Shared Memory Channels

Function Description

System containers enable the communication between container and host processes through shared memory. You can set the --host-channel parameter when creating a container to allow the host to share the same tmpfs with the container so that they can communicate with each other.

Parameter Description

Command	Parameter	Value Description
isula create/run	--host-channel	Variable of the string type. Its format is as follows: <host path>:<container path>:<rw/ro>:<size limit> The parameter is described as follows: <host path>: path to which tmpfs is mounted on the host, which must be an absolute path. <container path>: path to which tmpfs is mounted in a container, which must be an absolute path. <rw/ro>: permissions on the file system mounted to the container. The value can only be rw (read and write) or ro (read only). The default value is rw. <size limit>: maximum size used by the mounted tmpfs. The minimum value is one 4 KB physical page, and the maximum value is half of the total physical memory in the system. The default value is 64MB.

Constraints

The lifecycle of tmpfs mounted on the host starts from the container startup to the container deletion. After a container is deleted and its occupied space is released, the space is removed.
When a container is deleted, the path to which tmpfs is mounted on the host is deleted. Therefore, an existing directory on the host cannot be used as the mount path.
To ensure that processes running by non-root users on the host can communicate with containers, the permission for tmpfs mounted on the host is 1777.

Example

Specify the --host-channel parameter when creating a container.

shell

[root@localhost ~]# isula run --rm -it --host-channel /testdir:/testdir:rw:32M --system-container --external-rootfs /root/myrootfs none init
root@3b947668eb54:/# dd if=/dev/zero of=/testdir/test.file bs=1024 count=64K
dd: error writing '/testdir/test.file': No space left on device
32769+0 records in
32768+0 records out
33554432 bytes (34 MB, 32 MiB) copied, 0.0766899 s, 438 MB/s

NOTE

If --host-channel is used for size limit, the file size is constrained by the memory limit in the container. (The OOM error may occur when the memory usage reaches the upper limit.)
If a user creates a shared file on the host, the file size is not constrained by the memory limit in the container.
If you need to create a shared file in the container and the service is memory-intensive, you can add the value of --host-channel to the original value of the container memory limit, eliminating the impact.

Shared Memory Channels ​

Function Description ​

Parameter Description ​

Constraints ​

Example ​

Shared Memory Channels

Function Description

Parameter Description

Constraints

Example