cgroup: implement the PIDs subsystem

Adds a new single-purpose PIDs subsystem to limit the number of
tasks that can be forked inside a cgroup. Essentially this is an
implementation of RLIMIT_NPROC that applies to a cgroup rather than a
process tree.

However, it should be noted that organisational operations (adding and
removing tasks from a PIDs hierarchy) will *not* be prevented. Rather,
the number of tasks in the hierarchy cannot exceed the limit through
forking. This is due to the fact that, in the unified hierarchy, attach
cannot fail (and it is not possible for a task to overcome its PIDs
cgroup policy limit by attaching to a child cgroup -- even if migrating
mid-fork it must be able to fork in the parent first).

PIDs are fundamentally a global resource, and it is possible to reach
PID exhaustion inside a cgroup without hitting any reasonable kmemcg
policy. Once you've hit PID exhaustion, you're only in a marginally
better state than OOM. This subsystem allows PID exhaustion inside a
cgroup to be prevented.

Signed-off-by: Aleksa Sarai <cyphar@cyphar.com>
Signed-off-by: Tejun Heo <tj@kernel.org>

1 files changed, 5 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/include/linux/cgroup_subsys.h b/include/linux/cgroup_subsys.h
index ec43bce7e1ea..1f36945fd23d 100644
--- a/include/linux/cgroup_subsys.h
+++ b/include/linux/cgroup_subsys.h
@@ -62,6 +62,11 @@ SUBSYS(hugetlb)
  * Subsystems that implement the can_fork() family of callbacks.
  */
 SUBSYS_TAG(CANFORK_START)
+
+#if IS_ENABLED(CONFIG_CGROUP_PIDS)
+SUBSYS(pids)
+#endif
+
 SUBSYS_TAG(CANFORK_END)
 
 /*