This is post 3 out of 10 in the LXC 1.0 blog post series.

Exchanging data with a container

Because containers directly share their filesystem with the host, there’s a lot of things that can be done to pass data into a container or to get stuff out.

The first obvious one is that you can access the container’s root at:
/var/lib/lxc/<container name>/rootfs/

That’s great, but sometimes you need to access data that’s in the container and on a filesystem which was mounted by the container itself (such as a tmpfs). In those cases, you can use this trick:

sudo ls -lh /proc/$(sudo lxc-info -n p1 -p -H)/root/run/

Which will show you what’s in /run of the running container “p1”.

Now, that’s great to have access from the host to the container, but what about having the container access and write data to the host?
Well, let’s say we want to have our host’s /var/cache/lxc shared with “p1”, we can edit /var/lib/lxc/p1/fstab and append:

/var/cache/lxc var/cache/lxc none bind,create=dir

This line means, mount “/var/cache/lxc” from the host as “/var/cache/lxc” (the lack of initial / makes it relative to the container’s root), mount it as a bind-mount (“none” fstype and “bind” option) and create any directory that’s missing in the container (“create=dir”).

Now restart “p1” and you’ll see /var/cache/lxc in there, showing the same thing as you have on the host. Note that if you want the container to only be able to read the data, you can simply add “ro” as a mount flag in the fstab.

Container nesting

One pretty cool feature of LXC (though admittedly not very useful to most people) is support for nesting. That is, you can run LXC within LXC with pretty much no overhead.

By default this is blocked in Ubuntu as allowing this at the moment requires letting the container mount cgroupfs which will let it escape any cgroup restrictions that’s applied to it. It’s not an issue in most environment, but if you don’t trust your containers at all, then you shouldn’t be using nesting at this point.

So to enable nesting for our “p1” container, edit /var/lib/lxc/p1/config and add:

lxc.aa_profile = lxc-container-default-with-nesting

And then restart “p1”. Once that’s done, install lxc inside the container. I usually recommend using the same version as the host, though that’s not strictly required.

Once LXC is installed in the container, run:

sudo lxc-create -t ubuntu -n p1

As you’ve previously bind-mounted /var/cache/lxc inside the container, this should be very quick (it shouldn’t rebootstrap the whole environment). Then start that new container as usual.

At that point, you may now run lxc-ls on the host in nesting mode to see exactly what’s running on your system:

stgraber@castiana:~$ sudo lxc-ls --fancy --nesting
NAME    STATE    IPV4                 IPV6   AUTOSTART  
------------------------------------------------------
p1      RUNNING  10.0.3.82, 10.0.4.1  -      NO       
 \_ p1  RUNNING  10.0.4.7             -      NO       
p2      RUNNING  10.0.3.128           -      NO

There’s no real limit to the number of level you can go, though as fun as it may be, it’s hard to imagine why 10 levels of nesting would be of much use to anyone 🙂

Raw network access

In the previous post I mentioned passing raw devices from the host inside the container. One such container I use relatively often is when working with a remote network over a VPN. That network uses OpenVPN and a raw ethernet tap device.

I needed to have a completely isolated system access that VPN so I wouldn’t get mixed routes and it’d appear just like any other machine to the machines on the remote site.

All I had to do to make this work was set my container’s network configuration to:

lxc.network.type = phys
lxc.network.hwaddr = 00:16:3e:c6:0e:04
lxc.network.flags = up
lxc.network.link = tap0
lxc.network.name = eth0

Then all I have to do is start OpenVPN on my host which will connect and setup tap0, then start the container which will steal that interface and use it as its own eth0.The container will then use DHCP to grab an IP and will behave just like if it was a physical machine connect directly in the remote network.

This is post 2 out of 10 in the LXC 1.0 blog post series.

More templates

So at this point you should have a working Ubuntu container that’s called “p1” and was created using the default template called simply enough “ubuntu”.

But LXC supports much more than just standard Ubuntu. In fact, in current upstream git (and daily PPA), we support Alpine Linux, Alt Linux, Arch Linux, busybox, CentOS, Cirros, Debian, Fedora, OpenMandriva, OpenSUSE, Oracle, Plamo, sshd, Ubuntu Cloud and Ubuntu.

