Hey folks.
There are a lot of discussions going on in the last time regarding provisioning processes and I love to see that. But we need to work on these step by step and try to separate them into several parts, without breaking existing functionality.
Given that, we would like to focus again on the current approach we (ATIX) have been working on for some time and we would like to see our changes being accepted upstream.
I don’t want to pre-empt the discussions in the actual PRs but @goarsna and I have agreed already on that we would implement a few more details in order to make the current PR complete.***
At first glance, this adds again an additional PXELoader to Foreman and we all agree on that we actually would like to have less. But with these changes we would:
a) have a first support for provisioning Linux on SecureBoot enabled hosts and
b) we are paving the way for a generally more flexible design of PXE boot for individual hosts.
Having this working reliable, we can then think about (order isn’t fix):
- reducing list of PXELoader*
- refactoring/automating the way of providing all required PXE boot files**
- extend the host-specific NBPs (=DHCP filename) to other PXELoader as well
- start looking at IPv6 PXE boot
Please speak up @lzap @ekohl @lstejska if this works for you guys or if we are wrong here.
*) e.g. having only one “Grub2 UEFI” PXELoader which corresponds to the new one
**) e.g. RFC: Distribution of netboot files via OCI registry
***) clean up MAC-directories after host deletion, check for new PXELoader support utilizing SP capabilities, manual testing the other distributions RHEL/Oracle/SLES
PRs:
https://github.com/theforeman/foreman/pull/9864
https://github.com/theforeman/smart-proxy/pull/877