netdev - Re: [RFC][PATCH] ns: Syscalls for better namespace sharing control.

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Message-ID: <m1bpfbqajn.fsf@fess.ebiederm.org>
Date:	Sat, 27 Feb 2010 01:42:52 -0800
From:	ebiederm@...ssion.com (Eric W. Biederman)
To:	Pavel Emelyanov <xemul@...allels.com>
Cc:	hadi@...erus.ca, Daniel Lezcano <dlezcano@...ibm.com>,
	Patrick McHardy <kaber@...sh.net>,
	Linux Netdev List <netdev@...r.kernel.org>,
	containers@...ts.linux-foundation.org,
	Netfilter Development Mailinglist 
	<netfilter-devel@...r.kernel.org>,
	Ben Greear <greearb@...delatech.com>,
	Serge Hallyn <serue@...ibm.com>,
	Matt Helsley <matthltc@...ibm.com>
Subject: Re: [RFC][PATCH] ns: Syscalls for better namespace sharing control.

Pavel Emelyanov <xemul@...allels.com> writes:

> Thanks. What's the problem with setns?

joining a preexisting namespace is roughly the same problem as
unsharing a namespace.  We simply haven't figure out how to do it
safely for the pid and the uid namespaces.

>> I have designed these file descriptors to pin the namespaces, so
>> waiting for them to exit isn't something they can do now.  It makes a
>> lot of sense to have similar ones that take  weak references to the namespaces
>> that we can use to wait for a namespace to exit.
>
> Yes, I saw this from patches. Eric, I'd very much appreciate if we
> workout a solution that will allow us to kill two birds with one stone.
> I do not want to invent yet another bunch of system calls for "taking
> weak reference".

Definitely.  I only consider the current interface to be a mushy not
set in stone.

> As a "brain storm" start up. Can we use inotify/dnotify for this? 
> Or maybe we should better equip the nsfd call with flags argument and 
> add a flag for weak reference? In that case - how shall we get a 
> notification about namespace is dead? With poll? Maybe worth making
> the sys_close return only when the namespace is dead (by providing a
> proper ->release callback of a file)?

We would want poll to work, anything else is a weird work-around.
The challenging part is that we don't have any infrastructure for
notifying when a namespace goes away.  So that has to be built before
we can wire it up to userspace.  I don't expect it is too difficult
but there is work to be done.

Eric

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