Re: [PATCH 0/5 RFC] Add an interface to discover relationships between namespaces

[Eric W. Biederman]

Andrey Vagin <avagin@xxxxxxxxxx> writes:

> Hello,
>
> I forgot to add --cc-cover for git send-email, so everyone who is in
> Cc got only a cover letter. All messages were sent in mail lists.
>
> Sorry for inconvenience.

Mostly the code looked sensible.  But I had a couple of issues.
Resend this in September (when the merge window is closed and I am back
from vacation) and I will give this a thorough review and get this
merged.  Or possibly next week if Linus releases another -rc

> On Thu, Jul 14, 2016 at 11:20 AM, Andrey Vagin <avagin@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>> Each namespace has an owning user namespace and now there is not way
>> to discover these relationships.
>>
>> Pid and user namepaces are hierarchical. There is no way to discover
>> parent-child relationships too.
>>
>> Why we may want to know relationships between namespaces?
>>
>> One use would be visualization, in order to understand the running system.
>> Another would be to answer the question: what capability does process X have to
>> perform operations on a resource governed by namespace Y?
>>
>> One more use-case (which usually called abnormal) is checkpoint/restart.
>> In CRIU we age going to dump and restore nested namespaces.
>>
>> There [1] was a discussion about which interface to choose to determing
>> relationships between namespaces.
>>
>> Eric suggested to add two ioctl-s [2]:
>>> Grumble, Grumble.  I think this may actually a case for creating ioctls
>>> for these two cases.  Now that random nsfs file descriptors are bind
>>> mountable the original reason for using proc files is not as pressing.
>>>
>>> One ioctl for the user namespace that owns a file descriptor.
>>> One ioctl for the parent namespace of a namespace file descriptor.
>>
>> Here is an implementaions of these ioctl-s.
>>
>> [1] https://lkml.org/lkml/2016/7/6/158
>> [2] https://lkml.org/lkml/2016/7/9/101
>>
>> Cc: "Eric W. Biederman" <ebiederm@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
>> Cc: James Bottomley <James.Bottomley@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
>> Cc: "Michael Kerrisk (man-pages)" <mtk.manpages@xxxxxxxxx>
>> Cc: "W. Trevor King" <wking@xxxxxxxxxx>
>> Cc: Alexander Viro <viro@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
>> Cc: Serge Hallyn <serge.hallyn@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>


Eric