Since the tinderbox is now running on Linux containers I’m also experimenting with making more use of those. Since containers are, as the name implies, self contained, I can use them in place of chroots for testing stuff that I’d prefer wouldn’t contaminate my main system, for instance I can use them instead of the Python virtualenv to get a system where I can use easy_install to copy in the stuff that is not packaged in Portage as a temporary measure.
But after some playing around I came to the conclusion that we got essentially two problems with init scripts. Two very different problems actually, and one involves more than just Linux Containers, but I’ll just state both here.
The first problem is specific to Linux Containers and relates to one limitation I think I wrote of before; while the guest (tinderbox) cannot see the processes of the host (yamato) the opposite is not true, and indeed the host cannot really distinguish between its processes and the ones from the guest. This isn’t much of a problem, since the start and stop of daemons is usually done through pidfiles that list the started process id, rather than doing a search and destroy over all the processes.
But the “usually” part here is the problem: there are init scripts that use the killall command (which as far as I can tell does not take namespaces into consideration) to identify which process to send signals to. It’s not just a matter of using it to kill processes; most of the times, it seems to be used to send signals to the daemon (like SIGHUP for reloading configuration or stuff like that). This was probably done in response to changes to start-stop-daemon that asked for it not to be used for that task. Fortunately, there is a quick way to fix this: instead of using killall we can almost always use kill and take the PID to send the signal to through the pidfile created either by the daemon itself or by s-s-d.
Hopefully this won’t require especially huge changes, but it brings up the issue of improving the quality assurance over the init scripts we currently ship. I found quite a few that dependent on services that weren’t in the dependencies of the ebuild (either because they are “sample configurations’ or because they lacked some runtime dependencies), a few that had syntax mistakes in them (some due to the new POSIX-correctness introduced by OpenRC, but not all of them), and quite a bit of them which run commands in global scope that slow down the dependencies regeneration. I guess this is something else that we have to decide upon.
The other problem with init script involves KVM and QEmu as well. While RedHat has developed some tools for abstracting virtual machine management, I have my doubts about them as much now as I had some time ago for what concerns both configuration capabilities (they still seem to bring in a lot of unneeded stuff – to me – like dnsmasq), and now code quality as well (the libvirt testsuite is giving me more than a few headaches to be honest).
Luca already proposed some time ago that we could just write a multiplex-capable init script for KVM and QEmu so that we could just configure the virtual machines like we do for the network interfaces, and then use the standard rc system to start and stop them. While it should sound trivial, this is no simple task: starting is easy, but stopping the virtual machine? Do you just shut it down, detaching the virtual power cord? Or do you go stopping the services internal to the VM as you should? And how do you do that, with ACPI signals, with SSH commands?
The same problem applies to Linux containers, but with a twist: trying to run shutdown -h now inside a Linux container seem to rather stop the host, rather than the guest! And there you cannot rely on ACPI signals either.
If somebody has a suggestion, they are very welcome.