Linus Walleij wrote:
On Sun, 13 Jan 2008, Jeff Spaleta wrote:They are of course doing much more agressive things than simple preloading, more like suspend-to-disk, so the user actually more or less resumes a pre-booted image customized for that machine at "boot" time.That wont help the critical first impression phase..I wonder if we could do that.
I've considered this in the past, specifically for my mythtv home theatre box.
The theory is that the 120G disk is a big data disk and has nothing to do with the OS. The OS can live on a little usbflash.
Then, once thinking about it that way, and remembering the "repeatable resume" feature from vmware, the following idea occurred to me-
Do just as you say- Do a livecd/liveusb style copy-on-write boot, where the rootfs is read-only and changes go to a devicemapper snapshot. Then do a hibernate during install, but save a copy of this golden hibernate (swap) image along with a golden copy of the dm-snapshot. Also, make the hibernate do an unmount of all data disks, and a resume do a remounting of them.
Then, every power up of the system, would be a resume from the golden hibernation image. With a post-resume script that mounts data disks, resets the clock, and does whatever else is needed.
Really it is similar behavior as a vmware 'repeatable resume', but non-virtual.
-dmc