Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

gcmartin · Joined: 14 Oct 2005 Posts: 2627 Location: Earth

JamesBond does it again!!!

He has taken yet another of his GIANT steps with a very simple, and useful tool approach.

For some in the forum, this is unnecessary....But, for any of the rest of us, this is a great accomplishment as it removes some complexity and reduces effort to something very simple and easily understood.

What he did.....”A Running System Recreation” tool

I'm not sure if this ever will become a PET (because, at the moment, the tool is “top-secret” as a newer generation of FATDOG is being prepped for system introduction.
Edited: Oops, FATDOG has just released its first public Alpha.

But, when it does, it appears that the tool is general purpose enough that if it is PET'ed, it would allow any PUP (32/64 bit) to recreate itself.

Thanks again to him for one more of the great things he has done and inspired within the Puppy community. Puppy continues to mature.

So, let's examine this in the context of what he has provided for us in what Puppy already has for our use and what he provides. Puppy has a tool which ships with ALL PUPs; namely GRUB4DOS
This fact that this tool exist within the PUP's OS means that NO CD/DVD is required to get a Boot-Manager for use in re-creating an ISO. This is key as it will address the booting of the ISO that will be built.
Aside from the boot-manager, The 3 files which are key to a bootable system is

vmlinux
initrd.gz
the needed SFS (which constitutes all of the subsystems that run in your PUP)

That's it! So, a running PUP has all the necessary ingredients to re-creating a bootable ISO of itself.

Is there anything missing in this logic?
(for example, does anything have to happen with the internals of the 3 files so that all pointers and references are consistent?)

Please advise.

Thanks in advance

jamesbond · Joined: 26 Feb 2007 Posts: 1534 Location: The Blue Marble

The tool is general enough to be packaged as a pet, but it will not work without modification in other pups.

Fatdog64 600 holds entire copy of the OS in RAM, including initrd. Thus, one only needs the kernel (vmlinuz) to build a remaster ISO.

Others pup don't, they lose initrd as soon as they boot up, hence in addition to vmlinuz, a copy of the original initrd is required; and if you have zdrv.sfs, you also need those ...

Thus, no pet at this stage. I welcome anyone who's interested to look at /usr/sbin/fatdog-remaster.sh from Fatdog64 600 and modify that as needed.

But in principle the process is the same - make a temporary aufs mount of existing aufs branches; put tmpfs on top of it (so that one can modify the content without modifying the running system); and then mksquashfs of that aufs mount. Add initrd, add zdrv.sfs, add vmlinuz, and you've got yourself a remaster.

cheers!