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Fedora Project Considering "Stateless Linux"

Posted by timothy on from the man-without-a-country dept.

Havoc Pennington writes "Red Hat developers have been working on a generic framework covering all cases of sharing a single operating system install between multiple physical or virtual computers. This covers mounting the root filesystem diskless, keeping a read-only copy of it cached on a local disk, or storing it on a live CD, among other cases. Because OS configuration state is shared rather than local, the project is called 'stateless Linux.' The post to fedora-devel-list is here, and a PDF overview is here."

3 of 234 comments (clear)

  1. Re:mainframe by owlstead · · Score: 5, Informative

    Terminals did not have their own CPU to do things. Here everything is kept local, except the OS install which can easily be managed. Since Linux can work without rebooting for driver installs (which is a necesity in this case) you can even run different kind of hardware on a single install. Basically you now have a flexible, cheap network computer.

    And since we cannot do without networking anyway, and since storage devices are easy to make high available, this would seem like a blessing to me.

  2. Re:I want the opposite! by v1x · · Score: 5, Informative

    > Isn't this what we blame microsoft for? <

    Not quite: we blame them for having to *run* a lot of programs as root to get full functionality. In most *nixes, OTOH, you only need root passwords to *install* programs, while the programs themselves run just fine for regular users.

    I dont see anything wrong with having to ask for root passwords for critical changes to any system: its a good practice, and one of the better implementations of it is seen in OS X, which actually has 'Lock/Unlock' icons for settings that need root access.

  3. Not needing root and thin client hybrid... by agristin · · Score: 5, Informative

    If you read the article, you will see that:

    1) they don't want users to need root for hardware (but do want users to need the admin to install certain software). This info is in the PDF. They already see that needing root for hardware install or configuration needs to be worked around.

    2) the design is a hybrid or amalgamation of thin and fat client, trying to cherry pick the best of both:

    applications run on local systems

    software and data cached on local disk

    central management and configuration of nodes

    they call it a cached client technology

    3) they have a plan for laptops. Stateless... instantiation, sync... things that sound vague, but they seem to have a plan because this stuff is considered in the howto. There are some notes in the how-to covering the different types of clients:

    " diskless clients, which boot directly from a snapshot stored on the server
    caching clients, which boot from a copy of a snapshot, cached locally on a hard drive.
    Live CD clients, which boot from a copy of a snapshot burned onto a CD
    thick clients, which don't use snapshots and must be maintained by another means.
    "

    The idea has some very cool potential for a business or network situation. I can't imagine this is ready for production, but it could be soon.

    -A