Subject: Re: [vserver] OLPC and VServer
From: Herbert Poetzl <herbert@13thfloor.at>
Date: Fri, 4 Jan 2008 23:14:45 +0100

On Thu, Dec 27, 2007 at 09:35:07AM -0800, Ng, Cheon-woei wrote:
> Hi All,
> 
> 
> According to the item 12 of OLPC News from 2007-11-03 at 
> 
> 
> https://mailman2.grnet.gr/pipermail/olpc/2007-November/000484.html
> <https://mailman2.grnet.gr/pipermail/olpc/2007-November/000484.html> ,
> OLPC is removing VServer kernel patches from their Update 1 build.
> 
> The full text of item 12 is as followed:
> 
> 12. Kernel: Andres Salomon spent Sunday through Tuesday hunting down a
> bizarre bug that turned out to be something in the kernel scheduler.
> He ran out of time for debugging, but signs were pointing to it being
> a vserver bug. The instability of the VServer kernel patches has made
> us remove this from our builds for Update.1. We will likely revisit
> use of light-weight containerization for security in future releases.
> We are pursuing alternate approaches to activity isolation for our
> first releases.
> 
> Questions:
> 
> 1.	Are those bugs being solved?

the 'bug' was never verified and/or reported to
the Linux-VServer community 

> 2.	Is OLPC still actively working with Vserver team?

not at the moment, and as Ivan Krstic confirmed
the decision to remove Linux-VServer code was
a political one

> 3.	What are the bugs that make Vserver unstable in OLPC?

I have no idea, and I doubt that it actually was
the Linux-VServer code which caused whatever bug
Andres was seeing ...

> 4.	Is it true that it is very difficult to debug the 
>       kernel patch's codes? 

I should be easy to track down and fix any code
OLPC was using, but as I wrote above, there was
no interest in fixing that issue (from the OLPC
side) because the decision to use other security
mechanisms (like SELinux) was already made

> Thanks!

HTC,
Herbert

> 
>  
> 
> Sincerely,
> 
> Cheon-Woei Ng
> 
>  
>