Re: [Fedora-livecd-list] experimental unionfs and initramfs code
--- Jane Dogalt <jdogalt(a)yahoo.com> wrote:
Well, I managed to get my first proof-of-concept fedora core 5 based
livecd
iso
generated, which utilizes unionfs+squashfs via initramfs.
This is absolutely bleeding edge stuff which I only post as a helpful example
for others who may be interesting in similar hacking. I do have an iso
online,
but I won't advertise it's location because I don't want to blow my hosting
bandwidth on a 700MB download which isn't really useful in and of itself.
Actually, it's still only half done uploading because of a
hailstorm/powerouttage last night, and my horrible consumer grade upload
bandwidth. ETA 4 hours. If someone wants the url, I'll do it by private
email, though like I said, asside from working, it's pretty boring. (and I
haven't removed any fedora logos, which gets back to the last distribution
issues thread which doesn't seem to have resulted in any change to any
wiki/faq/ or documentation)
But
here are the nash and init modifications I made, which illustrate what I had
to
do, and I'll briefly outline the rest of what I did to manually stitch
together
the iso.
http://viros.org/releases/20060423a.dio/
So the nash I hacked on was the stock fedora core 5 one. And my modifcations
started from the truly elegant linux-from-scratch livecd init.c/init.h.
Though
by the time I packaged it up, I had mostly made my custom vswitchroot and
vsetuproot match up pretty closely with the native setuproot and switchroot.
When I'm done polishing, there may only be a couple lines of different code,
and therefore an argument to those functions might be the right answer (for
me).
The init (nash script) I started out with was the basic one from a normal
hard
disk install (via qemu, and not using lvm) fc5 initramfs. As you can tell by
a
diff, the changes are fairly minimal. In fact, with the above mentions,
eventually the difference might just be an argument to setuproot, switchroot,
and a new function setupliveunion.
Note, I am clearly aware of how horrific the code is. I got it working last
night, and decided to post that first pass as is.
Otherwise, the rest of the base system is relatively unmodified, just added
unionfs, disabled selinux (it puked, and may not be happy with unionfs, or
just
Apparently I was so sleep deprived I forgot that the issue is still squashfs
not supporting xattrs, and that it was unionfs+ext2image that _might_ work with
selinux. But going to an ext2 image instead of a squashfs image is trivial.
(Though as a manipulable product consumer, I am rather swayed by the squashfs
README.performance, and eagerly await xattr support so as to nix any current
theoretical usefulness of using an ext2 image).
-jdog
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