[Fedora-livecd-list] [PATCH] -fs.py-kickstart.py-chages-for-mulit-partitions
Jeremy Katz
katzj at redhat.com
Wed May 28 18:36:50 UTC 2008
David Huff wrote:
> Jeremy Katz wrote:
> | Jeremy Katz wrote:
> |> This I'm still not sure that I really want to be carrying in
> |> imgcreate. There's already a lot of overlap functionality-wise with
> |> anaconda and I know that as soon as we start down this path, we'll end
> |> up having to add all the other crud for various more "advanced"
> |> partitioning things (especially LVM and dm-crypt). Maintaining one
> |> copy of that kind of code is enough for me ;-)
> |>
> |> I'd be okay with adding the kickstart hunk, though. And then there's
> |> really not any big reason that I can see why you couldn't just have
> |> the PartitionedDisk bits just in your caller rather than having them a
> |> part of the main imgcreate API
> |
> | ... although I would still strongly ask the question of looking at what
> | you're doing and seeing if it makes sense to build your images by
> | actually going through an install (in a VM of some sort) rather than
> | using imgcreate once you get to the point of needing partitions, etc
>
> Partitions are needed for mainly two reasons. The most important reason
> is that it allows the use of grub. This makes any image created with
> this tool bootable and it looks and feels like any bare metal system.
> It also allows for the ability of creating multiple partitions so an
> appliance can have a septate data partition(s). This allows for
> flexibility in your update/data model, where if you want to, you can
> switch out your "appliance engine" and keep the data intact.
Oh, I can fully see why partitions are useful for a variety of cases...
> The ability for a tool to create these partitioned disk images via the
> command like, livecd-creator, is very helpful in reproducing known state
> appliances, epically with the rising use of visualization. Going
> through a actual install in a vm limits you to VM container, xen, kvm,
> vmware and adds extra overhead of building on a machine with extra virt
> resources.
Reproducing known state should work just as well with a kickstart config
and doing an install via, eg, virt-install. Yes, it adds overhead, but
there are also advantages in functionality and it also means *not*
maintaining this sort of code in multiple places. And that's a pretty
big win as partitioning code is not in the least bit trivial.
Especially as you start trying to handle more and more of the cases.
> We have also noticed that an image that was installed via
> anaconda is larger that an image created with the appliance creator
tools.
There shouldn't be any difference to speak of here. Take a look at the
package sets and see if there's anything, but I wouldn't expect this at
all. And if so, it's likely more due to bugs in imgcreate than anything
else
Jeremy
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