[Dovecot] Pid file?

[Timo Sirainen]

On Wed, 2003-11-26 at 13:04, Clive Jones wrote:
> Is there a way to make Dovecot maintain a pid file? Most daemons
> put their pid in /var/run/dovecot.pid (or similar) while they are
> running, then remove it on exit, but I can't find any option to
> do this in Dovecot.

Hmm. I guess I could add it.

> (Of course, if I could work out how on earth to stop Dovecot
> leaking processes, I wouldn't be looking for a simpler way to
> keep bringing the daemon down and restarting it. (-8 )

Well, I thought you would have looked at 0.99.10.4 release announcement
mail:

        - Fixed reference counters in imap-login and pop3-login.
          IMAP AUTHENTICATE and POP3 AUTH commands could have left the
          process stuck doing nothing forever.

I'd think it fixes your problem.

Also last night I started thinking about this problem in general and
figured out that manual reference counting is a bad idea. Either you
unref too much and cause double-free() security holes, or you forget to
unref something and it can be used to DoS like in this case.

Garbage collector would help .. but I don't really like the idea of
depending on Boehm GC. It's bloaty and I haven't had very good
experiences with it so far. I couldn't figure out why it's incorrectly
freeing some part of memory when running THREAD command and causing
crashes.

So.. I haven't fully finished my plan, but I think it would work if I
made some kind of GC for "objects". There would be just a few of them,
mostly where I use refcounting now. It would be fully ANSI-C and it
might not be as easy to use as real GC, but I think I could make it safe
so these kind of security holes would be prevented.

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