Linux Containers

Linux Containers, or LXC, is a Linux feature that allows Linux to run one or more isolated virtual systems (with their own network interfaces, process namespace, user namespace, and power state) using a single Linux kernel on a single server.

Status

As of Linux kernel 3.1.5, LXC is usable for isolating your own private workloads from one another. It is not yet ready to isolate potentially malicious users from one another or the host system. For a more mature containers solution that is appropriate for hosting environments, see OpenVZ.

LXC containers don't yet have their own system uptime, and they see everything that's in the host's dmesg output, among other things. But in general, the technology works.

Configuring the Funtoo Host System

Install LXC kernel

Any kernel beyond 3.1.5 will probably work. Personally I prefer the sys-kernel/gentoo-sources-3.4.9 as these have support for all the namespaces without sacrificing the xfs, FUSE or NFS support for example. These checks were introduced later starting from kernel 3.5, this could also mean that the user namespace is not working optimally.

• User namespace (EXPERIMENTAL) depends on EXPERIMENTAL and on UIDGID_CONVERTED
  • config UIDGID_CONVERTED
    • True if all of the selected software components are known to have uid_t and gid_t converted to kuid_t and kgid_t where appropriate and are otherwise safe to use with the user namespace.
      • Networking - depends on NET_9P = n
      • Filesystems - 9P_FS = n, AFS_FS = n, AUTOFS4_FS = n, CEPH_FS = n, CIFS = n, CODA_FS = n, FUSE_FS = n, GFS2_FS = n, NCP_FS = n, NFSD = n, NFS_FS = n, OCFS2_FS = n, XFS_FS = n
      • Security options - Grsecurity - GRKERNSEC = n (if applicable)

• • As of 3.10.xx kernel, all of the above options are safe to use with User namespaces, except for XFS_FS, therefore with kernel >=3.10.xx, you should answer XFS_FS = n, if you want User namespaces support.

Kernel configuration

These options should be enable in your kernel to be able to take full advantage of LXC.

• General setup
  • CONFIG_NAMESPACES
    • CONFIG_UTS_NS
    • CONFIG_IPC_NS
    • CONFIG_PID_NS
    • CONFIG_NET_NS
    • CONFIG_USER_NS
  • CONFIG_CGROUPS
    • CONFIG_CGROUP_DEVICE
    • CONFIG_CGROUP_SCHED
    • CONFIG_CGROUP_CPUACCT
    • CONFIG_CGROUP_MEM_RES_CTLR (in 3.6+ kernels it's called CONFIG_MEMCG)
    • CONFIG_CGROUP_MEM_RES_CTLR_SWAP (in 3.6+ kernels it's called CONFIG_MEMCG_SWAP)
    • CONFIG_CPUSETS (on multiprocessor hosts)
• Networking support
  • Networking options
    • CONFIG_VLAN_8021Q
• Device Drivers
  • Character devices
    • Unix98 PTY support
      • CONFIG_DEVPTS_MULTIPLE_INSTANCES
  • Network device support
    • Network core driver support
      • CONFIG_VETH
      • CONFIG_MACVLAN

Once you have lxc installed, you can then check your kernel config with:

root # CONFIG=/path/to/config /usr/sbin/lxc-checkconfig

Emerge lxc

root # emerge -av app-emulation/lxc

Configure Networking For Container

Typically, one uses a bridge to allow containers to connect to the network. This is how to do it under Funtoo Linux:

1. create a bridge using the Funtoo network configuration scripts. Name the bridge something like brwan (using /etc/init.d/netif.brwan). Configure your bridge to have an IP address.
2. Make your physical interface, such as eth0, an interface with no IP address (use the Funtoo interface-noip template.)
3. Make netif.eth0 a slave of netif.brwan in /etc/conf.d/netif.brwan.
4. Enable your new bridged network and make sure it is functioning properly on the host.

You will now be able to configure LXC to automatically add your container's virtual ethernet interface to the bridge when it starts, which will connect it to your network.

