Porteus

Hi,
Newbie question-- I was wondering what filesystems Porteus supports as a save.dat fs image; I noticed you're using xfs so I would assume that anything supported in the kernel can be mounted on a loop device at boot. If my assumption is right, what's supported in the kernel, or do you have a quick link to the kernel config? Or if I'm wrong, what's the mechanism limitations?

My ulterior motive is to get an encrypted filesystem to work. Am I duplicating effort? I did a few basic searches on the forum and didn't come up with anything.

You can go through the filesystems section of the kernel configs to see what's compiled in, what's out, and what's a module. To get the configs, do this, from within Porteus:

modprobe configs && zcat /proc/config.gz >> configs.txt

I grep'd for FS and came up with a bunch (some might be missing, lol)

EXT2, 3, and 4 are compiled in, as are:
REISERFS (not Reiser4)
JFS
XFS

NILFS2 and BTRFS are modules

There's also some other lesser known filesystems in there...maybe worth a look.

I'll be writing up a HOWTO for making a save.dat with a different filesystem. It's pretty simple for those that are compiled in, and considerably more difficult for those that are compiled as modules (or...not at all). This morning, I had save.dats running XFS, EXT4, NILFS2 and BTRFS. If you're thinking about BTRFS, I should warn you that I had massive stability issues with it, and I haven't figured out why (probably some mkfs or mount option I should be enabling or disabling--or maybe it just doesn't like being on a loop mounted file lol).

What FS are you planning to use?

ecryptfs would be the best to get what I want.
If it's not possible to use the built in save.dat functionality easily I can just hack something up, like mounting something to /home/myfolder after the os loads and use a userspace tool.
Thanks for the info, I'll try it.

ecryptfs is built as a module in Porteus. I've downloaded the utilities package, but I'm not familiar with ecryptfs. I don't see a mkfs.ecryptfs option. Do you use the tools to convert an existing filesystem to an ecryptfs? In other words, what commands would one normally perform to create an ecryptfs filesystem and mount it? If you can help me with that, I should be able to help you mount it as a save.dat, by putting everything you need inside the initrd.