Feature proposal: Rebootless Installer

[Douglas McClendon]

Christoph Wickert wrote:
> Am Dienstag, den 14.07.2009, 08:09 -0600 schrieb Douglas McClendon:
>> Colin Walters wrote:
>>> Another thing to keep in mind that immediately post-installation there
>>> are going to be updates, which will at a minimum need desktop reset
>>> (fast reboot experience), or more likely system restart.
>> I don't exactly get this.  I might understand some negligible things. 
>> But historically I've often done
>>
>> -normal install, reboot
>>
>> -booted, logged in using everying, then a massive yum update, then I'd 
>> wait till it was absolutely convenient to logout of the desktop or reboot
> 
> You wouldn't need no yum update if you enabled the updates repo during
> install. It's a single click.

I don't know this off the top of my head, but I think I can say with 
some certainty- either that isn't possible with the current LiveOS 
installer, or if it is, the same thing is a trivial addition to mine. 
I.e. in the context of my rebootless installer, it is literally just a 
checkbox which spawns a yum update, or pokes packagekit to do the same.

> 
> Your proposal sounds interesting, but I have two questions/issues:
>      1. The installation is not finished after reboot because we have
>         firstboot. How to trigger firstboot in a rebootless install?

firstboot really just isn't that much.  It is all stuff that can be done 
just as easily in the running system.  But as mentioned in response to 
Colin, integrating parts of that in the RebootlessInstaller are already 
in the ROADMAP.  But I don't think that that level of feature parity 
with existing installations should be required for feature acceptance in 
f12 (given 'experimental' tagging of the feature).


>      2. Imagine after the installation you switch rebootless to the new
>         system and install a kmod. But you are still running the kernel
>         from the installation medium and kmods get installed for the
>         running kernel, which not necessarily needs to be the one that
>         was installed.

As with a current LiveOS installation, the installation media kernel is 
the running kernel.  (unless the f11 installer already allows you to 
trigger a chrooted yum update as part of install).

So yes, if there is a kernel update available - and I'll grant, it is 
the rule for installations and not the exception - you will need to 
reboot to switch to that kernel (at least until the whole ksplice 
technology rolls into town...)

peace...

-dmc