Re: Better arm64 support
On Mon, Apr 27, 2020 at 11:41:10PM +0100, Wookey wrote:
> > > > generic is most flexible, genericcloud has physical hardware drivers disabled,
> > > > and nocloud is as minimal as possible. The tools, configs, and docs are in
> > > > this repo: https://salsa.debian.org/cloud-team/debian-cloud-images/
> > >
> > > OK. Sounds like arm64 should be enabled for these too. I'll have a look.
> >
> > What do you mean by "enabled"? "generic" arm64 images are available today at e.g.
> > https://cloud.debian.org/images/cloud/sid/daily/20200427-245/ and
> > https://cloud.debian.org/images/cloud/buster/20200425-243/, both of
> > which are two clicks from https://cloud.debian.org/images/cloud/
>
> Yes 'generic' is built for arm64 but 'genericcloud' and 'nocloud'
> aren't. By 'enabled' I meant build those other two images for arm64 as well.
nocloud is built for arm64, see e.g.
https://cloud.debian.org/images/cloud/sid/daily/20200427-245/debian-sid-nocloud-arm64-daily-20200427-245.tar.xz
It's only genericcloud that isn't. Again, this is because the arm64
cloud kernel was only introduced with linux 5.5, so it wasn't possible
until very recently.
> ---------start-------
> At Packet you can boot operating systems through our Custom iPXE
> setup, described in some detail at:
> https://www.packet.com/developers/docs/servers/operating-systems/custom-ipxe/
>
> We should be able to boot any "server-ready" operating system that way, so
> long as the image contains NIC drivers for the hardware (typically Mellanox CX-4
> in our Arm-based servers, or Intel x710 in our x86 servers).
>
> To make a given operating system directly provisionable at Packet
> we use "Packer" from Hashicorp, and there are some things we
> bake into the image - no daemons, but there are a few helper
> scripts for things like iSCSI attach for our block storage that get
> added to the base image.
> --------end------
It seems likely that the generic images will work there, though they
will try to use things like cloud-init that won't function usefully.
Cloud-init typically takes care of setup of user accounts and ssh keys
for remote access in environments that use it. How does Packet set this
up? Is the expectation that authorized_keys files are baked in to the
image, or is there some other mechanism to populate them dynamically?
> Ah cool, and I see that https://cloud.debian.org/images/cloud/ has
> been updated. That's great, cheers.
Yes, I just added a little more detail to it, once I was reminded of
where to look to actually do so...
noah
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