Include livenet and nbd dracut plugins on the Fedora Live ISO

[Lukas Zapletal]

Hello,

I would like to have livenet / nbd plugins to be present on the initram
disk of Fedora Workstation Live DVD, but I struggle to find a place
where to send a patch. Can you help me where should I file this? Must be
some dracut script that builds those, or is this the official kernel
that ships with Fedora system?

These modules are small, but it will offer possibility to boot Fedora
Live via PXE from network (HTTP, FTP or NBD). It has few dependencies
(nbd-client, curl) but those are tiny and I assume curl is already in
the minimal installation anyway.

Use case: A neighbour shows up with a broken Windows laptop without a
CD/DVD drive apparently and I have no USB stick with up-to-date Fedora
Live image handy. With my proposal implemented, I can offer connecting
to my network, booting up Fedora and to try things out. In dozens of
minutes, new happy Fedora user walks out of my doors :-)

I would like to carry on with a change to livecd-tools providing helper
script livecd-to-pxe-livenet and livecd-to-pxe-nbd to help with creating
those configurations.

If this turns to be a bad idea, then I will design the helper scripts to
generate the kernel/image from a running system, but then users need to
run compatible distro to successfully generate it.

-- 
Later,
 Lukas #lzap Zapletal

[Josh Boyer]

On Wed, Nov 25, 2015 at 7:17 AM, Lukas Zapletal <lzap(a)redhat.com&gt; wrote:
>  Hello,
>
>  I would like to have livenet / nbd plugins to be present on the initram
>  disk of Fedora Workstation Live DVD, but I struggle to find a place
>  where to send a patch. Can you help me where should I file this? Must be
>  some dracut script that builds those, or is this the official kernel
>  that ships with Fedora system? 
All Fedora Editions use the official kernel and the nbd driver is
already built.  You likely want to contact the Workstation WG on the
desktop to see about getting the dracut modules included, though you
might simply request it to be included in all of them.  I don't see
why you wouldn't want similar functionality for Server.

>  These modules are small, but it will offer possibility to boot
> Fedora
>  Live via PXE from network (HTTP, FTP or NBD). It has few dependencies
>  (nbd-client, curl) but those are tiny and I assume curl is already in
>  the minimal installation anyway.
>
>  Use case: A neighbour shows up with a broken Windows laptop without a
>  CD/DVD drive apparently and I have no USB stick with up-to-date Fedora
>  Live image handy. With my proposal implemented, I can offer connecting
>  to my network, booting up Fedora and to try things out. In dozens of
>  minutes, new happy Fedora user walks out of my doors :-)
>
>  I would like to carry on with a change to livecd-tools providing helper
>  script livecd-to-pxe-livenet and livecd-to-pxe-nbd to help with creating
>  those configurations. 
I think rel-eng is changing the tooling it uses to create the live
images.  You might want to review this:

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/LivemediaCreator

>  If this turns to be a bad idea, then I will design the helper scripts
> to
>  generate the kernel/image from a running system, but then users need to
>  run compatible distro to successfully generate it. 
I'm not sure what you mean by "generate the kernel" here.

josh

[Adam Williamson]

On Wed, 2015-11-25 at 12:14 -0500, Josh Boyer wrote:
>  On Wed, Nov 25, 2015 at 7:17 AM, Lukas Zapletal
> <lzap(a)redhat.com&gt; wrote:
>  > Hello,
>  > 
>  > I would like to have livenet / nbd plugins to be present on the initram
>  > disk of Fedora Workstation Live DVD, but I struggle to find a place
>  > where to send a patch. Can you help me where should I file this? Must be
>  > some dracut script that builds those, or is this the official kernel
>  > that ships with Fedora system?
>  
>  All Fedora Editions use the official kernel and the nbd driver is
>  already built.  You likely want to contact the Workstation WG on the
>  desktop to see about getting the dracut modules included, though you
>  might simply request it to be included in all of them.  I don't see
>  why you wouldn't want similar functionality for Server. 
dracut itself contains the configuration about what modules get built
into the initramfs in what situations. Live images use a generic (--no-
hostonly) initramfs. I'd talk to the dracut maintainer about the
appropriate way to add these.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | XMPP: adamw AT happyassassin . net
http://www.happyassassin.net

[Lukas Zapletal]

>  dracut itself contains the configuration about what modules get
> built
>  into the initramfs in what situations. Live images use a generic (--no-
>  hostonly) initramfs. I'd talk to the dracut maintainer about the
>  appropriate way to add these. 
Hmm, it looks like dracut-live contains the module livenet and
dracut-network contains nbd module. But where is the place with the list
of plugins to be included for workstation live spin? Can't find these.

I don't believe we include all the plugins as on Fedora 23 Live there is
no "livenet" module from what I understand (does not work for me).

-- 
Later,
 Lukas #lzap Zapletal

[Peter Robinson]

On Thu, Nov 26, 2015 at 8:53 AM, Lukas Zapletal <lzap(a)redhat.com&gt; wrote:
> > dracut itself contains the configuration about what modules get
> built
> > into the initramfs in what situations. Live images use a generic (--no-
> > hostonly) initramfs. I'd talk to the dracut maintainer about the
> > appropriate way to add these.
>
>  Hmm, it looks like dracut-live contains the module livenet and
>  dracut-network contains nbd module. But where is the place with the list
>  of plugins to be included for workstation live spin? Can't find these. 
It's probably defined in the lorax template [1] which is part of what
live-media-creator uses. Currently for F-23 we actually use
livecd-creator but in F-24 we'll be moving to lmc because it then uses
the same code paths etc as the rest of the tools we use to build the
distro so that's where the change should land.

[1] https://github.com/rhinstaller/lorax/blob/master/share/runtime-install.tmpl

[Lukas Zapletal]

>  It's probably defined in the lorax template [1] which is part of
> what
>  live-media-creator uses. Currently for F-23 we actually use
>  livecd-creator but in F-24 we'll be moving to lmc because it then uses
>  the same code paths etc as the rest of the tools we use to build the
>  distro so that's where the change should land. 
Ok, thanks. It looks like livenet is already included by default, so I
expect to have it in F24 then.

-- 
Later,
 Lukas #lzap Zapletal