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OpenSUSE MicroOS

microos.opensuse.org

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Re: OpenSUSE MicroOS

#11

Post by nickik »

Shared404 wrote: post #9
nickik wrote: post #8

Love it, I just not gone use anything with BTRFS. Any chance I can get the same with ZFS instead?

> just not gone use anything with BTRFS. Why? (Legitimately asking, I haven't played around much with using different filesystems.)

A filesystem should systematically from the ground up be designed to be safe, specially one making the claims of BTRFS.

BTRFS however went threw a number of cycles where it was considered save and then end up having issues. Of course there were always features considered unstable. It eating my own data, using non of the unstable features at the time. Maybe I could have recovered it but neither me nor the best IT person I know could recover anything.

My file system rule is simple, eat my data once and I will never use you again.

Maybe its all fine now, and all these issues are gone. Likely this is the case, however I will not use it again.

I would not recommend people not use it, but I'm simply not going to.

Re: OpenSUSE MicroOS

#12

Post by viraptor »

Do it seems like a Fedora Silverblue with the architecture and like CoreOS with the goals. That's interesting - I'd like to play with it in the future, but I don't see a feature that would excite me right now.

Re: OpenSUSE MicroOS

#13

Post by viraptor »

djeiasbsbo wrote: post #5
lmns wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The space is probably required for btrfs snapshots and to keep the last "good" image around in case a rollback is needed.

You're most probably right. I run my system on a 20gb btrfs partition and I have run into issues before where I ran out of space because of one big binary file that was in every snapshot.

That shouldn't be an issue. Btrfs snapshots are copy-on-write, so unless all blocks changed the big binary file should be there just once.

Re: OpenSUSE MicroOS

#14

Post by cuillevel3 »

g666 wrote: post #10
bleepblorp wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

JeOS is the SUSE OS for small footprint virtualized environments. I'm not too sure what niche MicroOS is supposed to fill that JeOS and the full-weight Leap don't already cover. MicroOS just seems to be answer to RedHat's Silverblue, but with no clear use case in the SUSE/openSUSE product lineup. It makes some sense as a tech demo for an immutable OS, but not much sense as an operational product.

JeOS it's a striped down version of a full blown linux bistro. Think Like RH,Centos. Can be used as a VM os or for anything else. MicroOS it's a cloud OS linux, more like: CoreOS, RancherOS, AtomicOS. I think it's a default choose for Kubernetes environments. I've been using JeOS for k8s hosts of Rancher environments since RancherOS was deprecated and I'm glad that they finally released a cloud OS like MicroOS. In ca…

So it's for Kubernetes nodes, VMs and bare metal?

Re: OpenSUSE MicroOS

#15

Post by gbraad »

This is 'almost' what Atomic did, which is now rolled into Fedora CoreOS and related derivatives and Silverblue. The eventual idea was not to rely on btrfs snapshots, so it uses ostree instead.

Re: OpenSUSE MicroOS

#16

Post by Vogtinator »

arminiusreturns wrote: post #7

This is awesome work on the part of the openSuse team! I have always liked the steady improvement openSuse and SuseEL have made over the last 5 years or so. While they are sort of the underdog still (just look at their numbers compared to RH), the fact that at least we have an alternative to RHEL in SEL for when companies require support contracts, is a huge benefit to users. I try not to talk about Canonical for...…

I assume you mean SLE instead of "SEL"?

Re: OpenSUSE MicroOS

#17

Post by Vogtinator »

gbraad wrote: post #15

This is 'almost' what Atomic did, which is now rolled into Fedora CoreOS and related derivatives and Silverblue. The eventual idea was not to rely on btrfs snapshots, so it uses ostree instead.

The underlying technology (read-only btrfs system snapshots) is actually much older than CoreOS (in SLE it was introduced somewhere in SLE 11 IIRC) and the idea to use it in a similar way as this is almost as old.

It has multiple advantages over rpm-ostree's approach:

- Much faster (no need to manage thousands of hardlinks)

- Arbitrary modifications can be done easily in a chroot

- Not only /usr is snapshotted

- No need for layering and rebases (rpm-ostree has a base image + rpms on top, which this doesn't need)

- RPMs just work as-is, there are no hacks with %post scripts and so on

Re: OpenSUSE MicroOS

#18

Post by Vogtinator »

g666 wrote: post #10
bleepblorp wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

JeOS is the SUSE OS for small footprint virtualized environments. I'm not too sure what niche MicroOS is supposed to fill that JeOS and the full-weight Leap don't already cover. MicroOS just seems to be answer to RedHat's Silverblue, but with no clear use case in the SUSE/openSUSE product lineup. It makes some sense as a tech demo for an immutable OS, but not much sense as an operational product.

JeOS it's a striped down version of a full blown linux bistro. Think Like RH,Centos. Can be used as a VM os or for anything else. MicroOS it's a cloud OS linux, more like: CoreOS, RancherOS, AtomicOS. I think it's a default choose for Kubernetes environments. I've been using JeOS for k8s hosts of Rancher environments since RancherOS was deprecated and I'm glad that they finally released a cloud OS like MicroOS. In ca…

JeOS is just a minimal installation into a VM harddisk, that's where the differences end. So it's actually more of a different installation/deployment method than a different distro.

Re: OpenSUSE MicroOS

#19

Post by ulzeraj »

nickik wrote: post #11
Shared404 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> just not gone use anything with BTRFS. Why? (Legitimately asking, I haven't played around much with using different filesystems.)

A filesystem should systematically from the ground up be designed to be safe, specially one making the claims of BTRFS. BTRFS however went threw a number of cycles where it was considered save and then end up having issues. Of course there were always features considered unstable. It eating my own data, using non of the unstable features at the time. Maybe I could have recovered it but neither me nor the best IT pers…

Micro-OS uses BTRFS for operating system only. User data defaults to XFS.

The transactional-server role mounts the operating system as read only with /var and /etc being virtual file systems that are committed each shutdown. You can use whatever you want including ZFS for your data.

Re: OpenSUSE MicroOS

#20

Post by barnacled »

I know this is going to sound like a typical missing-the-point HN comment (and possibly deserves to end up on n-gate) but - I do hate the trend of 'xxxOS' meaning not an OS but rather a distribution of linux.

I think it adds confusion as there are xxxOS projects which are indeed separate OSes and it dilutes the meaning of an 'OS'. Probably the GNU/-prefix crowd find it especially egregious as the work put in to the distribution exists more so around tooling than any kernel-specific aspect.

From the name I expected it to be an interesting new microkernel from OpenSUSE (the concept of which surprised me) so I have direct experience of the confusion this naming convention causes :)

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