A small (685K) Fedora appliance for the test day

[Richard W.M. Jones]

On Tue, Oct 11, 2011 at 09:46:10PM +0100, Mark McLoughlin wrote:
>   $> glance add name=a-fedora-appliance-kernel < /var/lib/a-fedora-appliance/kernel
>   Added new image with ID: 4
>   $> glance add name=a-fedora-appliance-initrd < /var/lib/a-fedora-appliance/initrd  
>   Added new image with ID: 5
>   $> glance add name=a-fedora-appliance-root < /var/lib/a-fedora-appliance/root
>   Added new image with ID: 6
> 
>   $> euca-run-instances a-fedora-appliance-root --kernel a-fedora-appliance-kernel --ramdisk a-fedora-appliance-initrd -k nova_key
> 
>   $> euca-get-console-output i-00000001
> 
> A few problems, though:
> 
>   - I got a kernel panic, see below

The panic seems to be because in febootstrap we always look for the
last disk image as the root disk.  eg. If there is /dev/vda and
/dev/vdb as there appears to be here, then /dev/vdb is the one we
expect as 'root'.

The reason for this is obscure -- to do with libguestfs where we
always want [/dev/vda ..] to be the disks added by the user, and the
last disk is the hidden appliance root.

Is it possible to rearrange the disks?

>   - We need to include a script which will download you public SSH key 
>     from the EC2 metadata API; see what I added with Oz. We could even 
>     use cloud-init for that instead

Yeah I guess if it was up to me I'd do it with libguestfs /
virt-sysprep, but that's something to get upstream.

>   - The root image is still 4Gb, which means copying 4Gb to glance and 
>     then copying it back down to glance. The beauty of the tty images is
>     that these copies are all small and then Nova resizes the image up 
>     to 10Gb automatically.

Of course it's really ~600 MB, because it's a sparse file, but yes.

[...]
> febootstrap: internal insmod virtio_blk.ko
> [    0.657670]  vda: unknown partition table
> [    0.659476]  vdb: unknown partition table

^ two disks

> febootstrap: internal insmod virtio_net.ko
> febootstrap: picked /sys/block/vdb/dev as root device

^ picks the second disk

> febootstrap: creating /dev/root as block special 252:16
> febootstrap: mounting new root on /root
> [    0.664363] EXT4-fs (vdb): mounting ext2 file system using the ext4 subsystem
> [    1.198440] input: ImExPS/2 Generic Explorer Mouse as /devices/platform/i8042/serio1/input/input2
> [    1.200879] EXT4-fs (vdb): mounted filesystem with ordered data mode. Opts: 
> febootstrap: chroot
> /proc/uptime: No such file or directory
> execl: /init: No such file or directory
> febootstrap: debug: listing directory /
>     2 d ..               040755 4096 8774:8774
>    11 d lost+found       040700 16384 0:0
>     2 d .                040755 4096 8774:8774

^ tries to mount /dev/vdb, chroot and run /init, but fails in the
chroot (although the mount is OK for some reason).

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones
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