Re: Building a BSD-jail clone out of namespaces

[Chris Webb <chris@arachsys.com>]

"Eric W. Biederman" <ebiederm@xmission.com> writes:

> It is a wider issue. Capabilities cover most of places in the kernel
> where the kernel tests if you have privilege but there are other
> filesystems like devtmpsfs, and the occasional silly piece of kernel
> code that should be using capabilities but is not.  Beyond the kernel
> there are files like /etc/shadow that only root is allowed to read.
> 
> Which all boils down to the fact that for the inconvience of using a
> separate range of uids a lot of other problems just go away.

Hi. Thanks for the clarifications here, which make a lot of sense.

> Not being able to share the host filesystem into a container is a
> downside of the current implementation.  In principle you can have an
> overlay style filesystem that munges the uids and removes this
> limitation, but that doesn't currently exist.

Yes, given the design means I can't just have an identity UID/GID mapping,
this seems like the building block I'm missing to get namespace IDs instead
of host IDs stored on disk. I imagine it might be fairly straightforward for
me to take a simple 'example' stacked filesystem like wrapfs and teach it to
map UIDs and GIDs. I'll have to take a look.

Cheers,

Chris.