eMMC support & concerns

[Cláudio Vieira]

Hi Michael,

Thanks for your suggestions!

> You could go fully "immutable", i.e. having a read-only base system. The
> data obviously has to reside on some SSD. Our installer/live ISO for
> instance is read-only. IMHO, most log files are not needed anyways or
> there is no or little need to persist them across reboots, especially
> for a HOME server.

That’s a great idea! Still well beyond my level of knowledge, but definitely
something that I want to experiment with in the near future… Of course,
I will often come back here asking for help! ;)

> If the eMMC is not supported, you can still use an USB stick. You can
> modify `nrelease` (our build system to produce the ISO or IMG live
> installers) accordingly to cover your configuration, pre-install some
> packages. Think of it as a much much poorer version of a Dockerfile :)
> With some work, you can have a small shell script that will produce a
> full image that you can then copy to a usb stick (or eMMC) and are ready
> to boot your system. If there are updates to DragonFly, just re-do the
> whole step with a newer source tree (or else mount the eMMC/USB stick
> read-write and do a `pkg upgrade`).

The initial idea is already evolving! This could be useful in many scenarios.
Probably I will experiment with a custom “immutable” DragonFly installation
on the eMMC or USB stick as a backup system for rescue purposes.

Best,
Cláudio Vieira