Tweaking MVI

A few months ago I first talked about minimal viable illumos, an attempt to construct a rather more minimalist bootable copy of illumos than the gigabyte-size image that are becoming the norm.

I've made a couple of changes recently, which are present in the mvi repository.

The first is to make it easier for people who aren't me (and myself when I'm not on my primary build machine) to actually use mvi. The original version had the locations of the packages hardcoded to the values on my build machine. Now I've abstracted out package installation, which eliminates quite a lot of code duplication. And then I added an alternative package installation script which uses zap to retrieve and install packages from the Tribblix repo, just like the regular system does. So you can much more easily run mvi from a vanilla Tribblix system.

What I would like to add is a script that can run on pretty much any (illumos) system. This isn't too hard, but would involve copying most of the functionality of zap into the install script. I'm holding off for a short while, hoping that a better mechanism presents itself. (By better, what I mean is that I've actually got a number of image creation utilities, and it would be nice to rationalise them rather than keep creating new ones.)

The second tweak was to improve the way that the size of the root archive is calculated, to give better defaults and adapt to variations more intelligently.

There are two slightly different mechanisms used to create the image. In mvi.sh, I install packages, and then delete what I'm sure I don't need; with mvix.sh I install packages and then only take the files I do need. The difference in size is considerable - for the basic installation mvi.sh is 127M and mvix.sh is 57M.

Rather than a common base image size of 192M, I've set mvi.sh to 160M and mvix.sh to 96M. These sizes give a reasonable amount of free space - enough that adding the odd package doesn't require the sizes to be adjusted.

I then have standard scripts to construct 32-bit and 64-bit images. A little bit of experimentation indicates that the 32-bit image ends up being half the size of the base, whereas the 64-bit image comes in at two thirds. (The difference is that in the 32-bit image, you can simply remove all 64-bit files. For a 64-bit kernel, you still need both 32-bit and 64-bit userland.) So I've got those scripts to simply scale the image size, rather than try and pick a new number out of the air.

I also have a sample script to install Node.js. This again modifies the image size, just adding the extra space that Node needs. I've had to calculate this more accurately, as reducing the size of the base archive gave me less margin for error.

(As an aside, adding applications doesn't really work well in general with mvix.sh, as it doesn't know what dependencies applications might need - it only installs the bare minimum the OS needs to boot. Fortunately Node is fairly self-contained, but other applications are much less so.)