Following up on Then and Now ...

In quiet moments at ICFP last August, I finished teaching Propellor to generate disk images. With an emphasis on doing a whole lot with very little new code and extreme amount of code reuse.

For example, let's make a disk image with nethack on it. First, we need to define a chroot. Disk image creation reuses propellor's chroot support, described back in propelling containers. Any propellor properties can be assigned to the chroot, so it's easy to describe the system we want.

 nethackChroot :: FilePath -> Chroot
    nethackChroot d = Chroot.debootstrapped (System (Debian Stable) "amd64") mempty d
        & Apt.installed ["linux-image-amd64"]
        & Apt.installed ["nethack-console"]
        & accountFor gamer
        & gamer `hasInsecurePassword` "hello"
        & gamer `hasLoginShell` "/usr/games/nethack"
      where gamer = User "gamer"

Now to make an image from that chroot, we just have to tell propellor where to put the image file, some partitioning information, and to make it boot using grub.

 nethackImage :: RevertableProperty
    nethackImage = imageBuilt "/srv/images/nethack.img" nethackChroot
        MSDOS (grubBooted PC)
        [ partition EXT2 `mountedAt` "/boot"
            `setFlag` BootFlag
        , partition EXT4 `mountedAt` "/"
            `addFreeSpace` MegaBytes 100
        , swapPartition (MegaBytes 256)
        ]

The disk image partitions default to being sized to fit exactly the files from the chroot that go into each partition, so, the disk image is as small as possible by default. There's a little DSL to configure the partitions. To give control over the partition size, it has some functions, like addFreeSpace and setSize. Other functions like setFlag and extended can further adjust the partitions. I think that worked out rather well; the partition specification is compact and avoids unecessary hardcoded sizes, while providing plenty of control.

By the end of ICFP, I had Propellor building complete disk images, but no boot loader installed on them.

Fast forward to today. After stuggling with some strange grub behavior, I found a working method to install grub onto a disk image.

The whole disk image feature weighs in at:

203 lines to interface with parted
88 lines to format and mount partitions
90 lines for the partition table specification DSL and partition sizing
196 lines to generate disk images
75 lines to install grub on a disk image
652 lines of code total

Which is about half the size of vmdebootstrap 1/4th the size of partman-base (probably 1/100th the size of total partman), and 1/13th the size of live-build. All of which do similar things, in ways that seem to me to be much less flexible than Propellor.

One thing I'm considering doing is extending this so Propellor can use qemu-user-static to create disk images for eg, arm. Add some u-boot setup, and this could create bootable images for arm boards. A library of configs for various arm boards could then be included in Propellor. This would be a lot easier than running the Debian Installer on an arm board.

Oh! I only just now realized that if you have a propellor host configured, like this example for my dialup gateway, leech --

 leech = host "leech.kitenet.net"
        & os (System (Debian (Stable "jessie")) "armel")
        & Apt.installed ["linux-image-kirkwood", "ppp", "screen", "iftop"]
        & privContent "/etc/ppp/peers/provider"
        & privContent "/etc/ppp/pap-secrets"
        & Ppp.onBoot
        & hasPassword (User "root")
        & Ssh.installed

-- The host's properties can be extracted from it, using eg hostProperties leech and reused to create a disk image with the same properties as the host!

So, when my dialup gateway gets struck by lightning again, I could use this to build a disk image for its replacement:

 import qualified Propellor.Property.Hardware.SheevaPlug as SheevaPlug

    laptop = host "darkstar.kitenet.net"
        & SheevaPlug.diskImage "/srv/images/leech.img" (MegaBytes 2000)
            (& propertyList "has all of leech's properties"
                (hostProperties leech))

This also means you can start with a manually built system, write down the properties it has, and iteratively run Propellor against it until you think you have a full specification of it, and then use that to generate a new, clean disk image. Nice way to transition from sysadmin days of yore to a clean declaratively specified system.