OSIE is the Operating System Installation Environment. It consists of an Alpine Linux based netboot image which fetches a prebuilt Ubuntu 16.04 container that does the actual installation. All of the above is built from this repository using GNU Make.

This repository is Experimental meaning that it's based on untested ideas or techniques and not yet established or finalized or involves a radically new and innovative style! This means that support is best effort (at best!) and we strongly encourage you to NOT use this in production.

The OSIE Ubuntu based container is built with docker for both aarch64 and x86_64. Some packages are rebuilt with different settings (git, using openssl) or updated upstream sources are built/installed. These can be built individually with make build/osie-aarch64.tar.gz or make build build/osie-x86_64.tar.gz.

The OSIE Alpine boot files are built in an Alpine Docker container. All the packages are built at container build time, including the kernel. The built/installed packages are later used at run time to generate initramfs and modloop files.

Building the Alpine Linux Kernel takes a long time, on account of building just about all of the kernel modules. This is usually not needed as we don't mess with the kernel configuration very often. Unfortunately, make will try to build the kernel unless certain steps are taken (usually only on initial git clone). Skipping these builds can be done by running the installer/alpine/skip-building-alpine-files script, which updates the modified timestamp of the source files so make will not try to rebuild.

The build dependencies can be seen in Makefile and rules.mk.j2, they are the source of truth. The packages found in shell.nix are good second source. Using nix-shell or lorri along with direnv is highly recommended.

Otherwise, ensure the following tools are installed:

• bash
• curl
• cpio
• docker
• git
• git-lfs
• gnumake
• gnused
• j2cli (for j2)
• libarchive (for bsdcpio, bsdtar)
• minio (for mc)
• pigz (and unpigz)

The Alpine x86_64 initramfs image used is fully self-reliant. We embed the .apk files, and repo metadata into the initramfs for all packages used as part of /init. Alpine packages should be installed in the installer/alpine/Dockerfile like so:

RUN apk add --no-scripts --update --upgrade --repository http://dl-cdn.alpinelinux.org/alpine/edge/testing kexec-tools

Those package names then need to be added to installer/alpine/init-x86_64 in this list:

KOPT_pkgs="curl,docker,jq,mdadm,openssh,kexec-tools"

If you need to install packages from a non-standard alpine repo, the URL will need to be listed in installer/alpine/init-x86_64 like so:

ALPINE_REPO="http://dl-cdn.alpinelinux.org/alpine/v3.7/main,http://dl-cdn.alpinelinux.org/alpine/v3.7/community,http://dl-cdn.alpinelinux.org/alpine/edge/testing"