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The u-root CPU command

book.linuxboot.org

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Re: The u-root CPU command

#2

Post by LanternLight83 »

Awesome! This write up is satisfyingly detailed. Prior work in this space includes Plan9 of course, as well as the python project Outrun, which has it's own RPC-based FUSE FS: https://github.com/Overv/outrun

Other approachs to deployment in particular include the functional package managers Nix and Guix, which can create lightweight application images, and could probably be cobbled together into some sort of remote environment replication even across architectures. As I read on, I thought less about how this compares with Guix in regards to application/environment packaging and more about how these things could be glued together in interesting ways, because I think the intro leads in through slightly off-label examples, if that makes sense. Application packaging isn't what this addresses at the end of the day, but it's no less fascinating for it.

Re: The u-root CPU command

#3

Post by dark-star »

This sounds interesting, but I think I don't fully understand the use-case here. I mean I get it, you "cpu in" to another system, and the session you have there will transparently mount all your /home, /etc, /usr, /bin and so on from your system to the remote host.

What are some actually useful commands to use with that? I mean if all you're doing is remote-execution of bash, you could just start bash locally since your filesystem looks the same anyway? If you run vi through that tool, it can edit the files that you have on your host (because all directories are "passed through"), so why not just run vi on your host?

Edit: two usecases that I could think of where this is useful, but both don't really work I guess: - If you have a very small flash-constrained system (think router, embedded, IoT) ... but these are usually different architectures (i.e. not x86_64) so this wouldn't work - The example from the article, if you have a different Ubuntu version running in a container than on your host. But this would create a "hybrid" Ubuntu after CPU'ing in, since many directories simply come from your host, and only some stuff is from your container. I don't think this would be very useful?

Re: The u-root CPU command

#4

Post by lmz »

dark-star wrote: post #3

This sounds interesting, but I think I don't fully understand the use-case here. I mean I get it, you "cpu in" to another system, and the session you have there will transparently mount all your /home, /etc, /usr, /bin and so on from your system to the remote host. What are some actually useful commands to use with that? I mean if all you're doing is remote-execution of bash, you could just start bash locally since y…

Maybe the "cpu host" is faster and you run a computationally heavy command there, or it's closer to some resource (e.g. you wrote a script to search for some data inside S3 and want to run it on an EC2 instance). Maybe it's something with specialized hardware that you'd like to control (I see /dev is not forwarded).
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