[gentoo-soc] Re: GSoc 2009 : Making the cluster LiveCD bootable from USB

[Eric Thibodeau]

In response to two e-mails I just got off list from Meetanshu Gupta  and 
Ajith Kamath, in both cases the impression is that the project is simply 
to port the bootable CD to USB disk. Here is are _some_ clarifications:

- The wiki's¹ description is misleading, booting to USB was ONE of my 
suggestions with a little more details here². Quite frankly, porting to 
USB should be somewhat trivial. The hardest part is to being very 
methodical and making sure the process can be reproduced using, ideally, 
Catalyst and little outside scripting. All of this also implies getting 
the catalyst specs up to date, modifying/removing many hacks that would 
no longer be required for a USB based boot (since we would now have an 
RW system). *** root on JFFS2 might be of interest here ***... and so on.

- AuFS is used as an overlay system and is required for the NFS-booted 
nodes. One might want to migrate that to a less efficient tmpfs approach 
(ref: LTSP implementation as being done under Gentoo too).
- Change most of the scripts to use dialog and automate some 
detection/ask questions as per what was discovered.
- ... and so on, the idea would be to implement my original proposal and 
push it further. I do have it but want some feedback before I dig it out 
and re-post it (Donnie, thought you had posted it as an example? If not 
so, feel free to do so if it's still relevant.)

¹: the wiki: 
http://en.gentoo-wiki.com/wiki/2009_Summer_Of_Code_Ideas#Make_the_clustering_LiveCD_from_last_year.27s_GSoC_bootable_from_USB 

²: Donnie's wordpress: 
http://dberkholz.wordpress.com/2009/02/19/planning-for-gentoo-in-the-2009-summer-of-code/ 


Eric Thibodeau
PS: I'm keeping anyone interested in the project in the loop... Some 
have already started getting familiarized with the code base at 
http://git.overlays.gentoo.org/gitweb/?p=proj/clustering-livecd.git;a=tree 
...I strongly urge anyone interested in the project to get familiar with 
using catalyst and the contents of the git!