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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."

7 of 234 comments (clear)

  1. Looks neat but... by cato+kaze · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I don't see the purpose. Maybe I'm just unitiated, but wouldn't a linux terminal server work better, or perhaps some other solution. This in particular doesn't look that amazing, but I could be wrong. Does anyone out there have specific uses for this? (TFA won't load for me, so I'm going on what I see)

    --
    Those who study history are doomed to watch others repeat it.
    1. Re:Looks neat but... by deragon · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Depending of your needs, its better than a thin client, because each user still has his own computer, with all the CPU power, GPU power, etc... for him/herself.

      You can still have one user work and experiment on a kernel module and crash his system while another continue with her wordprocessing.

      --
      Remember the year 2000? They promised us flying cars. They delivered the PT Cruiser...
    2. Re:Looks neat but... by Alien+Being · · Score: 5, Interesting

      It's actually a lot closer to Solaris autoclients.

  2. Like Clusters by deadline · · Score: 5, Interesting

    This is similar to what clusters try and do. It is important to maintain the same OS state on all nodes. Take a look at Rocks Clusters. Rocks will push the same OS image out to the nodes of the cluster. There is no reason the cluster nodes could not be workstations on a desk.

    --
    HPC for Primates. Read Cluster Monkey
  3. Re:NFS Mount? by nzkoz · · Score: 5, Interesting

    If you'd bother to read the white paper or howto (sure, I'm new here) you'd have read that this is more than NFS mounted roots.

    It's a framework for managing the servers, cached operation, integrated authentication etc. You can use this framework to manage roaming devices like laptops, allowing automatic install images, etc. etc.

    An NFS solution requires network connectivity the whole time, this doesn't.

    --
    Cheers Koz
  4. Got to love stateless installs by Trogre · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Heh. I once made a stateless distro, based on Red Hat, on a hard drive. The intention was to use it as a car ogg player.

    It had / mounted read-only. /var cannot be mounted read-only (needs /var/run, etc), so I mounted it as a 16M ramdisk, the contents of which was downloaded from /var.tgz at boot time. It worked splendid. Eventually, the slowest part of the boot process was waiting for the BIOS POST to finish.

    You could power down the thing whenever the hell you liked and never see fsck run.

    --
    "Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
  5. Interesting project by GolfBoy · · Score: 4, Interesting

    This is a very interesting project. As I understand the article, the point - long term - of the development effort is to try to get Linux (RedHat) adopted on the desktop by appealing to the TCO mentality of the IT department rather than by appealing to the desire of the end user to actually get stuff done. In other words, if the savings to IT of administering your machine centrally outweighs the benefits of you (corporate cube dweller) being able to configure your machine to your liking and use it as you see fit, then IT wins, and Linux makes an appearance on the Fortune 2000 desktop.

    'Thin client' was the first attempt to dethrone MS in this way, but this approach appears much more sophisticated, and consequently much more likely to succeed. Without seeing how the whole thing plays out I really have no idea whether the approach is successful or not. But it's a really nifty shot across the MS bows.

    Whether this goes anywhere or not ends up being decided by (as with most IT projects) whether the services provided by IT to the end users are adequate (in which case IT gets their way) or so obnoxiously limited that the end user cabal ends up storming the IT department with burning torches.