The ability of unshare to launch a new pid namespace is a bit limited.
The first process in the namespace is expected to be the "init" for it.
When it's not, you get bad behavior.
For example, trying to launch a shell in a new pid namespace fails very
quickly:
$ sudo unshare -p dash
# uname -r
3.8.3
# uname -m
dash: 2: Cannot fork
# ls -ld /
dash: 3: Cannot fork
# echo $$
1324
For this to work smoothly, we need an init process to actively watch over
things. But forcing people to re-use an existing init or write their own
mini init is a bit overkill. So let's add a --fork option to unshare to
do this common bit of book keeping. Now we can do:
$ sudo unshare -p --fork dash
# uname -r
3.8.3
# uname -m
x86_64
# ls -ld /
drwxr-xr-x 22 root root 4096 May 4 14:01 /
# echo $$
1
Thanks to Michael Kerrisk for his namespace articles on lwn.net