Re: [PATCH 1/1][V5] Add reboot_pid_ns to handle the reboot syscall

[Daniel Lezcano <daniel.lezcano-GANU6spQydw@public.gmane.org>]

On 02/03/2012 01:10 AM, Andrew Morton wrote:
> On Thu,  5 Jan 2012 10:06:50 +0100
> Daniel Lezcano<daniel.lezcano-GANU6spQydw@public.gmane.org>  wrote:
>
>> In the case of a child pid namespace, rebooting the system does not
>> really makes sense. When the pid namespace is used in conjunction
>> with the other namespaces in order to create a linux container, the
>> reboot syscall leads to some problems.
>>
>> A container can reboot the host. That can be fixed by dropping
>> the sys_reboot capability but we are unable to correctly to poweroff/
>> halt/reboot a container and the container stays stuck at the shutdown
>> time with the container's init process waiting indefinitively.
>>
>> After several attempts, no solution from userspace was found to reliabily
>> handle the shutdown from a container.
>>
>> This patch propose to make the init process of the child pid namespace to
>> exit with a signal status set to : SIGINT if the child pid namespace called
>> "halt/poweroff" and SIGHUP if the child pid namespace called "reboot".
>> When the reboot syscall is called and we are not in the initial
>> pid namespace, we kill the pid namespace for "HALT", "POWEROFF", "RESTART",
>> and "RESTART2". Otherwise we return EINVAL.
>>
>> Returning EINVAL is also an easy way to check if this feature is supported
>> by the kernel when invoking another 'reboot' option like CAD.
>>
>> By this way the parent process of the child pid namespace knows if
>> it rebooted or not and can take the right decision.
> Looks OK, although the comments need help.  Is the below still true?

Yes, thanks for fixing this.

>
> Do you think it would be feasible to put your testcase into
> tools/testing/selftests?  I'm thinking "no", because running the test
> needs elevated permissions and might reboot the user's machine(!).

Yes, right. I don't think the user will be happy with that. 
Unfortunately, I don't see how to test this feature without falling into 
a reboot on failure. On the other side, this very specific feature is 
used in the container environment and if it fails that will be spotted 
immediately and fixed. So I don't think that does make sense to add this 
test in tools/testing/selftests.

[ ... ]

>   	gid_t pid_gid;
>   	int hide_pid;
> +	int reboot;
>   };
> This was particuarly distressing.  The field was poorly named and other
> people forgotting to document their data structures doesn't mean that
> we should continue to do this!

Thanks again for adding the description. I will take care next time to 
add a simple description when the field name is not self-explicit or 
ambiguous.

   -- Daniel