[Devel] Re: [PATCH] netns: Delete virtual interfaces during namespace cleanup

[Eric W. Biederman]

Daniel Lezcano <dlezcano at fr.ibm.com> writes:

> I agree that will make the life easier for user space developer :)
>
> I have a few questions about this new behaviour.
>
> After discussing with Benjamin, this patch means an user can no longer manage a
> pool of virtual devices because they will be automatically destroyed when the
> namespace exits. I don't think it is a big concern, but just in case I am asking
> :)
>
> Another point, at present, the virtual devices go back to the initial network
> namespace when the namespace dies, and this behaviour is used to track the
> namespace life cycle. With this patch we have no way to know when the network
> namespace has exited. So we can have the last process exiting the network
> namespace, but the network namespace can stay alive (eg. some sockets still have
> buffer to send) ?

Depending on the network interfaces going back to the initial network namespace
is problematic in the long term because is breaks recursive containers.  I can't
see any behavior that does that as anything other than a bug.  Especially
as I already have production uses for recursive containers.

> AFAIR, Pavel told us about a patch extending the "wait" semantic and pass
> namespace options to wait for. Is that right Pavel ? Shouldn't we apply this
> path before deleting the virtual network devices ?

Tell you what.  I will post in a bit my patchset that makes /proc/net
it's own filesystem, that magically mounts on /proc/self/net.  It is a
long stupid story why I haven't posted it publicly.  At which point we have
complete visibility into when a network namespace exits and if we need to
be able to wait for it we can just implement a poll method on the root
directory.

That is simple and will work quite nicely in the long term, and gives
us a lot more visibility than a simple this namespace has exited bit.

Eric
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