[RFC] initoverlayfs - a scalable initial filesystem

[Nils Kattenbeck]

On Wed, Dec 13, 2023 at 10:03 AM Lennart Poettering
<lennart at poettering.net> wrote:
>
> On Di, 12.12.23 23:01, Nils Kattenbeck (nilskemail at gmail.com) wrote:
>
> > > sysexts are erofs or squashfs file systems with verity backing. Only
> > > the sectors you access are decompressed.
> >
> > Okay I forgot that they were erofs based and mentioned cpio archives
> > so I assumed they would be one.
> > Do they need to be fully read from disk to generate the cpio archive?
>
> erofs is a file system, cpio is a serialized archive. Two different
> things. The discussion here is whether to pass the initrd to the
> kernel as one or the other. But noone is suggesting to convert one to
> the other at boot time.

I was referring to the following line from sd-stub's man page: "The
following resources are passed as initrd cpio archives to the booted
kernel: [...] /.extra/sysext/*.raw [...]". I assume the initrd
containing the sysexts has to be created at some point?