Enabling μCernVM for the Interactive Use Case

The $\mu$CernVM will be the successor of the CernVM as a new appliance to help with accessing LHC for data analysis and development. CernVM has a web appliance agent that facilitates user interaction with the virtual machine and reduces the need for executing shell commands or installing graphical applications for displaying basic information such as memory usage or performing simple tasks such as updating the operating system. The updates are done differently in the $\mu$CernVM than mainstream Linux distributions. Its filesystem is a composition of a read-only layer that exists in the network and a read/write layer that is initilised on first boot and keeps the user changes afterwards. Thus, means are provided to avoid loss of user data and system instabilities when the operating system is updated by fetching a new read-only layer.