Re: [PATCH v3 00/25] user_namespace: introduce fsid mappings

[Christian Brauner]

On Tue, Feb 18, 2020 at 03:50:56PM -0800, James Bottomley wrote:
> On Tue, 2020-02-18 at 15:33 +0100, Christian Brauner wrote:
> > In the usual case of running an unprivileged container we will have
> > setup an id mapping, e.g. 0 100000 100000. The on-disk mapping will
> > correspond to this id mapping, i.e. all files which we want to appear
> > as 0:0 inside the user namespace will be chowned to 100000:100000 on
> > the host. This works, because whenever the kernel needs to do a
> > filesystem access it will lookup the corresponding uid and gid in the
> > idmapping tables of the container. Now think about the case where we
> > want to have an id mapping of 0 100000 100000 but an on-disk mapping
> > of 0 300000 100000 which is needed to e.g. share a single on-disk
> > mapping with multiple containers that all have different id mappings.
> > This will be problematic. Whenever a filesystem access is requested,
> > the kernel will now try to lookup a mapping for 300000 in the id
> > mapping tables of the user namespace but since there is none the
> > files will appear to be owned by the overflow id, i.e. usually
> > 65534:65534 or nobody:nogroup.
> > 
> > With fsid mappings we can solve this by writing an id mapping of 0
> > 100000 100000 and an fsid mapping of 0 300000 100000. On filesystem
> > access the kernel will now lookup the mapping for 300000 in the fsid
> > mapping tables of the user namespace. And since such a mapping
> > exists, the corresponding files will have correct ownership.
> 
> So I did compile this up in order to run the shiftfs tests over it to
> see how it coped with the various corner cases.  However, what I find
> is it simply fails the fsid reverse mapping in the setup.  Trying to
> use a simple uid of 0 100000 1000 and a fsid of 100000 0 1000 fails the
> entry setuid(0) call because of this code:

This is easy to fix. But what's the exact use-case?