mount: add OPEN_TREE_NAMESPACE
When creating containers the setup usually involves using CLONE_NEWNS
via clone3() or unshare(). This copies the caller's complete mount
namespace. The runtime will also assemble a new rootfs and then use
pivot_root() to switch the old mount tree with the new rootfs. Afterward
it will recursively umount the old mount tree thereby getting rid of all
mounts.
On a basic system here where the mount table isn't particularly large
this still copies about 30 mounts. Copying all of these mounts only to
get rid of them later is pretty wasteful.
This is exacerbated if intermediary mount namespaces are used that only
exist for a very short amount of time and are immediately destroyed
again causing a ton of mounts to be copied and destroyed needlessly.
With a large mount table and a system where thousands or ten-thousands
of namespaces are spawned in parallel this quickly becomes a bottleneck
increasing contention on the semaphore.
Extend open_tree() with a new OPEN_TREE_NAMESPACE flag. Similar to
OPEN_TREE_CLONE only the indicated mount tree is copied. Instead of
returning a file descriptor referring to that mount tree
OPEN_TREE_NAMESPACE will cause open_tree() to return a file descriptor
to a new mount namespace. In that new mount namespace the copied mount
tree has been mounted on top of a copy of the real rootfs.
The caller can setns() into that mount namespace and perform any
additionally setup such as move_mount()ing detached mounts in there.
This allows OPEN_TREE_NAMESPACE to function as a combined
unshare(CLONE_NEWNS) and pivot_root().
A caller may for example choose to create an extremely minimal rootfs:
fd_mntns = open_tree(-EBADF, "/var/lib/containers/wootwoot", OPEN_TREE_NAMESPACE);
This will create a mount namespace where "wootwoot" has become the
rootfs mounted on top of the real rootfs. The caller can now setns()
into this new mount namespace and assemble additional mounts.
This also works with user namespaces:
unshare(CLONE_NEWUSER);
fd_mntns = open_tree(-EBADF, "/var/lib/containers/wootwoot", OPEN_TREE_NAMESPACE);
which creates a new mount namespace owned by the earlier created user
namespace with "wootwoot" as the rootfs mounted on top of the real
rootfs.
This will scale a lot better when creating tons of mount namespaces and
will allow to get rid of a lot of unnecessary mount and umount cycles.
It also allows to create mount namespaces without needing to spawn
throwaway helper processes.
To: linux-fsdevel@vger.kernel.org
To: Jeff Layton <jlayton@kernel.org>
Cc: Alexander Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk>
Cc: Amir Goldstein <amir73il@gmail.com>
Cc: Josef Bacik <josef@toxicpanda.com>
Cc: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>
Cc: Aleksa Sarai <cyphar@cyphar.com>
Signed-off-by: Christian Brauner <brauner@kernel.org>
--- b4-submit-tracking ---
# This section is used internally by b4 prep for tracking purposes.
{
"series": {
"revision": 1,
"change-id": "20251229-work-empty-namespace-352a9c2dfe0a",
"prefixes": [],
"base-branch": "master.v6.19-rc1"
}
}