[lttng-dev] Tracepoints firing without being enabled in LTTng

[Jonathan Rajotte-Julien]

> One should be able to add LD_PRELOAD to an Environment line in a
> systemd unit file.  But beware, from ld.so docs:
> 
> In secure-execution mode, preload pathnames containing slashes are
> ignored.  Furthermore, shared objects are preloaded only from the
> standard search directories and only if they have set-user-ID mode bit
> enabled (which is not typical).

Those are all valid constraints and if I'm not mistaken can be controlled by a
system administrator. Thanks for bringing it up.

> 
> Another way that setting ld_preload can be hard is when the program
> that needs it is started by another process that does not need it. 
> Like say "mount" will fork and exec "losetup".  How do you set
> LD_PRELOAD for just losetup without getting mount too?  Modify the code
> of mount to inject an environment variable?

Unfortunately, for now, yes, if you know that the application that you exec is
instrumented with lttng and will perform either a fork call not followed by an
exec (family) call and/or close all FDs.

> Make a wrapper script
> named losetup that sets LD_PRELOAD and runs the real losetup binary?

This is valid option.

We do have a potential solution to eliminate the need of preloading the fork
wrapper but we did not yet have time to work on it.

As for the FD lib utility (liblttng-ust-fd) we are open to opinion on how to
solve the problem and make liblttng-ust-fd obsolete.

Cheers
-- 
Jonathan Rajotte-Julien
EfficiOS