Packer: qemu builder: Option to provide preseed files as CD devices

Created on 30 Mar 2019 · 9Comments · Source: hashicorp/packer

Some guests, such as Ubuntu 18.04 ppc64el on qemu-system-ppc64 with machine pseries, do not support floppy drives. Nor is networking up at the beginning of the installation process, so for these guests, neither floppy_files nor http_directory are sufficient to get preseed files into the guest.

However, CD drives are widely supported, e.g. for ISO booting. I think if Packer added a cd_files option, that would really help to get non-x86 guests building much faster and more reliably, compared to having to navigate GUI prompts by boot_command!

Could we please get a cd_files option for presenting preseed files to guests? usb_files would also be nice to have, however USB bus support is less common than CD drive support over PCI virtual bus.

buildeqemu community-supported plugin enhancement track-internal

Source

mcandre

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All 9 comments

This feature has been on my mind for some time. The only hard ting about it is to create an ISO9660 image from files natively in Go.

rickard-von-essen on 31 Mar 2019

I can also add that RedHat 8 beta has been released and support for floppy device has been removed.

sebyx on 10 Apr 2019

@rickard-von-essen Would this project suffice? https://github.com/johto/iso9660wrap

matthiassb on 17 May 2019

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@matthiassb maybe.. That looks interesting.

rickard-von-essen on 17 May 2019

No promises, but I'll try to get a PR in for the "cd_files" attribute and creating the image file. Will probably be some time since I have a few things on my plate at the moment.

matthiassb on 21 May 2019

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any update on this problem?

MaxPeal on 16 May 2020

BTW, there's also the https://github.com/kdomanski/iso9660 library to create iso files.

rgl on 16 May 2020

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This has been partially addressed in https://github.com/hashicorp/packer/pull/9796, with qemu support planned to follow by the 1.6.3 release.

SwampDragons on 9 Sep 2020

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I'm going to lock this issue because it has been closed for _30 days_ ⏳. This helps our maintainers find and focus on the active issues.

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