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Release notes

OpenShift sandboxed containers 1.8

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Abstract

The release notes summarize all new features and enhancements, notable technical changes, major corrections from the previous version, and any known bugs upon general availability.

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Chapter 1. About this release
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These release notes track the development of OpenShift sandboxed containers 1.8 alongside Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 4.17. Release notes include links to the original tickets. Private tickets have no links.

OpenShift Container Platform is designed for FIPS. When running Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) or Red Hat Enterprise Linux CoreOS (RHCOS) booted in FIPS mode, OpenShift Container Platform core components use the RHEL cryptographic libraries that have been submitted to NIST for FIPS 140-2/140-3 Validation on only the x86_64, ppc64le, and s390x architectures.

For more information about the NIST validation program, see Cryptographic Module Validation Program. For the latest NIST status for the individual versions of RHEL cryptographic libraries that have been submitted for validation, see Compliance Activities and Government Standards.

You can view all advisories, including security and bug fixes, for major and minor versions of this release on the Red Hat Customer Portal.

Chapter 2. Bug fixes
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This section describes bugs fixed in OpenShift sandboxed containers 1.8.

Pod VM image is now deleted when deleting KataConfig on Azure

Previously, when you deleted the KataConfig custom resource, the pod VM image might not have been deleted. A workaround required using the Azure CLI to check the pod VM gallery for the image and delete it manually, if necessary.

This issue is now resolved in the 1.8.1 release of OpenShift sandboxed containers.

Jira:KATA-3462

Chapter 3. Known issues
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This section describes known issues in OpenShift sandboxed containers 1.8.

Secure boot disabled by default for Confidential Containers on Azure

Secure boot is disabled by default for Confidential Containers on Azure. This is a security risk. To work around this problem, set ENABLE_SECURE_BOOT to true when you update the peer pods config map.

Jira:HCIDOCS-557

Increasing container CPU resource limits fails if CPUs are offline

Using container CPU resource limits to increase the number of available CPUs for a pod fails if the requested CPUs are offline. If the functionality is available, you can diagnose CPU resource issues by running the oc rsh <pod> command to access a pod and then running the lscpu command: 

$ lscpu
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Example output: 

CPU(s):                                16
On-line CPU(s) list:             0-12,14,15
Off-line CPU(s) list:            13
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The list of offline CPUs is unpredictable and can change from run to run.

To work around this problem, use a pod annotation to request additional CPUs as in the following example: 

metadata:
  annotations:
    io.katacontainers.config.hypervisor.default_vcpus: "16"
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Jira:KATA-1376

Increasing the sizeLimit does not expand an ephemeral volume

You cannot use the sizeLimit parameter in the pod specification to expand ephemeral volumes because the volume size default is 50% of the memory assigned to the sandboxed container.

To work around this problem, change the size by remounting the volume. For example, if the memory assigned to the sandboxed container is 6 GB and the ephemeral volume is mounted at /var/lib/containers, you can increase the size of this volume beyond the 3 GB default by running the following command: 

$ mount -o remount,size=4G /var/lib/containers
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Note that the mount command needs to run inside the pod. You can either have this as part of the pod manifest itself or you can start a shell session in the pod by running oc rsh and execute the mount command.

Jira:KATA-2579

OpenShift sandboxed containers 1.7 and later do not work with OpenShift Container Platform 4.14 and older versions

You must upgrade to OpenShift Container Platform 4.15 or later before installing or upgrading the OpenShift sandboxed containers Operator. For more information, see OpenShift sandboxed containers operator 1.7 is not available and Upgrade to OSC 1.7.0 put running Peer Pods into ContainerCreating status in the KnowledgeBase.

Jira:KATA-3193

Podvm image builder on AWS leaves snapshot behind

Podvm image builder creates an AMI image from a snapshot and while during proper uninstall process AMI is deleted, the snapshot itself is not deleted and require manual deletion

This happens in all peer pods versions on AWS.

Jira:KATA-3478

Without proper kataconfig deletion before cluster decommission, active pod vms could remain running.

Without peer pods feature, you could decommission a cluster w/o uninstalling the OSC operator, but with peer pods, the pods are running outside the cluster worker nodes (on podvm instances created per peer pod) and when no proper kataconfig deletion is performed before shutting down a cluster, these podvm instances are abandoned and never terminated.

Jira:KATA-3480

Chapter 4. Technology Previews
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This section provides a list of all Technology Previews available in OpenShift sandboxed containers 1.8.

See Technology Preview Features Support Scope for more information.

Peer pod support for IBM Z and IBM LinuxONE

You can deploy OpenShift sandboxed containers workloads, without nested virtualization, by using peer pods on IBM Z® and IBM® LinuxONE (s390x architecture).

Jira:KATA-2030

Confidential Containers on Microsoft Azure Cloud Computing Services, IBM Z, and IBM LinuxONE

Confidential Containers provides enhanced security for cloud-native applications, allowing them to run in secure and isolated environments known as Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs), which protect the containers and their data even when in use.

Note the following limitations:

  • No encryption and integrity protection of the confidential virtual machine (CVM) root filesystem (rootfs): The CVM executes inside the TEE and runs the container workload. Lack of encryption and integrity protection of the rootfs could allow a malicious admin to exfiltrate sensitive data written to the rootfs or to tamper with the rootfs data. Integrity protection and encryption for the rootfs is currently work in progress. You must ensure that all your application writes are in memory.
  • No encrypted container image support: Only signed container image support is currently available. Encrypted container image support is work in progress.
  • Communication between the Kata shim and the agent components inside the CVM is subject to tampering: The agent components inside the CVM are responsible for executing Kubernetes API commands from the Kata shim running on the OpenShift worker node. We use an agent policy in the CVM that turns off Kubernetes exec and log APIs for the containers to avoid exfiltration of sensitive data via the Kubernetes API. However, this is incomplete; further work is ongoing to harden the communication channel between the shim and the agent components. The agent policy can be overridden at runtime by using pod annotations. Currently, runtime policy annotations in the pod are not verified by the attestation process.
  • No native support for encrypted pod-to-pod communication: Pod-to-pod communication is unencrypted. You must use TLS at the application level for all pod-to-pod communication.
  • Image double-pull on the worker node and inside the CVM: The container image is downloaded and executed in the CVM that executes inside the TEE. However, currently the image is also downloaded on the worker node.
  • Building the CVM image for Confidential Containers requires the OpenShift sandboxed containers Operator to be available in the cluster.

Jira:KATA-2416

Appendix A. List of tickets by component
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Bugzilla and JIRA tickets are listed in this document for reference. The links lead to the release notes in this document that describe the tickets.

Expand
ComponentTickets

Hypervisor

Jira:KATA-1376

Sandboxed Containers

Jira:HCIDOCS-557

kata-agent

Jira:KATA-1376

kata-containers

Jira:KATA-3193

podvm-builder

Jira:KATA-3462, Jira:KATA-3478, Jira:KATA-3480

sandboxed-containers

Jira:KATA-2030, Jira:KATA-2579

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