nslite - chroot/exec with namespace support

Linux has had namespace support for a little while. Probably the most common user of it is LXC. For a lot of purposes, LXC is overkill. I was curious about how to use the underlying syscalls for another project and wrote nsfork.c. After discussing it with a friend who's doing some nice work with busybox inside chroots, I decided to throw this together for general use.

Requirements

Linux >= 2.6.24 with CONFIG_NAMESPACES=y

Root or CAP_SYS_ADMIN privileges

Build

make

The included Makefile should work on any modern distribution. Let me know if that proves false.

Example

mkdir -p /tmp/root/bin
cp `which busybox.static` /tmp/root/bin/busybox
sudo ./nschroot /tmp/root /bin/busybox msh
mkdir /proc
mount none /proc -t proc
ps -ef
ls -l /

Ideas / To do

• fill in nsexec
• add user/group switching
• add capabilities(7) support
• LD_PRELOAD example
• busybox applet?

Author

Amy Tobey tobert@gmail.com @MissAmyTobey

License

This is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the Artistic License 2.0. See the file LICENSE for details.