[Fedora-livecd-list] Anyone using the overlay file?

Jeremy Katz katzj at redhat.com
Wed Jan 21 22:10:05 UTC 2009


On Wednesday, January 21 2009, Forrest Taylor said:
> On Wed, 2009-01-21 at 14:00 -0500, Jeremy Katz wrote:
> > On Wednesday, January 21 2009, Forrest Taylor said:
> > > In the iso-to-disk script, one can add an overlay file.  However, I
> > > don't see that it is being used at all--livesys does not reference it at
> > > all.  It looks like the XO team passes a kernel parameter, but I haven't
> > > seen the code to actually use it.
> > > 
> > > My assumption is that the overlay file would be the backend storage for
> > > an LVM snapshot.  Has anyone actually used an overlay file?  Any ideas
> > > on the implementation?
> > 
> > The overlay gets set up in the initramfs, so see mkliveinitrd in the
> > mkinitrd package.  Basically what happens is that instead of creating a
> > file that's backed by RAM to use as our dm-snapshot device, we set up
> > dm-snapshot to write to the file on the USB stick instead.
> 
> Thanks, Jeremy, that makes sense now.  It looks like mayflower was the
> script that did this in RHEL5, so I'll see if I can backport it.

mkliveinitrd is basically mayflower renamed and moved into mkinitrd
(where it should have been to begin with).  
 
> Is there any way to see how much of the overlay is being used from
> within the live image?

Not usefully -- you can string together some 'dm table' commands and get
the number of blocks used but it requires being root and also had some
oddities.

My kingdom for an upstreamable unionfs :/

Jeremy




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