NAME
febootstrap-to-supermin - Convert febootstrap root to supermin
appliance.
SYNOPSIS
febootstrap-to-supermin DIR supermin.img hostfiles.txt
DESCRIPTION
febootstrap-to-supermin converts the filesystem created by
febootstrap(8) into a supermin appliance. The term "supermin
appliance" is described in the documentation below. First you should
be familiar with febootstrap(8) and febootstrap-to-initramfs(8).
PARAMETERS
"DIR" is the directory created by febootstrap (ie. the output of
febootstrap and the input to this program).
"supermin.img" is the name of the supermin appliance that this program
creates, and "hostfiles.txt" is the name of the list of hostfiles that
this program creates. (ie. the outputs of this program).
SUPERMIN APPLIANCE
A supermin appliance is a very specialized, highly minimized appliance
which can be reconstructed on-the-fly at runtime into an ordinary
(initramfs) appliance.
The normal appliance is a self-contained Linux operating system, based
on the Fedora/RHEL/CentOS Linux distro. So it contains a complete copy
of all the libraries and programs needed, like kernel, libc, bash,
coreutils etc etc.
The supermin appliance removes the kernel and all the executable
libraries and programs from the appliance. That just leaves a skeleton
of directories, config files and some data files, which is obviously
massively smaller than the normal appliance. At runtime we rebuild the
appliance on-the-fly from the libraries and programs on the host (eg.
pulling in the real /lib/libc.so, the real /bin/bash etc.)
Although this process of rebuilding the appliance each time sounds
slow, it turns out to be faster than using a prebuilt appliance. (Most
of the saving comes from not compressing the appliance - it transpires
that decompressing the appliance is the slowest part of the whole boot
sequence). On my machine, a new appliance can be built in under a
fifth of a second, and the boot time is several seconds shorter.
The big advantage of the supermin appliance for distributions like
Fedora is that it gets security fixes automatically from the host, so
there is no need to rebuild the whole appliance for a security update
in some underlying library.
There are several disadvantages:
It won’t work at all except in very narrow, controlled cases like the
Fedora packaging case. We control the dependencies of the appliance
RPM tightly to ensure that the required binaries are actually present
on the host.
Furthermore there are certain unlikely changes in the packages on the
host which could break a supermin appliance, eg. an updated library
which depends on an additional data file.
Also supermin appliances are subjected to changes in the host kernel
which might break compatibility with qemu -- these are, of course, real
bugs in any case.
Lastly, supermin appliances really can’t be moved between branches of
distributions (eg. built on Fedora 12 and moved to Fedora 10) because
they are not self-contained and they rely on certain libraries being
around. You shouldn’t do this anyway.
Use supermin appliances with caution.
ANATOMY OF A SUPERMIN APPLIANCE
A supermin appliance consists usually of just two files, but can
contain several files and directories from the list below:
supermin.img
The image file (conventionally called "supermin.img", but you can
call it anything you want) is the skeleton initramfs. This is like
an initramfs built by febootstrap-to-initramfs(8), but all
libraries and binaries are removed.
Note that this file is a cpio file in cpio "newc" format, and is
not compressed (unlike initramfs files which are compressed cpio
files).
hostfiles.txt
This plain text file contains a list of files that we need to add
back from the host at runtime. ie. It’s the list of libraries and
binaries that we removed when we constructed "supermin.img".
This file usually contains wildcards. This is because we don’t
want the file to break on minor updates to libraries, so for
example instead of listing
lib64/libreadline.so.6.1.2
the file contains
lib64/libreadline.so.6.*
any directory
You can specify a directory which should contain image file(s) and
hostfile(s).
Using a directory is useful either to keep the appliance-related
files together, or to make more complex appliances containing
optional bits.
RECONSTRUCTING AN INITRAMFS FROM A SUPERMIN APPLIANCE
The program febootstrap-supermin-helper(8) can be used to reconstruct a
full initramfs from "supermin.img" and "hostfiles.txt" (plus,
naturally, the required programs and libraries in the host filesystem).
See that man page for details.
RESTRICTION: UNREADABLE BINARIES ON THE HOST
Some binaries on the host are not publically readable. For example:
$ ll /usr/libexec/pt_chown
-rws--x--x 1 root root 28418 2009-09-28 13:42 /usr/libexec/pt_chown
$ ll /usr/bin/chsh
-rws--x--x 1 root root 18072 2009-10-05 16:28 /usr/bin/chsh
These binaries cause a problem when reconstructing the supermin
appliance, because we’d like to copy them into the final appliance, and
usually that process is done as non-root. Currently the only solution
is that you should remove these problematic binaries from the
appliance.
EXAMPLE
Create a basic Fedora directory and turn it into a supermin image.
NB You must only build "Rawhide on Rawhide". If using another Fedora
branch, you must change "rawhide" below as appropriate, eg to
"fedora-12".
$ febootstrap rawhide /tmp/fedora
$ febootstrap-to-supermin /tmp/fedora supermin.img hostfiles.txt
Examine the resulting files:
$ cpio -itv < supermin.img | less
$ less hostfiles.txt
Reconstruct the final kernel and initramfs.
NB The first time you run this, it will be slow because the required
host files are not in cache. With a "hot cache" it should be lightning
fast. Run it several times to get representative timings.
$ febootstrap-supermin-helper supermin.img hostfiles.txt \
/tmp/kernel /tmp/initrd
You would boot the final image like this, although in this example it
probably won’t work unless you add a "/init" file to the appliance (see
the discussion in febootstrap-to-initramfs(8)).
$ qemu -m 1024 -kernel /tmp/kernel -initrd /tmp/initrd [etc...]
SEE ALSO
febootstrap(8), febootstrap-to-initramfs(8),
febootstrap-supermin-helper(8).
AUTHORS
Richard W.M. Jones <rjones @ redhat . com>
COPYRIGHT
(C) Copyright 2009-2010 Red Hat Inc.,
<http://people.redhat.com/~rjones/febootstrap>.
This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it
under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the
Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your
option) any later version.
This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but
WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU
General Public License for more details.
You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along
with this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc.,
675 Mass Ave, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA.