User:Wwoods/Building images with treebuilder

What's treebuilder?

Treebuilder is the new branch of Lorax which builds Anaconda images that boot like regular Live images. The advantages of this approach are:

1. The installer uses much less RAM and starts up much faster than it did in F15
2. The initrd is a normal dracut image, so:
   • There's a shell in initrd.img
   • No more maintaining the ancient, crusty loader codebase. yay!
3. initrd.img is under 20MB, so PPC systems can netboot it

How do I get started?

1. set up an F16 chroot

• this is optional for x86 systems but required for ppc
  • see http://sharkcz.livejournal.com/8649.html for detailed directions
  • NOTE: you don't need a separate partition for this - just creating a directory named /f16 will work OK

2. yum install pungi fedora-kickstarts (inside the chroot if you're doing that)

3. Install a copy of the treebuilder branch:

 git clone git://git.fedorahosted.org/git/lorax
 cd lorax
 git checkout treebuilder
 make
 sudo make install

4. Grab a kickstart You can use fedora-install-fedora.ks from the fedora-kickstarts package, or you can use this minimized version if you're not going to build full DVD images:

# Minimal Fedora kickstart - basically just for testing anaconda

# ==== REPOS ====
repo --name=fedora --mirrorlist=http://mirrors.fedoraproject.org/mirrorlist?repo=fedora-16&arch=$basearch
repo --name=fedora --mirrorlist=http://mirrors.fedoraproject.org/mirrorlist?repo=updates-released-f16&arch=$basearch
repo --name=fedora --mirrorlist=http://mirrors.fedoraproject.org/mirrorlist?repo=updates-testing-f16&arch=$basearch
 
# And an extra line in case you have some local changes
#repo --name=localrepo --baseurl=file:///srv/pungi/localrepo --cost=1

%packages
# core stuff that isn't in @base
kernel*
dracut*
# basic groups
@filesystems
@base-x
# size removals
-*-devel
-*-src
-*javadoc*
-xorg-x11-docs
-kernel-doc
-frysk
-*gcj*
-kde*
%end

Save that as /srv/pungi/anacondatest.ks.

5. Run pungi Here's the script I use:

#!/bin/bash
if [ $(getenforce) == Enforcing ]; then
    sudo setenforce 0
    echo "turning off SELinux enforcing"
fi
echo "removing /srv/pungi/test, one moment..."
sudo rm -rf /srv/pungi/test
sudo pungi --nosource --nodebuginfo --destdir=/srv/pungi/test
           -c /srv/pungi/anacondatest.ks -G -C -B "$@"

Testing / troubleshooting

Treebuilder images are Live images
The treebuilder-style images are live images, just like the normal Fedora LiveCD. So the runtime image (root filesystem) is an ext4 image, inside a squashfs image, inside an iso image. It's complicated, but that's how live images work.

Making a USB stick

These are live images - use livecd-iso-to-disk.

Can't find root device when booting ISO image

Try changing the root= argument to root=live:/dev/sr0.

Slow

Treebuilder is slower. The first culprit looks like dracut.

number	execve
7606	/bin/egrep
2578	/bin/cp
1633	/lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2
1434	/usr/bin/ldd
1413	/bin/ln
1303	/usr/local/bin/ln
1303	/usr/bin/ln
1087	/sbin/modinfo

The second culprit is not honoring $TMPDIR, and not putting yumroot-$PID and installroot-$PID inside it.

count	filename
1693845	*
253387	$DESTDIR/yumroot/...
79977	$DESTDIR/installroot/...
44486	/etc/xattr.conf
41713	/proc/self/task/31818/attr/fscreate
25919	/proc/self/task/1070/attr/fscreate
20220	/usr
19487	/etc/localtime
18485	/lib64/libc.so.6
18294	/usr/share
18184	/etc/ld.so.cache
18074	/etc/ld.so.preload
17213	/usr/bin/ldd
14471	/bin/egrep
9861	/usr/share/locale
9090	/var/log/dracut.log
9013	/dev/null
7529	/sbin/modprobe
6110	.