search

ostreedev / ostree

Operating system and container binary deployment and upgrades
https://ostreedev.github.io/ostree/
Other
1.24k stars 289 forks source link

Investigate stronger overlayfs integration, deprecate rofiles-fuse #2281

Open cgwalters opened 3 years ago

cgwalters commented 3 years ago

In Linux 5.11, there's support for unprivileged overlayfs mounts: https://kernelnewbies.org/Linux_5.11?highlight=%28overlayfs%29#Unprivileged_Overlayfs_mounts

ostree was intentionally very conservative with kernel features (we just require link() with some more recent support for optionally using reflinks). But I think we should experiment with overlayfs+ostree and better tie them together.

We've long dipped our toes in this water with ostree admin unlock.

If successful I think we should consider rofiles-fuse deprecated after the basics of that are done (and port e.g. rpm-ostree away from it).

This is also related to https://github.com/ostreedev/ostree/issues/2259 - what would ostree look like if we supported a hard dependency on overlayfs?

wmanley commented 3 years ago

FWIW this wouldn't work for us. On our embedded device we're stuck on an ancient kernel that doesn't even have overlayfs - or at least doesn't have one that works very well. A dependency on overlayfs for the image creation tools wouldn't be a problem, but for deploying it would be.

cgwalters commented 3 years ago

Thanks for the feedback. To be clear this is just an "investigate" issue - I'm definitely not proposing any kind of hard switch to an overlayfs dependency in the next few years at least. In particular even just on the build side, it's going to take a while for 5.11 to propagate.