Re: About usage of floppy with linux guests on gnome-boxes

["Zeeshan Ali (Khattak)" <zeeshanak gnome org>]

On Fri, Dec 2, 2011 at 1:58 AM, Lucas Meneghel Rodrigues <lmr redhat com> wrote:
> On 12/01/2011 09:50 PM, Zeeshan Ali (Khattak) wrote:
>
>>   The first prototype code I wrote indeed created unattended CD-ROM
>> ISO but that method took quite some time and added also a lot to our
>> disk-usage. On further research and discussions with some relevant
>> developers, I found out that floppy method works for all OSs and
>> therefore implemented it. About floppy support being broken on Linux,
>> I was hoping to start using USB for Linux. Creating CD-ROM ISO is just
>> way too slow.
>
>
> Well, we did not see any noticeable difference among isos and floppies,
> since the ISO is going to hold most of the time a single unattended file,
> it's a tiny tiny iso :)

  Ah!

> Maybe approach you took was to re-generate the entire install iso file,

  That is correct and I thought that was the only CD-ROM method possible.

> which is certainly a disaster in terms of time spent, in our framework we
> just create a cdrom that holds the unattended file, so the time used to
> create it is negligible.

  Thats really good to know. I would still want to see both of them in
action before deciding though. All this installer code at first lived
in a separate repo/project and this is the commit where I moved from
cdrom generation to floppy method:

https://gitorious.org/virt-installer/virt-installer/commit/d0339fa03606e4c4d284294c99d36ce0fd724506

  I thought you might want to have a look at the old cold.

>>> So I'd like to implement unattended cdrom creation for gnome boxes,
>>
>>
>>   I'm sorry but I'll only want to go that route as the last resort
>> because of time and space concerns I mentioned above. How about you
>> try that USB method first?
>
>
> Fair enough, but my comment about the small isos holds true as far as I can
> see. As soon as I can get boxes built and I can get my first patches going
> I'll try USB first...

   I have no real objections on the cdrom method if:

1. We already try USB and it doesn't work for some reason (I think I
tried with Fedora and it worked for that).
2. Speed and disk usage isn't very different compared to floppy method.

   Another reason to prefer USB is that that then the code-path won't
be very different for windows and linux then. Actually IIRC we just
need to specify in the domain configuration that its a USB image and
thats it.

   BTW, it will be a big contribution if you could solve this mystery
for us: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=665001

-- 
Regards,

Zeeshan Ali (Khattak)
FSF member#5124