On Wed, 1 Feb 2023 19:01:16 +0100 Paul Holzinger <pholzing(a)redhat.com> wrote:When a user spawns a command with pasta they expect the network to be ready. Currently this does not work because pasta will fork/exec before it will setup the network config. This patch fixes it by using a pipe to sync parent and child. The child will now block reading from this pipe before the exec call. The parent will then unblock the child only after the netns was configured.Thanks for the patch! I'm reviewing this in a bit. A few considerations meanwhile: - there's actually a bigger issue (you're fixing here) than the namespace configuration (via netlink) itself: the tap device isn't ready (tap_sock_init() hasn't been called yet) when we spawn the command in the new namespace. Oops. If you're wondering: we can't just reorder things, because to complete the configuration phase (conf()) we need the namespace to be set up, and we can't initialise the tap device before it's set up - pipes are more commonly used to transfer data around (hence the whole code you need to open a communication channel, check it, close it). Did you try with a signal? Or is there a reason why it wouldn't work? You could simply SIGSTOP the child, from the child itself: kill(getpid(), SIGSTOP); and send a SIGCONT to it (we already store the PID of the child in pasta_child_pid) once we're ready. SIGCONT is special in that it doesn't need CAP_KILL or the processes to run under the same UID -- just in the same session, so it wouldn't risk interfering with the isolation_*() calls. I haven't tested this but I think it should lead to simpler code. -- Stefano