
%         Registration              Glen or Glenda: Empowering Users and      
%                                   Applications with Private Namespaces      
%                              Eric Van Hensbergen (bergevan@us.ibm.com)      

Private namespaces were first introduced into  
Linux during the 2.4 kernel series. Their use  
has been limited due to namespace manipulation 
being considered a privileged operation.       
Giving users and applications the ability to   
create private namespaces as well as the       
ability to mount and bind resources is the key 
to unlocking the full potential of this        
technology. There are serious performance,     
security and stability issues involved with    
user-controlled dynamic private namespaces in  
Linux. This paper will propose a mechanism for 
maintaining system integrity while unlocking   
the power of dynamic namespaces for normal     
users. It will go on to discuss relevant       
potential applications of this technology      
including its use with FUSE (Filesystem in     
Userspace), v9fs (the Linux port of the Plan 9 
resource sharing protocol) and Plan 9 from     
User Space (the Plan 9 application suite       
including userspace synthetic file servers     
ported to UNIX variants).                      



