Re: booting Linux directly from NTFS?

On Thursday 05 February 2009 21:34, someone identifying as
*soerns@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx* wrote in /comp.os.linux.setup:/

On 5 Feb., 21:13, Douglas Mayne <d...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

AFAIK, ntfs is not suitable for use as a "proper" root filesystem because
it does not accomodate the permission model for standard *nix OSs.

Yes, it does not provide the needed permissions.

But question to all, can Linux be booted on this filesystem anyway?

Your question is ambiguous. Either you mean "Can the kernel be loaded from
an NTFS filesystem by a bootloader?", or you mean "Can a GNU/Linux system
be brought to running off an NTFS filesystem natively?"

In case of the former, you can use /fuse/ with /ntfs-3g/ to mount the NTFS
partition on */boot* with write support, copy the /vmlinuz/ (and if so
required the /initrd/) file(s) to it, and then use LILO as your bootloader,
because LILO hardcodes logical block addresses in the master boot record,
unlike GRUB, which needs and uses a realmode filesystem driver to access
the files. The LILO bootloader must then also be installed in the master
boot record or in the root partition for the GNU/Linux system, because if
you install it in the NTFS partition it will overwrite the Windows
bootloader.

But still, then there is the second interpretation of your question, which
is that GNU/Linux requires a filesystem that supports UNIX file ownerships
and permissions, and that even with the Linux kernel image living on NTFS
would require that the entire Linux-specific UNIX file hierarchy (with the
exception of */boot,* for which you would be using the NTFS partition in
this case) be on one or multiple other partitions than the NTFS volume.

The only operating system I know of which can be made to run from a
filesystem that does not have any kind of security implementations is
Windows, which can be made to run off of a /msdos/ or /vfat./ UNIX does
not support this, and for good reason, as it's perverse. ;-)

There used to be /umsdos/ support in the Linux kernel - but this has been
removed in the meantime - which allowed a GNU/Linux system to be installed
on an /msdos/ (FAT12/16) filesystem, but this was an unstable construct
which saved the UNIX file ownerships, permissions and case-sensitive long
filenames inside files which in DOS would appear as hidden files. So in a
sense, it was like the loopback thing, but with the difference being that
it was only the case-sensitive long filenames, the file ownerships and the
permissions which were inside image files, while the files themselves were
on the actual /msdos/ filesystem itself.

This too was a perverse construct, but still not as perverse yet as Windows
is. ;-)

--
*Aragorn*
(registered GNU/Linux user #223157)
.

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