[Dnsmasq-discuss] Compile-time options - taming the combinatorial explosion.

Shankar Unni shankar.unni at gmail.com
Thu Oct 25 20:33:47 BST 2018


On Oct 24, 2018, at 2:49 PM, Simon Kelley <simon at thekelleys.org.uk> wrote:

> […]
> The next option in my sights is NO_FORK. This produces a
> mostly-functional binary that never forks any new processes. It was
> added long ago to support uclinux, the MMU-less version of Linux. As far
> as I can tell, MMU-less linux is a dead project, and I'm minded to
> remove NO_FORK. Opinions? Is this option vital to something I'm not
> aware of?

From what i can see, this will kill off the ‘k’ option that’s used by many process-management environments.  E.g. openwrt’s process management (the procd daemon) depends on the originally-launched process to stick around (it doesn’t know or care about the PID file), and does really ugly things if the PID changes after launch.  It also doesn’t seem to have an option to pass in an explicit PID file to read and poll.  (I just verified by removing the -k option, and it keeps spawning more and more dnsmasqs..)

If you do want to do this, it’ll probably need a few months of warning and preparation for various distros..






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