Arch Linux

ArchNemSyS

Member

Registered: 2012-02-29

Posts: 3

Construction of a Nested Loopback Squashfs

Currently trying to implement a 'nomad' archlinux live install (exists on Hdd) with persistence by way of DM snapshot Copy-on-Write.   

As described here:

File-systems in LiveCD by J. R. Okajima 2010/12
http://aufs.sourceforge.net/aufs2/report/sq/sq.pdf
Pages 4 - 9

Also:

device mapper in general
http://linuxgazette.net/114/kapil.html

I notice that the Archiso project has adopted dm snapshots

Can anyone point me in the right direction?

Thanks in advance
ArchNemsys

I recently discovered Archlinux after suffering dependency hell many other distros
(my fault being reliant the system to do package management thank you Pacman/AUR)
and have found the wiki, forum and community to exemplary resource.

djgera

Developer

From: Buenos Aires - Argentina

Registered: 2008-12-24

Posts: 723

Website

Re: Construction of a Nested Loopback Squashfs

This is what archiso exactly does, so what is your question?

Just copy the output of archiso to some place in hdd and thats all

ArchNemSyS

Member

Registered: 2012-02-29

Posts: 3

Re: Construction of a Nested Loopback Squashfs

Sorry for the long delay my system suffer a particularly bad brown out (fried power supply)
I have compiled an Archiso live dvd as per your suggestion and with the correct boot parameters I believe it is coming close to what I want.
Following guide here

https://kroweer.wordpress.com/2011/09/0 … -live-usb/
(“Excellent by the way”)

I should perhaps better clarify the system I am attempting to construct.
My need of a live “nomad” system clearly isn’t for portability,
However I have used many live systems over the years because I run several old computers with old slow (and potentially dieing dead) hard drives.
The hard drives along with peripherals never seem to get upgraded so the systems end up with reasonable cpu/ram even old but gaming gpu. So the largest bottleneck to the user experience is the harddrive speed.

Enter LZO compressed squashfs and that old harddrive runs like new. Now previously I used Aufs to get a transparent overlay this has clearly been superseded by the use of cow dm snapshots   
While I do believe with sufficient tinkering this could be achieved by the archiso scripts. Has anyone succeeded in integrating COW snapshots and squashfs to achieve transparent compression on a standard Arch install. 

Similar to https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Ma … ing_.2Fusr