The problem. When implementing a network namespace I need to be able
to have multiple network devices with the same name. Currently this
is a problem for /sys/class/net/*, /sys/devices/virtual/net/*, and
potentially a few other directories of the form /sys/ ... /net/*.
What this patch does is to add an additional tag field to the
sysfs dirent structure. For directories that should show different
contents depending on the context such as /sys/class/net/, and
/sys/devices/virtual/net/ this tag field is used to specify the
context in which those directories should be visible. Effectively
this is the same as creating multiple distinct directories with
the same name but internally to sysfs the result is nicer.
I am calling the concept of a single directory that looks like multiple
directories all at the same path in the filesystem tagged directories.
For the networking namespace the set of directories whose contents I need
to filter with tags can depend on the presence or absence of hotplug
hardware or which modules are currently loaded. Which means I need
a simple race free way to setup those directories as tagged.
To achieve a reace free design all tagged directories are created
and managed by sysfs itself.
Users of this interface:
- define a type in the sysfs_tag_type enumeration.
- call sysfs_register_ns_types with the type and it's operations
- sysfs_exit_ns when an individual tag is no longer valid
- Implement mount_ns() which returns the ns of the calling process
so we can attach it to a sysfs superblock.
- Implement ktype.namespace() which returns the ns of a syfs kobject.
Everything else is left up to sysfs and the driver layer.
For the network namespace mount_ns and namespace() are essentially
one line functions, and look to remain that.
Tags are currently represented a const void * pointers as that is
both generic, prevides enough information for equality comparisons,
and is trivial to create for current users, as it is just the
existing namespace pointer.
The work needed in sysfs is more extensive. At each directory
or symlink creating I need to check if the directory it is being
created in is a tagged directory and if so generate the appropriate
tag to place on the sysfs_dirent. Likewise at each symlink or
directory removal I need to check if the sysfs directory it is
being removed from is a tagged directory and if so figure out
which tag goes along with the name I am deleting.
Currently only directories which hold kobjects, and
symlinks are supported. There is not enough information
in the current file attribute interfaces to give us anything
to discriminate on which makes it useless, and there are
no potential users which makes it an uninteresting problem
to solve.
Signed-off-by: Eric W. Biederman <ebiederm@xmission.com>
Signed-off-by: Benjamin Thery <benjamin.thery@bull.net>
Signed-off-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@suse.de>
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