I created a Go test program that runs several Go routines, each of which verifies a byte array loaded from a file in advance. Each go-routine is spawned with a configurable delay in milliseconds. I tested it with 100 iterations, which resulted in at least 50 parallel processes. Each verification process uses its own context, as Crio does. I didn't encounter any errors.

Here is my repository with a README containing more information: https://git.sr.ht/~kulbartsch/gpgmego-verify-load-test

Ingo tested this and it worked.

Done by: rM8caa7cc517eb: Use sysconf as a fallback mechanism in the initialization.

OK. I'll add a code for setting the fallback value in _gpgme_io_subsystem_init and use it from get_max_fds.

iirc we introduced sysconf (_SC_OPEN_MAX) for non-linux platforms and that fixed real world problems. What about getting this value at module initialization time and keep on using it as a fallback?

For issues of get_max_fds, I created a sub task, although it seems not the direct cause of this particular problem.

I test following test program (gcc -o t-gmf t-gmf.c) on Debian machine of S390x.

In the log, we can observe duplicated lines generated by
https://dev.gnupg.org/source/gpgme/browse/master/src/posix-io.c$545
Example is like:

2025-05-19 20:16:35 gpgme[21970.55d7]   _gpgme_io_spawn: check: fd[0] = 0x1c -> 0x1
2025-05-19 20:16:35 gpgme[21970.55d7]   _gpgme_io_spawn: check: fd[0] = 0x1c -> 0x1

In practice, calling gpgme_get_key() will often pick up most changes because GPGME asks the underlying GPG agent daemon, which may re-read the keyring. That gives the impression that a long-lived context automatically reflects live updates. However, as aheinecke noted, some updates can still go unnoticed in a single gpgme_ctx_t, so it isn’t a strictly frozen snapshot nor a perfectly live view—behaviors are mixed.

In T7620#201528, @aheinecke wrote:

Maybe we should make the documentation clearer about context key reuse. But the context is specifically designed to cache information about a key, so as to avoid memory overhead. I learned early on that its best for each new operation to use a new context. A context is basically an instance of gpg or gpgsm. So you start one process, ask it for a keylist, keep the process running, start another process, modify the key database, and then ask the first process again about his worldview. Either the first process is a bit confused because it has read data and then that data changed (what happens here) or it has no idea about the change since it was efficient and only read the database once. But here in this example you should be able to reproduce this also by making any other modifications to the key, adding other subkeys, userids etc. That GPGME even notices the secret key is more of a side effect of how the programming works because the GPGME gpg process will ask the gpg-agent (so a third process).

In T7673#201735, @werner wrote:

We will keep the 1.24 branch for bug fixing. Do you really have a problem with gpgme 2.0? Ist that due to factoring out the c++ and qt bindings? That was actually a long standing request from the KDE community so that they can use their cmake stuff.

We will keep the 1.24 branch for bug fixing. Do you really have a problem with gpgme 2.0? Ist that due to factoring out the c++ and qt bindings? That was actually a long standing request from the KDE community so that they can use their cmake stuff.

I'm wondering whether gpgme v1 will still be supported? Or it will be abandoned from now on.

No other processes that I have seen. However please see this last update by Kulbarsch. https://github.com/cri-o/cri-o/issues/8906#issuecomment-2936351035

@sj98ta
Does cri-o invokes processes (other than the ones of gpgme) by its threads?