Installable ZOS

[muhamadazmy]

Zero-OS is mainly consisted of 2 parts:

• The actual operating system and that is basically the linux kernel that is custom built (mainly kernel configuraiton)
• The daemon parts, which are the main system services that works together to provide the actual api and behavior of the system.

Right now, there is few dependency points from the daemon on the actual type of the system it runs on. In other words ZOS daemons can (with few tweaks) run perfectly on any linux system (say ubuntu).

ZOS takes over the entire network setup which means you probably need to disable all network daemons that auto ships with other linux flavors like NetworkManager or systemd-networkd. But that can already be defined as part of the package dependency.

A farmer can has bare-metal nodes that already pre installed with few system options, the farmer then can just install zos as a package and it will bring all dependencies defined by the system.

There will still be minimal config, may be farmer-id only that can be stored in a file.

Pros:

• Much easier upgrade of the system
• Faster boot of nodes since you don't need to download the full image each time the system is booting
  • this cause load on the hub specially on a network wide event like mainnet upgrade
• Rely on pre-build packages which are well maintained instead of having to build all utils and binaries that are needed by the system.
• Easier kernel update
• More people will be willing to try and install zos and become part of the grid

Cons:

• If system is installed via packages it means a farmer already has access to the node over ssh or terminal.
  • System then need to rely on encryption only

Setbacks

• Networking will become harder to setup, the system need to take over the networking stack, and then take into account if the system is configured over dhcp, or cloud-init for example