Unfortunately there's no ready made answer yet here. We're busy designing and implementing a solution for these problems. https://github.com/systemd/systemd/pull/27792 has more details.
Cheers, Daan On Fri, 18 Aug 2023, 19:44 Nils Kattenbeck, <nilskem...@gmail.com> wrote: > Hi, > > currently I am building a minimalistic Linux image using mkosi which > should be installed on bare-metal hardware. > For the installation I am trying to create a USB-stick installer which > simply installs the resulting image on the hardware. > > First and foremost: > Does someone maybe know of an existing tool which generates such a USB > installer? > For now I have found the installer script[1] from Yocto, and FAI > (Fully automatic installation)[2]. > I would like to avoid using Yocto and the script seems to also perform > partitioning etc. which I do not need as mkosi already generates a > ready-to-use raw disk image with partitions set up. > FAI on the other hand seems to focus on network installs and prefers > to build its own images instead of using an arbitrary .raw/ISOs. > > So I fear that I will have to write my own installer... > I do not require fancy GUI shenanigans; a simple CLI application > prompting for the destination disk should suffice. > > Based on my understanding the primary steps are `cp /dev/usb-stick > /dev/target-disk` (or dd for the old fashioned), followed by a `parted > --script --fix /dev/target-disk print` to resolve GPT warnings due to > the header not being at the end when the disk is larger than the USB > stick. > Is it possible to replace the second step with `systemd-parted`. > Especially given that mkosi v15 now uses it for itself, this would > likely be a lot cleaner than invoking parted. > > The major problem I am facing with that approach is how do I know > whether I am booting from a USB stick or already from the final disk > drive. > One technique which comes to mind would be to create two images, one > of which will be placed into the mkosi.extra/ directory of the other. > This way I could have one auto-start the install script whereas the > other image would be completely free of that logic. > Am I missing a more obvious way to perform this? > > Any help would be greatly appreciated! > Kind regard, Nils > > [1] > https://github.com/yoctoproject/poky/blob/13734bb520732882a95da7ee6efe1e5b98568acc/meta/recipes-core/initrdscripts/initramfs-module-install-efi_1.0.bb > [2] https://fai-project.org/ >
