Package: wnpp
Severity: wishlist

 * Package name    : confinedrv
   Version         : 1.7.7-4
   Upstream Author : Elmar Stellnberger
 * URL             : https://www.elstel.org/qemu/
 * License         : GPLv3
   Programming Lang: bash
Description : a script to confine individual partitions to read-only or no access

confinedrv can be used to boot with qemu or similar virtualization software into another operating system installed on disk. If you have installed multiple operating systems into mutiple partitions you can not boot a second OS via qemu because you would need to give full write access to the same disk. However if the whole disk is accessed by two operating system instances in parallel that will cause disk corruption because there is no synchronization of these accesses. The solution confinedrv provides is to make the OS partition read write and all other partitions read-only so that they can not be written to and thereby possibly corrupted. Of course the OS partition must not be mounted by the host OS. You can also exclude read access for given partitions which will however still be visible in the partition table. confinedrv uses dmsetup and losetup internally to control access via device mapper. The partitions need to be aligned by the page size (usually 4096 Bytes) to make this work. However for modern SSDs this is the case by default.

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