mkosi VS netboot.xyz

I work with a free and open-source software community called Fedora Project. I had the opportunity to moderate the talk of one of the maintainers of the Systemd suite during the annual contributor conference, Flock To Fedora 2023 where he talked about a tool named Mkosi.

For testing i prefer systemd-nspawn containers with mkosi. A neat tool for running your other fav. distro in a terminal. Works like a charm and integrates nicely in your system. Eg. logs and systemd services or CI testing.

- https://github.com/systemd/mkosi

- man:systemd-nspawn(1)

- man:machinectl(1)

you're gonna have to build this on an x86 pc. sudo dnf install arch-install-scripts bubblewrap gdisk qemu-user-static rsync systemd-container python3 -m pip install --user git+https://github.com/systemd/mkosi.git git clone https://github.com/leifliddy/asahi-fedora-usb.git cd asahi-fedora-usb

There's also mkosi: https://github.com/systemd/mkosi. This one outputs an iso or similar image file and supports many base distributions.

[1] https://github.com/systemd/mkosi/issues/376

System's mkosi is worth checking out too: https://github.com/systemd/mkosi I don't think it generates docker/OCI images directly, but it definitely can generate a tarball of the final image contents and then crane of a similar tool could package it up into an appropriate image. For just docker usage it's probably overkill, the main advantage would be it can build other image types like adding a kernel and init to be a fully bootable iso of VM image.

Constellation ensures that all K8s nodes run on AMD-based Confidential VMs (CVMs). CVMs are strongly isolated from the host and remain encrypted in memory at runtime. Constellation also ensures that all nodes run the same minimal mkosi-based node image.

At first glance I thought your project is a frontend for mkosi but then I saw that you support non-systemd targets too. Mentioning it here because it may be relevant to other users/developers.

I replied to a reply of yours with this same info, but since you’re both sorta asking the same thing, I’ll post it here for you also.

https://netboot.xyz/

https://github.com/netbootxyz/netboot.xyz

Knew about http://netboot.xyz, but had no idea iVentoy existed. Good to know.

Set the computer to PXE boot, or use a boot image with iPXE (such as netboot.xyz). That would quickly rule out a problem with Debian or the Linux kernel (at least until you download and boot one). I don't know anything about your network setup, but making sure DHCP is enabled on your router and there are enough unreserved IP addresses would probably help.

Hey thanks for the detailed response. You're saying you boot FCOS on bare metal over PXE, correct? I've thought about trying that approach, but have little experience with PXE and TFTP. I just checked out netboot.xyz and it looks surprisingly easy to get going. Last time I played around with PXE I used Synology's TFTP server and, while I got it working, I was more confused by the end than when I started. I think actually learning PXE end-to-end and understanding what I am doing there would be a solid foundation for building my environment the right way.

For netbooting we rely on a netboot.xyz inspired ipxe based setup.

[[UPDATE]]: The fix was as 'simple' as going into the 'bios', and selecting 'add a boot option', which automatically came up with the correct EFI file/path, then putting it at the top of the boot order. 'Simple' it wasn't, many new and temporary instances brought online while digging my way through it all, and finally just going with a brand new Debian Bookworm and migrating my data over from the old disk file. At least I learned a lot about recovering from this weird circumstance. The incorrect EFI file/path must be an artifact of using netboot.xyz to install Deb Bookworm over a previously provisioned Ubuntu instance. Makes sense I guess. Still loving netboot.xyz as a super fast way to spin up an unsupported OS.

I learned about GRML only a few years ago. Absolutely love the mixture of power and minimalism. Here is the only ISO which increases my mileage even more: https://netboot.xyz