livecds in the future

[Peter Jones]

On 11/30/2009 01:27 PM, Peter Jones wrote:
> On 11/30/2009 12:27 PM, Matthias Clasen wrote:
>> 3. 'Chain-booting' from cd to usb sounds like an elegant way to avoid
>> the 'Can't boot USB' problem. Did we figure out how Mandriva are doing
>> it ?
> 
> No, we didn't. There are some things we might be able to do here, though,
> which may solve this problem without actually "chain-booting". The most
> obvious is to make sure the live image's initrd searches for a USB device
> with the right filesystem label (and possibly other criteria) and mounts
> that as root, and then build a liveboot.iso with one boot image and no[1]
> real filesystem. The boot image would contain the kernel and initrd as
> the only boot option.
> 
> This is fairly trivial to do, actually.
> 
> [1] It'd have to have an iso9660 filesystem with the isolinux/ directory
> much like our current boot.iso does, but the kernel and initrd there would
> be the ones from the live image, and we wouldn't put the rest of the live
> OS on the disc.
> 

Further research[1] seems to indicate that this is almost exactly what
they're doing.

[1] Adam pointed me at http://svn.mandriva.com/cgi-bin/viewvc.cgi/soft/drakx/trunk/rescue/make_flash_rescue?revision=263686&view=markup

-- 
        Peter

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