hmm, now it works, but only when strace'ing it.
that's really strange.
On my box, with my patch applied, also busybox works now.
But still I wonder whether user_ns really solves my problem, as I don't
want to create sandboxed users, but only private namespaces just like
on Plan9.
Well, I'd be surprised if that works out of the box.
Since you're posting on LKML I assumed you're hacking the kernel to support
plan9-alike namespaces...