What can affect a process?

I’ve been following an interesting thread on fedora-devel which set me thinking. What is the complete list of different things that can affect the way your process runs?

Here’s my list below. If you have any other ideas, post a comment and I’ll keep this list updated.

1. Environment variables. Obviously there are direct effects, like if $PATH is different then you may end up running different sub-processes. But there are more subtle differences like what happens if the environment is too large or completely empty? Also $LD_* variables can make a big difference to what is inside your process.
2. ulimits. Too small and your program could fail to allocate memory or fail to open a file.
3. Signal masks. Often overlooked, but I’ve hit this one: If a signal is masked, your program can behave quite differently. There is a famous bug where SIGPIPE was masked in the whole of Fedora, because some early program (login) was using dbus which promiscuously masked the signal, then login was forking every other program with this signal masked.
4. Program arguments. You could put this in the “too obvious” class if you want, but consider also argv[0] which might affect your program but not be an immediately visible change.
5. The PID. I have actually seen this: a program (sshd) was trying to create some lock file, something like /var/lock/sshd.<pid> at boot time in order to ensure only one instance was running. It was consistently failing to start sshd at boot. It took me some time to work out that because the boot was exactly predictable (and thus the PID was always the same), it was falling over its own lock file left from last time the machine was shut down.
6. The file descriptors. Does the program change behaviour if fds 0, 1, 2 (stdin, stdout, stderr) are not open? How about if other open fds are leaked from the parent process?
7. Current working directory. Affects what files are opened by relative paths. I guess you could include the chroot here too, but that is quite an obvious change.
8. Number of other processes. This is like an “unofficial” ulimit, since as normally configured Linux will only allow 32766(?) processes (less PID 0 which is reserved and PID 1 for init).
9. UIDs and GIDs. If these are very large, Bad Things can happen. External utilities like cpio and tar will fail.
10. SELinux context. (Suggested by David Malcolm) One thing to note is that the SELinux context of a root login can be different from the context of, say, a daemon started at boot.
11. Wallclock time or other timers. (Alexander E. Patrakov)
12. Filesystem journalling mode, filesystem type. (see Bruno Wolff’s comment)

That’s all I can think of for now. Post a comment if you can think of any more.