Changes/KojiLocalImageBuilder

Koji uses Red Hat Image Builder locally

This is a proposed Change for Fedora Linux.
This document represents a proposed Change. As part of the Changes process, proposals are publicly announced in order to receive community feedback. This proposal will only be implemented if approved by the Fedora Engineering Steering Committee.

Summary

Switch the Red Hat Image Builder-built images in Koji to not build through a service, but locally.

Owner

• Name: Simon de Vlieger
• Email: cmdr@supakeen.com

• Targeted release: Fedora Linux 42
• Last updated: 2025-01-10
• Announced
• Discussion thread
• FESCo issue: <will be assigned by the Wrangler>
• Tracker bug: <will be assigned by the Wrangler>
• Release notes tracker: <will be assigned by the Wrangler>

Detailed Description

Several Fedora images are being built by the Red Hat Image Builder service (Fedora IoT, Fedora Minimal). Image Builder acts as a content generator in Koji. Images are built external to Fedora infrastructure as requested by Koji and then delivered back.

This has led to of issues over time. Amongst them instability and the inability of Fedora release engineering and infrastructure teams to intervene and the inability to freeze the external infrastructure during a release window.

I plan to replace the current approach in koji-osbuild with a local-only build. Image Builder machinery and definitions will still be used for the mentioned images but the build will run locally on Fedora infrastructure and builders. In the same way that kiwi or livemediacreator-images are built.

My plan is to start with adding these tasks to koji-osbuild, keeping them there for a cycle and if they are stable to upstream them into koji directly; deprecating koji-osbuild at that point in the future.

image-builder-cli built images can be easily rebuilt locally from their manifests uploaded in koji. The images can be easily built locally and support all end-user customizations available. Work is ongoing in the Image Builder stack to also move the definitions of the distribution to a declarative format.

Feedback

This change proposal does not yet provide a way for the distribution definitions to be owned by, and live inside, Fedora infrastructure. I plan to address this in a later change proposal.

Benefit to Fedora

Control over Image Builder on its own infrastructure, lessen remove the need to reach out to external parties when releases are blocked.

Scope

Proposal Owners

• Submit the image-builder-cli package for inclusion in Fedora 42.
• Request a image-builder-build comp group for the build requirements in koji roots.
• Change the koji-osbuild plugin to provide a new task type that uses image-builder-cli.

• Changes to pungi to be able to schedule these tasks.
• Changes to pungi config for Fedora IoT.
• Changes to pungi config for Fedora Minimal.

Contingency Plan

Independent of where on the above tasks I get stuck images can continue to be built with the current setup.