8:37 a.m.
Hi Peter,
Thanks a lot for your help!
FTI all, I am trying to capture the useful pieces of info from this
thread on the feature page:
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Feature_roadmap/Run_Fedora_applications_on_XO
Feel free to update that or use it for your reference.
Thanks,
Greg S
****************
Date: Wed, 17 Dec 2008 01:21:32 +0100
From: "Peter Robinson" <pbrobinson(a)gmail.com>
Subject: Re: Slimmed Down Fedora 10 on XO (was Fedora 10 on XO)
To: "Erik Garrison" <erik(a)laptop.org>
Cc: OLPC Development <devel(a)lists.laptop.org>, greg(a)laptop.org,
fedora-olpc-list(a)redhat.com
Message-ID:
<5256d0b0812161621u4acb70cch92250f2606d4bde2(a)mail.gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
Hi Erik,
> Fedora has a set of tools now called Appliance-Tools [1] for
creating
> this sort of thing. You can use it to specify a minimal build and then
> pull in the extra stuff you want, specify repositories etc. I used it
> to build a joyride VM I could use for slicing and dicing package deps
> and the like the other day in around 15 mins (plus the time it takes
> to construct the actual filesystem etc). I can post the kickstart file
> somewhere if your interested in using it as a base. The image it
> produced has a boot issue that I need to get time to fix (or work out
> why its got root fs issues) but it was a quick demo to see if it
> helped.
I heard about these (appliance tools) from Reuben. Any documentation
you can post would be highly useful. There are a lot of ways to achieve
a similar result, and a lot of people appear to have duplicated effort
as a result. I think this is good, as it gives us some degree of
selection moving forward. Eventually we need to coalesce effort around
one system if we are going to update OLPC's build infrastructure
successfully.
The kick start file can be found on my fedora space [1] and the
commands I used were essentially
appliance-creator --name OLPC-4 --config olpc-4.ks
and if you use virtmanage the following command to import it.
virt-image OLPC-4/OLPC-4.xml
All these sort of tools are what's used to create fedora. Things like
mock and koji from the build system side of things and livecd-tools
and appliance-tools and the like to build the livecds etc. So from a
development point of view they're probably the direction to be headed.
jkatz who is around on fedora-devel (and devel@laptop too I think)
would be the one to shed more light in this direction.
FWIW: The boot issue might be related to nash's mount command
not
working for jffs2. The quick and dirty way to get around it was to drop
busybox into an initramfs and change the root partition mount line in
the init script to use busybox's mount command instead of nash's. Found
nash extremely unweildy and am curious why it is used in the initramfs.
The initrd I produced is:
http://dev.laptop.org/~erik/rpmxo/initrd.img-2.6.25-20080925.1.olpc.f10b6...
(It is built against the stock 8.2-767 kernel using stock Fedora
initramfs-tools, I just unpacked it and dropped busybox and its library
deps in and made the afformentioned hack to init.)
I specified a ext3 fs so it would be easier to deal with on my laptop
so it might not be so easy :( but I think it might be the device I
used or something.
> I think this is what you are after. There are still some issues
with
> packages pulling in too many deps and as time permits I'm trying to
> work through most of these issues while not having to fork half the
> distribution which in turn makes it more work for the OLPC guys. Its a
> fine line.
Yes. This seems to be endemic, but it appears to be generally a problem
for systems which don't get stretched in this direction (I have seen the
same kind of bloat while testing Ubuntu builds).
Its one that quite a few in Fedora are well aware of and people are
slowly moving towards. There are a number of SIGs (special interest
groups) that are looking to reduce them from different directions. I
also hope the push from GNOME to get rid of libgnome/bonobo/gnomevfs
etc should settle down and reduce a lot of them before long too. eg
most gnome 2.24 now don't depend on gnomevfs but some of the bigger
apps like firefox always trail.
> I can help you as much as possible, I'm relatively free for
the next
> couple of days but will be then travelling over the next couple of
> weeks so will have limited connectivity.
Great! Any way you'd like to help. Paring down dependencies is
crucial. 'Minimal' package lists would be also very helpful. I am
hacking mine together and I'm worried I might miss critical things that
would be obvious to a more experienced Fedora developer.
Critical packages? They should be auto pulled in by yum. Or do you
mean by paring down dependencies in actual packages. If the later let
me know what the packages are so I can review changes and see if we
can't just get them upstream (in a lot of cases we can split some of
the deps out to sub packages in other cases they might be
superfluous). Or maybe I've missed the point too :)
One package-level curiosity I've had is how to auto-remove
packages
which were automatically installed to satisfy the dependencies of a
manually installed package after said packge is removed.
Well in the case of appliance tools that create images on the fly it
just won't pull them in. For already installed systems I'm not sure
there is for auto remove but there are some tools that identify unused
deps. I have a note of some of them somewhere, I'll try and dig
details out.
Cheers,
Peter
[1] http://pbrobinson.fedorapeople.org/olpc/
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