Additional ext4-backed mount point for high-throughput I/O caching (besides `/kaggle/working`)

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Assessment

Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Newbie friendliness
25/100
Issue type
Feature
Clarity
Mostly clear
Activity status
Stale
Tech stack
docker, linux
Domain
infrastructure, operating-systems

Research direction

Start by reviewing the issue’s I/O benchmark and the existing container mount configuration; no implementation files or tests are named in the report. Define the additional physical-device-backed ext4 mount separately from /kaggle/working, then verify that it provides a larger, faster cache path without changing the existing mount behavior.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

enhancement

🚀 Feature

Provide an additional mount point backed by a physical device (ext4), separate from /kaggle/working, to use as a high-throughput I/O cache (e.g., /tmp).

Motivation

  • The container root (/) appears to be provided via an overlay filesystem; write/metadata performance on overlay can be slower or less predictable than on a host-backed volume such as /kaggle/working.
  • Some applications default to /tmp for I/O-intensive caches; on overlay this default can become an I/O bottleneck.
  • /kaggle/working is relatively fast and can be an alternatives to /tmp, but its capacity is limited to ~20 GB per session, which is sometimes insufficient to host checkpoint of LLMs (~100GB).
  • An additional fast endpoint for caching has the potential to better utilize the instance’s compute resources (e.g., T4, P100) that are often bottlenecked by disk I/O.

Additional context

I benchmarked sequential I/O and observed both writes and reads to be slower on /tmp (overlay) than on /kaggle/working (host-backed). Write throughput on /tmp is especially unstable; it sometimes gets ~5–10× lower in my tests.

Dominant language
Python
Stars
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Forks
1k
Avg merge
5h 55m
Merged PRs (30d)
1

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