[lxc-devel] How does the console work in most recent release?

[Rob Landley]

I'm attempting to write a simple HOWTO for setting up a container with 
LXC.  Unfortunately, console handling is really really brittle and the 
only way I've gotten it to work is kind of unpleasant to document.

Using lxc 0.7.3 (both in debian sid and built from source myself), I can 
lxc-create a container, and when I run lxc-start it launches init in the 
container.  But the console is screwy.

If my init program is just a command shell, the first key I type will 
crash lxc-start with an I/O error.  (Wrapping said shell with a script 
to redirect stdin/stdout/stderr to various /dev character devices 
doesn't seem to improve matters.)

Using the busybox template and the busybox-i686 binary off of 
busybox.net, it runs init and connects to the various tty devices, and 
this somehow prevents lxc-start from crashing.  But if I "press enter to 
active this console" like it says, the resulting shell prompt is 
completely unusable.  If I'm running from an actual TTY device, then 
some of the keys I type go to the container and some don't.  If my 
console is connected to a PTY when I run lxc-start (such as if I ssh in 
and run lxc-start from the ssh session), _none_ of the characters I type 
go to the shell prompt.

To get a usable shell prompt in the container, what I have to do is 
lxc-start in one window, ssh into the server to get a fresh terminal, 
and then run lxc-console in that second terminal.  That's the only magic 
sequence I've found so far that works.

The attached html file is a long drawn-out reproduction sequence for this.

I tried downloading lxc-git to see if this is already fixed, but running 
"autoconf" doesn't seem to want to produce a ./configure file for me. 
("configure.ac:8: error: possibly undefined macro: AM_CONFIG_HEADER") 
I'm really not an autoconf expert (the whole thing is just a horrible 
idea at the design level), so have no idea what I'm doing wrong there.

Rob
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