GoboLinux 016 Released With Its Own Filesystem Virtualization Tool (gobolinux.org)

Long-time Slashdot reader paranoidd writes: GoboLinux announced Thursday the availability of a new major release. What's special about it is that it comes together with a container-free filesystem virtualization that's kind of unique thanks to the way that installed programs are arranged by the distro. Rather than having to create full-fledged containers simply to get around conflicting libraries, a lightweight solution simply plays with overlays to create dynamic filesystem views for each process that wants them. Even more interesting, the whole concept also enables 32-bit and 64-bit programs to coexist with no need for a lib64 directory (as implemented by mostly all bi-arch distributions out there).
"Instead of having parts of a program thrown at /usr/bin, other parts at /etc and yet more parts thrown at /usr/share/something/or/another, each program gets its own directory tree, keeping them all neatly separated and allowing you to see everything that's installed in the system and which files belong to which programs in a simple and obvious way."

Comments

Re:sounds like Mac OS X app resources

[pixel sorceress]

I kinda doubt Apple could've patented that. It's not substantially different to what the older (and incredibly awesome) RISC OS did. This news made me think of RISC OS first, which made me smile.

Wrong /etc/hosts

[Anonymous Coward]

I can see the discussions in 5 years:

1> I put it in /etc/hosts but it doesn't resolve
2> Ok, you also need to add an SE Linux permission
1> Did that, but it still doesn't respond
2> Wait that /etc/hosts is the one used by chrome, you need to modify the ones for firefox and ssh too
3> CAN YOUR ADBLOCK DO 16 THINGS? HOSTS ENGINE MODIFIES ALL /ETC/HOSTSEES WITH SIMPLE SCRIPT

Re: Wrong /etc/hosts

[paranoidd]

Note that settings files are not overlaid by GoboLinux's virtualization tool. Runner only creates customized views of bin, lib, include, share, libexec, and sbin -- your typical /usr tree. So, unless somebody borrows this idea and apply it poorly on another distro, there is no chance this particular discussion will take place in 5 years from now. :-)

Re:sounds like Mac OS X app resources

[TheRaven64]

OS X uses almost exactly the same .app bundle format as NeXTSTEP. If there were any patents, they'd have expired in 2008 at the latest. That said, this doesn't sound much like the bundle format, it sounds more like the PC-BSD package format.

Re:chroot

[fahrbot-bot]

So... they re-invented the chroot?

Sounds more like UnionFS.

Re:and it does not use systemD

[SumDog]

I too was impressed by what I've seen. I don't like the idea of monolithic apps that we see in MacOS and even with newer Linux package managers like Snappy. They seem to have combined both single application folders while also not repeating dependencies. The symbolic linking looks a bit messy, but so long as they have good tooling around it, it could be really beneficial. Their Current links seem to take the place of eselect in Gentoo or etc-alternatives in Debian/Ubuntu.

I might give this OS a shot. I recently tried Void Linux on my custom router and am very impressed by it and its use of the runit init system:

http://penguindreams.org/blog/building-a-thin-itx-router/

Re:sounds like Mac OS X app resources

[caseih]

GoboLinux has been using symlinks to do this sort of things for years now. Don't think patents have any part of it. NextStep also used to do it.

I think the overlay file system idea is a very good one. It's a nice compromise between full containers and just wanting to run an app that has particular dependencies. Especially if you don't particularly want or need the kind of isolation docker has. Though perhaps isolation as a fundamental aspect of the OS security like QubesOS will become ubiquitous in an increasingly dangerous computer world.

I find it sufficiently interesting that I may download it and try it in a virtual machine.

Re:sounds like Mac OS X app resources

[pixel sorceress]

A very fair point. This is the company that managed to patent "rounded corners", and "moving your finger in a line across a touchscreen (to unlock the device)".

Amiga did this back in the 80's!

[gabrieltss]

The Commodore Amiga did this back in the 80's. Any installed programs installed all their files in a single directory. It allowed you to copy that directory ANYWHERE on the filesystem and you could still run it.

Nothing new about this idea.....

Re:Amiga did this back in the 80's!

[drinkypoo]

The Commodore Amiga did this back in the 80's. Any installed programs installed all their files in a single directory. It allowed you to copy that directory ANYWHERE on the filesystem and you could still run it.

First, the Amiga didn't have that. Lots of programs forced you to dick around with assigns to get them to run. It was copy the directory anywhere, and then dick with your startup-sequence.

Further, it seems from your comment that you believe that this is a system for Linux which mimics OSX packages. It isn't. What this system is actually doing is creating a "container"
(a set of mounts, really) dynamically for every process, so that they see a subset of the filesystem as if it were the entire filesystem. The Amiga definitely didn't do that.

Re: Those who do not know Unix...

[HishamMuhammad]

This link is a bit outdated (for instance, we don't tweak the root user for years now), but I've already responded to some criticism of this kind back in 2004: http://gobolinux.org/doc/artic...