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Adrian Reber 14cb3c2016 net: Route veth restore through usernsd for userns mode
Starting with Linux kernel commit 7b735ef81286 ("rtnetlink: add
missing netlink_ns_capable() check for peer netns"), creating a
veth pair with a peer in a different network namespace requires
CAP_NET_ADMIN in the peer namespace as well:

    rtnetlink: add missing netlink_ns_capable() check for peer netns

    rtnl_newlink() lacks a CAP_NET_ADMIN capability check on the peer
    network namespace when creating paired devices (veth, vxcan,
    netkit). This allows an unprivileged user with a user namespace
    to create interfaces in arbitrary network namespaces, including
    init_net.

    Add a netlink_ns_capable() check for CAP_NET_ADMIN in the peer
    namespace before allowing device creation to proceed.

Link: 7b735ef812

When CRIU restores a veth in user namespace mode, it sends the
RTM_NEWLINK request from a netlink socket inside the child user
namespace.  The veth peer is placed into the root network namespace
via IFLA_NET_NS_FD, but the child user namespace does not have
CAP_NET_ADMIN in the root namespace, so the new kernel check
rejects the request with EPERM.

Fix this by routing the veth creation through usernsd when the
peer lives in an external (host) namespace specified via the
--external veth[name] restore option.  usernsd runs with real
root privileges in the init user namespace, so it passes the
capability check in both namespaces.

The usernsd path is only used for external veth mappings, not for
child-to-child namespace veths (has_peer_nsid), because in that
case both namespaces share the same user namespace and already
have CAP_NET_ADMIN in each other.

The approach mirrors restore_one_macvlan(), which already solves
the same CAP_NET_ADMIN-in-both-namespaces problem for macvlan
devices.  A new veth_link_info_userns() builds the RTM_NEWLINK
request without IFLA_NET_NS_FD for the peer -- since usernsd
sends the request from the root network namespace, the peer
naturally stays there.  userns_restore_one_link() then adds a
top-level IFLA_NET_NS_FD to move the main device into the child
namespace.

Assisted-by: Claude Code (claude-opus-4-6):claude-opus-4-6@default
Signed-off-by: Adrian Reber <areber@redhat.com>
2026-04-22 12:56:36 +01:00
.circleci ci: silence CircleCI warning about deprecated image 2024-09-11 16:02:11 -07:00
.github ci: Add vanilla next kernel test variant to Lima CI job 2026-04-22 08:22:50 +01:00
compel compel: fix heap alignment for structs with xsave state 2026-03-25 04:31:18 +01:00
contrib ci: add iproute2 to the list of packages in apt-packages.sh 2026-01-08 15:35:49 -08:00
coredump coredump: enable coredump generation on riscv64 2026-03-20 08:16:25 +00:00
crit contributing: update links to mailing list 2025-11-02 07:48:24 -08:00
criu net: Route veth restore through usernsd for userns mode 2026-04-22 12:56:36 +01:00
Documentation readme: use a local copy of the CRIU logo 2025-12-17 08:43:50 -08:00
images pipes: restore pipe ownership to fix /proc/self/fd access 2026-03-25 21:09:15 -07:00
include compel: fix heap alignment for structs with xsave state 2026-03-25 04:31:18 +01:00
lib pycriu: Fix FieldDescriptor.label removal in protobuf 7.x 2026-04-22 12:15:02 +01:00
plugins plugins/amdgpu: Fix remaining wrong usages of pr_perror 2026-04-20 11:03:04 -07:00
scripts ci: Add vanilla next kernel test variant to Lima CI job 2026-04-22 08:22:50 +01:00
soccr soccr: Log name of socket queue that failed to restore. 2023-10-22 13:29:25 -07:00
test zdtm: Fix rseq01 test for kernel 7.0 rseq changes 2026-04-22 10:35:31 +02:00
.cirrus.yml ci: remove aarch64 Fedora Rawhide from Cirrus CI 2026-03-29 20:26:45 -07:00
.clang-format clang-format: disable column limit constraint 2023-10-22 13:29:25 -07:00
.codespellrc codespell: skip amdgpu kernel headers 2025-11-14 18:31:37 +00:00
.gitignore Keep images/google/protobuf directory 2025-11-02 07:48:22 -08:00
.lgtm.yml images: remove symlink for descriptor.proto 2025-11-02 07:48:22 -08:00
.mailmap mailmap: update my email 2023-04-15 21:17:21 -07:00
CLAUDE.md docs: add developer overviews for AI assistants 2025-11-02 07:48:23 -08:00
CONTRIBUTING.md contributing: document AI-assisted contribution guidelines 2026-03-19 16:44:10 +00:00
COPYING COPYING: fix a typo in a preamble 2016-08-11 16:18:43 +03:00
CREDITS Add the CREDITS file 2012-07-30 13:52:37 +04:00
flake.lock feat: specify ourselves as Nix flake source 2026-03-15 21:04:43 +00:00
flake.nix feat: remove build-time patches from Nixpkgs 2026-03-15 21:04:43 +00:00
GEMINI.md contributing: document AI-assisted contribution guidelines 2026-03-19 16:44:10 +00:00
INSTALL.md docs: mark make commands with same format as elsewhere 2025-03-21 12:40:31 -07:00
MAINTAINERS MAINTAINERS: Update maintainer roles 2026-02-22 15:23:04 -08:00
MAINTAINERS_GUIDE.md Fix some codespell warnings 2022-04-28 17:53:52 -07:00
Makefile test/others: add tests for check() with pycriu 2025-11-05 15:41:35 -08:00
Makefile.compel Remove travis-ci leftovers 2025-11-02 07:48:23 -08:00
Makefile.config make: remove checks and warnings for bsd strlcat and strlcpy 2025-11-02 07:48:21 -08:00
Makefile.install make: don't install external dependencies 2025-11-05 15:41:34 -08:00
Makefile.versions criu: Version 4.2 (CRIUTIBILITY) 2025-11-13 08:40:46 -08:00
README.md readme: update reference to consolidated workflows 2026-03-09 10:29:57 +00:00

