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What is Silverblue?

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Re: What is Silverblue?

#21

Post by antpls »

Basically : the OS is itself a layered read-only "container", on top of which flatpak is the recommended way to install applications.

I wish someone built an OS based on k8s as a service and application orchestrator. We wouldn't have to reinvent all the config files, the command line tools and we could reuse knowledge between cluster and single-machine administration. Plus k8s already voluntary abstracted the underlying technologies, so it should be simple to reuse it. We would use the same high-availability concepts than from the cloud, such as stateless service, horizontal scaling of services, etc. We could also reuse Istio and all the standards it is built-on to introspect the system. In other words, a microservice based OS.

Re: What is Silverblue?

#22

Post by quicklime »

ghostpepper wrote: post #14
silisili wrote: post #9

As a Linux user from the 90s, I welcome this change. RPM Hell and its Debian equivalent are real and painful things. When disk space was a premium, system dynamic linking made sense. Today, it absolutely does not. rpm-ostree is a bit ugly. Snap has the right idea of doing both system services and apps. Fedora should do the same.

While I can appreciate the security advantages of snap packages, I can't help but resent the fact that the output of the mount command is now polluted with dozens of lines unrelated to mounted disks.

Thank you, it's nice to know that I'm not the only one who thinks this. You could use an alias to hide this:

alias df='df -x squashfs'

Given that squashfs is a read-only filesystem, I don't know why this isn't done by default. No one needs to worry about how much free space is left on an ro volume.

I also go a few steps further and disable udev (-x devtmpfs) and tmpfs (-x tmpfs) as well.

Re: What is Silverblue?

#23

Post by wmf »

antpls wrote: post #21

Basically : the OS is itself a layered read-only "container", on top of which flatpak is the recommended way to install applications. I wish someone built an OS based on k8s as a service and application orchestrator. We wouldn't have to reinvent all the config files, the command line tools and we could reuse knowledge between cluster and single-machine administration. Plus k8s already voluntary abstracted the underly…

Check out k3os and OpenShift/OKD 4.

Re: What is Silverblue?

#24

Post by wmf »

besulzbach wrote: post #6

> The operating system is delivered in images that are created by utilizing the rpm-ostree project. The main benefits of the system are speed, security, atomic updates and immutability. The article never mentions speed (or performance) again. Is the OS somehow expected to be faster because it is mounted read-only?

Do they mean speed of installing updates (compared to an RPM-based OS)?

Re: What is Silverblue?

#25

Post by wmf »

KUcxrAVrtI wrote: post #16
silisili wrote: post #9

As a Linux user from the 90s, I welcome this change. RPM Hell and its Debian equivalent are real and painful things. When disk space was a premium, system dynamic linking made sense. Today, it absolutely does not. rpm-ostree is a bit ugly. Snap has the right idea of doing both system services and apps. Fedora should do the same.

>system dynamic linking made sense I too look forwards to having to manually updated all security patches for each binary in the system.

The brave new OSTree/Flatpak world needs build systems that know how to do security updates. There's a lot of work in this area in the Dockerverse; maybe it will cross over.

Re: What is Silverblue?

#26

Post by microtonal »

KUcxrAVrtI wrote: post #16
silisili wrote: post #9

As a Linux user from the 90s, I welcome this change. RPM Hell and its Debian equivalent are real and painful things. When disk space was a premium, system dynamic linking made sense. Today, it absolutely does not. rpm-ostree is a bit ugly. Snap has the right idea of doing both system services and apps. Fedora should do the same.

>system dynamic linking made sense I too look forwards to having to manually updated all security patches for each binary in the system.

This is what Nix gets right. Even if static linking is used, if some dependency is updated, all packages that have that dependency in its transitive closure get recompiled.

Re: What is Silverblue?

#27

Post by microtonal »

lugg wrote: post #4
saltedshiv wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are flatpaks not all sandboxed? I thought the concept of flatpak and snap was that it offered sandboxing in a way what was never implemented to normal repo packages

Flatpak uses kernel namespaces (like docker) to run software with a bundled set of libraries. From their FAQ: > Flatpak mostly deployed as a convenient library bundling technology early on, with the sandboxing or containerization being phased in over time for most applications. I don't really know if sandboxing is worth it for me. Running everything inside docker cotnaienrs sounds like an absolute nightmare when it c…

we wouldn't feel the need for sandboxing now would we.

Applications have vulnerabilities. Sandboxes help as an additional layer of security for trusted applications.

Of course, if applications are trusted and under control, a simpler mechanism like OpenBSD's pledge/unveil may be enough.

Re: What is Silverblue?

#28

Post by meruru »

KUcxrAVrtI wrote: post #17
pcr910303 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not trying to be sarcastic, but opinions like this make me sure that the Desktop Linux won’t fly. > I'm not sure why there is this push for Linux to have the "download and double click" install experience of windows / Mac.

There isn't a desktop any more, we might as well be trying to make Linux for the mini computer if you're chasing the desktop market.

That's a meme propagated by the news, but I'm pretty sure the desktop is still a thing.

Re: What is Silverblue?

#29

Post by bnegreve »

lugg wrote: post #13
viraptor wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, I wouldn't expect this system to be faster in a meaningful way. Actually maybe a bit slower since fewer libraries will be cached / memory mapped between applications if they carry their own copies.

I'd love to see stats on how many libraries are really shared, I'd imagine it might be less than you hope (other than the big graphical ones)

On my laptop:

How many libraries are loaded:

    $ sudo cat /proc/[0-9]*/maps | grep '\.so' | grep 'r-xp'  |  tr -s ' ' | cut -d ' ' -f 6  |  wc -l 
    15429
How many unique library names:

    $ sudo cat /proc/[0-9]*/maps | grep '\.so' | grep 'r-xp'  |  tr -s ' ' | cut -d ' ' -f 6  |  sort | uniq | wc -l 
    872
Top 10 most shared libraries:

    sudo cat /proc/[0-9]*/maps | grep '\.so' | grep 'r-xp' | tr -s ' ' | cut -d ' ' -f 6 | awk '{count[$0]++}END{for (i in count) print i, count[i]}' | sort -k 2 -n -r | head -n 10
    /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libc-2.28.so 299
    /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/ld-2.28.so 299
    /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libdl-2.28.so 262
    /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libpthread-2.28.so 237
    /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/librt-2.28.so 227
    /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libuuid.so.1.3.0 205
    /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libz.so.1.2.11 200
    /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libpcre.so.3.13.3 186
    /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libresolv-2.28.so 170
    /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libgpg-error.so.0.26.1 169
EDIT: add grep r-xp to count code segment only, values in previous edit were overestimated.

Re: What is Silverblue?

#30

Post by mycall »

antpls wrote: post #21

Basically : the OS is itself a layered read-only "container", on top of which flatpak is the recommended way to install applications. I wish someone built an OS based on k8s as a service and application orchestrator. We wouldn't have to reinvent all the config files, the command line tools and we could reuse knowledge between cluster and single-machine administration. Plus k8s already voluntary abstracted the underly…

How fast would Steam games play?
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