[Arm-dev] Disk Image Creation Suggestions

Mon Oct 3 18:22:04 UTC 2016
Christopher Covington <cov at codeaurora.org>

Hi,

I'm running Anaconda regularly and I plan on continuing to do so, but
there are certain circumstances where I'd like to lock down all the
package versions and provision many similar systems as quickly as
possible. So I'm looking for an automated and reliable mechanism for
generating disk images for use on "bare metal" or physical (not
virtualized) installs. The images will probably be copied to SATA*.

How are the disk images currently generated? Does Jim manually launch
an install with the documented [1] kickstart file and then move the
storage medium to another machine and run dd? Or is it more automated?

1. http://mirror.centos.org/altarch/7/isos/aarch64/ReadMe.txt

Looking through the archives I see Richard announcing virt-builder and
virt-install availability for AArch64. It looks very useful for this
sort of task. Are there any reasons to not use its output on a
non-virtualized, physical instance? ("V2P"?)

Then there's livemedia-creator [2]. Would it be best to use that to
wrap the virt-install invocation?

2. http://lorax.readthedocs.io/en/latest/livemedia-creator.html

If anyone has experience and guidance with the above tools or
alternatives, especially on AArch64, it would be appreciated. The
documentation looks very good for these tools but some aspects
like authoring kickstart files which are compatible with
lorax/livemedia-creator seem particularly tricky.

Thanks,
Cov

* Not essential, but having the option to do some kind of read-only
Network Block Device (NBD) root filesystem which many systems could
share, with a local, writeable, essentially throw-away overlay might
be handy.

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