> On Tue, 2008-04-08 at 17:53 -0700, H. Peter Anvin wrote:
> >
sukadev@us.ibm.com wrote:
> > > Devpts namespace patchset
> > >
> > > In continuation of the implementation of containers in mainline, we need to
> > > support multiple PTY namespaces so that the PTY index (ie the tty names) in
> > > one container is independent of the PTY indices of other containers. For
> > > instance this would allow each container to have a '/dev/pts/0' PTY and
> > > refer to different terminals.
> > >
> >
> > Why do we "need" this? There isn't a fundamental need for this to be a
> > dense numberspace (in fact, there are substantial reasons why it's a bad
> > idea; the only reason the namespace is dense at the moment is because of
> > the hideously bad handing of utmp in glibc.) Other than indicies, this
> > seems to be a more special case of device isolation across namespaces,
> > would that be a more useful problem to solve across the board?
>
> In short application migration. When you move a running applicaiton
> from one machine to another you want to be able to keep the same pseudo
> devices.
>
> The isolation that you have noticed is also an important application and
> like the rest of the namespaces if we can solve the duplicate identifier
> problem needed to restore checkpoints we also largely solve the
> isolation problem.
>
> This problem is much larger then ptys. ptys are the really in your face
> aspect of it. There are a more pseudo devices in the kernel and it is
> the device number to device mapping that we are abstracting. So this
> really should be done as a device namespace not a pty namespace.
>
> I would be happy if the first version of the device namespace could not
> map anything but pty's (assuming an incremental implementation path). I
> really don't think we should do a special case for each kind of device.
