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That’s not at all what Linux namespaces permit. It’s a side effect of using them that could be leveraged using something like CRIU, sure, but it’s not what they
by glorfindel66 5y ago
That’s not at all what Linux namespaces permit. It’s a side effect of using them that could be leveraged using something like CRIU, sure, but it’s not what they’re for and they’re not a building block for anything mentioned in the portion of their comment you quoted.
Namespaces simply make the kernel lie when asked about sockets and users and such. It’s intended for isolation on a single server. They’re next to useless in distributed work, particularly the kind being discussed here (Plan 9ish). You actually want the opposite: to accomplish that, you want the kernel to lie even harder and make things up in the context of those interfaces, rather than hide things. Namespaces don’t really get you there in their current form.
- zozbot234 5y ago> That’s not at all what Linux namespaces permit. Isolating processes from the specifics of the system they're running on is a key feature of the namespace-based model; it seems weird to call it a "side effect only". We should keep in mind that CRIU itself is still a fairly new feature that's only entered mainline recently, and the kernel already has plenty of ways to "make up" more virtual resources that are effectively controlled by userspace. While it may be true that these things are largely ad hoc for now, it's not clear that this will be an obstacle in the future,
- gnufx 5y agoI can talk about namespaces in HPC distributed systems, and they don't look anything like Plan 9 to me. They make life harder in various respects, and even dangerous with Linux features that don't take them into account (like at least one of the "zero-copy" add-on modules used by MPI shared memory implementations).