>> Can you demonstrate the benefits of your method with examples of how things >> become simpler? (only tested-to-work examples, please, no should-work ones)
I’m not sure of any other way to configure the rump kernels network and disk except via json.cfg - is there any alternative way? Maybe I’ve missed some obvious way of getting json.cfg into the kernel. Configuration of network-only unikernels is one good use case. Currently I’m trying to load a unikernel which will not have any disk activity at all - just network. To do so, right now to get the network configured I have to be able to provide the unikernel with either an ext2 disk or boot from ISO, and the unikernel will automount and load the json.cfg from there. To be specific, it turns out to be quite complex and fiddly to build bootable disk images that are either pure ext2 or alternatively ext4 with additional ext2 partitions that can be specified as the root partition to the rump kernel. After having spent the past few days learning the ins and outs of boot process, grub, mbr & gpt partition tables etc and finding how brittle all that is, I’m thinking “all this to get an ext2 disk attached so I can load one configuration file which is less than 100 bytes, when it could be configured by directly passing that config into the kernel boot params, and its not even desireable to have the ext2 file system hanging around once I’ve got the config file”. I should note out I’m trying to do this in a bare metal hardware configuration - not that this makes much difference to anything. I know that’s just my problem but I do think it would be generally more useful if a kernel configuration could be passed in via the boot process rather than either compiled in or loaded from a disk automounted during boot - an automounted disk shouldn’t be needed for configuration loading. Loading json.cfg from automounted disks is probably a good thing to have as an option but getting those disks configured can add to the overall complexity of the setup - by a big margin if you’re not a deep-tech systems admin who knows all about disks and partitions and grub and stuff. I’m not sure if I’m putting a good enough case. If you’re not convinced, let me know and I’ll try to formulate a stronger argument that better articulates why I think this is valuable. as
