Answering a couple of things Karen didn't respond to:
On 12/15/10 12:22 PM, 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) - 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.
It isn't being actively pursued by Solaris engineering due to other priorities. I personally couldn't get Moinak's code at the time to work correctly in the little time I had to play with it. Contributions to add that support are of course welcome!
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.
There isn't any other compression option on SPARC. ZFS booting from ramdisks would require some amount of work, don't know how much offhand, but could also have side-effect increases in memory usage that might well negate anything you'd get from it. I have some interest in pursuing this at some point since install's root ramdisk is the only remaining usage of UFS booting in S11. Nothing in the works right now, though.
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.
I'm unaware of a specific limitation there, but I would also wonder why you need one that's so large. Current default AI ramdisk is around 180 MB so there seems something rather odd with whatever you're doing in customizing it...
Dave
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