Greetings and salutations,
This is an update of the current status of the SystemImager development
code. The following are some of the key features or modifications that
will be included in the next stable release(1).
Current status of code to be included in next stable release:
* Modular kernel
* SCSI, file system, other drivers compiled as modules.
* Network drivers compiled in statically.
* Many more network drivers compiled in.
* "Module only" drivers can be used, including network
drivers.
* Allows a "complete" kernel to be provided with
SystemImager
* Makes it possible to add support for additional file
systems much more easily.
* Hardware auto-detection
* Necessary modules are automatically loaded.
* devfs is used
* Eliminates the need to keep up with device files for new
block devices as they get added (Hardware RAID controllers
for example).
* Building of initrd.gz from source code happens faster.
* tmpfs
* BOEL(2) now uses tmpfs as it's root file system.
* Size constraint of files that can be copied to the in
memory file system on auto-install clients is effectively
eliminated. See
/usr/src/linux/Documentation/filesystems/tmpfs.txt for
details.
* boel_binaries tarball
* A single tarball of additional binaries (that don't fit on
the auto-install media) is now pulled over to auto-install
clients once network connectivity is achieved.
* This tarball contains additional kernel modules and other
binaries, such as mke2fs, mkraid, mkreiserfs, and their
shared libraries.
* HP Smart Array 5xxx series
* Support for the HP Smart Array 5xxx series of hardware
RAID controllers has been added. These devices use
/dev/cciss/* device files.
* Other HP Smart Array controllers
* Support for HP Smart Array controllers that use /dev/ida/*
device files has been added.
* IA64
* IA64 support has been added.
* GPT (GUID Partition Table) support has been added.
* Build environment
* The entire SystemImager package can be built on any
distribution. It is no longer limited to a hand modified
version of a specific Debian release.
* Debian rocks, and I will continue to use it as *my*
development environment, but this will make it much easier
for packaging into other distributions, and for
maintaining past releases.
Additional features in progress:
* Dynamic Partitioning support
* Giving users the ability to specify percentages or
megabytes for partition schemes.
* Easily change file system types used by an image. This
will an image pulled from a golden client using ext2 to be
deployed on a machine as reiserfs, for example.
* Easily change destination disks. This will allow an image
pulled from a machine with IDE disks to be installed on a
machine with SCSI disks.
* A single image can me used across machines using different
drive types and different file system types.
* Netboot control
* The ability to control which PXE enabled machines boot
from the network, and when they boot. This will give the
system administrator control over network booting so that
a machine can be made to boot from the network for an
auto-install, but not boot from the network after
completing the install.
Certainly it's not possible to include all improvements here, but as you
can see, there have been quite a few. Many of them are structural
changes that will significantly improve our ability to add support to
SystemImager for new file systems, hardware, and architectures.
And of course you will see a number of bug fixes. The 2.0.x series
happened to be a particularly buggy series. I'm afraid that this was
partially due to my limited involvement due to lack of funding at the
time. Funding levels have increased, and I'm anticipating this next
release to be a very stable release.
If you have other features or modifications that you would like to see,
please submit a feature request (http://systemimager.org/support/) or
contact <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> to commission development. If a
feature you are interested in is already listed, please add a "ME TOO!"
comment as a logged in SourceForge user. This will help me determine
demand for certain features.
Finally, I would expect you're wondering when this release will happen
and what it will be called. I am hoping to make this release prior to
September, and currently have it slated to be called "3.0.0". There
have been enough architectural changes that I believe the changing of
the first digit is warranted.
Notes:
1. All of this is subject to change prior to release.
2. BOEL is Brian's Own Embedded Linux. It is the embedded Linux
used to auto-install clients.
Please feel free to forward this message on to other lists, or groups
that use SystemImager and System Installation Suite (SIS).
Cheers, -Brian
--
---------------------------------------------------
Brian Elliott Finley http://baldguysoftware.com/
phone: 214.280.8188 http://systemimager.org/
---------------------------------------------------
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