CI CircleCI

CRIU -- A project to implement checkpoint/restore functionality for Linux

CRIU (stands for Checkpoint and Restore in Userspace) is a utility to checkpoint/restore Linux tasks.

Using this tool, you can freeze a running application (or part of it) and checkpoint it to a hard drive as a collection of files. You can then use the files to restore and run the application from the point it was frozen at. The distinctive feature of the CRIU project is that it is mainly implemented in user space. There are some more projects doing C/R for Linux, and so far CRIU appears to be the most feature-rich and up-to-date with the kernel.

CRIU project is (almost) the never-ending story, because we have to always keep up with the Linux kernel supporting checkpoint and restore for all the features it provides. Thus we're looking for contributors of all kinds -- feedback, bug reports, testing, coding, writing, etc. Please refer to CONTRIBUTING.md if you would like to get involved.

The project started as the way to do live migration for OpenVZ Linux containers, but later grew to more sophisticated and flexible tool. It is currently used by (integrated into) OpenVZ, LXC/LXD, Docker, and other software, project gets tremendous help from the community, and its packages are included into many Linux distributions.

The project home is at http://criu.org. This wiki contains all the knowledge base for CRIU we have. Pages worth starting with are:

Checkpoint and restore of simple loop process

Advanced features

As main usage for CRIU is live migration, there's a library for it called P.Haul. Also the project exposes two cool core features as standalone libraries. These are libcompel for parasite code injection and libsoccr for TCP connections checkpoint-restore.

Live migration

True live migration using CRIU is possible, but doing all the steps by hands might be complicated. The phaul sub-project provides a Go library that encapsulates most of the complexity. This library and the Go bindings for CRIU are stored in the go-criu repository.

Parasite code injection

In order to get state of the running process CRIU needs to make this process execute some code, that would fetch the required information. To make this happen without killing the application itself, CRIU uses the parasite code injection technique, which is also available as a standalone library called libcompel.

TCP sockets checkpoint-restore

One of the CRIU features is the ability to save and restore state of a TCP socket without breaking the connection. This functionality is considered to be useful by itself, and we have it available as the libsoccr library.

Licence

The project is licensed under GPLv2 (though files sitting in the lib/ directory are LGPLv2.1).

All files in the images/ directory are licensed under the Expat license (so-called MIT). See the images/LICENSE file.