[Devel] udev in containers

[Serge E. Hallyn]

Hi,

Now that we are allowing udev to run in containers, Daniel has
noticed that updates to sysfs uevent files will trigger a flurry
of activity in all containers on the host.  While not a problem
with just a few containers, this can severaly impact performance
with hundreds or more containers.

(Daniel, would it be possible for you to get some measurements
on host and in a container versus # of active containers, with
and without udev?  Do you have a otehrwise unused machien you
could try that on?)

Is there anything we can/should do about this?

Two approaches, neither sufficiently thought out yet, would be
to generalize the directory tagging currently used for
/sys/class/net, and full-fledged implementation of a device
namespace.

The directory tagging would probably only work if we can assign
multiple tags to a device, but we could for instance make
/sys/block tagged, and really no container probably needs to see
/sys/block/sda.

The device namespace would be similar, except I suspect it
would not only hide certain devices from certain namespaces,
but it would actually virtualize the device major:minor
mapping, for checkpoint/restart, so that /dev/sda could be
redirected to another device more completely than simply
fudging the nodes under /dev.

Comments?  Designs?  Plans?

thanks,
-serge
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