Hello David et al, I had a new idea for your project of using OI as a base for the distro to sustain/update existing Solaris deployments.
In *our* systems management we have relatively little use for sparse-root zones, but quite a bit more of full-root ones, and to save on disk space (and minimize human error) we pre-create a "golden dummy" zone which remains unused per se, while its zfs clones are used to initialize the application zones. I understand that other deployments may have more use for sparse-root zones. I believe that fundamental differences between zones of different packaging would be in their branding and the scripts which implement this zone-branding (i.e. actions upon boot/attach/upgrade/etc.) - for example, an SVR4 "native" zone-attachment or even bootup might involve detection of packages installed in the global zone (or some other SVR4 template zone) and migration of zone info into the local zone's /var/sadm/install/contents, /var/sadm/pkg/* and similar databases. I wonder: if we add support for SVR4 zones into OI, maybe with an option to support sparse-root zones in some manner like read-only lofi-mounts of *some* /usr /lib etc. images, why not also support an svr4-golden zone type which would be a golden-image zone for mounting into sparse zones (and maybe for cloning into full-root zones - though any source zone can be cloned). This way updates of an svr4-golden zone would automatically propagate into svr4-sparse zones which are based on this golden zone instance, just like it used to take place for native SVR4 global zones. The differences now would be: 1) Instead of one global zone, there can be several golden zones to template for different tasks; it would also be more simple to have a "full" installation with GUI in GZ and a "minimized" installation in its zones 2) The GZ can be of any type (like IPS or DEB), while SVR4 packaging can be used to instantiate and bulk-upgrade sparse-root zones; 3) Possibly, it might make sense to change an LZ's assigned golden zone (where it mounts its binaries from) so as to change versions or whole software sets - perhaps this could aid in one-by-one migrations into newer software. Maybe, even, migrate an SVR4-based zone into an ipkg zone with an identical set of software in different packaging. PS: I think some terminology should be made, because the way I wrote it above, "GZ" stands for Global Zones as usual, but could be mistaken for "golden zones". Maybe, define TZ (template zones) or something like that? ;) HTH, //Jim Klimov _______________________________________________ OpenIndiana-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://openindiana.org/mailman/listinfo/openindiana-discuss
