[fedora-arm] Custom image from kickstart

[James Szinger]

Hi,

I've become used to using kickstart files to automate my Fedora
installs to VMs and bare-metal x86 hardware. I'm getting started with
Fedora on ARM and am wondering if there is something similar to create
custom disk images. The closest I've found is the page on creating ARM
remixes:
<https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Architectures/ARM/Creating_Remixes>.

Is that still the way to go, or is there a better approach?

Thanks,
Jim
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[Peter Robinson]

Post by James Szinger
I've become used to using kickstart files to automate my Fedora
installs to VMs and bare-metal x86 hardware. I'm getting started with
Fedora on ARM and am wondering if there is something similar to create
custom disk images. The closest I've found is the page on creating ARM
<https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Architectures/ARM/Creating_Remixes>.
Is that still the way to go, or is there a better approach?

It depends a little, ARMv7 or aarch64? The mechanism will work for
ARMv7, for aarch64 you'll need to use imagefactory.

You can also run the install directly on the device as you can use
u-boot to PXE boot and kick off an install using tftp like on x86,
depending a little on the device some people will even put u-boot on a
small SD card, eg an old 128Mb one from a phone, and then pxe/tftp
install to another medium. With F-28 in theory (I'm not sure anyone
has had a chance to test it) you can use uEFI/iPXE from u-boot to do a
whole lot of other options too.

Peter
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[RENARD Pierre-Francois]

Post by Peter Robinson

Post by James Szinger
I've become used to using kickstart files to automate my Fedora
installs to VMs and bare-metal x86 hardware. I'm getting started with
Fedora on ARM and am wondering if there is something similar to create
custom disk images. The closest I've found is the page on creating ARM
<https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Architectures/ARM/Creating_Remixes>.
Is that still the way to go, or is there a better approach?

It depends a little, ARMv7 or aarch64? The mechanism will work for
ARMv7, for aarch64 you'll need to use imagefactory.
You can also run the install directly on the device as you can use
u-boot to PXE boot and kick off an install using tftp like on x86,
depending a little on the device some people will even put u-boot on a
small SD card, eg an old 128Mb one from a phone, and then pxe/tftp
install to another medium. With F-28 in theory (I'm not sure anyone
has had a chance to test it) you can use uEFI/iPXE from u-boot to do a
whole lot of other options too.
Peter
_______________________________________________

what is the best solution between

    using a pre-built image from fedora (it is really easy to dump the
image on a SD card and plug it into the ARM box :) )

    using a kickstart process to setup it with all customizations you
want (but kickstart can be tricky to setup/tune at least a few years ago !)


By the way, is there documentation describing all stuffs need to
kickstart (u-boot for example) and how to setup everything

on an external flash drive ? (it is easy to move lvm from sd to ssd for
example)

Fox

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[Peter Robinson]

Post by RENARD Pierre-Francois

Post by Peter Robinson

Post by James Szinger
I've become used to using kickstart files to automate my Fedora
installs to VMs and bare-metal x86 hardware. I'm getting started with
Fedora on ARM and am wondering if there is something similar to create
custom disk images. The closest I've found is the page on creating ARM
<https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Architectures/ARM/Creating_Remixes>.
Is that still the way to go, or is there a better approach?

It depends a little, ARMv7 or aarch64? The mechanism will work for
ARMv7, for aarch64 you'll need to use imagefactory.
You can also run the install directly on the device as you can use
u-boot to PXE boot and kick off an install using tftp like on x86,
depending a little on the device some people will even put u-boot on a
small SD card, eg an old 128Mb one from a phone, and then pxe/tftp
install to another medium. With F-28 in theory (I'm not sure anyone
has had a chance to test it) you can use uEFI/iPXE from u-boot to do a
whole lot of other options too.

what is the best solution between
using a pre-built image from fedora (it is really easy to dump the image
on a SD card and plug it into the ARM box :) )
using a kickstart process to setup it with all customizations you want
(but kickstart can be tricky to setup/tune at least a few years ago !)

It depends on your use case, for the vast majority of users the
easiest way is to use a pre-canned image and then use a tool like
ansible to configure the machine to their liking. It tends to be more
self contained and easier to deal with multiple different use cases.

Post by RENARD Pierre-Francois
By the way, is there documentation describing all stuffs need to kickstart
(u-boot for example) and how to setup everything

The setup is basically the same as doing it on x86, u-boot (and uEFI
on u-boot on aarch64), in the vast majority of devices, will
automatically fall back to attempting to do network boot in the case
there's no local OS install to boot.

Post by RENARD Pierre-Francois
on an external flash drive ? (it is easy to move lvm from sd to ssd for
example)

Why move it? Why not set it up like that from the outset? The process
would be the same as any other architecture/storage combination for
moving data around with LVM, arm is no special case here.
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[James Szinger]

On Fri, 27 Apr 2018 07:19:42 +0100

Post by Peter Robinson

Post by James Szinger
I've become used to using kickstart files to automate my Fedora
installs to VMs and bare-metal x86 hardware. I'm getting started
with Fedora on ARM and am wondering if there is something similar
to create custom disk images. The closest I've found is the page
<https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Architectures/ARM/Creating_Remixes>.
Is that still the way to go, or is there a better approach?

It depends a little, ARMv7 or aarch64? The mechanism will work for
ARMv7, for aarch64 you'll need to use imagefactory.

I'm currently experiment with F28 pre-release on both ARMv7 and
aarch64 on a Raspberry Pi 3. It's somewhat tedious to get the same
set up on both sd cards. Part of the attraction of the RPi is the
ease of swapping cards, and I want an easy path to set them up.

Thanks for the pointer to imagefactory. My searching had not found
that before. I'll look into it. I also found the "Using Mock and
--no-virt to Create Images" section of the livemedia-creator docs
<https://github.com/weldr/lorax/blob/master/docs/livemedia-creator.rst#using-mock-and---no-virt-to-create-images>
This looks very promising.

Post by Peter Robinson
You can also run the install directly on the device as you can use
u-boot to PXE boot and kick off an install using tftp like on x86,
depending a little on the device some people will even put u-boot on a
small SD card, eg an old 128Mb one from a phone, and then pxe/tftp
install to another medium. With F-28 in theory (I'm not sure anyone
has had a chance to test it) you can use uEFI/iPXE from u-boot to do a
whole lot of other options too.

I'm not sure I want to set up a PXE boot environment just for a Pi, and
network booting a Pi is an advanced skill. For x86, I copy the ISO to a
USB drive and inject the kickstart, which is easy and low overhead for
an infrequent job.

Jim
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[Peter Robinson]

Post by James Szinger
On Fri, 27 Apr 2018 07:19:42 +0100

Post by Peter Robinson

Post by James Szinger
I've become used to using kickstart files to automate my Fedora
installs to VMs and bare-metal x86 hardware. I'm getting started
with Fedora on ARM and am wondering if there is something similar
to create custom disk images. The closest I've found is the page
<https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Architectures/ARM/Creating_Remixes>.
Is that still the way to go, or is there a better approach?

It depends a little, ARMv7 or aarch64? The mechanism will work for
ARMv7, for aarch64 you'll need to use imagefactory.

I'm currently experiment with F28 pre-release on both ARMv7 and
aarch64 on a Raspberry Pi 3. It's somewhat tedious to get the same
set up on both sd cards. Part of the attraction of the RPi is the
ease of swapping cards, and I want an easy path to set them up.
Thanks for the pointer to imagefactory. My searching had not found
that before. I'll look into it. I also found the "Using Mock and
--no-virt to Create Images" section of the livemedia-creator docs
<https://github.com/weldr/lorax/blob/master/docs/livemedia-creator.rst#using-mock-and---no-virt-to-create-images>
This looks very promising.

There's issues for some use cases using --no-virt

Post by James Szinger

Post by Peter Robinson
You can also run the install directly on the device as you can use
u-boot to PXE boot and kick off an install using tftp like on x86,
depending a little on the device some people will even put u-boot on a
small SD card, eg an old 128Mb one from a phone, and then pxe/tftp
install to another medium. With F-28 in theory (I'm not sure anyone
has had a chance to test it) you can use uEFI/iPXE from u-boot to do a
whole lot of other options too.

I'm not sure I want to set up a PXE boot environment just for a Pi, and
network booting a Pi is an advanced skill. For x86, I copy the ISO to a
USB drive and inject the kickstart, which is easy and low overhead for
an infrequent job.

At the moment for ARMv7 we don't support installer ISOs, we do on
aarch64 for server, and uEFI u-boot support should support this on
aarch64 but I've not tested it.

Ansible is also a good solution that doesn't require a lot of infra.

Peter
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[James Szinger]

On Fri, 27 Apr 2018 07:32:02 -0600

Post by James Szinger
Thanks for the pointer to imagefactory. My searching had not found
that before. I'll look into it. I also found the "Using Mock and
--no-virt to Create Images" section of the livemedia-creator docs
<https://github.com/weldr/lorax/blob/master/docs/livemedia-creator.rst#using-mock-and---no-virt-to-create-images>
This looks very promising.

Well, I tried it and ran into several obstacles. First, livemedia-
creator in no-virt mode can't cross-install from x86 to ARM. Second,
livemedia-creator in virt mode needs an install ISO, but there is no
ISO for armfph and livemedia-creator can't find the kernel on the
aarch64 media. Third, I tried running livemedia-creator on an aarch64
VM, but it's not as easy as it should be, and I don't have a
successful image yet.

My next attempt will be to try virt-install to create a VM image and
then copy the image to an sd card.

Failing that, I'll learn how to boot the RPi from a USB drive and use
that to install to the sd card.

Jim
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[Peter Robinson]

Post by James Szinger
On Fri, 27 Apr 2018 07:32:02 -0600

Post by James Szinger
Thanks for the pointer to imagefactory. My searching had not found
that before. I'll look into it. I also found the "Using Mock and
--no-virt to Create Images" section of the livemedia-creator docs
<https://github.com/weldr/lorax/blob/master/docs/livemedia-creator.rst#using-mock-and---no-virt-to-create-images>
This looks very promising.

Well, I tried it and ran into several obstacles. First, livemedia-
creator in no-virt mode can't cross-install from x86 to ARM. Second,

Correct, rpm scripts need to be run on native arch.

Post by James Szinger
livemedia-creator in virt mode needs an install ISO, but there is no
ISO for armfph and livemedia-creator can't find the kernel on the
aarch64 media. Third, I tried running livemedia-creator on an aarch64
VM, but it's not as easy as it should be, and I don't have a
successful image yet.

LMC is largely untested from my point of view, we use imagefactory for
most things aarch64, and appliance-creator currently for ARMv7 but I
intend to move all that to imagefactory soon too.

Post by James Szinger
My next attempt will be to try virt-install to create a VM image and
then copy the image to an sd card.
Failing that, I'll learn how to boot the RPi from a USB drive and use
that to install to the sd card.
Jim
_______________________________________________

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