"Stateless Linux" project

Havoc Pennington hp at redhat.com
Mon Sep 13 22:24:58 UTC 2004


On Mon, 2004-09-13 at 22:55 +0100, Miles Sabin wrote:
> Havoc Pennington wrote,
> > Right, for a sufficiently low number of machines, setting up an
> > elaborate framework is going to be more annoying than just managing
> > them all separately. Though we should try to make the framework easy
> > enough to use that it makes sense even for a single machine, if we
> > can.
> 
> Do you have any feel for how low that number is given the current stage 
> of development?

Right now I think you'd be spending a lot of time fixing the
framework ;-) It's pretty alpha. But the goal here is to get the OS
itself to comprehensively assume that the OS install may be shared read-
only. Then at least an individual site only has to worry about their
unique configuration and workload, rather than all the OS bits.
At that point the degree of pain to "go stateless" would depend on the
local site.

> I'm not so sure about this. There are many scenarios where it makes 
> sense to restrict particular roles to a specific set of hosts, or to 
> restrict particular hosts to a specific set of roles. Security is one 
> (eg., to take an extreme example, I don't want a firewall to be able to 
> run any workload) but it's not the only one.

Good point.

> As you say, a lot of this works already ... I work with parallel 
> applications on clusters, and common configuration in a shared 
> filesystem with symmetry-breaking via hostname works fabulously well 
> given how trivial it is to set up (until the NFS server goes down, that 
> is ;-).
> 
> But it's pretty much limited to machines which are always connected to 
> the same network. Extending this to laptops which move between 
> networks, or no network at all could be a lot more challenging. OTOH, a 
> scheme which could handle that case as well would be a huge bonus.

Right. We've been primarily thinking of the laptop case, really, since
the desktop hackers have been working on this. So all the networking
stuff for example is designed with laptops as primary target.

Havoc






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