Why not just put all of portage on read-only NBD volumes?

[nokilli]

The tree, the distfiles, all of it.

Do mirrors just like is being done now with http, https, rsync....

Only now, you're inviting the public to mount the network block device and access it like it's a local drive.

Go further, and make it part of the handbook, where you have everybody setting up the chroot. In the same way if you were using nfs for portage, by doing those mounts before the chroot.

The final system could do something which uses dm-cache or lvm's cache or whatever to make it so that files that are effectively downloaded from the NBD volume can be reused later without having to re-fetch.

A NBD server should be a simple affair. You're identifying bandwidth abusers at the block level ffs, people who try dd get throttled quickly and easily.

And you'd have the only distro as far as I can tell that allows users some piece of mind as they perform updates of their system. Everybody else seems to either demand simultaneous access to your home directory with the tls connection back to the mothership or works hard to break any proxy solution the community comes up with to gain some measure of control over their data.

The install cd combined with the read-only repository drive should provide excellent privacy for its users.

Moved from "Portage & Programming" to "Gentoo Chat". --Zucca
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Today is the first day of the rest of your Gentoo installation.

[John R. Graham]

I've tried it and I didn't like it—with the repositories, at least. My own personal experience is that Portage performance with a remotely mounted repository is dramatically lower than with a local copy. This is principally during the dependency resolution process. I do sync my home server against Gentoo and then sync all my other machines against my home server, but that's more out of respect for Gentoo's donated bandwidth than anything else. My home server also shares its /usr/portage/distfiles with the rest of the network for the same reason.

- John
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I can confirm that I have received between 0 and 499 National Security Letters.

[Hu]

What problem is this solving? If users need to avoid revealing what they are reading, then asking them to read it over the Internet from a network block device is not an improvement over asking them to read it over the Internet using a TLS-encrypted connection. They need a way to get a purely local copy and do so without revealing what they are reading. Portage already caches everything it reasonably can, using local files, not a mirror of a block device.

[nokilli]

Performance would be solved using dm-cache. Yes the first sync pulls in the whole tree but we're doing that already anyways. Once all of the bits are sitting in your local cache, speeds should back to normal.

And nobody is asking to avoid revealing what THEY are reading. The point is to be able to update a Linux installation without letting THE PACKAGE MANAGER read any of the data the user has on the system.

I should be able to update my Linux system without exposing my data. This does that.

And it seems so simple.
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Today is the first day of the rest of your Gentoo installation.

[Hu]

I don't see how this solves your stated problem. If you don't want the package manager poking around in the user's home directories, give those home directories permission bits that prevent the Linux user portage from searching them. That can be done just as readily with the current Portage design as with your proposal.

If you want everything cached by dm-cache, would it not be better to download everything in one go to local storage that knows it is primary, rather than letting the cache slowly populate itself as it is accessed? Your proposal does not seem simple to me. It relies on at least two kernel features that most people otherwise do not need to enable. It relies on infrastructure no one is running yet. It seems to me that its performance will at best be equal to the current setup, but likely worse due to demand-loading parts of the tree over time instead of eagerly loading the entire tree into local storage at emerge --sync time.

[nokilli]

[nokilli]