Darren J Moffat wrote:
Bart Smaalders wrote:
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
But the Solaris installer doesn't read the data at that rate. If it
got the drive going then it would be fine, but it spends half its
time jumping all over the place, and even when doing nothing but
reading
a simple data stream it's at a very much slower rate. The problem
is in the install process being slow, not in how fast the media is.
And it uses the media in a way which is particularly bad for
DVDs.
Casper
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We know of several ways to speed up install, and it will
happen.
We need to:
1) keep dvd spun up.
2) switch to lower cost compression instead of bzip2
3) stop rewriting /var/sadm/install/contents file repeatedly.
If we stored the packages as a single CPIO archive instead
of separate files on the dvd, we could stream the data off
continuously, uncompress it and install it all at the same
time.
What about just storing them as stream format packages and adding
support to libpkg to do the decompress on the fly ? Would that help?
I addition "mkisofs -sort" along with a properly ordered file list
can reduce
CD/DVD head seeking to almost like reading a continuous audio/video
stream.
I used this technique for BeleniX by profiling using the iosnoop.d
script from
the DTrace Toolkit with significant benefits for Xfce and KDE startup
performance. This is not however perfect for OpenSolaris boot due to the
parallelism.
But Install is essentialy a serial process and should benefit
greatly. In addition
using the compressed lofi mechanism for install cds will add to the
improvement
and also provide more space by compressing all the metadata and a
whole bunch
of other files on the CD.
Regards,
Moinak.
One of the other advantages of stream format packages, well from a
security geeks view of the world anyway, is that they can be
cryptographically signed and are automatically verified against
configurable trust anchors when they are installed with pkgadd.
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