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feat: enable persistent var (EXPERIMENTAL)#1680

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feat: enable persistent var (EXPERIMENTAL)#1680
gsanchietti wants to merge 1 commit into
nethsecurity-8.8from
persistent_var

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@gsanchietti gsanchietti commented May 15, 2026

EXPERIMENTAL: test how the image behaves

Upstream commit: openwrt/openwrt@57807f5

@gsanchietti gsanchietti self-assigned this May 15, 2026
@Tbaile Tbaile force-pushed the nethsecurity-8.8 branch 2 times, most recently from 4001fc2 to 841b872 Compare May 20, 2026 07:12
@gsanchietti gsanchietti mentioned this pull request May 20, 2026
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EXPERIMENTAL: test how the image behaves
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The persistent var could be useful to retain the following files:

  • /var/log/lastlog is always empty
  • /var/log/messages is already stored also in /mnt/data
  • /var/log/wtmp could be useful, but we do not have the last command to parse it, also similar info is already present inside the messages

But has many drawbacks:

  • upstream implementation does not support mounting a different partition under /var
  • it stores also many files in /vat/etc that are recreated by applications upon starts, such files should be temporary
  • the messages file can get bigger and fill all the root
  • victoria metrics are stored inside /var/lib/victoria-metrics-data and can get bigger and fill the root
  • despite of the linked commit, having a persistent var does not preserve dhcp leases across reboots because they are saved by default on a temp directory (dhcp.ns_dnsmasq.leasefile='/tmp/dhcp.leases')

In the end, I think that persistent may cause many problems on long running machines.
My opinion is to ditch the feature and eventually move the DHCP lease to storage, when present.

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