[PATCH v3 0/7] User namespace mount updates

[Seth Forshee]

On Thu, Nov 19, 2015 at 06:19:10PM +0200, Octavian Purdila wrote:
> On Thu, Nov 19, 2015 at 5:23 PM, Seth Forshee
> <seth.forshee at canonical.com> wrote:
> > On Wed, Nov 18, 2015 at 12:00:17AM +0200, Octavian Purdila wrote:
> >> On Tue, Nov 17, 2015 at 10:12 PM, Richard Weinberger <richard at nod.at> wrote:
> >> > Am 17.11.2015 um 20:25 schrieb Octavian Purdila:
> >> >> On Tue, Nov 17, 2015 at 9:21 PM, Seth Forshee
> >> >> <seth.forshee at canonical.com> wrote:
> >> >>>
> >> >>> On Tue, Nov 17, 2015 at 08:12:31PM +0100, Richard Weinberger wrote:
> >> >>>> On Tue, Nov 17, 2015 at 7:34 PM, Seth Forshee
> >> >>>> <seth.forshee at canonical.com> wrote:
> >> >>>>> On Tue, Nov 17, 2015 at 05:55:06PM +0000, Al Viro wrote:
> >> >>>>>> On Tue, Nov 17, 2015 at 11:25:51AM -0600, Seth Forshee wrote:
> >> >>>>>>
> >> >>>>>>> Shortly after that I plan to follow with support for ext4. I've been
> >> >>>>>>> fuzzing ext4 for a while now and it has held up well, and I'm currently
> >> >>>>>>> working on hand-crafted attacks. Ted has commented privately (to others,
> >> >>>>>>> not to me personally) that he will fix bugs for such attacks, though I
> >> >>>>>>> haven't seen any public comments to that effect.
> >> >>>>>>
> >> >>>>>> _Static_ attacks, or change-image-under-mounted-fs attacks?
> >> >>>>>
> >> >>>>> Right now only static attacks, change-image-under-mounted-fs attacks
> >> >>>>> will be next.
> >> >>>>
> >> >>>> Do we *really* need to enable unprivileged mounting of kernel filesystems?
> >> >>>> What about just enabling fuse and implement ext4 and friends as fuse
> >> >>>> filesystems?
> >> >>>> Using the approaching Linux Kernel Libary[1] this is easy.
> >> >>>
> >> >>> I haven't looked at this project, but I'm guessing that programs must be
> >> >>> written specifically to make use of it? I.e. you can't just use the
> >> >>> mount syscall, and thus all existing software still doesn't work?
> >> >>>
> >> >>
> >> >> The projects includes a lklfuse program that uses fuse to mount a
> >> >> fileystem image.
> >> >
> >> > Cool. I gave it a try.
> >> > It seems to work fine, but only if I run it in foreground (using -d)
> >> > otherwise fuse blocks every filesystem request.
> >> >
> >>
> >> Now it should work in the background as well, thanks for reporting the issue.
> >
> 
> Hi Seth,
> 
> > I'm playing with lklfuse now, it's surprisingly easy to get up and
> > running. I did have a few problems though that I thought you'd like to
> > know about.
> >
> 
> Great, thanks for giving it a try and reporting the issues.

No problem, looks like a promising project.

> > Unfortunately I still can't run it in background mode, I get a segfault.
> 
> I got it to reproduce as well now. Not sure why how it worked before,
> probably a race condition between lkl initialization and fuse calls.
> 
> > It's working fine on light workloads, but I'm having issues when I start
> > trying to stress it. In a couple runs of the stress-ng filesystem
> > stressors I saw both stress-ng and lklfuse get stuck in uninterruptible
> > sleep during the first run, and during the second I got some OOM errors
> > in lklfuse followed by I/O errors and eventually a journal error that
> > cause the filesystem to go read-only.
> >
> > The command I used for the first run was:
> >
> >  stress-ng --class filesystem --all 0
> >
> 
> I will reproduce it and take a look.
> 
> > And for the second:
> >
> >  stress-ng --class filesystem --seq 0 -v -t 60
> >
> > There really wasn't anything interesting in the lklfuse output for the
> > first run, but for the second run I pasted the output here:
> > http://paste.ubuntu.com/13346993/
> 
> lklfuse allocates a fixed 100MB to the kernel and this is probably not
> enough. For the short term I can add a parameter to lklfuse that
> allows the user to specify the amount of memory to allocate to lkl. A
> better fix would probably be to dynamically adjust the memory size of
> lkl. I am thinking of using the ballon virtio driver or the memory
> hotplug infrastructure. Any other suggestions?
> 
> I created a couple of issues in github [1] that you can track if you
> want - I want to avoid spamming the list with reporting progress on
> them.

Makes sense, I'm watching those issues now and will direct any furure
discussion there. Thanks!