Richard,
The we were hoping to release a beta of LTSP-4.2, with all the cool
ltspfs stuff back on Dec 15th, but real life got in the way of meeting
that goal. Now, with the holidays behind us, and things getting back to
normal, Scott and I are back at work, integrating his excellent ltspfs
stuff into LTSP. I'm not going to commit to a release date at this
time, because it would only be a guess. But, with LinuxWorld-Boston
coming up in early April, we are trying very hard to have it ready to
show off by then.
Here's a short (unofficial) list of some of the things we are doing in
the next release:
o ltspfs It's a FUSE module for exporting local
devices back to the server
o 2.6.15 kernel. We'll be dropping the 2.4 kernel completely
because the new stuff we're doing in LTSP-4.2 requires features
that are only in the 2.6 kernels.
o Swap over NBD. There is no NFS-Swap patch for the 2.6 kernels,
so we've integrated swap over NBD into LTSP. So far, it's working
great
o udev instead of devfs. udev is a replacement for devfs and hotplug.
It makes it much easier for us to implement local devices, and in
the process, it's drastically improved the detection time of hotplug
devices.
o initramfs instead of initrd. The 2.6 kernels have introduced a new
way to setup the initial filesystem used by the thin client,
before the
NFS root filesystem gets mounted. The initramfs gives us more
flexibility and improved memory use. The end result is that we've
removed about 6mb from the footprint of the thin client. In the lab,
along with NBD-Swap turned on, we've been able to boot a client
with only 12mb of ram, and the performance was quite acceptable.
o Xorg 7.0. This is the new "modular build" of X.org. Going to the
modular Xorg instead of the older "monolithic" build makes it easier
for us to build the X window system, and it makes it easier for the
driver developers to develop better drivers for more video cards.
o Cleaned up the LBE a bit, to display better progress information
while it's building.
o "/" is now ram-based, with each of the subdirectories that are needed
from the server (such as bin, etc, usr, ...) being symlinks to the nfs
mounted filesystem in /nfsroot. The end result is that when the
workstation needs to access something in /tmp or /var, it doesn't
cause a NFS hit across the network.
o The LTSP kernels are now built outside of the LBE, which means it
is MUCH easier for people to build custom LTSP kernels. Also, a
new 'ltsp_kernel_kit' has been created, which includes the scripts
for building the initramfs to match the new kernel.
Lots of other changes as well.
You can see, there's quite a bit in the new release, and we're anxious
to get it pushed out the door, but we don't want to rush it.
Jim McQuillan
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Richard Bos wrote:
Op zondag 15 januari 2006 01:59, schreef Peter Billson:
Just a FYI for those that are interested.
I have put together a script to automatically mount/unmount ltspfs
shares when a terminal boots. You can grab the script from
http://www.elbnet.com/ltsp/files/floppy_watch
Scotty, ltspfs is *fantastic* - thank you!
Can anybody say something about a release date for ltsp that includes all
those ltspfs goodies? Will that be soon?
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