Ed W wrote: > > Have you considered an approach which DOES use aufs for the rootfs, but > stacks only read-only images? The idea is to break the system up into > some read-only modules which can be stacked together. The top level > always needs to be slightly writable, but of course I accept this can be > solved in lots of ways including symlinks to a writable partition, aufs, etc >
When we were working on our quick boot product, one of the products we examined was Splashtop from DeviceVM. It's the product used by Asus' "Express Gate" motherboards. http://www.splashtop.com/indexsplash.php They do something very similar - software sets are squashfs modules that are mounted on top of everything else. There are some good articles dissecting it at Phoronix. As a proof of concept, I gave it a try and expanded some debian packagages of software that were fairly self contained without too many dependencies (the Gimp, OpenOffice, etc), packed them up as a squashfs and set up a bunch of scripts that would look for all these packs in a directory and mount them. Worked quite well and I didn't notice any significant slowdown. We actually do a fair bit of benchmarking and we've found that mounting squashfs/aufs is really quite fast and not a significant percentage of overhead. cheers, Kris ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Let Crystal Reports handle the reporting - Free Crystal Reports 2008 30-Day trial. Simplify your report design, integration and deployment - and focus on what you do best, core application coding. Discover what's new with Crystal Reports now. http://p.sf.net/sfu/bobj-july
