Dave Miner wrote: > Alan DuBoff wrote: >> On Monday 29 January 2007 03:30 pm, Dave Miner wrote: >>> [...] >>> with our read-only /usr for diskless clients. God knows the Live Media >>> project would be a lot easier if we already had this ;-) >> >> Dave, >> >> The way I think about this, Gnome would still be able to update /usr, >> given root access, just that it would be laid over the top of what >> was a read-only FS. A user might still need to change a file/binary, >> sendmail being the classic example I 'spose. >> >> In this scenario, you would always be guaranteed to have a clean >> bootable filesystem, since it is treated as a ROM. Only that it can >> actually be updated. >> >> I suspect this wouldn't be a simple project, it would take some thought. >> > > No question about that. I'm pretty lukewarm on this sort of UnionFS > approach, though; it seems to add layers of complication and cost > without a counterbalancing level of improvement. And I'm really > unclear on how well such an approach would interact with our desire to > move decisively to ZFS as our primary file system and leverage > snapshots and clones for the operations which they obviously would > benefit.
Most of the UnionFS features like snapshots overlap with ZFS and ZFS does a much better job of handling those. The only benefit of using UnionFS would be in the area of Install/Live media where a minimal UnionFS port will suffice. Compare a ramdisk just 10-20MB in size vs the current 256+ Meg. Regards, Moinak.
