Initcpio hooks for overlayfs ontop of root

Tired of the slow I/O when running Linux on a USB OS? Liveroot greatly speeds up USB based Linux by writing to ram instead of to the USB. Flushing the ram to the USB stick can be controlled by the user by calling /usr/bin/overlay_flush.

Liveroot has 3 modes of operation that can be triggered by adding to the kernel cmdline:

You will want to move these files to the appropriate directory:

Add oroot to the hooks array of /etc/mkinitcpio.conf (after udev and possibly encrypt) and run # mkinitcpio -p linux to run oroot at boot.

*In addition, liveroot now has a compiler that can create a more customized liveroot script. If you pass "btrfs" to the compiler it'll produce a version of liveroot that uses btrfs snapshotting abilities for overlay_flush. Note, to use the btrfs mode, you will need to have a a btrfs root and a subvolume at /snapshots for snapshots. To use the compiler : chmod u+x compiler ./compiler or ./compiler btrfsP This will generate two files: oroot, oroot_install

You will want to move these files to the appropriate directory :

Unmounts /boot when running in ram, and overwrites /etc/motd with a message about the device on which the root filesystem is mounted. This is important if /boot is a distinct mount point e.g. an efi partition. It takes no action if /boot is not a distinct mount point.

This is a safety measure to make sure running pacman -Syu when booted into ram doesn't leave the system partially updated (or broken).

Compile the code in liverootsafety e.g.

go build -ldflags="-s -w" -v

Drop the binary into /usr/local/bin and deploy the systemd targets.