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Move coreos-installer out of initramfs #203

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bgilbert opened this issue Jun 21, 2019 · 3 comments
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Move coreos-installer out of initramfs #203

bgilbert opened this issue Jun 21, 2019 · 3 comments
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@bgilbert
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Under some circumstances, users need to run arbitrary code before/after coreos-installer. (coreos/coreos-installer#25 is the tip of the iceberg.) At present, this requires either a) modifying coreos-installer to ship that code directly, or b) allowing users to run arbitrary code in the initramfs. (a) presents an ongoing maintenance problem, and (b) adds compatibility constraints to the construction of the initramfs. (For example, we couldn't remove a command-line tool that might be used by a third-party script.)

Once #105 and #106 land, it will be possible to drop the separate installer image, recommend running coreos-installer from the live PXE or ISO image, and move coreos-installer to the real root. In the typical case, the UX wouldn't change: the installer would still be driven by kargs. But the user could also provide an Ignition config which configures additional services to run before/after the installer, and those services would have access to all the facilities of a full FCOS system.

Alternatively, we could provide the option to run the installer in either the initramfs or the real root. That might allow dropping the separate installer PXE image (since the live PXE image would simply never look for the root filesystem when not needed), but we'd still need to make a decision about the installer ISO. I don't think there's enough value to this approach to justify the complexity, though.

@strawgate
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This is a blocker for us to moving to Fedora CoreOS -- not being able to boot to a shell and invoke the install and other pre and post-install tasks makes the transition not possible at this time

@lucab
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lucab commented Nov 14, 2019

@strawgate a small status update that may be relevant to you (on behalf of @bgilbert who did most of the work):

jlebon added a commit to jlebon/coreos-assembler that referenced this issue Jan 9, 2020
In FCOS, we're looking to drop the installer ISO in favour of the live
images:

coreos/fedora-coreos-tracker#203
coreos/fedora-coreos-config#261

AFAIK, RHCOS should be able to follow suit once the new
coreos-installer binary makes it there.

Until then though, rather than entirely drop support for building it, at
least check upfront that the `installer/` directory exists so we don't
do a bunch of work for nothing.
jlebon added a commit to jlebon/coreos-assembler that referenced this issue Jan 9, 2020
In FCOS, we're looking to drop the installer ISO in favour of the live
images:

coreos/fedora-coreos-tracker#203
coreos/fedora-coreos-config#261

AFAIK, RHCOS should be able to follow suit once the new
coreos-installer binary makes it there.

Until then though, rather than entirely drop support for building it, at
least check upfront that the `installer/` directory exists so we don't
do a bunch of work for nothing.
@dustymabe dustymabe assigned dustymabe and unassigned bgilbert Jan 9, 2020
@dustymabe
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Now that we have systemd services for the new rustlang based coreos-installer and a new rust-coreos-installer rpm with them included. We have removed the old installer ISO from the pipeline and the configs.

This work should be complete. New releases will pick up all the changes and we'll do installs via the live images.

jlebon added a commit to jlebon/coreos-assembler that referenced this issue Jan 9, 2020
In FCOS, we're looking to drop the installer ISO in favour of the live
images:

coreos/fedora-coreos-tracker#203
coreos/fedora-coreos-config#261

AFAIK, RHCOS should be able to follow suit once the new
coreos-installer binary makes it there.

Until then though, rather than entirely drop support for building it, at
least check upfront that the `installer/` directory exists so we don't
do a bunch of work for nothing.
cgwalters pushed a commit to coreos/coreos-assembler that referenced this issue Jan 10, 2020
In FCOS, we're looking to drop the installer ISO in favour of the live
images:

coreos/fedora-coreos-tracker#203
coreos/fedora-coreos-config#261

AFAIK, RHCOS should be able to follow suit once the new
coreos-installer binary makes it there.

Until then though, rather than entirely drop support for building it, at
least check upfront that the `installer/` directory exists so we don't
do a bunch of work for nothing.
@dustymabe dustymabe reopened this Jan 10, 2020
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