All of those can usually be found in /usr/share/lxc/templates. They also all typically have extra advanced options which you can get to by passing “--help” after the “lxc-create” call (the “--” is required to split “lxc-create” options from the template’s).

Writing extra templates isn’t too difficult, they basically are executables (all shell scripts but that’s not a requirement) which take a set of standard arguments and are expected to produce a working rootfs in the path that’s passed to them.

One thing to be aware of is that due to missing tools not all distros can be bootstrapped on all distros. It’s usually best to just try. We’re always interested in making those work on more distros even if that means using some rather weird tricks (like is done in the fedora template) so if you have a specific combination which doesn’t work at the moment, patches are definitely welcome!

Anyway, enough talking for now, let’s go ahead and create an Oracle Linux container that we’ll force to be 32bit.

sudo lxc-create -t oracle -n p2 -- -a i386

On most systems, this will initially fail, telling you to install the “rpm” package first which is needed for bootstrap reasons. So install it and “yum” and then try again.

After some time downloading RPMs, the container will be created, then it’s just a:

sudo lxc-start -n p2

And you’ll be greated by the Oracle Linux login prompt (root / root).

At that point since you started the container without passing “-d” to “lxc-start”, you’ll have to shut it down to get your shell back (you can’t detach from a container which wasn’t started initially in the background).

Now if you are wondering why Ubuntu has two templates. The Ubuntu template which I’ve been using so far does a local bootstrap using “debootstrap” basically building your container from scratch, whereas the Ubuntu Cloud template (ubuntu-cloud) downloads a pre-generated cloud image (identical to what you’d get on EC2 or other cloud services) and starts it. That image also includes cloud-init and supports the standard cloud metadata.

It’s a matter of personal choice which you like best. I personally have a local mirror so the “ubuntu” template is much faster for me and I also trust it more since I know everything was downloaded from the archive in front of me and assembled locally on my machine.

One last note on templates. Most of them use a local cache, so the initial bootstrap of a container for a given arch will be slow, any subsequent one will just be a local copy from the cache and will be much faster.

Auto-start

So what if you want to start a container automatically at boot time?

Well, that’s been supported for a long time in Ubuntu and other distros by using some init scripts and symlinks in /etc, but very recently (two days ago), this has now been implemented cleanly upstream.

So here’s how auto-started containers work nowadays:

As you may know, each container has a configuration file typically under
/var/lib/lxc/<container name>/config

That file is key = value with the list of valid keys being specified in lxc.conf(5).

The startup related values that are available are:

• lxc.start.auto = 0 (disabled) or 1 (enabled)
• lxc.start.delay = 0 (delay in second to wait after starting the container)
• lxc.start.order = 0 (priority of the container, higher value means starts earlier)
• lxc.group = group1,group2,group3,… (groups the container is a member of)

When your machine starts, an init script will ask “lxc-autostart” to start all containers of a given group (by default, all containers which aren’t in any) in the right order and waiting the specified time between them.

To illustrate that, edit /var/lib/lxc/p1/config and append those lines to the file:

lxc.start.auto = 1
lxc.group = ubuntu

And /var/lib/lxc/p2/config and append those lines:

lxc.start.auto = 1
lxc.start.delay = 5
lxc.start.order = 100

Doing that means that only the p2 container will be started at boot time (since only those without a group are by default), the order value won’t matter since it’s alone and the init script will wait 5s before moving on.

You may check what containers are automatically started using “lxc-ls”:

stgraber@castiana:~$ sudo lxc-ls --fancy
NAME    STATE    IPV4        IPV6                                    AUTOSTART     
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
p1      RUNNING  10.0.3.128  2607:f2c0:f00f:2751:216:3eff:feb1:4c7f  YES (ubuntu)
p2      RUNNING  10.0.3.165  2607:f2c0:f00f:2751:216:3eff:fe3a:f1c1  YES

Now you can also manually play with those containers using the “lxc-autostart” command which let’s you start/stop/kill/reboot any container marked with lxc.start.auto=1.

