[CentOS-devel] RFC: Performance tuning of the Vagrant images

Laurențiu Păncescu lpancescu at gmail.com
Tue Apr 26 18:44:57 UTC 2016


Hello Vince,

thanks for the feedback. I also prefer minimalism, and not changing
defaults without a good reason.

On Tue, Apr 26, 2016 at 7:42 PM, Vince Skahan <vds at uw.edu> wrote:

> I'd suggest keeping centos6 looking like vanilla centos6 to the extent
> possible, rather than adding things not native to that base os as it comes
> from upstream.....
>
>
The package selection depends on what you select during install.  I think
deltarpm isn't installed by a minimal install, but it might be on desktops
(I never installed a CentOS desktop, but Fedora Workstation includes
deltarpm, while Fedora Cloud doesn't, if I remeber correctly). That's not
an issue, though, since deltarpm doesn't bring any functional differences,
from a user's perspective: "yum update" produces identical results (and the
admin can force yum to not use diff packages via yum.conf - all these
variants are officially supported and documented). Both deltarpm and tuned
make a lot of sense for a system that only runs as a VM guest, to minimize
the impact on the host, and they are transparent to the user. The tuned
profiles are the result of optimization work done by RedHat over many
months, and fully supported and documented upstream - see the Power
Management Guide, for both version 6 and 7.

However, some other things in our Vagrant images *do* bring functional
differences. The firewall is disabled, and we add rsync and nfs-utils to
the image, since they provide things that Vagrant, or some of its plugins,
need. bash-completion is also added on CentOS 7 (not part of @base).  And
we create a smaller swap partition than recommended by RedHat's
installation guide, to conserve space.


> Once you go down the path of over-optimizing for one or a few user
> communities, you'll be signing up for a lot of labor and questions
> regarding 'why does my vagrant box not work like a baremetal centosNNN
> box?' type questions.   Danger.....
>
>
The Vagrant images are only intended for Vagrant users, running under one
of the supported virtualization solutions. I think it makes sense to adapt
them to run as smoothly as possible for their special use case: as a VM
guest. But you're right, we need to document any changes, so people know
what to expect.

Best regards,
Laurențiu
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