Linux namespaces

D

daniel_a

Hey!

First of all, I'm a pretty new FreeBSD user. I've mostly been using Linux, but there are certain aspects of FreeBSD that is pulling me in. The linux compat layer has so far been great, but there are certain limitations that is slightly... bothersome- and that is that a lot of the software I've been using on linux have been using various namespaces. Be it Steam, or or some other software.

So I decided to give it a try to see if I could start implementing namespaces (initially user namspaces), and so far it's been pretty fun writing on this. Still have a lot of things I need to figure out of course.

Now I have a few questions:
- Is linux containers something that FreeBSD should support, any interest in this?
- Would it be fair to say that any such implementation should not be a security feature? That is, this implementation cannot and should not be used as an alternative to jails. These would be more like "views" than actual namespacing and jailing? Or would that be an unacceptable limitation to namespaces?

I admit there is a whole lot I haven't thought through, and I've only recently started going through the kernel source learning this stuff as I go. While I see myself as a somewhat okay C developer, I haven't written any kernel code before, so it's something new alright!

Any thoughts?
 
The linuxator/linux-emulator is for my impression "basic" & "buggy".
Don't know if containers are supported.
I don't use it.
Or i boot freebsd or i boot artix-linux.
 
Welcome to the land of FreeBSD!

basic and buggy describes it pretty good. I would not touch the linuxulator unless you like to waste your time debugging some stuff that may be broken with the next release again. If you want Linux stuff to work, just use bhyve and spin up a Linux vm and use your containers inside the VM. Considering the speed of development of the Linux community and the limited availability of resources in FreeBSD I would love to see linuxulator be abandoned and those resources better be spent in improving bhyve and it's ecosystem (GPU passthrough, full p9-fs support and live migration please)
 
daniel_a said:
- Is linux containers something that FreeBSD should support, any interest in this?
Click to expand...
Its kind of in the name.

Linux containers will never be supported on any operating system other than Linux. Running Linux is the only option. On non-Linux platforms you can emulate it via either a compat layer or a VM but this is not as good as a native solution.

But if you are looking at perhaps implementing the namespaces approach (possibly integrating with FreeBSD's Jail system?). That could be a cool technical challenge.
 
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