[Libguestfs] febootstrap 3.x use cases.

[Richard W.M. Jones]

On Tue, Apr 03, 2012 at 01:31:55PM +0100, Carwyn Edwards wrote:
> > febootstrap is intended for building supermin appliances, see:
> >
> > http://libguestfs.org/febootstrap.8.html#supermin_appliances
> 
> Thanks Richard! Maybe a better question would be what are the use
> cases for supermin appliances? What are they not suitable for?

Well we use them in libguestfs as a secure and efficient alternative
to distributing a whole appliance, on Fedora and Debian.

> What I'm after is something akin to a Solaris sparse Zone. i.e. most
> of the files are the same are the parent OS except the website's data
> files, a tiny amount of config and it needs to be jailed off from all
> the other hosted sites.

At one point I was going to write a virtio 9p extension to qemu to do
this.  Didn't get around to it, but it would be very useful ...
This wouldn't help you for LXC though.

> It would seem that an on demand launched supermin with the web server
> config, ip address and a document root would fit well? Apart from
> these bits of data all the containers would be identical. In fact we
> very much want everything else to be the same.

Supermin appliances give you a disk image (or cpio file, if you
prefer).  They don't give you a host filesystem, so they're probably
not going to be much use for LXC, without a great deal of hacking.

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones
libguestfs lets you edit virtual machines.  Supports shell scripting,
bindings from many languages.  http://libguestfs.org