Redesign of folder hierarchy in wkg-partition

This is a little progress report for those who are following the technical aspects of EasyOS development. The fact that the latest version is 0.9.7 is misleading, as the underlying architecture is still undergoing major changes as we head toward a stable 1.0 release. This post is about changes to the working-partition.

In 0.9.7 and earlier, if you look in /mnt/wkg, you will see these folders:

containers home repository .session

Easy uses a per-folder encryption mechanism, and in 0.9.6 and earlier, the 'containers', 'home', 'repository' and '.session' folders were encrypted. This is encrypting everything, which is most secure, however, it also means the SFS files such as 'q.sfs' and 'devx-*.sfs' are encrypted, imposing extra delay when accessing them. These SFS files will be found in the 'repository' folder, for example repository/easy-0.9.6/q.sfs.

These SFS files do not have anything that needs to be encrypted, so it is an unnecessary overhead. Consequently, for 0.9.7, only the 'home' folder is encrypted. This encrypts all your personal files, downloads, etc., however, the '.session' folder may contain sensitive information, as well as the snapshots (rw-*.sfs files) in the 'containers' and 'repository' folders. So, 0.9.7 is not satisfactory.

Working toward 0.9.8, the folders are now:

containers home releases sfs .session

The 'repository' folder has been renamed to 'releases', which more accurately describes its function. The new sfs folder has the SFS files, and symlinks are placed to the SFS files from within the 'containers' and 'releases' folders.

Now we are back to encrypting 'containers', 'home', 'releases' and '.session', for maximum security, but the SFS files are in an un-encrypted folder. The snapshots, 'rw-*.sfs' files, remain inside the encrypted folders.

So, we have maximum security, without unnecessary decryption overhead.

As an example, /mnt/wkg/releases/easy-0.9.7.1/q.sfs is a symlink:

../../sfs/easyos/oe/pyro/q_0.9.7.1_amd64.sfs

...notice that the name of q.sfs has been changed. This renaming, and the folder hierarchy inside the 'sfs' folder, are to support the upcoming EasyPak SFS package management. Which it is intended to describe later!

Tags: easy