Hi guys,

I try to get my head around the SPARC micro-root limitations
when wanbooting over the network and had a good deal of
experimentation with the distribution constructor and the
auto-install image generation of the ai microroot.

As far as I could gather, the following restrictions apply at
the moment (build 151a) to SPARC wanboot-able micro-roots:

-  SPARC microroot needs to be ufs

-  it can use fiocompress for compression of (selected) files to
   save  some space (like in the sparc ai image creation)

-  if fiocompress is used, then this results in the microroot
   being  mounted as READ-ONLY and it cannot be remounted RW.
   (This seems to be a limitation of the dcfs overlay...)

-  due to OBP/SPARC memory allocation limitations, the maximum
   initial ramdisk (and thus microroot size) is limited to
   around 450MB.

Before going on, can somebody confirm the above is indeed the
current state and I did not get anything wrong.

I saw in Dec 2008 there was a suggestion by Moinak on this alias
to  use compression on lofi/ramdisk level rather than individual
fiocompress'ed files and dcfs. He called it cramdisk :-)
Is this still under consideration or has this line of thought
been abandoned.

Is there "any" way to get to a read-writable (!) SPARC microroot
that can  also have some level of compression? Maybe another
file system (ZFS compressed?). Otherwise the 450MB SPARC limit
is quickly reached.

Thanks,
 --Marcus

PS: Anybody understand the details of that 450 MB SPARC boot
ramdisk limit? Is this a limitation by the OBP firmware for
early memory allocation? Just trying to sort the concept in my head.
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