"hot plugging" filesystem mounts into running LXC containers

[Serge Hallyn]

Quoting Daniel P. Berrange (berrange at redhat.com):
> One of the things I've been thinking about in the context of libvirt's
> LXC support, is how to support "hot plug" of new filesystem mounts
> into a running container.
> 
> eg
> 
>  * mount host directory /export/bigdata at /var/www in a container
>  * mount host device /dev/volgroup/bigdata at /var/www in a container
>  * mount host file /export/bigdata.img at /var/www in a container
> 
> If the container & host OS share the same root filesystem this is
> easy-ish:
> 
>   1. nsfd = open("/proc/self/ns/mounts")
>   2. setns(nsfd, CLONE_NEWNS)
>   3. mount("/export/bigdata", "/var/www", NULL, MS_BIND, NULL);
> 
> Also mounting devices it is easy, because assuming suitable cgroups
> device ACL settings, the device nodes are not hidden from the process
> doing the mount after setns().
> 
> The problem is what todo in the case that the container and host have
> completely separated root filesystems, and you want to setup a new bind
> mount. Step 3 would fail because /export/bigdata is not visible once
> inside the container's mount namespace.
> 
> One random idea I had would be to enable mount based on a file
> descriptor as the source, via an invented syscall
> 
>    mountat(fd, tgt, fstype, flags, data)
> 
> eg
> 
>   1. nsfd = open("/proc/self/ns/mounts")
>   2. srcfd = open("/export/bigdata")
>   2. setns(fd, CLONE_NEWNS)
>   3. mountat(srcfd, "/var/www", NULL, MS_BIND, NULL);

That's neat.  I like it.  You could bring this up at plumber's if you
still want to look for other ideas (maybe there's a way of doing this
with no new functionality), but a patch doing this would be cool.

> An alternative would be if the container's mount namespace was actually
> visible in the host. In theory /proc/$PID/root would be the thing to use,
> but that doesn't actually give you a proper view into the container's
> mount namespace. If /proc/$PID/root  did actually do the right thing,
> then we could just do
> 
>   1. mountat("/export/bigdata", "/proc/$PID/root/var/www", NULL, MS_BIND, NULL);
> 
> Any other ideas / suggestions ?
> 
> Regards,
> Daniel
> -- 
> |: http://berrange.com      -o-    http://www.flickr.com/photos/dberrange/ :|
> |: http://libvirt.org              -o-             http://virt-manager.org :|
> |: http://autobuild.org       -o-         http://search.cpan.org/~danberr/ :|
> |: http://entangle-photo.org       -o-       http://live.gnome.org/gtk-vnc :|
> _______________________________________________
> Containers mailing list
> Containers at lists.linux-foundation.org
> https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/containers