On 2013-02-07 00:12, Ian Collins wrote:
Reginald Beardsley wrote:
Why can't a custom distro be just a disk image created w/ dd dumped
into a slice which is as large or larger? Is there so much metadata
stored that this won't work anymore? If that's the case, we ought to
be able to script fixing it if we know where it is.
Well it could if every target machine was identical...
The LiveCD is great, but there are problems it doesn't solve and
sometimes what you really need is just a copy of something that works.
In that case, if you have a reference system, half of a mirrored boot
drive would do the trick.
Perhaps that is why many vendors distribute "demos" or even usable
deployments of their software as preconfigured VMs. I think some
ready-to-go VirtualBox image would be nice - except that in too
many cases VM performance in disk I/O - at which a build is very
intensive - is known to be abysmal. Like 40 hours instead of 1-5.
Still, with zones being independent of hardware, it might be possible
to transfer a preconfigured zone with compilers and checked-out
source code gates from such a VM image onto a physical OI machine.
Just update the gates with hg or git, and start the build on bare
metal :)
I think someone on the lists (Nick?) already proposed that, in way
of distributing ZFS-send images of such prepared zones. I wonder
where that led, and if any such deployments are ready to download?..
Regarding a disk image - it should work, after you solve the two
problems: of drivers (but all known to man might be cobundled,
like in a Windows distro) and of rpool import which currently
relies on the device-path string saved in the label, unlike any
other pools on the system. This is what makes it hard to switch
between SATA and Legacy-IDE modes in BIOS, transfer boot disks
between different hardware servers or just plop them onto a
different connector, dual-boot an installation on metal and in
VM (from partition), etc. The latter problem I really hate :)
//Jim
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