Tar output mode for installworld

[Ulrich Spoerlein]

On 7/15/07, Tim Kientzle <kientzle at freebsd.org> wrote:
> Ulrich Spoerlein wrote:
> > Simple and elegant. It would also do away with those base.aa, base.ab,
> > etc. madness.
>
> I'm confused.  base.aa, etc, are a tar file, so I don't
> entirely understand how this would be different?  The
> current installer does the equivalent of
>    cat base.* | tar -xf -
>
> I can see one advantage and one disadvantage of installing
> a specification file (which references other files) instead:
>
> Plus:  The specification file can re-use the existing
> files on CD, so you don't have, e.g., one copy of /bin/sh
> on the live CD and another buried in base.tgz.  This
> could save space.

That is exactly what I was referring to above. And AFAIK DragonflyBSD
does it in a similar way. They simply copy the live CD onto the HDD.

> Minus:  Installing a specification file this way would
> be slower because you then have to read a lot of small
> files off of CD.

True, but couldn't we optimize the ISO layout so it will be a near
sequential read of the CD? This should be done for every live CD
anyway to avoid excessive seeks during boot up.

Uli