There are quite a few issues that contribute to poor install performance. The following ones have been identified: 1. HSFS driver performs poorly - Moinak has an improved one. 2. Layout on the media is non-optimal for CD/DVD. Even though we know the order in the with the pkgs are installed, the bits on the media are not laid out optimally. As a result there is a lot of head seek. Live Media (and Slim Install) optimize the layout to minimize the seeks. 3. bzip2 compression cost. Once the above factors are removed, bzip2 compression does impact the install. My experiments showed that simply changing bzip2 to zip for the existing install approach made very little difference. 4. The other big issue is that we are installing a whole lot of bits which are of very little interest to the user. So moving fewer but more appropriate bits would also improve the overall install experience.
What if a different approach is used. Why not have "flars" on the media which can be applied to the system ? Then if users wanted something more, they could add/update on a pkg by pkg level or as prebuilt flars that deliver additional functionality ? -Sanjay This message posted from opensolaris.org
