Re: [PATCH] virtiofsd: Use clone() and not unshare(), support non-root

[Stefan Hajnoczi]

On Fri, May 01, 2020 at 02:25:48PM -0400, Colin Walters wrote:
> I'd like to make use of virtiofs as part of our tooling in
> https://github.com/coreos/coreos-assembler
> Most of the code runs as non-root today; qemu also runs as non-root.
> We use 9p right now.
> 
> virtiofsd's builtin sandboxing effectively assumes it runs as
> root.
> 
> First, change the code to use `clone()` and not `unshare()+fork()`.
> 
> Next, automatically use `CLONE_NEWUSER` if we're running as non root.
> 
> This is similar logic to that in https://github.com/containers/bubblewrap
> (Which...BTW, it could make sense for virtiofs to depend on bubblewrap
>  and re-exec itself rather than re-implementing the containerization
>  itself)
> 
> Signed-off-by: Colin Walters <walters@verbum.org>
> ---
>  tools/virtiofsd/passthrough_ll.c | 26 +++++++++++++++++++++-----
>  1 file changed, 21 insertions(+), 5 deletions(-)

Ping Colin. It would be great if you have time to share your thoughts on
this discussion and explain how you are using this patch.

To summarize: I'm unclear what behavior a user can expect since I'm not
aware of anything that applies /etc/subuid for the user namespace. Does
this mean the expected behavior is that virtiofsd will map all uids/gids
to -1 when invoked non-root?

Could you document the behavior and consider supporting both -1 and
/etc/subuid operation? Both seem like useful behaviors for different use
cases.

Thanks,
Stefan

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