Package: wnpp
Severity: wishlist
* Package name : confinedrv
Version : 1.7.7-4
Upstream Author : Elmar Stellnberger
* URL : https://www.elstel.org/qemu/
* License : GPLv3
Programming Lang: bash
Description : a script to confine individual partitions to
read-only or no access
confinedrv can be used to boot with qemu or similar virtualization
software into another operating system installed on disk. If you have
installed multiple operating systems into mutiple partitions you can not
boot a second OS via qemu because you would need to give full write
access to the same disk. However if the whole disk is accessed by two
operating system instances in parallel that will cause disk corruption
because there is no synchronization of these accesses. The solution
confinedrv provides is to make the OS partition read write and all other
partitions read-only so that they can not be written to and thereby
possibly corrupted. Of course the OS partition must not be mounted by
the host OS. You can also exclude read access for given partitions which
will however still be visible in the partition table. confinedrv uses
dmsetup and losetup internally to control access via device mapper. The
partitions need to be aligned by the page size (usually 4096 Bytes) to
make this work. However for modern SSDs this is the case by default.