I was curious to see why there was much noise coming from the Gentoo Wiki LXC page to my blog lately, so I decided to peek at the documentation there once again, slightly more thoroughly; while there are a number of things that could likely be simplified (but unless I’m paid to do so I’m not going to work on documenting LXC until it’s stable enough upstream; as it is it might just be a waste of time since they change the format of configuration files every other release), there is one thing that really baffled me:
If you want to share distfiles from your host, you might want to look at unionfs, which lets you mount the files from your host’s /usr/portage/distfiles/ read-only whilst enabling read-write within the guest.
While unionfs is the kind of feature that goes quite well with LXC, for something as simple as that is quite an overkill. On the other hand I remembered that I also had to ask about this to Zac, so it might be a good idea to document this a moment.
Portage already allows you to share a read-only distfiles directory.
You probably remember that I originally started using Kerberos because I wanted some safe way to share a few directories between Yamato and the other boxes. One of the common situations I had was the problem of sharing the distfiles, since quite a few are big enough that I’d rather not download them twice. Well, even with that implemented, I couldn’t get Portage to properly access them, so I looked for alternative ways. And there is a variable that solves everything: PORTAGE_RO_DISTDIRS.
How does that work? Simply mount some path such as /var/cache/portage/distfiles/remote as the remote distfiles directory, then set PORTAGE_RO_DISTDIRS to that value. If the required files are in the read-only directory, and not in the read-write one, Portage will symlink them and ensure access on a stable path. Depending on your setup, you might want to export/import the directory as NFS, or – in case of LXC – you might want to set it up as a read-only bind mount. Whatever you choose, you don’t need kernel support for unionfs to use a read-only distfiles directory. Okay?