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I'm learning about container technologies of Linux and wrote a minimal container implementation on my own. I'm currently confused about consoles / terminals for container processes, as I'm "reusing" the controlling terminal as /dev/console (instead of c 5 1) in the container.

I determine the current terminal from /proc/self/fd/0 and /proc/self/fd/2, read its device node (major and minor), and mknod(2) using the discovered device nodes to create /dev/console node in the container.

This appears fine when running a regular application like /bin/sh as PID 1 (in PID namespace), but not when through an init system (I used BusyBox for this).

Here's my /etc/inittab for the BusyBox rootfs:

::sysinit:/bin/true
::respawn:-/bin/sh

However, the shell spawned by init always complains can't access tty; job control turned off. I also tried using the same host TTY node for /dev/tty (instead of c 5 0) but this problem still persists.

I looked into the source code of systemd-nspawn and found that it creates a "forwarded pty", where the container runs on a new PTY that's "forwarded" to the host side. The code is too complex for my educational project so it's not viable for me.

How can I use the host terminal for the container?


Details: My container program clone(2) only one child with flags = CLONE_NEWGROUP | CLONE_NEWNET | CLONE_NEWPID | CLONE_NEWIPC | CLONE_NEWUTS | SIGCHLD, and the child sets up capabilities (blacklisting) and seccomp (whitelisting, syscall list taken from Docker), before pivot_root(2) to the container rootfs and execve(2) into the target application.

I'm currently experimenting on Linux 5.3 (Ubuntu 18.04 HWE), but I don't expect this to be different on any recent Linux versions.

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  • Instead of ::respawn:-/bin/sh, use ::respawn:/bin/cttyhack /bin/sh. This is a well known problem, well explained in the //config comments from the cttyhack source code
    – user313992
    Mar 18, 2020 at 8:43
  • running script /dev/null (which will create a pseudo-tty owned by you) also works in cases like this.
    – user313992
    Mar 18, 2020 at 8:48

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