Current Thinking On How To Make Seeds

Basic Plan

1. Each seed will have its own profile, for managing 'system' apps, USE flags, masking, and so on.
2. Each seed will have a meta-package (e.g. seeds/lamp-server), which will DEPEND on standard Gentoo packages.
3. The metapackage will also DEPEND on configuration packages (e.g. seeds-config/lamp-server-portage); they'll contain the configuration that we want to drop in.
4. We'll use catalyst to create stage4 tarballs from the seed packages.
5. We'll create ready-to-use images for Xen and VMware Server. Images for VirtualBox, Parallels also interest us. Images for KVM will have to wait until KVM's performance improves.

Notes

Catalyst

I've had mail from plasmaroo / Tim Yamin on catalyst2 and the netbooting demonstration he gave on GentooUK 2006. Catalyst2 can be used for repeatable stage4 generation. Most of the advanced stuff wrt netbooting and automagically configured kernels etc. is done by genkernel4 which is not (yet) integrated with catalyst2.

Catalyst can be emerged and there's a sample spec file for stage4 generation in /usr/share/doc/catalyst-2.0/examples/stage4_template.spec

Genkernel-4 can be checked out of svn by using

svn co https://svn.gentooexperimental.org/genkernel

Usage docs is in the docs dir or at http://dev.gentoo.org/~plasmaroo/stuff/genkernel.8.html

After searching a bit, I found a work in progress on gentoo-wiki. Although not the absolutely right thing it gives one somewhat of an idea how the whole catalyst-process works. Also, the official documentation of the catalyst project, even though a bit outdated, can give a few more hints as to how everything works with it.

beandog came up with two good points.

• We'll need to install /etc/portage/foo files as part of our solution; we can't control USE flags tightly enough just from a traditional profile. seeds-config/ packages now do this.
• The seeds-base/ and seeds-config/ packages should support USE flags, so that folks who want to tailor a seed on their own box can do so (e.g. install lamp-server w/out ruby, or w/out PHP).

I had the chance to play with catalyst this weekend. See DocsCatalystStage4 for more details.

Once we have the stage4, we need a stage4-installer. This is an installer for system seeds (this could be different for Xen or VMWare seeds). Basically the installer should be able to :

• Create the partitions (automatically or not)
• Choose a stage4 from a specified list (local or remote)
• Extract the seed
• Install the boot-loader
• Set the hostname
• Setup networking. Ips, resolv.conf, hosts (optional)
• Done

See :

• http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_Custom_Stage4
• http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/releng/installer/
• sys-app/gli