the fcntl function is heavy, so make the syscall directly instead.
also, avoid the code size and runtime overhead of querying the old
flags, since it's reasonable to assume nothing will be set on a
newly-created socket. this code is only used on old kernels which lack
proper atomic close-on-exec support, so future changes that might
invalidate such an assumption do not need to be considered.
checking for EINVAL should be sufficient, but qemu user emulation
returns EPROTONOSUPPORT in some of the failure cases, and it seems
conceivable that other kernels doing linux-emulation could make the
same mistake. since DNS lookups and other important code might break
if the fallback does not get invoked, be extra careful and check for
either error.
note that it's important NOT to perform the fallback code on other
errors such as resource-exhaustion cases, since the fallback is not
atomic and will lead to file-descriptor leaks in multi-threaded
programs that use exec. the fallback code is only "safe" to run when
the initial failure is caused by the application's choice of
arguments, not the system state.
also update syslog to use SOCK_CLOEXEC rather than separate fcntl
step, to make it safe in multithreaded programs that run external
programs.
emulation is not atomic; it could be made atomic by holding a lock on
forking during the operation, but this seems like overkill. my goal is
not to achieve perfect behavior on old kernels (which have plenty of
other imperfect behavior already) but to avoid catastrophic breakage
in (1) syslog, which would give no output on old kernels with the
change to use SOCK_CLOEXEC, and (2) programs built on a new kernel
where configure scripts detected a working SOCK_CLOEXEC, which later
get run on older kernels (they may otherwise fail to work completely).
Rich Felker