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

From: Glauber Costa
Date: Tue Jun 05 2012 - 07:35:54 EST


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


Daniel,

Please let me know what you think of the attached patch. It is ontop of Eric's tree that you pointed me to, but I am not really using any of its functionality, so this would be equally doable in current mainline kernel - but I wanted to make sure it integrates well with what Eric is doing as well.

It is a bit wasteful space-wise, but this approach pretty much guarantees we don't need to update pointers anywhere - therefore, totally lock-free. pid->level is only updated after switch_task_namespaces(), so every call before that will see correct information up to the previous level.