[OpenIndiana-discuss] Proposal: OpenIndiana Stable Branch

[Dave Miner]

On 01/18/11 05:01 PM, Alasdair Lumsden wrote:
> 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.
>

It will greatly increase both, in my experience, as any interesting 
package repo would seem to be quite large (multiple GB) and pkg has 
pretty substantial overhead in generating and executing a plan.  Really, 
you'd probably be better off booting into the installed system before 
adding more software.

Dave