febootstrap 3.x use cases.
I'm confused! What use cases is the new febootstrap primarily intended for? I'm mainly trying to figure out if I'm trying to put a square peg into a round hole. What I'm looking into is using linux containers (LXC) either using libvirt or lxc-tools) to create jails for a web hosting type environment. I can see that in the long run btrfs has some nice features to help with this too. Is febootstrap really intended for this kind of use case? I can see two mechanisms that might work for what I'm trying to do: * Figure out how to create application containers around apache/whateverwebserver with a docroot and virtually no other filesystem. The down side to this is that it needs a lot of stuff added to the jail to make it work. * Use something like febootstrap or btrfs to create minimal filesystem roots for each hosted environment. This seems simpler if a little overkill. I'll probably ask over at the lxc lists and take a look at OpenVZ too. I'm mainly interested in finding out more about the intended use of febootstrap here. Thanks, Carwyn
On Mon, Apr 02, 2012 at 11:59:03AM +0100, Carwyn Edwards wrote:
I'm confused! What use cases is the new febootstrap primarily intended for? I'm mainly trying to figure out if I'm trying to put a square peg into a round hole.
What I'm looking into is using linux containers (LXC) either using libvirt or lxc-tools) to create jails for a web hosting type environment. I can see that in the long run btrfs has some nice features to help with this too.
Is febootstrap really intended for this kind of use case?
No. I strongly suggest using yum with the --installroot option. febootstrap is intended for building supermin appliances, see: http://libguestfs.org/febootstrap.8.html#supermin_appliances Rich. -- Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones virt-top is 'top' for virtual machines. Tiny program with many powerful monitoring features, net stats, disk stats, logging, etc. http://et.redhat.com/~rjones/virt-top
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? 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. 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. Carwyn
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
What I'm after is something akin to a Solaris sparse Zone.
At one point I was going to write a virtio 9p extension to qemu to do this.
This sounds interesting, could you elaborate a little? 9p? We're using a lot of KVM and libguest FS here besides this web hosting requirement.
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.
I think the penny is dropping. What febootstrap is doing internally is similar to what I'm after but it's output is different. Obvious in hindsight :) I think I'll take this element to the LXC lists now. Many thanks. Carwyn
On Tue, Apr 03, 2012 at 02:41:36PM +0100, Carwyn Edwards wrote:
What I'm after is something akin to a Solaris sparse Zone.
At one point I was going to write a virtio 9p extension to qemu to do this.
This sounds interesting, could you elaborate a little? 9p? We're using a lot of KVM and libguest FS here besides this web hosting requirement.
virtio-9p (the plan 9 filesystem over virtio) is a way to export the host filesystem to qemu guests. We could use this to export the appliance to guests (instead of building a disk image). Except that it's not really flexible enough in its current state. We would need some sort of config file which would let us control exactly what files, from where, get exported from the host, and what host files get replaced.
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.
I think the penny is dropping. What febootstrap is doing internally is similar to what I'm after but it's output is different. Obvious in hindsight :)
I think I'll take this element to the LXC lists now. Many thanks.
Carwyn
Rich. -- Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones Read my programming blog: http://rwmj.wordpress.com Fedora now supports 80 OCaml packages (the OPEN alternative to F#) http://cocan.org/getting_started_with_ocaml_on_red_hat_and_fedora
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Carwyn Edwards -
Richard W.M. Jones