Monday, June 18, 2007

Solaris metacluster sizes

As part of the Indiana discussion, I was looking at the installed sizes of various Solaris clusters of packages. The idea is to work out where all the space is going so as to be able to trim an OpenSolaris distribution onto a single CD. Depending on compression, this might allow something just over 1G of software.

A minor extension let me do the same for the various metaclusters you can choose from in the Solaris installer. And the sizes of those on a Solaris 10 update 3 x86 system are like this:

157.945M : SUNWCmreq
168.594M : SUNWCrnet
195.372M : SUNWCreq
2010.12M : SUNWCuser
2579.84M : SUNWCprog
2614.19M : SUNWCall
2614.2M : SUNWCXall

This confirms what we've known all along, that the small clusters are tiny, the other install clusters are huge, and there's a great big gap between the two extremes. More than that, the end user cluster misses out on a lot of stuff that would be really valuable to an individual user.

(I would recommend to anyone who wants to customize the packages when installing a Solaris system - either using jumpstart or interactively - that they start with either SUNWCrnet or SUNWCall, as the others don't help you much at all.)

The snag with building a CD sized distribution is that the target size is right in the middle of the gaping chasm between a fully functional (SUNWCprog) and minimized (SUNWCrnet) layout.

Fortunately, things aren't quite as bad as they look. These numbers are for a regular Solaris system. This includes a fair amount of software that isn't freely redistributable, so all the numbers shrink. Sometimes by a lot, as if you start taking StarOffice or java out then you save significant amounts of diskspace.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

The problem is that software vendors often just require you to install the SUNWCuser cluster or above and claim all below is not supported. Even Sun itself doesn't support it (e.g. in JES).

Anonymous said...

No, the 3rd party vendors require SUNWCall with added "find / | xargs chmod 777" in the postinstall.

Bitter, me? Nooo.