#612 Fedora Media Writer to support CoreOS images?
Closed: Wontfix 3 years ago by kparal. Opened 4 years ago by kparal.

Let's figure out if FMW should include a CoreOS option. We talked to @dustymabe and they currently use coreos-installer. Dusty said:

I could see value in using FMW as a GUI interface to reach more users, but really only if FMW just wrapped coreos-installer when installing FCOS, which would have FMV require coreos-installer and then call out to /usr/bin/coreos-installer with appropriate arguments.

We need to figure out if coreos-installer is multiplatform (because FMW is), and if it makes sense to FMW developers to add a custom handling for CoreOS (because everything else uses just a dd-style copy to a removable device). And if this all is a worth-while effort. @sumantrom said he would talk to @mbriza (FMW developer) and report back.


Thanks @kparal - one other point that I made during that exchange was:

  • I think there is a lot of value in FCOS users consistently using coreos-installer when installing to hard drives (i.e. not in a cloud environment).

which is why my suggestion was to have FMW wrap coreos-installer.

In a later exchange I also noted:

  • FCOS is just a simple dd as well. The only extra bit is really injecting the ignition config that the user wants to use into the image after the dd operation.

So while FCOS is just a disk image there is an extra operation that's needed otherwise the booted system won't have any way to be logged into by the user as there are no default credentials.You'll have a system that you can't access and is doing nothing.

Regarding:

We need to figure out if coreos-installer is multiplatform

I believe that it could be but I think right now it's linux only.

Developer and Maintainer for Fedora Media Writer, mentioned that he would like to add CoreOS entry on the list of releases as soon as it has enough quality translated content to make a separate entry list. It's not a code problem, he would like to see versions of CoreOS at least translated in different languages and not just English.

Let me quote an important part of the email here:

Sumantro:
1. Can Fedora Media Writer be used to write a fedora core os image on a flash drive?
Martin:
I don't know if it can write Fedora CoreOS image but it should probably be able to write bare metal ISO and raw images just fine.

But Dusty said:

I could see value in using FMW as a GUI interface to reach more users, but really only if FMW just wrapped coreos-installer when installing FCOS, which would have FMV require coreos-installer and then call out to /usr/bin/coreos-installer with appropriate arguments.

So Martin was replying with the assumption it's just another raw image that gets written to the stick and booted from. And thinking about it, I guess I and @dustymabe have been perhaps a bit confused initially :smiley: Because FMW is used on host A to create a bootable stick which is then used to boot host B, where the installation occurs. It doesn't make sense to make FMW perform the actual installation, it runs on a different host. But, we can easily make FMW copy the Bare Metal ISO (available here) to the USB stick using the regular dd approach, and then that stick is inserted into host B, booted, and the installation is performed according to documentation. This is exactly the use case for FMW, creating bootable installation sticks.

@dustymabe @mbriza Does this sound reasonable?

Martin also says:

Adding it to Mediawriter is not really an issue of code but rather content. There is barely any text about it on getfedora.org and it doesn't seem translated to any language other than English. This is actually the same issue as with Silverblue - I would add it as a separate release but there's just not enough quality translated content to make a separate entry in the release entry list.

So what we need is a few paragraphs of FCOS description that we can add to FMW, and also let's make sure we include a link to the installation documentation (this is not a click-click-click process).

But, we can easily make FMW copy the Bare Metal ISO (available here) to the USB stick using the regular dd approach, and then that stick is inserted into host B, booted, and the installation is performed according to documentation. This is exactly the use case for FMW, creating bootable installation sticks.

I have accidentally run into this conversation and I think that @kparal has made a valid statement here. It is not the task of Fedora Media Writer to install anything. The task of FMW is to prepare a bootable flash drive from which the OS can be installed and nothing more.

If CoreOS provides such an ISO image (seems it does), I support to have it as one of the options in FMW. Otherwise, coreos-installer will work just fine and if there is a need for a GUI wrapper for it, it should not be integrated into FMW.

Ping @dustymabe @mbriza , have you seen my previous comment, please?

@sumantrom You had some updates about this IIRC, please update this ticket, thanks.

As a bit of a change of heart, it's good to note that it is not our job to push this feature. (We can of course try to, to improve the end user experience, but it is not our primary job). We just need to know if it is planned (for F33), so that we are prepared with our test cases/test days.

So, @sumantrom, if you learn that FCOS doesn't plan to implement this for F33, we can simply close this ticket. If they think about it but it's not very likely, just ask them to ping us if they actually decide to do it (or announce a Fedora Change or something). And that's it.

hey all - sorry for the late response here - i'm behind on notifications.

I see, yes I was mistaken. You're suggesting FMW write the ISO to the flash drive and that flash drive will then perform the installation. Seems fine to me. It should just be a dd of the ISO image to a USB, which FMW I assume already knows how to do.

I realized it doesn't make sense to track this here. The functionality is not there, so no work for QA. I filed an upstream FCOS ticket here:
https://github.com/coreos/fedora-coreos-tracker/issues/566

I'll watch that ticket. If FCOS appears in FMW, I'll update our QA tickets and we'll discuss the next steps with regards to testing it regularly.

Metadata Update from @kparal:
- Issue close_status updated to: Wontfix
- Issue status updated to: Closed (was: Open)

3 years ago

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