[Devel] Re: [PATCH 0/16] Pid namespaces

[Pavel Emelianov]

Herbert Poetzl wrote:
> On Fri, Jul 06, 2007 at 12:01:59PM +0400, Pavel Emelianov wrote:
>> This is "submition for inclusion" of hierarchical, not kconfig
>> configurable, zero overheaded ;) pid namespaces.
>>
>> The overall idea is the following:
>>
>> The namespace are organized as a tree - once a task is cloned
>> with CLONE_NEWPIDS (yes, I've also switched to it :) the new
>> namespace becomes the parent's child and tasks living in the
>> parent namespace see the tasks from the new one. The numerical
>> ids are used on the kernel-user boundary, i.e. when we export
>> pid to user we show the id, that should be used to address the
>> task in question from the namespace we're exporting this id to.
> 
> how does that behave when:
> 
>  a) the parent dies and gets reaped?

The children are re-parented to the namespace's init.
Surprised?

>  b) the 'spawned' init dies, but other tasks
>     inside the pid space are still active?

The init's init becomes the namespace's init.

>  c) what visibility rules do apply for the
>     various spaces (including the default host space)?

Each task sees tasks from its namespace and all its children
namespaces. Yes, each task can see itself as well ;)

>> The main difference from Suka's patches are the following:
>>
>> 0. Suka's patches change the kernel/pid.c code too heavy.
>>    This set keeps the kernel code look like it was without
>>    the patches. However, this is a minor issue. The major is:
>>
>> 1. Suka's approach is to remove the notion of the task's 
>>    numerical pid from the kernel at all. The numbers are 
>>    used on the kernel-user boundary or within the kernel but
>>    with the namespace this nr belongs to. This results in 
>>    massive changes of struct's members fro int pid to struct
>>    pid *pid, task->pid becomes the virtual id and so on and
>>    so forth.
>>    My approach is to keep the good old logic in the kernel. 
>>    The task->pid is a global and unique pid, find_pid() finds
>>    the pid by its global id and so on. The virtual ids appear
>>    on the user-kernel boundary only. Thus drivers and other 
>>    kernel code may still be unaware of pids unless they do not
>>    communicate with the userspace and get/put numerical pids.
> 
> interesting ... not sure that is what kernel folks
> have in mind though (IIRC, the struct pid change was
> considered a kernel side cleanup)

That's why I'm sending the patches - to make "kernel folks" make
a decision. Will we see some patches from VServer team?

>> And some more minor differences:
>>
>> 2. Suka's patches have the limit of pid namespace nesting. 
>>    My patches do not.
>>
>> 3. Suka assumes that pid namespace can live without proc mount
>>    and tries to make the code work with pid_ns->proc_mnt change
>>    from NULL to not-NULL from times to times.
>>    My code calls the kern_mount() at the namespace creation and
>>    thus the pid_namespace always works with proc.
> 
> shouldn't that be done by userspace instead?

It can be. But when the namespace is being created there's no
any userspace in it yet.

>> There are some small issues that I can describe if someone is
>> interested.
>>
>> The tests like nptl perf, unixbench spawn, getpid and others
>> didn't reveal any performance degradation in init_namespace
>> with the RHEL5 kernel .config file. I admit, that different
>> .config-s may show that patches hurt the performance, but the
>> intention was *not* to make the kernel work worse with popular
>> distributions.
>>
>> This set has some ways to move forward, but this is some kind
>> of a core, that do not change the init_pid_namespace behavior
>> (checked with LTP tests) and may require some hacking to do 
>> with the namespaces only.
> 
> TIA,
> Herbert
> 

BTW, why did you remove Suka and Serge from Cc?

Pavel
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