[arch-releng] [RFC] [PATCH] [archiso] Add support for squashfs compression types

[Gerardo Exequiel Pozzi]

  On 10/17/2010 07:12 PM, Thomas Bächler wrote:
> Am 17.10.2010 23:55, schrieb Gerardo Exequiel Pozzi:
>>> The aforementioned test images are here:
>>> http://alberich.archlinux.org/misc/testiso/
>>>
>>> As for the "hacked" part:
>>> 1) I built kernel26-live with squashfs-lzma and aufs in the kernel (will
>>> become an [extra] package maybe?).
>> Sounds good. What patches are you using? Is not posible/easy to build
>> only "sqfslzma" module? (plus a trivial patch for add lzma "as
>> supported" in kernel26 package).
> No, the part that was rejected by Linus was making the lzma decompressor
> available to non-init code. The changes to the squashfs module are
> rather small.
>
> http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/pkl/squashfs-lzma.git;a=summary
> The last 6 patches can be cleanly rebased upon 2.6.35.7, that's what I use.
OK.
>> (We have a party when we lzma + Val's writable overlays in Linux vanilla
>> :P)
> We can try porting archiso to union-mounts soon and see how that works out.
Interesting. I never experimented with this, only read the documentation.
We need a patched util-linux-ng. (I guess the patch for e2fsprogs is not 
needed because writable branch will be tmpfs in our case).

>>> 2) I removed tiacx and ndiswrapper as I didn't want to build any
>>> external modules for now (Can we drop them from the ISO?).
>> I don't know I never used that.
> The tiacx has no future, and ndiswrapper is almost dead these days.
OK.
>>> 3) I patched syslinux-iso to pacman -Rn kernel26 (this is ugly, but I
>>> see no better way).
>> another workaround can be in Makefile
>>
>> - mkarchiso -p base create $(WORKDIR)
>> + mkarchiso -p $(shell pacman -Sgq base | grep -v ^kernel26$) create
>> $(WORKDIR)
> If we do not insist on using the base group, why not?
Sorry, I did not understand this. Could you put it another way?

Are you saying that do not "force" in install all the base packages, 
only a selection?

>>> On another note, archisobasedir was broken (still is in the test
>>> images), and converting an ISO to run from a subfolder requires some
>>> sed-work. Maybe it would be easier to just have everything in the
>>> archlinux/ subfolder on the ISO, so that remastering onto another medium
>>> will be less messy (I copied the ISO to a FAT32 into an archlinux/
>>> subfolder, adjusted archisolabel, archisobasedir, installed syslinux(FAT
>>> version) and changes some paths here and there - I now have an Arch
>>> system contained entirely in a subfolder on my USB).
>>>
>> Yes I want this, seems that other people too :)
>> In these days I am busy, but I can experiment on this in some days.
> Then the easiest thing to do is move all files to archlinux/ (including
> isomounts) and set archisobasedir=archlinux/.
>
So the medium, by default created by archiso will look like:

/
/boot/
/archlinux/ isomounts *.sqfs

and by archiso2dual:

/
/boot/
/archlinux/ isomounts*
/archlinux/any/ *.sqfs
/archlinux/i686/ *.sqfs
/archlinux/x86_64/ *.sqfs

OK?

-- 
Gerardo Exequiel Pozzi
\cos^2\alpha + \sin^2\alpha = 1