fedora on a flash drive

[Alan Cox]

On Mon, Mar 07, 2005 at 02:31:55PM -0800, Florin Andrei wrote:
> Q1: Do you think it's too crazy a project to fly? :-)

I've seen similar but done different ways. The init on the CF bootstraps the
system by running sanity checks on the disk. It then does one of two things

#1 If the sanity check passes, chroots (it was pre the root swivel stuff)
and execs /sbin/init.

#2 If it fails, it rebuilds the disk environment from the flash and puts
everything there.

That wasn't trying to save configuration changes merely to restore a pre
arranged 'boot' configuration off the CF.

> Q3: Are there any filesystems that are better for Flash, in that they
> "spread" the writes across multiple blocks?
> Ext3 and any other journalised FSs should be avoided, right? (due to
> concentrating lots of writes in the journal)

Decent CF cards use wear levelling (its actually log structured internally).
If you buy your CF from Micron (ie crucical) it comes with a lifetime 
warranty so it's their problem 8)

Also for maximum reliability turn off the write cache on the hard disk.