Precise Cloud images lack bare dev tree for LXC

[Ben Howard]

The cloud images for precise lack a bare device tree for boot within LXC.

[Ben Howard (darkmuggle-deactivatedaccount)]

The cause is that the precise images were not being built within a precise chroot via live-build. The other images are built in within a distro chroot (i.e. live-build debootstraps an Oneiric chroot to build the Oneiric image within that Oneiric chroot).

Fix has been uploaded and confirmed. New 12.04.1 daily image is being published now and will be promoted to new released image once testing is complete.

[Ben Howard (darkmuggle-deactivatedaccount)]

FWIW, I am wondering if this is a potential bug in LXC too. If LXC requires certain devices to exist withn the container, shouldn't the container create the device nodes if missing? On a modern Linux system, the actual disk image itself does not need any device nodes to boot, as the device nodes are populated at boot time.

[Serge Hallyn (serge-hallyn)]

I don't think we can call it a bug in lxc startup - (at that point we'd have to call it a bug in upstart too). We can call it a bug in the ubuntu-cloud lxc template, and require it to create the needed devices.

To look at it another way, it's not ok to require lxc to guess all the device nodes which init in all distributions might need, and create them. However the container creation templates exist exactly to tailor a container rootfs to be suitable for the distribution's init, so requiring lxc-ubuntu-cloud to create the /dev nodes is reasonable.

However I can envision plenty of other cases where the ubuntu cloud images not having /dev nodes would cause a problem - using a kernel without devtmpfs support (with qemu --kernel), chrooting in, etc.

[Ben Howard (darkmuggle-deactivatedaccount)]

Marking as fixed released. This was fixed a long time ago.