support deploying an ubuntu cloud image

[Michael Hudson-Doyle]

It seems to me that it would be great if we could deploy ubuntu cloud images to LAVA devices. I've managed to make this work on midway, as documented here:

https://docs.google.com/a/linaro.org/document/d/1KvKJ_s6BgAxzna2ocbbuDtqX3KerXY41Xwy7Xm_FNvY/edit

And it works! https://validation.linaro.org/scheduler/job/130771/log_file#bottom

Most of these steps can be automated I think (I'm not sure about the flash kernel part), or eliminated with dispatcher support (e.g. we could pass a metadata url on the kernel command line rather than having to drop things into the image, and, for midway at least, it ought to be possible to drop the insistence that an image has two partitions). It would be especially nice to drop the requirement to set up the console on serial -- which I thought LAVA had support for now, but I couldn't figure out how to drive it.

A follow-on step might be to pull the simple streams data so that a job could just say "deploy the latest daily trusty cloud image" rather than giving a URL, but that can wait I think...

[Antonio Terceiro (terceiro)]

Hello Michael,

We agree with the need to make LAVA more flexible with regard to partition layout, and we will already take this into consideration in the dispatcher refactoring. We think it's just not worth it at this point to keep hacking the dispatcher to support new use cases.

[Michael Hudson-Doyle (mwhudson)]

Oh yes, I'm not asking for short term hacks, just, as with the d-i request, things it would be good to support in the upcoming refactoring.

[Michael Hudson-Doyle (mwhudson)]

Especially as I can do this by hand for now.