Advanced Topics

Abstract

Chapter 13 dealt with the InfiniBand subsystem and its implementation in Linux. This chapter deals with several advanced topics and some topics that didn’t fit logically into other chapters. The chapter starts with a discussion about network namespaces, a type of lightweight process virtualization mechanism that was added to Linux in recent years. I will discuss the namespaces implementation in general and network namespaces in particular. You will learn that only two new system calls are needed in order to implement namespaces. You will also see several examples of how simple it is to create and manage network namespaces with the ip command of iproute2, and how simple it is to move one network device from one network namespace to another and to attach a specified process to a specified network namespace. The cgroups subsystem also provides resource management solution, which is different from namespaces. I will describe the cgroups subsystem and its two network modules, net_prio and cls_cgroup, and give two examples of using these cgroup network modules.