Re: [gentoo-catalyst] LiveCD UNIONFS overlay

[Chris Gianelloni]

On Sat, 2005-09-10 at 20:50 +0200, Georg Lippold wrote:

Make a patch and file a bug for the scanning.  Same with the changes
from your last email.

> You say it's known to be broken, what else needs to be fixed besides bug
> 99682 (and that is already resolved, as it seems)? I currently have the

Well, unionfs "support" was added as a proof of concept by one of the
developers in very little time.  It was in a "works for me" state then,
and hasn't really been touched since.  If you're willing to provide
patches, then I don't see why they wouldn't be included, we just aren't
going to spend *our* time doing development on it right now until we can
get some more pressing bugs resolved.

> strange feeling, that unionctl is not copied to the initrd of the
> livecd, as it was not found when I booted from a CD made with 'genkernel
> --unionfs'. I tried to extract the file isolinux/gentoo.igz from the
> cdrom to check, but I didn't get all of it's contents, as it seems.
> 'gunzip -c gentoo.igz | cpio -i' has only this content:

There is no initrd.  It is an initramfs.  It also is a concatenation of
multiple cpio archives, so you can't just extract one and expect it to
work.  You're only getting the "base" cpio image.  The best way to look
into them is to look into the caches that genkernel makes when creating
the initramfs.  I know that rocket knows of a way to actually work out
the extraction, but to make it simple, you're only extracting the first
cpio archive of many.

> But the file has extracted ~17 MB... Mounting it with -o loop didn't
> succeed either, but maybe I'm not having the right FS in my kernel. Can
> you help me on this?

It isn't a file-system, so it cannot be mounted.

> For me this feature is very important, and I would be willing to
> maintain the unionfs of the LiveCD, if it helps you having more time.

Well, the main thing is providing patches.  Even better would be to
watch genkernel@g.o on bugzilla, and file patches for any bugs
that people find regarding unionfs.  From what you're telling me, it
sounds like it might be 90% there, and just needs the last 10% to make
it work right.  If that's the case, then it shouldn't be a problem
getting the proper support into genkernel.  Right now, we just don't
want to touch it, though we'll gladly accept patches.  ;]

-- 
Chris Gianelloni
Release Engineering - Strategic Lead/QA Manager
Games - Developer
Gentoo Linux