[OpenIndiana-discuss] Updates in OI

[Toomas Soome]

> On 4. May 2021, at 16:27, Dave Miner <dave.miner at oracle.com> wrote:
> 
> 
> 
> On 5/4/2021 8:59 AM, Yassine Chaouche wrote:
> > Le 5/4/21 à 1:43 PM, Stephan Althaus a écrit :
> >>
> >> Hello!
> >>
> >> We have "Boot environments"
> >>
> >> On every "pkg update" you get a new BE that will be used on next reboot.
> >
> > This is just
> >
> ...
> > Is this done by issuing a ZFS snapshot of the whole root partition ? or
> > is it more granular ?
> >
> > If this is done via snapshots, this means writing to an evergrowing file
> > on disk until the snapshot is removed. So the longer you keep a snapshot,
> > the bigger the file gets.
> >
> 
> Yes, boot environments in the OpenSolaris-derived OS's are implemented using ZFS snapshots/clones of the root datasets.  Combined with IPS's optimizations to only update objects that have changed between package versions, you may find that boot environments for an update may not be nearly as large as the initial installation; it all depends on how much has changed.  Reclaiming space is as simple as deleting older boot environments when they're no longer needed.  It's not at all unusual for a system to have a dozen or more boot environments; some of the more masochistic among us used to have systems with 100 or more.
> 
> Dave
> 

With old grub, the number is limited to 50 - 60 becsuse of memory setup. With loader, I did demo with 600, but since loader is using sliding window, the number of BE’s is not limited there.

Rgds,
Toomas