OpenStack image for arm64
Hi,
Over the last few months, Steve McIntyre and myself have worked on arm64
support for the official Debian OpenStack images. This week, I was able
to test the generated image, and I'm happy to announce that it worked
well for me on the Linaro cloud: I have a tenant there for testing,
thanks Linaro for their support.
The way to build the image is to run this on an arm64 machine:
build-openstack-debian-image -bt uefi \
-u http://ftp.debian.org/debian \
-s http://ftp.debian.org/debian -a arm64 -r stretch
This needs openstack-debian-images version 1.18, currently in Sid, not
yet migrated to Stretch (but unblock approved by the release team).
The fact that the image works, means that we also have a working UEFI
support, as arm64 mandate the use of UEFI. So this is good news too.
Unfortunately, running default (ie: without the -a and -bt option)
doesn't really work. At this point, I don't think it is reasonable to
attempt fixing this before the release. We may fix the problem in the
script after Stretch is release, with possibly an attempt to push an
update through proposed-updates.
Moving forward, I hope Steve will have enough time before the release to
push the arm64 generation into production, so we have both amd64 and
arm64 official images at the time of the release over on the official
repository cdimages.debian.org.
Also, Steve worked on having security updates of the image *only when
needed*. What he's done is that the list packages used in the image is
checked against the list of security updates. If a security update is
done before a point release, then a new image is generated. Meaning we
do have intermediary official images before a point release, fixing any
security issue. This is a much better approach than having nightly builds.
Now, I still didn't check if the generated images work with AWS. As I
don't really wish to give my credit card information to Amazon, I am
still looking for a volunteer to check if the OpenStack image would
work. I have all reasons to believe it would. Please do test it and
report success or failure.
I'd like to hereby thanks Steve for his support and continuous work.
He's been just great.
Hoping this work will please all Debian users on the cloud,
Cheers,
Thomas Goirand (zigo)
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