Linux 2.6.24, released more than three years ago, introduced two very interesting features: PID and network namespaces. They allow us to create a process that does not share the same PID namespace or the same network namespace than other processes. These namespaces are then inherited by the children (unless they are assigned new namespaces).

PID & mount namespaces#

A PID namespace is a view of the processes running on the system. Each PID namespace will have its own numbering of the processes contained in its namespace (including the namespace of the children). Other processes are hidden and therefore, it is not possible to issue any operation requiring a PID on them, like kill(2). Moreover, the process that was created first in a namespace will get PID 1. If it gets killed, the namespace is destroyed and all other processes contained in this namespace are killed as well. systemd, a system and service manager for Linux, targeted as a replacement for the old SysV init, uses could use this feature to launch daemons in their own PID namespace and keep track of them without relying on their cooperation. When it needs to kill a daemon, it just kills the process with PID 1 (which has another PID in the global namespace) and the kernel will do the hard work of killing all processes that were started in this namespace. You can get more details about this namespace in the manual page of clone(2) (search for CLONE_NEWPID).

For example, here is the result of pstree -p inside a PID namespace:

# pstree -p
bash(1)─┬─pstree(8)
        └─sleep(7)

The PID of sleep is 7. In the global namespace, it is 31762 instead. But it is the same process!

# ps -eo pid,command | grep sleep
31762 sleep 1000

Linux have also supported mount namespaces since a long time. Each process can have its own mount points that will be visible only by processes in the same namespace or in children namespaces. When the namespace is destroyed (when no process left), the kernel will do the cleanup itself.

chroot#

A common way to test experimental software or do packaging work is to build a chroot: debootstrap is used to build a new complete system inside a directory and chroot allows one to “enter” into this new system. Tools like schroot can become handy if you need to do that often.

Unfortunately, you only get an isolated filesystem. When you start launching daemons and mounting partitions, you need to keep track of all your actions to undo them. Quitting the chroot will not kill any daemon nor unmount any partition.

Extending an existing tool, like schroot to use PID and mount namespaces seems the best way to prevent such problems. I have filed bug #637870 for this purpose. However, this is not as simple as it seems since schroot allows us to run a process into an existing session. When the session is a chroot, this is quite easy: just chroot into the same root filesystem and launch the process here. With other kind of namespaces, you need to use a new system call, setns(), to change the current namespace of the running process. However, some bits are still missing. First, the GNU C Library does not implement the appropriate wrapper. Second, Linux (as of 3.0) does not contain the support to change the PID namespace of a running process yet.

Other tools exist, like lxc (aka Linux Containers). However, it is more targeted at providing a complete container. I have reported that lxc-execute is not able to spawn a standalone shell but got no luck.

jchroot#

Building a chroot clone using namespaces is quite easy. The only difficulty is the use of clone(2). Here is a sketch:

int main() {
  pid_t pid;
  int ret;
  long stack_size = sysconf(_SC_PAGESIZE);
  void *stack = alloca(stack_size) + stack_size;
  /* New process with its own PID/IPC/NS namespace */
  pid = clone(step2,
              stack,
              SIGCHLD | CLONE_NEWPID | CLONE_NEWIPC |
              CLONE_NEWNS | CLONE_FILES,
              NULL);
  /* Wait for the child to terminate */
  while (waitpid(pid, &ret, 0) < 0 && errno == EINTR)
    continue;
  return WIFEXITED(ret)?WEXITSTATUS(ret):EXIT_FAILURE;
}

static int step2(void *a) {
  /* Mount /proc as an example */
  mount("proc", "/proc", "proc", 0, "");
  /* Chroot */
  chroot("/srv/debian");
  chdir("/");
  /* Drop privileges */
  setgid(1000);
  setgroups(0, NULL);
  setuid(1000);
  /* Exec shell */
  execl("/bin/bash", "/bin/bash", NULL);
}

Add command flags, error handling and fstab parsing for the definition of mount points and you get jchroot. Here is an example of usage:

$ cat fstab
proc     /proc  proc    defaults                  0  0
sys      /sys   sysfs   defaults                  0  0
/home    /home  none    bind,rw                   0  0
/dev/pts /dev/pts none  bind,rw                   0  0
/var/run /var/run tmpfs rw,nosuid,noexec,mode=755 0  0
/etc/resolv.conf /etc/resolv.conf none bind,ro    0  0
$ sudo jchroot -f fstab -n test /srv/debian/squeeze /bin/bash
# hostname
test
# ps auxww
USER       PID %CPU %MEM    VSZ   RSS TTY      STAT START   TIME COMMAND
root         1  0.0  0.0  19480  1888 pts/1    S    15:18   0:00 /bin/bash
root         3  0.0  0.0  16536  1184 pts/1    R+   15:18   0:00 ps auxww
# /etc/init.d/postgresql start
Starting PostgreSQL 9.0 database server: main.
# exit
$ ps auxwwc | grep postgres
$

I hope that jchroot won’t live for too long and that its features will be integrated into regular chroot tools. I was thinking at proposing a patch for chroot(8). Anyone knows if this would have a chance to be accepted?