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Let a caller set the runtime spec's hooks, and a pod's containers reach an OCI runtime - #887

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MayCXC wants to merge 16 commits into
apple:mainfrom
MayCXC:oci-hooks
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Let a caller set the runtime spec's hooks, and a pod's containers reach an OCI runtime#887
MayCXC wants to merge 16 commits into
apple:mainfrom
MayCXC:oci-hooks

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@MayCXC MayCXC commented Aug 27, 2026

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Summary

The runtime specification's hooks have a field on the spec type and no way to reach it: the configuration has nowhere to put them and the spec the container is built from never carries any. They travel intact once set, and the bundle's config.json contains them. Whether anything runs them depends on the runtime the container is launched under, which the field's documentation says.

A container in a pod is spawned with the runtime path hardcoded to nil, so the runtime a standalone container reaches through ociRuntimePath is out of reach for the same container placed in a pod, and the spec it is built from carries no hooks for that runtime to run. Nothing about a pod prevents either: the runtime path is passed per process, and the pause process is the only one with a reason to stay on the default. The configuration carries both now: the container's own runtime path is used when its process starts and when a process is executed in it, and its hooks travel on the spec, as they do for a standalone container.

Dependency and Merge Order

This targets stock apple/containerization:main and sits at the end of the pod stack. Merge order: #863, #872, #878, #885, #886, then this. The head carries their commits because all of them target stock main; after they merge, this branch takes current main and its remaining diff is the two commits above.

Motivation and Context

Discussion: #880, which also covers the device half in the follow-on branch. The end-to-end motivation is a nested container runtime: without hooks and without a runtime path a pod's container cannot host one.

Testing

  • make containerization and make check clean.
  • swift test passing; the spec built for a container carries the hooks set on its configuration, and the bundle's config.json contains them.
  • make integration: a pod's container reaches its configured runtime path when its process starts and when a process is executed in it.

Type of Change

  • Bug fix
  • New feature
  • Breaking change
  • Documentation update

MayCXC added 16 commits August 27, 2026 20:43
The reaper that runs at a concurrency of one deletes everything in the
test directory except the unpacked rootfs it means to preserve. It held
that rootfs path as FileManager reports it, under /var, and compared it
against the entries of contentsOfDirectory, which reports them under
/private/var, so the preserved path never matched any entry and the
rootfs was deleted along with the per-test files. The unpack coordinator
still held it as unpacked, so the next test opened a rootfs that was no
longer there and failed with a missing file error.

Resolve both sides with resolvingSymlinksInPathWithPrivate, which exists
for this difference between the two views of the same directory.
Tests guarded for Linux are compiled out on macOS, so `make test` reports
success without having run them, and nothing says so. The target that
does run them is not mentioned anywhere outside the makefile.
The default kernel the tests fetch had drifted from the one users run.
container installs kata 3.28.0 and its 6.18.15 kernel, while these tests
fetched 3.17.0, so the suite exercised a guest with a different feature
set to the one it is meant to represent. Nested runtimes are the visible
case: 3.17.0 was built without nf_tables, so a docker daemon inside a
container fails there and works on what ships.

Kata moved from xz to zstd between those releases, so the archive is no
longer named for its compression and tar is left to recognise it rather
than being told, which also holds if the format changes again.
A test's rootfs clones, init block, and writable layers land in a
directory the runner creates for it and deletes when it finishes, so a
test holds disk only while it runs at any concurrency. The run-shared
directory holds the unpacked images every bootstrap clones from, and is
removed when the run ends.
A container's storage is its rootfs, an optional writable layer, and its
mounts; a machine's is its containers' plus the volumes they share. One
generic shape describes both the Mount values a machine is configured
with and the AttachedFilesystem values it reports once attached, so
converting between the two is a map over the structure and the roles
cannot drift between configuration and attachment.

Device addresses are allocated walking the same sorted order the devices
are created in, on both backends. Consumers read roles instead of list
positions: the spec builders take a container's mounts without prefix
arithmetic, pod volumes mount by name, and a cloud-hypervisor volume's
virtiofsd is held by a machine-lifetime reference alongside its
containers' reference counts.
A container can be given a swap area, so a workload whose memory exceeds
its limit is reclaimed rather than killed. The area is a raw file on the
host attached as a block device, which is how a guest gets swap it can
write to when its own root is read only, and vminitd formats and enables
it while mounting the container's filesystems.

