the helper program for the s6lockd(8) daemon. 💅

✨ DESCRIPTION ✨

So s6lockd-helper literally just acquires a lock and holds it until it is killed or told to exit by its parent daemon. That's the whole job. It is not meant to be invoked directly by the user: it will be spawned by the s6lockd(8) program. No cap.

It blocks on lock acquisition until it succeeds. Then it notifies its parent. It exits when its parent tells it to (i.e. when the client asks for lock release). During the lock acquisition phase, it can be killed if its parent detects a timeout. Periodt. 🫶

One s6lockd-helper process per lock is the only way (apart from threads) to implement timed lock acquisition. This can lead to a lot of s6lockd-helper processes, but this is not a problem:

  • Processes are not a scarce resource. Today's schedulers work in O(1), or in O(a function of the number of runnable processes), which means that a sleeping process takes no scheduling time at all.
  • s6lockd-helper is extremely tiny. Every instance should use up at most one or two pages of non-sharable memory.

It's giving minimal, tiny, unbothered icon behavior. 🦋

🌈 SEE ALSO 🌈

This man page is ported from the authoritative documentation at: https://skarnet.org/software/s6/libs6/s6lockd-helper.html

👑 AUTHORS 👑

  • Laurent Bercot
  • Alexis <flexibeast@gmail.com> (man page port)

Source/version check, bestie: this is from Debian, it's the S6LOCKD-HELPER(8) page, and it's dated September 29, 2021. Slay. 🎀✨

📦 where this page comes from