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#1 2017-05-22 06:29:46

nomme
Member
Registered: 2016-04-20
Posts: 7

[Solved] systemd-nspawn: prevent guest from mounting /tmp as tmpfs

Hi

Background:
I have a host running Arch with a container running Ubuntu. One difference between these two distros is that Arch mounts /tmp with tmpfs where as Ubuntu uses whatever is mounted on / for /tmp. Systemd-nspawn, I guess, clones some of the mount setup of the host i.e. /tmp is mounted with tmpfs in the Ubuntu container. This creates some problems as I use the container to compile a project which puts some large files in /tmp. The files are large enough to exhaust the 8GB of space in /tmp.

Problem:
I cannot find a way of specifying that I don't want /tmp mounted with tmpfs in the Ubuntu container in systemd-nspawn. Is there a way? Can i specify it in Ubuntu somehow?
I have tried to manually unmount /tmp in the container and one resort could be to automate that unmount at boot. I'm out of ideas how to do that though.
A final resort, which I would like to avoid, is to extend the tmpfs size. I need at least 12GB of free space.

Any suggestions for how to do this?

Thanks

Last edited by nomme (2017-05-23 06:42:25)

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#2 2017-05-22 08:50:45

nomme
Member
Registered: 2016-04-20
Posts: 7

Re: [Solved] systemd-nspawn: prevent guest from mounting /tmp as tmpfs

It seems I made some incorrect assumptions on what systemd-nspawn does.
The Ubuntu machine runs systemd as well and thus seems to mount /tmp with tmp.mount. However, it is still mounted at boot after masking tmp.mount:

● tmp.mount
   Loaded: masked (/dev/null; bad)
   Active: active (mounted) since Mon 2017-05-22 10:36:56 CEST; 4min 52s ago
    Where: /tmp
     What: tmpfs

Stopping tmp.mount unmounts /tmp though. So I'll keep looking in that area.

Last edited by nomme (2017-05-22 09:20:48)

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#3 2017-05-22 10:13:24

tom.ty89
Member
Registered: 2012-11-15
Posts: 897

Re: [Solved] systemd-nspawn: prevent guest from mounting /tmp as tmpfs

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#4 2017-05-22 10:37:30

nomme
Member
Registered: 2016-04-20
Posts: 7

Re: [Solved] systemd-nspawn: prevent guest from mounting /tmp as tmpfs

Sorry, should have mentioned that fstab i empty in the container.
Adding this made no change:

tmpfs /tmp tmpfs noauto 0 0

Also:

ubuntedx # systemctl cat tmp.mount
# /dev/null 

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#5 2017-05-22 10:57:48

tom.ty89
Member
Registered: 2012-11-15
Posts: 897

Re: [Solved] systemd-nspawn: prevent guest from mounting /tmp as tmpfs

nomme wrote:

Sorry, should have mentioned that fstab i empty in the container.
Adding this made no change:

tmpfs /tmp tmpfs noauto 0 0

Also:

ubuntedx # systemctl cat tmp.mount
# /dev/null 

Never mind. See my edited post.

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#6 2017-05-22 11:50:56

nomme
Member
Registered: 2016-04-20
Posts: 7

Re: [Solved] systemd-nspawn: prevent guest from mounting /tmp as tmpfs

Wow, that's some nice digging right there.
Disappointing at the same time though... Why would nspawn take it upon itself to force this on the guest.

Thanks a lot Tom!

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#7 2017-05-22 11:56:36

tom.ty89
Member
Registered: 2012-11-15
Posts: 897

Re: [Solved] systemd-nspawn: prevent guest from mounting /tmp as tmpfs

Well, here is the commit message from poettering, if you are interested tongue

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#8 2017-05-22 14:32:07

nomme
Member
Registered: 2016-04-20
Posts: 7

Re: [Solved] systemd-nspawn: prevent guest from mounting /tmp as tmpfs

Well, that wouldn't be the first time someone has opinions which clash with Poettering's big_smile
I'm sure there are good reasons for nspawn to behave this way.

But since I cannot have it like that I searched for ways of umounting /tmp after boot. I tried different variations in tmp.mount such as  LazyUmount, ForceUmount, StopWhenUnneeded but without success. The idea I had was that systemd in the container could unmount /tmp after nspawn had mounted it.

One solution I found is to unmount /tmp in /etc/rc.local:

 # /etc/rc.local
# Either
systemctl stop tmp.mount
# Or
umount /tmp

I'm not sure which option is better or if using rc.local is a crappy idea to begin with.
But if someone has a better idea or input on why this is not a good idea I'm glad to hear it. Otherwise I can mark this as solved.

Thanks again Tom.

Last edited by nomme (2017-05-23 06:45:34)

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#9 2017-05-22 15:14:43

Ropid
Member
Registered: 2015-03-09
Posts: 1,069

Re: [Solved] systemd-nspawn: prevent guest from mounting /tmp as tmpfs

About extending the size of /tmp, I did that with a config that adds to the original config:

# /etc/systemd/system/tmp.mount.d/override.conf
[Mount]
Options=mode=1777,strictatime,nosuid,nodev,size=12G

You can see the original file when you do "systemctl cat tmp.mount". That's where I got the rest of that stuff you see on that "Options=..." line. After you create a config like this, you need to run "sudo systemctl daemon-reload", can then check with "systemctl cat tmp.mount" if systemd found your config.

I think you are also supposed to be able to change the size through an entry in /etc/fstab, but I didn't try that.

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#10 2017-05-22 19:56:56

tom.ty89
Member
Registered: 2012-11-15
Posts: 897

Re: [Solved] systemd-nspawn: prevent guest from mounting /tmp as tmpfs

@nomme, well I don't really know about nspawn (almost zero experience with it), so I don't know if rc.local is the only possible "implementation" (maybe you can do it with a systemd service as well?). But I do think that a manual stop / umount is the only way, because of how nspawn does the mount.

@Ropid you can't do that for nspawn machines, see this pull request I made after I dug for this post.

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