How to share the toolcache with hostPath

[WoodyWoodsta]

I have a bunch of ephemeral runners deployed on a bare-metal K8s cluster, and I'd like to share toolcache between them. At the moment, we do not have provisioned external storage, and so we're using the host storage via hostPath (we don't care about duplication/missing cache between nodes because the toolcache is supposed to be flexible that way.)

However, we're finding that, for example, actions/setup-node makes use of symlinks within the cache folder itself, and these symlinks appear to be ignored/removed when attempting to create them in the hostPath.

The three approaches to solving this problem are:

1. Get hostPath to preserve symlinks
2. Prevent tools from using symlinks in the toolcache
3. Use something other that hostPath

Has anyone needed to do the above and come up with a way that works?