Linux Containers and Docker pstree

Once in a while I find myself wanting to see the state of a container from a bird’s eye view. My favorite way to do this is with a special tool I wrote called docker-pstree . Here is how it works. (Stay tuned for angst at the end.)

Typically in a virtual machine or in a container there is one root process which all other processes descend from. On a traditional system this is init(1) , but in containers it is often simply your application.

The problem comes when one uses docker exec to run a process within a container:

$ docker exec -it w.pl /bin/sh -c 'ps ; echo "---"; pstree' PID USER TIME COMMAND 1 1000 0:00 {w.sh} /bin/sh /bin/w.sh KBIX KSMO 43 1000 0:00 /bin/sh 67 1000 0:00 sleep 600 82 1000 0:00 /bin/sh -c ps ; echo "---"; pstree 87 1000 0:00 ps --- w.sh---sleep

(note that the pstree does not include the current process, but ps does.)

The cause is that pstree (at least in busybox, which is what is used in this example) starts at pid 1 and walks from there and when you use docker exec , the new process is not under the “init” of the container, it’s under some other thing (the docker daemon, to be precise.)

Containers in linux are simply attributes on processes, set by modifying files under cgroupfs. The defacto location would be something like /sys/fs/cgroup/pids/$cgroup/tasks , where you add the pid to that file. So it makes perfect sense that a process could be in a container but not run by one of the other processes in the container.

There’s a fairly easy fix for this. The first is a tool I wrote to find “root” processes of a docker container:

#!/usr/bin/env perl use 5.24.0; use warnings; my $target = shift; my $container = `docker inspect --format {{.Id}} $target`; my %pids; # build hash to map pid->ppid of all procs in container for my $line (map s/^\s+//r, grep m/\Q$container/, `ps -ww -eo pid= -o ppid= -o cgroup=`) { my ($pid, $ppid) = split /\s+/, $line; $pids{$pid} = $ppid; } # find ppids that aren't in the hash and dedup my %result = map { $_ => 1 } grep !$pids{$_}, values %pids; say $_ for keys %result;

And then I have a super simple wrapper around pstree called docker-pstree :

#!/bin/dash docker-root-pids "$1" | xargs -n1 pstree "${2:--U}"

This uses the host pstree, instead of the container pstree, which means that the pstree implementation is more powerful. I could reimplement all of the tooling to run inside the container without a lot of effort, but I’d end up rewriting the perl script since many of my containers have no scripting language at all except for dash. Oh and some of my containers might not have pstree either.

I tend to run the above with watch -n 0.3 docker-pstree w.pl .

🔗 nsenter and solving problems

There’s a more generic tool than docker exec called nsenter that comes with util-linux, which includes such venerable tools as cfdisk , more , reset , and dmesg . I have blogged about unshare before, which is sortav a micro Docker that ships with util-linux. nsenter is a micro docker exec . I find it useful to use if only to see how it works:

nsenter -m -u -i -n -p -t "$(docker inspect --format '{{.State.Pid}}' w.pl)" /bin/sh

When a process is created by nsenter the core system calls (verified by calling strace on nsenter ) are setns and clone . Here is the meat of the trace:

# 6968 is the pid of w.sh open("/proc/6968/ns/ipc", O_RDONLY) = 3 open("/proc/6968/ns/uts", O_RDONLY) = 4 open("/proc/6968/ns/net", O_RDONLY) = 5 open("/proc/6968/ns/pid", O_RDONLY) = 6 open("/proc/6968/ns/mnt", O_RDONLY) = 7 # These each corespond with one of the flags passed to nsenter setns(3, CLONE_NEWIPC) = 0 close(3) = 0 setns(4, CLONE_NEWUTS) = 0 close(4) = 0 setns(5, CLONE_NEWNET) = 0 close(5) = 0 setns(6, CLONE_NEWPID) = 0 close(6) = 0 setns(7, CLONE_NEWNS) = 0 close(7) = 0 clone(child_stack=0, flags=CLONE_CHILD_CLEARTID|CLONE_CHILD_SETTID|SIGCHLD, child_tidptr=0x7f849eb56ad0) = 38559

The frustrating thing here is that it doesn’t work with the tooling I created above! The problem is that containers in linux are complicated. I mentioned before that they are basically membership of cgroups. Well they are also membership of namespaces. nsenter merely enters the namespaces of the docker container, and doesn’t do anything with the cgroups. I wrote a little script to enter the cgroups of a container:

#!/usr/bin/env perl use 5.22.0; use warnings; use IO::All; my $pid = shift; my @cgroups = map { chomp; my ($id, $subs, $cgroup) = split /:/; my @subs = map s/name=//r, split /,/, $subs; map "$_$cgroup", @subs; } io->file("/proc/$pid/cgroup")->slurp; io->file("/sys/fs/cgroup/$_/tasks")->append("$$

") for @cgroups; exec @ARGV;

So now, if for some reason you wanted to use nsenter instead of docker exec , you could do this:

PID="$(docker inspect --format '{{.State.Pid}}' w.pl)" sudo \ cgenter $PID \ nsenter -m -u -i -n -p -t $PID \ /bin/sh

It’s not perfect, but it’s interesting!

🔗 The Inevitable Angst

To some extent I feel like this whole nsenter side-trip is evidence that the ad-hoc nature of Linux containers does end up leaving something to be desired. Without something like docker or LXC to tie the disparate pieces together, it just ends up being a hassle.

What I find even weirder is that while namespaces and cgroups, taken together, make containers, they act pretty differently. One is controlled with the magical cgroupfs filesystem and the other is controlled with system calls. There’s a handy, clear manpage for namespaces ( namespaces(7) ) while cgroups are documented in the not typically installed kernel documentation ( /Documentation/cgroup-v1/ specifically.) I can see the cgroups for a process as a user with ps , as above, but to see the pidns (or presumably other namespaces) I have to be root. Why aren’t they more similar?

At the very least, my tooling works, and I could make it use namespaces if I end up being willing to run it as root. The easiest and most robust option will probably involve rewriting the perl script in shell and implementing docker-pstree and a gnarly docker exec call. I might do that if I ever end up using this tool for more than my containers on my laptop. While the situation is frustrating, the tooling still ends up being fairly straightforward and useful.

Posted Fri, Aug 12, 2016

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