Setting up a Funtoo Linux LXC Container

Here are the steps required to get Funtoo Linux running inside a container. The steps below show you how to set up a container using an existing Funtoo Linux OpenVZ template. It is now also possible to use Metro to build an lxc container tarball directly, which will save you manual configuration steps and will provide an /etc/fstab.lxc file that you can use for your host container config. See Metro Recipes for info on how to use Metro to generate an lxc container.

Create and Configure Container Filesystem

1. Start with a Funtoo LXC template, and unpack it to a directory such as /var/lib/lxc/funtoo.
2. Create an empty /var/lib/lxc/funtoo/etc/fstab file.
3. Ensure c1 line is uncommented (enabled) and c2 through c6 lines are disabled in /var/lib/lxc/funtoo/etc/inittab.

That's almost all you need to get the container filesystem ready to start.

Create Container Configuration Files

Create the following files:

/etc/lxc/funtoo/config

   Note

Daniel Robbins needs to update this config to be more in line with http://wiki.progress-linux.org/software/lxc/ -- this config appears to have nice, refined device node permissions and other goodies.

Read "man 5 lxc.conf" , to get more information about linux container configuration file.

## Container
lxc.utsname                             = funtoo
lxc.rootfs                              = /var/lib/lxc/funtoo
lxc.arch                                = x86_64
lxc.tty                                 = 6
lxc.pts                                 = 1024
#lxc.console                            = /var/log/lxc/funtoo.console

## Capabilities
lxc.cap.drop                            = sys_admin sys_module mac_admin mac_override

## Devices
# Allow all devices
#lxc.cgroup.devices.allow               = a
# Deny all devices
lxc.cgroup.devices.deny                 = a
# Allow to mknod all devices (but not using them)
lxc.cgroup.devices.allow                = c *:* m
lxc.cgroup.devices.allow                = b *:* m
# /dev/console
lxc.cgroup.devices.allow                = c 5:1 rwm
# /dev/fuse
lxc.cgroup.devices.allow                = c 10:229 rwm
# /dev/null
lxc.cgroup.devices.allow                = c 1:3 rwm
# /dev/ptmx
lxc.cgroup.devices.allow                = c 5:2 rwm
# /dev/pts/*
lxc.cgroup.devices.allow                = c 136:* rwm
# /dev/random
lxc.cgroup.devices.allow                = c 1:8 rwm
# /dev/rtc
lxc.cgroup.devices.allow                = c 254:0 rwm
# /dev/tty
lxc.cgroup.devices.allow                = c 5:0 rwm
# /dev/urandom
lxc.cgroup.devices.allow                = c 1:9 rwm
# /dev/zero
lxc.cgroup.devices.allow                = c 1:5 rwm

## Limits#
lxc.cgroup.cpu.shares                  = 1024
#lxc.cgroup.cpuset.cpus                 = 0
#lxc.cgroup.memory.limit_in_bytes       = 256M
#lxc.cgroup.memory.memsw.limit_in_bytes = 1G

## Filesystem
lxc.mount                               = /etc/lxc/funtoo/fstab
#lxc.mount.entry                         = proc /var/lib/lxc/example.org/rootfs/proc proc nodev,noexec,nosuid 0 0
#lxc.mount.entry                         = sysfs /var/lib/lxc/example.org/rootfs/sys sysfs defaults,ro 0 0
#lxc.mount.entry                        = /srv/share/example.org /var/lib/example.org/rootfs/srv/example.org none defaults,bind 0 0

## Network
lxc.network.type                        = veth
lxc.network.flags                       = up
lxc.network.hwaddr                      = #put your MAC address here, otherwise you will get a random one
lxc.network.link                        = br0
lxc.network.name                        = eth0
#lxc.network.veth.pair                   = veth-example

Read "man 7 capabilities" to get more information aboout Linux capabilities.

