[Sugar-devel] Hello, was Re: Hack to get a USB/SD to autologin to only "Sugar-desktop on a stick". from a F12-alpha live CD

[Douglas McClendon]

Martin Dengler wrote:

>> I am suggesting that ease of installation to another medium is not
>> longer the primary usecase for SoaS.
> 
> Caroline continues to ask for easy ways to duplicate a stick.

zyx-liveinstaller should be one way to duplicate sticks in the sense of going 
from one LiveOS to many StickOS's.  liveusb-creator or livecd-iso-to-disk 
should be existing methods of creating duplicate LiveUSBs.

> 
>> The primary use case is now running Sugar and the underlying OS as
>> natively as possible on the removable solid state media.  The primary
>> goals are now reliability and speed.
> 
> What does "as natively as possible" mean?

I'm guessing it means running a ext3/4/ubi/btrfs filesystem as the rootfs on a 
partition of the stick, instead of the LiveUSB form of an ext4 as rootfs 
mounted from an image file in a squashed-fs image file, residing on a vfat or 
other filesystem on a partition of the stick, possibly with a readwrite 
devicemapper overlay which could reside on the same partition on the stick, or 
a different partition.

-dmc


> 
>> The issue is not that overlays are bad/good or real file systems.  The
>> issue is, can SoaS improve stick reliable  and speed by eliminating
>> the overlays and writing the _contents_ of the overlay directly onto
>> the solid state device
> 
> Is what you're saying that it's easier to corrupt a bit on the overlay
> than it is to corrupt a bit on a non-overlay fs?
> 
>> using a file systems which is aware of the design characteristics of
>> current generations of USB keys.
> 
> Please clarify what you mean.
> 
>> I have been conducting some very initial tests using WAD's SD card
>> test tools.
> 
> Where can these be found?
> 
>> #1. Standard SOAS.
>> #2. Install the contents of the SoaS overlay to a usb key using
>> #   ext2.
> 
> Meaning what exactly?
> 
>> I am just running various methods of installing soas on USB sticks in
>> qemu directly from usb sticks using
>>
>> qemu  -hda /dev/sd*
>>
>> My initial runs using the cheapest drives I could find at best buy
>> indicate that #2 has at least 10X the lifetime as #1.
> 
> What are the units in which you're measuring "lifetime"?
> 
>> david
> 
> Martin