Re: virt-builder metadata for Debian cloud images
On Tue, Jul 21, 2015 at 07:21:57PM +0200, Pino Toscano wrote:
>Hi,
Hi Pino,
>I'm one of the upstream of the libguestfs [1] project, which is a
>library and a set of tools to manipulate disk images. It is also
>packaged in Debian.
>
>One of the tools is virt-builder [2], which allows to create quickly
>new guests starting from templates. So far, we are providing all the
>templates ourselves on our website, and some of them are also Debian
>stable images:
>
>$ virt-builder --list
>centos-6 x86_64 CentOS 6.6
>centos-7.0 x86_64 CentOS 7.0
>centos-7.1 x86_64 CentOS 7.1
>cirros-0.3.1 x86_64 CirrOS 0.3.1
>debian-6 x86_64 Debian 6 (Squeeze)
>debian-7 x86_64 Debian 7 (Wheezy)
>debian-8 x86_64 Debian 8 (Jessie)
>fedora-18 x86_64 Fedora® 18
>fedora-19 x86_64 Fedora® 19
>fedora-20 x86_64 Fedora® 20
>fedora-21 x86_64 Fedora® 21 Server
>fedora-21 aarch64 Fedora® 21 Server (aarch64)
>fedora-21 armv7l Fedora® 21 Server (armv7l)
>fedora-21 ppc64 Fedora® 21 Server (ppc64)
>fedora-21 ppc64le Fedora® 21 Server (ppc64le)
>fedora-22 x86_64 Fedora® 22 Server
>fedora-22 aarch64 Fedora® 22 Server (aarch64)
>fedora-22 armv7l Fedora® 22 Server (armv7l)
>scientificlinux-6 x86_64 Scientific Linux 6.5
>ubuntu-10.04 x86_64 Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid)
>ubuntu-12.04 x86_64 Ubuntu 12.04 (Precise)
>ubuntu-14.04 x86_64 Ubuntu 14.04 (Trusty)
>
>Speaking with Thomas Goirand (zigo), I was told about the OpenStack
>images [3], so it would be nice to have them available in virt-builder
>for the users of this tool.
OK, cool. :-)
>Basically, it is matter to provide an index file, INI-like style, with
>the proper metadata for each image (name, description, size, sha512,
>etc), optionally GPG-signed inline (it is not mandatory, although would
>be recommeded). You can check the configuration bits in the
>"SOURCES OF TEMPLATES" section of [2], and also the current index on
>libguestfs.org [4] as example.
>To use this index, there would be the need to install locally (i.e.
>where virt-builder is installed) a very small .conf file (and the copy
>of the GPG key, if the index is signed); the files for the
>libguestfs.org are currently part of the libguestfs-tools package
>(together with virt-builder), installed under
>/etc/xdg/virt-builder/repos.d/.
>
>I would be happy to help in getting the online metadata (i.e. the
>index, possibly signed) generated, so how would I get to it?
The build is done insida a VM hosted on our CD / live image production
machine (pettersson.debian.org) - that's where the openstack images
are made. It's not easy to give out access to that VM, but it's easy
enough to add extra steps to the image production code that runs
there. There's a slight snag, though - the signing process is outside
of the VM so we'd probably have to generate the index file then
post-process it to add the signature.
>Also, a different chapter would be having proper non-cloud qcow2
>images available (always with virt-builder metadata, of course).
>This, other than allowing us to avoid maintaining Debian images, would
>mean virt-builder users can get official images of stable released,
>updated periodically.
>Would that be something useful? If so, how/where/etc could this process
>get started?
Sure, we can do that too - we have scope for producing all sorts of
images. It's something that there's going to be discussion about at
DebConf next month, in fact!
--
Steve McIntyre, Cambridge, UK. steve@einval.com
Armed with "Valor": "Centurion" represents quality of Discipline,
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