Re: [uml-devel] UML "Distro" ?

[Cameron P. <ca...@pa...>]

roland wrote:

> I would like to hear your opinion if it`s worth thinking about a
> "UML Linux Distribution".

Sounds like an eminently sensible idea to me :-)

> It could be based on another distro (debian? fedora?) and contain:

My personal bias would be to base it on Debian, as it is generally
quite readily hackable, and has a lot of the infrastructure to support
UML already there.  Dunno, I don't think it really matters that much.

> - A setup for installation of a minimalistic, UML-"ready" base
> system - call it a "UML runtime environment". That means: Recent and
> skas/sysemu-patched kernel(2.6), modules, X, uml-utilities, screen,
> scripts, bridge-utils......

Is having X installed really desirable most of the time?  Most of the
uses for this distro would be on servers, and having X on the host
makes maintaining the distro harder for relatively little benefit.

> - Pre-configured environment (bridge setup,tmpfs,mountpoints...)

Scripts to make it easy to add and remove UML guest instances would
also be quite useful -- especially if it could take care of having
UMLs running as their own user id (for security reasons) and setting
up a root filesystem.

> - basic root-filesystems "ready to run"

Or alternatively, including tools like rootstrap to make generating
root fs'es easy?

Cameron.