On 10/15/2012 11:44 AM, Wesley PA4WDH wrote:
> --- On Mon, 10/15/12, Gordon Messmer <[email protected]> wrote:
>> If you're putting in hard drives, don't boot from flash.  Your
>> system is going to operate more slowly, and there's no benefit.
>
> I don't really understand this, but maybe i sould explain my idea a
> bit further. My plan was to put /boot and grub (or whatever loader is
> feasable for USB) on flash to make it independant of the software
> raid setup. Can you explain how this would slow things down ? I don't
> really care for the boot speed, so if that's the only issue it's no
> problem for me.

If it's just for /boot, I wouldn't expect much of a difference.  It 
sounded like you wanted to install the OS on a flash drive.

Still, booting from RAID 1 isn't generally a problem.  Start the first 
partition (/boot) at 1 megabyte for best alignment and install grub on 
both drives.  I won't suggest that booting from flash is wrong, but 
there really aren't any advantages.

> The host will be Gentoo, i haven't decided about the guest yet. It
> seems a bit overkill to use gentoo there too. The workload would be
> email with an MTA, Secure IMAP, Webmail and maybe some spam
> filtering. The number of emails would be somewhere in the 10s per day
> or so, so i guess that won't be a problem. My main question would be
> if it's responsive enough to be usable.

The answer depends a lot on what you use for virtualization.  It doesn't 
sound like anyone who's answered has done virt on a Soekris.  Support in 
the CPU isn't enough by itself.  I'd be somewhat surprised if you could 
do hardware virt on a 6501.  If you use Xen and paravirt, ignoring 
hardware virt, the guest would probably be responsive enough.

Bear in mind that you'll want to minimize overhead in any way that you 
can.  The biggest overhead in most virtualization setups is disk 
storage.  If you use an LVM to provide backing for your guest, you'll 
see a huge performance benefit relative to using file backed storage.
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