Bryan Kearney wrote:
I would like to submit for approval an Appliance Operating System
(AOS)
Spin. This spin is part of the appliance-tools feature [1] and also part
of the thincrust project [2]. The Kickstart file can be found in the
repo [3] but I have flattened it and attached it to this email.
The goal of this spin is to provide a minimal base upon which software
appliances can be built. The main deployment for appliances is expected
to be virtual machine, but since there are no kernel changes this could
work bare metal as well. This would be the fedora implementation of a
JeOS [4].
First of all, it's great to see this "special" spin being submitted for
review and possibly being released alongside Fedora 10 as a perfect
showcase of how both spins as well as the JeOS or AOS work.
== Name ==
The name I would choose to give to this spin is "Fedora AOS" (at which
point the name of the kickstart becomes "fedora-livecd-aos.ks" or
possibly just "fedora-live-aos.ks".
== Feature Page ==
The feature page is more extensive then other Spin's feature pages
because this particular spin is only part of a feature. To be able to
track the Spin Feature separately, we may need a separate AOS Spin
Feature page. I'm not sure how other involved parties are seeing this
(eg. Feature wrangler / Release Engineering).
Whereas the appliance-tools has additional features compared to
livecd-tools, this particular spin is a perfect showcase, and a great
way to test whatever it is someone might want to do.
It may need a little clarification though on why a user should use this
spin (eg. scope and target audience things).
== Kickstart ==
First of all, since this is a unique spin concept in that it has a
specific goal, these notes and corresponding feedback needs to be taken
into account by the Spin SIG as well as the spin maintainers...
1) SELinux on this spin is disabled. Although understandable, we would
like to see if SELinux could be enabled, or hear about why it is
disabled entirely (rather then set permissive). SELinux is a major major
feature in Fedora as well as RHEL, so we would like to preserve SELinux
as a feature on all spins.
2) A root password is set, which is understandable for real live systems
but is not conform the other spin concepts where an additional, normal
user is created and the root password is removed. If there is a
motivation for setting a root password and not creating a (regular) user
in this spin concept, please let us know.
3) the partitioning configuration has --ondisk sda as well as --fstype
ext3 which is not taken into account with creating a live spin.
4) the package manifest includes @core, which is included already
5) the kickstart removes fedora-logos, but does not add another logos
package, resulting in that fedora-logos still ends up on the image. A
minor problem for when the spin is approved by the Board for trademark
usage, but you may want to add "generic-logos" to the manifest for now.
6) the network isn't started on boot. Note that the network service does
not start on boot by default anymore, in favor of the NetworkManager
service, which is not available on this spin, and which I think would
also not be favorable to the spin's specific use case.
== Image Size ==
The image size composed against today's rawhide is 117M, which should
definitely fit on a CD (~690-700M), or some of the even smaller media
for that matter.
Noted the aforementioned issues this overall looks as a great spin to
include in the release. Please change or motivate the issues set forth
and we'll gladly take another stab at this spin ;-)
Kind regards,
Jeroen van Meeuwen
-kanarip