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Booting squashfs from local filesystem



Hello there,

I have set up an infrastructure that boots squashfs from the network via nbd.
Now I am trying to integrate notebooks into the same infrastructure.

The notebooks should boot the same image as the desktop computers, but since
they cannot be relied on to be on the network all the time, what I intend to
do is:

 * Set up a small ext3 partition on the notebook
 * copy the squashfs onto the ext3 partition
 * set up extlinux on the notebook
 * load the squashfs locally, instead of loading from nbd

I am confident that I can build a squashfs in a way, that it works in both
setups. I am also at a point where I have installed the partition and got
extlinux working. I am an experienced user of pxelinux/syslinux suite. The
initramfs is built using the live-boot package. Squashfs-support is also
enabled.

The problem: I cannot figure out the right boot command line, to load the
squashfs root image from an ext3 partition.
Digging through the boot scripts I have come up with:

(from /proc/cmdline)
BOOT_IMAGE=vmlinuz initrd=initrd.img boot=live \
  plainroot fromiso=/dev/sda1 root=stretch.squash

or

BOOT_IMAGE=vmlinuz initrd=initrd.img boot=live \
  plainroot bootfrom=/dev/sda1 root=stretch.squash

however when I am dropped off in the initramfs shell, I find /live/medium to
be empty and /dev/sda1 not mounted. I can mount the fs manually. I can also
see a successful mount attempt scrolling through during the boot, but in the
end the script does not find the squash image residing in the fs root.

Before I go crazy over the entangled variables, functions, and branches in
/var/live/boot, is anyone on this list familiar enough with the system to tell
me what would be the correct boot line here?

Thank you very much.
-- 
Paul Hänsch

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