Zach's Kernel News
Zach's Kernel News
Chronicler Zack Brown reports on the latest news, views, dilemmas, and developments within the Linux kernel community.
Extending Containers
Marian Marinov noticed that if he ran multiple containers, they all shared the same process counters. In other words, if two containers used the same user ID numbers and group ID numbers, then the processes owned by those IDs, but on completely separate containers, would appear to be owned by the same user. This would mess with his ability to do process resource limiting on a per-container basis.
This situation caused problems for Marian, because his containers were all instantiated by an identical template (hence identical UID and GID numbers) that contained a large number of files for a particular project. Changing the ownerships of those files within the running container would be a very time consuming task, and abandoning his template would require a lot of redesign. He proposed modifying some kernel data structures to isolate each container's user namespace, so the process counters would see them as separate from each other.
Eric W. Biederman replied that the current behavior was actually intentional, and he felt it would be bad to have per-user namespace data structures in the kernel, although he did say that he'd been considering allowing resource limits that would detect the different containers and apply the limits appropriately.
[...]
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