Re: [patch] PID namespace design bug, workaround

From: Ingo Molnar
Date: Thu Nov 01 2007 - 11:18:22 EST



* Pavel Emelyanov <xemul@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> The "fix" I mention is just returning -EINVAL in case user orders
> CLONE_NEWPIDS and compiling out all the namespace cloning code. This
> is just a more elegant way to get rid of pid namespaces rather than
> Ingo proposed.

unfortunately i have to NACK that approach. We never allowed broken
user-space visible APIs into the kernel like that because it just gives
a vector for that breakage to become de-facto used and forced upon the
core kernel. Even if they can be .config turned off. That's just a lame
excuse that delays the fixing of it. We may mark features that have a
good expectation to be fixed as CONFIG_EXPERIMENTAL, and we may mark
drivers that nobody maintains anymore as CONFIG_BROKEN, but we dont
introduce new core syscall features with CONFIG_BROKEN! We never did and
i hope we never will.

The _only_ way to force the fixing of such type of breakages is to not
offer them _at all_. Really, you are proposing a major new extension to
lots of important core Linux APIs so please try to solve this problem
cleanly, it's really severe. Right now as things stand this containers
sub-feature is "a little bit pregnant". This is one of the few cases
where we really _must_ say no.

Ingo
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