On Tue, Aug 30, 2016 at 11:07:33AM +0200, Thomas Goirand wrote: > On 08/22/2016 01:29 PM, Adam Bolte wrote: > I believe I could write it myself if: > 1/ I had access to an AWS account. Can anyone help in this regard? Amazon offers a free-of-charge trial, with no-cost access to one of the micro instance types as I recall. That should suffice, and is probably your best bet to get started, although I think you will need a credit card. > 2/ Someone just told me what's missing in the current image. Adam, could > you give a quick summary of what's needed? A good starting point would be the ec2 directory of debian-image-builder, since that splits out the EC2-specific steps reasonably well I think. Those files can be seen here: https://github.com/sitepoint/debian-image-builder/tree/master/tasks/ec2 Some of it is specific to EC2 image types, such as paravirtual Vs HVM images, and EC2-backed Vs instance-backed images. I'm not sure if the plan for openstack-debian-images is to support all possible EC2 instance types, or just the latest ones AWS recommends (albeit perhaps not compatible with all existing environments). debian-image-builder does no partitioning when building HVM images since only paravirtual images existed when it was written. I would aim to make sure that partitioning is properly taken care of for HVM images when adding new code to openstack-debian-images. As part of the creation process, I attach an EBS volume and install GRUB on that to avoid some issues I had previously with grub-install. Maybe that's no longer an issue, so should be re-tested with the grub-install approach openstack-debian-images uses before adding that code. My suspicion is that it won't be an issue when partitioning for HVM images, and Jessie has the grub-xen package which you can use to create a menu.lst / grub.conf file without needing to run grub-install for paravirtual images. Actually, the paravirtual update-grub approach taken in debian-image-builder could use some improvement. For paravirtual images, installing grub-xen, removing execute permission on everything in /etc/default/grub/ except 10_linux, and setting GRUB_DISABLE_SUBMENU="y" in /etc/default/grub should be enough to cleanly generate a grub.conf file that's compatible with pygrub, without the need for the 40_custom Grub script you can see I deploy. But honestly I don't know if many people use paravirtual images on AWS these days, and AWS was the main focus of my project since that's what I use it for. That's everything I can think of that's noteworthy. Let me know if you have any questions. > Since both OpenStack and AWS are using the EC2 metadata server, I'm > convince that it should be possible (and even desirable) for Debian to > ship a single image that would accommodate both. I'm willing to do > so. That sounds good. Although I personally use EC2 right now, I'd like to see OpenStack supported as well. Another tool to maybe take hints from is the xen-create-image script included in the xen-tools package. It basically creates a Debian paravirtual image. Written in Perl, but probably simple enough to understand without much Perl knowledge. It's officially packaged for Debian, and you can compare the image modifications it makes by default. Cheers, Adam
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