Finnix, and mastering optimization
I said I'd announce my project here, and here it is: Finnix
(http://www.finnix.org/) version 86.0 has been released. Finnix is a
small (<100MB) LiveCD with a focus on system administration; it includes
many packages not found in Knoppix, such as LVM2 and cryptsetup, but no
X or productivity tools. It uses Debian testing as a base, unionfs, and
squashfs as the loopback filesystem. The initrd and rcS scripts are
based on Knoppix, but diverged a decent amount. Because of those
differences, I don't consider Finnix a "remaster" project, but I'm
grateful for the existing code to be based off :). Below is the
sourceforge announcement, but I thought I'd talk about sorting/ordering
first.
Klaus posted earlier his code for generating a list of files to be used
with -sort on mkisofs. I think I've improved upon that a bit. To start
out, temporarily replace the autoconfig script with a script that starts
an strace (capturing open, stat64 and execve), then calls the original
autoconfig script. I have an example script on the Finnix CD in
/etc/init.d/finnix-autoconfig-strace. Build the CD, and boot it. Then
I use a perl script on the running machine against the strace output
(it's done on the running machine because it checks for files that are
deleted before the end, such as /etc/mtab~). The script is available at
http://www.finnix.org/files/strace-reorder . The script uses a simple
weight based on when the file was first looked at, and how many times
it's accessed after that (some math geeks could probably improve it by
averaging out access positions based on other file accesses, so each CD
seek could travel the least amount of distance necessary, etc). Then
the result is fed to mkisofs (or in my case mksquashfs) and a final
build is done.
Let me know if you have any ideas for improvement. Thanks!
RF
--
Finnix 86.0 Released
http://sourceforge.net/forum/forum.php?forum_id=505408
Nearly 6 years ago, Finnix 0.03 made history as one of the first
bootable CD Linux distributions. It may have taken awhile, but Finnix is
back as a small (less than 100MB), fully-featured LiveCD for system
administrators.
Finnix 86.0 includes 336 Debian packages, Linux kernel 2.6.13, and
advanced system utilities such as LVM2. You can mount and manipulate
hard drives and partitions, monitor networks, rebuild boot records,
install other operating systems, and much more. Finnix can be run in as
little as 32MB RAM, but if you have at least 192MB RAM, you can run the
entire distribution from a ramdisk, saving access time during use, at
the expense of a small wait during boot while the CD is copied to RAM
(this wait is negligible due to the distribution's small size).
Most importantly, Finnix can be burned to a "Mini-CDR", which, as a
fashion statement, goes great with your laptop bag or pocket.
Please visit http://www.finnix.org/ to learn more or download a copy!
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