Files
runc/libcontainer/nsenter
Aleksa Sarai 2cd9c31b99 nsenter: guarantee correct user namespace ordering
Depending on your SELinux setup, the order in which you join namespaces
can be important. In general, user namespaces should *always* be joined
and unshared first because then the other namespaces are correctly
pinned and you have the right priviliges within them. This also is very
useful for rootless containers, as well as older kernels that had
essentially broken unshare(2) and clone(2) implementations.

This also includes huge refactorings in how we spawn processes for
complicated reasons that I don't want to get into because it will make
me spiral into a cloud of rage. The reasoning is in the giant comment in
clone_parent. Have fun.

In addition, because we now create multiple children with CLONE_PARENT,
we cannot wait for them to SIGCHLD us in the case of a death. Thus, we
have to resort to having a child kindly send us their exit code before
they die. Hopefully this all works okay, but at this point there's not
much more than we can do.

Signed-off-by: Aleksa Sarai <asarai@suse.de>
2016-10-04 16:17:55 +11:00
..
2015-06-21 19:29:15 -07:00
2016-07-19 12:11:33 -04:00

nsenter

The nsenter package registers a special init constructor that is called before the Go runtime has a chance to boot. This provides us the ability to setns on existing namespaces and avoid the issues that the Go runtime has with multiple threads. This constructor will be called if this package is registered, imported, in your go application.

The nsenter package will import "C" and it uses cgo package. In cgo, if the import of "C" is immediately preceded by a comment, that comment, called the preamble, is used as a header when compiling the C parts of the package. So every time we import package nsenter, the C code function nsexec() would be called. And package nsenter is now only imported in main_unix.go, so every time before we call cmd.Start on linux, that C code would run.

Because nsexec() must be run before the Go runtime in order to use the Linux kernel namespace, you must import this library into a package if you plan to use libcontainer directly. Otherwise Go will not execute the nsexec() constructor, which means that the re-exec will not cause the namespaces to be joined. You can import it like this:

import _ "github.com/opencontainers/runc/libcontainer/nsenter"

nsexec() will first get the file descriptor number for the init pipe from the environment variable _LIBCONTAINER_INITPIPE (which was opened by the parent and kept open across the fork-exec of the nsexec() init process). The init pipe is used to read bootstrap data (namespace paths, clone flags, uid and gid mappings, and the console path) from the parent process. nsexec() will then call setns(2) to join the namespaces provided in the bootstrap data (if available), clone(2) a child process with the provided clone flags, update the user and group ID mappings, do some further miscellaneous setup steps, and then send the PID of the child process to the parent of the nsexec() "caller". Finally, the parent nsexec() will exit and the child nsexec() process will return to allow the Go runtime take over.

NOTE: We do both setns(2) and clone(2) even if we don't have any CLONE_NEW* clone flags because we must fork a new process in order to enter the PID namespace.