On 02/07/2012 10:34 PM, Peter Robinson wrote:
On Tue, Feb 7, 2012 at 10:26 PM, Gordan Bobic<gordan@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On 02/07/2012 10:20 PM, Peter Robinson wrote:
On Tue, Feb 7, 2012 at 9:15 PM, Mark Langsdorf
<mark.langsdorf@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On 02/06/2012 10:33 PM, Chris Tyler wrote:
But back to the original question: what's the optimal way to package an
installable image? I see several valid options:
(1)- Per-platform image with MBR plus one or more partitions, with the
last partition shipped as minimal length and resizable to fill the
device (either at installation or firstboot).
(2)- Per-platform tarball, including a tarball for a boot partition (if
applicable) plus a tarball of the rootfs, plus some sort of layout
config file (XML? script?) that configures how the partitioning is set
up.
(3)- Generic per-arch (armv5tel/armv7hl) rootfs tarball plus
per-platform boot tarball, separately downloaded. (Nice to cache the
rootfs if installing into multiple, different devices, but messy as far
as RPM knowledge of what's on the boot partition).
I think having an easy installer is ultimately more important than which
format we use. To get tens of thousands of people running Fedora on
Raspis in the next six months, for example, we need a tool that's
friendly, dirt-simple to use, and ideally runs on Windows as well as
Fedora.
Speaking for a possible minority position here, I'd also like to
see a solution that scales well for business customers looking
to provision dozens to hundreds of notes with real SATA drives.
A generic 2GB image intended for an SD-card is probably not going
to fit the bill.
No, you would want a standard anaconda install for that using
kickstart files. The is planned and TBH may already even work.
Really? Anaconda has been made to build/work on ARM? When?
I don't see how anything other than option 3 is sustainable over
any significant number of different platforms, though. So I'd
want to see a resizable generic per-arch rootfs that is
intended to be the last partition following 0 or more boot
partitions that are platform specific.
I agree. The ultimate plan is to use anaconda for all options. Things
will settle down when things like device-tree become the norm and we
can use a few standard kernels across devices.
I don't see why it needs to be any diffrent - you can ship the ext4
installer image, make the installer stretch the image to the size of the
disk (or some user-selectable size), and then install from local disk to
local disk, to the same FS the installer is running from. The only downside
is that you will not be able to align the partitions properly for the SSD
erase block sizes and suchlike, but the primary architectures don't do that
either (whether they should is open to debate, but I personally thought that
removing the relevant options from the text mode install around F11 was a
giant leap backwards for server installs).
Offers zero flexibility over file system types, file system layout,
package configuration and a billion other combinations of choices that
people might want.
It would still offer package configuration flexibility, you'd just use
the installer FS as the rootfs. But yes, you wouldn't get the
flexibility of fs layout and fs type flexibility. Then again, if that's
an issue, you don't get partition alignment flexibility anyway, which
tends to be pretty important on SSDs and disks with 4KB hardware sectors
(especially those that completely hide the fact that they have 4KB
sectors). So I would argue that if we're going to worry about that,
let's worry about the full scale of the limitations that the installer
imposes.
Oh and text mode works just fine, even works over serial port. I use
it on occasion but the fact is that anyone who does any amount of
server installs that use those sorts of options automate it using
kickstart and scripting.
The problem with the text mode install is that the manual partition
options were removed, and there is no way to do anything but an install
using the default partition layout. Kickstart is a workaround, but
having to either write a kickstart for a every test install is tedious
when there is no reason for it to be.
Gordan
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