[SoaS] An Introduction

[David Farning]

On Wed, Jan 27, 2010 at 4:10 AM, Xander Pirdy <xander.pirdy at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello Everyone,
> My name is Alexander Pirdy. I am a new follower of this mailing list (as of
> Sunday) and just wanted to take a minute to introduce myself, and what I am
> doing

Always good to see someone posting at 4:30 in the morning.   The quite
house with the dog gently snoring on his bed next to my desk make
mornings rather pleasant.

> I was assigned to work on this project by Caroline Meeks, in the hopes of
> being able to help figure out a solution, or at least explore options to the
> problems that some sticks are having with the overlay becoming corrupted and
> preventing booting.
> I have been trying to follow these posts but I am getting lost in all of the
> nested responses; the first thing that I am going to do is to create a wiki
> page so that this can be a bit more organized and we can hopefully take a
> more systematic approach. I am still just trying to understand this problem.
>
> To me it seems likely that this is just linked to running out of space on
> the squashfs file, if not then it seems like we have two distinct problems.
> I will create a brief wiki about it tonight and will expand it over the next
> couple of days.
> It would be really helpful for me if everyone that has seen this problem
> could detail how they set their stick up, what size they made the overlay
> file, what happened when they ran into trouble, what they were doing when
> trouble was noticed and their ideas on potential solutions, and the
> shortcomings of each solution. For example moving to a full installation on
> the stick may incur a penalty for lacking as diverse of hardware support,
> and reducing drive life (www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Live_usb) though this may be
> insignificant. It also may make creation of these sticks more difficult, and
> may reduce the robustness of the system (replacing the overlay fixes the
> problem right?).  From what I have heard from David Farning, full installs
> last an order of magnitude longer than the live-type of installs with his
> setups and tests, though I am unsure if they crash in different ways, or if
> there is just more free space on a full install (I doubt by a factor of 10
> though).
> It would also be helpful for me if anyone has tests or suites of tests that
> they would like to see run successfully on the sticks. (I think I saw
> something about dd'ing a bunch of info). Also if anyone has already worked
> out a roadmap towards a solution and want to share it that could save me
> some time.
> At the very least it looks like this system needs to be made to crash more
> gracefully (if running out of space can't be avoided), even with just a
> warning.
> One last note: If the plan is to move to SoaS being based on Ubuntu I doubt
> that this issue will persist in the same form.

I have _no_ interest in moving SoaS to Ubuntu!  I have a _huge_
interesting in creating an ecosystem were the '.deb'ers and the
'.rpm'ers compete on the merits of the their products and... branch
and merge as they learn from one another to make Sugar awesome.

david

> Can anyone replicate the
> issue with Ubuntu?  What are the thoughts on the architecture of running it
> on Ubuntu, should it switch to a casper-rw/home-rw partition type
> persistence? Can that setup be accomplished with a squashfs file (so that
> the sticks don't have to be formated or partitioned)?
> I look forward to working with all of you, and hopefully working this (and
> future) issue(s) out,
> Thank you,
> Alexander
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