Re: [gentoo-catalyst] catalyst + uml

[Eric Edgar]

I am in the process of trying to develop something along these lines.  I
havent gotten very far because I am trying to develop a list of features
to be implemented.  In the near term the busybox discussion that you are
mentioning wont be implemented.  There is too much work to get a usable
system based on that.  I know for a fact that much of the regular
expression stuff will break because of that.  Who knows how much else
will be broken.

For what you are doing however you could use cow files to make things
more secure.  If you feel you have been hacked you can stop the instance
and remove the cow file and restart and you are back to the point when
you first started the instance.  I am not sure if this is what you are
after but it could help.  

Basically what is left to add to catalyst is a new target that will take
a seed stage and copy it into a loop back filesystem.  COde needs to be
added to choose the size and name of the initial backing file.  What
type of filesystem should be formatted to it etc.  Most of the other
heavy lifting is already in place.  

When catalyst 2 comes out you can take the stage4 target which makes it
possible to make a system that is stored in a tarball and take some
scripts and migrate it into the uml loop back files.  This may be what
you are looking for.  Otherwise at somepoint catalyst may have these
features built in but it depends on the time constraints.

I hope this helps.
Rocket

On 17:28 Wed 29 Jun     , Chris Gianelloni wrote:
> On Wed, 2005-06-29 at 17:04 -0400, Victor Condino wrote:
> > Also, I was wondering how realistic it is to replace bash, grep, sed,
> > awk, tail, procps, psutil, etc. with busybox. I know that the
> > initscripts in baselayout rely on these various text- and shell-utils
> > and obviously on bash... is it possible to get them to run using busybox
> > and its builtin applets? if so that would cut down on the root-fs size
> > and complexity, not to mention my build time, by alot.
>
> The embedded stuff uses baselayout-lite, I believe.  Otherwise,
> replacing the baselayout stuff will be a serious pain and will probably
> take you quite a few man-hours.
>
> > I know catalyst is designed to do this sort of thing, and from what I
> > gather, the embedded target, although meant for real (as in hw) embedded
> > systems, is pretty close to what I need, but when it comes to python, i
> > know very little, so examining the source in /usr/lib/catalyst/modules/
> > hasn't been too helpful. Which target is closest to what I'm looking
> > for, and if the embedded target is it, where can I find some good info
> > and an example .spec for it? I found this link:
> > [http://dev.gentoo.org/~mutex/catalyst-doc], but at the end there's
> > nothing after the line, "Links to sample spec files:" ;)
>
> I would think it would be the embedded target.  Very little work has
> really been done in this area by me, so I couldn't tell you how it
> works.
>
> > I'm willing to take the plunge and learn python if nescessary to do some
> > hacking on one of the existing target modules to get it to do what i
> > need. Basically just wondering if anyone else is interested in automated
> > building of this kind of system, and if anyone can suggest where to
> > start and what might need to be done in order to get catalyst to do
> > this. I don't mean to pester the developers; this is not intended as a
> > "feature request" or a "how do I ..." help-desk call ;)
>
> I'm sure rocket will pipe in once I quit harassing him for changes for
> the release.  He's been poking around with both UML and Xen, so he would
> probably be one of the best resources on this.
>
> --
> Chris Gianelloni
> Release Engineering - Strategic Lead/QA Manager
> Games - Developer
> Gentoo Linux