[Fedora-livecd-list] PATCH: Disk (appliance) creator tool

[Daniel P. Berrange]

On Wed, Feb 20, 2008 at 09:49:57PM -0600, Douglas McClendon wrote:
> Daniel P. Berrange wrote:
> >
> >Some other examples of scenarios where you want to build appliance images 
> >but
> >do not have virtualization capabilities directly accessible.
> >
> > - Machines where the user's primary OS is running under an embedded 
> > hypervisor.
> >   QEMU is tolerable for booting an image to verify that it works, but 
> >   building
> >   the image in QEMU is too slow to be practical.
> 
> 
> Obviously, since my project uses precisely that (qemu) I'll defend a 
> bit:  Some examples of where 'too slow to be practical' is IMHO an 
> oversweeping generalization-
> 
> - when a few hours or overnight is not a big deal

Yes it is a big deal because it directly impacts the amount of development
and testing I can do in any single day. If it takes 15 minutes to build
an image I can get through many many build & test cycles in a day. If it
takes overnight then I can only do one build & test.  For some people it
may not be a big deal to wait overnight, but for many people it it totally
impractical to wait this long.

> - in the future, when qemu, either via kvm/kqemu or just plain faster 
> hardware, reduces the install time from hours to minutes, and the 
> simplicity and security of no-root-privs becomes more valuable than the 
> time saved using alternate methods (at least for some usage cases).

KQEMU is essentially unmaintained & you can't assume access to KVM
since it requires hardeware virtualization & even if your hardware has
such capabilities there are plenty of scenarios where the end user will
not be able to use them.

> Naturally these might not be situations you are interested in, but I 
> think your statement of 'too slow to be practical' was an 
> oversimplification which you knew I would take the bait and defend ;)

You're imagining things - if you choose to use QEMU for your project
I've no problem with that - that's your choice to make. It is simply
not practical for my day-to-day work to wait for installs inside QEMU
emulator to complete.

Dan.
-- 
|=- Red Hat, Engineering, Emerging Technologies, Boston.  +1 978 392 2496 -=|
|=-           Perl modules: http://search.cpan.org/~danberr/              -=|
|=-               Projects: http://freshmeat.net/~danielpb/               -=|
|=-  GnuPG: 7D3B9505   F3C9 553F A1DA 4AC2 5648 23C1 B3DF F742 7D3B 9505  -=|