nsexec

Just like nsenter, nsexec run program in different namespaces.

The most significant benefit of nsexec is that it can run binaries that don't exist in the target namespace. For example, if the target namespace is a distroless image, the ls, bash and cat don't exist.

Example

nsexec -m /proc/xxxx/ns/mnt -l /bin/bash

The option --library-path should be set to the path of libnsenter.so. If you compile nsexec with cargo build --release --all, you can find it in ./target/release/libnsenter.so. The default library-path is /usr/local/lib/libnsenter.so

The option -l, --local means to load the binaries from the current mnt namespace (but not target namespace).

Implementation

nsexec has a lot of limitations. The best way to understand the limitation is to know the implementation and choose whether to use it in your situation.

Without -l, --local, the implementation is calling setns directly and spawn a new child process, which is nearly the same as nsenter.

With -l, --local, we will not call setns to set mount namespace in nsexec. Instead, nsexec will modify the LD_PRELOAD environment variable of the child process to preload a dynamic library. The library, as shown in /nsenter/src/lib.rs, will call setns to set mount namespace in the constructor.

Note

nsexec will also bypass some signals such as SIGTERM and SIGINT to the child process, for the convenience of killing processes.