[Fedora-livecd-list] skel, root, bindmount inversion, relayfs, and lions and tigers and bears, oh MY!

[Toshio Kuratomi]

On Wed, 2006-03-29 at 17:50 -0800, Jane Dogalt wrote:

> Isn't the real issue here that kadischi is nuking the contents of /root?
> 
> Rather than nuke and then copy /etc/skel, I think the answer is to leave /root
> alone.
> 
Yes.  After talking with AutOPSY on irc, I think I'll just let the
rootfiles package populate /root and get rid of this code altogether.
It's always nice to remove unnecessary complexity rather than add it.

> Of course the decision was originally made probably due to /root living in
> tmpfs, and not wanting things like install.syslog or whatever around.
> 
I'm not certain what the original thought was.  If someone knows, be
sure to bring it up so I don't kill the functionality incorrectly :-)

> Currently root is read-only, and then writable tmpfs directories are bind
> mounted there.  I suggest, and have successfully used in the past, the inverse
> method, which is to make / a tmpfs, and then bindmount big readonly directories
> there.
> 
I think with the stateless project working on these issues too we're
going to have more commonality with ro being the default and only
creating rw areas in specific trouble spots.  Of course with unionfs...

> Of course that was a long time ago before the advent (or at least
> out-of-the-box availability) of unionfs/relayfs.  These days we should be able
> to have a completely generic fully populated read-only / (coming from the full
> system install), with a full read-write tmpfs / overlayed/unioned/relayfsd on
> top.

Heh -- the infrastructure is falling into place to put unionfs kernel
modules into Extras now.  So it could be that we can start working on
this idea now.  This would allow us to feed code back and forth with
stateless linux but maintain a (transient) rw filesystem at the same
time.  I'm going to be concetrating on a few other areas more important
to what I'm doing with kadischi, though, so this is an exciting project
for someone else to start working on.

-Toshio
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