Re: [gentoo-user] Gentoo LiveUSB

["Ritesh Kumar" <ritesh@cs.unc.edu>]

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On Jan 11, 2008 3:00 PM, Alan McKinnon <alan.mckinnon@gmail.com> wrote:

> On Friday 11 January 2008, Anthony E. Caudel wrote:
> > 2nd question: I must be dense on this one so someone help me out.
> > Since a USB stick is seen as a hard drive, why can't I do a standard
> > install to it? Is it because until lately they haven't been large
> > enough? I'm thinking of using an 8GB one.
>
> There's a few reasons:
>
> 1. The memory used on those devices has a limited life - about 100,000
> writes for the good ones and maybe 10,000 for the bad ones. With a
> standard install, frequent writes are the norm (think cache and other
> similar things). This usually ends up at the same spot on the disk,
> meaning your new install will last about a month if you are lucky.
> There are ways around this, for instance how a LiveCD does things.
>

You are right about the re-write life of flash media. However, there are
filesystems which can help by not writing to the same location in the flash
media again and again. I recall JFFS2 being a such flash filesystem which is
available for linux.


>
> 2. Booting off it is a pain. You need drivers for the entire USB stack
> at boot time, which usually means a ginormous initrd.
>

Why not compile them in the kernel?


> 3. Size, which you mentioned


8GB is pretty large IMHO. You should be able to fit quite some software +
data on it. My *entire* gentoo distribution fits in just over 2GB... though
I must confess that I am a little minimalistic.

_r

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