Status of EC2 AMIs for Fedora 12 and beyond?

[Joey Boggs]

On 02/01/2010 10:11 PM, Greg DeKoenigsberg wrote:
> On Fri, 29 Jan 2010, John Poelstra wrote:
>
>> Greetings,
>>
>> I sat in on a session at FUDCon where there was discussion about 
>> getting the AMIs updated to Fedora 12.  Are we tracking those steps 
>> and their status on the wiki anywhere?  Can I help with that process?
>>
>> I'm also curious if we have done any work to map out what needs to 
>> happen and when (a schedule) for Fedora 13 in terms of having Fedora 
>> 13 AMIs ready on release day?  If there is not a schedule I'd be glad 
>> to help map one out and I'm guessing we need to start on this ASAP?
>>
>> Who is working on the different pieces right now?
>
> Let me do my best to describe where we are right now, and where we 
> should be headed.  We should be working on two separate efforts: 
> getting the Fedora kernel sorted for EC2, and working on image build 
> tools for EC2.
>
> ====
>
> 1. Fedora AKI for EC2.
>
> Where we are: Chatted with Justin Forbes today briefly, and evidently 
> we're waiting for the 2.6.32 kernel to move from updates-testing to 
> release.  The goal of the kernel work is to make sure that it actually 
> runs properly on Xen hosts, which is what Amazon runs EC2 on.
>
> How to help: Amazon runs EC2 on many versions of RHEL.  The oldest is 
> analogous to RHEL 5.2.  If you can build a (RH)EL 5.2 Xen host, and 
> install a Fedora 12 guest built with the 2.6.32 kernel in 
> updates-testing. Justin, any particular things to test on that guest?  
> Is "does the damned thing boot" an effective test?  Any particular set 
> of tests?
>
> ====
>
> 2. Compose tools for Fedora EC2 images.
>
> To some degree, this is parallel work.  To complete it, we'll need a 
> good F12 kernel -- but to get it started, we just need an overview of 
> the current tools, figure out how they're used, document, improve if 
> need be, and make it dead-easy for Fedora users to do what they want 
> to do.  I think a lot of people have ideas of what we *could* do, but 
> we've yet to articulate what we *will* do.
>
> My $0.02: seems like thincrust might be a good place to start.  Red 
> Hat folks have been working on it for a while, and I've liked my 
> initial experiences with it.  It's dead easy to go from kickstart file 
> to virtual image, and they've also got a tool called ec2-converter 
> that allegedly sets up AMI images that are ready for upload.  Maybe 
> the place to start is to take a current spin and walk down the path of 
> turning it into an AMI, and see how far we get.  (Copying Joey Boggs, 
> who is the maintainer of ec2-converter: any advice?  Gotchas?)

ec2-converter is hardcoded to a specific kernel/modules setup, this can 
be updated and add a kernel override option once we have a new kernel to 
use. No gotchas AFAIK but it's been a few months since I've used and 
uploaded an AMI.

>
> The goal should be to have a handful of F13 AMIs very shortly after 
> the F13 release.
>
> ====
>
> 3. IRC meetings.
>
> This "roadmap", such as it is, is very high-level.  I wonder if 
> perhaps we should convene an IRC meeting this week and figure out 
> who's willing to jump in and help.  At the very least, we can 
> articulate some tasks at a more granular level, and maybe get some 
> folks to pick them up.
>
> So... um... Thursday at 1900GMT / 1400 Eastern US time?  I've got 
> #fedora-cloud registered on freenode.  We could hang out, put together 
> a roadmap... you know, junk like that.

works for me
>
> Any takers?  Any counter-proposals?
>
> --g
>
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