From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: David Woodhouse To: Michael In-Reply-To: <20041217231645.79122.qmail@web52701.mail.yahoo.com> References: <20041217231645.79122.qmail@web52701.mail.yahoo.com> Content-Type: text/plain Date: Tue, 21 Dec 2004 12:39:26 +0000 Message-Id: <1103632766.6111.74.camel@localhost.localdomain> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Cc: linux-mtd@lists.infradead.org Subject: Re: Rootfs choice ideas List-Id: Linux MTD discussion mailing list List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , On Fri, 2004-12-17 at 15:16 -0800, Michael wrote: > And we can modify files freely. Yes but you don't _have_ to modify files freely. You can exercise a little restraint :) > However, there seem to be some disadvantages: > 1. Instead of versioning a fixed filesystem image (which you could > do with cramfs or initrd), you now manage a collection of files > each of which could change independently. Yes. This is usually done in packages -- by RPM or more usefully on an embedded system by something smaller like ipkg. Take a look at the Familiar distribution. > 2. It would be hard or impractical to check the entire image for > consistency, as you could with a cramfs image. 'rpm -Vva' Not sure if ipkg stores checksums of the installed files. > 3. I could perhaps run into problems when updating it, for > instance if the update fails part-way through. You reattempt the update after you come back up. > 4. There seems to be some overhead in scanning the rootfs at boot > time (yeah, there are recent changes that speed this up), and > garbage collection running in the background. (which is a seperate > issue) These are true. We're trying to improve it. > So, it's acting very much like a desktop (which can possibly > develope cruft), and very little like an embedded device (which > typically can't change). > > Does anyone share some of these same concerns (or perhaps others as > well)? What schemes have you used or seen, and how do they > compare? Basically it's up to you -- if you can manage to live with a read-only file system, as presumably you could since you seem to consider writeability a disadvantage, then you might as well stick with cramfs. -- dwmw2