From time to time people begin discussions about how thenamespaces are working/going-to-work together.
Ted T'so proposed to create some document that describes what
problems user may have when he/she creates some new namespace,
but keeps others shared. I liked this idea, so here's the initial version of such a document with the problems I currently have in mind and can describe somewhat audibly - the "namespaces compatibility list".
The Documentation/namespaces/ directory is about to contain more
docs about the namespaces stuff.
Thanks to Cedirc for notes and spell checks on the doc.
Signed-off-by: Pavel Emelyanov <xemul@xxxxxxxxxx>
---
commit 83061c56e1c4dcd54d48a62b108d219a7f5279a0
Author: Pavel <pavel@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Fri Nov 16 12:25:53 2007 +0300
Namespaces compatibility list
diff --git a/Documentation/00-INDEX b/Documentation/00-INDEX
index 910e511..3ead06b 100644
--- a/Documentation/00-INDEX
+++ b/Documentation/00-INDEX
@@ -262,6 +262,8 @@ mtrr.txt
- how to use PPro Memory Type Range Registers to increase performance.
mutex-design.txt
- info on the generic mutex subsystem.
+namespaces/
+ - directory with various information about namespaces
nbd.txt
- info on a TCP implementation of a network block device.
netlabel/
diff --git a/Documentation/namespaces/compatibility-list.txt b/Documentation/namespaces/compatibility-list.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..9c9e5c1
--- /dev/null
+++ b/Documentation/namespaces/compatibility-list.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,33 @@
+ Namespaces compatibility list
+
+This document contains the information about the problems user
+may have when creating tasks living in different namespaces.
+
+Here's the summary. This matrix shows the known problems, that
+occur when tasks share some namespace (the columns) while living
+in different other namespaces (the rows):
+
+ UTS IPC VFS PID User Net
+UTS X
+IPC X 1 +VFS X
+PID 1 1 X +User 2 X
+Net +
+1. Both the IPC and the PID namespaces provide IDs to addressIntentionaly
+ object inside the kernel. E.g. semaphore with ipcid or
+ process group with pid.
+
+ In both cases, tasks shouldn't try exposing this id to some
+ other task living in a different namespace via a shared filesystem
+ or IPC shmem/message. The fact is that this ID is only valid
+ within the namespace it was obtained in and may refer to some
+ other object in another namespace.
+
+2. Intentionnaly, two equal user ids in different user namespaces
+ should not be equal from the VFS point of view. In otherbelonging
+ words, user 10 in one user namespace shouldn't have the same
+ access permissions to files, beloging to user 10 in another
+ namespace. But currently this is not so.
+