Re: strawman proposal: homed directories for users

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On Tue, Oct 8, 2024, at 1:14 PM, Barry Scott wrote:

> I like the idea of being able to reinstall and keep the /home.
> But I'd rather not use systemd-homed to get the feature.

It's an explicit feature request for the new installer's "Guided" partitioning path. The current UI (also for Fedora 41) requires the use of the Custom/Manual partitioning path, and for the user to know there's a several tricks. [1]

It would be nice to have a spec on how to do this without user intervention, and have the installer and homed use it.


[1]
One is a little obvious, you need to locate and click on the existing home subvolume and assign it to the `/home` mount point. But the second trick is not at all obvious. You need to click on + to add a new mount point, specify `/` as the mounpoint, and leave the capacity field blank. Do this and the installer creates a new subvolume on the existing Btrfs for the use of `/` with your existing (populated) `/home` subvolume. 

Still another is UID matching, since the new /etc/passwd doesn't have your user added yet - at least with Workstation edition, the new user is created by GNOME Initial Setup. If it's a single user setup, the UID for the first user created is 1000, and so if you just go through that part of GNOME Initial Setup again, it will create the entry in /etc/passwd, but will not touch the existing directory in `/home` for UID 1000, but if something is off - well I haven't tested that. So there could be some fragility here.



> I already have full-disk-encryption for security.
>
> What about having the necessary meta data in a per user file in /home
> and read that when doing the reinstall?

Perhaps set an XATTR on such a subvolume, so that only subvolumes with the XATTR are searched for this metadata? Btrfs supports 2^64 subvolumes. A casual user could easily have hundreds. 

-- 
Chris Murphy
-- 
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