Foreman discovery image 4.0 el8 RC

lzap · December 22, 2021, 3:00pm

Hello,

I am presenting you the very first alpha build of FDI build from CentOS 8 Stream, download here:

https://people.redhat.com/~lzapleta/fdi/el8-alpha/

It is a big change, EL8 uses new stack to build livecd called Lorax and we had to do lot of changes. Special thanks to srwalter for the initial patch, I did the rest. Please report issues or even positive feedback here - we need to hear from you guys how it works so we can proceed to the beta phase.

This build is really an alpha build because it was built locally on my system, integration with our Jenkins is next. It will be a challenge because due to some limitations the build can be only performed via QEMU, therefore nested virtualization will be used on our Jenkins I guess. Let’s see next year.

Marek_Hulan · December 23, 2021, 12:54pm

I’ve extracted the files by running livecd-iso-to-pxeboot fdi-3.8.0-ef65877.iso and then tried to boot it, however once I got the files over PXE and it started booting it failed like this

and then dropped to the dracut shell

lzap · December 23, 2021, 1:00pm

You need to rename the image to fdi.iso prior doing that. Or use this instead:

github.com

theforeman/foreman-discovery-image/blob/master/aux/livecd-iso-to-pxeboot

#!/bin/bash
# Convert a live CD iso so that it can be booted over the network
# using PXELINUX.
# Copyright 2008 Red Hat, Inc.
# Written by Richard W.M. Jones <rjones@redhat.com>
# Based on a script by Jeremy Katz <katzj@redhat.com>
# Based on original work by Chris Lalancette <clalance@redhat.com>
#
# This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
# it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
# the Free Software Foundation; version 2 of the License.
#
# This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
# but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
# MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
# GNU Library General Public License for more details.
#
# You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
# along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software
# Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place - Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307, USA.

This file has been truncated. show original

I tested the ISO locally (not PXE yet) and it works fine.

lzap · December 23, 2021, 1:10pm

Just for the record, I am finishing off with CI changes and the next version (beta) will have both ISO and PXE files for download on our standard location. If you want PXE, perhaps just wait.

lzap · December 23, 2021, 7:10pm

I was hoping to push out another alpha build before holidays, but I am getting no route error to isodirect on the CentOS CI:

https://ci.centos.org/job/foreman-discovery-image-build/55/console

So, I guess this is it! See you next year.

lzap · January 3, 2022, 12:07pm

Thanks to @evgeni who helped me to track down the problem with ISO.

However, it does not look good. Lorax only produces usable artifacts when FDI is built via libvirt, therefore nested virtualization is used and it looks like it is extremely slow. It’s not 3 hours and counting: foreman-discovery-image-build #58 Console [Jenkins]

evgeni · January 3, 2022, 1:49pm

I’ve aborted the build after over 4h

lzap · January 3, 2022, 1:53pm

Yeah thanks, I was keeping an eye on this, this is bad. I am looking into building via mock now which “should work but I haven’t tested it” from the original author. Hmmm.

lzap · January 6, 2022, 12:03pm

I have finally successfully built FDI 4.0 on our CI:

https://downloads.theforeman.org/discovery/nightly/

Test it out while it is hot!

lzap · January 6, 2022, 12:21pm

I have found out that the hostname (fdi) does resolve pretty slow which makes facter very slow. Added the entry to the /etc/hosts to resolve that.

Image fdi-4.0.0-975b541.iso is affected, initiated a new build that will solve the problem for quicker testing.

lzap · January 6, 2022, 2:33pm

The latest build looks okay, anyone else tested it? fdi-4.0.0-4f189ba.iso

That could be our RC!

lzap · January 11, 2022, 7:56am

There are problems with rebooting, systemd does not carry over correctly to initramdisk and reboot command fails. Fix is in the works.

lzap · January 12, 2022, 9:03am

And we have a winner! This is the final build of FDI 4.0:

https://downloads.theforeman.org/discovery/releases/4.0/

Have fun.