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trynd / wren

Linux boot platform that provides a portable, multi-system, run-in-memory Linux environment.
GNU General Public License v3.0
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Add option to disable active Btrfs #27

Open codewithmichael opened 9 years ago

codewithmichael commented 9 years ago

Addressed by PR #29 (Option to disable active data file system)

As noted in issue #10 (Investigate ZFS and Btrfs), Btrfs potentially has issues with certain multi-core processors under 3.13.x kernels (the only kernels presently available in Ubuntu 14.04.x).

I suggest we add a boot option to disable Btrfs, or more specifically to force an ext4-based active data image instead. This would break save-time snapshot functionality, but would ensure the system can run. We need to make sure online resizing still works with with disk images, but I believe it does.

A modification along these lines (assuming we don't want to bring back LVM) is required to progress on Apple Mac compatibility.

codewithmichael commented 9 years ago

I don't know why I didn't think of it before, but we probably don't even need a active data storage file system image if we're not using Btrfs — we ought to be able to store the data directly in the running system's tmpfs mount and skip the separate image all together.

codewithmichael commented 9 years ago

I've addressed this in PR #29. I've added a new boot option, BOOT_NO_ACTIVE_FS, which can be enabled to fall back to storing data directly in the running system's tmpfs mount.

Being a negative boolean, the new option name goes against the usual option convention, but it seemed the safest way to ensure it was disabled from the start — at least until we've found a way to address #13 (Add conf file variable defaults to loadRunEnvConf()).

The current notation of manually setting boot options to 0 (zero) to disable them is somewhat cumbersome as it stands, so we may want to take on the no-* convention for all boot options.