Features/TrimLiveInstalls

Better Defaults for Live Installs

Summary

Remove enterprise-oriented services from default live installations to save space and reduce boot time.

Owner

• Name: Elad Alfassa

• Email: elad@fedoraproject.org

Current status

• Targeted release: Fedora 19
• Last updated: (DATE)
• Percentage of completion: 00%

Detailed Description

This features aims to remove (or disable) enterprise-oriented services from Fedora's default Live Desktop media. This includes MTA (some previous work on this subject was done in Features/NoMTA), iSCSI and multipathd. All these technologies might be useful for servers or for enterprise users, but they are not the target audience of the Live Desktop media.

Enterprise users or server users do not use Live media for installation, they are more likely to use the DVD and a custom kickstart file. Therefore, these features should not be installed by default on Fedora Live desktops.

Benefit to Fedora

Live media will be a bit smaller, and installations done from live media will boot faster.

Scope

This part is still work-in-progress

The first two items would probably not cause too much of a challenge

• Have Features/NoMTA 100% complete
• Remove iscsi-initiator-utils from default package set or exclude it on the live media kickstart file

The next parts might be more difficult

• Exclude device-mapper-multipath from the LiveCD kickstrart file.
  • This would require changes in anaconda so that foce-utils (which in turn depends on device-mapper-multipath) would be just an optional dependency (this will result the Live installer to not be able to install on multipath targets, but these are not used outside large enterprises).
  • This would also require libvirt server stuff removed from the livecd (which makes sense, IMO) or make their dependency on foce-utils optional as well.
• Conditionally disable fedora-wait-storage.service, fedora-storage-init.service, fedora-storage-init-late.service, lvm2-monitor.service, mdmonitor-takeover.service and other related services if the relevant storage technologies (LVM and RAID) are not used on the current machine during install time.

User Experience

Users might notice faster bootup and a bit smaller Live media size.

Dependencies

TODO

Contingency Plan

Continue shipping these services.

Documentation

• None

Release Notes

• TODO

Comments and Discussion

• See Talk:Features/TrimLiveInstalls