Re: [Ltsp-discuss] LTSP fat clients vs. Debian Live netboot

[Rob O. <ro...@pt...>]

On Sun, Dec 12, 2010 at 08:10:13PM -0800, Vagrant Cascadian wrote:
> On Sun, Dec 12, 2010 at 07:05:29PM -0500, Rob Owens wrote:
> > But today I tried
> > using a netboot image from Debian Live, and it was pretty nice.  I'm
> > wondering how it compares to an LTSP fat client.
> > 
> > The Debian Live solution works like this:
> > 
> > Download or build your own live image (the same kind of live image that
> > can be used on a USB or CD).  Share the image, read-only, over NFS.  Set
> > up tftpboot and dhcp.  Then your clients will download the live image
> > over the network and use local resources to run it.
> 
> i *think* debian-live loads the whole OS into ram, whereas LTSP's fatclient
> approach only loads parts over the network it actually uses when it uses it.
> both approaches have advantages and disadvantages, namely in how much server
> vs. local resources it takes.
> 
All testing in Virtualbox:

Standard Debian installation, Gnome desktop, gnome-terminal opened.
'top' shows 189708k RAM usage.

Debian Live with "squashfs" filesystem, Gnome desktop, gnome-terminal opened.
'top' shows 339828k RAM usage.
Note:  squashfs image is 556M on disk.

Debian Live with "plain" filesystem, Gnome desktop, gnome-terminal opened.
'top' shows 223856k RAM usage.
Note:  Live filesystem is 1.8G on disk.

I didn't verify that my "standard" Debian installation was identical to
the "live" Debian installations, in terms of what packages are
installed.  They are at least pretty close, though.

Anyway, it doesn't look like debian-live loads the whole
image/filesystem into RAM.

-Rob