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