The continuous crippling of Fedora LiveCDs by removing usefull stuff for no apparent reason

[Chris Murphy]

On Sun, Dec 20, 2015 at 3:31 PM, Fernando Cassia <fcassia at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Sun, Dec 20, 2015 at 6:35 AM, Ian Malone <ibmalone at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> It's neither of these,
>>
>> https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/How_to_create_and_use_Live_USB#Data_persistence
>>
>> 'currently implemented (as a Device-mapper copy-on-write snapshot),
>> every single change to it (writes AND deletes) subtracts from its free
>> space, so it will eventually be "used up"'
>
>
> It confirms what I said: it's broken.

It's not broken. It's working as designed and documented. From
livecd-iso-to-disk --help

*Note well* that
        deletion of any original files in the read-only root filesystem does not
        recover any storage space on your LiveOS device.  Storage in the
        persistent /LiveOS/overlay-<device_id> file is allocated as needed, but
        the system will crash *without warning* and fail to boot once the
        overlay has been totally consumed.  If significant changes or updates
        to the root filesystem are to be made, carefully watch the fraction of
        space allocated in the overlay by issuing the 'dmsetup status' command
        at a command line of the running LiveOS image.  Some consumption of root
        filesystem and overlay space can be avoided by specifying a persistent
        home filesystem for user files, see --home-size-mb below.


> How about changing the LiveCD creator
> to allow for "persistent storage" partition that is formatted with F2FS?

Someone needs to volunteer to do the research why that's a better
option, and include some patches and kickstart scripts so that others
can test. F2FS does not produce better results just by using it. It's
highly customizeable/tunable, and it assumes you know things about
your flash based drive that it can't know (because manufacturer's hide
this information) so you can tune it. If you don't tune it, you can
get worse results than just using ext4/XFS/Btrfs or heck even FAT or
NTFS because the FTL in especially USB flash storage is very well
tuned for FAT.

-- 
Chris Murphy