Russell Nelson writes:
This will end up affecting much more stuff. Plenty of code relies on the combination of pid_t+time_t being a locally-unique ID.one Maildir dir will be unique in all of them." Other bits of code assume that "No pid will be reused in the same second".
Now, what I don't understand is this. This is supposed to be all about sooper, dooper, security, right? Now, I don't see how monotonically increasing pids have any security-related issues, unless there's already an existing, potential, exploit; an existing defect somewhere else which can be used, in conjunction with monotonical pids, to manufacture a exploitable race condition.
Now, there's nothing wrong with using a random pid generator to minimize the possibility of generating an exploitable race condition. Nothing wrong at all.
Except that, it seems to me now, having different processes sharing the same pid within such a short period of time would certainly now create exploitable race conditions of their very own.
So you're not really getting anything of value at all. You're merely replacing one potential race condition, with another one. So what exactly did we accomplish, here?
