The Kata agent is a long running process that runs inside the Virtual Machine (VM) (also known as the "pod" or "sandbox").
The agent is packaged inside the Kata Containers guest image which is used to boot the VM. Once the runtime has launched the configured hypervisor to create a new VM, the agent is started. From this point on, the agent is responsible for creating and managing the life cycle of the containers inside the VM.
For further details, see the architecture document.
If you simply wish to use Kata Containers, it is not necessary to understand the details of how the agent operates. Please see the installation documentation for details of how deploy Kata Containers (which will include the Kata agent).
The remainder of this document is only useful for developers and testers.
Since the agent is written in the Rust language this section assumes the tool
chain has been installed using standard Rust rustup tool.
If you wish to build the agent with the musl C library, you need to run the
following commands:
$ arch=$(uname -m)
$ rustup target add "${arch}-unknown-linux-musl"
$ sudo ln -s /usr/bin/g++ /bin/musl-g++Note:
It is not currently possible to build using
muslon ppc64le and s390x since both platforms lack themusltarget.
The following steps download the Kata Containers source files and build the agent:
$ GOPATH="${GOPATH:-$HOME/go}"
$ dir="$GOPATH/src/github.com/kata-containers"
$ git -C ${dir} clone --depth 1 https://github.com/kata-containers/kata-containers
$ make -C ${dir}/kata-containers/src/agentThe Kata runtime communicates with the Kata agent using a ttRPC based API protocol.
This ttRPC API is defined by a set of protocol buffers files. The protocol files are used to generate the bindings for the following components:
| Component | Language | Generation method [*] |
Tooling required |
|---|---|---|---|
| runtime | Golang | Run, make generate-protocols |
protoc |
| agent | Rust | Run, make |
Key:
[*]- All commands must be run in the agent repository.
If you wish to change the API, these files must be regenerated. Although the
rust code will be automatically generated by the
build script,
the Golang code generation requires the external protoc command to be
available in $PATH.
To install the protoc command on a Fedora/CentOS/RHEL system:
$ sudo dnf install -y protobuf-compilerIf you wish to develop or test changes to the agent, you will need to create a custom guest image using the osbuilder tool. You may also wish to create a custom guest kernel.
Once created, configure Kata Containers to use these custom assets to allow you to test your changes.
Note:
To simplify development and testing, you may wish to run the agent stand alone initially.
For details of tracing the operation of the agent, see the tracing documentation.
Although the agent is designed to run in a VM environment, for development and testing purposes it is possible to run it as a normal application.
When run in this way, the agent can be controlled using the low-level Kata agent control tool, rather than the Kata runtime.
For further details, see the agent control tool documentation.
The kata agent has the ability to configure agent options in guest kernel command line at runtime. Currently, the following agent options can be configured:
| Option | Name | Description | Type | Default |
|---|---|---|---|---|
agent.config_file |
Configuration file |
Allow to configure options through a configuration file from the root filesystem | string | "" |
agent.container_pipe_size |
Container pipe sizes |
Allow to configure the stdout or stderr pipe sizes | integer | 0 |
agent.debug_console |
Debug console flag | Allow to connect guest OS running inside hypervisor Connect using kata-runtime exec <sandbox-id> |
boolean | false |
agent.debug_console_vport |
Debug console port | Allow to specify the vsock port to connect the debugging console |
integer | 0 |
agent.devmode |
Developer mode | Allow the agent process to coredump | boolean | false |
agent.hotplug_timeout |
Hotplug timeout | Allow to configure hotplug timeout(seconds) of block devices | integer | 3 |
agent.guest_components_rest_api |
api-server-rest configuration |
Select the features that the API Server Rest attestation component will run with. Valid values are all, attestation, resource |
string | resource |
agent.guest_components_procs |
guest-components processes | Attestation-related processes that should be spawned as children of the guest. Valid values are none, attestation-agent, confidential-data-hub (implies attestation-agent), api-server-rest (implies attestation-agent and confidential-data-hub) |
string | api-server-rest |
agent.https_proxy |
HTTPS proxy | Allow to configure https_proxy in the guest |
string | "" |
agent.log |
Log level | Allow the agent log level to be changed (produces more or less output) | string | "info" |
agent.log_vport |
Log port | Allow to specify the vsock port to read logs |
integer | 0 |
agent.no_proxy |
NO proxy | Allow to configure no_proxy in the guest |
string | "" |
agent.passfd_listener_port |
File descriptor passthrough IO listener port | Allow to set the file descriptor passthrough IO listener port | integer | 0 |
agent.server_addr |
Server address | Allow the ttRPC server address to be specified | string | "vsock://-1:1024" |
agent.trace |
Trace mode | Allow to static tracing | boolean | false |
systemd.unified_cgroup_hierarchy |
Cgroup hierarchy |
Allow to setup v2 cgroups | boolean | false |
Note: Accepted values for some agent options
agent.config_file: If we enableagent.config_filein guest kernel command line, we will generate the agent config from it. The agent will fail to start if the configuration file is not present, or if it can't be parsed properly.agent.devmode: true | falseagent.hotplug_timeout: a whole number of secondsagent.log: "critical"("fatal" | "panic") | "error" | "warn"("warning") | "info" | "debug"agent.server_addr: "{VSOCK_ADDR}:{VSOCK_PORT}"agent.trace: true | falsesystemd.unified_cgroup_hierarchy: true | false
For instance, you can enable the debug console and set the agent log level to debug by configuring the guest kernel command line in the configuration file:
kernel_params = "agent.debug_console agent.log=debug agent.hotplug_timeout=10"results in:
{"msg":"announce","level":"INFO","subsystem":"root","version":"0.1.0","pid":"214","source":"agent","name":"kata-agent","config":"AgentConfig { debug_console: true, dev_mode: false, log_level: Debug, hotplug_timeout: 10s, debug_console_vport: 0, log_vport: 0, container_pipe_size: 0, server_addr: "vsock://-1:1024", passfd_listener_port: 0, unified_cgroup_hierarchy: false, tracing: false, supports_seccomp: true }","agent-version":"3.3.0-alpha0"}