[Devel] Re: [PATCH] allow a task to join a pid namespace

[Glauber Costa]

On 06/05/2012 04:52 PM, Daniel Lezcano wrote:
> On 06/05/2012 12:00 PM, Glauber Costa wrote:
>> On 06/05/2012 01:37 PM, Glauber Costa wrote:
>>> On 06/05/2012 01:36 PM, Daniel Lezcano wrote:
>>>> On 06/04/2012 03:33 PM, Glauber Costa wrote:
>>>>> Currently, it is possible for a process to join existing
>>>>> net, uts and ipc namespaces. This patch allows a process to join an
>>>>> existing pid namespace as well.
>>>>>
>>>>> For that to remain sane, some restrictions are made in the calling
>>>>> process:
>>>>>
>>>>> * It needs to be in the parent namespace of the namespace it wants to
>>>>> jump to
>>>>> * It needs to sit in its own session and group as a leader.
>>>>>
>>>>> The rationale for that, is that people want to trigger actions in a
>>>>> Container
>>>>> from the outside. For instance, mainstream linux recently gained the
>>>>> ability
>>>>> to safely reboot a container. It would be desirable, however, that
>>>>> this
>>>>> action is triggered from an admin in the outside world, very much
>>>>> like a
>>>>> power switch in a physical box.
>>>>>
>>>>> This would also allow us to connect a console to the container,
>>>>> provide a
>>>>> repair mode for setups without networking (or with a broken one), etc.
>>>>
>>>> Hi Glauber,
>>>>
>>>> I am in favor of this patch but I think the pidns support won't be
>>>> complete and some corner-cases are not handled.
>>>>
>>>> May be you can look at Eric's patchset [1] where, IMO, everything is
>>>> taken into account. Some of the patches may be already upstream.
>>>>
>>>> Thanks
>>>> -- Daniel
>>>
>>> I don't remember seeing such patchset in the mailing lists, but that
>>> might be my fault, due to traffic...
>>>
>>> I'll take a look. If it does what I need, I can just drop this.
>>>
>>
>> Ok. In a quick look, it does not seem to go all the way. This is just
>> by reading, but your reboot patch, for instance, is unlikely to work
>> with that, since if it doesn't alter pid->level, things like task
>> ns_of_pid won't work.
>>
>> Running the test scripts I wrote for my testing of that patch also
>> doesn't seem to produce the expected result:
>>
>> after doing setns, the pid won't show up in that namespace.
>
> Yes, AFAIR, pid won't show up, you have to do fork-exec.

Ah, so you mean the kid will show up... Well, ok.

That's acceptable, but how about the behavior I am proposing ? (in the 
patch I sent as a reply to this thread).

I believe it to be saner, even though there is a price tag attached to 
it. None of the other setns calls require you to do any such trickery...