Re: A further though on /proc/PID/timens_offsets

[Michael Kerrisk (man-pages)]

Hello Andrei

On Fri, 10 Apr 2020 at 07:24, Andrey Vagin <avagin@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> On Thu, Apr 9, 2020 at 2:35 PM Eric W. Biederman <ebiederm@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> >
> > Andrey Vagin <avagin@xxxxxxxxxx> writes:
> >
> > > On Tue, Apr 7, 2020 at 6:24 AM Michael Kerrisk (man-pages)
> > > <mtk.manpages@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > >
> > >>        The  clock-id  identifies the clock whose offsets are being shown.
> > >>        This field is either 1, for CLOCK_MONOTONIC, or 7, for CLOCK_BOOTâ
> > >>        TIME.
> > >>
> > >> What was the reason for exposing numeric clock IDs in the
> > >> timens_offsets file? In API terms, that seems a little ugly.
> > >>
> > >> I think it would have been much nicer if the clocks were defined
> > >> symbolically in this file. I.e., that reading the file would have
> > >> shown something like
> > >>
> > >> monotonic    x    y
> > >> boottime     x    y
> > >>
> > >> And that records similarly with symbolic clock names could have
> > >> been written to the file. Was there a reason not to do this?
> > >
> > > No, there was not except that I haven't thought about this. I agree
> > > that symbolic clock names looks nicer for humans, but numeric clock
> > > IDs are a bit more convenient when we  need to set/read offsets from
> > > code. This interface is in the released kernel, so I think we can't
> > > change the format of the content of this file. But we can add support
> > > of symbolic clock names for setting clock offsets. What do you think?
> >
> > The rule is we can change things as long as userspace doesn't care.  For
> > very new interfaces like this it is possible there are few enough
> > userspace programs that nothing cares.
> >
> > Do you know if someone is using this interface yet?
>
> CRIU has the support of time namespace, but these changes are in the
> devel branch and have not been released yet.
>
> I know two more project:
> * The util-linux (unshare and nsenter tools):
> https://github.com/karelzak/util-linux/commit/7f1f0584c24a77909a7c96e62e30f63f4c1b10ad
> https://github.com/karelzak/util-linux/commit/ef0341c9be441b834848d260ba0dbeb47a20f7a3
>
> The last release of util-linux was at the end of January, so these
> changes have not been released.
>
> * crun
> https://github.com/containers/crun/commit/a669dc64f70f71423a0ee1bb977f2d77e473649a
>
> These changes have been released in the crun v0.13.
>
> All these projects only set offsets, so I think following the rule
> that you described, we can start showing symbolic clock names and
> accept both variants for setting offsets. If everyone agrees with
> this, I can prepare a patch tomorrow.

That would be great! Thank you!

Cheers,

Michael



-- 
Michael Kerrisk
Linux man-pages maintainer; http://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/
Linux/UNIX System Programming Training: http://man7.org/training/