What about unionfs, aufs or overlayfs to stack togheter squashfs

[Roberto A. Foglietta]

I found this document

http://aufs.sourceforge.net/aufs2/report/sq/sq.pdf

and wikipedia says about squashfs

It is often combined with a union mount filesystem, such as UnionFS, OverlayFS, or aufs, to provide a read-write environment for live Linux distributions.

Anyone have take in consideration to use this approach to fasten tce-load extensions?

[nick65go]

He he, no way! in tinycore you have already RW environment
Do you remenmber that the rootfs ( / ) is in RAM? And the $PATH search order? (hit: /home/tc/local/bin)
If you like to over-write (ex: /usr/bin or /usr/local/bin) you can do it.
/usr/bin is in RAM ; /usr/local/bin includes symbolic-linked from /tmp/tcloop/*/bin.
So you can replace whatever you want in RAM. Wonderful simple, is it not?

[Rich]

Hi Roberto A. Foglietta
Those other file systems were considered. You will have to search the forum if you want to know why they aren't used.
The squashfs extensions are intentionally read only to make it difficult to modify them either accidentally or maliciously.

[nick65go]

Anyone have take in consideration to use this approach to fasten tce-load extensions?

faster LOAD of many extensions? why not combine all you need in a super extension so you only load one?
tinycore wiki is your friend about how to do it.

[Roberto A. Foglietta]

Hi Roberto A. Foglietta
The squashfs extensions are intentionally read only to make it difficult to modify them either accidentally or maliciously.

I mean, keeping the squash extensions but stack with unionfs for example instead of using links.

[nick65go]

@roberto: do you know that one goal in TC is to REMOVE an extension on the fly, without rebooting?
I do not know about unionfs mounting, but with linked squashfs is simple, and is working.

What improvment (seconds in loading speed) do you get and for which (how many) tcz in the same time?
FYI: for my needs (firefox, vlc, ffmpeg, libreoffice), if we talk about big/fat dinosaurus, is about 3-8 seconds loading. Regarding "productivity", for me, if I would spend 3-5 hours one-off to design/test/change/test etc, then is not worth it; I need 3 times/day mounting x 30 days/month x 12 months x 3 years to recover "my investment" in this project. IMMV.

[Roberto A. Foglietta]

@roberto: do you know that one goal in TC is to REMOVE an extension on the fly, without rebooting?
I do not know about unionfs mounting, but with linked squashfs is simple, and is working.

Nice to know. AFAIK, unionfs-fuse is not suitable for the task of merging squashfs on root.
Possibly unionfs implemented in kernel space might do the magic.
However, it is a way which I am not going to follow further.