On 11/30/2016 10:23 AM, William L. Thomson Jr. wrote:
A couple more links, I should have provided initially as they better support
the argument.

First from Debian, I cannot find a list, but it is clearly mentioned.

"0-99:
Globally allocated by the Debian project, the same on every Debian system"
https://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-opersys.html#s9.2.2

This is even better, what Gentoo lacks, and could build upon.
https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-US/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux/5/html/
Deployment_Guide/s1-users-groups-standard-users.html

Also carries to CentOS of course
https://www.centos.org/docs/5/html/Deployment_Guide-en-US/s1-users-groups-standard-users.html

Per previous links installing some RPMs that have fixed UID/GID will result in
problems of other things are using it

"The vdsm user however is fixed to a UID of 36 and the kvm group is fixed to a
GID of 36.
If UID 36 or GID 36 is already used by another account on the system then a
conflict will arise during installation of the vdsm and qemu-kvm-rhev
packages."

https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-US/
Red_Hat_Enterprise_Virtualization/3.5/html/Installation_Guide/sect-
System_Accounts.html

I appreciate all the discussion on uid-gid as it is central to cluster provisioning work.

Some Background::


My specific area of development is heterogeneous (hardware) gentoo clusters with a specific focus on "uni-kernels' (UK). I define UK as a minimized, optimized hardened kernel that are specifically tuned to a minimized and optimize framework for a specific problem or specific category of problem for High Performance Computing (HPC) needs. In fact the need to benchmark and compare a myriad of codes, such as openstack on RHEL vs a skinny gentoo solution, on the exact same hardware will necessitate provisioning from bare metal up to full stack online and thus require numerous boot cycles. uid/gid symmetry would be a keen component of to my solutions. One of the challenges I have not worked on yet, is a systematic and automated solution for a variety of uid-gid differences between the systems I need to test and compare.

I am not certain that an ebuild or PMS level solution will work for comparing images(canned solutions from various sources) to a minimized and optimized gentoo solution. Furthermore, I'd definitely appreciated any advice and templates/profiles/scripts/etc that facilitate the automation of uid/gid compatibility for as wide a variety of kernels+OS+framework at least within gentoo. Note: for me a 'framework' is vary similar to the world-file. On other distros, a framework is the sum of additional codes on top of a basic installation of that distro. Applicability to other major distros, such as *bunu, RH, debian, and arch derivatives would be keenly useful for my research and development needs. Furthermore, I believe that docker is just killing the cluster competition with uni-kernels and a minimized distro such as Alpine. This is an embarrassment to Gentoo that docker+alpine is 'killing it' in a space that is natural for Gentoo to dominate, imho.


This is a complex issue, as most of what has already been posted to this thread are all impactfully true. So flexibility is paramount, imho. In fact if there is a way, I'd suggest that a multitude of scenarios are supported to the point that for my work there could easily be hundreds of variants. The keyword, 'profiles' comes to mind, but that has additional connotations within gentoo. Surely a robust and automated way to deal with differences in uid/gid between differing systems (same distro or not) would be an excellent project. If this is or is not possible, regardless of whether other distros use this capability, it would certainly aid folks in migrating other systems from different distros to gentoo; so that bring enormous value to gentoo as a distro.


More specifically::

One thing is for sure, uni-kernels are just killing 'canned cluster' solutions for specific types of problems, particular defined by HPC. I strongly believe that all of that pioneering work on HPC clustering will definitely impact routine web/admin/processing venues, eventually. A given organization will be able to find the optimal images for their needs and then easily migrate their needs to a wide variety of datacenters for peak or scale-up. Unikernels in a wide variety of forms, will enable hybrid clusters and ease the migration of business, web and other needs between clusters, in a seamless fashion.

A robust and flexible way to automate, orchestrate (overused term I know) and provision thousands of systems is desperately needed, imo,
and a tool to transparently handle uid/gid differences would be keen.

I want to thank you, for introducing this topic and I tremendously appreciate all of the comments folks are interjecting, even the terse comments from admins that need a way to 'turn off' these features. Ultimately, CoreOS has an automated provisioning system which when combined with a robust and flexible uid/gid solution would be a fantastic pathway to enabling gentoo to once again dominate the clustering world (like it did over a decade ago), via optimized uni-kernels::

https://blog.docker.com/2016/01/unikernel/


Additionally, for a deeper dive::
BGO: 5932218

or these links::
https://github.com/coreos/coreos-baremetal

https://coreos.com/blog/introducing-ignition.htm

https://github.com/coreos/ignition/blob/master/doc/getting-started.md

https://github.com/coreos/ignition/blob/master/doc/supported-platforms.md


Thanks,
James


Reply via email to