[Bug 1608953] Re: PostgreSQL does not start in container

[Christopher Horrell]

We have not observed this issue under lxc, but under lx-brand. Some
background information on lx-brand:

http://www.slideshare.net/bcantrill/illumos-lx


Based on my discussion with the engineer who discovered this, it's probably an issue you'll hit in a Docker container as well as an lx-brand environment.

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1608953

Title:
  PostgreSQL does not start in container

Status in systemd package in Ubuntu:
  Incomplete
Status in systemd source package in Xenial:
  Incomplete

Bug description:
  We have a 16.04 Ubuntu lx-brand container image available in our
  public cloud and recently discovered a systemd bug that's related to
  running in a container environment.

  I'm forwarded below what one of our engineers discovered:

  ----

  After installing postgres (apt-get install -y -q postgresql), systemd
  does not actually start any of the postgres services. We tracked this
  down to a failure from sed from within the /lib/systemd/system-
  generators/postgresql-generator script. The sed command tries to close
  stderr (fd 2) which fails, so sed returns an error code, which causes
  the entire postgres generator to fail.

  The root cause of the problem lies in the systemd code. Because we are
  running inside of a container (see detect_container) we don't execute
  the following block of code in the systemd main().

          if (getpid() == 1 && detect_container() <= 0) {

                  /* Running outside of a container as PID 1 */
                  arg_running_as = MANAGER_SYSTEM;
                  make_null_stdio();

  The make_null_stdio function is what sets up fd 0-2 as /dev/null in
  systemd on bare metal. Having those fd's setup is what allows the
  postgres system-generator to work properly since sed expects to be
  able to close stderr.

  Because we never call make_null_stdio when inside any container, the
  low fd's wind up getting setup later using /dev/console with
  O_CLOEXEC, so when we actually run the system generator script, we
  don't have the low fd's setup at all like sed expects.

  Interestingly, looking at the master branch of systemd, at
  src/core/main.c this bug appears to no longer exist. The relevant code
  block has been moved so it is no longer conditional on being in a
  container, but the commit was not intended to fix this problem. It was
  apparently due to color handling on the console/

  commit 3a18b60489504056f9b0b1a139439cbfa60a87e1

  It would be great if this fix could be pulled in to an update for
  Ubuntu 16.04.

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