Application crash in chroot jail

Question

I have a Debian 9 installation with a Debian 6 chroot jail. I am using a proprietary application which up until recently worked fine in the jail. But when I run its newer versions, it crashes in libc. I tired creating a newer Debian jail (Debian 8) but it still crashes. If I run it on native Debian 8, it works. If I import my Debian 6/8 jail in Docker, it still works.

Does anybody have any idea why the application would crash in chroot but not when running naively or when the chroot directory is imported and ran in Docker?

Answer 1

While the kernel folks try to avoid making incompatible changes to userspace ABIs, sometimes they do have to do so anyway (usually for security reasons), and then such issues may ensue. To avoid sudden breakage of userspace binaries, initially the old ABI will still be enabled, but after a while it gets disabled by default. At this point, such problems can occur.

To make things not fail, you have two options:

• Install the old software in a VM (not a chroot) using the old kernel. This should always work
• If your current kernel still has the feature that you need but doesn't have it enabled by default, you may be able to enable it for a while. Do note that doing so may reduce the security of your environment, however, so don't do it on security-critical environments.

For your specific issue, the most likely culprit is the vsyscall emulation, which is disabled by default in most recent distributions, but which can be enabled by specifying the kernel boot-time parameter vsyscall=emulate.