How to test for upcoming Fedora Linux 41 - Modernize the live media Overlay Features?

Hi all !

@ngompa has published an upcoming Change into Fedora Linux 41 Live: Modernize the live media by switching to the “new” live environment setup scripts.

But how to test the new persistent overlay feature ?

How_To_Test section in ModernizeLiveMedia states that

There should be new options for resetting the persistent overlay and booting with no persistence. The default options should boot with persistence and setup of persistence should work.

No such options in the GRUB menu…

I’ve downloaded the latest Workstation Live .iso from rawhide here and installed it on a 4GB USB drive using Fedora Media Writer (Creating and using a live installation image :: Fedora Docs).
This leaves room for est. 1,7 Go of available space on the device

But after booting the USB Live Media, GRUB doesn’t prompt for persistent overlay…

What am I missing… ?

And what about allowing for NON persistent RAM only overlay:

  • by adding rd.live.overlay.overlayfs to the standard kernel command line parameters rd.live.image quiet rhgband adding a new GRUB dedicated menu option ?
  • by including in the new livesys-scripts the relevant command mount -o remount,size=<nbytes> /run (see here and there)

It has not been added yet. I have a draft pull request for this at the moment that I need to work on.

Hi @ngompa

Since Modernize the live media has been moved to a Fedora Change scheduled for 43 release :

You have expanded the persistence features: packaging livesys-scripts and enabling new dracut functionality.

On a related subject, to customize the Live Media, the livesys-scripts allow now for extra stuff to be defined (i.e. commands for internationalization, locale, custom Gnome settings, and so on…) in two separate steps of the boot process, if the corresponding files exist:
/var/lib/livesys/livesys-session-extra and /var/lib/livesys/livesys-session-late-extra

Those files are obviously not included in the Live ISO provided from https://getfedora.org/

Until now, I have to package them into an updates.img file, which needs to be located on a partition discoverable by grub, and grub.cfg must include the file and path appended to the initrdefi command.

Would it be possible to have a simpler way to have the Live ISO be “notified” of those files with an option which could be recognized by dracut login and embedded into the kernel command line parameters ?

In the past, I seem to recall that kickstart files were “notified” similarly during the boot and install process to Anaconda