On Wed, Dec 08, 2010 at 03:35:06PM +0000, James Allsopp wrote: > Could someone explain more what the overlay does, is this a temporary > area for installation or is it where additional installed material is > kept?
/overlay is a persistent, read-write filesystem (usually jffs2) that is union-mounted with the read-only root (usually squashfs), and then mounted on /. (The union-mount is handled by the "mini_fo" filesystem.) So you can make permanent changes (installing packages, modifying configs, etc.) and they will be recorded in the overlay. I suppose the rationale is to allow updating the squashfs partition "underneath" your local modifications, but I'm not sure how well this works in practice. If you're willing to just backup, upgrade, and restore local settings, I frankly don't see the advantage over just making the entire area used for root + overlay into a single read-write filesystem using, say, ubifs. -- Eric Cooper e c c @ c m u . e d u _______________________________________________ openwrt-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.openwrt.org/mailman/listinfo/openwrt-users
