tarball images

tarball images

Posted Aug 8, 2008 12:48 UTC (Fri) by michaelkjohnson (subscriber, #41438)
In reply to: OpenVZ by kolyshkin
Parent article: Building custom appliance distributions with rBuilder

rBuilder is able to create tarball images, but not every product has tarball images created by its developers. There are a lot of image types and not all are relevant to every product. Furthermore, just because a tarball image has been created does not mean that it would be the correct images for deploying under OpenVZ. I have built them for deployment as Xen domU instances. I would suspect that for OpenVZ you do not want Xen-specific tools and configuration.

I was addressing the question of whether rBuilder provides the capability to support building OpenVZ guest images. As far as I can tell, the base technical capability of building tarball images provides what is needed, and the rest is just a new OS Template.

The rPath Linux 2 release you link to, announced on our blog and described at our wiki, is intended to be a base OS from which to create your own works, and so has a rather small sample of image types built. It's certainly not exhaustive; we created what we thought would be the most commonly-used types. Perhaps we should consider adding tarball images to those types -- the question would then be: tarball images of what? The most common deployment scenario to date for a tarball image has been a Xen domU. It's not that hard to convert a Xen domU tarball to a non-Xen install (the exact command depends on the image installed), but that doesn't preclude releasing non-Xen tarball images. It's essentially a question of sufficient interest to make it worth doing the extra work for each new release to add the image type to the build script.

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