Raw image installation about elemental HOT 7 OPEN

Would it make sense to have a build-raw action in the elemental cli?
This should be parallel to build-iso and we could have the raw image served as we currently serve the iso.

It's also important I think that we do exploit the elemental-register --install argument (instead of --reset), so that when we implement installation status tracking, this will be consistent with iso installs.

from elemental.

Yes, something like build-raw (which would probably share a lot with build-iso) would be ok.

However, we already have (too?) many build steps hardcoded in elemental-cli. And I wonder how to make them more flexible.

Maybe we could start with a post-build implementation, similar to generate-rpi-image 🤔

from elemental.

The benefit of using the elemental-cli is that we can keep the workflow parallel to the iso.
That will also include image channels I guess.

So from the user point of view everything will be the same, they will just be able to download an .iso or a .raw(?) image from the seedimage pod. We should also inject the machine registration config as we do with the iso, so that there is no further action needed. Just dd the image into a disk, boot the machine, and you are done.

It is a lot of changes though. The biggest problem is that I don't think we have an architecture level for the images. Ideally as a user I would like to set the architecture on the MachineRegistration.
This should lead to the generation of either amd64 or aarch64 ISOs, depending on what I configured.

I think that we could start by officially supporting the aarch64 ISO before we implement this issue.

Edit: Nevermind the multi-arch support on MachineRegistration, I forgot Cluster is not registration bound, so it's fine to have one registration per architecture.

from elemental.

I think that we could start by officially supporting the aarch64 ISO before we implement this issue.

This is actually just waiting for a respective ARM board (Raspberry cannot boot from ISO - and that's the only ARM board we have available 🤷🏻 )

from elemental.

Yeah I guess it will be mostly useless, but at least we can use it for modeling the architecture on the MachineRegistration, otherwise arm artifacts will always be external and will always have a different workflow.

For testing I guess we could just use QEMU.

from elemental.

For comparison, you can see that SLE Micro does ship .iso for arm
https://www.suse.com/download/sle-micro/

So maybe there is a use case out there.

If we model the architecture it should be easy to add more in the future and keep everything consistent.
I would love to see Elemental on mainframes.

from elemental.

As we discussed, I created #948 so that we can first model and implement multi-arch support on the operator/seedimage-builder side.

from elemental.