[Fedora-livecd-list] /etc/statetab and persistence

[Douglas McClendon]

Jon Steer wrote:
> I just noticed that there is apparently a /etc/statetab which allows
> you to specify directory paths to load from other sources upon bootup.
> 
> So, on a liveCD,mounting /etc or mounting /var on another partition,
> especially on USB keys would work pretty handily.
> 
> What am I missing?

Well, the statetab presumably must live on a version of /etc that gets 
mounted over then.  And in the livecd case, you wouldn't want the 
initial statetab to point somewhere else for /etc.  And given that, it 
is kind of hard to modify after the fact.

But it wouldn't be hard at all to have some sort of kernel argument like 
"statetab="/etc:/dev/sdb2,/var:/dev/sdb3" or maybe with a little more work,

statetab="/etc:LABEL="myipodstate":/path/to/etc"

which would cause it to mount -t auto the filesystem labeled 
'myipodstate' and then bindmount /path/to/etc from there to /etc.

The main downside I see over what I've been trying to do with 
dm-snapshot, is that

a) you would have to store the entire /etc on the persistent storage.
b) /usr would then not be persistent, thus making 'yum -y install emacs' 
not work like you want it to.

But for a subset of the problem, it definitely works.

And as mentioned before, another dirt simple solution would be to just 
have tarballs stored on a usbstick, and then have the boot process 
extract them into the ram overlay automatically if it finds them.  That 
also would be a quick and dirty way to accomplish a lot of things.


-dmc