Headsup: Alternative to the filesystem overlay

[Alexander A. Filippov]

On Mon, Sep 21, 2020 at 11:52:54AM +0200, Anton Kachalov wrote:
> There was a topic year ago:
> 
> https://lists.ozlabs.org/pipermail/openbmc/2019-August/017611.html
> 
> Is anyone currently working in this direction? Any thoughts on possible
> approaches?

As I can see there is no any actions in this direction.

I solved the problem with a difference of the user groups set during firmware
upgrade by installing a systemd service which starts on the first BMC boot after
upgrade and merges groups from RWFS and new ROFS.

This recipe is stored in our internal repo only, but I can share it if it is
interesting to someone.

The problems with other files is not met yet.

> 
> We're going to revisit this and discuss possible solutions.
> 
> One point to mention is: introduce an image feature flag that would enable
> rootfs overlay, i.e. for development purposes.

We still use a static flash layout on our hardware which already uses overlayfs.
It works fine for us.

--
Regards,
Alexander