[OpenIndiana-discuss] Proposal: OpenIndiana Stable Branch

[Gordon Ross]

Dave Miner writes:
[...]
>> Perhaps refactoring of Caiman is needed, where the Live CD ships with a
>> pkg repo, starts a pkg server, and does an install from that. Not sure
>> how feasible this would be. Given how complete pkg is, probably not all
>> that hard.
>>
>
> We looked into this a little quite some time ago.  The problem with doing
> IPS-based installation from CD's or DVD's is that IPS's data access patterns
> during package installation are relatively random, not streaming, and so you
> will get utterly abysmal installation performance (orders of magnitude worse
> than anything you've ever used) when using physical CD or DVD media.  That
> storage technology just isn't designed for random access.  This doesn't
> apply much if you're using an ISO image as a virtual CD or using USB flash
> memory media.
>
> Dave

Interesting.  Thanks, Dave.

One way around that is to do sort of a "two stage" install, where the
first stage, running from the CD installs a "bare minimum" system
(from a cpio image or whatever, to avoid the problems with poor
random-access to the CD).  Then for the second stage, boot into the
new bare-minimum system and finish the install from IPS, perhaps
allowing use of the CD as your repo, or a local copy, or get it off
the net...