Time Namespace isolates clock values.
The kernel provides access to several clocks CLOCK_REALTIME,
CLOCK_MONOTONIC, CLOCK_BOOTTIME, etc.
CLOCK_REALTIME
System-wide clock that measures real (i.e., wall-clock) time.
CLOCK_MONOTONIC
Clock that cannot be set and represents monotonic time since
some unspecified starting point.
CLOCK_BOOTTIME
Identical to CLOCK_MONOTONIC, except it also includes any time
that the system is suspended.
For many users, the time namespace means the ability to changes date and
time in a container (CLOCK_REALTIME). Providing per namespace notions of
CLOCK_REALTIME would be complex with a massive overhead, but has a dubious
value.
But in the context of checkpoint/restore functionality, monotonic and
boottime clocks become interesting. Both clocks are monotonic with
unspecified starting points. These clocks are widely used to measure time
slices and set timers. After restoring or migrating processes, it has to be
guaranteed that they never go backward. In an ideal case, the behavior of
these clocks should be the same as for a case when a whole system is
suspended. All this means that it is required to set CLOCK_MONOTONIC and
CLOCK_BOOTTIME clocks, which can be achieved by adding per-namespace
offsets for clocks.
A time namespace is similar to a pid namespace in the way how it is
created: unshare(CLONE_NEWTIME) system call creates a new time namespace,
but doesn't set it to the current process. Then all children of the process
will be born in the new time namespace, or a process can use the setns()
system call to join a namespace.
This scheme allows setting clock offsets for a namespace, before any
processes appear in it.
All available clone flags have been used, so CLONE_NEWTIME uses the highest
bit of CSIGNAL. It means that it can be used only with the unshare() and
the clone3() system calls.
[ tglx: Adjusted paragraph about clone3() to reality and massaged the
changelog a bit. ]
Co-developed-by: Dmitry Safonov <dima@arista.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrei Vagin <avagin@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Dmitry Safonov <dima@arista.com>
Signed-off-by: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>
Link: https://criu.org/Time_namespace
Link: https://lists.openvz.org/pipermail/criu/2018-June/041504.html
Link: https://lore.kernel.org/r/20191112012724.250792-4-dima@arista.com
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