Red Hat Looks For Feedback On Its New Initoverlayfs File-System Proposal

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Red Hat Looks For Feedback On Its New Initoverlayfs File-System Proposal

Red Hat engineers have been developing Initoverlayfs as a scalable initial file-system. The code is currently in early form and the developers are still looking for feedback from the community as well as figuring out whether it properly belongs in kernel or user-space...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Red-Hat-Initoverlayfs

[chuckula]

Jokes on them, I just compile in the stuff I need and skip initrd entirely.

(But yes, I do see how this would be helpful for the non-custom kernel peasantry)

[spicfoo]

Jokes on them, I just compile in the stuff I need and skip initrd entirely.

(But yes, I do see how this would be helpful for the non-custom kernel peasantry)

Non custom kernel "peasantry" is precisely what distributions care about. In the early days, kernel patching wasn't uncommon even for typical users. These days I suspect it is a minuscule number anyway.

[petete]

"Those muggles don't appreciate the beauty of a hand-crafted kernel."

[Kjell]

LGTM
/approved

[jeisom]

This sound great for systems that have a lot of kernels installed for testing or recovery when a bad kernel update occurs. Even with 2 kernels installed, each kernel is taking 99MB each just for the initramfs files on my system. Sharing it also would speed up things when installing on a system where it is generated and it could be updated independently. Probably would saves a little bit of bandwidth when downloaded from the distro servers as well.

[jeisom]

Can this be used to clean wine prefixes? It would have made my life easier if wine prefixes only had the DIFF files and registry keys and had the option to overlay a default prefix.

This would just effect the initial boot process and would not effect userspace.

[ElectricPrism]

This would just effect the initial boot process and would not effect userspace.

Right, I was just doing my reading into it right now and deleted my comment, the name threw me off and I incorrectly assumed that "Overlay Filesystem" had something to do with, well, overlaying filesystems ;P thanks for the clarification anyways

[archkde]

This sound great for systems that have a lot of kernels installed for testing or recovery when a bad kernel update occurs. Even with 2 kernels installed, each kernel is taking 99MB each just for the initramfs files on my system. Sharing it also would speed up things when installing on a system where it is generated and it could be updated independently. Probably would saves a little bit of bandwidth when downloaded from the distro servers as well.

You should look into compressing your initrd. 99MB is very large.

[jeisom]

You should look into compressing your initrd. 99MB is very large.

That is compressed, with zstd.