Bug 7796

Summary:	Writable Live images
Product:	Mageia	Reporter:	Sander Lepik <mageia>
Component:	RPM Packages	Assignee:	ISO building group <isobuild>
Status:	RESOLVED FIXED	QA Contact:
Severity:	enhancement
Priority:	Normal	CC:	mageia, mageia, mageia, marcello.anni, marja11, sysadmin-bugs, thierry.vignaud
Version:	Cauldron
Target Milestone:	---
Hardware:	All
OS:	Linux
Whiteboard:
Source RPM:	draklive	CVE:
Status comment:

Description Sander Lepik 2012-10-15 09:51:36 CEST

Description of problem:

Some time after Mageia 2 release we talked about it and you maybe even had an idea how to do it. Now that we have new filesystem in use, might it be possible that it's even easier to do?

What i have in mind in general:
During Live boot Mageia will check if there is some partition (labeled as MGA-WRITABLE for example) that contains image (mga-writable.img for example) on the boot media and if there is then will mount it as needed to save all changes made after boot (new installed packages, etc).

Idea comes from this tutorial: http://www.mandrivauser.de/doku/doku.php?id=allgemein:tutorials:diystick_en

It's too much trouble for normal user. Creating partition and image shouldn't be that hard.

Or maybe you have even better idea, i don't know :)

Thierry Vignaud 2012-10-15 13:19:25 CEST

CC: (none) => mageia, thierry.vignaud

Comment 1 Sander Lepik 2013-03-02 09:53:16 CET

The link in above post is down. This link still has some info: http://lordikc.free.fr/wordpress/?page_id=158

Colin, I'm adding you too as this is something that must be done in initrd, AFAIK.

CC: (none) => mageia

Thierry Vignaud 2013-03-02 10:00:34 CET

Component: Release (media or process) => RPM Packages
Source RPM: (none) => draklive
Severity: normal => enhancement

Comment 2 Sander Lepik 2013-03-02 10:35:22 CET

Do we use draklive for creating our release media?

Comment 3 Manuel Hiebel 2013-03-02 11:41:48 CET

yep

Comment 4 Sander Lepik 2014-01-11 15:43:41 CET

http://askubuntu.com/questions/109413/how-do-i-use-overlayfs/109441#109441 - we probably need to do something like this during booting but I'm not sure if it should be done by systemd with some unit or should it be done already in initrd..

Comment 5 Colin Guthrie 2014-01-21 10:46:57 CET

This is actually something that is kinda of supported already. There are a bunch of initscripts that do this whole bind mounting things for writable folders, but personally I don't like that too much. I prefer something of a union-fs instead.

I was actually going to bring up a sort of related issue sometime soon... that of using btrfs for Live media. The idea being that we could layer subvolumes or snapshots (not sure of the terminology in btrfs land) where we would install:
1) Pristine basesystem-minimal
2) The desktop of choice
3) Customisations to make it run in live.

This way when "installing" the live CD we can actually copy from the snapshots directly, and NOT from the upper image and then tweak it to be non-live again later.

This would also be very nice IMO.

Anyway, off-topic for this bug :)

Yes, it should be possible, but I think Thomas is more clued up on the live structure than me.

Cheers

Marja Van Waes 2016-08-28 09:15:55 CEST

CC: (none) => marja11
Assignee: tmb => isobuild

Marcello Anni 2017-03-12 21:11:17 CET

CC: (none) => marcello.anni

Comment 6 Martin Whitaker 2019-02-03 00:14:22 CET

Persistence is supported by the Mageia-7 Live ISOs. If you add an extra partition to the USB stick after dumping the ISO, containing a Linux-compatible filesystem labelled 'mgalive-persist', that partition will be used as the upper layer of the overlayfs filesystem used for the live system.

The Mageia Isodumper tool has been enhanced to support adding this extra partition.

Resolution: (none) => FIXED
CC: (none) => mageia
Status: NEW => RESOLVED