[SoaS] [Sugar-devel] SOAS 2 problems

[Douglas McClendon]

On 01/24/2010 02:07 PM, Bernie Innocenti wrote:
> 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.

Bernie, please file a bug with fedora against livecd-tools.  I will 
craft a fix that at boot time, upon detecting a filled overlay on usb 
storage, automatically adds a second overlay based in ram (as the livecd 
or nonpersistent liveusb do normally).

In this way, you should always be able to boot.  I will add a text 
message displayed at the time, telling the user that the overlay is 
full, and that new changes will only be temporarily written to memory, 
and that they should copy any needed data to another device, and then 
reset their overlay at next boot by adding the kernel parameter 
'reset_overlay' when they next boot.

Now, the closest thing livecd-tools has to a maintainer at the moment is 
I think someone who considers me an obnoxious <expletive deleted> due to 
a prior exchange we had about a 1 line reversion of a reversion to the 
code.  Of course the feeling is mutual, but hopefully it won't interfere 
with the adoption of the above solution/workaround to the problem you 
described.

-dmc