> On Fri, Dec 07, 2012 at 11:41:21AM -0000, James Hunt wrote:
> > My only worry is that if a user attempts to build this on a system whose
> > libc is too old, PR_SET_CHILD_SUBREAPER won't be defined.
> 
> FWIW, this definition comes from /usr/include/linux/prctl.h, which is a
> header from linux-libc-dev rather than from libc.  So I think only the
> kernel version is relevant here.

You're correct, I didn't look too closely for the source of the define.

Now for your other comment on relying on the prctl subreaper feature.
Yes, we'll be relying on that feature a fair bit for the user session, however 
after we discussed it with James and Dmitrijs, we came to the conclusion that 
we still need to allow starting a user session on a system that doesn't support 
it.

The biggest use case will be for people upgrading from 12.04's stock kernel to 
14.04. On those systems, the current running kernel won't support prctl and we 
can't exclude that a user will attempt to open a user session before reboot.
That's why we came up with the warning+event fallback where if prctl isn't 
supported, we write a warning that'll ultimately end up in .xsession_errors and 
we emit the child-subreaper-failed event so that we can have jobs react on the 
missing feature and for example show a window telling the user about it and 
recommending a reboot.

In practice, running without prctl support will be identical to what you 
currently get when running upstart on the session bus as a user. Upstart can 
spawn jobs, can track their PID but can't know whether they stopped or need 
respawning. That's annoying but isn't much worse than what we have on the 
current gnome-session managed system, so I don't think preventing upstart from 
starting completely would be appropriate.
-- 
https://code.launchpad.net/~stgraber/upstart/upstart-prctl/+merge/136759
Your team Upstart Reviewers is requested to review the proposed merge of 
lp:~stgraber/upstart/upstart-prctl into lp:upstart.

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