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
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