Re: [atomic-devel] Screen in Atomic

[Colin Walters <walters verbum org>]

On Mon, Apr 20, 2015, at 01:10 PM, Stephen Major wrote:

 

The please add feature x will never stop and it is a slippery slope that has already been asked many times

 

This is true, however...progress has been made on using more privileged containers for some of the things that would traditionally have been on the host.  We're still in the early days on this - and in the short term the cost of maintaining the install-on-host-via-package *and* the install-on-host-via-container paths is high, but long term there's going to be a lot of flexibility with the latter.

 

One thing I should emphasize though is that while you *can* run `screen` or `tmux` from inside a Docker container, it has many flaws, among them that a major point of the tool is to be able to run commands on the host - so you need to purely escape.  Second, the lifecycle of the session is now bound to the docker daemon, which means even if you managed to configure it to run commands on the host properly, you can't e.g. `yum update docker` as it will kill the `yum` process...  This problem matters less for the atomic host where we don't currently support any partial live updates, but there are still valid reasons to want to be able to restart the docker daemon from inside tmux or screen without your sessions dying.

 

I'm certainly listening to the :+1: and :-1:s in this discussion but since none of them have patches, and for the above reasons I'm unlikely to back out the patch myself at this time unless something else changes.