Bug 274337 – build snapshot as squashfs instead of tar.bz2

• Product: Gentoo Hosted Projects
• Status: RESOLVED FIXED

[Description Alexandre Nuno Milheiro 2009-06-16 13:00:46 UTC]

Portage snapshot takes too much inode count once untarred, we could add an option named SNAPSQUASH to be used instead of SNAPCACHE which would do the following:
1 - build a squashfs portage snapshot instead of a tar.bz2
2 - mount this squashfs on $chroot_path/usr/portage instead of untarring portage snapshot then bind mount

[Comment 1 Alexandre Nuno Milheiro 2009-06-16 13:06:19 UTC]

Created attachment 194876 [details, diff]
patch to add the snapsquash feature

This patch adds the snapsquash feature. It works well for snapshot, stage[1-3] targets.
It lacks:
1 - Mutual exclusion of snapcache and snapsquash catalyst options (where's the best place to implement it?)
2 - Failure recovery (umount of squashfs)
3 - Checks for loop and squashfs support
4 - peer review :)

[Comment 2 Andrew Gaffney (RETIRED) 2009-06-17 00:21:14 UTC]

It's certainly an interesting idea. I'd never use it myself, since it gets rid of one of the cool unintended features of snapcache, the ability to monkey around with the snapshot without rebuilding the snapshot tarball.

I'm not going to apply this patch now. However, I'll keep this one in mind while I'm playing around with the catalyst_3 branch.

[Comment 3 Rick Farina (Zero_Chaos) 2014-02-05 18:07:54 UTC]

New catalyst has support for .tar.bz2 and .tar.xz as well as a few other formats.  The question is, why would we want to support squashfs? what does this give us that the others do not?

[Comment 4 Alexandre Nuno Milheiro 2014-02-05 18:20:07 UTC]

with squashfs we do not untar the portage, we simply mount it
when we ar done we do not rm-rf the place we untarred it, we simply unmount it

[Comment 5 Brian Dolbec (RETIRED) 2014-02-05 18:21:35 UTC]

This is coming later this spring along with the new compress/decompress routines.  
In fact you will be able to select which format you want as well as specify a custom format.
Whether catalyst will mount a sqaushfs image is another matter, but should be doable with the new mount system in place now.

[Comment 6 Matt Turner 2020-05-03 01:53:05 UTC]

I forgot that we had a bug open for this. Implemented with https://gitweb.gentoo.org/proj/catalyst.git/commit/?id=5b29d4a88f492f6890d0574d0addefb9e6a13271