| Issue |
EPJ Web Conf.
Volume 245, 2020
24th International Conference on Computing in High Energy and Nuclear Physics (CHEP 2019)
|
|
|---|---|---|
| Article Number | 07012 | |
| Number of page(s) | 5 | |
| Section | 7 - Facilities, Clouds and Containers | |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1051/epjconf/202024507012 | |
| Published online | 16 November 2020 | |
https://doi.org/10.1051/epjconf/202024507012
A fully unprivileged CernVM-FS
1
CERN, Geneva, Switzerland
2
Fermilab, Chicago, U.S.
* e-mail: jblomer@cern.ch
Published online: 16 November 2020
The CernVM File System provides the software and container distribution backbone for most High Energy and Nuclear Physics experiments. It is implemented as a file system in user-space (Fuse) module, which permits its execution without any elevated privileges. Yet, mounting the file system in the first place is handled by a privileged suid helper program that is installed by the Fuse package on most systems. The privileged nature of the mount system call is a serious hindrance to running CernVM-FS on opportunistic resource and supercomputers. Fortunately, recent developments in the Linux kernel and in the Fuse user-space libraries enabled fully unprivileged mounting for Fuse file systems (as of RHEL 8), or at least outsourcing the privileged mount system call to a custom, external process. This opens the door to several, very appealing new ways to use CernVM-FS, such as a generally usable “super pilot” consisting of the pilot code bundled with Singularity and CernVM-FS, or the on-demand instantiation of unprivileged, ephemeral containers to publish new CernVM-FS content from anywhere. In this contribution, we discuss the integration of these new Linux features with CernVM-FS and show some of its most promising, new applications.
© The Authors, published by EDP Sciences, 2020
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
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