[Devel] Device Namespaces

[Greg Kroah-Hartman]

On Sun, Sep 29, 2013 at 10:28:55PM +0300, Amir Goldstein wrote:
> 
> 
> 
> On Thu, Sep 26, 2013 at 8:33 AM, Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh at linuxfoundation.org
> > wrote:
> 
>     On Wed, Sep 25, 2013 at 02:34:54PM -0700, Eric W. Biederman wrote:
>     > So the big issues for a device namespace to solve are filtering which
>     > devices a container has access to and being able to dynamically change
>     > which devices those are at run time (aka hotplug).
> 
>     As _all_ devices are hotpluggable now (look, there's no CONFIG_HOTPLUG
>     anymore, because it was redundant), I think you need to really think
>     this through better (pci, memory, cpus, etc.) before you do anything in
>     the kernel.
> 
>     > After having thought about this for a bit I don't know if a pure
>     > userspace solution is sufficient or actually a good idea.
>     >
>     > - We can manually manage a tmpfs with device nodes in userspace.
>     >   (But that is deprecated functionality in the mainstream kernel).
> 
>     Yes, but I'm not going to namespace devtmpfs, as that is going to be an
>     impossible task, right?
> 
> 
> That sounds like a challenge ;-)
> Seriously, as Serge correctly noted, it would not be that different from devpts
> if you start from an empty devtmpfs and populate it with devices that are
> "added in the context of that namespace".  The semantics in which
> devices are "added in the context of a namespace" is the missing piece
> of the puzzle.

And the fact that these devices are almost all created before userspace
starts up, is a non-trivial "piece of the puzzle" :)

Good luck,

greg k-h