Arch Linux

drag0nius

Member

Registered: 2013-04-20

Posts: 6

[SOLVED] UnionFS-ish filesystem alternatives?

UnionFS-Fuse does not seem to work with switch_root/pivot_root.
Ausf3 kernel is outdated.

The basic idea is to load read only system base over network and make it writeable using RAM (or some other form of local storage).
I think rootaufs/live CDs perfectly describe the problem.

Last edited by drag0nius (2013-06-30 23:53:06)

WonderWoofy

Member

From: Los Gatos, CA

Registered: 2012-05-19

Posts: 8,414

Re: [SOLVED] UnionFS-ish filesystem alternatives?

The aufs3-friendly kernel is not the only kernel in the AUR with the aufs3 patchset.  The pfkernel also has it I believe.  Also, if you are building from source anyway (via the AUR) it is pretty trivial to add the aufs3 patchset to the PKGBUILD.

drag0nius

Member

Registered: 2013-04-20

Posts: 6

Re: [SOLVED] UnionFS-ish filesystem alternatives?

Is there any sort of information on how to properly install it?

WonderWoofy

Member

From: Los Gatos, CA

Registered: 2012-05-19

Posts: 8,414

Re: [SOLVED] UnionFS-ish filesystem alternatives?

It is a patchset which is released against that latest stable kernels.  So all you have to do is either use the ABS and makepkg to build linux. You could first download and extract the sources, then patch it manually, then running makepkg with the 'e' switch to ensure that you use existing sources.  Or you could just include the patchset into the sources array (with the md5sum of course) and then just include the patching in the part of the PKGBUILD where the console-log-level.patch is applied.  If you know just a little bit of bash, it is not all that hard.

Of course, if you want to use the pf-kernel, you couldjust use that.  There is a package in teh AUR for that.  Also I believe there is a binary pf-kernel repo as well (unofficial of course).  But these methods probably won't teach you anything about how aweseom the build tools in Arch really are.  They are so damn simple it is mind blowing.

Then you are going to need the aufs tools... whatever they are called.  One of the dependencies of them (last I checked) was the aufs_friendly kernel.  Of course, this is not the only kernel that is compatible, since we have already established above, the aufs patchset can be applied to any kernel.

Besides the aufs3 patchset, I know that the OpenWRT project has been happily using something called overlayfs for quite some time.  Again, it is a patchset, as is anything that is not included in the kernel.  But since CeroWRT is the variant of OpenWRT that is closest in kernel versions to us, I can only tell you that there must be overlayfs patches up to the latest 3.8 kernel.  But I have not checked where CeroWRT was at in a few weeks.  They very well may have moved to the 3.9 world by now.