Tag Archives: ironic

Patches for OpenStack Ironic Python Agent to create Buildroot images with Make

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Recently I wrote about creating an OpenStack Ironic deploy image with Buildroot. Doing this manually is good because it helps to understand how it’s pieced together, however it is slightly more involved.

The Ironic Python Agent (IPA) repo has some imagebuild scripts which make building the CoreOS and TinyCore images pretty trivial. I now have some patches which add support for creating the Buildroot images, too.

The patches consist of a few scripts which wrap the manual build method and a Makefile to tie it all together. Only the install-deps.sh script requires root privileges, if it detects missing dependencies, all other Buildroot tasks are run as a non-privileged user. It’s one of the great things about the Buildroot method!

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Creating an OpenStack Ironic deploy image with Buildroot

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Edit: See this post on how to automate the builds using buildimage scripts.

Ironic is an OpenStack project which provisions bare metal machines (as opposed to virtual).

A tool called Ironic Python Agent (IPA) is used to control and provision these physical nodes, performing tasks such as wiping the machine and writing an image to disk. This is done by booting a custom Linux kernel and initramfs image which runs IPA and connects back to the Ironic Conductor.

The Ironic project supports a couple of different image builders, including CoreOS, TinyCore and others via Disk Image Builder.

These have their limitations, however, for example they require root privileges to be built and, with the exception of TinyCore, are all hundreds of megabytes in size. One of the downsides of TinyCore is limited hardware support and although it’s not used in production, it is used in the OpenStack gating tests (where it’s booted in virtual machines with ~300MB RAM).

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