I have been using Docker for ebuild development for quite a while and absolutely love it, mostly because how easy it is to manipulate filesystem state with it. Work on several separate ebuilds in parallel? Just spin up several containers. Clean up once I’m done? Happens automatically when I close the container. Come back to something later? One docker commit invocation and I’m done. I could of course do something similar with virtual machines (and indeed I have to for cross-platform work) – but for native amd64 is is extremely convenient.
There is, however, one catch. By default processes running in a Docker container are fairly restricted privilege-wise and the Gentoo sandbox uses ptrace(). Result? By default, certain ebuilds (sys-libs/glibc and dev-libs/gobject-introspection , to name just two) will fail to emerge. One can of course set FEATURES=”-sandbox -usersandbox” for such ebuilds but it is an absolute no-no for both new ebuilds and any stabilisation work.
In the past working around this issue required messing with Docker security policies, which at least I found rather awkward. Fortunately since version 1.13.0 there has been a considerably easier way – simply pass
--cap-add=SYS_PTRACE
to docker-run. Done! Sandbox can now use ptrace() to its heart’s content.
Big Fat Warning: The reason why by default Docker restricts CAP_SYS_PTRACE is that a malicious program can use ptrace() to break out of the container it runs in. Do not grant this capability to containers unless you know what you are doing. Seriously.
Unfortunately the above is not the end of the story because at least as of version 1.13.0, Docker does not allow to enhance the capabilities of a docker-build job. Why is this a problem? For my own work I use a custom image which extends somewhat the official gentoo/stage3-amd64-hardened . One of the things my Dockerfile does is rsync the Portage tree and update @world so that my image contains a fully up-to-date stage3 even when the official base image does not. You can guess what happens when Docker tries to emerge an ebuild requiring the sandbox to use ptrace()… and remember, one of the packages containing such ebuilds is sys-libs/glibc . To my current knowledge the only way around this is to spin up a ptrace-enabled container using the latest good intermediate image left behind by docker-build and execute the remaining build steps manually. Not fun… Hope they will fix this some day.