Node goes anaconda

After writing about oVirt Node using cockpit for administration, there is more news.

The setup TUI we deprecated in favor of cockpit was only one part of our custom TUI code.

The installer is the second component in Node using or own handcrafted TUI. But, even more problematic is, that we also maintain our own installer.

That can not be to hard, can it? Well, think of multipath, efi, secure boot, and an iSCSI root, and for sure all possible combinations of those items, then you get an idea how much fun and actually real work it can be to maintain a custom installer.

Long story short, after some investigations of how we can improve our own owninstaller by leveraging more of other installers, we came to the conclusion that it makes more sense to settle with an existing installer, rather than trying to keep and maintain our own.

anaconda is Fedora’s, as well as CentOS’s and RHEL’s installer, and it has everything we need, so at last weeks team meeting we also decide to settle with anaconda as our default installer.

EFI, Secure Boot, multipath, iSCSI all of this is already supported by anaconda. But Node is image based (and we want to stick with that), how can you use anaconda? Anaconda is typically used with packages, but it can also install ‘live-images’ (squashfs or even real disk images), and also ostrees.

Over all it is quite obvious that Node is aligning much more with upstream projects than before. This will also lead to shift in how the Node team works, initially we’ll be working hard to upstream our requests, to make sure that everything is in place to be able to ship a Node which can serve as the stable ground for oVirt.

In additiona we take care to leverage cockpit’s and anaconda’s “extension points” to add some Node specific bits.

We need to add cockpit plugins to deliver the functionality we already offer today.

We want to add an anaconda plugin to support Engine registration during the installation.

So there is some stuff on the horizon, and it is already close enough to see the contures.

::: {#footer} [ February 23rd, 2015 11:38am ]{#timestamp} [anaconda]{.tag} [ovirt]{.tag} [node]{.tag} [fedora]{.tag} [centos]{.tag} [rhel]{.tag} [cockpit]{.tag} [plugin]{.tag} :::