bug: surface supervisor startup failures to sandbox commands
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Assessment
- Difficulty
- 4/5
- Estimated time
- 3-5 days
- Newbie friendliness
- 52/100
Research direction
Start by tracing the sandbox create/run command result through supervisor startup and readiness handling, using the reproduced /bin/cat permission failure as the test case. Identify where ContainerExited is produced and where startup diagnostics can be classified and sanitized. Done means the CLI reports a distinct startup failure and a unit or integration test covers entrypoint execution failure without exposing raw logs or credentials.
Written by the indexing model from the issue text.
Description
User Story
As an OpenShell operator, I want a sandbox command to report a meaningful startup failure so that I can diagnose failed sandbox launches without manually inspecting runtime logs.
Problem Statement
When a supervisor cannot start the workload entrypoint, the sandbox lifecycle is reduced to a generic container exit. For example, a rootless Podman run that fails to execute /bin/cat with Permission denied (os error 13) is reported by the CLI as ContainerExited with exit code 1. The useful error is only present in the supervisor container stderr; the workload log instead records the subsequent control-channel termination.
Impact / Why This Matters
Operators cannot distinguish an entrypoint execution failure from an ordinary workload exit through the OpenShell command result. The current workaround is to preserve failed containers and inspect Podman logs manually, which is runtime-specific, slow, and unsuitable for automated diagnostics.
Acceptance Criteria
- A supervisor failure before sandbox readiness is represented as a distinct sandbox startup failure rather than only
ContainerExited. -
openshell sandbox createorrunexposes a concise, sanitized diagnostic that identifies the failed startup stage and failure class. - The implementation does not propagate arbitrary workload or supervisor log output, credentials, or environment values into lifecycle status.
- The behavior is covered by a unit or integration test for an entrypoint execution failure.
Reproduction Steps
- Configure a rootless Podman gateway with the current restrictive sandbox policy.
- Create a sandbox from Alpine with an explicit executable entrypoint, for example
-- /bin/cat /proc/self/uid_map. - Observe the command fail with a generic container-exited status.
- Inspect the supervisor container logs to find the underlying
Permission denied (os error 13)spawn failure.
Environment
- OpenShell: current main / Alpine-default work
- OS: Fedora tmachine VM
- Runtime: rootless Podman
Logs
Error: process error: boundary process leaf: start process supervisor leaf:
spawn delegated workload process
failed to spawn sandbox entrypoint process '/bin/cat'
Permission denied (os error 13)
Related Work
The Alpine-default work is being tracked in PR #3386. This issue is deliberately scoped to reporting the failure; the policy/entrypoint failure itself can be addressed independently.
- Dominant language
- Rust
- Stars
- 8.7k
- Forks
- 1.3k
- Avg merge
- 2d 8h
- Merged PRs (30d)
- 271
Contributor guide
First steps
- Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
- Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
- Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
- Open a pull request that references the issue number.
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web-infra-dev/rspack#15847 ·