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hacking.md

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Hacking stacker

The first step to trying to find a bug in stacker is to run it with --debug. This will give you a stack trace from where (at least in stacker's code) the error originated via github.com/pkg/errors.

Sometimes it is useful to write a small reproducer in test/, and run it with:

make check TEST=myreproducer.bats

Overlayfs / layer issues

Another thing --debug will show you is what overlay arguments it is sending to LXC. Note that the build overlay filesystem never exists in the host mount namespace, but is created by liblxc in the child namespace. Sometimes it can be useful to take these overlay args and split up the lowerdirs:

/data/ssd/builds/stacker/stacker_layers/.roots/sha256_f8e46c301da6347e78057d8fe48a6bbd8fc0cab213d47825f5c0c0646f542b6b/overlay
/data/ssd/builds/stacker/stacker_layers/.roots/sha256_7eb8e296d351fe6d0c87fea979b305e2b1f19548d99f9aee4b8030b596f02efd/overlay
/data/ssd/builds/stacker/stacker_layers/.roots/sha256_ca379e914166030218007477a7b9cfd0ca3dd554c58e2401c58c634fac9182f8/overlay

and look through each one (top to bottom, as the overlay stack would present) in order to see what's going on.

Debugging LXC

If things are really bad, you may end up wading through liblxc. With --debug, stacker will also try and render any liblxc ERRORs to stdout, but sometimes it can be useful to see a full liblxc trace log. This is available in $(--stacker-dir)/lxc.log for the last run.

If you get even more in the weeds, you may need to build your own liblxc with debug statements. Thankfully, everything is statically linked so this is fairly easy to test locally, as long as your host liblxc can build stacker:

make LXC_CLONE_URL=https://github.com/tych0/lxc LXC_BRANCH=my-debug-branch

Stacker links against this through a convoluted mechanism: it builds a static C program in /cmd/lxc-wrapper/ that takes a few relevant arguments about what mode to drive liblxc in. Stacker uses the go-embed mechanism to embed the resulting statically linked binary, and then resolves and execs it at runtime via the code in /embed-exec. The reason for all this indirection vs. linking against something directly is that the kernel does not allow multithreaded programs to unshare user namespaces. Since the go runtime spawns many threads for GC and various other tasks, go code cannot directly unshare a user namespace (one wonders, then, why this was the language chosen for runc, lxd, etc...). A previous implementation (the one in lxd) was to use some __attribute__((constructor)) nonsense and hope for the best, but it doesn't work in all cases, and go-embed allows for librar-ization of stacker code if someone else wants to use it eventually. See 8fa336834f31 ("container: move to go-embed for re-exec of C code") for details on that approach.

Overlay storage layout

The storage parent directory is whatever is specified to stacker via --roots-dir. Each layer is extracted into a sha256_$hash/overlay directory, which is then sewn together via overlayfs. At the top level, for a layer called foo, there are two directories: foo/rootfs, and foo/overlay. During the build, foo's rootfs is mounted inside the container as foo/rootfs, with the overlay upperdir=foo/overlay. This way, whatever filesystem mutations the foo layer's run: section performs end up in foo/overlay.

After the run: section, stacker generates whatever layers the user requested from this, creates sha256_$hash/overlay dirs with the contents (if two layer types were converted, then the hash of the squashfs output will just be a symlink to the tar layer's directory to save space), and foo/overlay_metadata.json will be updated to reflect these new outputs, for use when e.g. foo is a dependency of some other layer bar.

Note that there is currently one wart. In a stacker file like:

foo:
    from:
        type: docker
        url: docker://ubuntu:latest
    build_only: true
    run: |
        dd if=/dev/random of=/bigfile bs=1M count=1000
bar:
    from:
        type: bult
        tag: foo
    run: |
        rm /bigfile

The final image for bar will actually contain a layer with /bigfile in it, because the foo layer's mutations are generated independently of bar's. Some clever userspace overlay collapsing could be done here to remove this wart, though.