kernel cmdline different for some nodes

[rpabel]

I am using luna to install nodes in a cluster made of heterogeneous nodes (completely different vendors). Some nodes need kernel option console=ttyS0 some console=ttyS1. I tried changing options in the Console Redirection settings in the BIOS, but to no avail. And you cannot specify both console=tty[0,1] at the same time, due to a limitation of the Linux kernel.

Otherwise, all nodes use the same image (most configuration is done on first by boot anyway).
Since the kernel options are tied to the osimage, I clone the image now and then change the kernopts parameter. The nodes are put in different groups and then each group gets a different (cloned) image.
Is this the way to do it?

It would be easier if nodes could add/override kernel options. Or that images could be cloned "lightly", where no files are copied, just reused.

[dchirikov]

Thank you for your request, that would be a handy addition indeed. But here is at least one thing need to be considered. For example, if we allow overriding some option in Luna, a user might expect it is possible to override other things, like domain, or network prefixes, etc. Probably better solution would be to kernel options from osimage to group item. But this is, probably, for the newer version we are currently working on.

For your case, it is possible to use templates to fine-tune behavior. Those are located in ~luna/templates and be considered as 'last-resort' configuration options. Please, don't forget to restart lweb daemon after editing.

[rpabel]

Thanks for your quick reply, I've looked in the templates and the python scripts in general. I'll work on the templates as soon as I have some time, for now I'll just clone the osimage.
If I might ask: Is this "newer version" a rewrite or an incremental update?

I have a suggestion for another problem I had: Proper UEFI Installations need /boot/efi formatted with vfat. So far, I've done this from within the chroot environment in the post script. I found the dracut configuration and added mkdosfs to the initrd, now it works directly from the part script.
Also mkswap and blkdiscard are really useful in this context. It would be great if you would add these three programs to the default initrd.

[dchirikov]

Sorry for the delayed answer.
I think we will change a lot, as we want to make luna more flexible to support more sophisticated environments. Plus we need to be ready to next major release of RHEL, where python 2 marked as obsolete. By the way, most of the work is now moved to https://github.com/clustervision/luna repo. So luna outgrew pet-project state.

Regarding dracut in future releases: dracut module will contain bare-minimum of the binaries and the other stuff will be moved to /etc/dracut.d files. But anyway, you did it almost right with chroot. Personally, I would add vfat into /etc/dracut.d (man dracut.conf for reference) to avoid using chroot. Note filesystems+= and install_items+= variables.