[Fedora-livecd-list] [RFC/PATCH] livecd rebootless installer

[Douglas McClendon]

Elias Hunt wrote:
> Perfect, I'll keep a watch out for anything traveling down the pipe.
> 
> If you would like, feel free to pester me directly for assistance
> testing (when you get that far), and I'll happily spin some test CDs
> based on our setup using any new/patched code and provide feedback.

Definitely.  And to spam this list with yet more technical ideas...  in this 
case specific to your use case...

The live snapshot device, normally located in ram, could also be live migrated 
to a different file on the cache-destination drive, such that changes to the 
root-fs from the live-session (i.e. /var/log/messages ....) don't eat up your ram.

Then, since you don't want changes to survive subsequent reboots, when rebooting 
from the livecd (or perhaps grub harddrive mbr), it would detect that the 
livecd's ext3 image file has already been cached to disk, and use it, but also 
utilize a fresh overlay file on the disk, so that no changes from the 
live-session are remembered.

(also, to correct/clarify myself yet again, I do realize that using lvm for 
rootfs is basically 'always using a dm linear device layer for the rootfs'.  But 
as I said earlier, I'm not yet a power-user of lvm.  And by limiting yourself to 
device-mapper, you can support the more general use case of non-lvm, OR lvm root 
filesystems)

-dmc



> -E
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> Elias Hunt wrote:
>> Douglas,
>>
>> Assuming that iso-caching-to-disk feature is implemented, would it be
>> easy to have the caching occur on an ext3 partition?
> 
> 
> Yup Yup Yup :)  My 2001 project would scan for all partitions it could
> blindly 
> mount (mount -t auto), and use any that it found available with at least
> 2X the 
> free space needed.
> 
> I'll take your use-case as added motivation to work on a proof of
> concept 
> implementation of that feature...  So much code to write... so little
> time ;)
> 
> -dmc
> 
> 
>> My company actually has a use case where we create custom livecds for
>> hundreds of systems, using a local drive for data storage only as we
>> don't want the OS to be modified permanently (a reboot will restore to
>> normal). Having the performance gain of actually running the iso from
>> the local disk, while still being able to mount the disk for data
>> storage, and being able to insert other CDs to the running system
> would
>> provide huge benefits.
>>
>> -Eli
> 
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