Re: [lxc-devel] [RFC PATCH 00/11] Add support for devtmpfs in user namespaces

["Serge E. Hallyn" <serge@hallyn.com>]

Quoting Seth Forshee (seth.forshee@canonical.com):
> On Fri, May 23, 2014 at 03:23:50PM -0700, Eric W. Biederman wrote:
> > Serge Hallyn <serge.hallyn@ubuntu.com> writes:
> > 
> > > Quoting Eric W. Biederman (ebiederm@xmission.com):
> > >> 
> > >> 
> > >> >> Ultimately the technical challenge is how do we create a block device
> > >> >> that is safe for a user who does not have any capabilities to use, and
> > >> >> what can we do with that block device to make it useful.
> > >> >
> > >> > Yes, and I'd like to get started solving those challenges. But I also
> > >> > don't think we can address these two points (support partition blkdevs,
> > >> > help prevent more priveleged users from using a namespace's loop
> > >> > devices) sufficiently while having an implementation completely
> > >> > contained within the loop driver as Greg is requesting.
> > >> 
> > >> My key take away from the conversation is that we should reduce the
> > >> scope of what is being done to something that makes sense and the
> > >> propblems are immediately visible.
> > >> 
> > >> Part of me would like to suggest that fuse and it's ability to imitate
> > >> device nodes might be a more appropriate solution, to something that
> > >
> > > Do you have a link to more info on this?  Some googling got me to an
> > > interesting but old thread on CUSE, but nothing specifically about fuse
> > > doing this.
> > 
> > CUSE is probably what I was thinking of.  It is all part of the fuse
> > code base in the kernel.  And now that I am reminded it is called CUSE
> > I go Duh that is a character device...
> > 
> > Fuse and everything it can do is definitely the filesystem I would like
> > to see most have the audits to be enabled in user namespace.  Fuse
> > was built to be sufficiently paranoid to allow this and so it should not
> > take a lot to take fuse the rest of the way.
> 
> I was aware of FUSE but hadn't ever looked at it much. Looking at it
> now, this isn't going to satisfy any of the use cases I know about,
> which are wanting to use filesystems supported in-kernel (isofs, ext*).
> I don't see that any of these have a FUSE implementation, and I think we
> gain more from figuring out how to use in-kernel filesystems in
> containers than trying to find a way to shoehorn selected filesystems
> into FUSE.

That's why I was wondering how much work it would be to auto-generate
fuse fs support from the in-kernel source.

-serge