Toying around with using a minimal RAM-resident version of OpenSolaris (currently 80MB) as an appliance platform. The idea here would be that the OS would be real small, would boot real fast (from flash), would have no disk footprint, and most importantly -- be stateless. The stateless part is where it gets tricky. For some use cases, state must be preserved across boots. As one example, (storage appliance) a kludge here would be to have a small private zfs zpool called SYS which keeps state and gets mounted early in the boot process. I've played around with creating a zfs-kludge SMF service which, as its name implies, is kludgy, but seems to accomplish this OK.
Continuing down this path, I now realize that the SMF repository will need to be preserved across boots also. At minimum, the repository will change, for example, as shares are administered. I've read a few of the blog entries explaining the interaction with boot and SMF, and am wondering if I could add some additional kludgery. Would it be possible to have a service which, upon reaching some kind of milestone, switches repositories from the static one found in the flash boot image to one that could be modified and preserved? The Solaris 10 smf_bootstrap(5) manpage suggests that the present version of smf(5) does not support multiple repositories. Thanks, -- Jim C This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
