[Devel] Re: CLONE_PARENT in a container

[Eric W. Biederman]

Sukadev Bhattiprolu <sukadev at linux.vnet.ibm.com> writes:

> Cc: Oleg, Eric
>
> Oren Laadan [orenl at cs.columbia.edu] wrote:
> | 
> | What happens when a container-init calls clone() with the
> | CLONE_PARENT flag set ?
> | 
> | Since CLONE_PARENT can be used to create a sibling, I'd
> | think that this will create a sibling, in particular,  a
> | new task in the same container whose parent is the parent
> | of the container. From a quick look in the code I can't
> | see why this would be impossible.
> | 
> | Is this so ?  Is this the desired behavior ?
>
> Good question.  CLONE_PARENT was discussed recently on lkml but did
> not look obvious to me who uses it or what the semantics are.
> Some observations.
>
> 	- the "reaper" for this sibling would be the reaper of the
> 	  parent container, not the init of the new container.
>
> 	- if container-init exits, this sibling will also be killed since
> 	  it has a pid in this container.
> 	   
> Not sure if it needs to be prevented though.  An using CLONE_PARENT
> may want to run as a container-init :-) And if CLONE_PARENT is used
> with CLONE_THREAD, we don't want to preclude threaded container-inits.

Fascinating.   We have a way of generating processes that breaks the unix
process tree.

In the initial pid namespace a init that calls CLONE_PARENT will be the
reaper of that child, because the idle thread is in the same pid namespace.

I hadn't even thought about CLONE_PARENT in the context of a pid namespace.

CLONE_PARENT is a rare uncommon case a left over from the first experiments of
threading in linux.  So I would not work hard at getting it to do the right thing.
If it is a problem I would kill it.

However if we can support processes who don't have init as their parent it makes
entering a pid namespace a much more realistic proposition.

Eric
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