Martin,
To be clear, this topic is on our roadmap, but not currently
scoped, planned, or with engineers assigned to it. It'll
happen when it happens.
If you want to do it, feel free. As you know, our source is
open and there's apparently nothing (including hardware, in
your case) standing between you and accomplishing this task.
As you'd expect, you're welcome to engage on this alias with your
plans, directions, code, or whatever.
Good luck!
Eric
--
Eric J. Ray
Senior Software Engineering Manager
Solaris Install
Sun Microsystems
303-223-7843 (direct)/x81067
eric.ray at sun.com
On Mar 17, 2009, at 2:57 AM, Martin Bochnig wrote:
> <snip>
>
> 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
