[virt-tools-list] [virt-install PATCH v2 00/14] Add support for unattended installations

[Fabiano Fidêncio]

On Tue, Mar 5, 2019 at 10:50 PM Cole Robinson <crobinso at redhat.com> wrote:
>
> On 2/22/19 3:40 AM, Fabiano Fidêncio wrote:
> > This series add support for *network* (--location) unattended
> > installations of a few OSes that libosinfo/osinfo-db provides support
> > for:
> > - Fedora;
> > - CentOS;
> > - RHEL;
> > - Debian;
> > - openSUSE;
> > - Ubuntu*;
> >
> > *: Ubuntu needs some pending patches for osinfo-db;
> >
> > One example** of how to perform a unattended installation is:
> > `virt-install \
> >     --name fedora29 \
> >     --os-variant fedora29 \
> >     --unattended profile=desktop`
> >
> > **: https://www.redhat.com/archives/libosinfo/2019-February/msg00173.html
> >     is needed in order to have the example above working properly
> >
>
> Thanks for the work and sorry for the review delay. I've pushed this
> series now with some minor pylint and bug fixes sprinkled into your patches.
>
> On top I added some more work, the main chunk was moving most of the
> osdict.py into their own classes/functions in unattended.py, and adding
> some unit tests to cover most of the virtinst/ bits
>
> > The TODO list:
> > - Work on Linuxes medias ("--cdrom") unattended installations:
> >   This will make me bump libosinfo dep to 1.4.0 and we'll also require
> >   some patches for osinfo-db;
>
> Instead of bumping the dep, let's just throw an error if an unattended
> install is attempted but libosinfo is too old to work. Look at
> unattended.py OSInstallScript __init__ for an example
>
> > - Work on Windowses medias ("--cdrom") unattended installations:
> > - Tests, tests, tests ...
> > - Update man-pages
> >
>
> Another piece to consider: the script is generated in a predictable path
> ~/.cache/virt-manager/fedora.ks for example. It's not likely to happen
> but two virt-install runs could overwrite each others scripts here. I'd
> expect the generated filename to be sometime like tmpfile output.

One thing that we could easily do is generate the script in
~/.cache/virt-manager/<random_generated_per_vm_name>/fedora.ks ...

The problem we had in the past, if my memory is not playing tricks on
me, is that some distros (or Windows?) expected a specific filename.
Although it my not apply to initrd injection.

>
> It wasn't clear to me how to actually ask libosinfo to write to a
> different pathname though, and we would likely need to extend the initrd
> inject logic to handle file rename before injection or something like
> that. But it's worth considering

If the generating a <random_generated_per_vm_name> works well, we can
just generate it here[0] and be happy as it wouldn't colide:

https://github.com/virt-manager/virt-manager/blob/master/virtinst/unattended.py#L243

Does this approach look okay?

>
> Thanks,
> Cole

Best Regards,
-- 
Fabiano Fidêncio