On Mon, 2017-05-22 at 09:53 -0700, James Bottomley wrote: > [Added missing cc to containers list] > On Mon, 2017-05-22 at 17:22 +0100, David Howells wrote: > > Here are a set of patches to define a container object for the kernel > > and to provide some methods to create and manipulate them. > > > > The reason I think this is necessary is that the kernel has no idea > > how to direct upcalls to what userspace considers to be a container - > > current Linux practice appears to make a "container" just an > > arbitrarily chosen junction of namespaces, control groups and files, > > which may be changed individually within the "container". > > This sounds like a step in the wrong direction: the strength of the > current container interfaces in Linux is that people who set up > containers don't have to agree what they look like. So I can set up a > user namespace without a mount namespace or an architecture emulation > container with only a mount namespace. > Does this really mandate what they look like though? AFAICT, you can still spawn disconnected namespaces to your heart's content. What this does is provide a container for several different namespaces so that the kernel can actually be aware of the association between them. The way you populate the different namespaces looks to be pretty flexible. > But ignoring my fun foibles with containers and to give a concrete > example in terms of a popular orchestration system: in kubernetes, > where certain namespaces are shared across pods, do you imagine the > kernel's view of the "container" to be the pod or what kubernetes > thinks of as the container? This is important, because half the > examples you give below are network related and usually pods share a > network namespace. > > > The kernel upcall mechanism then needs to decide which set of > > namespaces, etc., it must exec the appropriate upcall program. > > Examples of this include: > > > > (1) The DNS resolver. The DNS cache in the kernel should probably > > be per-network namespace, but in userspace the program, its > > libraries and its config data are associated with a mount tree and a > > user namespace and it gets run in a particular pid namespace. > > All persistent (written to fs data) has to be mount ns associated; > there are no ifs, ands and buts to that. I agree this implies that if > you want to run a separate network namespace, you either take DNS from > the parent (a lot of containers do) or you set up a daemon to run > within the mount namespace. I agree the latter is a slightly fiddly > operation you have to get right, but that's why we have orchestration > systems. > > What is it we could do with the above that we cannot do today? > Spawn a task directly from the kernel, already set up in the correct namespaces, a'la call_usermodehelper. So far there is no way to do that, and it is something we'd very much desire. Ian Kent has made several passes at it recently. > > (2) NFS ID mapper. The NFS ID mapping cache should also probably be > > per-network namespace. > > I think this is a view but not the only one: Right at the moment, NFS > ID mapping is used as the one of the ways we can get the user namespace > ID mapping writes to file problems fixed ... that makes it a property > of the mount namespace for a lot of containers. There are many other > instances where they do exactly as you say, but what I'm saying is that > we don't want to lose the flexibility we currently have. > > > (3) nfsdcltrack. A way for NFSD to access stable storage for > > tracking of persistent state. Again, network-namespace dependent, > > but also perhaps mount-namespace dependent. Definitely mount-namespace dependent. > > So again, given we can set this up to work today, this sounds like more > a restriction that will bite us than an enhancement that gives us extra > features. > How do you set this up to work today? AFAIK, if you want to run knfsd in a container today, you're out of luck for any non-trivial configuration. The main reason is that most of knfsd is namespace-ized in the network namespace, but there is no clear way to associate that with a mount namespace, which is what we need to do this properly inside a container. I think David's patches would get us there. > > (4) General request-key upcalls. Not particularly namespace > > dependent, apart from keyrings being somewhat governed by the user > > namespace and the upcall being configured by the mount namespace. > > All mount namespaces have an owning user namespace, so the data > relations are already there in the kernel, is the problem simply > finding them? > > > These patches are built on top of the mount context patchset so that > > namespaces can be properly propagated over submounts/automounts. > > I'll stop here ... you get the idea that I think this is imposing a set > of restrictions that will come back to bite us later. If this is just > for the sake of figuring out how to get keyring upcalls to work, then > I'm sure we can come up with something. > -- Jeff Layton <jlayton@xxxxxxxxxx> -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-nfs" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
