Open Stack

On Tue, May 07, 2019 at 03:38:48PM -0500, Jose Carlos Venegas Munoz wrote:
> Thanks to bring this to the ML. This is an interesting approach I have
> not play with Dracut a lot in the past but it definitely is a good thing
> look at.
> 
> When we started osbuilder the idea was to show adopters that Kata
> was able to boot with any OS as base (as long follow some requirements) 
> and probably they adapt as needed or create their own tooling get Kata
> working for them. After all this time I see that it is more value to
> have just one tool that anyone can use and is flexible for developers
> and linux distributions adoption. 
> 
> So I think would need more feedback from all the community and also
> from linux distributions in general so we can have a solution that 
> works better for all.

This dracut approach is only aimed at distro package maintainers wishing
to ship official Kata Containers packages.  Users building Kata from
source or customizing should continue to use osbuilder.

dracut does not cover all cases that osbuilder covers.  It's also not
used by all Linux distros, so they will have to use their equivalent
tool.

However, I think dracut or equivalent distro tools are the right fit for
official Kata Containers packages in Fedora, Debian, etc because:

1. The same tool is already used to build the host initramfs and is
   familiar to package maintainers.
2. It produces a smaller initramfs than osbuilder.
3. It is fast because files are copied from the host instead of
   installed using a package manager.
4. It eliminates packaging policy headaches because all files come from
   the host and therefore don't raise questions like "can we
   redistribute a ClearLinux rootfs and where do we mirror/publish the
   sources?".

Due to dracut's speed it would be appropriate to rebuild
kata-containers-initrd.img every time the host kernel or kata-agent
package is updated.  Previously this problem was discussed because
building a rootfs with osbuilder is slow and shouldn't hold up software
updates, but I think it becomes a non-issue with dracut.

> Here some question related with dracut usage:
> 
> 1. Is it possible to build a disk image?
> I think the answer is not. This is a feature that is still difficult
> to be compatible with packaging but helps in memory usage if used with
> DAX. So probably a nice feature to keep

AFAIK dracut does not build disk images.

I've been booting from virtio-fs (with DAX) recently and am now
wondering about skipping the cpio + compression step in dracut.  That
could achieve the same thing although virtiofsd has more memory overhead
than a disk image NVDIMM.

> 2. Is it possible to have a custom rootfs with packages I want?
> Today we require system + agent + iptables + chrony. But also
> we support not having system but the agent as init. Also, users 
> may want to add additional binaries in the future (to be part of the
> official image or just for hacking). 

Additional files and binaries can be added from the host system.  dracut
does not use a package manager to install them, instead it copies them
and library dependencies.

In the example I posted there is an initramfs-overlay/ directory.  Files
dropped in there will be built into the initramfs.

Stefan
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 488 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://lists.katacontainers.io/pipermail/kata-dev/attachments/20190509/0a2719b8/attachment.sig>