Douglas McClendon wrote:
Daniel P. Berrange wrote:
This patch adds support for another installation variant. The
livecd-creator
produces ISO images which boot using syslinux. The image-creator
creates a
single file containing a filesystem in which the OS is installated.
This patch
adds a new disk-creator, which creates a single file containing a
partitioned
disk with potentially many filesystems in which the OS is installed.
Furthermore
it installs grub in the boot sector, so this image is immediately
bootable in
a virtual machine.
FWIW, I advocate, (and my VirOS projects already uses), a system where
such a virtual appliance is a mandatory phase of livecd creation. I
don't expect any buy-in to convert livecd-creator to this, but this
seems an appropriate time to advocate the design choice-
Basically, I see it as useful to look at the process as
distro_config
--(phase1process)-->
virtual_appliance_disk_image
--(phase2process)-->
livecd_image
Also, one other advantage of this pipeline, is that having the
virt_appliance_disk_image, allows you to add interesting extra steps to
the pipeline that involve virtually booting the appliance. The two that
come to mind are
a) virt booting to precook auto-logged-in-user home directory contents
such that they needn't be created during livecd boot and live in ram
(instead living in the squashfs).
b) virt booting to determine optimal ways to perform the livecd creation
processing. (i.e. determining boot file access order, and then sorting
the filesystem... I still need to prove that that is worth it, but I
think it is)
-dmc
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