Re: Hurd advocacy? Bootable (Knoppix-like) CD?
On Thu, Aug 21, 2003 at 02:40:46PM +0200, Niels M?ller wrote:
> Marcus Brinkmann <Marcus.Brinkmann@ruhr-uni-bochum.de> writes:
>
> > Well, I think that the above procedure is mostly useful for diskless
> > booting. For the CD Rom, a unionfs seems to be the better approach to me,
> > as it saves a lot of RAM.
>
> Right, unionfs should be well suited for this. Then you need at least
> three filesystem processes: The cd-rom, a ramdisk (tmpfs or some ext2
> on an image), and the unionfs. Which should be the root filesystem?
The root filesystem would be the unionfs of course, with ext2fs using the
CD Rom filesystem as the readonly fs, and tmpfs on top of that to store
modifications.
The boot filesystem would be ext2fs. It would later see that on its root
node there is a translator setting and start up the translator. This
translator would be unionfs. It would of course need to have the tmpfs
translator configured. Maybe unionfs could be hacked to support such a
translator internally (as making a read only fs writable seems to be a
common operation, common enough to have special support in unionfs for
that), or it could be configured to use /tmp-live, which would exist in the CD
ROM filesystem and has tmpfs on it.
> Does it work to install active and/or passive translators, in
> particular unionfs, on / ?
It should work. It probably doesn't, but that's how it should be setup and
made work.
Thanks,
Marcus
--
`Rhubarb is no Egyptian god.' GNU http://www.gnu.org marcus@gnu.org
Marcus Brinkmann The Hurd http://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/
Marcus.Brinkmann@ruhr-uni-bochum.de
http://www.marcus-brinkmann.de/
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