nsproxy: attach to namespaces via pidfds
For quite a while we have been thinking about using pidfds to attach to
namespaces. This patchset has existed for about a year already but we've
wanted to wait to see how the general api would be received and adopted.
Now that more and more programs in userspace have started using pidfds
for process management it's time to send this one out.
This patch makes it possible to use pidfds to attach to the namespaces
of another process, i.e. they can be passed as the first argument to the
setns() syscall. When only a single namespace type is specified the
semantics are equivalent to passing an nsfd. That means
setns(nsfd, CLONE_NEWNET) equals setns(pidfd, CLONE_NEWNET). However,
when a pidfd is passed, multiple namespace flags can be specified in the
second setns() argument and setns() will attach the caller to all the
specified namespaces all at once or to none of them. Specifying 0 is not
valid together with a pidfd.
The obvious example where this is useful is a standard container
manager interacting with a running container: pushing and pulling files
or directories, injecting mounts, attaching/execing any kind of process,
managing network devices all these operations require attaching to all
or at least multiple namespaces at the same time. Given that nowadays
most containers are spawned with all namespaces enabled we're currently
looking at at least 14 syscalls, 7 to open the /proc/<pid>/ns/<ns>
nsfds, another 7 to actually perform the namespace switch. With time
namespaces we're looking at about 16 syscalls.
(We could amortize the first 7 or 8 syscalls for opening the nsfds by
stashing them in each container's monitor process but that would mean
we need to send around those file descriptors through unix sockets
everytime we want to interact with the container or keep on-disk
state. Even in scenarios where a caller wants to join a particular
namespace in a particular order callers still profit from batching
other namespaces. That mostly applies to the user namespace but
all container runtimes I found join the user namespace first no matter
if it privileges or deprivileges the container similar to how unshare
behaves.)
With pidfds this becomes a single syscall no matter how many namespaces
are supposed to be attached to.
A decently designed, large-scale container manager usually isn't the
parent of any of the containers it spawns so the containers don't die
when it crashes or needs to update or reinitialize. This means that
for the manager to interact with containers through pids is inherently
racy especially on systems where the maximum pid number is not
significicantly bumped. This is even more problematic since we often spawn
and manage thousands or ten-thousands of containers. Interacting with a
container through a pid thus can become risky quite quickly. Especially
since we allow for an administrator to enable advanced features such as
syscall interception where we're performing syscalls in lieu of the
container. In all of those cases we use pidfds if they are available and
we pass them around as stable references. Using them to setns() to the
target process namespaces is as reliable as using nsfds. Either the
target process is already dead and we get ESRCH or we manage to attach
to its namespaces but we can't accidently attach to another process'
namespaces. So pidfds lend themselves to be used with this api.
Apart from significiantly reducing the number of syscalls from double
digit to single digit which is a decent reason post-spectre/meltdown
this also allows to switch to a set of namespaces atomically, i.e.
either attaching to all the specified namespaces succeeds or we fail. If
we fail we haven't changed a single namespace. There are currently three
namespaces that can fail (other than for ENOMEM which really is not
very interesting since we then have other problems anyway) for
non-trivial reasons, user, mount, and pid namespaces. We can fail to
attach to a pid namespace if it is not our current active pid namespace
or a descendant of it. We can fail to attach to a user namespace because
we are multi-threaded, because our current mount namespace shares
filesystem state with other tasks, or because we're trying to setns()
to the same user namespace, i.e. the target task has the same user
namespace as we do. We can fail to attach to a mount namespace because
it shares filesystem state with other tasks or because we fail to lookup
the new root for the new mount namespace. In most non-pathological
scenarios these issues can be somewhat mitigated. But there's e.g.
still an inherent race between trying to setns() to the mount namespace
of a task and that task spawning a child with CLONE_FS. If that process
runs in a new user namespace we must have already setns()ed into the new
user namespace otherwise we fail to attach to the mount namespace. There
are other cases similar to that and we've had issues where we're
half-attached to some namespace and failing in the middle. I've talked
about some of these problem during the hallway track (something only the
pre-COVID-19 generation will remember) of Plumber in Los Angeles in
2018(?). Even if all these issues could be avoided with super careful
userspace coding it would be nicer to have this done in-kernel. Pidfds
seem to lend themselves nicely for this.
The other neat thing about this is that setns()
Cc: Eric W. Biederman <ebiederm@xmission.com>
Cc: Serge Hallyn <serge@hallyn.com>
Cc: Jann Horn <jannh@google.com>
Cc: Michael Kerrisk <mtk.manpages@gmail.com>
Cc: Aleksa Sarai <cyphar@cyphar.com>
Signed-off-by: Christian Brauner <christian.brauner@ubuntu.com>
---
If we agree that this is useful than I'd pick this up for for v5.8.
There's probably some smart trick around nsproxy and pidns life-cycle
management that I'm missing but I tried to be conservative wrt to taking
references.
13 files changed
