Fedora cloud image feedback

[Jonathan Lebon]

Hi all,
> https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/Local_Test_Cloud

Interesting tool. Hadn't seen it before.

I've also been working on a similar feature for the Atomic
image (although it should work just fine for the Base images
as well if we want). Basically, it adds a new boot menu item
labeled "Developer Mode" (working title ;) ).

It's meant for users with little experience (e.g. don't know
anything about cloud-init or how to use Vagrant, or even
Linux in general) or for those who want to "kick the tire",
so to speak.

When booted in Dev Mode:
   - cloud-init is configured to set a password for the
     cloud-user and root accounts
   - tty1 is automatically logged in as root with a tmux
     shell set up
   - cockpit is automatically downloaded and started and
     a URL is printed out for users to open in their
     browsers.

There is a card on the platinfra Trello board for this work:
https://trello.com/c/eK54YRTp

One advantage of this approach is that everything necessary
is encapsulated in the image, so there are no pkg (or even
OS) requirements on the user env (other than being able to
boot the image). But it does require a small kickstart
tweak as well as a new package added.

Cheers,

Jonathan

[Matthew Miller]

On Tue, Dec 15, 2015 at 11:59:41AM -0500, Jonathan Lebon wrote:
> I've also been working on a similar feature for the Atomic
> image (although it should work just fine for the Base images
> as well if we want). Basically, it adds a new boot menu item
> labeled "Developer Mode" (working title ;) ).

This is pretty clever, and maybe something we should ship in the cloud
base image too.

The price, though, is a delay at boot time -- based on
experience, the POST goes so fast in KVM that you don't get a chance to
hit a key unless there's a boot menu delay of at least a couple of
seconds. And then for cloud instances _not_ in developer mode, that's
two+ seconds of boot delay every time, for no reason.

I dunno, maybe it's worth it.