Deployment image customization

[Daniel Drake]

On Tue, Dec 23, 2008 at 8:08 PM,  <pgf at laptop.org> wrote:
> ssh host keys are probably generated on first boot as well.
>
> with partitioning support, it should be possible to have a r.o. root
> overlaid by a unionfs writeable mount, so machine-specific changes
> don't modify the released partition.  this would make cloning quite a
> bit easier, i'd think.  i have no idea what the performance hit of
> a unionfs setup would be, nor how such a partitioning would fit
> into the rest of the update strategy (e.g.  olpc-update).

unionfs isn't upstream and was quite unreliable last time I use it.
And it adds the challenge of differentiating state that must be
discarded for the cloned image, and state that must not be.

For example, we would want to ssh keys generated during first boot to
*not* be included in the clonable image, that's obvious. But if the
user boots the OLPC image, goes into the control panel and sets a
language, then we *do* want that language change to be included in the
clonable image that is the output of the process.

How would the system differentiate between those two?

Daniel