Re: [Xen-users] Xen on USB Key

[Jayesh Salvi <jayeshsalvi@xxxxxxxxx>]

Yes I was thinking on these lines. However in a desktop environment something like SAN or boot over network won't be possible. But if you consider typical use cases, then it won't be too inconvinient to gather all the immuatble (and bulky) part (bin,lib,usr) in a readonly image and deploy it on the machines that you expect to use most frequently (your office and home desktop). Then all you have to carry on disk is changing part (home,var).

I had tried this last week, but I could not figure out the readonly part of a distribution. I will update on this if I get any success.

Thanks,
Jayesh

On 1/23/06, Ralph Passgang <ralph@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Am Montag, 23. Januar 2006 13:17 schrieb William Man:
> I had initial thoughts along the same line.  I have built the kernel to run
> off a key, but not tried it yet.
> But ALL logging need to be moved to tmp, all lock files need to be moved to
> tmp, etc...
>
> As the general lifetime of a key is like 10yrs, if you only write on it
> once/twice a day.  But if you use it daily then..... it won't last long.
>
> Also, I had an idea of using a squash FS, (if its called that), where you
> mount the drive read only, then mount a ramdrive ontop of it.  So any
> modifications will be from the ram.  Same as what live cds do.  But if it
> crashes, you have no logs.  Or, sacrifice ram and boot into ramdisk.
>
> Obviously this requires alot of effort, which i currently don't have.

... or boot a hdd-less xen system via pxe and mount a remote blockdevice (san)
in the initrrd and use it as root device. this definitly works but also
requires some work to be done to set something like this up. espacially the
initrd part where network support & san support must be included and
scripted. so the difficult part is not the xen related part at all...

> W

--Ralph

>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Dániel Vásárhelyi" <asdmin@xxxxxxxxx>
> To: "xen users list" < Xen-users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> Sent: Monday, January 23, 2006 11:08 AM
> Subject: Re: [Xen-users] Xen on USB Key
>
> On 1/23/06, Jayesh Salvi < jayeshsalvi@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> >  Here is the idea. I am running a domU out of a partition on a USB drive.
>
> I
>
> > use the other partition to store the domU state. Then I carry this USB
> > key to my office and restore the VM at the point where I left it. Thus I
> > am trying to use xen's virtualization to carry my desktop on a USB key.
> > http://www-users.cs.umn.edu/~salvi/xenonkey/index.html
>
> I have the strong opinion your key will _die_ in couple of weeks.
>
> Daniel
>
> --
> Dániel Vásárhelyi
> http://www.nsfw.hu/ | http://www.tophost.hu/
>
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-- 
Jayesh

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