The area is enabled with discard, and the device backing it is marked non
rotational first. virtio block devices are rotational by default, and the
kernel only tracks a swap area in clusters when its device is non
rotational, so without that the discard flags are accepted and no discard
is ever issued. Together they let the sparse file that backs the area
release the blocks the guest stops using, rather than holding the area's
high water mark for as long as the container runs.
A pod's containers share one virtual machine, so they can share one swap
area as well, with the guest kernel deciding whose pages are reclaimed to
it rather than each container carrying its own. The area is attached with
the pod's other mounts and enabled once, after the agent comes up.

A container may cap how much of the area it uses. That cap counts swap
alone, while the runtime spec carries memory and swap as a single total,
so the container's memory limit is added to it when the spec is built. A
cap without a memory limit is rejected when the container is added,
because the total cannot be worked out without one. Leaving the cap unset
lets a container use the whole area, which is what containers sharing a
pool generally want.
A pod works out the memory and swap total its containers are capped at,
the way the runtime spec asks for it, and sends that along with the rest
of the resources. The guest wrote the memory limit and dropped the rest,
so a container drew on the whole of the pod's swap area whatever it had
been given.

Cgroup v2 wants the swap on its own rather than the total, so the memory
limit comes back out of it before the limit is written, and the spec's
unlimited and unset values are carried across as the controller spells
them. Reading the limit back from the kernel is what the test does,
since a limit the guest never applied leaves nothing else to see.

https://github.com/opencontainers/cgroups/blob/main/utils.go
An unlimited memory limit leaves nothing to subtract from the memory and
swap total, so the swap stands as it was given rather than becoming
unlimited alongside it. A memory limit that is negative without being the
unlimited sentinel is not a limit at all, and is refused rather than read
as one.

https://github.com/opencontainers/cgroups/blob/main/utils.go
Copying a file between the host and a container is reachable only for a
container in a machine of its own; the same container placed in a pod has
no way to be copied into or out of, so a tool that offers `cp` loses it the
moment a container joins a pod.

What the transfer needs is the machine, the path the container's filesystem
sits at in the guest, and a vsock port, and only the path differs between
the two cases. It moves to a type that takes those, which both a standalone
container and a pod's containers hand it.

The round trip is covered against a running pod, including that a file
copied into one container reaches that container alone.
A container with a machine of its own is given the size it asked for plus
the guest agent's, so a container that asks for a gibibyte has a gibibyte
and the agent runs beside it. A pod hands its size to the machine as it
stands, so the agent comes out of what the pod asked for and its containers
are left with less: a pod given twelve gibibytes reports eleven and a half.

The pod's size and the agent's are added the same way, and what a pod was
given is what its containers have.
A container with a machine of its own can be given a block device to write
into, with its image mounted read-only beneath, so the image is left as it
is and every write lands in the layer. The same container placed in a pod
has nowhere to be given one.

The layer is attached with the container's other block devices, mounted in
the guest as the upper layer of an overlay over the image, dropped from the
mounts the runtime spec carries, and unmounted with the container. A pod's
containers take one whether they were placed before the machine booted or
hotplugged into it afterwards.
The file carried the sibling repository's copyright line, so the license
header check found no header it recognized.
Stopping a container tears down what it was running and keeps its place:
the name still answers for it, and placing another container under it is
refused. Removal is the separate act the runtime specification names for
giving the place up, taken once the container has stopped, so a name can
run again in a machine that outlives what it last ran.
https://github.com/kubernetes/cri-api/blob/master/pkg/apis/runtime/v1/api.proto
The runtime specification's hooks have a field on the spec type and no
way to reach it: the configuration has nowhere to put them and the spec
the container is built from never carries any.

They travel intact once set, and the bundle's config.json contains them.
Whether anything runs them depends on the runtime the container is
launched under, which the field's documentation says.
A container in a pod is spawned with the runtime path hardcoded to nil, so
the runtime a standalone container reaches through `ociRuntimePath` is out
of reach for the same container placed in a pod, and the spec it is built
from carries no hooks for that runtime to run. Nothing about a pod prevents
either: the runtime path is passed per process, and the pause process is
the only one with a reason to stay on the default.

The configuration carries both. The container's own runtime path is used
when its process starts and when a process is executed in it, and its hooks
travel on the spec, as they do for a standalone container.
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