Above, use the following command to generate a random MAC for lxc.network.hwaddr:

# openssl rand -hex 6 | sed 's/\(..\)/\1:/g; s/.$//'

It is a very good idea to assign a static MAC address to your container using lxc.network.hwaddr. If you don't, LXC will auto-generate a new random MAC every time your container starts, which may confuse network equipment that expects MAC addresses to remain constant.

It might happen from case to case that you aren't able to start your LXC Container with the above generated MAC address so for all these who run into that problem here is a little script that connects your IP for the container with the MAC address. Just save the following code as /etc/lxc/hwaddr.sh, make it executable and run it like /etc/lxc/hwaddr.sh xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx where xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx represents your Container IP.

#!/bin/sh
IP=$*
HA=`printf "02:00:%x:%x:%x:%x" ${IP//./ }`
echo $HA

/etc/lxc/funtoo/fstab

none /lxc/funtoo/dev/pts devpts defaults 0 0
none /lxc/funtoo/proc proc defaults 0 0
none /lxc/funtoo/sys sysfs defaults 0 0
none /lxc/funtoo/dev/shm tmpfs nodev,nosuid,noexec,mode=1777,rw 0 0

Initializing and Starting the Container

You will probably need to set the root password for the container before you can log in. You can use chroot to do this quickly:

# chroot /lxc/funtoo
(chroot) # passwd
New password: XXXXXXXX
Retype new password: XXXXXXXX
passwd: password updated successfully
# exit

Now that the root password is set, run:

# lxc-start -n funtoo -d

The -d option will cause it to run in the background.

To attach to the console:

# lxc-console -n funtoo

You should now be able to log in and use the container. In addition, the container should now be accessible on the network.

To stop the container:

# lxc-stop -n funtoo

Ensure that networking is working from within the container while it is running, and you're good to go!

LXC Bugs/Missing Features

This section is devoted to documenting issues with the current implementation of LXC and its associated tools. We will be gradually expanding this section with detailed descriptions of problems, their status, and proposed solutions.

reboot

By default, lxc does not support rebooting a container from within. It will simply stop and the host will not know to start it.

PID namespaces

Process ID namespaces are functional, but the container can still see the CPU utilization of the host via the system load (ie. in top).

/dev/pts newinstance

• Some changes may be required to the host to properly implement "newinstance" /dev/pts. See This Red Hat bug.

lxc-create and lxc-destroy

• LXC's shell scripts are badly designed and are sure way to destruction, avoid using lxc-create and lxc-destroy.

network initialization and cleanup

• If used network.type = phys after lxc-stop the interface will be renamed to value from lxc.network.link. It supposed to be fixed in 0.7.4, happens still on 0.7.5 - http://www.mail-archive.com/lxc-users@lists.sourceforge.net/msg01760.html

• Re-starting a container can result in a failure as network resource are tied up from the already-defunct instance: [1]

lxc-halt

• Missing tool to graceful shutdown container. 'lxc-halt' should be written and be posix sh-compatible, using lxc-execute to run halt in container.

funtoo

• Our udev should be updated to contain -lxc in scripts. (This has been done as of 02-Nov-2011, so should be resolved. But not fixed in our openvz templates, so need to regen them in a few days.)
• Our openrc should be patched to handle the case where it cannot mount tmpfs, and gracefully handle this situation somehow. (Work-around in our docs above, which is to mount tmpfs to /libexec/rc/init.d using the container-specific fstab file (on the host.)
• Emerging udev within a container can/will fail when realdev is run, if a device node cannot be created (such as /dev/console) if there are no mknod capabilities within the container. This should be fixed.

References

• man 7 capabilities
• man 5 lxc.conf

Links

• There are a number of additional lxc features that can be enabled via patches: [2]
• Ubuntu User Namespaces page
• lxc-gentoo setup script on GitHub

• IBM developerWorks
  • LXC: Linux Container Tools
  • Secure Linux Containers Cookbook

• Linux Weekly News
  • Smack for simplified access control