From: Brian Elliott Finley To: SystemImager Discuss , SISuite-devel Cc: Dann Frazier , Sean Dague , Michael Chase-Salerno Subject: Status of Development Code Date: 1 Jul 2002 09:01:29 -0500 Greetings and salutations, This is an update of the current status of the SystemImager development code. The following are some of the key features or modifications that will be included in the next stable release(1). Current status of code to be included in next stable release: * Modular kernel * SCSI, file system, other drivers compiled as modules. * Network drivers compiled in statically. * Many more network drivers compiled in. * Gigabit Ethernet support on auto-install clients. * "Module only" drivers can be used, including network drivers. * Allows a "complete" kernel to be provided with SystemImager * Makes it possible to add support for additional file systems much more easily. * Hardware auto-detection * Necessary modules are automatically loaded. * devfs is used * Eliminates the need to keep up with device files for new block devices as they get added (Hardware RAID controllers for example). * Building of initrd.gz from source code happens faster. * tmpfs * BOEL(2) now uses tmpfs as it's root file system. * Size constraint of files that can be copied to the in memory file system on auto-install clients is effectively eliminated. See /usr/src/linux/Documentation/filesystems/tmpfs.txt for details. * boel_binaries tarball * A single tarball of additional binaries (that don't fit on the auto-install media) is now pulled over to auto-install clients once network connectivity is achieved. * This tarball contains additional kernel modules and other binaries, such as mke2fs, mkraid, mkreiserfs, and their shared libraries. * Many additional features in BOEL including: * a "vi" editor * filename completion * syslogd * Auto-install clients can send their syslog messages to the image server, or to a separate logging server. * HP Smart Array 5xxx series * Support for the HP Smart Array 5xxx series of hardware RAID controllers has been added. These devices use /dev/cciss/* device files. * Other HP Smart Array controllers * Support for HP Smart Array controllers that use /dev/ida/* device files has been added. * IA64 * IA64 support has been added. * GPT (GUID Partition Table) support has been added. * Build environment * The entire SystemImager package can be built on any distribution. It is no longer limited to a hand modified version of a specific Debian release. * Debian rocks, and I will continue to use it as *my* development environment, but this will make it much easier for packaging into other distributions, and for maintaining past releases. Additional features in progress: * Dynamic Partitioning support * Giving users the ability to specify percentages or megabytes for partition schemes. * Easily change file system types used by an image. This will an image pulled from a golden client using ext2 to be deployed on a machine as reiserfs, for example. * Easily change destination disks. This will allow an image pulled from a machine with IDE disks to be installed on a machine with SCSI disks. * A single image can me used across machines using different drive types and different file system types. * Netboot control * The ability to control which PXE enabled machines boot from the network, and when they boot. This will give the system administrator control over network booting so that a machine can be made to boot from the network for an auto-install, but not boot from the network after completing the install. Certainly it's not possible to include all improvements here, but as you can see, there have been quite a few. Many of them are structural changes that will significantly improve our ability to add support to SystemImager for new file systems, hardware, and architectures. And of course you will see a number of bug fixes. The 2.0.x series happened to be a particularly buggy series. I'm afraid that this was partially due to my limited involvement due to lack of funding at the time. Funding levels have increased, and I'm anticipating this next release to be a very stable release. If you have other features or modifications that you would like to see, please submit a feature request (http://systemimager.org/support/) or contact to commission development. If a feature you are interested in is already listed, please add a "ME TOO!" comment as a logged in SourceForge user. This will help me determine demand for certain features. Finally, I would expect you're wondering when this release will happen and what it will be called. I am hoping to make this release prior to September, and currently have it slated to be called "3.0.0". There have been enough architectural changes that I believe the changing of the first digit is warranted. Notes: 1. All of this is subject to change prior to release. 2. BOEL is Brian's Own Embedded Linux. It is the embedded Linux used to auto-install clients. Please feel free to forward this message on to other lists, or groups that use SystemImager and System Installation Suite (SIS). Cheers, -Brian -- --------------------------------------------------- Brian Elliott Finley http://baldguysoftware.com/ phone: 214.280.8188 http://systemimager.org/ ---------------------------------------------------