from Hacker News

Why ISO was retired (2021)

by worez on 8/3/23, 10:06 AM with 81 comments

• by tjoff on 8/3/23, 6:57 PM

  I have no idea how I would install EasyOS in my hypervisor. Well, I could probably boot from a Live linux ISO and then install it from there.

  And on actual hardware I can mount an ISO over IPMI but I would not immediately be able to install EasyOS that way.

  Also, the argument that you can store state isn't always an advantage. When I boot a Live ISO I never ever want to save anything, a clean state is one of the features of a Live ISO.

  I don't know what EasyOS is, and it is for sure possible that it lives in a niche where it never makes sense to have an ISO. But I don't get the crusade against ISO.

  >There are some multi-boot tools, that enable putting many ISO files on the one USB-stick; however, the ISO format does not have any intrinsic avantage, these boot managers could also be made to boot image files.

  Well, they don't. Maybe that ought to be a hint?

• by lucideer on 8/3/23, 7:08 PM

  > So, I am repeating, there are no use-cases where the ISO format has an advantage over a Linux distribution as a drive image file. The perceived advantages are only due to ignorance.

  This is paradoxical statement: overcoming said ignorance (read: ease of use) is by definition an advantage (actual, not just "perceived")

• by Aloha on 8/3/23, 8:48 PM

  I often feel we missed a chance to make booting from removable media real easy.

  If we had built ISO support into EFI, you could just copy an ISO (like a container) to a MBR or GPT partitioned thumb drive and boot it - no magic tools required, no bits to set. Yes FAT32 has a 4gb limitation, but there is nothing saying that couldn't be fixed with future versions of EFI, or by using multiple partitions on thumb drive.

  Either way, I feel like an opportunity was missed.

• by koito17 on 8/3/23, 7:18 PM

  For the specific case of "burning" some Linux distro's installer to a USB drive, I've always found those .img files much easier to deal with than ISO files, simply because a single dd(1) invocation is all I need to "burn" the image onto my drive.

  I figure this is probably the vast majority of people who install Linux from a physical device rather than network booting. (I have dealt with PXE about a decade ago but I can't figure out how to use it anymore.)

• by gregw2 on 8/3/23, 11:36 PM

  I dunno, I used to use ISO linux images because they were write-once and assuming I had a trusted source of the ISO or system writing the ISO, I didn't have to worry about the Linux system getting compromised and I could just run Linux off a CD/DVD.

  I'm surprised that didn't come up in the original article or comments here on HN.

  (I am aware of course of non-persistent in-memory worms, and the fact things can persist in places other than the filesystem, but I presume they are much rarer.)

• by programmer_dude on 8/3/23, 7:36 PM

  What is a drive image? Is it a standard like ISO?

• by themerone on 8/3/23, 7:20 PM

  I like that ISOs are easy to inspect with user space tools without mounting.

  With a disk image, I would need to identify the file system and go hunting for tools that can do this.

• by donatj on 8/3/23, 8:58 PM

  I've always wondered, why are CDs a specific ISO file system and not just whatever the intended target can read (FAT32 / HFS(+)) like other media?

  Is it just that the write once nature of the media makes pre-composing the file system a pain?

• by cvccvroomvroom on 8/3/23, 9:33 PM

  While the floppy disc and optical drive may have been retired to the domain retro computing, ISOs are still the standard delivery mechanism for most hypervisor OS installations.

  If you don't provided a convenient means to test your tiny OS, I'm not going to jump through hoops that could've been automated and solved at the scale of 1 release process vs. N users.

• by yellowapple on 8/4/23, 2:13 AM

  > On the other hand, a live-CD type of distribution, like Puppy Linux, it is an issue, because the "save file" can only be created on some other drive, usually an internal drive. Wouldn't it be nice if the "save file" or "save folder" could be on the USB-stick, or rather it would be nice if you had that choice.

  I'm about 98.69% sure this is easy to fix with any ol' partition editor. Even if it wasn't, the absolute worst-case scenario here for a fully-in-ramdisk distro (my experience is with Damn Small and Tiny Core, but I'm sure Puppy and EasyOS can do this, too) is to just boot into such a distro and reinstall the whole OS on top of the USB stick; everything's in RAM already anyway, so with such distros you can reformat or even unplug the stick once you're booted up.

• by zgluck on 8/3/23, 8:10 PM

  The original https://www.iso.org/ is still here, btw.

  "Why ISO[-9660 format] images relases were retired from EasyOS" would have have been a more suitable headline.

  I kind of miss the times when hackers were sticklers for details.

• by toastal on 8/4/23, 5:25 AM

  I wouldn’t care so much if I could get a USB 3.2 or 4 device that’s only 2–4 GiB for like $2. I would actually buy a handful for each system I need, label it, and update that dedicated drive. However, fast, new drives don’t come at sizes appropriate just an ISO.

• by miga on 8/4/23, 11:27 AM

  Since observing a SquashFS image outperforming others when doing PDB database processing, I await Linux boot images to all switch to compressed read-only filesystems.

  Kernel image files already use bzimage for a long time.

  That would make it boot much faster, and use less memory than ISO:

  https://blog.sigma-star.at/post/2022/07/squashfs-erofs/

  First step of system installation on Ubuntu (Debian) is uncompressing the filesystem. Why not use compressed FS for this purpose too, and shorten the whole process to few seconds?

• by cat_plus_plus on 8/4/23, 4:18 AM

  I have no clue what EasyOS is, maybe I can quickly fire up a VmWare/VirtualBox/qemu VM and then I have a better idea. Anyone has a link to something I can stuff into -cdrom command line argument and give it a whirl?

• by JohnFen on 8/3/23, 7:55 PM

  I prefer ISOs for Linux distributions as well, for a number of reasons. But it's not that big of a deal. If I get an image in another format, I can convert it to ISO myself.

• by jillesvangurp on 8/4/23, 9:29 AM

  Maybe more productive to just point people to a tool to convert disk images to iso format if you really need one. I'm sure that wouldn't be too hard.

• by ChrisArchitect on 8/4/23, 7:04 AM

  Previous discussion from 2 years ago with a clearer title:

  Why I stopped releasing EasyOS as an ISO file

  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29490679

• by Paianni on 8/4/23, 4:08 PM

  My 2010 computer (with 2012 CPUs) won't boot from USB flash drive images. So I'll be using optical media for a while yet.

• by qwerty456127 on 8/4/23, 8:12 AM

  An underlooked fact is ISO has became a fundamental word for an OS distribution file (which is meant to be universally compatible and straightforward to deploy).

  Another interesting thing: the author mentions boot managers which let you boot from a number of ISOs (see? I don'r even wan to bother saying "disk images" even though HDD images are meant to be supported here) put on a single USB drive but he forgets USB drives with have such managers integrated with the hardware (e.g. Zalman ZM-VE200) - I intend to buy one but who knows if these support non-ISO drive images.