ostree is git for filesystems. It enables versioning, distribution & atomic deployment of linux systems.

It stores complete system snapshot, making updates & rollbacks easier.

Based on composefs, relies on EROFS (Enhanced Read Only Filesystem), which guarantees against data corruption, and natively performs data deduplication & LZ4 compression.

Data is in /sysroot/ostree/repo/objects. Similar to git, allows creating commits, versions & switch between them.

Only /var is mutable, other mutable dirs are symlinked to var. /etc is special overlay, it intelligently merges new changes with old. #question explore this more.

It uses rpm-ostree package manager. #question what can it do/not do compared to dnf?

Which creates new commits but changes are not affected until reboot.

Can use rpm-ostree rollback to rollback to previous commit.

Sources

• https://lwn.net/Articles/581811/
• https://blog.verbum.org/2014/01/21/ostree-in-action-rpm-ostree-and-switching-trees/
• https://github.com/coreos/rpm-ostree/blob/main/docs/background.md

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