[Devel] Re: namespaces compatibility list

[Cedric Le Goater]

Pavel Emelyanov wrote:
> Hi guys!
> 
> As you might have seen, recently there was some spontaneous 
> discussion about the namespaces-working-together problems.
> 
> Ted T'so proposed to create some document that describes what
> problems user may have when he/she creates some new namespace,
> but keeps others shared. I like this idea, so here's the draft
> with the problems I currently have in mind and can describe 
> somewhat audibly - the "namespaces compatibility list".

that compatibility list could be encoded in the way we check
the clone flags in copy_process() and unshare(). It would 
also be good to have it as a comment somewhere in kernel/fork.c

> The Documentation/namespaces/ dir is about to contain more
> docs about the namespaces stuff (e.g. I'm going to prepare
> a doc about the pid namespaces, maybe Serge will want to
> write something about the user namespaces development, Eric
> may want to put some notes about the netns API and so on), 
> but currently there will be only one file.
> 
> What would you say about it?

well, as this is user space issues, I'd say that we should
help building a good man page. What's in  Documentation/
could help to do that but I don't trust documentation when
it's maintained in 2 places. 

So a check_flags() routine for namespaces with all the required 
comments would probably be more helpful for the manpage 
maintainer. 
 
I was thinking of merging some clone flags together also and
keep only 3, NS, PID and NET. 

> 
> Signed-off-by: Pavel Emelyanov <xemul at openvz.org>
> 
> ---
> 
> diff --git a/Documentation/namespaces/compatibility-list.txt b/Documentation/namespaces/compatibility-list.txt
> new file mode 100644
> index 0000000..4be4a3c
> --- /dev/null
> +++ b/Documentation/namespaces/compatibility-list.txt
> @@ -0,0 +1,32 @@
> +	Namespaces compatibility list
> +
> +This document contains the information about the problems user
> +may have when creating tasks living in different namespaces.
> +
> +Here's the summary. This matrix shows the known problems, that
> +occur when tasks share some namespace (the columns) while living
> +in different other namespaces (the raws):
> +
> +	UTS	IPC	VFS	PID	User	Net
> +UTS
> +IPC			 1
> +VFS
> +PID		 1	 1
> +User			 2
> +Net
> +

funny, I had just started doing :

depends	on	VFS	PID	IPC	NET	UTS	MQ
VFS		*
PID		*	*				
IPC			*	*			
NET  					*	*	
UTS						*	
MQ		*	*		?	*	*

I kept VFS out for the moment.

I would rather build a matrix giving the dependencies. nop ? which
is a way to enforce the clone flags.

C.


> +1. Both the IPC and the PID namespaces provide IDs to address
> +   object inside the kernel. E.g. semaphore with ipcid or
> +   process group with pid.
> +
> +   In both cases, tasks shouldn't try telling this id to some
> +   other task living in different namespace vid shared filesystem
> +   or IPC shmem/message. The fact is that this ID is only valid
> +   within the namespace it was obtained in and may refer to some
> +   other object in another namespace.
> +
> +2. Intentionnaly, two equal user ids in different user namespaces
> +   should not be equal from the VFS point of view. In other
> +   words, user 10 in one user namespace shouldn't have the same
> +   access permissions to files, beloging to user 10 in another
> +   namespace. But currently this is not so.
> 

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