I've long meant to ask, is there a sort of Jumpstart for zones? I want to use minimized zones, global as well as local. For global zones there is a jumpstart mechanism to require and remove specific packages and package clusters. Is there a way to define the list of packages for a local zone, in such a manner that this list is honoured during LiveUpgrade (and "zoneadm attach -u")?
I have a firm belief that while lowlevel hardware packages (like SCSI, video, NIC drivers) have nothing to do in local zones with abstracted hardware "by the definition", some other packages in our systems should also be installed global-only (X11 graphics, etc.) for specific reasons. When updating a system, I found that these packages are either re-installed in the global zone with their default settings (as inheritable) and trash the zones with packages I don't want there (and removed manually in the past); or they are not upgradeable in automatic luupgrade run and become "issues" to be resolved manually. As a sad example, a typical server zone root takes 200-300Mb on our systems, and detach-attach'ing during upgrade it bloats the zone to over 500Mb with packages we don't ever need nor want there. When there are tens of zones on a server, this adds up to a lot of wasted space. The manual work on removing these packages and reinstalling them with the -G flag again and again is a showstopper for us to enable automated patching of systems, for example. Which is a bad thing. So, is there a ready solution, or can anyone take on this outlined problem as an RFE? :) -- This message posted from opensolaris.org
