[SoaS] [Sugar-devel] SOAS 2 problems

[Walter Bender]

On Mon, Jan 25, 2010 at 12:08 AM, Douglas McClendon
<dmc.sugar at filteredperception.org> wrote:
> 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

It would also be really great to get a non-zero default value for
Persistent Storage. I filled a ticket on this a while ago. I cannot
image it is more than a one-line patch, but it would eliminate a large
class of bug reports: "my journal didn't save between sessions", so it
is a *huge win* from the support perspective. (As I said in the
ticket, I imagine that 0 was taken as the default because of the
CD-ROM lineage and I can imagine that if the goal is simply to use
LiveUSB images as demonstrations of Fedora in place of CDs, it makes
sense. I don't know enough about the latter scenario (and others) to
know if a bit of persistent storage is a problem.)

-walter

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-- 
Walter Bender
Sugar Labs
http://www.sugarlabs.org