On Thu, Feb 13, 2014 at 09:38:53 -0500,
John.Florian(a)dart.biz wrote:
I just had interesting (or incredibly stupid) idea concerning the
critical
limitation of the live overlays where the host crashes with bus errors
when the temporary space for the COW is exhausted. Is it possible to use
trim/discard support to mitigate some of the unidirectional growth for
when files are deleted and/or overwritten? Conceptually it seems like it
is a good fit, but I've not investigated the practicality. Just curious
if this has been explored or if there are easily known reasons why this
wouldn't work.
I don't think this will help. You aren't going to recover space from the
base file system, because it never changes. As more an more packages
are updated you are going to use more space in the overlay area.
Portable flash drives are getting cheaper and you might consider getting
one large enough for a normal install and use that instead of a live image.
Depending on how much you are installing, a 64 GB flash drive is probably
large enough.