Release: USB image of OS Circular and deb packages of LBCAS (LoopBack Content Addressable Storage)

Release: USB image of OS Circular and deb packages of LBCAS (LoopBack Content Addressable Storage)

[Kuniyasu Suzaki]

Hello,

We released bootable USB image of "OS circular" and the Debian packages of 
LBCAS (LoopBack Content Addressable Storage).

OS Circular is a framework of Internet Disk Image Distributor for anonymous 
operating systems.  This version enables to boot "Ubuntu" or "Debian GNU Linux" 
on virtual machine "KVM" without installation. The disk image is obtained with 
LBCAS (LoopBack Content Addressable Storage) from the Internet. The 
transferred OS is maintained every week from 03/Oct/2008. User can 
select the suitable OS image on OS circular.

  Home Page http://openlab.jp/oscircular/
  OS Circular Guide http://openlab.jp/oscircular/OSCircularGuide20090323-J.pdf

The installation and usage are described in the guide PDF. 
The bootable USB image uses KVM for transferred OS. However the transferred 
disk image is available on Xen and QEMU. Please customize the Debian packages.


Reference
  Linux.Conf.Australia 2009, "OS Circular: Internet bootable OS Archive" 
  http://linux.conf.au/slides/145.pdf

------
suzaki

Re: Release: USB image of OS Circular and deb packages of LBCAS (LoopBack Content Addressable Storage)

[Alexander Graf]

Kuniyasu Suzaki wrote:
> Hello,
>
> We released bootable USB image of "OS circular" and the Debian packages of 
> LBCAS (LoopBack Content Addressable Storage).
>
> OS Circular is a framework of Internet Disk Image Distributor for anonymous 
> operating systems.  This version enables to boot "Ubuntu" or "Debian GNU Linux" 
> on virtual machine "KVM" without installation. The disk image is obtained with 
> LBCAS (LoopBack Content Addressable Storage) from the Internet. The 
> transferred OS is maintained every week from 03/Oct/2008. User can 
> select the suitable OS image on OS circular.
>
>   Home Page http://openlab.jp/oscircular/
>   OS Circular Guide http://openlab.jp/oscircular/OSCircularGuide20090323-J.pdf
>
> The installation and usage are described in the guide PDF. 
> The bootable USB image uses KVM for transferred OS. However the transferred 
> disk image is available on Xen and QEMU. Please customize the Debian packages.
>   

Looking at the backend (LBCAS) that is the actually interesting part: Is
there any reason you implemented this as FUSE plugin?

I was thinking of implementing something like this myself for SUSE
Studio and figured the best way to do it would be to make it a qemu
block driver backend, en par with the "posix-raw" one. That way you
wouldn't need FUSE to download images on demand and also enable this
features for say Windows users.

So is there any plan on your side to write something like this for
upstream Qemu? If not that's fine too, I just need to know if I'd have
to do it myself :-).

Alex

Re: Release: USB image of OS Circular and deb packages of LBCAS (LoopBack Content Addressable Storage)

[Kuniyasu Suzaki]

Hello Alex,

 >>From: Alexander Graf <agraf@suse.de>
 >>Subject: Re: Release: USB image of OS Circular and deb packages of LBCAS (LoopBack Content Addressable Storage)
 >>
 >>Kuniyasu Suzaki wrote:
 >>> Hello,
 >>>
 >>> We released bootable USB image of "OS circular" and the Debian packages of 
 >>> LBCAS (LoopBack Content Addressable Storage).
 >>
 >>Looking at the backend (LBCAS) that is the actually interesting part: Is
 >>there any reason you implemented this as FUSE plugin?

Because it is easy to implement a virtual loopback file.
A real content, which is save to a block-file, is mapped to the
virtual loopback file when a block is accessed.  The mapping is a kind
of indirect addressing, which translates physical address to
block-file name (SHA1 digest of its contents). The management is
achieved by FUSE.

 >>I was thinking of implementing something like this myself for SUSE
 >>Studio and figured the best way to do it would be to make it a qemu
 >>block driver backend, en par with the "posix-raw" one. That way you
 >>wouldn't need FUSE to download images on demand and also enable this
 >>features for say Windows users.

Good idea.
OS Circular, however, is designed to be applied to any virtual
machines, i.e., VirtualBox, VMWare, etc. OS Circular also aims to
applied to REAL MACHINE.
Please refer the big picture of OS Circular project.
   http://openlab.jp/oscircular/big-picture.PNG

 >>So is there any plan on your side to write something like this for
 >>upstream Qemu? If not that's fine too, I just need to know if I'd have
 >>to do it myself :-).

Please make your backend driver :-).
I want to ask you to fix the blocking I/O of loopback device.
It would be another topic discussed in this ML threads.

------
suzaki