[Fedora-livecd-list] RHEL Live CD + Persistance?

[Douglas McClendon]

Mike Dickson wrote:
> Is there any chance of getting a current version of RHEL into the Live 
> CD + Persistence game?

Were you ever able to test those patches I sent you a couple months back
(on fedora)?  (and for the most part, posted to this list)

For me, they do basically work in trivial testing scenarios.

The main problem I have mustering any enjoyment developing them is the
utter grossness of what it takes to patch the standard /etc/rc.d/init.d
halt and functions file.  (which is needed to defer unmounting of
persistence device until after readonly remounting of rootfs).

I do have an alternate distribution method of the feature, which makes
it more of a proof of concept "live iso patch" to the official f8
livecd, but it's still the same code and mechanism.

The same fragility may still apply to my method that I mentioned months
ago, i.e. that it may become unrecoverably corrupted if not shutdown
cleanly.  But I suspect that if I can make the distribution of it as
easy as a 'patch' to apply to the f8 livecd, and get some testers, that
that problem can be solved (pure speculation).

My time estimates are usually overly ambitious, but I'll try to get that
iso-patch posted in a couple hours.

And as I responded long ago to the original criticism of the ugliness of
the halt&functions patching- I totally agree, and am open to suggestions.

Attached is the last patch I sent Mike, which is pretty close to what I
last posted to this list.  It's still useful if anyone is interested in
trying to understand the method I'm using.  The main thing to simplify
reading it, is

a) ignore the 'overlay=auto' code path.  It's a nice feature, but
complexity that should wait for the future when the base case is well
understood, tested and stable.  The base case being

b) assume the only use of the patch is with the modified
livecd-iso-to-disk.  I.e. the new usage would be

livecd-iso-to-disk --overlay-size-mb 128 /path/to/f8.iso /dev/sdb1

which would initialize a 128M persistence file and cause the bootloader
on the liveusb to use it.  I.e. the syslinux append line goes from

root=UUID=abcd-1234

to

root=UUID=abcd-1234 overlay=UUID=abcd-1234

Then, try to ignore the horrendously ugly selinux magic act required to
patch halt&functions, and just look at the contents of the halt.patch
and functions.patch.

-dmc

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