[How to] Build aarch64 discovery images

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Hey there,

my employer has quite a few aarch64 machines, supporting PXE boot. We are currently in the process of switching to foreman for deployment and use the discovery plugin (which is working really nice by the way, at least for x86_64 nodes). Unfortunately, by default, the discovery image only supports x86_64 machines and no other architectures. I spent the last 2 days building the image for aarch64, which worked pretty cleanly. I only needed to build a few RPMs manually and replace a few dependencies and build options.

I wrote instructions on how to build the aarch64 image, you can find them here:

I hope it helps others with aarch64 hosts.

Maybe this can even be used as base for officials builds in the future :slight_smile:

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This is great.

Patch The Discovery Image Build

It would be great if at one point the script had a parameter for the architecture.

Build A Local ARM64 RPM Repository

In Bootstrapping Foreman RPM packaging I wrote up how to (re)build Foreman’s packages from scratch. As an experiment, I built a copr repository. I already had a chat with @Odilhao about building Foreman for aarch64. We’re working on building Foreman on EL10 and I think it’s a great time to start building on both aarch64 and x86_64.

Patch The Kickstart For ARM64

The whole repo part isn’t needed once we build packages in our regular repos.

But this part:

Remove x86-only packages and add ARM64 GRUB/shim packages:

I wonder if there are virtual packages we can install. For example, if you depend on shim then it will install shim-x64:

# rpm -q --provides shim-x64
bundled(openssl) = 1.0.2j
shim = 15.8-3
shim-signed = 15.8-3
shim-signed-x64 = 15.8-3
shim-x64 = 15.8-3
shim-x64(x86-64) = 15.8-3

I’d imagine that shim-aa64 has the same provides. Perhaps you can provide those patches to the repository?

I only skimmed over the further parts, but that looks logical. Again, would be nice to provide this by default.

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