A fuse based initfs

Jon Nettleton jon.nettleton at gmail.com
Thu Aug 23 23:25:58 UTC 2007


On 8/23/07, Andrew Bartlett <abartlet at samba.org> wrote:
> On Thu, 2007-08-23 at 18:02 -0400, Jon Nettleton wrote:
> > On 8/22/07, Douglas McClendon <dmc.fedora at filteredperception.org> wrote:
>
> > >
> > > In general, it sounds like you are outlining several different
> > > problem/solutions, but I don't think they all need to be as tightly
> > > integrated as you suggest.
> > >
> > > For instance, the gdm in initramfs (or very very early).  Why do you
> > > need this copy-on-write rootfs stuff?  Why not just have a tmpfs, and a
> > > gdm configuration that looks there.  Likewise for the early logging
> > > stuff.  Later during boot, the early-boot logfiles in tmpfs can be
> > > copied to /var/log.  This isn't as nice as the magic
> > > unionfs/dm-snapshot-merge automagic merging.  But I don't think that is
> > > necessary and worth the steps you are taking to get it.
> >
> > The problem is that all the X gdm talk is through fifo sockets.  This
> > busies the filesystems
> > and makes it impossible to just copy things around.  If we want the
> > boot process to be
> > smooth and seamless we are going to need some sort of ability to write
> > to a "read only" filesystem in place.
>
> Why not just put the fifo on a tmpfs, and keep it around for the life of
> the system.  Being tmpfs, it cleans up nicely when shut down.  There are
> many other reasons to move the X socket from /tmp (selinux etc).
>
> Would a permanent symlink from /tmp -> a tmpfs mounted on /var/run/X
> solve the legacy issues?
>

That only leaves some log issues.  However if other people have no
problems with /var/run/X and /var/run/gdm being tmpfs or ramfs then
this is do-able.

Jon




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