Re: [tlug] Small footprint Linux distribution without a GUI

[Mattia Dongili <malattia@example.com>]

On Wed, May 09, 2007 at 10:46:20AM +0900, Al Hoang wrote:
> On Wed, May 09, 2007 at 09:11:17AM +0900, Jedidiah Israel wrote:
> > On 5/9/07, leon calvaud <enae95@example.com> wrote:
> > 
> > It does. Thank you.
> > 
> > My lofty idea is to create a Linux project that uses KVM to host
> > individual service instances. For example, having a mail instance, a
> > http server instance, and so forth. I hope to use FUSE to bound the
> > file systems where appropriate. The idea needs alot of  work. It is
> > similar to jailed environment, but I want something more than a simple
> > jail.
> > 
> > The initial goals are to 1) replace VMware, 2) steer clear of SELinux
> > and 3) stay small and conceptually simple.
> 
>     Depending on your needs, you might want to also explore OpenVZ [1] if you
> don't need a whole instance that is virtualized.  It is conceptually similar to what
> FreeBSD calls Jails or Solaris calls zones/containers.
> 
>     Also I'm a little confused if your host environment is going to be on this
> highly constrained environment or are the virtualized instances going to be going
> on a diet.  If it is the former, I'm curious to see if this will work well in practice
> since the following things sort of spring to mind:
> 
> 1. Each virtualized instance needs basically a whole install to run 
>    properly which dictates they also need space.   So let's say you 
>    want to run 10 service instances and you have pared down your 
>    custom Linux install to about 20MB.  Each virtualized instance 
>    will require approximately the same amount plus factor in the compiled
>    binaries for the service in question.

then user-mode-linux might be a nice choice. See the COW file format,
basically you can have just one base install shared between all the UML
instances and have COW files for each of the "service-instances".
http://user-mode-linux.sourceforge.net/shared_fs.html

I guess qemu can do something similar but I'm having no luck with google
now.

Cheers
-- 
mattia
:wq!