More robust iso

Summary

Make SoaS .isos more robust by removing the compressed CoW indirection layer for root fs / sole partition.

Owner

This feature does not yet have an owner.

This should link to your home wiki page so we know who you are

Name: Your Name

Include you email address that you can be reached should people want to contact you about helping with your feature, status is requested, or technical issues need to be resolved

Email: <your email address so we can contact you, invite you to meetings, etc.>

Current status

Targeted release: SoaS v4
Last updated: Mchua 18:36, 11 June 2010 (EDT)
Percentage of completion: 0%

Detailed Description

SoaS sticks regularly fail in an irrecoverable manner after a certain volume of writes to the image; when the overlay runs out of storage, it corrupts the entire overlay the compressed ext3 filesystem fails when the overlay runs out of storage.

normal fs = "sorry, can't write your file that you just tried to write cause the disk is full"

overlay fs = "sorry, can't write your file and I just corrupted everything you ever wrote to the overlay".

Our current thinking is that this goal is achievable with a bit of scripting that takes the livecd-tools .iso image we get now and...

creates a pre-partitioned disk image (cue loads of partition / cylinder /etc. nuances here)
unrolls the livecd-tools' nested filesystems and copies the contents to the disk image from #1
does any hacking of the filesystem contents necessary to remove any undesirable assumptions about the livecd-tools' filesystem configuration.

Benefit to SoaS

SoaS stick failure is inevitable after a certain volume of writes right now because the overlay will run out of the finite amount of space it has. This eliminates this method of stick failure.

#1798 is the relevant ticket.

Scope

What work do the developers have to accomplish to complete the feature in time for release? Is it a large change affecting many parts of the distribution or is it a very isolated change? What are those changes?

UI Design

Does the feature have a direct impact on the work flow, or does it need a UI? Link here mockups, or add detailed descriptions.

How To Test

More robust iso/Testing

User Experience

If this feature is noticeable by its target audience, how will their experiences change as a result? Describe what they will see or notice.

Dependencies

What other packages (RPMs) depend on this package? Are there changes outside the developers' control on which completion of this feature depends? In other words, does your feature depend on completion of another feature owned by someone else or that you would need to coordinate, which might cause you to be unable to finish on time? Other upstream projects like Python?

Contingency Plan

If you cannot complete your feature by the final development freeze, what is the backup plan? This might be as simple as "None necessary, revert to previous release behaviour." Or it might not. If your feature is not completed in time, we want to assure others that other parts of Sugar will not be in jeopardy.

Documentation

Is there upstream documentation on this feature, or notes you have written yourself? Has this topic been discussed in the mailing list or during a meeting? Link to that material here so other interested developers can get involved.

The below links are not sorted, but are here for reference when this feature proposal is being written up in more detail. Not all of them may be useful, as a warning for the next person to tackle this page. Mchua 19:04, 11 June 2010 (EDT)

Release Notes

The Sugar Release Notes inform end-users about what is new in the release. An Example is 0.84/Notes. The release notes also help users know how to deal with platform changes such as ABIs/APIs, configuration or data file formats, or upgrade concerns. If there are any such changes involved in this feature, indicate them here. You can also link to upstream documentation if it satisfies this need. This information forms the basis of the release notes edited by the release team and shipped with the release.

Comments and Discussion

See discussion tab for this feature