Trees in volumes

[Fabian Deutsch <fdeutsch redhat com>]

Hey,

my name is Fabian and for my $dayjob I'm lurking around in oVirt, and
if I find some free time, in Fedora as well.

I've been following ostree a bit, the idea, it is actually quite related to what
we do with [oVirt Node](http://www.ovirt.org/Node), but Node is (basically)
shipping the trees and their updates in images.
Because the nature is similar (server side created fstrees) we share some problems,
like the always-around uid/gid drifts.

So, what I wondered - I've brought this up in some smaller cirlces before - is
if ostree could have another backend, where the trees are not stored in the filesystem,
but rather in LVM logical volumes with thin snapshots on top providing the writable
overlay.

The benefit would be, that the ostrees would not be trees in a fstree, but rather
that the trees become filesystems in their own.
This makes a lot of stuff easy, on the host side, because you can mess with the
filesystem as much as you want.

The compose and retrieval of the tree would work as usual, it just be different storage.

Are there thoughts about such an idea?
And are the benefits of such an approach clear?

Greetings
fabian