virtcontainers

What is it?

virtcontainers is a Go library that can be used to build hardware-virtualized container runtimes.

Background

The few existing VM-based container runtimes (Clear Containers, runV, rkt's KVM stage 1) all share the same hardware virtualization semantics but use different code bases to implement them. virtcontainers's goal is to factorize this code into a common Go library.

Ideally, VM-based container runtime implementations would become translation layers from the runtime specification they implement (e.g. the OCI runtime-spec or the Kubernetes CRI) to the virtcontainers API.

virtcontainers was used as a foundational package for the Kata Containers runtime implementation, formerly the Clear Containers runtime implementation.

Out of scope

Implementing a container runtime is out of scope for this project. Any tools or executables in this repository are only provided for demonstration or testing purposes.

virtcontainers and Kubernetes CRI

virtcontainers's API is loosely inspired by the Kubernetes CRI because we believe it provides the right level of abstractions for containerized sandboxes. However, despite the API similarities between the two projects, the goal of virtcontainers is not to build a CRI implementation, but instead to provide a generic, runtime-specification agnostic, hardware-virtualized containers library that other projects could leverage to implement CRI themselves.

Design

Sandboxes

The virtcontainers execution unit is a sandbox, i.e. virtcontainers users start sandboxes where containers will be running.

virtcontainers creates a sandbox by starting a virtual machine and setting the sandbox up within that environment. Starting a sandbox means launching all containers with the VM sandbox runtime environment.

Hypervisors

The virtcontainers package relies on hypervisors to start and stop virtual machine where sandboxes will be running. An hypervisor is defined by an Hypervisor interface implementation, and the default implementation is the QEMU one.

Update cloud-hypervisor client code

See docs

Agents

During the lifecycle of a container, the runtime running on the host needs to interact with the virtual machine guest OS in order to start new commands to be executed as part of a given container workload, set new networking routes or interfaces, fetch a container standard or error output, and so on. There are many existing and potential solutions to resolve that problem and virtcontainers abstracts this through the Agent interface.

API

The high level virtcontainers API includes Sandbox API and Container API. For further details, see the API documentation.

Networking

virtcontainers supports the 2 major container networking models: the Container Network Model (CNM) and the Container Network Interface (CNI).

Typically the former is the Docker default networking model while the later is used on Kubernetes deployments.

CNM

CNM lifecycle

1. RequestPool

2. CreateNetwork

3. RequestAddress

4. CreateEndPoint

5. CreateContainer

6. Create config.json

7. Create PID and network namespace

8. ProcessExternalKey

9. JoinEndPoint

10. LaunchContainer

11. Launch

12. Run container

Runtime network setup with CNM

1. Read config.json

2. Create the network namespace (code)

3. Call the prestart hook (from inside the netns) (code)

4. Scan network interfaces inside netns and get the name of the interface created by prestart hook (code)

5. Create bridge, TAP, and link all together with network interface previously created (code)

6. Start VM inside the netns and start the container (code)

Drawbacks of CNM

There are three drawbacks about using CNM instead of CNI:

• The way we call into it is not very explicit: Have to re-exec dockerd binary so that it can accept parameters and execute the prestart hook related to network setup.
• Implicit way to designate the network namespace: Instead of explicitly giving the netns to dockerd, we give it the PID of our runtime so that it can find the netns from this PID. This means we have to make sure being in the right netns while calling the hook, otherwise the VETH pair will be created with the wrong netns.
• No results are back from the hook: We have to scan the network interfaces to discover which one has been created inside the netns. This introduces more latency in the code because it forces us to scan the network in the CreateSandbox path, which is critical for starting the VM as quick as possible.

Storage

See Kata Containers Architecture.

Devices

Support has been added to pass VFIO assigned devices on the docker command line with --device. Support for passing other devices including block devices with --device has not been added yet. PCI and AP (IBM Z Crypto Express cards) devices can be passed.

How to pass a device using VFIO-PCI passthrough

1. Requirements

IOMMU group represents the smallest set of devices for which the IOMMU has visibility and which is isolated from other groups. VFIO uses this information to enforce safe ownership of devices for userspace.

You will need Intel VT-d capable hardware. Check if IOMMU is enabled in your host kernel by verifying CONFIG_VFIO_NOIOMMU is not in the kernel configuration. If it is set, you will need to rebuild your kernel.

The following kernel configuration options need to be enabled:

CONFIG_VFIO_IOMMU_TYPE1=m 
CONFIG_VFIO=m
CONFIG_VFIO_PCI=m

In addition, you need to pass intel_iommu=on on the kernel command line.

