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I have no clue what EasyOS is, maybe I can quickly fire up a VmWare/VirtualBox/qemu VM and then I have a better idea. Anyone has a link to something I can stuff into -cdrom command line argument and give it a whirl?
I've always wondered, why are CDs a specific ISO file system and not just whatever the intended target can read (FAT32 / HFS(+)) like other media? Is it just that the write once nature of the media makes pre-composing the file system a pain?
You're lucky it's standardized at all. Before the ISO specification each and every CD-ROM released had its own format, drivers, and headaches.
As I recall, the High Sierra Format - which served as the basis for ISO 9660 — was widely used prior to ISO 9660’s standardization and adoption.
What is a drive image? Is it a standard like ISO?
It's the result of 'cat /dev/sda >drive.img', basically. It's not that different from an "ISO image", which is the same except for the CD-ROM drive (I forgot which device name that is). An ISO image is just a "drive image" with the ISO9660 filesystem. (Live images like this typically do have different bootloaders than your regular/dev/sda).
Why I stopped releasing EasyOS as an ISO file
Another interesting thing: the author mentions boot managers which let you boot from a number of ISOs (see? I don'r even wan to bother saying "disk images" even though HDD images are meant to be supported here) put on a single USB drive but he forgets USB drives with have such managers integrated with the hardware (e.g. Zalman ZM-VE200) - I intend to buy one but who knows if these support non-ISO drive images.
I've always wondered, why are CDs a specific ISO file system and not just whatever the intended target can read (FAT32 / HFS(+)) like other media? Is it just that the write once nature of the media makes pre-composing the file system a pain?
I have no idea how I would install EasyOS in my hypervisor. Well, I could probably boot from a Live linux ISO and then install it from there. And on actual hardware I can mount an ISO over IPMI but I would not immediately be able to install EasyOS that way. Also, the argument that you can store state isn't always an advantage. When I boot a Live ISO I never ever want to save anything, a clean state is one of the feat…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
ISO is great at keeping things immutable - most OSes auto-mount inserted USB sticks r/w by default, so your ext4 USB rescue stick cam be broken by one accidental mouse drag, or by a typo in "rm" command. And even if you fix one OS to not mount it r/w, it will still happen if you insert into your friend's PC. On the other hand, ISO is guaranteed to be immutable, you need some real effort to break it.
Immutability is not a property of the ISO file (system) format, it's a property of having it live on an optical disc. But most computers these days don't have drives for optical discs, and if your ISO is merely a file on a USB stick, then it can be broken just as easily.
The only writable filesystems that use the same allocation strategy are log-based flash filesystems, but they also have support for quickly scanning the filesystem to get the most recent snapshot state. Again, ISO9660 does not have that because it was not designed to be writable.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, the article is correct that there is nothing unique to ISO on your comment. You can achieve all of that with an EXT-4 or NTFS filesystem too. Our tooling evolves in some strange ways. The only reason you want an ISO is because some software insists that it can't use a simpler FS the same way. It's like the software that insisted on saving things into floppy drivers even after no computer had them anymore. Of co…
Obviously, but with that logic the only unique thing with his solution is that it doesn't work well in the software ecosystem of our time. Not a great selling point. It is more than fine to opt at not supporting ISO, but the arguments put forward for this crusade are not convincing.