Re: [RFC] shared subtrees

[Mike Waychison]

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Al Viro wrote:

> OK, here comes the first draft of proposed semantics for subtree
> sharing.  What we want is being able to propagate events between
> the parts of mount trees.  Below is a description of what I think
> might be a workable semantics; it does *NOT* describe the data
> structures I would consider final and there are considerable
> areas where we still need to figure out the right behaviour.
> 

Okay, I'm not convinced that shared subtrees as proposed will work well
with autofs.

The idea discussed off-line was this:

When you install an autofs mountpoint, on say /home, a daemon is started
to service the requests.  As far as the admin is concerned, an fs is
mounted in the current namespace, call it namespaceA.  The daemon
actually runs in it's one private namespace: call it namespaceB.
namespaceB receives a new autofs filesystem: call it autofsB.  autofsB
is in it's own p-node.  namespaceA gets an autofsA on /home as well, and
autofsA is 'owned' by autofsB's p-node.

So:

autofsB -> autofsB
and
autofsB -> autofsA

Effectively, namespaceA has a private instance of autofsB in its tree.

The problem is this:

Assume /home/mikew is accessed in namespaceA.  The daemon running in
namespaceB gets the event, and mounts an nfs vfsmount on autofsB.  This
event is propagated back to autofsA.

(Problem 1: how do you block access to /home/mikew in namespaceA?)

Next, a CLONE_NS is done in namespaceA, creating namespaceA'.  the
homedir on /home/mikew is also copied.

Now, in namespaceA', what happens when a user umount's /home/mikew?  We
haven't yet determined how to handle umount event propagation, but it
appears likely that it will be *a hard thing to do*.

Assuming the nfs umount succeeds, /home/mikew is accessed again in
namespaceA'.

(Problem 2: The daemon in namespaceB will see the event, but it already
has something mounted on it's version of /home/mikew.  How does it
'send' a mountpoint to namespaceB.)

- -----------

Shared subtrees may help in some adminstrative situations, but don't
look like the right solution for autofs.

Autofs will work with namespaces if the following functionality is added
to the kernel:  The ability to perform mount(2) operations on a
directory fd.

This has been discussed before and quickly vetoed, citing that it is a
security risk.  I still fail to understand how allowing a mount to
happen cross-namespace given a dirfd target is any worse than what is
already possible given a dirfd.  If you don't want someone to play with
your namespace, don't give them a dirfd.

Thoughts?

- --
Mike Waychison
Sun Microsystems, Inc.
1 (650) 352-5299 voice
1 (416) 202-8336 voice

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NOTICE:  The opinions expressed in this email are held by me,
and may not represent the views of Sun Microsystems, Inc.
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