[OpenIndiana-discuss] Buildable distro?

[Reginald Beardsley]

Linux has long had the ability to rebuild itself as part of a distribution, at least for the ones I've played with to any degree.

Is there anyone in a position to easily produce a buildable OI DVD?  In particular, one that tracked the current build.  Something that if I bought a machine and dedicated it to the task I could be set up to fix things by installing the distro.

I spent a few hours reading wikis on the subject of building OI & illumos and was left with very low confidence that the contents were up to date.  I was also left with the impression that setting up to do even a trivial task like turning on SD_INFO() would be quite labor intensive.

I'm a geoscientist.  So this is a tool I use, not an end goal.  However, I do know a bit about operating systems and software.  So I don't mind fixing things that affect me.  Obviously, the overhead to understand the code for some things is prohibitive, but there is a lot of stuff (i.e. minor bugs) I could work on pretty easily.  But setting up to build OI is not a pretty picture.

FWIW I figured out that the hardware cost of building a bootable RAIDZ array as I did on the N40L was less than $3.  It's not really bootable RAIDZ.  It's a mirrored rpool in s0 with a RAIDZ pool in s1.  I plan to move /export over to the RAIDZ pool, but haven't done it yet.  But I've got 3 disks and can gracefully take a single disk failure while keeping the storage efficiency of RAIDZ.  I'm trying to decide if I should add a 4th drive or not. 3.5 TB is a lot of space for my current needs, so 5.25 TB may be overkill.  But then I could do RAIDZ2 if I had 4 drives ;-)

Have Fun!
Reg