[OSM-dev] Automating Freemap tile rendering

[Jon Burgess]

On Fri, 2007-02-16 at 11:09 +0000, matthew-osm at newtoncomputing.co.uk
wrote:
> On Fri, Feb 16, 2007 at 10:54:25AM +0100, Olivier Macchioni wrote:
> > >Yes, it's never going to be small. You have the overhead of the operating
> > >system as well as the required programs and libraries. I've currently got a
> > >working version based on a very cut-down Debian in a 500M image, including
> > >about 100M for swap and 100M free space. After compression, the download is
> > >likely to be about 150M.
> 
> > It's probably possible to have a much smaller version which would install
> > itself from the Web, downloading .deb packages - thus putting a bit more
> > load on Debian's servers and a bit less on OSM's :P
> 
> Yes, I wasn't expecting to put it on OSM's servers, though.
> 
> > Another option could be qemu (http://fabrice.bellard.free.fr/qemu/) which is
> > similar to VMWare but fully GPL. I don't know what performance hit it would
> > induce CPU-wise nor how complex it is to use as opposed to VMWare.
> 
> I haven't tried qemu since the kernel accelerator module became free. It may now
> be fast enough to handle this.
> 
> The other option, for Linux users, is an image to run with User Mode Linux.
> However, this would be more difficult to set up, and is only really aimed at
> Linux users. Of course, everyone should be a Linux user, but for those who
> haven't worked this out yet, VMware is easier ;-)
> 

I think the following steps are another possible alternative for
avoiding running vmware:
- Use the vmware/qemu tools to pull the root filesystem image out of the
vmware disk image.
- Loopback mount this filesystem and chroot to it.
- Launch render script

This falls down if the system needs to launch database daemons and or
other server processes on ports which clash with the main OS but should
be OK for simple applications. The only other limitation that I can
think of is that the glibc from some modern distributions will no longer
run on the 2.4 series kernels which some people are still using.

Another alternative is to use http://klik.atekon.de/ which is another
way to provide an application package with all its dependencies in a
single blob.

Sometimes there are too many available options.

	Jon