20–24 Sept 2021
US/Pacific timezone

Alternative ways to extract information about processes

20 Sept 2021, 10:00
25m
Microconference2/Virtual-Room (LPC Virtual)

Microconference2/Virtual-Room

LPC Virtual

150
Containers and Checkpoint/Restore MC Containers and Checkpoint/Restore MC

Speakers

Alexander Mikhalitsyn (Virtuozzo) Andrei Vagin

Description

CRIU uses many different interfaces to get information about kernel resources,
to extract sockets data sock_diag subsystem is used, for mounts/mount namespaces,
procfs per-pid mountinfo files are used, to get some file type-specific info we
use procfs fdinfo interface (which allows to get mnt_id from which file was opened,
file flags and so on).

One of the most important and time-consuming stages in CRIU dump is getting
process memory mappings information. Let's discuss that problem and
approaches to optimize the performance of this stage. There was a prototype
implementation of netlink-based interface to get information about a task
[1]. We suggest to use eBPF iterators framework [2] to create
CRIU-optimized interface to get task VMAs data.

Another interesting thing is mounts information acqusition. For simple cases
mountinfo file seems sufficient. Previous year we introduced support of
checkpoint-restoring nested containers. Main goal was to have ability to
C/R OpenVZ containers with Docker containers inside. And here we met
problem with overlayfs mounts. CRIU needs to get real overlayfs paths from
the kernel (mnt_id+full path for each source directory) and these paths
may be very long (like PAGE_SIZE). And this is the problem because of
serious limitations which implied by mountinfo interface (limited size of lines,
bad extendability). Some overlayfs-specific patches were proposed [3] earlier,
but it's worth to have some universal approach to query mounts information for
all file systems. There was a great subsystem called fsinfo [4] proposed by
David Howells. But for some reasons it wasn't merged. There is idea to
get some progress by creating some eBPF helpers which allows to get mounts
information.

Thanks a lot to Andrei Vagin for advices and help.

Links:
[1] https://github.com/avagin/linux-task-diag/commits/v5.8-task-diag
[2] https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/tree/kernel/bpf/task_iter.c?h=v5.13#n472
[3] overlayfs: C/R enhancments https://lkml.org/lkml/2020/10/4/208
[4] fsinfo https://lwn.net/Articles/827934/

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Primary authors

Alexander Mikhalitsyn (Virtuozzo) Andrei Vagin

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