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

Hi,

On 14 July 2016 at 20:20, Andrey Vagin [off-list ref] 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.

This looks interesting to me because I am interested in representing
in a graphical way the relationship between different mounts in
different mount namespaces (showing the ID, the parent-children
relationships, mount peer groups, the master-slave relationships etc),
specially for containers. The first idea was to take both
/proc/1/mountinfo and /proc/$OTHER_PID/mountinfo and I can correlate
the "shared:" and "master:" fields in the mountinfo files.

But I cannot read the /proc/$pid/mountinfo of mount namespaces when
there are no processes in those mount namespaces. For example, if
those mount namespaces stay alive only because they contain
"shared&slave" mounts between master mounts and slave mounts that I
can see in /proc/$pid/mountinfo. Fictional example:

# mntns 1, mountinfo 1 (visible via /proc/1/mountinfo)
61 0 253:1 / / rw shared:1

# mntns 2, mountinfo 2 (not visible via any /proc/$pid/mountinfo)
731 569 0:75 / / rw master:1 shared:42

# mntns 3, mountinfo 3 (not visible via any /proc/${container_pid}/mountinfo)
762 597 0:82 / / rw master:42 shared:76

As far as I understand, I cannot get a reference to the mntns2 fd
because mnt namespaces are not hierarchical, and I cannot get its
/proc/???/mountinfo because no processes live inside.

Is there a way around it? Should this use case be handled together?

Thanks!
Alban

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]:

quoted

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-aS9lmoZGLiVWk0Htik3J/w@public.gmane.org>
Cc: James Bottomley <James.Bottomley-d9PhHud1JfjCXq6kfMZ53/egYHeGw8Jk@public.gmane.org>
Cc: "Michael Kerrisk (man-pages)" <redacted>
Cc: "W. Trevor King" <redacted>
Cc: Alexander Viro <viro-RmSDqhL/yNMiFSDQTTA3OLVCufUGDwFn@public.gmane.org>
Cc: Serge Hallyn <redacted>

--
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