mkstage4

This is a Bash script to create stage 4 tarballs either for the running system, or a system at a specified mount point. The script is a new edition of an earlier mkstage4 script by Greg Fitzgerald (unmaintained as of 2012) which is itself a revamped edition of the original mkstage4 by Reto Glauser (unmaintaied as of 2009).

More information on mkstage4 can be found on its own Chymeric Tutorials article: mkstage4 - Stage 4 Tarballs Made Easy.

Chinese Introduction 中文说明

Installation

The script can be run directly from its containing folder (and thus, is installed simply by downloading or cloning it from here - and adding run permissions):

git clone https://github.com/TheChymera/mkstage4.git /your/mkstage4/directory
cd /your/mkstage4/directory
chmod +x mkstage4.sh

For Gentoo Linux and Derivatives, mkstage4 is also available in Portage via the base Gentoo overlay. On any Gentoo system, just run the following command:

emerge app-backup/mkstage4

Usage

If you are running the script from the containing folder (first install method) please make sure you use the ./mkstage4.sh command instead of just mkstage4!

Archive your current system (mounted at /):

mkstage4 -s archive_name

Archive system located at a custom mount point:

mkstage4 -t /custom/mount/point archive_name

Command line arguments:

  mkstage4.sh [-q -c -b -l -k -p] [-s || -t <target-mountpoint>] [-e <additional excludes dir*>] <archive-filename> [custom-tar-options]
  -q: activates quiet mode (no confirmation).
  -c: excludes connman network lists.
  -b: excludes boot directory.
  -l: excludes lost+found directory.
  -p: compresses parallelly using pbzip2.
  -e: an additional excludes directory (one dir one -e).
  -s: makes tarball of current system.
  -k: separately save current kernel modules and src (smaller & save decompression time).
  -t: makes tarball of system located at the <target-mountpoint>.
  -h: displays help message.

Extract Tarball

Tarballs created with mkstage4 can be extracted with:

tar xvjpf archive_name.tar.bz2

If you use -k option, extract src & modules separately

tar xvjpf archive_name.tar.bz2.kmod
tar xvjpf archive_name.tar.bz2.ksrc

If you have install pbzip2, you can extract parallelly with:

tar -I pbzip2 -xvf archive_name.tar.bz2

Dependencies

• Bash - in Portage as app-shells/bash
• tar - in Portage as app-arch/tar
• pbzip2 (optional, if it is installed the archive can be compressed using multiple parallel threads) - in Portage as app-arch/pbzip2

Please note that these are very basic dependencies and should already be included in any Linux system.

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Released under the GPLv3 license. Project led by Horea Christian (address all correspondence to: chr@chymera.eu).