2. Identify BDF(Bus-Device-Function) of the PCI device to be assigned.

$ lspci -D | grep -e Ethernet -e Network
0000:01:00.0 Ethernet controller: Intel Corporation Ethernet Controller 10-Gigabit X540-AT2 (rev 01)

$ BDF=0000:01:00.0

3. Find vendor and device id.

$ lspci -n -s $BDF
01:00.0 0200: 8086:1528 (rev 01)

4. Find IOMMU group.

$ readlink /sys/bus/pci/devices/$BDF/iommu_group
../../../../kernel/iommu_groups/16

5. Unbind the device from host driver.

$ echo $BDF | sudo tee /sys/bus/pci/devices/$BDF/driver/unbind

6. Bind the device to vfio-pci.

$ sudo modprobe vfio-pci
$ echo 8086 1528 | sudo tee /sys/bus/pci/drivers/vfio-pci/new_id
$ echo $BDF | sudo tee --append /sys/bus/pci/drivers/vfio-pci/bind

7. Check /dev/vfio

$ ls /dev/vfio
16 vfio

8. Start a Clear Containers container passing the VFIO group on the docker command line.

docker run -it --device=/dev/vfio/16 centos/tools bash

9. Running lspci within the container should show the device among the PCI devices. The driver for the device needs to be present within the Clear Containers kernel. If the driver is missing, you can add it to your custom container kernel using the osbuilder tooling.

How to pass a device using VFIO-AP passthrough

IBM Z mainframes (s390x) use the AP (Adjunct Processor) bus for their Crypto Express hardware security modules. Such devices can be passed over VFIO, which is also supported in Kata. Pass-through happens separated by adapter and domain, i.e. a passable VFIO device has one or multiple adapter-domain combinations.

1. You must follow the kernel documentation for preparing VFIO-AP passthrough. In short, your host kernel should have the following enabled or available as module (in case of modules, load the modules accordingly, e.g. through modprobe). If one is missing, you will have to update your kernel accordingly, e.g. through recompiling.

CONFIG_VFIO_AP
CONFIG_VFIO_IOMMU_TYPE1
CONFIG_VFIO
CONFIG_VFIO_MDEV
CONFIG_VFIO_MDEV_DEVICE
CONFIG_S390_AP_IOMMU

2. Set the AP adapter(s) and domain(s) you want to pass in /sys/bus/ap/apmask and /sys/bus/ap/aqmask by writing their negative numbers. Assuming you want to pass 06.0032, you'd run

$ echo -0x6 | sudo tee /sys/bus/ap/apmask > /dev/null
$ echo -0x32 | sudo tee /sys/bus/ap/aqmask > /dev/null

3. Create one or multiple mediated devices -- one per container you want to pass to. You must write a UUID for the device to /sys/devices/vfio_ap/matrix/mdev_supported_types/vfio_ap-passthrough/create. You can use uuidgen for generating the UUID, e.g.

$ uuidgen | sudo tee /sys/devices/vfio_ap/matrix/mdev_supported_types/vfio_ap-passthrough/create
a297db4a-f4c2-11e6-90f6-d3b88d6c9525

4. Set the AP adapter(s) and domain(s) you want to pass per device by writing their numbers to /sys/devices/vfio_ap/matrix/${UUID}/assign_adapter and assign_domain in the same directory. For the UUID from step 3, that would be

$ echo 0x6 | sudo tee /sys/devices/vfio_ap/matrix/a297db4a-f4c2-11e6-90f6-d3b88d6c9525/assign_adapter > /dev/null
$ echo 0x32 | sudo tee /sys/devices/vfio_ap/matrix/a297db4a-f4c2-11e6-90f6-d3b88d6c9525/assign_domain > /dev/null

5. Find the IOMMU group of the mediated device by following the link from /sys/devices/vfio_ap/matrix/${UUID}/iommu_group. There should be a correspondent VFIO device in /dev/vfio.

$ readlink /sys/devices/vfio_ap/matrix/a297db4a-f4c2-11e6-90f6-d3b88d6c9525/iommu_group
../../../../kernel/iommu_groups/0
$ ls /dev/vfio
0 vfio

6. This device can now be passed. To verify the cards are there, you can use lszcrypt from s390-tools (s390-tools in Alpine, Debian, and Ubuntu, s390utils in Fedora). With lszcrypt, you can see the cards after the configuration time has passed.

$ sudo docker run -it --device /dev/vfio/0 ubuntu
$ lszcrypt
CARD.DOMAIN TYPE  MODE        STATUS  REQUESTS
----------------------------------------------
06          CEX7C CCA-Coproc  online         1
06.0032     CEX7C CCA-Coproc  online         1

Developers

For information on how to build, develop and test virtcontainers, see the developer documentation.

Persistent storage plugin support

See the persistent storage plugin documentation.

Experimental features

See the experimental features documentation.