Help, solution found? to Memory Expansion outside of Lite

Discussion in 'Linux' started by BrandonMB, Aug 17, 2008.

  1. BrandonMB

    BrandonMB

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    Possible solution to using the Storage Expansion slot to expand SSD storage in Ubuntu, XFCE, or other distro's, need some final help

    I have been searching for the way in which the One expands the memory using the expansion slot in Linpus, and therefore the reason why this goes away when any other distro or XFCE, etc is used, and I think I figured it out.

    As near as I can tell, the expansion slot is a standard SD reader, except that within the Linpus OS, it has a symlink in order to ensure consistent naming within the OS. Then when expanding or "upgrading" the storage, the system uses Unionfs in order to merge the directory / and /media/disk. Then it mounts it as /home.

    The command would look something like this:
    mount -t unionfs -o dirs=/,/media/disk \
    > none /mnt/home


    I am certain that this will work, however unionfs is not included in the system that I am on which I converted to full XFCE, and I don't know if it is in the Ubuntu kernel either. Hence, the reason I am asking for help. While I am fairly confident that this would work, I don't know how to add modules to the kernel.

    Here is the link to unionfs:
    http://www.filesystems.org/project-unionfs.html

    If someone can either post help with adding the unionfs module into the kernel, or alternately wants to take a stab at seeing if this works on their system and posting a step by step, it would be greatly appreciated.

    Here is a copy of some of the research I found on kernel korner that seems to support this model, while this refers to multiple home directories on multiple servers, the same system will work for local directories.


    Unified Home Directories

    Often a single client machine mounts home directories from several different NFS servers. Unfortunately, each server has a distinct mountpoint, which is inconvenient for users. It would be ideal if all home directories were available from the same place (/home for example). Some automounters use symbolic links to create the illusion of a union. With Unionfs, these links are not necessary. The separate exported directories simply can be unified into a single view. Assume we have two filesystems, one mounted on /alcid and the other mounted on /penguin. We can unify them into /home as follows:

    # mount -t unionfs -o dirs=/alcid,/penguin \
    > none /home


    Now home directories from both /alcid and /penguin are available from /home.

    Unionfs supports multiple read-write branches, so the user's files will not migrate from one directory to another. This contrasts with previous unioning systems, such as BSD-4.4's Union Mounts, which generally supported only a single read-write branch.
     
    BrandonMB, Aug 17, 2008
    #1
  2. BrandonMB

    BrandonMB

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    Getting closer, it doesn't use unionfs, but instead uses aufs, which is already part of the kernel. I am getting closer, however when attempting to merge the two directories, /media/disk and /user/home I get the following error at the end of dmesg:

    aufs au_wh_init:517:mount[8331]: /doesn't support link (2), use noplink and rw+nolwh

    the command that I used was

    mount -t aufs -o br:/media/disk:/user/home none /user/home

    I am getting closer, but if someone who has more experience with linux file systems can give me a hand closing this off, it would be appreciated.
     
    BrandonMB, Aug 18, 2008
    #2
  3. BrandonMB

    jjoshua

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    I installed funionfs, because I thought that might help, but it didn't. I have the same problem. I used that excellent script and everything seems to be working, but that.
     
    jjoshua, Aug 18, 2008
    #3
  4. BrandonMB

    kompute

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    kompute, Sep 3, 2008
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