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Briefly: Is it possible to reserve some free space using mksquashfs?

I'm creating an image of simple livecd based on squashfs filesystem. Everything works fine except that I've got very little "free" space on a root partition.

Can I assign more free space with mksquashfs?

For now as I workaround I'm mounting ramfs after livecd boot. Another idea will be to create a large file on squashfs, pack it using mksquashfs and delete it after bootup.

Is there any "clean" solution?

Dejwi
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    Squashfs is a read-only filesystem. It is not possible to have free space, because it's not possible to write to it after it is created. – phemmer Jul 16 '14 at 15:00
  • Patrick is correct. Even if you had free space on squashfs, it would be wasted, because it is read-only. What you want is more writable space. To get that, you need to mount temporary partitions using RAM memory. – Sepero Jul 16 '14 at 17:07
  • Ok, I was sure that it exists within a RAM and is writeable (as live CD allows me to edit files within /). – Dejwi Jul 17 '14 at 06:52
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    @Dejwi Live CDs do this by using an overlay filesystem with writes backed by a tmpfs volume (i.e. aufs + tmpfs) – phemmer Jul 21 '14 at 14:26

1 Answers1

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update

you can, first, mount the filesystem on /mnt or anywhere else

sudo mount /dev/sda2 /mnt

create a dummy file that makes mksquashfs think it has more space

truncate -s 5G /mnt/dummyfile

You can change the size and the name and location of the dummy file

now just create the image

mksquashfs /mnt root.squashfs

and all done

s.s silva
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    Have you tried this yourself? How much free space you had in a squashfs? How are you going to use that space afterwards? Did you read the comments to the question, which explain why is this question incorrect and therefore can not possibly have any meaningful answer? – Nikita Kipriyanov Jul 26 '23 at 18:19