A year ago, FAI entered the cloud when it introduced support for the creation of disk images. The new FAI release 5.4 will now enter the embedded world. You can create cross architecture disk images, for e.g. build an image for 64-bit ARM (aarch64) on a host running 64-bit x86 Linux (amd64). The creation of chroot environments (or rootfs) for a foreign architecture is supported by the 'fai dirinstall' command.
The new FAI version also adds support for eMMC storage during installation. LVM partitions can now be created inside disk images, even if the host system already uses LVM. The default URL to access the Debian package repositories is the new deb.debian.org mirror network (CDN). Instead of calling debootstrap - which takes a long time - FAI can use a minimal tarball called basefile. You can download pre-created basefiles for several architectures from https://fai-project.org/download/basefiles/ fai-cd has a new option -s for adding additional disk space onto the boot media. fai-chboot can print the full path to the PXE config file for a given host or a list of hosts using the option -q. A detail list of all changes can be found at http://metadata.ftp-master.debian.org/changelogs/main/f/fai/unstable_changelog The new packages are tested with Debian 9 (aka stretch) and are available when using this line in sources.list deb https://fai-project.org/download stretch koeln Several variants of the FAI CD images are available at http://fai-project.org/fai-cd/ -- regards Thomas
