On Fri, 2016-10-07 at 12:38 -0700, Adam Williamson wrote:

On Mon, 2016-10-03 at 20:03 +0000, John Florian wrote:


On Mon, 2016-10-03 at 12:07 -0700, Adam Williamson wrote:
If we do not 'support' livecd-iso-to-disk any more, we no longer
support:

1) persistent storage (via overlays)
2) non-destructive write


I've known for quite some time that livecd-tools was/is to be
replaced with livemedia-creator, but only now did I realize that lm-c
won't have persistent storage -- I simply have never had the time to
explore it.  I'm extremely dependent on the persistent storage as my
whole day job revolves around making hundreds of little mostly-
stateless appliances for data collection purposes and has so since
F13 or so.  These have been built with livecd-iso-to-disk and lots of
glue via specialized kickstarts and other custom packages.  These
appliances leverage a stateless OS very robustness, but do expect
some persistent storage for their management.  So the above certainly
caught my attention.



There's a slight misconception in the above.

livemedia-creator *creates the image files themselves*. We're not
talking about that in this thread. We're talking about the tools for
taking an image that's been created - whether by livecd-creator or
livemedia-creator or anything else - and writing them to a USB stick.


I'm fine with that and I think it matches my understanding/expectations.  Do 
one thing and do it we



The 'persistence' feature requires support both in the image itself and
in the tool used to write it. I believe livemedia-creator-produced
images are set up to support persistence, just like livecd-creator-
produced images were.


I suspect this "support within the image" overlaps with some of the glue to 
which I referred.  Once upon a time these live images auto-mounted their 
backing storage (where the immutable squashfs image is kept).  Then that 
stopped working and I had to write an init service to do the same.  Whether 
that service is still needed or not, I haven't investigated -- it's been 
working happily.



The issue here is that we are discussing what tools for *writing the
image to a USB stick* should be 'supported' / 'recommended' / whatever,
and we'd kinda like to drop livecd-iso-to-disk from that group, but it
is currently the only one of the 'write image to stick' tools which
supports persistence.

No-one's proposing dropping livecd-iso-to-disk entirely at present, so
you will still be able to attempt to write sticks with persistent
storage, but we are discussing effectively a downgrade in how much
testing it gets and how much we care if it's broken.


I'm fine with all that.  I certainly don't expect Fedora to cater to my 
specific needs, but I like to chime in now and then if it might help preserve 
some feature that everyone might otherwise feel is unused.



It is worth noting that we've never formally tested the persistence
features in any case, so we would never have blocked a release for
'persistence doesn't work right' anyhow. But at present we do, by
policy, block the release if writing sticks with livecd-iso-to-disk
doesn't work.


No worries there.  I/we've been testing it exhaustively.  When I push an update 
to hundreds a machines (most of which are headless/keyboard-less and ill-suited 
for such attachments and work) that all deploy it autonomously, it has to "just 
work".  Though I would never suggest our mutation reflects what the real Fedora 
is doing.  [:-)] ​





Are there plans to get persistent storage capabilities into lm-c?

Also, after much work I managed to get my live ISO spins generated
out of a private Koji setup.  I see there a warning "spin-livecd is
deprecated and will be replaced with spin-livemedia" -- I assume this
related, true?  If so, do any improvements to lm-c (say to add
persistence) automagically benefit the "spin-livemedia" method in
Koji?



Well, yeah. 'spin-livecd' is the Koji method for creating images with
livecd-creator; it's now deprecated and never used in the official
Fedora Koji instance, Fedora live images are all now created with the
'spin-livemedia' method. 'spin-livemedia' is the Koji method for
creating images with livemedia-creator.



So since what 'spin-livemedia' *does* is create a live image using
livemedia-creator, of course any changes to livemedia-creator will be
reflected when you create an image with the Koji 'spin-livemedia'
method.


Thanks for all the feedback Adam.  I'll start playing around with 
livemedia-creator to learn how my world needs to transform.  It will be 
interesting to see how this all dovetails with the stateless support[0] that 
the systemd folks have (had?) been working on.

[0] http://0pointer.net/blog/projects/stateless.html

--

John Florian <john.flor...@dart.biz<mailto:john.flor...@dart.biz>>
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