Hi,

could I please ask for reviewing changes for creating
reduced AI image ?

Those changes are delivered under umbrella of following bug:

4166 The automated installer hangs on a 1 GB system without swap
http://defect.opensolaris.org/bz/show_bug.cgi?id=4166

webrev:
http://cr.opensolaris.org/~dambi/bug-4166/

Special thanks to:
* Dave Miner for making all investigation and original work
* Mary Ding for huge help with testing

Background:
-----------
Those modifications reduce the content of AI image and take
advantage of split of SUNWgui-install package (bugs 5468, 5657).
This package originally delivered both install libraries required by AI
and GUI installer. Because of this, bunch of unnecessary stuff
was being pulled into AI image (X, Gnome libraries, media libraries, ...).
By taking advantage of that split, AI images could be reduced by ~45%.

Testing
-------
These changes are delivered under umbrella of bug 4166, since they allow
to install on x86 machines with 1GB of available physical memory without
creating swap device.

For x86, I tested on Ultra 20 with 1GB of memory. Before AI
installation started, 30MB file was created in /tmp directory
to make sure there is still some reserve available.

As far as Sparc is concerned, I tested on T1000 (8GB RWM)
and T5220 (1GB RWM + 512MB swap).

Mary did testing on x86 as well as Sparc sun4u & sun4v machines.

These changes are not intended to address problems with the installation
on x86 machines with less than 1GB available memory and Sparc machines
with less than 2GB available memory. That said, it was observed
that AI succeeded in additional following cases:

* installation in Virtual Box with guest assigned with 600MB of memory
  + 512MB swap
* Sparc machines with 1GB physical memory + 512MB swap

AI failed in following test cases:

* x86 machines with 512MB of memory
* x86 machines with 768MB of memory (no swap)
* x86 machines with 1GB memory, but shared with graphic controller

Mary, please feel free to correct me or add additional information.


Additional issues
-----------------
Currently, both AI as well as LiveCD share the same set of steps
as far as creating and configuring SMF repository is concerned -
they are implemented by mkrepo script. Since some of services
are not present in reduced AI image, Distribution Constructor
started to display following warning messages when building
reduced AI image:

...
==== br-config: Boot root configuration
Configuring bootroot...
Preloading SMF repository...
Loading smf(5) service descriptions:
Loaded 120 smf(5) service descriptions
svccfg: Pattern 'application/font/fc-cache' doesn't match any instances 
or services
svccfg: Pattern 'system/dbus' doesn't match any instances or services
svccfg: Pattern 'application/opengl/ogl-select' doesn't match any 
instances or services
svccfg: Pattern 'application/graphical-login/gdm' doesn't match any 
instances or services
Creating additional symlinks in ramdisk ...
==== ai-br-config: Auto Install boot root configuration
...

Those doesn't prevent building AI image, but definitely should be addressed.
I was thinking if solving that problem might fall under bug which seems to
take care of redesigning the stuff mkrepo script takes care of right now,
or if new bug should be filed or if different approach might be more 
appropriate
to deal with this issue. Please let me know, what you think. Thank you.


Reply via email to