A small presentation on Linux namespaces

Over the weekend I spent time putting together a few slides on Linux namespaces, mostly because I wanted to understand better (and putting this together helped a lot!), but also because it will be useful to me later, and finally (and really) because I promised to a few colleagues I’ll explain how all this works :)

So the HTML slides are here, and the source is on github. I put the source up because I’m very sure this has lots of mistakes; not only in the intro where I mention FreeBSD jails and OpenVZ a bit (but I have zero experience with both), but also in the main content, so any corrections are more than welcome.

Writing this, and organising it, was actually much more entertaining than I originally thought. It also made me realise that the kernel-level implementation is very powerful, and—at least to the extent that e.g. Debian uses it by default—it’s basically wasted (a lot of lost opportunity). I know there are some tools to use this, but for example why Firefox is not by default namespaced… I don’t know. Food for later thought. Happy to receive information otherwise, of course.

Most of the information is gathered from man pages, Wikipedia (for the historic bits), blog posts, mailing list archives, etc., so I don’t claim a lot of deep original content; the main idea is just to put all this information together in a single place.

Hope this is useful to somebody else, and again, contributions and re-sharing welcome (CC-BY-SA-4.0).