Could this OpenVZ optimization be doable/useful?

[itsjohncs]

We may be able to mount most of the directories in the container's root file systems such that all the containers share much of their file systems, and only the home directories ever change. See this StackOverflow thread regarding sharing files between OpenVZ containers
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I imagine that the mounting could be done between creating the container and actually starting it. I think this will definitely be worth playing with because it could greatly speed up our container creation time without resorting to using RAM disks.

[itsjohncs]

Added this into the 4-month sprint milestone because this optimization would really be amazingly beneficial if it works out, and should be simple enough to implement and work with. I really hope it works 😟.

[itsjohncs]

400th issue! Wooooo 🍰

[itsjohncs]

This is looking pretty solidly viable. I'm reading about bind mounts and I'm sad I didn't know about them before since I could have used them when I was using a lot of chroot jails in the past. Creating a read-only bind mounts seems doable, though it appears there used to be some bugs in the implementation of them in the Linux kernel so I'll want to be wary. I can bind mount everything in /etc, /bin, and /usr without problems most likely. If I carefully prune the services running in the VM I can probably get some other ones as well. 👯