Ephemeral Workspaces. Durable Shared History.

LayerFS is the substrate under your agents. Each one mounts a complete, writable Workspace over shared committed history, does its work, commits what it changed, and goes away.

Get started · Website · Docs · Benchmarks · Video · LayerFS × DSH · Community

Status: LayerFS 1.0.0, the first official release after the 0.1.x Developer Previews, released as source. The results below ran on main at e5c7aaae05. The Store runs in its Disposable profile only, with no crash or power-loss durability: use LayerFS for agent work and its history, not as the only copy of data you cannot rebuild.

Current main also supports native Windows dsh Live through WSL2 and its own Linux Docker Engine; see the Windows setup. This adapter was added after the v1.0.0 source release.

LayerFS runs today through LayerFS × DSH, the dsh-layerfs plugin for DeepSeek Harness. Agents in a dsh session fork Branches, test them in Sandboxes, merge and publish, and the Work and History tabs show every agent's Branch, live.

01 · Ephemeral Computing Compute exists only while a command runs.	02 · Decentralized Agents Agents on different computers share one serverless Store.	03 · Multiagent Coordination One project, many Branches. One Branch, many agents.
04 · Recursive Filesystem Fork recursively any Commit, at any depth.	05 · Ultra Storage Optimization 157 snapshots of a real project in 100 MB, 19.9× smaller than Btrfs + zstd.	06 · Instant Bootstrap Dependencies come with every mount. No time lost reinstalling.

And underneath them

	Supporting idea	In one line
	07 · Auto Checkpoints	Every step an agent takes is a checkpoint to return to.
	08 · Append-only Objects	Saved objects are never rewritten. The Store only grows.
	09 · Conflict Rules (.lww)	Name the files that should never conflict. The newest edit wins.
	10 · Big File, Small Edit	An edit costs the size of the edit, not the size of the file.

_{Agents fork Branches, work in Workspaces inside Sandboxes, commit, merge and publish to main. The history grows as they go.}

Every suite ran once on main at e5c7aaae05 through the JavaScript SDK. Each row links to its method, environment and receipts.

_{One sample per case, seed 1, no best-of. Host: arm64 Mac, Docker Desktop linux/arm64, 8 CPUs, 8.3 GB; host load is recorded per suite. These are release measurements, not a guarantee for your workload. Earlier fs-bench-pro results: v0.1.4 · v0.1.5 · v0.1.6.}

agent tool call
 ├─ file tool (read, write, edit, grep …) ── SDK, in process ──────► Store
 └─ Bash ── mount ─► exec ─► commit ─► unmount                       ▲
             └─ Workspace: FUSE view in a Sandbox's daemon ───────────┘
                (committed root + its own overlay)

• Store. One SQLite file holds every Branch, Commit and content object. Each daemon and SDK process opens it directly; there is no database server.
• Branch, Commit, Layer. A Branch is a writable line of Commits. Publishing a Branch to main adds a Layer. Content is chunked and stored once.
• Workspace. A mount binds the whole committed tree without copying it. Writes go to the Workspace's own overlay until a Commit saves them. Unmount deletes the overlay, never history.
• Conflict. Two Commits that change the same file are refused with Conflict, unless a .lww rule says the newest edit wins.

Questions, ideas and show-and-tell are welcome in either place.

Discord discord.gg/8mmAMCDc2

WeChat · LayerFS的好朋友 Scan in WeChat to join the group.

LayerFS is licensed under the MIT License.