Rework fork/exec strategy

cmd_exec_process is used whenever sway is meant to execute a child
process on behalf of the user, and had a lot of complexity.

In order to avoid having to wait on the user's process, a double-fork
was used, which in turn required us to wait on the outer process. In
order to track the child PID for launcher purposes, a pipe was used to
transmit the PID back to sway.

This resulted in sway blocking for 5-6 ms per exec on my system, which
is quite significant. The error handling was also quite lacking - the
read loop did not handle errors at all for example.

Instead, teach sway to handle SIGCHLD and do away with the double-fork.
This in turn allows us to get rid of the pipe as we can record the
child's PID directly. This reduces the time we block to just 1.5 ms on
my system. We'd be able to get down to just 150 µs if we could use
posix_spawn(3), but posix_spawn(3) cannot reset NOFILE. clone(2) or
vfork(2) would be alternatives, but that presents portability issues.

This change is replicated for swaybar, swaybg and swaynag handling,
which had similar albeit less complicated implementations.
This commit is contained in:
Kenny Levinsen 2025-02-11 12:41:59 +01:00 committed by Simon Ser
parent 962e1e70a6
commit e3d9cc2aa5
5 changed files with 73 additions and 140 deletions

View file

@ -220,29 +220,21 @@ static void invoke_swaybar(struct bar_config *bar) {
signal(SIGPIPE, SIG_DFL);
restore_nofile_limit();
pid = fork();
if (pid < 0) {
sway_log_errno(SWAY_ERROR, "fork failed");
_exit(EXIT_FAILURE);
} else if (pid == 0) {
if (!sway_set_cloexec(sockets[1], false)) {
_exit(EXIT_FAILURE);
}
char wayland_socket_str[16];
snprintf(wayland_socket_str, sizeof(wayland_socket_str),
"%d", sockets[1]);
setenv("WAYLAND_SOCKET", wayland_socket_str, true);
// run custom swaybar
char *const cmd[] = {
bar->swaybar_command ? bar->swaybar_command : "swaybar",
"-b", bar->id, NULL};
execvp(cmd[0], cmd);
if (!sway_set_cloexec(sockets[1], false)) {
_exit(EXIT_FAILURE);
}
_exit(EXIT_SUCCESS);
char wayland_socket_str[16];
snprintf(wayland_socket_str, sizeof(wayland_socket_str),
"%d", sockets[1]);
setenv("WAYLAND_SOCKET", wayland_socket_str, true);
// run custom swaybar
char *const cmd[] = {
bar->swaybar_command ? bar->swaybar_command : "swaybar",
"-b", bar->id, NULL};
execvp(cmd[0], cmd);
_exit(EXIT_FAILURE);
}
if (close(sockets[1]) != 0) {
@ -250,11 +242,6 @@ static void invoke_swaybar(struct bar_config *bar) {
return;
}
if (waitpid(pid, NULL, 0) < 0) {
sway_log_errno(SWAY_ERROR, "waitpid failed");
return;
}
sway_log(SWAY_DEBUG, "Spawned swaybar %s", bar->id);
}

View file

@ -1061,41 +1061,27 @@ static bool _spawn_swaybg(char **command) {
return false;
} else if (pid == 0) {
restore_nofile_limit();
pid = fork();
if (pid < 0) {
sway_log_errno(SWAY_ERROR, "fork failed");
_exit(EXIT_FAILURE);
} else if (pid == 0) {
if (!sway_set_cloexec(sockets[1], false)) {
_exit(EXIT_FAILURE);
}
char wayland_socket_str[16];
snprintf(wayland_socket_str, sizeof(wayland_socket_str),
"%d", sockets[1]);
setenv("WAYLAND_SOCKET", wayland_socket_str, true);
execvp(command[0], command);
sway_log_errno(SWAY_ERROR, "failed to execute '%s' "
"(background configuration probably not applied)",
command[0]);
if (!sway_set_cloexec(sockets[1], false)) {
_exit(EXIT_FAILURE);
}
_exit(EXIT_SUCCESS);
char wayland_socket_str[16];
snprintf(wayland_socket_str, sizeof(wayland_socket_str),
"%d", sockets[1]);
setenv("WAYLAND_SOCKET", wayland_socket_str, true);
execvp(command[0], command);
sway_log_errno(SWAY_ERROR, "failed to execute '%s' "
"(background configuration probably not applied)",
command[0]);
_exit(EXIT_FAILURE);
}
if (close(sockets[1]) != 0) {
sway_log_errno(SWAY_ERROR, "close failed");
return false;
}
int fork_status = 0;
if (waitpid(pid, &fork_status, 0) < 0) {
sway_log_errno(SWAY_ERROR, "waitpid failed");
return false;
}
return WIFEXITED(fork_status) && WEXITSTATUS(fork_status) == EXIT_SUCCESS;
return true;
}
bool spawn_swaybg(void) {