Cool links and commentary
As of the version 39 of Fedora Silverblue all the basic code is merged to support a composefs-based root filesystem. To try it, do: Update to the latest version (I tested 39.20240115.0) Configure ostree to create and use composefs images: $ sudo ostree config set ex-integrity.composefs yes Trigger a manual (re)deploy of the current version: Continue reading Testing composefs in Silverblue
As of Linux 6.6-rc1, which contains the overlayfs fs-verity support, all the kernel changes that was required for composefs are upstream. This allows us to finalize the composefs image format and give guarantees of its future stability. This means that we are happy to welcome Composefs 1.0 to the world! The main feature of 1.0 Continue reading Announcing composefs 1.0
I can t belive its been more than a year since my last composefs blog. So much has changed, yet the goal is the same. However, finally things are starting to settling down, so I think it is time to do an update on the current state. Background First some background, like what even is Composefs? Continue reading Composefs state of the union
Recently I ve been looking at what options there are for OSTree based systems to be fully cryptographically sealed, similar to dm-verity. I really like the efficiency and flexibility of the ostree storage model, but it currently has this one weakness compared to image-based systems. See for example the FAQ in Lennarts recent blog about image-based Continue reading Using Composefs in OSTree
UPDATE: Note that this describes the initial separate release of quadlet. Since the Podman 4.4 release, quadlet is merged into podman and will be available automatically. Kubernetes and its likes is an excellent way to run containers in the cloud. And for development and testing, manually running podman is very useful (although do check out Continue reading Quadlet, an easier way to run system…
Flatpak relies on OSTree to distribute apps. This means that flatpak repositories, such as Flathub, are really just OSTree repositories. At the core of an OSTree repository is the summary file, which describes the content of the repository. This is similar to the metadata that apt-get update downloads. Every time you do an flatpak install Continue reading Scaling Flathub 100x
Compatibility has always been a complex problems in the Linux world. With the advent of containers/sandboxing it has become even more complicated. Containers help solve compatibility problems, but there are still remaining issues. Especially on the Linux desktop where things are highly interconnected. In fact, containers even create some problems that we didn t use to Continue reading…
For infrastructure reasons the Fedora flatpaks are delivered using the container registry, rather than OSTree (which is normally used for flatpaks). Container registries are quite inefficient for updates, so we have been getting complaints about large downloads. I ve been working on ways to make this more efficient. That would help not only the desktop use-case, Continue reading Putting container…
GLib supports a binary data format called GVariant, which is commonly used to store various forms of application data. For example, it is used to store the dconf database and as the on-disk data in OSTree repositories. The GVariant serialization format is very interesting. It has a recursive type-system (based on the DBus types) and Continue reading Introducing GVariant schemas
Today I made a new release of Gthree, version 0.2.0. Newly added in this release is support for Raycaster, which is important if you re making interactive 3D applications. For example, it s used if you want clicks on the window to pick a 3D object from the scene. See the interactive demo for an example of Continue reading Gthree ready to play