On Tue, Mar 17, 2009 at 9:18 AM, sanjay nadkarni (Laptop)
<Sanjay.Nadkarni at sun.com> wrote:
> Martin Bochnig wrote:
>>
>> Hello all ? :)
>>
>> Sorry, I was not subscribed to this list for over a year.
>> I am familiar with the repos, but didn't read any meeting minutes or
>> the huge mail archives.
>>
>> Can somebody please clarify what has been the reason to not produce
>> any bootable LiveCD for SPARC, but to go the AI way exclusively?
>>
>
> Given the limited resources, we needed to decide what to tackle first for
> Sparc.
> We noticed that the set of graphics drivers for sparc was limited. ?Sparc
> systems were mostly
> servers and jumpstart was the most common way to install them. ?Therefor we
> decided
> to tackle AI *first*.
Hi Sanjay,
thanks for the quick response.
Okay, so it sounds as if a LiveCD is still on the table? That's great.
I think Sun and I, and me and Sun have made peace now. So this means
that I can simply interact with you engineers via lists like
caiman-discuss.
Here is my simple idea for SPARC-LiveCD: Use UFS (with nologging) at
the lowest layer of the CD, similar to the old install CD's.
Effectively emulate a read-only hdd with one or more read-only UFS
slice(s), maybe tweak UFS read-ahead performance by means of Moinak's
latest work. This allows us to keep most things on the CD's root,
rather than in any bootarchive.
The entry in /etc/system for keeping the ramdisk as "/"-fs will be
disabled. So the ramdisk gets discarded and the "/"-fs will reside on
the CD-root, just like during a normal newboot hdd-boot (of an
installed system)
All additional files (everything not required for the boot) get into
compressed hsfs or maybe even ufs archives (if this brings any benefit
beyond the easier re-creation options, by having rw-access to such an
archive, which is never the case if you want to modify a hsfs based
archive [e.g. If a distro developer needs to change only one file, for
hsfs she has to recreate the entire archive. In case of UFS you can
simply mount it, make a change, done.]) and get c-lofi mounted. All
parts which need to be rw reside in tmpfs and get lofs-mounted over ro
mountpoints inside the ro-UFS-CD-root (or in some cases simply
symlinked to /tmp/foo/sub-foo) to the mountpoints which need write
access, such as parts of /var.
This whole thing will simply be a mixture of the MartUX LiveCD/DVD
from 2006, crossed with the Natamar test demo LiveCD from September
2008 {#0} divided by Moinaks and Eremins (and others') and your great
work.
What do you think about it?
It is relatively easy and - if desired - can be done relatively quickly.
{#0}
http://martux.org/SPARC_distro_incl_Xorg7.2/cdrom__NoGnome_NoJDS_with_icewm/
Be aware that www.natamar.org is in my possession and online (although empty).
If the first phase does not pass Sun's challenging quality standards,
we could simply put it onto my site, under the MartUX brand, where you
have no responsibility and nobody can request support from you.
Then - if it gets more complete and stable - you can take it from your
gate (I would need rw access, maybe) and adjust everything to your
needs.
I wanted to give away my SPARC gear, but once again I didn't bring it
over my heart. So the entire line of Sun-Workstation models is
available for compatibility testing. While you on your side do have
access to all the modern server and telco hardware, CoolThreads stuff
and Fujitsu SPARC64 gear.
Just thoughts.
%martin
