[Libguestfs] building a supermin appliance with febootstrap...

[Kashyap Chamarthy]

On 08/17/2011 03:00 PM, Richard W.M. Jones wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 17, 2011 at 10:24:10AM +0100, Richard W.M. Jones wrote:
>> In libguestfs, our "init process" is the guestfsd daemon.  We
>> configure the kernel to reboot instead of panicking by adding the
>> kernel command line option "panic=1".
>
> I should say, we configure the kernel to reboot (panic=1), and qemu to
> shutdown on reboot (qemu-kvm -no-reboot).
>
> Rich.
>

Ok, so , If I have to build appliance which has a bunch of %post, %preun, %postun, %pre 
operations in it's RPM SPEC file, I need to pull all of those into a custom init 
script(like the one for libguestfs[1]), so that the guest kernel can detect this(run it as 
PID 1) and sanely bring up the rest of the system ?


And then I need to invoke 'febootstrap-supermin-helper' like below to build the appliance.

# febootstrap-supermin-helper -f ext2 supermin.d x86_64 kernel initrd appliance.

Where appliance is the file system.  As of now, other file systems like ext3/ext4(maybe 
btrfs in future) are not yet available ?


Question: After I build and boot the appliance, how about networking inside it? Any 
pointers to that?


Thank Rich and Hilko. I need to wrap my head a little bit more around this and try a few 
more things.



Ref:

[1] http://git.annexia.org/?p=libguestfs.git;a=blob;f=appliance/init;hb=HEAD




-- 
/kashyap