PID Namespaces in Linux

One of the tools I wrote shortly after joining ZipRecruiter is for managing a Selenium test harness. It’s interesting because there are a lot of constraints related to total capacity of the host, desired speed of the test suite, and desired correctness of the codebase.

Anyway one of the major issues that I found was if I stopped a test prematurely (with Ctrl-C, which sends a SIGINT) I’d end up with a bunch of orphaned workers. My intial idea was to just forward along any signal that the process received to the child workers (minus some obvious ones like CHLD and WINCH) but that ended up causing problems, because the workers had many children of their own and they did not handle the situation correctly either.

There are a couple ways to do this. The first way is I think portable across unices; this involves giving the main process a TTY of it’s own. This will send all child processes (recursively, I think) a SIGHUP (as in the TTY hung up) when the main process exits. Here’s the code, it’s pretty easy to do in Perl, though I have not gone through the effort to figure out how to do it with vanilla shell.

use IO::Pty; my $pty = IO::Pty->new; $pty->make_slave_controlling_terminal;

The other way, which you may have guessed if you read the title of this post, is using a Linux PID namespace. In a PID namespace you basically start a process and it sees itself as PID 1 (aka init). All child processes are in the namespace as well and will have similarly “low” PIDs themselves. This is not really interesting for our use case. The interesting thing is, if PID 1 of a Linux PID namespace exits, all children get a SIGKILL. Unlike SIGHUP, SIGKILL cannot be ignored, and the processes will definitely go away, and it will be immediate (unless they are in uninteruptable sleep I guess.)

PID namespaces have been around for like, forever (2008, which at this point is nearly eight years.) The problem is you can only create one as root, which is a hassle to say the very least. Now if you create a user namespace you do not need root, but that requires Linux 3.8, which is from 2013; pretty recent! Here’s an example of how to start a program in a PID namespace:

unshare --pid --user --mount --mount-proc --fork ./my-app

The first two flags should be obvious. The mount related flags are so that the processes inside of the namespace can read from /proc and find out about whatever details they might need to know. If you are sure your processes never read from /proc you can safely elide those flags. The fork flag is because creating the pid namespace around a running process doesn’t really work.

unshare comes from the util-linux package, which any real (read: non-embedded) Linux distro ships with. To be clear: the above command is really light weight. The meat of it clocks in at two system calls ( unshare and clone .) The whole thing adds about 5ms to runtime. I think of unshare as a much more powerful fork . At some point I would like to make using it from within a language as easy as fork .

If you want to try this out, I’ve written more including some test scripts on github.

Posted Wed, Nov 25, 2015

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