Re: [PATCH RFC] pidns: introduce syscall getvpid

From: Konstantin Khlebnikov
Date: Wed Sep 16 2015 - 03:37:46 EST


On 15.09.2015 20:41, Serge Hallyn wrote:
Quoting Stéphane Graber (stgraber@xxxxxxxxxx):
On Tue, Sep 15, 2015 at 06:01:38PM +0300, Konstantin Khlebnikov wrote:
On 15.09.2015 17:27, Eric W. Biederman wrote:
Konstantin Khlebnikov <khlebnikov@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:

pid_t getvpid(pid_t pid, pid_t source, pid_t target);

This syscall converts pid from one pid-ns into pid in another pid-ns:
it takes @pid in namespace of @source task (zero for current) and
returns related pid in namespace of @target task (zero for current too).
If pid is unreachable from target pid-ns then it returns zero.

This interface as presented is inherently racy. It would be better
if source and target were file descriptors referring to the namespaces
you wish to translate between.

Yep, it's racy. As well as any operation with non-child pids.
With file descriptors for source/target result will be racy anyway.


Such conversion is required for interaction between processes from
different pid-namespaces. For example when system service talks with
client from isolated container via socket about task in container:

Sockets are already supported. At least the metadata of sockets is.

Maybe we need this but I am not convinced of it's utility.

What are you trying to do that motivates this?

I'm working on hierarchical container management system which
allows to create and control nested sub-containers from containers
( https://github.com/yandex/porto ). Main server works in host and
have to interact with all levels of nested namespaces. This syscall
makes some operations much easier: server must remember only pid in
host pid namespace and convert it into right vpid on demand.

Note that as Eric said earlier, sending a PID inside a ucred through a
unix socket will have the pid translated.

So while your solution certainly should be faster, you can already achieve
what you want today by doing:

== Translate PID in container to PID in host
- open a socket
- setns to container's pidns
- send ucred from that container containing the requested container PID
- host sees the host PID

== Translate PID on host to PID in container
- open a socket
- setns to container's pidns
- send ucred from the host containing the request host PID
(send will fail if the host PID isn't part of that container)
- container sees the container PID

In addition, since commit e4bc332451 : /proc/PID/status: show all sets of pid according to ns
we now also have 'NSpid' etc in /proc/$$/status.


As I see this works perfectly only for converting host pid into virtual.

Backward conversion is troublesome: we have to scan all pids in host
procfs and somehow filter tasks from container and its sub-pid-ns.
Or I am missing something trivial?

--
Konstantin
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