Re: [PATCH RFC v5] pidns: introduce syscall translate_pid

From: Eric W. Biederman
Date: Thu May 31 2018 - 14:03:04 EST


"Michael Kerrisk (man-pages)" <mtk.manpages@xxxxxxxxx> writes:

> On 04/05/2018 09:02 AM, Konstantin Khlebnikov wrote:
>> On 05.04.2018 01:29, Eric W. Biederman wrote:
>>> Nagarathnam Muthusamy <nagarathnam.muthusamy@xxxxxxxxxx> writes:
>>>
>>>> On 04/04/2018 12:11 PM, Konstantin Khlebnikov wrote:
>>>>> Each process have different pids, one for each pid namespace it belongs.
>>>>> When interaction happens within single pid-ns translation isn't required.
>>>>> More complicated scenarios needs special handling.
>>>>>
>>>>> For example:
>>>>> - reading pid-files or logs written inside container with pid namespace
>>>>> - attaching with ptrace to tasks from different pid namespace
>>>>> - passing pids across pid namespaces in any kind of API
>>>>>
>>>>> Currently there are several interfaces that could be used here:
>>>>>
>>>>> Pid namespaces are identified by inode number of /proc/[pid]/ns/pid.
>>>
>>> Using the inode number in interfaces is not an option. Especially not
>>> withou referencing the device number for the filesystem as well.
>>
>> This is supposed to be single-instance fs,
>> not part of proc but referenced but its magic "symlinks".
>>
>> Device numbers are not mentioned in "man namespaces".
>
> Thanks for the heads-up!
>
> That was a bug in the man-page. ioctl_ns(2) already says the right thing.
> Now I patches namespaces(7), as below.

Acked-by: "Eric W. Biederman" <ebiederm@xxxxxxxxxxxx>

For the changes to namespaces.7. I suspect you have already applied
them by now, but if not.

Eric


> Cheers,
>
> Michael
>
> diff --git a/man7/namespaces.7 b/man7/namespaces.7
> index 725ebaff6..3c155de7e 100644
> --- a/man7/namespaces.7
> +++ b/man7/namespaces.7
> @@ -154,11 +154,14 @@ In Linux 3.7 and earlier, these files were visible as hard links.
> Since Linux 3.8,
> .\" commit bf056bfa80596a5d14b26b17276a56a0dcb080e5
> they appear as symbolic links.
> -If two processes are in the same namespace, then the inode numbers of their
> +If two processes are in the same namespace,
> +then the device IDs and inode numbers of their
> .IR /proc/[pid]/ns/xxx
> symbolic links will be the same; an application can check this using the
> +.I stat.st_dev
> +and
> .I stat.st_ino
> -field returned by
> +fields returned by
> .BR stat (2).
> The content of this symbolic link is a string containing
> the namespace type and inode number as in the following example: