Re: [discuss] How much OpenIndiana is lagging behind Linux in live usb technology?

[Peter Tribble <peter.tribble@gmail.com>]

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On Tue, Jul 30, 2024 at 12:00 AM nsgnkhibdk2cls0f via illumos-discuss <
discuss@lists.illumos.org> wrote:

> Thank you for clarification. But the overall experience with OpenIndiana
> live usb is still very bad. You should have a look at it and do something
> to improve the performance.
>

Historically, OpenSolaris/OpenIndiana/Solaris, based on the Caiman
installer, have
typically taken about twice as long as Ubuntu (which is probably a fair
comparison
out of the available Linux distros). I did some comparisons back in
OpenSolaris, and
I don't know whether there's been significant change in that ratio.
Certainly the recent
Debian installs I've done have been horribly slow.

While OmniOS and Tribblix are very very much quicker, I'm not entirely sure
how much
of that work translates directly to OpenIndiana - with different targets in
mind we can
optimize in very different directions, and both those distros wrote
something from scratch.

A couple of the things I have in my old notes last time I looked at this (I
haven't
done a regular OpenIndiana install for some years now):

1. As the live environment is absolutely static, certain things could be
precalculated
ahead of time. I think it has to calculate the lists of files to transfer,
which seems
wasteful to do each time.

2. One useful trick I do in Tribblix, again based on the notion that you
know precisely
what the install environment looks like, is to pregenerate the full SMF
respository
(by doing a test boot and saving off the repository.db. it's going to be
the same every
time) so as to avoid waiting for SMF import at first boot, which can save a
bit [especially
in some virtualized environments where manifest import seems to run
abnormally slowly].

But one of the snags is that there isn't a great deal of understanding of
the live
boot and installer internals. Being a good perl programmer many decades ago
gave me Laziness, Impatience, and Hubris, and after spending a few minutes
trying to work out what Caiman was doing I decided it was too complicated
for me so I wrote all the tools for Tribblix from scratch in a fraction of
the time.

-- 
-Peter Tribble
http://www.petertribble.co.uk/ - http://ptribble.blogspot.com/

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