Hi Marcus, I got a couple of comments and questions.
On 12/15/10 09:22 AM, Marcus Heine wrote:
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)
Compression is done to all files in the root archive except those that are specified in the do not fiocompress list in the manifest, a few files listed in boot/solaris/filelist.ramdisk, and all the files in usr/kernel directory.
- 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.
The root archive should only have files and directories that are REQUIRED for booting until /usr and all the other directories are mounted. We try to keep the size of the root archive as small as possible so systems with small amount of memory can be supported. Can you elaborate on what you are trying to do that will require such a large amount of space in the root archive? Thanks, --Karen
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. _______________________________________________ caiman-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/caiman-discuss
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