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Building images

The Automotive SIG uses OSBuild as the tool to build its images on CentOS Stream, Fedora, and RHEL hosts, with the option to build immutable images using OSTree.

Note

For all hosts, installing osbuild-tools provides the osbuild-mpp utility.

Prerequisites

  • No cross-compilation: To build AArch64 or x86_64 images, you must run OSBuild on the respective systems. Some options for AArch64 hosting include Raspberry Pi 4 or qemu on Linux or macOS. For more information, see AutoSD system running on a Raspberry Pi 4 or AutoSD system running on qemu.

  • A subscribed RHEL system: To build RHEL images, you must have access to a subscribed RHEL system in order to access to the entitlements. RHEL images can only be built on subscribed RHEL systems.

Installing osbuild

To configure your system you must install osbuild and the related tools.

Note

We use a newer version of these tools than what is generally available in the distributions, so you must configure a custom repository.

Installing osbuild on CentOS Stream 8

  1. Enable the osbuild repo: 
    dnf copr enable @osbuild/osbuild centos-stream-8-`uname -p`
  2. Install osbuild and related packages: 
    dnf install osbuild osbuild-tools osbuild-ostree

Installing osbuild on CentOS Stream 9, Fedora, or RHEL

  1. Enable the osbuild repo: 
    dnf copr enable @osbuild/osbuild
  2. Install osbuild and related packages: 
    dnf install osbuild osbuild-tools osbuild-ostree

Finding a manifest

All manifests exist in the project hosted at the Automotive SIG GitLab.

  1. Clone the repository to download all manifests: 
    git clone https://gitlab.com/CentOS/automotive/sample-images.git
  2. Locate the manifests in the osbuild-manifest folder. Manifests are organized by OS, then by target platform. For example: 
        osbuild-manifests
    └── cs9
        ├── minimal.mpp.yml
        └   neptune.mpp.yml
    Each folder may include a README file with information about the differences between the files.

Building the image

You can build an image manually or by using makefile.

Building the image manually

Building an image manually is a two-step process.

  1. Pass the selected YAML manifest and some options to the osbuild-mpp tool.

This applies the options and resolves the package names against the repositories used to produce a JSON manifest with fully resolved versions of all the packages. This JSON file is fully self contained and produces reproducible builds.

The manifest has multiple options that can affect how the manifest is preprocessed, for example:

  * `image_type` specifies whether the system is `ostree` or `dnf` based.
  * `extra_rpms` passes extra RPMs to the built image.
  1. After preprocessing, pass the resolved manifest to osbuild, which builds the image in a series of steps.

When you run osbuild you can choose which steps to export. Typically, we export either the step called image or the step called qcow2:

  * Image is a raw image that can be written to disk.
  * QCOW2 is a format used by QEMU for image files.

Using makefile to build the image

You can simplify the build process by using makefile.

Note

Makefile uses sudo, so you may be asked for your password during the build process.

  1. From the osbuild-manifest directory, run make. Be sure to use the correct image name as the target: 

    make cs9-qemu-minimal-regular.x86_64.qcow2
    This command preprocesses and builds the manifest for the current architecture and defines the image type to be ostree. This results in a file named cs9-qemu-minimal-regular.x86_64.qcow2, which is stored in the current directory.

  2. You can use makefile to build RAW images as well. To see the full list of images available for the current architecture: 

    make help

  3. Optional: Remove the _build directory to regain disk space: 
    rm -r _build

Note

During the build process, artifacts such as JSON files, RPMs, and cached parts from previous builds are stored in the _build directory. Everything in this directory is derived from other sources.

Changing the default password

The sample images use password as the default password for root and guest. You can change the default password when you build the image: 

DEFINES='root_password="hash_of_new_password"'

Running the image

You can either run the image in QEMU/KVM or flash the image onto an SD card.

Booting the image in QEMU/KVM

  1. Boot the QCOW2 image in virt-manager or run it directly through QEMU using the included tool (runvm):

If on MacOS, you must install qemu to use runvm via:

brew install qemu

runvm command:

./runvm cs9-qemu-minimal-regular.x86_64.qcow2

Flashing the image onto an SD card

To flash the image onto an SD card:

dd if=cs9-qemu-minimal-regular.x86_64.img of=/dev/sda status=progress bs=4M

Important

In the example, the block device is called /dev/sda. You must change this to match the block device used in your system. If required, add -bios /usr/share/OVMF/OVMF_CODE.fd to QEMU command.

Using make manifests

You can use make manifests to preprocess all of the existing manifests without building them. You can use make manifests to verify that all combinations of options still work after a change or to inspect the resulting manifests.

In addition to the image types *.img and *.qcow2, the makefile also supports targets such as:

  • *.rootfs
  • *.repo
  • *.tar
  • *.container
  • *.ext4

These targets are useful during development and testing. For more information, run make help.

Building in a virtual machine

The makefile configuration supports running osbuild inside a virtual machine. There are two scenarios in which this is beneficial:

  • Standard osbuild requires root/sudo permissions, because it performs some system-level operations such as loopback mounts. Running osbuild in a VM allows you to run it non-privileged.
  • When you build an image for a different architecture, you can use QEMU software emulation to make this work. Software emulation is slower than native, but for some use cases it is sufficient.

Running make osbuildvm-images uses osbuild on the host to build the supporting image files, _build/osbuildvm-*, which are required to build an image on a VM. The supporting image files can later be used to build other images from the same architecture inside a virtual machine by passing VM=1 to make.

To build images from a different architecture you must copy the output of osbuildvm-images from a build on a different architecture into _build. Then run make with a target that has a different architecture, for example, make cs9-qemu-minimal-regular.aarch64.qcow2.

Note

You can download pre-built osbuildvm-images files for the aarch64 architecture from the nightly folder at: https://autosd.sig.centos.org/AutoSD-9/nightly/osbuildvm-images/

Note

If you have a previous version of osbuildvm-images for a different architecture, you can rebuild or refresh them by using VM=1 on your architecture.

Additional resources

For more information, see:

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