boxxy VS reverie

I made a tool to control where Linux applications put their files via bind mounts and environment variables: https://github.com/queer/boxxy

I've heard that it's made it as far as university HPC clusters to help control iffy code written by students; I'm glad I managed to make that stuff a bit easier for the people operating them.

This is a tool I’ve been working on for the last ~6 months. It was born out of frustration trying to package boxxy[1] for different distros.

This was originally to be presented at RustConf 2023 in a few days, under the talk “Repackage the World!,” but unfortunately my health took a sudden turn for the worse and I’m no longer able to give the talk.

peckish IS NOT a replacement for distro-specific packaging tools, and its packages WILL NOT be compliant with every distribution’s standards for packages.

peckish IS:

- a way to make a quick-and-dirty packages for distributing a program

- a CLI/library for manipulating the contents of Linux packages

The core abstraction is an in-memory filesystem behind an async std::fs-like facade[2], allowing packages to be manipulated with more-intuitive random-access I/O instead of putting up with (nested) streaming archive formats. This facade also is used for ex. enabling easier archive manipulation[3], a library for copying between facade implementations[4], and more. This bets that most packages will never be larger than memory, which in my testing is a safe bet even with Docker images as inputs.

Sorry for adding more YAML to the world :P

[1] https://github.com/queer/boxxy

[2] https://github.com/queer/floppy-disk

[3] https://github.com/queer/flop

[4] https://github.com/queer/disk-drive

boxxy

I am not sure if you know boxxy: it is a handy tool that uses linux userspace namespaces to wrap requests for a file to a proper (configurable) location.

macOS + systemd? If on Linux this tool allows you to move config dir and file locations transparently. Pretty neat. https://github.com/queer/boxxy

By the way Facebook has a nice library/system for creating neat observability tools using a small amount of rust: https://github.com/facebookexperimental/reverie.

For a structured approach to ptrace/syscall rewriting, you could try FB's reverie. I worked on and used it during an internship a few years back; it's pretty amazing at what it does.

https://github.com/facebookexperimental/reverie

Note that this is a follow-on project from the earlier Dettrace system, which was applied mainly to reproducible builds (as in the academic paper, https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3373376.3378519, and presented to the Debian Reproducible Builds summit):

- https://github.com/dettrace/dettrace

And one cool part of it is this Rust program instrumentation layer:

- https://github.com/facebookexperimental/reverie

It's good for building OS-emulator style projects or tracing tools.