[SoaS] [Sugar-devel] SOAS 2 problems

[Bernie Innocenti]

On Sun, 2010-01-24 at 14:34 +1200, David Leeming wrote:
> I am sorry that I am a little slow on the uptake.
> Blueberry SOAS2 seems to work OK. I have used LiveUSBCreator
> and it's installed on a flash drive. Is this what you are
> recommending? We have done this on several PCs and notebooks
> and it is fine, although I admit we haven't really pushed it. 
> 
> Are you saying that there is a risk that whilst in use,
> there is a chance that they could render it inoperable?
> If so, no worries as it can simply be re-flashed, we can
> live with that.   

Have you tried writing to the journal until you fill up the overlay
space?

Unless I'm seriously misunderstanding how LVM snapshots work, this
should systematically make the flash drive inoperable until reformatted,
and all data inaccessible.

This is not a random bug, it's the result of copy-on-write becoming
read-only due to lack of spare blocks and the ext3 filesystem being
unwilling to mount itself without first committing the journal. Each
subsystem is doing the "right thing" individually, but the resulting
interaction results in this very unfortunate behavior.

Hope I'm not being too technical :) The bottom line is: we shouldn't be
doing this in SoaS, no matter what upstream is doing. Upstream is wrong
in doing it.

My understanding is that Fedora would also like to get this problem
fixed, but the live usb tools package is currently missing a full-time
maintainer and, thus, the fix is not happening.

The fix for us is easier, because we don't really need any of the fancy
things that livecd-iso-to-disk does. All we need to do is stop
mentioning it in our wiki and switch to liveinst, as Peter Robinson
suggests, or any other tool that does the (rather trivial) job of
transferring an ext3 image onto a (flash) drive.

-- 
   // Bernie Innocenti - http://codewiz.org/
 \X/  Sugar Labs       - http://sugarlabs.org/