Hello there,
I've recently been working on a very similar project, making a CD bootable system based on Mandrake 8.2. Running upon this project, I found it quite interesting, and thought maybe I could get a developers take on some questions/comments based on what I've learned on my own, and what I've read about V-L. Unfortunately I haven't been able to d/l it and give it a try (modem only at home) so I haven't been able to look at your distro directly.
From what I've read here, VL basically boots into an initrd which symlinks the whole system to a cloop mounted loopback file. I've played with cloop a bit, but right now I've got mine booting with the CD as root, and no initrd. It also doesn't use any compression yet either, but I was intending to add zisofs eventually which is built into the default mandrake 8.2 kernel. Have any of you guys played with zisofs when you were designing this distro? If so any comments on usability or performance? I have heard that cloop improves performance.
As for hardware autodetection, does VL rely on kudzu only, or have you added something. I read something about multiple config files for all the video cards for X. I'm very curious how you have this set up. I have not yet had much chance to try my project on different machines, so I have not assessed its robustness as much as I would like to.
Currently I have rc.sysinit setup to iterate through /dev/discs/disc*/part* to look for loopback files to mount etc and home to (if none are found it uses tmpfs and files stored in .etc and .home). Also with a boot commandline parameter it will mount home via an smb share. There seems like there must be a cleaner and more flexible way to check for local filesystems, though without devfs it would be uglier. The most annoying thing is that I've been test mounting only vfat partitions as mount knows about no filesystems that early in the boot. I have also been considering creating an fstab on the fly, but its only given me headaches so far. Any tips in this arena would be quite welcome
I look forward to learning more about this interesting project.
I have also tried various tricks to detect and mount filesystems, with very different results .
My current approach is to add a few real devices like /dev/hda?-hdh? ,shut down devfsd
loop through them and compare to what the kernel has found (demesg), compare primary devices with fdisk to find eventual swap devices, then add numbers to the found primary devices like /dev/hda1 until all has been found .
After that another loop checks for mountable filesystems on present devices, checks wether they are already mounted, and mounts everything possible, then the script adds
desktop links and fstab entries for the devices found ...
Eventual swap devices and compatible raid systems is also mounted without user intervention , settings saved to harddrive during previous settings is loaded, etc .
You can have a look at my vlutil script if you like .. it can be found in the forums, or be mailed from me . (not nicely written ..)
Gaa..does atleast work ..
I have tried to use devfs and devfsd , but it seems to be rather confusing for mount, and does not work very reliable .
About hardware detection:
I use Kudzu for Hw autodetect, no changes there exept for a removed hardware database and files like XF8sconfig and all of the others, the system is entirely clean at every boot .
The thing you had read about added config, is simply that i have added every x related
package found in Mandrake 8, Xservers and stuff alike.
In all, this approach works normally very well, there arn't that much people complaining
about hw problems, VL has been downloaded close to 150,000 times, and i have maybe 30-50 complaints / release regarding to incompability, and that is pretty nice from my point of view .
Cloop Rulez , ihave tried both zisofs and other compressed filesystems, but cloop is the fastest i'v ever seen, fileaccess is very fast as the fat table lives in ram etc ..
Hi there,
Thanks for getting back to me. I think you've helped me out in a few places. Thanks for the insight on the cloop, I had settled on using ziosfs for simplicitys sake, but I think I will look back into it hearing about your experiences. I was never able to get it to mount properly in my initrd. One thing I was curious about was why you don't mount the cloop system as root directly? I suppose it wouldn't make much difference in much, as it works out about the same. Any thoughts?
What you mentioned about removing config files also might help a lot. I have been having trouble with autodetection, but all I have removed is hwconfig. Did you remove all of sysconfig? If you could clue me into all the config files you took out to make kudzu detect properly I would be very grateful.
Devfs can be a pain, but it seems to simplify things. I don't know about 8.1, as I jumped from 8.0 directly to 8.2, but devfs obviates the need to search for the CD, and simplifies the search for local partitions. The first CD will always be /dev/cdroms/cdrom0 and the local disks are always in /dev/discs. Of course, using devfs means one would have to make sure to remount it properly after pivot_root.
I would definately like to see the vlutil script. I couldn't find it in the forums anywhere.
Definately sounds like a good track record. Compatability problems are inevitable to some degree in any distro release. This is a very neat project, and really fills a much desired niche which hasn't gotten a lot of attention from other distributors.
Thanks! However it seems to be compressed somehow. I've tried to uncompress it using UPX but it doesn't seem to take. However at the moment I'm stuck on a Win box so that might have something to do with it.
Hmm, i have stumbled on that before, it is version incompat between early versions of upx ... or maybee because i have tampered a little with the upx i use )
Tip, use the upx version found in vlutil distro ..
i.ll reboot and copy in the most recently published vlutil , then paste it in here or mail it to dave for submission to the download area.
I forgot to answer your question about directmounted cloop images as root .
The provblem with that is , first of all that the cloop image is mounted read only, right ?
That causes about everything to stop working, as we need lots of places writable, like /etc, /root, /tmp and so on .
To make that happen, we must mount other small images ontop of / to make it work, if we use a cloop image as root ..
I would love to get my hands on an updated version of the now lost VirtualFS, it could have handled all of this like a dream .
If u have'nt heard of it before, virtual fs makes writing possible to a non writable fs, by
automagic saving changes to a writable folder in ram, keeps logs a bit like jfs etc .
Developpment stopped a couple of years ago, so i guess that all hope is gone ..
Btw, what have you called your Cd Bootable version ?
Is it published somewhere ?
All new ideas is worth a look ..
