1 |
%% Eric Edgar <rocket@g.o> writes: |
2 |
|
3 |
ee> Catalyst doesnt really support unionfs at the moment. You will |
4 |
ee> need to add unionfs to your isolinux loader script to get it to |
5 |
ee> work. |
6 |
|
7 |
"isolinux loader script"? |
8 |
|
9 |
ee> unionfs=/path/to/block device will let you use a formatted device |
10 |
ee> as the place to store changes. This code is VERY experimental and |
11 |
ee> is currently just starting to be supported. It will not be in |
12 |
ee> official cds for sometime as no one has tested it all besides |
13 |
ee> myself. |
14 |
|
15 |
Hm. I had it working with the previous genkernel/catalyst, with a |
16 |
custom linuxrc, but took out what I had in favor of the new support; |
17 |
maybe I was too hasty :-). |
18 |
|
19 |
|
20 |
The way I had it working was twofold: first, I used it even in the |
21 |
livecd situation where there was no formatted device; in this case the |
22 |
"top" filesystem in the union, the RW one, was a ramdisk. The advantage |
23 |
here is that I could avoid the long tmpfs copy step (by far the slowest |
24 |
step) during boot: instead of copying all the modifiable directory |
25 |
structures (/etc, /var, etc.) to a ramdisk I just used the unionfs to |
26 |
overlay the RO partition and I was done. |
27 |
|
28 |
Secondly, as you say, it could be used as a persistent storage. In this |
29 |
case I had the linuxrc try to mount disk devices (using /sys/block/...) |
30 |
until I found one with a special token file in the root of the |
31 |
filesystem. I had it hardcoded to ext3 so I didn't need to worry about |
32 |
different filesystem types. If I found an ext3 filesystem with that |
33 |
token file in the root I would use that as the top (RW) element in the |
34 |
unionfs. |
35 |
|
36 |
|
37 |
Anyway, for the time being I'm mostly interested in the first item: |
38 |
speeding up the boot. As things are turning out it's going to be more |
39 |
important in my project to be able to install the whole thing to disk |
40 |
and boot off of disk, than to boot off of CD with a persistent storage. |
41 |
However, unionfs really helps me in two ways anyway: first is the boot |
42 |
time from CD as I mentioned above. Second is the copy time to the HD |
43 |
partition, which can also benefit. |
44 |
|
45 |
-- |
46 |
------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
47 |
Paul D. Smith <psmith@××××××.com> HASMAT--HA Software Mthds & Tools |
48 |
"Please remain calm...I may be mad, but I am a professional." --Mad Scientist |
49 |
------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
50 |
These are my opinions---Nortel Networks takes no responsibility for them. |
51 |
-- |
52 |
gentoo-catalyst@g.o mailing list |