[node-devel] Building ovirt-node on other Linux distros

[Mike Burns]

On Fri, 2011-11-18 at 12:59 +0800, shu ming wrote:
> Hi,
>    In the building guide of ovirt-node, Fedroa 15+ is required to setup 
> the building environment .  I believe some other guys may still have the 
> interest to setup the environment on other linux distros like RHEL 6.x, 
> ubuntu 11.x&etc.  I know the work is non-trivial.  Build tool scripts 
> should be modified, package dependency should be cleared, &etc.    In my 
> initial thought, we may give two options to the developers.  Options I) 
> packaging all the tools and dependency in one installation scripts and 
> developers can install the package with one command.  Options II) 
> providing several customized ISO image for RHEL 6.x, ubuntu 11.x and 
> developers can install the ISO image on their machines(virtual or 
> non-virtual).   How do you feel about these?

My understanding is that there are people from various other distros
that are working on an ovirt-node-like image.  Making ovirt-node distro
neutral is not a trivial problem by any stretch.  There are a number of
steps that need to be taken to do this.

1.  get all distros to provide a "Virtualization Minimal" package group
that contains the minimum package set to run virtual machines.
Currently we have a list of packages in Fedora that we need.  There are
some package naming differences between the various distros, so that
would need to be updated to pull a specific set of packages

2.  A lot of our scripting directly touches files in various places
rather than using other tools.  For example, we directly
manipulate /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-* files rather than
using a common library like netcf.  Anywhere we do something like that
would need to be changed to use some common library (or at least
conditionalized so that each distro does it differently.

3.  We currently use livecd-tools to create.  My understanding is that
this isn't available on every distro.  So the actual image production
would be different on each.

4.  We require a Read Only root filesystem currently to support a
stateless environment.  This model is only available upstream in Fedora,
at least as far as I understand it.  This impacts how we store
configuration and persist various aspects of the system that we need to
across boots.  The model used by distros varies.

5.  The packaging aspect for other distros is something that is beyond
the members of the current node team.  We're all fedora people and know
fedora packaging.  We would need to get help from members of other
distributions to get this working.

This is just a list that comes to mind off the top of my head.  There
are probably other challenges as well.  We're not opposed to making
these changes, but we need the help of the community to get it going.

Patches Welcome as always.

Mike

> 
> 
> Thanks.
> 
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