[Devel] Re: [PATCH 0/6] containers: Generic Process Containers (V6)

[Serge E. Hallyn]

Quoting Paul Menage (menage at google.com):
> Hi Serge,
> 
> On 1/3/07, Serge E. Hallyn <serue at us.ibm.com> wrote:
> >From: Serge E. Hallyn <serue at us.ibm.com>
> >Subject: [RFC] [PATCH 1/1] container: define a namespace container 
> >subsystem
> >
> >Here's a stab at a namespace container subsystem based on
> >Paul Menage's containers patch, just to experiment with
> >how semantics suit what we want.
> 
> Thanks for looking at this.
> 
> What you have here is the basic boilerplate for any generic container
> subsystem. I realise that my current containers patch has some
> incompatibilities with the way that nsproxy wants to work.

In retrospect I don't like the changes in behavior.  So my next
version will aim for closer to the original (non-containerfs)
behavior.

> >A few things we'll want to address:
> >
> >        1. We'll want to be able to hook things like
> >           rmdir, so that we can rm -rf /containers/vserver1
> >           to kill all processes in that container and all
> >           child containers.
> 
> The current model is that rmdir fails if there are any processes still
> in the container; so you'd have to kill processes by looking for pids
> in the "tasks" info file. This was behaviour inherited from the
> cpusets code; I'd be open to making this more configurable (e.g.
> specifying that rmdir should try to kill any remaining tasks).

Ok - of course I suspect I'll have to just start coding away before
i can guess at what help I might need from your code.

> >
> >        2. We need a semantic difference between attaching
> >           to a container, and being the first to join the
> >           container you just created.
> 
> Right - the way to do this would probably be some kind of
> "container_clone()" function that duplicates the properties of the
> current container in a child, and immediately moves the current
> process into that container.
>
> >        3. We will want to be able to give the container
> >           attach function more info, so that we can ask to
> >           attach to just the network namespace, but none of
> >           the others, in the container we're attaching to.
> 
> If you want to be able to attach to different namespaces separately,
> then possibly they should be separate container subsystems?

That's one possibility, but imo somewhat unpalatable.

As I mentioned in the last email, I really like the idea of having
files representing each namespace under each namespace container
directory, creating a new container by linking some of those
namespace files, and entering containers by echoing the pathname
to the new container into /proc/$$/ns_container.  (either upon
the echo, or, I think preferably, upon a subsequent exec)

-serge