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

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