On Tue, 27 May 2014 15:00:07 +1200 Michael Hudson-Doyle michael.hudson@linaro.org wrote:

For reasons that probably aren't especially good[1] I've been poking a bit today at using a preseeded debian-installer to get an image onto a LAVA system. It turns out to be mostly possible, with a job like this:

http://paste.ubuntu.com/7526204/

and a preseed like this:

http://paste.ubuntu.com/7526152/

but there is a hard coded timeout on boot_linaro_image of 5 minutes, which is not long enough for d-i to run. Oh well!

:-(

How far did the install get? Is it just a case of saving a few seconds on downloads or doubling the timeout?

Maybe skip the openssh-server tasksel and install that as a separate action after the install has booted?

ports.ubuntu.com is often *really* slow - a local mirror of that will be a lot more useful, both for the archive and the installer image.

So I guess I have two questions really:

1. Would it be possible to override this timeout? I.e. add a

timeout= parameter to boot_linaro_image?

There's no support for that right now - it may be better to have a install_image action added to the list of elements for the upcoming sprint.

2. Is there any sense in LAVA supporting d-i as a deployment

method? I guess the dispatcher could even handle generating the preseed for you, at least mostly.

Yes, the dispatcher certainly could handle the pre-seeding of debconf for d-i and for other package installs, using parameters where required. It would be a different kind of deployment with custom deployment data based on the underlying OS.

A separate action would be the best way to implement that.