Mounting a partition into a 'sandbox'

Question

I'm wondering if this is possible. I want to set up a linux system that mounts / remote linux machine to / on the local machine. However, I want all changes on the local machine to be saved to ram so that it doesn't affect the remote machine. Ideally the changes would NEVER be written, so that when I reboot, it mounts the original / partition again disregarding all changes made during the previous session.

Is something like that possible?

Answer 1

Use unionfs, aufs (both are external patches for kernel) or unionfsfuse/funionfs (uses FUSE) and create union by marking external / as RO and internal filesystem (mounted as tmpfs/ramfs/additional partition which is cleaned each time).

Alternativly you can use filesystem or LVM with snapshots. Then changes are written but you can clean snapshots at each boot.

Answer 2

There are several ways to go about this. The easiest set up would use a union filesystem, which presents a single view of two directory trees A and B, such that all changes are saved to B. In your case, A would be an NFS/Samba/sshfs/… mount point, and B would be an initially empty directory on a tmpfs filesystem.

Linux doesn't have an in-kernel union filesystem, but there are several FUSE implementations: funionfs, Unionfs-fuse.

Answer 3

If / fits into the RAM of the local machine and leaves enough room for running applications, the basic idea would probably be to boot a minimal Linux system on the target machine and then automatically create a ramfs virtual disk, copy / from remote into it and chroot into this new /. If RAM is not sufficient, you can basically follow the same procedure but not using ramfs but a real disk partition whose content you have to clear before copying. Instead of clearing and full copy you could also use rsync with appropriate options.

Answer 4

This can be archiev very easy with PXE boot. i am running a live xbmc system over pxe tftp nfs boot. changes are written with COW to NFS share.

Answer 5

You can go for Btrfs and it's Copy-on-Write (CoW) feature.

The one you might be looking for is described on Btrfs Wiki as Seed-device:

• https://btrfs.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Seed-device

Basic idea is to make partition with original data read-only, than to "add additional layer on a top of it", which is another writeable partition (you can always make it in RAM, e.g. on /dev/shm) and mount it:

btrfstune -S 1 /dev/RO #make it read-only
mount /dev/RO /mnt/temp
btrfs device add /dev/RW /mnt/temp
umount /mnt/temp

and from that moment, each time you mount

mount /dev/RW /mnt/test

changes are saved on /dev/RW, while /dev/RO stays untouched.

(examples are based on those in wiki )