[Bug 1266808] Re: No mechanism to wait until a started container is ready and has finished booting

[Stéphane Graber]

Speaking as the upstream for LXC and package maintainer, the only way I
consider to be acceptable for this is the one Serge and I described by
adding a new socket owned by LXC which allows for a simple text based
communication between the container and its host. This protocol would
allow "state ready" kind of command which would allow switching to a
list of allowed states that'd in turn be visible in lxc-wait.

Monitoring the container's runlevel isn't practical as inotify isn't
reliable, lxc-attach doesn't work on all kernels and containers may
store that information on a filesystem we can't see from the host (e.g.
/run on tmpfs) so I'll NACK any patch trying to implement something like
this, both as an upstream change and as a distro-specific change.

I've been fighting pretty hard this cycle to make sure LXC in Ubuntu is
perfectly in sync with upstream, we don't carry any patches, our upstart
jobs and apparmor profiles all come from upstream now, I'm not about to
change this for this kind of hack, especially not when I'll have to
maintain this for 5 years.


We also have a policy in Ubuntu that LXC should not do any customization of the rootfs that'd be wrong to do on a host. So adding upstart jobs from the template is out of the question, any extra upstart jobs has to come through the distro (there again, we've been fighting to achieve this for years, I'm not about to compromise on this now).

Note that in any case, this feature very likely won't make it before LXC
1.1 as I'm about to tag the first release candidate of LXC 1.0 after
which point I won't be accepting feature changes anymore.

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1266808

Title:
  No mechanism to wait until a started container is ready and has
  finished booting

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