Hi All, I'd like to propose that we do some work on "hardware images" in the 13.10 cycle. The end result is basically to a 'cloud-image' that works on hardware the way our cloud-images currently work on virtual platforms.
* Currently, we're making "ephemeral" images available for use in MAAS. These images are essentially cloud images with a -generic kernel inserted. They're really close to what we'd end up with. * We did some work last cycle on a "fast path installer". Installing ready-to-go images to disk is not terribly difficult. If everything is working perfectly, its not much more than 'dd if=image of=disk'. We need to do some work on automation and production of these images so that they're available. * There is a growing interest in Openstack "Bare Metal" provisioning. We'd like to have Ubuntu images "just work" with openstack bare metal the way our cloud images do with openstack kvm/xen. There is some work that we'd need to do: * cloud-init datasource for bare metal. Doing first boot customization is tricky without a datasource available. We'll need to come up with some agreement between an "installer" and the created image on how to communicate first-boot customization. Our current solution with the maas images and the fast path installer is Ubuntu specific (d-i preseeding / file writing "inside the image") * produce baremetal cloud images on similar build cycle to the cloud-images. * work with openstack to make sure our images are working perfectly there. * misc other things. My first pass at just making dd'able images performed poorly because of filesystem alignment. There might be things we can do to improve this. * boot work (EFI and secure boot) One additional piece of work I'd like to consider is the return of the '-server' kernel. We currently have basically 2 kernel options for server installation: * linux-image-virtual (~25M installed) * linux-image-generic (~155M installed) there is certainly some set of modules that a "default server install" could do without. Ie, you probably aren't using a bluetooth headset, audio, or wifi on your server install. I've not done any digging at all, but if there is a middle ground that makes a high percentage of server hardware boot with a 60M footprint, then we could eventually consider dropping -virtual for that kernel. Since our "hardware images" will be mainly "cloud images with a hardware kernel", we could potentially at some point join the two. The -virtual kernel is very useful. Our images are a ~200M download and come with a filesystem ~700M populated. If we just swapped out -virtual for -generic, we'd see ~15% size growth as a result, and at almost zero percent growth in function. -- ubuntu-server mailing list [email protected] https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-server More info: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ServerTeam
