Disk layout for XO-1.5

[Martin Langhoff]

On Tue, Aug 4, 2009 at 4:42 AM, Albert Cahalan<acahalan at gmail.com> wrote:
> First partition: FAT16 with 4 KB clusters
> Second partition: LVM with ext4

Gentlemen, before LVM can be considered, we need

 - fs resize that is fail-safe in the face of powerloss, for the fs
types we plan to use.

 - lvm resize that is fail-safe in the face of powerloss

I don't see how we are going to get that. Given that LVM is not
applicable, and that part of our system lands in /home (Activities), I
suspect that the best arrangement is

 - small FAT16 for boot
 - a single partition of whatever kind we want, taking the rest of the space

And we'll keep playing games with symlink trees and overlaid
bindmounts -- which we have to do anyway as olpc-update is the only
failsafe OS upgrade mechanism we have so far.

Once BTRFS is mature, yum learns to snapshot-upgrade-or-revert and we
switch to that combo, we will be able to retire olpc-update, the
symlink trees and the fancy overlays.

In the meantime, anyone proposing a change of affairs needs a very
solid plan that addresses all the points discussed in the discussion
with dsd about a month ago about olpc-update.

cheers,



m
-- 
 martin.langhoff at gmail.com
 martin at laptop.org -- School Server Architect
 - ask interesting questions
 - don't get distracted with shiny stuff  - working code first
 - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff