[virt-tools-list] --initrd-inject into old distributions

Magnus Fromreide magnus.fromreide at teligent.se
Thu Apr 19 21:03:15 UTC 2012


Hello.

In old distributions initrd.img is a compressed ext2 filesystem and not
a cpio image, but virt-install fails to detect this and happily appends
a chunk of gzipped cpio data to the end of the file system.

When the image is then booted you end up with a message telling you that
there is no ks file in the initrd image.

I think virt-install should detect the type of the image and, if it of
the wrong kind, give an error.

I further think it would be nice if it could work with ancient
distributions.

Tested version:
        Fedora 16 - python-virtinst-0.600.1-1.fc16.noarch

How to reproduce:

        virt-install --blabla --location=some-ancient-distribution-like-rh4 --initrd-inject=my.ks -x ks=file:/my.ks

What happens:

        The virtual machine is created and stops after a while,
        complaining about my.ks not beeing in the file system

Expected result:

        Either an error from virt-installer about bad file format or
        success


I do have a patch but since it uses the unpack, loopback mount, add and
then recompress style it is problematic as it requires root access and
suffer from potential out of space conditions in the install image.

/MF
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 198 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part
URL: <http://listman.redhat.com/archives/virt-tools-list/attachments/20120419/c69b5140/attachment.sig>


More information about the virt-tools-list mailing list