Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1750997AbWAUKFQ (ORCPT ); Sat, 21 Jan 2006 05:05:16 -0500 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S1751198AbWAUKFQ (ORCPT ); Sat, 21 Jan 2006 05:05:16 -0500 Received: from ebiederm.dsl.xmission.com ([166.70.28.69]:48084 "EHLO ebiederm.dsl.xmission.com") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1750997AbWAUKFO (ORCPT ); Sat, 21 Jan 2006 05:05:14 -0500 To: "Serge E. Hallyn" Cc: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, "Alan Cox Dave Hansen" , Arjan van de Ven , Suleiman Souhlal , Hubertus Franke , Cedric Le Goater Subject: Re: RFC: Multiple instances of kernel namespaces. References: <43CD18FF.4070006@FreeBSD.org> <1137517698.8091.29.camel@localhost.localdomain> <43CD32F0.9010506@FreeBSD.org> <1137521557.5526.18.camel@localhost.localdomain> <1137522550.14135.76.camel@localhost.localdomain> <1137610912.24321.50.camel@localhost.localdomain> <1137612537.3005.116.camel@laptopd505.fenrus.org> <1137613088.24321.60.camel@localhost.localdomain> <1137624867.1760.1.camel@localhost.localdomain> <20060120201353.GA13265@sergelap.austin.ibm.com> From: ebiederm@xmission.com (Eric W. Biederman) Date: Sat, 21 Jan 2006 03:04:16 -0700 In-Reply-To: <20060120201353.GA13265@sergelap.austin.ibm.com> (Serge E. Hallyn's message of "Fri, 20 Jan 2006 14:13:53 -0600") Message-ID: User-Agent: Gnus/5.1007 (Gnus v5.10.7) Emacs/21.4 (gnu/linux) MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Content-Length: 2987 Lines: 75 "Serge E. Hallyn" writes: > Quoting Eric W. Biederman (ebiederm@xmission.com): >> >> At this point I have to confess I have been working on something >> similar, to IBM's pid virtualization work. But I have what is at >> least for me a unifying concept, that makes things easier to think >> about. >> >> The idea is to think about things in terms of namespaces. Currently >> in the kernel we have the fs/mount namespace already implemented. >> >> Partly this helps on what the interface for creating a new namespace >> instance should be. 'clone(CLONE_NEW)', and how >> it should be managed from the kernel data structures. >> >> Partly thinking of things as namespaces helps me scope the problem. >> >> Does this sound like a sane approach? > > And a bonus of this is that for security and vserver-type applications, > the CLONE_NEWPID and CLONE_NEWFS will often happen at the same time. > > How do you (or do you?) address naming namespaces? This would be > necessary for transitioning into an existing namespace, performing > actions on existing namespaces (i.e. checkpoint, migrate to another > machine, enter the namespace and kill pid 521), and would just be > useful for accounting purposes, i.e. how else do you have a > "ps --all-namespaces" specify a process' namespace? So I address naming indirectly. The last thing I want to have is to add yet another namespace to the kernel for naming namespaces. We have enough namespaces already. In any sane context for a pid-namespace we need a pid that we can call waitpid on, so we don't break the process tree. Which means at least the init process has 2 pids, one that it's parent sees, and another (1) that it and it's children see. So I name pidspaces like we do sessions of process groups and sessions by the pid of the leader. So in the simple case I have names like: 1178/1632 > Doubt we want to add an argument to clone(), so do we just add a new > proc, sysfs, or syscall for setting a pid-namespace name? That shouldn't be necessary. > Do we need a new syscall for transitioning into an existing namespace? That is a good question. The FS namespaces that we already have has much the same problem. A completely different solution to this problem seems to have been implemented but I don't grasp it yet. Inherently transitioning to an existing namespace is something that is straight forward to implement, so it is worth thinking about. If I want a guest that can keep secrets from the host sysadmin I don't want transitioning into a guest namespace to come too easily. Currently I can always just create an extra child of pid 1 that I will be my slave. The problem is that this is an extra process laying around. Eric - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/