[systemd-devel] [libvirt] How to make udev not touch my device?

[Michal Privoznik]

On 07.11.2016 10:17, Daniel P. Berrange wrote:
> On Fri, Nov 04, 2016 at 08:47:34AM +0100, Michal Privoznik wrote:
>> Hey udev developers,
>>
>> I'm a libvirt developer and I've been facing an interesting issue
>> recently. Libvirt is a library for managing virtual machines and as such
>> allows basically any device to be exposed to a virtual machine. For
>> instance, a virtual machine can use /dev/sdX as its own disk. Because of
>> security reasons we allow users to configure their VMs to run under
>> different UID/GID and also SELinux context. That means that whenever a
>> VM is being started up, libvirtd (our daemon we have) relabels all the
>> necessary paths that QEMU process (representing VM) can touch.
>> However, I'm facing an issue that I don't know how to fix. In some cases
>> QEMU can close & reopen a block device. However, closing a block device
>> triggers an event and hence if there is a rule that sets a security
>> label on a device the QEMU process is unable to reopen the device again.
>>
>> My question is, whet we can do to prevent udev from mangling with our
>> security labels that we've set on the devices?
>>
>> One of the ideas our lead developer had was for libvirt to set some kind
>> of udev label on devices managed by libvirt (when setting up security
>> labels) and then whenever udev sees such labelled device it won't touch
>> it at all (this could be achieved by a rule perhaps?). Later, when
>> domain is shutting down libvirt removes that label. But I don't think
>> setting an arbitrary label on devices is supported, is it?
> 
> Having thought about this over the weekend, I'm strongly inclined to
> just take udev out of the equation by starting a new mount namespace
> for each QEMU we launch and setting up a custom /dev containing just
> the devices we need. This will be both a security improvement and
> avoid the udev races, with no complex code required in libvirt and
> will work for libvirt all the way back to RHEL6

How would this work with device hotplug, i.e. I start a domain with some
set of devices. Then I bring up an iSCSI target (which appears under
/dev) and how does one 'transfer' the device into the new namespace?
BTW: can you elaborate more one udev-namespace relations? Doesn't udev
run in the namespaces too?

Michal