openSUSE:ALP/Workgroups/Installation
Mission
Find the best way in which ALP can be deployed to bare-metal system in those cases in which a simple "copy a pre-built image into the device" is not enough.
Cover the use-case of current SLE and openSUSE users with complex needs regarding hardware that cannot be configured easily after the initial installation (eg. network-based storage, non-automatic network setup, etc.).
Provide a mechanism that is useful for interactive and for unattended installations and also for both local and remote ones.
Current members
- ancorgs Talk - Contributions Driver
- locilka Talk - Contributions Interested
- Jreidinger Talk - Contributions Interested
- Everybody Talk - Contributions Feel free to add yourself as interested
Context
A full-feature installer as previously available on SLE 15 or openSUSE Leap is not expected in ALP. The goal is to deploy the Host OS and leave the rest of the system configuration to the configuration management.
See more considerations at openSUSE:ALP/Workgroups/Installation/Context
Current status
Updated: 2022-10-20
The work group is currently exploring two ideas. We are using temporary codenames for describing them.
- Iguana: an ambitious universal initial ramdisk which actual functionality is provided in containers.
- D-Installer: An installer that uses YaST components under the hood and offers a web-based interface.
Both projects could actually be complementary, since both promote the idea of small interchangeable components.
- Current status of Iguana. See https://github.com/aaannz/iguana
- Currently an initrd with Podman (Podman to be removed/streamlined in the future)
- Basic fetching and orchestration of containers with an API inspired by GitHub Actions.
- In progress: a basic container able to create a graphical session so serve as base for containers with an UI).
- Current status of D-Installer. See https://github.com/yast/d-installer
- Already capable of installing several distributions
- Two partially functional interfaces: web and command-line
- In progress:
- Network configuration (based on NetworkManager)
- Storage (partitioning) configuration
- Making it possible to install ALP
- Inclusion in the Tumbleweed distribution
- For more (scattered) details, see blog posts: 2022-07-19, 2022-08-02, 2022-08-23, 2022-09-06, 2022-09-22, 2022-10-20
Obstacles
ALP will be a very image-oriented distribution. Even the installer is expected to base its work in images (by any of the mechanisms described above) but:
- We do not know what the image building tooling will look like at this point.
- We do not know how the images produced by this tooling will look like
Regular meetings
Every other Monday at 10am UTC at https://meet.opensuse.org/alp-installation
Minutes:
- Extraordinary meeting during oSC'22
- Regular meeting 2022-06-06
- Regular meeting 2022-06-20
- Regular meeting 2022-07-04
- Regular meeting 2022-07-11
- Regular meeting 2022-07-17