[HN Gopher] Composefs: Content-Addressable Overlay Filesystem fo...
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       Composefs: Content-Addressable Overlay Filesystem for Linux
        
       Author : ignoramous
       Score  : 4 points
       Date   : 2023-01-25 21:50 UTC (1 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (github.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
        
       | mathfailure wrote:
       | I've read the project's description and still failed to
       | understand what it does and what it is useful for.
        
         | ecnahc515 wrote:
         | The main advantage is the content addressable part. Existing
         | overlay filesystems only handle the overlay aspect, and then
         | tools like docker/containerd attempt to reuse layers
         | efficiently, but it's not perfect. The same files from two
         | different layers may have the same content, but it's still
         | stored twice because the layers are the "unit" of storage
         | roughly speaking. By making a single filesystem which handles
         | both content addressability and the overlay aspect, you can
         | avoid duplicating files that are the same, but in different
         | layers.
        
         | PlutoIsAPlanet wrote:
         | Another way of describing it, rather than a Docker/Container
         | image being a group of layered archives, each with changes,
         | instead a list of file hashes is distributed, detailing where
         | those files need to be in a mounted filesystem, with x
         | permissions.
         | 
         | Since everything is named based on hashes, content is naturally
         | deduplicated if two images share the same files and all files
         | are stored in the same place.
         | 
         | If you boot on top of a composed filesystem, you also get easy
         | file verification as long as the booted list is signed and
         | unmodified. If you modify the local files, the hashes won't
         | match.
        
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       (page generated 2023-01-25 23:01 UTC)