OSPool and thin volumes: Storage for Image-based systems
Image-based Linux systems have different storage requirements from traditional mutable systems as they rely on signed, immutable disk images for software delivery and separate writable filesystems for data.
Technologies like systemd-homed require that multiple writable filesystems share the same backing storage. This thin provisioning is not something that is well supported by Linux today as filesystems are not aware of it. Another area for improvement is that many disk images often contain similar data that could be deduplicated.
We will present a storage system prototype designed for the usecases of image based systems and our plans for improving thin provisioning on Linux.