[sisuite-users] SystemImager-NG build 20200525 supports CentOS-6.X CentOS-7.X CentOS-8.X and openSuSE-Leap-15.2

[LAHAYE O. <oli...@ce...>]

Hi every one,

I hope all of you are fine during this Covid crisis.

Development of the new SystemImager was not stopped, and after days of hacking, finding bugs in Plymouth and in distro packaging, I’ve finally succeeded in porting SystemImager (next gen) to CentOS-8.1 and to openSUSE-Leap 15.2)

There is still lot of work before final stable release, but this release is already functional (I use it to deploy my CentOS-8 OSCAR Cluster).

Reminder: this SystemImager supports:

  *   CentOS-6 to CentOS-8.1, openSUSE Leap 12.2 (maybe other openSUSE and most Fedora distros)
  *   UEFI Bios
  *   UEFI grub2 installation (clover and reFind not yet supported but hooks in code are present)
  *   All storage devices and filesystems supported by distro vendor
  *   Raid, lvm, raid+lvm, …
  *   No need for a main script (disk detection, partitioning, formatting, mounting, bootloader install, … is handled by SystemImager logic). Mainscript is still supported (if you want to setup a mountpoint, some nfs stuffs, or any other things not handled by SystemImager logic)
  *   Web console
  *   Imager graphical GUI based on plymouth
  *   …

Builds will be soon available here: http://www.usablesecurity.net/OSCAR/repos/unstable/

Quick start guide here: https://github.com/finley/SystemImager/wiki/QuickStartGuide

Sorry, no up to date Debian/ubuntu packaging. SystemImager should be buildable for those distros provided dracut and dracut-network can be installed aside initramfs-tools (./configure; make install DESTDIR=/usr. WARNING, doing so will “pollute your system”, thouth other DESTDIR have not been tested and I doubt they are functional especially for web stuffs) but regarding packaging, a lot of work is still needed (mainly dependencies that needs to be backported)

Happy testing.

PS:  if you rebuild your initrd, the result will not work on openSUSE-15.2:

  *   dracut module 35network-legacy fails to run initqueue/online hook if network is brought up with dhcp: Imager fails in initqueue mainloop with timeout because online hook is never run.
  *   PlymouthGUI won’t show up on qemu / bochs / … due to a bad openSUSE patch that tries to manage DRM devices while it shouldn’t anymore.

--
Olivier LAHAYE