BOINC TMP OS Ideas

[delta1512]

The following are staging Ideas for the BOINC TMP OS experimental version:

• Squashfs

• Fully functional GUI similar to that of the standard spin

• Low security requirements (due to temporary nature) - No ssh

[delta1512]

I attempted to get a bootable squashfs ISO today and I was able to get it working under BIOS only but could not load the root file system. I believe this BIOS only problem has to do with the fact that there was a line missing in the xorriso command. I think I will be releasing a minimal version first via bittorrent before moving to a proper ISO.

Here is a documentation of some notes to remind me in the future:

Resources:

• Arch wiki article for customising their installation ISO

• GitHub wiki resource

Notes to reproduce

• Mount the Arch linux ISO to a temporary place and then copy over to another drive. Then extract the .sfs to an empty file system on a USB drive.

• Make sure the copied files are at the base of the directory else the arch-chroot command will fail to carry over a root directory and complain about not enough space.

• Follow the additional steps below the main ISO generation command on the wiki page so that it will work with USB.

[tomasbrod]

What I suggest is:

1. get a popular distro with live cd
2. install and configure boinc into the live enviroment (+drivers?)
3. remaster the iso to include the stuff from the temporary enviroment
4. mock something up to persist boinc account credentials

get it working under BIOS only but could not load the root file system

BIOS does not mount the root filesystem, it is the kernel/initrd. Please check that the kernel/initrd has modules needed to support squashfs and union.

Next, I suggest users to set up fast, large swap. Because that is where the changes are going to be temporary stored when memory runs out. (wus can pull multiple gigs sometimes)