PuzzleFS Continues Striving To Be The Best File-System For Containers

Amid all the recent chatter around Bcachefs working its way toward mainline and all the ongoing improvements to existing Linux file-systems, you may have forgotten about Puzzlefs as the new file-system aiming to be an optimal solution for containers and with a kernel driver written in the Rust programming language.

PuzzleFS is a container file-system aimed to address the shortcomings of OCI. PuzzleFS is being worked on by Cisco engineers and the Rust-written kernel driver remains out of tree while it works to overcome limitations of not having all the necessary Rust abstractions in place within the mainline Linux kernel yet.

Armand-Ariel Miculas of Cisco presented at Open-Source Summit Europe's ContainerCon today on PuzzleFS. PuzzleFS is immutable, overcomes limitations of the OCI v1 format, and additionally has design goals of reduced duplication, reproducible image builds, direct mounting support, data integrity, and memory safety guarantees. Both the native Linux kernel driver and a FUSE-based file-system implementation are written in Rust as part of the memory safety guarantees. PuzzleFS also has optional Zstd compression support.

Those wishing to learn more about PuzzleFS can see the OSS EU 2023 presentation page for the slide deck and soon the video recording from the presentation in Spain. The code to PuzzleFS is available on GitHub.