Time to reveal what we’re doing with qemu, febootstrap and minimal Fedora images.
A constant problem with virtualization management is how to “see inside” the guest virtual machine. You can measure things like how much CPU it’s using or how much network traffic it generates, but people often ask how much disk space a guest [...]
Posts Tagged as ‘minimization’
April 1, 2009
libguestfs: Access and modify virtual machine disk images
March 27, 2009
RPM dependency size viewer now available
The interactive RPM dependency size viewer (discussed earlier here and here) has now reached a stable 1.0 version. You can grab source and x86-64 RPMs from my website.
The diagram below shows an example, ocaml-camlp4-devel, a rather large OCaml package which I’m partly responsible for.
If you were to take a fresh Fedora 10 machine and [...]
March 20, 2009
febootstrap “minimal” now 15.9 MB
febootstrap now includes an image minimization tool which can remove some “non-essential” data, such as locales. (You can configure exactly what it removes).
The bootable minimal install is now around 16 MB. There’s still room for improvement, for example by removing shared libraries that are never used.
Even my realistic image, which includes LVM, NTFS, [...]
March 20, 2009
Why not use a minimal distribution?
In a comment on my previous post, Zod asked:
We do you try to strip down your fedora and not just build a minimal linux distribution with tools like t2?
There’s nothing wrong at all with using one of the many minimal linux kits around. Using busybox and a replacement libc it’s possible to squeeze Linux [...]
March 20, 2009
Why “minimal” is 225 MB
As I mentioned in the last post a “minimal” febootstrap Fedora install clocks in at a staggering 225 MB. When I say minimal, I mean just bash and the simplest command-line tools from coreutils:
$ ls /bin
arch chgrp cut echo fgrep ls [...]
