[Fedora-spins] The magic 4GiB squashfs filesize limit

[Bruno Wolff III]

On Thu, Jan 22, 2009 at 16:50:38 +0100,
  Jeroen van Meeuwen <kanarip at kanarip.com> wrote:
>
> LiveUSB however is going to have the squashfs on the USB stick, probably
> on vfat. I think this is an additional consideration we should make
> regarding a general guideline of <= 4GB spins or > 4GB spins.

Reformatting USB drives is a lot less of an issue than trying to get windows
users to switch their system disks from vfat to ntfs. If a drive doesn't
need to be read under windows it can be reformatted as ext[2-4] and
there won't be a problem.

If the drive does need to be readable by windows, so that files can easily
be copied to and from host systems, there are a couple of possible solutions.

One is to put more than one partition on the drive. Ext[2-4] can be used
for grub and possibly the rest of the liveusb stuff and vfat or ntfs can
be used for another partition. I don't know what the support for multiple
partitions on usb drives is (I don't want to reformat mine right now to test
it out), but I expect it to work at least under linux.

Another possible solution is to use a single ntfs partition. Grub can specify
file locations by block numbers, so in theory it should be possible to tell
grub where to read the grub.conf file. This is fragile, but I don't think
people do a lot of hand editing of grub.conf on live usb drives. If kernel
updates are being done using overlays, then some extra work will probably
be needed to relocate the updated grub.conf file.