[OpenIndiana-discuss] Proposal: OpenIndiana Stable Branch

[Alasdair Lumsden]

On 18 Jan 2011, at 18:31, Gordon Ross wrote:

> 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.

Yes - thank you for this info, very helpful!

> 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...

This sounds like something worth exploring.

There are a few options here.. just thinking out loud, a possibility would be:

1. Install the minimal base via CPIO
2. If more packages are requested than base, then extract the pkg repo to ram (tmpfs) or local disk
3. Install the additional software requested via pkg

This may bump the RAM or Disk space requirements to do an install, but the OS needs a lot of that to run anyway.

I also think we should add an advanced options tickbox so people can customise the size of the swap/dump zvols created. I also think it should be an option to disable the dump device - on systems with not much disk space but loads of RAM (eg 64GB Fileserver with a 64GB SSD) you can't install the OS. This applies to the text installer too (iirc it doesn't let you customise this option either).

Cheers,

Alasdair