When someone on my team started playing with this new Knoppix thing I was blown away: not just a rescue disk but a full-on distribution!
Moral: publish your hacks!
Hey, I found the email:
Date: Sat, 3 Jun 2000 02:17:47 +0200 From: Klaus Knopper <knopper@linuxtag.de> To: Paul.Russell@linuxcare.com.au Subject: Compressed Loopback device Message-ID: <20000603021747.A17496@linuxtag.de> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii X-Mailer: Mutt 1.0pre3i Sender: rusty@linuxcare.com.au
Hello Mr. Russel,
I'm trying to use your compressed loopback device as found on the LinuxCare rescue CD-Rom, for my selfconfiguring Linux distribution that runs entirely from CD (including XFree and KDE).
Unfortunately, the version that I got of the cloop device seems to act quite instable (of course I recompiled it for Kernel 2.2.15, which should not differ all too much from 2.2.14). I blame it on the fact that the file handle is being read from stdin of insmod, but it could be something different.
With an SMP-Kernel, cloop.o crashes immediately on insmod when calling fget(0). With a non-SMP kernel, it kills the kernel block buffer system, shutting down all other block devices as well, when accessing certain large files on an ext2 filesystem within the compressed block device file. It seems that the ll_rw_block() routine fails in that case, and wait_for_buffer() never returns, locking up something in the kernel block buffer management.
Do you maybe have a newer version of cloop that I can start working on? Btw, I found and fixed the bug in extract_compressed_fs.c, but I think it would really be nice if the sources for the whole package could be downloaded from LinuxCare somewhere without having to get the whole CD-Rom image.
If I find the cloop lockup-bug before you have time to answer, I will send a patch.
Regards
-Klaus Knopper