On 2023/1/9 16:43, Gao Xiang wrote: > Hi folks, > > * Background * > > We've been continuously working on forming a useful read-only > (immutable) image solution since the end of 2017 (as a part of our > work) until now as everyone may know: EROFS. > > Currently it has already successfully landed to (about) billions of > Android-related devices, other types of embedded devices and containers > with many vendors involved, and we've always been seeking more use > cases such as incremental immutable rootfs, app sandboxes or packages > (Android apk? with many duplicated libraries), dataset packages, etc. > > The reasons why we always do believe immutable images can benefit > various use cases are: > > - much easier for all vendors to ship/distribute/keep original signing > (golden) images to each instance; > > - (combined with the writable layer such as overlayfs) easy to roll > back to the original shipped state or do incremental updates; > > - easy to check data corruption or do data recovery (no matter > whether physical device or network errors); > > - easy for real storage devices to do hardware write-protection for > immutable images; > > - can do various offline algorithms (such as reduced metadata, > content-defined rolling hash deduplication, compression) to minimize > image sizes; > > - initrd with FSDAX to avoid double caching with advantages above; > > - and more. > > In 2019, a LSF/MM/BPF topic was put forward to show EROFS initial use > cases [1] as the read-only Android rootfs of a single instance on > resource-limited devices so that effective compression became quite > important at that time. > > > * Problem * > > In addition to enhance data compression for single-instance deployment, > as a self-contained approach (so that all use cases can share the only > _one_ signed image), we've also focusing on multiple instances (such as > containers or apps, each image represents a complete filesystem tree) > all together on one device with similar data recently years so that > effective data deduplication, on-demand lazy pulling, page cache > sharing among such different golden images became vital as well. > > > * Current progresses * > > In order to resolve the challenges above, we've worked out: > > - (v5.15) chunk-based inodes (to form inode extents) to do data > deduplication among a single image; > > - (v5.16) multiple shared blobs (to keep content-defined data) in > addition to the primary blob (to keep filesystem metadata) for wider > deduplication across different images: > > - (v5.19) file-based distribution by introducing in-kernel local > caching fscache and on-demand lazy pulling feature [2]; > > - (v6.1) shared domain to share such multiple shared blobs in > fscache mode [3]; > > - [RFC] preliminary page cache sharing between diffenent images [4]. > > > * Potential topics to discuss * > > - data verification of different images with thousands (or more) > shared blobs [5]; > > - encryption with per-extent keys for confidential containers [5][6]; > > - current page cache sharing limitation due to mm reserve mapping and > finer (folio or page-based) page cache sharing among images/blobs > [4][7]; > > - more effective in-kernel local caching features for fscache such as > failover and daemonless; > > - (wild preliminary ideas, maybe) overlayfs partial copy-up with > fscache as the upper layer in order to form a unique caching > subsystem for better space saving? > Hello Xiang and all, We interested in these topic too. Our cloud products will also want to use erofs + overlayfs as container's base image and want to do more researchs on deduplication, page cache sharing and disk space saving, and I also have some study on overlayfs partial copy-up feature. I hope we could have further discussion on this topic in person. Thanks, Yi. > - FSDAX enhancements for initial ramdisk or other use cases; > > - other issues when landing. > > > Finally, if our efforts (or plans) also make sense to you, we do hope > more people could join us, Thanks! > > [1] https://lore.kernel.org/r/f44b1696-2f73-3637-9964-d73e3d5832b7@xxxxxxxxxx > [2] https://lore.kernel.org/r/Yoj1AcHoBPqir++H@debian > [3] https://lore.kernel.org/r/20220918043456.147-1-zhujia.zj@xxxxxxxxxxxxx > [4] https://lore.kernel.org/r/20230106125330.55529-1-jefflexu@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx > [5] https://lore.kernel.org/r/Y6KqpGscDV6u5AfQ@B-P7TQMD6M-0146.local > [6] https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/918893/4d389217f9b8d679 > [7] https://lwn.net/Articles/895907 > > Thanks, > Gao Xiang > .
