assert_signal_internal() returns 0 in two distinct cases:
1. In the child process (immediately after fork returns 0).
2. In the parent process, if the child exited normally (no signal).
ASSERT_SIGNAL fails to distinguish these cases. When a child exited
normally (case 2), the parent process receives 0, incorrectly interprets
it as meaning it is the child, and re-executes the test expression
inside the parent process. Goodness gracious!
This causes two severe test integrity issues:
1. False positives. The parent can run the expression, succeed, and call
_exit(EXIT_SUCCESS), causing the test to pass even though no signal
was raised.
2. Silent truncation. The _exit() call in the parent terminates the test
runner prematurely, preventing subsequent tests in the same file from
running.
Example of the bug in action, from #39674:
ASSERT_SIGNAL(fd_is_writable(closed_fd), SIGABRT)
This test should fail (fd_is_writable does not SIGABRT here), but with
the bug, the parent hallucinated being the child, re-ran the expression
successfully, and exited with success.
Fix this by refactoring assert_signal_internal() to be much more strict
about separating control flow from data.
The signal status is now returned via a strictly typed output parameter,
guaranteeing that determining whether we are the child is never
conflated with whether the child exited cleanly.
When a child process exits normally (si_code == CLD_EXITED),
siginfo.si_status contains the exit code. When it is killed by a signal
(si_code == CLD_KILLED or CLD_DUMPED), si_status contains the signal
number. However, assert_signal_internal() returns si_status blindly.
This causes exit codes to be misinterpreted as signal numbers.
This allows failing tests to silently pass if their exit code
numerically coincides with the expected signal. For example, a test
expecting SIGABRT (6) would incorrectly pass if the child simply exited
with status 6 instead of being killed by a signal.
Fix this by checking si_code. Only return si_status as a signal number
if the child was actually killed by a signal (CLD_KILLED or CLD_DUMPED).
If the child exited normally (CLD_EXITED), return 0 to indicate that no
signal occurred.
Daan De Meyer
Chris Down
Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek