Killing a child process on the server side crashes VSCode

VSCode: 1.55.2 3c4e3df9e89829dce27b7b5c24508306b151f30d x64

OS: macOS Big Sur 11.2.3 (20D91)

Steps to reproduce:

• create a long-standing child process using either ChildProcess.execFile or ChildProcess.spawn, trying from either the client side or the server side
• after some time, kill() the process

Expected: the process dies in both cases

Actual:

• from the client, nothing bad seems to happen
• when the server one is killed, the whole VSCode goes down with the window has crashed (reason 'killed')

Is there something to do to prevent that?

[deepak1556]

That makes sense 😃

I don’t think we have to selectively sandbox this scenario given the nature of extension host. Closing for now, @dbaeumer feel free to reopen if you think this deserves further attention.

[Ptival]

Oh, thanks to you I found the source of the problem!

The process I am launching is a research tool, which I have now found, in its setup, installs a signal handler for the SIGTERM signal that broadcasts the signal to its entire process group!

It is actually now very easy to reproduce, for instance, by using the following Python “group murder” script:

#! /usr/bin/env python
import os, signal
os.killpg(os.getpgid(os.getpid()), signal.SIGTERM)

If you run this script in the language server, it brings down all VSCode instances.

In this light, it actually seems moderately reasonable to not expect the language server to sandbox this entirely. I’ll leave it up to you to decide whether you want this behavior to be prohibited entirely, or whether to close the issue.