Re: [Vserver] A possible new idea

From: Bernd Petrovitsch <bernd_at_firmix.at>
Date: Thu 11 May 2006 - 09:23:46 BST
Message-Id: <1147335826.2348.51.camel@tara.firmix.at>

Sorry, the email escaped:
On Thu, 2006-05-11 at 10:18 +0200, Bernd Petrovitsch wrote:
> Risking to get off-topic:
>
> On Wed, 2006-05-10 at 23:20 -0400, Stephen Harris wrote:
> > On Thu, May 11, 2006 at 12:35:38AM +0200, Herbert Poetzl wrote:
> > > why would somebody want to _share_ the host files with
> > > the guest, instead of having a separate filesystem for
> > > them?
> >
> > This is actually how Solaris 10 zones work. In a Solaris 10
> > zone the filesystems /usr /bin /lib and so on are read-only loop-back
> > mounts to the host OS. It makes the guest a lot smaller as a result.
> > Pretty much most of the overhead of a guest ("zone" in Solaris terms)
> > is the local files in writeable filesystems to ensure OS stability
> > (eg /var/sadm for package maintenance).
> >
> > You don't have to worry about patching each guest because each guest
> > is using the host OS; patch the host, reboot the guest and it's
> > automatically patched. Yes, this requires native OS support (eg the
> > patch utilities need to know that a guest exists and so updates it's
> > package state files; the patch _contents_ would appear automatically as
> > a result of the loopback mounts; it's merely the package state files that
> > need updating).
>
> On Solaris not even that is necessary - the package mgmt tools can
> handle the "update" of already updated files (e.g. on read-only mounted
> NFS-volumes) since ages cleanly.
And removal to (of already removed files).

Sorry, this doesn't really work with .deb and .rpm AFAIK.

        Bernd

-- 
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