Gentoo Archives: gentoo-embedded

From: Ed W <lists@××××××××××.com>
To: gentoo-embedded@l.g.o
Subject: Re: [gentoo-embedded] quickpkg and PKG_INSTALL_MASK
Date: Fri, 27 Jan 2012 19:09:15
Message-Id: 4F22E9D1.9070509@wildgooses.com
In Reply to: Re: [gentoo-embedded] quickpkg and PKG_INSTALL_MASK by Todd Goodman
1 On 26/01/2012 13:30, Todd Goodman wrote:
2 > * Joakim Tjernlund<joakim.tjernlund@×××××××××.se> [120126 05:38]:
3 > [..]
4 >> When you update the RO layer you will be back to a single copy, the previous
5 >> release which is only in the overlay is gone, right?
6 > That's up to you. You can manage your updates however you want. For
7 > example, you can have your RO layer loop mounted out of a release image
8 > and have two (or more) different RW areas depending on which image
9 > you're running. That can allow you to fallback from an update fairly
10 > easily.
11
12 Indeed.
13
14 So for example I am trying something a bit like the Slax distro:
15 - I produce a base distro that will hopefully change very slowly. This
16 has the minimal software for any other base (uclibc, busybox, few tools ...)
17 - I produce a faster moving update that has real software on it (eg I
18 need Dovecot/Postfix, some other stuff)
19 - I have a final overlay with "my" software on, ie integration stuff
20 (this is the web apps, very specific stuff to this build, etc. note
21 this may turn out to be a wrong move - considering combining this with
22 the step above...)
23 - I bind mount some other stuff over the top of this, eg my kernel
24 /lib/modules is in a squashfs and bind mounted into this. Therefore I
25 can update the kernel separately to all of the above.
26
27
28 The goal of this chain was to minimise the *size* of updates. Your goal
29 might be different and hence have fewer/more layers. I also considered
30 the possibility of "shims" between the faster moving layers above. The
31 motivation was to be able to do little micro updates without rebuilding
32 a whole layer (my layers are perhaps 10MB+ and the users have expensive
33 and slow bandwidth, so being able to ship a 50KB shim to fix something
34 is better than a 10MB module - not convinced yet, but sharing the idea...)
35
36 Don't feel this is right for you. Just highlighting how you could use
37 an overlay filesystem. Also see the Slax distribution for an example
38 which takes this to extremes (software installs are just overlay modules
39 to a basic core system - very clever)
40
41 Good luck
42
43 Ed W