To build debian-live with overlayfs you will need
A patch for live-boot until applied upstream
A linux kernel with overlayfs support
- Get a kernel from Miklos Szeredi's git repo. This is a work in progress but using this kernel you should be able to boot Debian Live. You can check the repo for more up-to-date branches.
- Configure and build the kernel.
CONFIG_TMPFS_XATTR=y
CONFIG_OVERLAYFS_FS=m
make-kpkg --rootcmd fakeroot --initrd --append-to-version -ovfs-i686 kernel-image kernel-headers
- Unfortunately kernel-package and initramfs-tools package maintainers can't agree on a way to tell initramfs-tools to generate an initramfs so you will need to generate one in a hook (put in chroot_local-hooks). Also cross-building i686 on amd64 seems broken.
Tell live-initramfs to use overlayfs instead of aufs
- Use some arguments like these with lb config
-k ovfs-i686+ \
--bootappend-live union=overlayfs \
--packages "httpfs2 less open-iscsi links2" \
--linux-packages linux-image-2.6.39-rc3 \