On Wed, Aug 04, 2010 at 07:36:04PM +0300, Avi Kivity wrote: > This is basically my suggestion to libguestfs: instead of generating > an initrd, generate a bootable cdrom, and boot from that. The > result is faster and has a smaller memory footprint. Everyone wins. We had some discussion of this upstream & decided to do this. It should save the time it takes for the guest kernel to unpack the initrd, so maybe another second off boot time, which could bring us ever closer to the "golden" 5 second boot target. It's not trivial mind you, and won't happen straightaway. Part of it is that it requires reworking the appliance builder (a matter of just coding really). The less trivial part is that we have to 'hide' the CD device throughout the publically available interfaces. Then of course, a lot of testing. I will note that virt-install uses the -initrd interface for installing guests (large initrds too). And I've talked with a sysadmin who was using -kernel and -initrd for deploying VM hosting. In his case he did it so he could centralize kernel distribution / updates, and have the guests use /dev/vda == filesystem which made provisioning easy [for him -- I would have used libguestfs ...]. Rich. -- Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones virt-df lists disk usage of guests without needing to install any software inside the virtual machine. Supports Linux and Windows. http://et.redhat.com/~rjones/virt-df/ -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe kvm" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
