investigate how to use LXD images

[ncopa]

LXD maintains a lot of OS OCI images. It would be nice to be able to pull OS images from LXD. Needs investigation on how we can do this.

[kke]

I was able to extract the qcow2 from https://jenkins.linuxcontainers.org/view/Images/job/image-alpine/lastBuild/architecture=amd64,release=3.18,variant=default/ - I put it into disk.tar.gz and created a Dockerfile:

FROM scratch
ADD disk.tar.gz /

I can then run that image with /sbin/init like bootloose does. The start-up sequence ends with a loop trying to find a tty from /dev/tty1.../dev/tty4 for starting a console, but looks like it's "up" enough so that I can docker exec into it. Looks like everything is working, but there's no sshd preinstalled, other than that, it should probably work just fine as a "bootoose image". All bootloose does is that it starts a container with the command /sbin/init then docker execs into it and appends the ssh pubkey into /root/.ssh/authorized_keys.

There are go packages for interacting with the image server and reading qcow2 files, so I guess it would be possible to have bootloose download lxd images and create docker containers, but there would still have to be some customization for example to install sshd.

[kke]

Of course it could just start it as-is and if there's no sshd, so be it. Bootloose could include an exec command so you could do something like bootloose exec node0 /bin/bash to run a shell in the "machine" if there's no ssh.

[ncopa]

I wonder how/where lxd pulls the images from? https://images.linuxcontainers.org/

[kke]

Yes I think that's the repo, https://github.com/lxc/incus/tree/main/client somehow downloads images from there, there are some commits that mention images.linuxcontainers.com