[arch-releng] [PATCH] Allow using a USB device as read-write branch instead of tmpfs

Thomas Bächler thomas at archlinux.org
Mon Aug 24 05:54:47 EDT 2009


Dieter Plaetinck schrieb:
> If this is the patch that enables you to make all your changes persistent on the usb stick, then I love this.
> Maybe we could go further: do we even need unionning here at all?

We need unioning to keep the image creation consistent with CDs and to 
severely reduce the download size (remember that squashfs reduces the 
size considerably). What you are proposing is a normal installed system 
on a USB disk, we wouldn't need archiso to create that, but much leaner 
scripts that only create the root and copy it to a new filesystem.

Also, I'd like to have a USB image creator in the future, which takes an 
existing USB device (potentially with files on it) and installs the live 
system on it. It is much more convenient to just have 3 squashfs files 
here instead of a whole operating system.

The beauty of this approach is that you can simply delete the 
/livesystem folder from the USB stick and have the image in its original 
state.

We could still offer an option in archiso to just create a filesystem 
from the workdir instead of squashing and unioning - it has its uses.

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