Unpack the “Russian doll” of a F11 live CD

Fedora 11 live CDs are like Russian Matryoshka dolls – a filesystem within a filesystem within a filesystem.

On the outside they have to be in the standard CD ISO format because that’s what CDs require. However the CD ISO format is pretty useless, slow, limited filename length, and no support for SELinux labelling. So …

Inside the ISO is another filesystem, a Linux squashfs. (Question: why do they use the squashfs?) That’s not the end though, because …

Inside the squashfs is the final ext3 filesystem as a blob.

In libguestfs / guestfish 1.0.62+ I’ve added some commands to make it easy to unpack this, so you can read out the contents of the inner ext3 filesystem.

All without needing to be root, of course.

Here’s how:

$ guestfish -a Fedora-11-i686-Live.iso

Welcome to guestfish, the libguestfs filesystem interactive shell for
editing virtual machine filesystems.

Type: 'help' for help with commands
      'quit' to quit the shell


><fs> mkmountpoint /cd
><fs> mkmountpoint /squash
><fs> mount /dev/sda /cd
><fs> mount-loop /cd/LiveOS/squashfs.img /squash
><fs> ls /squash/
LiveOS
><fs> ls /squash/LiveOS/
ext3fs.img
><fs> mkmountpoint /ext3
><fs> mount-loop /squash/LiveOS/ext3fs.img /ext3
><fs> ls /ext3/
.readahead_collect
bin
boot
dev
etc
home
[...]

After this, the inner ext3 filesystem is mounted inside guestfish as /ext3 and you can go ahead and read out files from it. (But not, unfortunately, edit it because ISO images are read-only. See my earlier posting about that).