Re: installing debian onto a loopback mounted root fs
On Mon, Nov 08, 1999 at 02:19:21PM -0500, Adam Di Carlo wrote:
> Goswin Brederlow <goswin.brederlow@student.uni-tuebingen.de> writes:
>
> > Chris Cheney <ccheney@cheney.cx> writes:
> >
> > > [1 <text/plain; us-ascii (7bit)>]
> > > Has anyone looked into installing debian into a loopback mounted
> > > root partition? For example having a fileon a fat fs that contains
> > > all of linux, to avoid having to repartition the hard drive. This
> > > seems like it could be very useful for new users wanting to try out
> > > linux but do not understand how to repartition a drive or don't want
> > > to risk resizing it.
> >
> > I´m working on something similar, a live-filesystem. It boots via
> > bootdisk, CD or loadlin.exe and tries to find a partition or cdrom
> > containing the live-filesystem as loopback file. That gets attached to
> > a loopback device and then the booting continues from there.
> >
> > The reason for a loopback device is that I want to use the e2xt
> > compression filesystem to reduce the size and to have the loopback
> > file on any filesystem including dos.
>
> Would it be possible to complete the dbootstrap work to support this
> as well? It seems that we're pretty close, and you obviously have
> expertise on what's involved.
I've just noticed there seems to be a bug in mount. It can't fsck
loopback devices at boot time. Actually what happens is that, for
example, I have some lines like
/newroot/local-main-x11 /local/linux/debian/dists/potato/main/binary-i386/x11 ext2 rw,loop=/dev/loop5 0 0
/newroot/local-non-free /local/linux/debian/dists/potato/non-free ext2 rw,loop=/dev/loop6 0 0
/newroot/local-slink-main-i386-devel /local/linux/debian/dists/slink/main/binary-i386/devel ext2 rw,loop=/dev/loop7 0 0
in my fstab. If I put a non-0 pass number on them, fsck chokes because
it tries to fsck the file, not the loopback device and complains that
it's not a valid ext2 filesystem. It is, but it's not a block device.
After every reboot, I have to manually, umount, losetup, fsck, losetup
-d, and mount each of these filesystems.
I don't know if this will affect you or not since it seems you'll be
mounting the loopback device even earlier than this to read the root fs.
I've just submitted a bug on it (don't have the number back yet).
This would be a nice feature though - I have some systems on which I'd
use it.
Thanks for all your hard work,
Steve Bowman
>
> --
> .....Adam Di Carlo....adam@onShore.com.....<URL:http://www.onShore.com/>
>
>
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--
Steve Bowman <sbowman@goodnet.com><bowmanc@acm.org>
Buckeye, AZ
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