[Thincrust-devel] appliance-creator options

[David Huff]

On 09/22/2009 10:42 AM, Cameron Ross wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I'm running appliance-creator on a Fedora 11 x86_64 host to create an image
> for an i386 target.  However, the tool does not have an option to specify
> the target architecture and so incorrectly uses the architecture of the host
> within the generated xml file (i.e. x86_64 in my case).  Note that
> appliance-creator does have options for other parameters that end up in this
> configuration file such as --vmem.  Two questions come to mind:
> 
> 1) Is the generated xml file the only place where this parameter needs to be
> manually changed?
> 2) Is this a planned feature?
> 

The main way the appliance arch is specified is by the packages that are
install via the yum repos specified in the kickstart file. They usually
default to the arch of the machine you build on, ie:

repo --name=rawhide
--mirrorlist=http://mirrors.fedoraproject.org/mirrorlist?repo=rawhide&arch=$basearch

You are correct that the xml is set to the arch of the machine:

"xml += "        <arch>%s</arch>\n" % os.uname()[4]"

This could possibly be changed to look for the arch of the packages
installed on the appliance.  However I am not sure if there would be
other repressions on building a appliance on a different arch then the
target.

My main areas of concern are the fact that during build time /proc and
other dirs on the build host are temporarily mounted on the appliance. I
am also not sure how the selinux relabel would react to this.

Has anyone had any luck doing this? does livecd-tools support building
different archs?  I personally have not tried this?

comments....

-D