[Beowulf] Anybody here still use SystemImager?

[Joe Landman]

On 2/26/19 12:56 PM, David Mathog wrote:

[...]

> What I really need is a version of Boel which will chroot into a 
> Centos 7 system.
> Anybody have one?  Failing that, is there another small PXE bootable 
> linux distro, more or less like Boel but with a kernel near 3.10, with 
> an initrd which loads a target script (by nodename) into busybox and 
> runs it?


I've never used system imager or Boel, so I can't necessarily comment on 
how to fix that.   I can point out though, that the project I built 
(https://github.com/joelandman/nyble) turns your standard CentOS7, 
Debian9, or Ubuntu18.04 distro into a PXE (or USB or local disk) 
bootable RAMdisk mounted system.  I used this (previous versions of 
this) at Scalable Informatics to boot/run infrastructure we shipped.

You can hand the system a boot time argument on a script to run after it 
comes up.  I used boot options of

         root=ram rootfstype=ramdisk 
runscript=http://path/to/simple/shell/script.sh simplenet=1 verbose 
console=ttyS1,115200n8

I do need to update the readme file on that as it is out of date.  You 
can see all the boot options in the 
https://github.com/joelandman/nyble/blob/master/nyble-ramboot-init.d 
file, of the form 'grep -q option= /proc/cmdline).

I use this for doing all my booting of immutable images.  Just need the 
kernel, and the initramfs.  I can build one for you if you want, and you 
can play with it.

-- 

Joe Landman
e: joe.landman at gmail.com
t: @hpcjoe
w: https://scalability.org
g: https://github.com/joelandman
l: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joelandman