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New Installer: Minimal System

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Ladislav Slezák edited this page Oct 16, 2013 · 1 revision

Minimal System

The installer is required to allow to install a minimal system, without bringing its own stuff to the system installed.

Minimal system is required to be able to maintain itself (e.g. install additional and update software) and to be bootable on the hardware it is running on.

An example of such minimal system is JeOS image template from SUSE Studio or the Minimal System pattern.

Stuff Installer Can Rely On

The installer can rely on following parts being part of the minimal system:

  1. Networking stuff

This stuff is probably of not much use for the installer, but this will depend on how the networking in SLES12 looks like. Installer needs to make sure that all relevant packages get installed for the specific network configuration (and only if they are relevant for the specific configuration)

  • ifplugd
  • bridge-utils
  • dhcpcd
  • ....
  1. Storage stuff

The storage-related stuff will be mostly needed only for the set-up of the system (e.g. creating of initrd), not for the installer itself. However, the installer may benefit from these subsystems being installed if they are relevant for the specific system.

  • device-mapper
  • mdadm, lvm2, cryptsetup, dmraid
  • iSCSI, FCoE initiators
  • ....
  1. Bootloader

Although technically it is possible to install bootable system without including bootloader package in the system (but in inst-sys), it only makes limited sense regarding future system updates as well as installation memory footprint. The same approach also applies for efibootmgr (needed for the firmware set-up)

  • bootloader itself
  • mkinitrd
  • perl-Bootloader
  1. Registration

To be considered

  1. Language interpreters

Perl + its libraries

  • needed by suseRegister (probably obsolete with SLE12 and replaced with Ruby?)
  • needed by suse-sam
  • needed by perl-Bootloader Python
  • needed for nfs-client only

Conclusion: Perl can be used quite safely, it will remain with perl-Bootloader The dependencies may not be complete due to bugs

  1. Libraries in minimal system
  • libzypp + zypper
  • augeas
  • glib2
  • hwinfo (if still needed)

Notes

The list of packages for individual subsystems do not aim to be complete and will depend on the installed system. Packages needed by any subsystem (e.g. software RAID) are required to be installed if specific subsystem is configured, resp. specific hardware is present.

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