For example, you could do:

sudo lxc-autostart -a

Which will start any container that has lxc.start.auto=1 (ignoring the lxc.group value) which in our case means it’ll first start p2 (because of order = 100), then wait 5s (because of delay = 5) and then start p1 and return immediately afterwards.

If at that point you want to reboot all containers that are in the “ubuntu” group, you may do:

sudo lxc-autostart -r -g ubuntu

You can also pass “-L” with any of those commands which will simply print which containers would be affected and what the delays would be but won’t actually do anything (useful to integrate with other scripts).

Freezing your containers

Sometimes containers may be running daemons that take time to shutdown or restart, yet you don’t want to run the container because you’re not actively using it at the time.

In such cases, “sudo lxc-freeze -n <container name>” can be used. That very simply freezes all the processes in the container so they won’t get any time allocated by the scheduler. However the processes will still exist and will still use whatever memory they used to.

Once you need the service again, just call “sudo lxc-unfreeze -n <container name>” and all the processes will be restarted.

Networking

As you may have noticed in the configuration file while you were setting the auto-start settings, LXC has a relatively flexible network configuration.
By default in Ubuntu we allocate one “veth” device per container which is bridged into a “lxcbr0” bridge on the host on which we run a minimal dnsmasq dhcp server.

While that’s usually good enough for most people. You may want something slightly more complex, such as multiple network interfaces in the container or passing through physical network interfaces, … The details of all of those options are listed in lxc.conf(5) so I won’t repeat them here, however here’s a quick example of what can be done.

lxc.network.type = veth
lxc.network.hwaddr = 00:16:3e:3a:f1:c1
lxc.network.flags = up
lxc.network.link = lxcbr0
lxc.network.name = eth0

lxc.network.type = veth
lxc.network.link = virbr0
lxc.network.name = virt0

lxc.network.type = phys
lxc.network.link = eth2
lxc.network.name = eth1

With this setup my container will have 3 interfaces, eth0 will be the usual veth device in the lxcbr0 bridge, eth1 will be the host’s eth2 moved inside the container (it’ll disappear from the host while the container is running) and virt0 will be another veth device in the virbr0 bridge on the host.

Those last two interfaces don’t have a mac address or network flags set, so they’ll get a random mac address at boot time (non-persistent) and it’ll be up to the container to bring the link up.

Attach

Provided you are running a sufficiently recent kernel, that is 3.8 or higher, you may use the “lxc-attach” tool. It’s most basic feature is to give you a standard shell inside a running container:

sudo lxc-attach -n p1

You may also use it from scripts to run actions in the container, such as:

sudo lxc-attach -n p1 -- restart ssh

But it’s a lot more powerful than that. For example, take:

sudo lxc-attach -n p1 -e -s 'NETWORK|UTSNAME'

In that case, you’ll get a shell that says “root@p1” (thanks to UTSNAME), running “ifconfig -a” from there will list the container’s network interfaces. But everything else will be that of the host. Also passing “-e” means that the cgroup, apparmor, … restrictions won’t apply to any processes started from that shell.

This can be very useful at times to spawn a software located on the host but inside the container’s network or pid namespace.

Passing devices to a running container

It’s great being able to enter and leave the container at will, but what about accessing some random devices on your host?

By default LXC will prevent any such access using the devices cgroup as a filtering mechanism. You could edit the container configuration to allow the right additional devices and then restart the container.

But for one-off things, there’s also a very convenient tool called “lxc-device”.
With it, you can simply do:

sudo lxc-device add -n p1 /dev/ttyUSB0 /dev/ttyS0

Which will add (mknod) /dev/ttyS0 in the container with the same type/major/minor as /dev/ttyUSB0 and then add the matching cgroup entry allowing access from the container.

The same tool also allows moving network devices from the host to within the container.

This is post 1 out of 10 in the LXC 1.0 blog post series.

So what’s LXC?

Most of you probably already know the answer to that one, but here it goes:

“LXC is a userspace interface for the Linux kernel containment features.
Through a powerful API and simple tools, it lets Linux users easily create and manage system or application containers.”

