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Explicitly document procedure for bare metal install on RAID #461
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You're right that we don't explicitly document this, and we should. The correct approach is implicit in the existing docs, but is pretty non-obvious if you're used to setting up RAID on other distros. The idea is: don't try to set up RAID before installing. Instead, install onto a single disk, reboot, and let the system reconfigure itself to use RAID. If the OS is given an Ignition config that recreates any of the default filesystems, it'll automatically copy their contents into RAM beforehand and copy them back afterward. This may seem backwards, but keep in mind that CoreOS is designed as an image-based distro. In the cloud or a VM, the OS is initially launched from a generic image, and then customizes itself with Ignition on the first boot. For consistency, bare-metal installs work the same way: the installer merely writes an image to disk, and then the OS customizes itself when it boots. Because the OS can switch to RAID at boot time, RAID can be used on any Fedora CoreOS system, including in the cloud if desired. So concretely, you'd install directly onto Re discussion forums, there's a Fedora Discussion forum, an Ask Fedora tag, a mailing list, and |
Ok, thanks a ton! Sounds logical now that you describe it like that :-) I'll try this on a VM first and report results (the actual machine has been shipped off now, attached to the Internet booting straight into the ISO live image, and all the shots I have at installing it correctly better succeed or I end up with paperweight stuck at a initrd maintenance prompt if anything goes wrong...). PS: I had played around with |
Oh wow. Let us know how it goes. 😅 Since this comes down to an OS-level docs enhancement, I'll retitle the issue and move it to the docs repo. |
coreos-installer
when installing from ISO on a RAID device
Hello,
I'm not sure if this is a bug or just a misunderstanding of mine. But I believe that in any case, even if it's just clarifying the documentation, some change needs to be done, so I'm posting this as a bug. Feel free to move this away otherwise, or kindly point me in the right direction as to where to post it.
Bug
coreos-installer install DEST_DEVICE
expects aDEST_DEVICE
, but there's either no way, or unclear, as to which device that would be if one would install on a RAID device.To start, I'm trying to install Fedora CoreOS using an Ignition file that essentially looks like this (Butane format):
Creating a custom boot image from a pristine CoreOS install/live ISO:
Booting the system using that ISO (on a thumb drive) results in a system that apparently has all the right devices:
Installing fails:
Essentially this means that not everyting is in place as it should be (e.g. no root file system at /dev/md/md-root). Apparently what is supposed to be the root filesystem only (i.e.
/dev/md/md-root
) is now home to 4 different partitions. Booting the system will obviously not result in the desired result.Specifying a raw device device will fail:
Specifying a totally different drive (e.g.
/dev/sda
, which is a stand-alone "spinning rust" hard drive) will look like success, but when booting, will run into an unconfigured GRUB (i.e. one with no kernel entries to boot).Host Operating System Version
Fedora Silverblue
Target Operating System Version
Fedora CoreOS 36.20220806.3.0 (booting from ISO)
coreos-installer Version
coreos-installer 0.15.0
Expected Behavior
coreos-installer install
should either install according to the specifications of an ignition file (i.e. not requesting a DEST_DEVICE), or should accept different devices for each task (root filesystem, boot device, and possibly others).Or documentation should be updated on how to call
coreos-installer
for the case of installing (a) from ISO, while (b) targeting a RAID disk setup.Actual Behavior
coreos-installer
either complains of insufficient permissions, or it interprets the desired root partition as a whole-disk device.Reproduction Steps
butane --strict --pretty -d . file.bu --output file.ign
podman run --security-opt label=disable --pull=always --rm -v .:/data -w /data quay.io/coreos/coreos-installer:release iso customize --live-ignition file.ign -o coreos-mod.iso coreos-pristine.iso
dd if=coreos-mod.iso of=/dev/sda && sync
/dev/sda
coreos-installer install ...
see above all the possible variations I could think of.Other Information
Again, this pretty much feels like I'm doing it wrong. I've read all I could find here to exhaustion, all the links related to this and to
coreos-installer
, and whatever I could find on Google and Reddit. I'm not aware of a CoreOS "user forum" or mailing list that I could ask, if there is one -- a nudge in the right direction would be greatly appreciated.The text was updated successfully, but these errors were encountered: