What ever happened to "Stateless Linux"?

Phil Regier pregier at ittc.ku.edu
Fri May 23 17:55:22 UTC 2008


I'm not entirely sure I follow.  If you're looking to justify a 
perception of broad interest, I probably won't be able to offer much on 
that front.  :)

For my current purposes, the idea is to be able to to run a full 
GNU/Linux environment on top of a machine that has a simple system 
already installed without touching the system as it's installed on disk, 
in this particular case for testing/running third-party imaging software 
(not my idea) with no hardware reconfiguration.

Another benefit is speed; it's hard to match (estimated) 60 seconds from 
bare metal to full-fledged init 3 (init 5 if you want to spend the time 
setting it up) when you're in a hurry and don't have time to re-load a 
machine.

I also seem to recall there being a time when smartctl was not available 
from rescue mode, but it looks like that concern is obsolete (may have 
been for a long time now).  Even so, from time to time there's something 
I need to do to recover a failing system that I can't quite seem to do 
from a rescue shell.

So the only benefit that I see in this case that would apply to the 
Fedora world at large is just the instant-provisioning aspect, which 
probably is or will be subsumed by a more general set of functionality, 
such as <shudder> cobbler.

See anything of potentially real value here?

Phil

Stephen John Smoogen wrote:
> On Fri, May 23, 2008 at 9:30 AM, Phil Regier <pregier at ittc.ku.edu> wrote:
>> I forgot to CC the list on the last message, so in case anyone else is
>> interested, this did work quite well after a little local tweaking.
>>
>> It may or may not be interesting to note that anaconda under Fedora 9 failed
>> to run to completion from the command line, but it worked very well under 8.
>>
>> Thanks again, Bill!
>>
> 
> A secondary question is what do people need stateless linux to do?
> What are the places it is useful and how can it be built to do that? A
> sort of 10 things that can be hacked on and checked off.
> 
> 
> 




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