[systemd-devel] USB installer for mkosi

[Daan De Meyer]

Unfortunately there's no ready made answer yet here. We're busy designing
and implementing a solution for these problems.
https://github.com/systemd/systemd/pull/27792 has more details.

Cheers,

Daan

On Fri, 18 Aug 2023, 19:44 Nils Kattenbeck, <nilskemail at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> currently I am building a minimalistic Linux image using mkosi which
> should be installed on bare-metal hardware.
> For the installation I am trying to create a USB-stick installer which
> simply installs the resulting image on the hardware.
>
> First and foremost:
> Does someone maybe know of an existing tool which generates such a USB
> installer?
> For now I have found the installer script[1] from Yocto, and FAI
> (Fully automatic installation)[2].
> I would like to avoid using Yocto and the script seems to also perform
> partitioning etc. which I do not need as mkosi already generates a
> ready-to-use raw disk image with partitions set up.
> FAI on the other hand seems to focus on network installs and prefers
> to build its own images instead of using an arbitrary .raw/ISOs.
>
> So I fear that I will have to write my own installer...
> I do not require fancy GUI shenanigans; a simple CLI application
> prompting for the destination disk should suffice.
>
> Based on my understanding the primary steps are `cp /dev/usb-stick
> /dev/target-disk` (or dd for the old fashioned), followed by a `parted
> --script --fix /dev/target-disk print` to resolve GPT warnings due to
> the header not being at the end when the disk is larger than the USB
> stick.
> Is it possible to replace the second step with `systemd-parted`.
> Especially given that mkosi v15 now uses it for itself, this would
> likely be a lot cleaner than invoking parted.
>
> The major problem I am facing with that approach is how do I know
> whether I am booting from a USB stick or already from the final disk
> drive.
> One technique which comes to mind would be to create two images, one
> of which will be placed into the mkosi.extra/ directory of the other.
> This way I could have one auto-start the install script whereas the
> other image would be completely free of that logic.
> Am I missing a more obvious way to perform this?
>
> Any help would be greatly appreciated!
> Kind regard, Nils
>
> [1]
> https://github.com/yoctoproject/poky/blob/13734bb520732882a95da7ee6efe1e5b98568acc/meta/recipes-core/initrdscripts/initramfs-module-install-efi_1.0.bb
> [2] https://fai-project.org/
>
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