Re: Machine available for community use

On Thu, 26 Jul 2007, Joshua D. Drake wrote:

> IMO, a multiboot is o.k. but a vm isn't worth it. This box is big enough to
> actually starting looking at SMP and I/O issues for PostgreSQL that we
> normally can't because we don't have access to the hardware in the community.

Certainly agree with that; VM overhead is much lower than it used to be,
but it's still going to fuzz exactly the kind of performance results that
this box would be most useful for exploring.

What I normally do in this situation is create a second primary partition
on the boot drive with around 10GB of space on it that doesn't get touched
by the initial OS install. Then it's straighforward to install a second
Linux into there; the only time that gets tricky is if you're doing two
RedHat style installs because of how they mount partitions by label. A
little bit of GRUB merging after the second install, and now you've got a
dual-boot system. Even in a NOC setup where you don't see the boot menu,
you'd just have to change the grub.conf default and reboot in order to
switch between the two.

As long as a bootable partition of reasonable size is set aside like this,
there's all kinds of flexibility for being able to confirm results apply
to multiple Linux distributions in the future. You might even put a BSD
or Solaris in that space one day.

--
* Greg Smith gsmith(at)gregsmith(dot)com http://www.gregsmith.com Baltimore, MD