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ALSchwalm / pISO

Hardware and software source for the pISO
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/178023282/piso-the-most-versatile-flash-drive-yet?ref=user_menu
GNU General Public License v3.0
137 stars 35 forks source link

Couple of feature requests #54

Open asmagill opened 5 years ago

asmagill commented 5 years ago

For consideration, I have a couple of feature requests.

Firstly, for my use case, except when I travel, I'm expecting to mostly leave this plugged into one of my machines and then access the shares over the Wifi... it would be nice if a specific wifi definition could be marked for "auto-connection" on boot up so I don't have to select it in the menu each time I have to unplug/replug the device in.

And secondly, while I'm sure you hope it slows down soon, since there are updates occurring somewhat regularly, it would be useful if there was a way to apply the updated files without having to pull the device out and remove the SD card each time.

The ideas that came to my mind for how this might be implemented are:

  1. Make the /boot partition a mountable virtual drive through the pISO. I'm assuming that internally the partition is mounted for the pISO operating system, so this probably would require unmounting it internally when it is selected and then remounting it afterwards... not sure how often your code access it during normal use so no idea if this is even feasible.
  2. Allow the /boot partition to be shared over Wifi but not as an attached virtual drive. Likely easier programmatically than 1, but only useful if you're using a Pi Zero W.
  3. Like the ISOS folder, have a special folder which is scanned for each (a specific?) virtual drive for updated files and move/copy them when they change. Could be slow if all virtual drives are to be scanned.

And if this feature is implemented, you'd also need to add a "Reboot" menu item in the Options section.

joedemo42 commented 5 years ago

Maybe make 1) and 2) kind of a debug option in the options menu. 3) seems to me to be impractical since the pISO would have to be able to read every filesystem. Also, does the buildroot kernel have some kind of FAM enabled? dnotify, inotify or what the kids use these days... The move/copy job sounds like a way to specific task for a general feature. Maybe extend buildroot with some script to do that for yourself?