[Fedora-livecd-list] experimental unionfs and initramfs code

[Jane Dogalt]

--- Jane Dogalt <jdogalt at 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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