Remastering Tiny Core and Micro Core as Qemu VMs

[RogerWilco]

The GNS3 project has a couple of really old Tiny Core and Micro Core appliances that work well. I though I might try my hand add remastering the newest versions into new VMs, since they come in handy. The problem I ran into was that they'd take an excessivly long to to log (compared to 20-30 seconds). Is there a step by step guide on how to do this? When I searched the forums, pretty much all the answers were "LOL! Learn 2 TC, noob!", which obviously wasn't very helpful.  If not, no sweat, I'll just tell the GNS3 users to suck it up, and use the ancient versions until some kinda soul goes to the effort of remastering them (with a few more useful tools). 

[curaga]

What do you mean by "remaster into VM"? Is it not just a normal install to a virtual hd?

Also, what do you mean by "slow to log"?

[RogerWilco]

I can remaster Tiny core and micro core to install as HDD VMs, but they take 3-5 minutes to load, as opposed to the 10-20 seconds they normally take. Sorry I was unclear about that.

The appeal of the the pre-exising VMs that the GNS3 folks created, are that they load incredibly quickly, since the TC and MC appliances are useful for far more than those dumb VPCS appliances.

[curaga]

That's just an install, what we call remaster means editing the initrd. I guess that's some of the confusion.

We'll need a lot more info on what is slow, in what environment, etc.

[RogerWilco]

What I've been trying to do was install the Tiny/Micro Core .iso files as a  .qcow2 qemu file, so that users could just load the qemu files as a VM within GNS3.  The GNS3 devs remastered older TC/MC images as a .qcow2 file, and they can boot within 5 seconds. When I try to use the latest TC/MC .iso files, and use the "remaster" or install to hdd command to create a .qcow2 image, they take about 5 minutes to load during boot, when added to a topology. 

The reason I want to do this, is because TC/MC are far more useful than those dumb VPCS images, and it would be great if I could get the updated "remasted" Core images to load equally quickly. Sure, I can open up the pre-existing Core images outside GNS3 in Qemu, and add extensions, to make them even more useful, since the VPCS appliances are only useful for pinging and ARP, but I'd like to create a .qcow2 appliance that already has the latest Core code, and contains as many useful extensions as possible.

Sorry if I was unclear about this before. 

[curaga]

Can you perhaps watch the boot to tell which part is slow, or is GNS3 a headless system?

printk.time=1 would leave traces in dmesg, etc.

[RogerWilco]

Can you perhaps watch the boot to tell which part is slow, or is GNS3 a headless system?

printk.time=1 would leave traces in dmesg, etc.

It's not a headless system, unless you want it to be. I'll try recreating what I did this afternoon, and post the results.

BTW, where do I add printk.time=1 ?

[Rich]

Hi RogerWilco
Add it to the config file of the boot loader.

[RogerWilco]

Thank you, Rich!