Re: PRoot experiments

[Henning Schild <henning.schild@siemens.com>]

On Wed, 18 Oct 2017 15:29:36 +0300
Alexander Smirnov <asmirnov@ilbers.de> wrote:

> Hi all,
> 
> I've performed several experiments with PRoot:
> 
> 1. Generate multistrap filesystem:
> 
> As reference I've used the following resource:
> https://github.com/josch/polystrap/blob/master/polystrap.sh
> 
> So, I was able to run the following command without root permissions:
> 
> $ PROOT_NO_SECCOMP=1 proot -0 /usr/sbin/multistrap -f multistrap.conf
> -d test
> 
> After this command execution I have 'test' folder which looks quite 
> similar to one, generated with sudo (at least 'du -sm' is the same).
> 
> 2. Run commands in PRoot chroot:
> 
> I'm successfully able to run PRoot chroot for various architectures:
> 
> $ PROOT_NO_SECCOMP=1 proot -0 -r ./test /bin/bash
> 
> Also I was able to run: 'dpkg --configure -a' in these chroots.
> 
> 3. Mount of various work folders:
> 
> Mount forlder using PRoot seems also works good:
> 
> $ PROOT_NO_SECCOMP=1 proot -0 -b /proc -b /dev -r ./test /bin/bash
> 
> And in this chroot I have /proc and /dev mounted.
> 
> 
> So, my brief conclusion is: PRoot could be a good option for Isar. It 
> seems that it's designed to support exact features that are required
> for Isar. :-)

Sounds promising. The last release of proot was in 2014 but when
looking at github it seems it is not dead yet.
Would be nice to get a solution to the sudo issue, otherwise we can
resort to VMs. But docker or "native" is more light-weight and easier
to integrate into CI.

Henning

> I'd like to try to implement simple PoC to test if *.deb package
> could be generated in Isar without 'sudo'.
> 
> BTW: PRoot is a part of standard Debian, so it could be installed via 
> 'apt-get', no custom repos required.
>