On Tue, Oct 11, 2011 at 09:23:15AM +0100, Daniel P. Berrange wrote: > - libguestfs directly boots its appliance using the regular host's > kernel image and a custom built initrd image. The initrd does > not contain the entire appliance, just enough to boot up and > dynamically read files in from the host OS on demand. This is > a so called "supermin appliance". > > The kernel is < 5 MB, while the initrd is approx 100MB. [...]
Actually this is how libguestfs used to work, but the performance of such a large initrd against the poor qemu implementation meant we had to abandon this approach. We now use -kernel ~5MB, a small -initrd ~1.1MB and a large ext2 format root disk (of course loaded on demand, which is better anyway). Nevertheless any improvement in -kernel and -initrd load times would help us a gain a few 1/10ths of seconds, which is still very important for us. Overall boot time is 3-4 seconds and we are often in a situation where we need to repeatedly boot the appliance. Rich. -- Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones Read my programming blog: http://rwmj.wordpress.com Fedora now supports 80 OCaml packages (the OPEN alternative to F#) http://cocan.org/getting_started_with_ocaml_on_red_hat_and_fedora
