26.3. Introducing namespaces

Namespaces create separate spaces for organizing and identifying software objects. This keeps them from affecting each other. As a result, each software object contains its own set of resources, for example, a mount point, a network device, or a hostname, even though they are sharing the same system.

One of the most common technologies that use namespaces are containers.

Changes to a particular global resource are visible only to processes in that namespace and do not affect the rest of the system or other namespaces.

To inspect which namespaces a process is a member of, you can check the symbolic links in the /proc/<PID>/ns/ directory.

See namespaces(7) and cgroup_namespaces(7) man pages on your system for more information.