Re: guix system disk-image: preset user profiles (packages & arbitrary data)

[ludo@gnu.org (Ludovic Courtès)]

Hello Pierre,

Pierre Neidhardt <ambrevar@gmail.com> skribis:

> I'd like to built a live disk-image for a USB stick I carry around with
> me.  Booting it would result in the exact configuration I have on my
> machine.

FWIW I did that a year or two ago with hacky modifications to the code.
It would be nice to make it accessible through the command-line
interface and API.

> I'm also wondering now if the USB stick is writable.  That would solve
> it then.

As you found out, ‘disk-image’ creates a “volatile” image, where the
root file system is mounted read-only, with a writable overlayfs on top
of it.  The main use case for this is the installation image where you
want to make sure you’re not going to modify what’s on the USB disk.

There are two things we could do:

  • Add an option to make the root file system persistent (easy).

  • Add an option to allow users to specify additional partitions in the
    disk image (which would be writable).  If you look at ‘qemu-image’
    in (gnu system vm), you’ll see there’s already a list of partitions
    there, and this is what needs to be modified.

My preference goes to the second option; it’s a bit more work, but it’s
not too hard.

HTH!

Ludo’.