I’m one of the two upstream maintainers of LXC along with Serge Hallyn.
The project is quite actively developed with milestones every month and a stable release coming up in February. It’s so far been developed by 67 contributors from a wide range of backgrounds and companies.

The project is mostly developed on github: http://github.com/lxc
We have a website at: http://linuxcontainers.org
And mailing lists at: http://lists.linuxcontainers.org

LXC 1.0

So what’s that 1.0 release all about?

Well, simply put it’s going to be the first real stable release of LXC and the first we’ll be supporting for 5 years with bugfix releases. It’s also the one which will be included in Ubuntu 14.04 LTS to be released in April 2014.

It’s also going to come with a stable API and a set of bindings, quite a few interesting new features which will be detailed in the next few posts and support for a wide range of host and guest distributions (including Android).

How to get it?

I’m assuming most of you will be using Ubuntu. For the next few posts, I’ll myself be using the current upstream daily builds on Ubuntu 14.04 but we maintain daily builds on 12.04, 12.10, 13.04, 13.10 and 14.04, so if you want the latest upstream code, you can use our PPA.

Alternatively, LXC is also directly in Ubuntu and quite usable since Ubuntu 12.04 LTS. You can choose to use the version which comes with whatever release you are on, or you can use one the backported version we maintain.

If you want to build it yourself, you can do (not recommended when you can simply use the packages for your distribution):

git clone git://github.com/lxc/lxc
cd lxc
sh autogen.sh
# You will probably want to run the configure script with --help and then set the paths
./configure
make
sudo make install

What about that first container?

Oh right, that was actually the goal of this post wasn’t it?

Ok, so now that you have LXC installed, hopefully using the Ubuntu packages, it’s really as simple as:

# Create a "p1" container using the "ubuntu" template and the same version of Ubuntu
# and architecture as the host. Pass "-- --help" to list all available options.
sudo lxc-create -t ubuntu -n p1

# Start the container (in the background)
sudo lxc-start -n p1 -d

# Enter the container in one of those ways## Attach to the container's console (ctrl-a + q to detach)
sudo lxc-console -n p1

## Spawn bash directly in the container (bypassing the console login), requires a >= 3.8 kernel
sudo lxc-attach -n p1

## SSH into it
sudo lxc-info -n p1
ssh ubuntu@<ip from lxc-info>

# Stop the container in one of those ways
## Stop it from within
sudo poweroff

## Stop it cleanly from the outside
sudo lxc-stop -n p1

## Kill it from the outside
sudo lxc-stop -n p1 -k

And there you go, that’s your first container. You’ll note that everything usually just works on Ubuntu. Our kernels have support for all the features that LXC may use and our packages setup a bridge and a DHCP server that the containers will use by default.
All of that is obviously configurable and will be covered in the coming posts.

So it’s almost the end of the year, I’ve got about 10 days of vacation for the holidays and a bit of time on my hands.

Since I’ve been doing quite a bit of work on LXC lately in prevision for the LXC 1.0 release early next year, I thought that it’d be a good use of some of that extra time to blog about the current state of LXC.

As a result, I’m preparing a series of 10 blog posts covering what I think are some of the most exciting features of LXC. The planned structure is:

• LXC 1.0: Your first Ubuntu container [1/10]
• LXC 1.0: Your second container [2/10]
• LXC 1.0: Advanced container usage [3/10]
• LXC 1.0: Some more advanced container usage [4/10]
• LXC 1.0: Container storage [5/10]
• LXC 1.0: Security features [6/10]
• LXC 1.0: Unprivileged containers [7/10]
• LXC 1.0: Scripting with the API [8/10]
• LXC 1.0: GUI in containers [9/10]
• LXC 1.0: Troubleshooting and debugging [10/10]

While they are all titled LXC 1.0, most of the things I’ll be showing will work just as well on older LXC. However some of the features will need a very very recent version of LXC (as in, current upstream git). I’ll try to make that clear and will explain how to use our stable backports in Ubuntu or current upstream snapshots from our PPA.

I’ll be updating this first blog post with links to all of the posts in the series. So if you want to bookmark or refer to these, please use this post.