[Libguestfs] [PATCH] febootstrap: Use contents of installed Debian packages instead of downloading and unpacking them.

[Richard W.M. Jones]

On Mon, Sep 12, 2011 at 11:58:09PM +0200, Hilko Bengen wrote:
> ---
>  src/febootstrap_debian.ml |   65 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++-------
>  1 files changed, 54 insertions(+), 11 deletions(-)
> 

Update on this one since I've been busy investigating a serious
bug in RHEL.

We decided that this functionality was great, but that it should be
available optionally, and across at least the Debian and Yum backends.
It would be useful for Fedora builds too.

----

On a separate note, febootstrap-supermin-helper could use a 9pfs
backend.  This would make boot times even faster, while reducing the
complexity of the boot process -- in other words, it's all upside.

It seems that the hard bit of this is modifying the 9p server inside
qemu to make it more flexible.  It would be good if the 9p server
could be driven a text configuration file:

  /etc directory
  /etc/passwd replace /tmp/base/etc/passwd mode 0644 owner root group root
  /usr/bin directory
  /usr/bin/ls host
  /usr/bin/vi host

This describes to qemu how to synthesize a filesystem.  Some files
comes from host files directly (hostfiles), and some files are
replacement files (from base.img).

Then all the febootstrap-supermin-helper backend would need to do
would be to unpack base.img and construct this simple text config
file.

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones
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