[Devel] Re: semantics for namespace naming

[Eric W. Biederman]

"Serge E. Hallyn" <serue at us.ibm.com> writes:

> Quoting Eric W. Biederman (ebiederm at xmission.com):
>
> (still digesting the earlier part of your email, will respond
> to that later.  I'm not sure whether you're laying out the
> purely pid-addressed approach as an alternative, or just
> extensively arguing that the container should point to an
> init_pid and not an nsproxy, or whether you are saying
> something differently entirely which I still need to process.)

Mostly I was thinking aloud, and trying to define the problem
we are trying to solve.

> Main downside of that is that we then again expect the init
> process to stick around.
>
> And since we can have a new container without having a new pidspace,
> it's not even limited to one "reserved" process per pidspace.
> Imagine a system with 300 users logging in, each with a
> polyinstantiated /tmp directory.  So now you have 300 implicit
> containers due to their sys_unshare(CLONE_NS), and each of
> these containers points to and reserves the PAM process which
> did the unshare?

I guess if we want to think of those uses of namespaces as containers
there is a clear problem.

>> I'm not quite convinced we need the struct container.  But I have
>> no fundamental objects to it either.
>
> I'm not convinced either.  I stuck it in there mainly for
> description of the idea.
>
> Though as I mentioned in my response to Suka, there is the
> issue of keeping container 'vserver1' around even if both
> the original nsproxy and the init process for that vserver
> are gone.  Because so long as one of it's decendents still
> exists, we should still be able to say "kill vserver1", and
> kill all it's decendents.
>
> (And here we may want to talk about unsharing the container
> namespace so that /vserver1/vserver3 can become independent
> of /vserver1, but I don't like the security implications of
> that)

Digesting things a little more.
If we are assigning names, there does seem to be value in
hierarchical names.  My biggest objection is that if the
operation we really want to perform is kill vserver1 that
does not map very naturally to the current kill command.

As for making /vserver1/vserver3 independent of /vserver1 you need to
be outside of /vserver1 to do it and it probably just a move on your
magic filesystem.  But having the ability for a process to leave
a container even if it is pulled out has all kinds of interesting
consequences, especially if you inadvertently remove a security
restriction by doing so.

>> > Plus of course relevant sysfs stuff.
>> 
>> /proc is actually the appropriate filesystem for this sort of
>> information not sysfs.  Handling the network information that
>> is in sysfs is going to be hard enough.
>
> Ok, good point.  In addition to actually being process info, that'll
> also make it trivial (compared to sysfs) to present different
> information depending on a process' container.

Exactly.

Eric
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