[MESOS-8229] Make it possible to reliably inject environment variables into forked processes

• Type: Improvement
• Status: Open
• Priority: Major
• Resolution: Unresolved
• Component/s: agent, containerization, master
• Assignee: Unassigned
• Reporter: Benjamin Bannier
• Created: 15/Nov/17 08:57
• Updated: 24/Jan/18 23:55

Description

We should consider supporting reliable injection of environment variables into forked processes, e.g., to customize dynamic library loading with LD_PRELOAD or the influence the behavior of the used runtime (e.g., glibc options). Customary, environment variables are used for this, but we tend to in many cases strip away all but a hardcoded set of flags (e.g., when starting executors). The possible set of these flags seems to be open.

I came across this when trying to run our test suites with a build with clang address sanitization enabled (passing -fsanitize=address in the compiler flags). This links in a C runtime which aborts processes if memory leaks are detected. These aborts can be disabled by passing runtime options in an environment variable ASAN_OPTIONS, but unfortunately, it is not effective in all forked processes.

Issue Links

• is related to: MESOS-7292 Introduce a "sensitive mode" in Mesos which prevents leaks of sensitive data.