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
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?
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
On 04/27/2018 08:19 AM, Peter Robinson wrote:
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?
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 _______________________________________________ arm mailing list -- arm@lists.fedoraproject.org To unsubscribe send an email to arm-leave@lists.fedoraproject.org
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
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?
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 imageon 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.
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.
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.
On Fri, 27 Apr 2018 07:19:42 +0100 Peter Robinson pbrobinson@gmail.com wrote:
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?
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.
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
On Fri, Apr 27, 2018 at 2:32 PM, James Szinger jszinger@gmail.com wrote:
On Fri, 27 Apr 2018 07:19:42 +0100 Peter Robinson pbrobinson@gmail.com wrote:
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?
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
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
On Fri, 27 Apr 2018 07:32:02 -0600 James Szinger jszinger@gmail.com wrote:
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
On Sat, Apr 28, 2018 at 2:30 PM, James Szinger jszinger@gmail.com wrote:
On Fri, 27 Apr 2018 07:32:02 -0600 James Szinger jszinger@gmail.com wrote:
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.
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.
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 _______________________________________________ arm mailing list -- arm@lists.fedoraproject.org To unsubscribe send an email to arm-leave@lists.fedoraproject.org
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James Szinger -
Peter Robinson -
RENARD Pierre-Francois