docs: Talk about sysroot, growing

This one is also important to understand as growing the rootfs
is a corner case.

Signed-off-by: Colin Walters <walters@verbum.org>

docs/src/SUMMARY.md

@@ -38,6 +38,7 @@
 
 - [Image layout](bootc-images.md)
 - [Filesystem](filesystem.md)
+- [Filesystem: sysroot](filesystem-sysroot.md)
 
 # More information
 

docs/src/filesystem-sysroot.md

@@ -0,0 +1,69 @@
+# Filesystem: Physical /sysroot
+
+The bootc project uses [ostree](https://github.com/ostreedev/ostree/) as a backend,
+and maps fetched container images to a "deployment": <https://ostreedev.github.io/ostree/deployment/>.
+
+## stateroot
+
+The underlying `ostree` CLI and API tooling expose a concept of `stateroot`, which
+is not yet exposed via `bootc`.  The `stateroot` used by `bootc install`
+is just named `default`.
+
+The stateroot concept allows having fully separate parallel operating
+system installations with fully separate `/etc` and `/var`, while
+still sharing an underlying root filesystem.
+
+In the future, this functionality will be exposed and used by `bootc`.
+
+## /sysroot mount
+
+When booted, the physical root will be available at `/sysroot` as a
+read-only mount point.  This is a key aspect of how `bootc upgrade` operates:
+it fetches the updated container image and writes new files to `/sysroot/ostree`.
+
+Beyond that and debugging/introspection, there are few use cases for tooling to
+operate on the physical root.
+
+## Expanding the root filesystem
+
+One notable use case that *does* need to operate on `/sysroot`
+is expanding the root filesystem.
+
+Some higher level tools such as e.g. `cloud-init` may (reasonably)
+expect the `/` mount point to be the physical root.  Tools like
+this will need to be adjusted to instead detect this and operate
+on `/sysroot`.
+
+### Growing the block device
+
+Fundamentally bootc is agnostic to the underlying block device setup.
+How to grow the root block device depends on the underlying
+storage stack, from basic partitions to LVM.  However, a
+common tool is the https://manpages.debian.org/testing/cloud-guest-utils/growpart.1.en.html[growpart]
+utility from `cloud-init`.
+
+### Growing the filesytem
+
+The systemd project ships a [systemd-growfs](https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/latest/systemd-growfs.html#)
+tool and corresponding `systemd-growfs@` services.  This is
+a relatively thin abstraction over detecting the target
+root filesystem type and running the underlying tool such as
+`xfs_growfs`.
+
+At the current time, most Linux filesystems require
+the target to be mounted writable in order to grow.  Hence,
+an invocation of `system-growfs /sysroot` or `xfs_growfs /sysroot`
+will need to be further wrapped in a temporary mount namespace.
+
+Using a `MountFlags=slave` drop-in stanza for `systemd-growfs@sysroot.service`
+is recommended, along with an `ExecStartPre=mount -o remount,rw /sysroot`.
+
+### Detecting bootc/ostree systems
+
+For tools like `cloud-init` that want to operate generically,
+conditionally detecting this situation can be done via e.g.:
+
+- Checking for `/` being an `overlay` mount point
+- Checking for `/sysroot/ostree`
+
+

docs/src/filesystem.md

@@ -16,6 +16,15 @@ enabled = true
 
 This will ensure that the entire `/` is a read-only filesystem.
 
+## Understanding physical vs logical root with `/sysroot`
+
+When the system is fully booted, it is into the equivalent of a `chroot`.
+The "physical" host root filesystem will be mounted at `/sysroot`.
+For more on this, see [filesystem: sysroot](filesystem-sysroot.md).
+
+All the remaining filesystem paths below are part of a "deployment root" which
+is used as a final target for the system boot.
+
 ## `/usr`
 
 The overall recommendation is to keep all operating system content in `/usr`,