> From: [email protected] > > Is there any way I can get livecd-iso-to-disk to do its thing with a > target that is not a regular block-device? > > I spin images regularly throughout the work day and then have to > transfer the image to a CF or SD card using this tool, then drop > said card into a host for each test cycle. This is, of course, > tedious. I'd like to shorten the process by using a VM as the host > and simply point this VM to a disk image file that I populate > directly with livecd-iso-to-disk. Presently, the tool balks at my > attempt complaining with the error that, "test.img is not a block device". > > I already have used the VM to run the ISO directly, but that is > insufficient for my use case because I absolutely need the > persistent storage that usually is possible via the remaining space > of the CF/SD card. Yes, I could create a second virtual disk for > the persistent storage, but that would require lots of retooling of > my various OS hooks and arguably be sufficiently different to the > normal deployment that it would be a weak test at best.
After a bit of poking around in /usr/bin/livecd-iso-to-disk, I see getdisk() and isdevloop() which hinted at me (where the docs did not) to try the following: # dd if=/dev/zero of=test.img bs=1G count=2 # losetup --find --show test.img /dev/loop0 # livecd-iso-to-disk --reset-mbr --noverify my.iso /dev/loop0 After that completed I configured a libvirt VM with an IDE disk whose source path was /dev/loop0 and storage format was raw. The VM booted and behaved perfectly as I'd hoped. I'll have to play with this for a while to see if it can be made a bit less cumbersome. Another option I toyed with was creating a logical volume to serve the same purpose as test.img here. That was in fact how I wound looking at getdisk() because it chokes on logical volume type block devices and probably all virtual block devices from what I've seen. If I put together a patch to allow this, would that be of interest to the livecd-tools project? -- John Florian
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