Feature idea: package an installer image as a grub entry before F8. Was [ Re: Very much packages with fc6 tag instead of fc7 in the FC7 tree ]

Benjamin Lewis ben.lewis at benl.co.uk
Fri Jun 1 17:45:57 UTC 2007


Will Woods wrote:
> On Fri, 2007-06-01 at 18:25 +0100, Benjamin Lewis wrote:
>   
>> Jeff Spaleta wrote:
>>     
>>> On 6/1/07, Christopher Aillon <caillon at redhat.com> wrote:
>>>       
>>>> Actually, many people do network installs.  I have no DVD burner so the
>>>> DVD ISO does me no good.  So I downloaded the boot.iso to load up
>>>> anaconda, and pointed the installer at the right places on the network.
>>>>   Much less downloading as you only update what you need.
>>>>         
>>> For people who do network based upgrades/re-installs......
>>> would it be feasible, and appropriate to provide a package in the F7
>>> repo which contained the F8 installer image as a grub entry for an F7
>>> system at the time of F8 release. So people could install that and
>>> reboot into the installer via their grub menu and do an upgrade via
>>> the installer.. instead of being tempted to do a live upgrade just
>>> with yum. Clever monkeys can do this manually now with some effort to
>>> pull the installer image from the iso. The question is, does it make
>>> sense to make this easier for the general userbase and provide a
>>> package in a timely manner into F7 for the F8 release?
>>>
>>> -jef
>>>       
>> I kind of like this as an idea! My only concern is that people will use
>> this to do ftp installs off the mirrors - which is a bad as yum really.
>>     
>
> "bad" in what sense? It's hard on mirror bandwidth, and that's bad, but
> it's not as likely to hose your system as a yum-upgrade would be.
>
> I've also been pondering what anaconda work would be needed to do system
> upgrades from the hard drive you're upgrading - assuming you have the
> free space on your drive, you could do something like:
>   
sorry, ambiguous - I meant bad as in bandwidth, not as in yum eating
your system alive (which I've done at least twice)
> Start "live-updater" tool
>   - Checks installed packages, as anaconda does
>   - Downloads all updated packages 
>     - (Alternately: use a DVD iso and it would only 
> download the packages you're missing.)
>   - Grab kernel/initrd (from mirror or DVD iso)
>   - update grub.conf, adding special flag(s) for anaconda
> Reboot into anaconda
>   - Upgrade filesystems, perform other fixups that require unmounted fs
>   - Mount target filesystem label
>   - Upgrade using previously-downloaded packages / iso image
>
> The downside is that it requires a few gigs of free drive space, but on
> the plus side we don't need a separate partition for holding the
> updates.
>
> A sneaky thing we might do is:
>
> 1) download all packages
> 2) swapoff
> 3) mkfs.ext3 $SWAP_PARTITION
> 4) mount $SWAP_PARTITION /mnt/swap
> 5) copy all packages to /mnt/swap
> 6) get vmlinuz/initrd and update grubby
> 7) reboot into anaconda, upgrading from $SWAP_PARTITION
>
> Just a thought.
>
> -w
>   
I prefer the second option, provided the machine has the ram to run
without swap.

-- 

Benjamin Lewis
Fedora Ambassador
ben.lewis at benl.co.uk

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"In cases of major discrepancy, it is always reality that got it wrong"
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