Hi All, We have recently been working on something called initoverlayfs, which we sent an RFC email to the systemd and dracut mailing lists to gather feedback. This is an exploratory email as we are unsure if a solution like this fits in userspace or kernelspace and we would like to gather feedback from the community. To describe this briefly, the idea is to use erofs+overlayfs as an initial filesystem rather than an initramfs. The benefits are, we can start userspace significantly faster as we do not have to unpack, decompress and populate a tmpfs upfront, instead we can rely on transparent decompression like lz4hc instead. What we believe is the greater benefit, is that we can have less fear of initial filesystem bloat, as when you are using transparent decompression you only pay for decompressing the bytes you actually use. We implemented the first version of this, by creating a small initramfs that only contains storage drivers, udev and a couple of 100 lines of C code, just enough userspace to mount an erofs with transient overlay. Then we build a second initramfs which has all the contents of a normal everyday initramfs with all the bells and whistles and convert this into an erofs. Then at boot time you basically transition to this erofs+overlayfs in userspace and everything works as normal as it would in a traditional initramfs. The current implementation looks like this: ``` >From the filesystem perspective (roughly): fw -> bootloader -> kernel -> mini-initramfs -> initoverlayfs -> rootfs >From the process perspective (roughly): fw -> bootloader -> kernel -> storage-init -> init -----------------> ``` But we have been asking the question whether we should be implementing this in kernelspace so it looks more like: ``` >From the filesystem perspective (roughly): fw -> bootloader -> kernel -> initoverlayfs -> rootfs >From the process perspective (roughly): fw -> bootloader -> kernel -> init -----------------> ``` The kind of questions we are asking are: Would it be possible to implement this in kernelspace so we could just mount the initial filesystem data as an erofs+overlayfs filesystem without unpacking, decompressing, copying the data to a tmpfs, etc.? Could we memmap the initramfs buffer and mount it like an erofs? What other considerations should be taken into account? Echo'ing Lennart we must also "keep in mind from the beginning how authentication of every component of your process shall work" as that's essential to a couple of different Linux distributions today. We kept this email short because we want people to read it and avoid duplicating information from elsewhere. The effort is described from different perspectives in the systemd/dracut RFC email and github README.md if you'd like to learn more, it's worth reading the discussion in the systemd mailing list: https://marc.info/?l=systemd-devel&m=170214639006704&w=2 https://github.com/containers/initoverlayfs/blob/main/README.md We also received feedback informally in the community that it would be nice if we could optionally use btrfs as an alternative. Is mise le meas/Regards, Eric Curtin
