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                      Bedrock Linux

Bedrock Linux 1.0beta1 Hawky


© Bedrock Linux 2012-2022
Linux® is a registered
trademark of Linus Torvalds

Bedrock Linux 1.0beta1 Hawky Concepts

Below is an explanation of the key concepts, theory, and terminology behind Bedrock Linux 1.0beta1 Hawky.

Bedrock Linux Concepts, Theory, and Terminology

Clients

Most Linux distributions have packages which contain the software the distros provide. There are also meta-packages which do not contain anything themselves but rather refer to other packages to group or redirect packages conceptually. Packages are typically collected and made available through repositories. Moreover, distributions typically provide package managers: tools to automate installation, removal, acquisition and other details of managing packages

A Bedrock Linux client is a collection of the above concepts. The defining feature of a client is that all of the software in the client is intended to work together. A client's package manager can manage the particular type of package format used by the packages in the client. Any dependencies in any given client should be met by other packages in the same client. The repositories should provide packages which make the same assumptions about the filesystem as other packages; most of the packages which depend on a standard C library will likely depend on the same exact one.

A typical Bedrock Linux system will have multiple clients, usually from different distributions. However, one is certainly welcome to have multiple clients from different releases of the same distribution, or even multiple clients corresponding to the exact same release of the exact same distribution.

Bedrock Linux, itself, is very small. It is intended to only provide enough software to bootstrap and manage the software provided by the clients.

Local and Global files

The fundamental problem with running software intended for different distributions is that the software may make mutually exclusive assumptions about the filesystem. For example, two programs may both expect different, incompatible versions of a library at the same exact file path. Or two programs may expect /bin/sh to be implemented by different other programs. One could have, for example, a #!/bin/sh script that uses bash-isms. If /bin/sh is provided by /bin/bash, this will work fine, but if it is provided by another program it may not.

Bedrock Linux's solution is to have multiple instances of any of the files which could cause such conflicts. Such files are referred to as local files. Which version of any given local file is being accessed is differentiated by client. In contrast, files which do not result in such conflicts are global files. A Bedrock Linux system will only have one instance of any given global file.

By default, all files are local. This way if some client distribution is doing something unusual with its file system it will not confuse other clients. What files should be global - which tends to be the same across most Linux distributions - are listed in configuration files. This way Bedrock Linux can provide a sane set of default configuration files which typically just work, even against client distributions against which they were not explicitly designed.

Direct, Implicit and Explicit file access

One potential problem with having multiple copies of any given local file is determining which should be accessed when, and how to specify and configure this. Bedrock Linux provides three separate methods of accessing local files.

The first method is direct. When any given process tries to read a local file at its typical location it will get the same version of the file it would have gotten had it done so on its own distribution. For example, if a process provided by a Fedora client tries to access a library, it will see that Fedora release's version of the libary. If another process from OpenSUSE runs a #!/bin/sh script, it will be run by the same /bin/sh that comes with its release of OpenSUSE. The primary reason for direct file access is to ensure dependencies are resolved correctly at runtime.

If a file is not available directly, it will be accessed implicitly. In an implicit file access, if any one client provides a given file, that version of the file will be returned. If multiple clients can provide a file, they are ordered by a certain configured priority and the highest priority client which can provide a given file will. For example, if a process from Arch Linux tries to run firefox, but the Arch client does not have firefox installed, but a Gentoo client does have firefox installed, the Gentoo client's firefox will run. If the man executable from Mint looks for the man page for yum, it probably won't see it directly because Mint typically does not use the yum package manager. However, if a Fedora client is installed, Mint's man can implicitly read Fedora's yum man page. This implicit file access is largely automatic. The primary reason for implicit file access is to have things "just work" across clients.

Finally, if a user would like to explicitly specify which version of a local file to access, this can be done through the explicit file access. For example, if multiple clients can provide the vlc media player, an end user can specify exactly which one to use.

Between these three file access types, most things just work as one would expect despite the fact that they are not intended to work together.

Directly accessing a file is done as one would typically do so. It is necessary for this to be the typical method for dependencies to be automatically met by software intended for other distributions.

Implicitly accessing files is done through the filesystem mounted at /bedrock/brpath. This provides a (read-only) view of the files available in all clients. If any client provides a file, it can be made accessible here. By adding /bedrock/brpath at the end of various $PATH-style variables, programs will automatically search for their own local files first and, if it does not find anything, attempt to use files provided by other clients. Bedrock Linux sets up these $PATH variables automatically so that no manual work or thought is necessary to access anything implicitly - it "just works" as one would have expected if the software was packaged for the distribution.

Explicitly accessing a file is done by accessing the file through a path at:

/bedrock/clients/client-name/path/to/file

Where client-name is the name of the client and path/to/file is the path to the desired file. To explicitly specify which client's executable one would want, use brc:

brc client-name command arguments.

For example, to use the vim text editor from the Arch client to modify the gentoo client's (local) /etc/issue file, one could use:

brc arch vim /bedrock/clients/gentoo/etc/issue