Re: [RFC PATCH 0/2] Loop device psuedo filesystem

From: Shea Levy <shea@shealevy.com>
To: Seth Forshee <seth.forshee@canonical.com>
Cc: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, lxc-devel@lists.linuxcontainers.org
Subject: Re: [RFC PATCH 0/2] Loop device psuedo filesystem
Date: Mon, 15 Sep 2014 16:38:44 -0400	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <20140915203844.GA14761@nixos.hsd1.nh.comcast.net> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <1401227936-15698-1-git-send-email-seth.forshee@canonical.com>

Hi,

I wanted to test these patches (to support creating and filling a disk
image containing a btrfs filesystem and several subvolumes as an
unprivileged user), but the build fails due to what looks like a missing
loopfs.c in fs/loopfs (or alternatively an erroneous line in
fs/loopfs/Makefile). I built based off of 3.17-rc5.

~Shea

On Tue, May 27, 2014 at 11:58:54PM +0200, Seth Forshee wrote:
> I'm posting these patches in response to the ongoing discussion of loop
> devices in containers at [1].
> 
> The patches implement a psuedo filesystem for loop devices, which will
> allow use of loop devices in containters using standard utilities. Under
> normal use a loopfs mount will initially contain a single device node
> for loop-control which can be used to request and release loop devices.
> Any devices allocated via this node will automatically appear in that
> loopfs mount (and in devtmpfs) but not in any other loopfs mounts.
> CAP_SYS_ADMIN in the userns of the process which performed the mount is
> allowed to perform privileged loop ioctls on these devices.
> 
> Alternately loopfs can be mounted with the hostmount option, intended
> for mounting /dev/loop in the host. This is the default mount for any
> devices not created via loop-control in a loopfs mount (e.g. devices
> created during driver init, devices created via /dev/loop-control, etc).
> This is only available to system-wide CAP_SYS_ADMIN.
> 
> I still have some testing to do on these patches, but they work at
> minimum for simple use cases. It's possible to use an unmodified losetup
> if it's new enough to know about loop-control, with a couple of caveats:
> 
>  * /dev/loop-control must be symlinked to /dev/loop/loop-control
>  * In some cases losetup attempts to use /dev/loopN when the device node
>    is at /dev/loop/N. For example, 'losetup -f disk.img' fails.
> 
> Device nodes for loop partitions are not created in loopfs. These
> devices are created by the generic block layer, and the loop driver has
> no way of knowing when they are created, so some kind of hook into the
> driver will be needed to support this.
> 
> Thanks,
> Seth
> 
> [1] http://article.gmane.org/gmane.linux.kernel/1703988
> 
> Seth Forshee (2):
>   loop: Add loop filesystem
>   loop: Permit priveleged operations within user namespaces
> 
>  drivers/block/loop.c       | 137 +++++++++++++----
>  drivers/block/loop.h       |   2 +
>  fs/Makefile                |   1 +
>  fs/loopfs/Makefile         |   6 +
>  fs/loopfs/inode.c          | 360 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
>  include/linux/loopfs.h     |  53 +++++++
>  include/uapi/linux/magic.h |   1 +
>  7 files changed, 535 insertions(+), 25 deletions(-)
>  create mode 100644 fs/loopfs/Makefile
>  create mode 100644 fs/loopfs/inode.c
>  create mode 100644 include/linux/loopfs.h
> 
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