Hello Luca, Luca: > I'm a developer of Chakra Linux and I'm analyzing the pros and cons to switch > our bundle system from unionfs to aufs. > Maybe first a short description of what a bundle is: Chakra is kde-centric > distribution, was decided to don't provide the gtk applications as package > but > only in the form of bundle. A Bundle is a squash file system with all the > dependencies on it that is mounted on request. Currently the bundles are > mounted in /tmp/ and in some case (like chrome) a chroot+unionfs is need.
Although I may not fully understand what bundle is, it sounds similar to the "module" in SLAX LiveCD. I'd suggest you to take a look at SLAX. > I would like to know what do you think about this points below based on your > experience: > - mounting on / is a good approach on a real system? (not a livecd where is > used mostly) No problem. But you should aware of the mount hierarchy. Aufs doens't follow-down the branch fs. > - what about the read/write speed on the HD if the root is mounted with aufs? > can decrease if many branches are added? Possible. Aufs is surely an overhead. But it won't be a problem to the file read/write. Reading a dir will cost higher, particularry when the dir contains a lot of files on every branch. You can easily imagine that the internal behaviour is actually, $ for i in $every_branch > do ls $dir > done | > merge_and_whiteout > - use aufs without remount / (is already mounted at boot) is possible? > something like "mount -t aufs -o dirs=/=rw none /" make sense? While I have never tried such approach, I think it is possible. But (again) you should pay attention to the mount hierarchy. For instance, you may already have mounted /proc, /sys or something. Since aufs doesn't follow-down the mounts under the branch, they will be all ignored after "mount -t aufs -o dirs=/=rw none /". Loosing /proc may be harmful for you system. Of course you may be mount /proc again just after mouting aufs. But your utilities may require /proc. Also you should think about - the XINO files, which are created on the first writable branch (by default) - the mount-point of the branch fs J. R. Okajima ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Precog is a next-generation analytics platform capable of advanced analytics on semi-structured data. The platform includes APIs for building apps and a phenomenal toolset for data science. Developers can use our toolset for easy data analysis & visualization. Get a free account! http://www2.precog.com/precogplatform/slashdotnewsletter
