Images for Rocky are unbootable starting with rocky 8.7/9.1

[Jason Tucker]

See also: https://forums.rockylinux.org/t/problem-with-8-7-cloud-image/8315

Starting with Rocky 8.7 (and 9.1), the distro cloud images were switched to a new GPT multi-partition layout to support both legacy BIOS and UEFI booting. As a result, images processed by diskimage-builder are failing to boot, as they are missing the necessary /boot partition.

[Neil Hanlon (nhanlon)]

Hi Jason,

As I mentioned over on the Rocky forums, could you please describe your usage of DIB in processing the GenericCloud image? From there we can look to see what if anything needs modification in DIB.

I am a bit busy until after the new year but am happy to look into this for you

[Jason Tucker (guzzijason)]

Hi Niel - in a nutshell, we take the public GenericCloud image, and use DIB to help add a number of customizations for our application environment and re-pack. We've had a regularly scheduled automation job that does this 2x a month, and then publishes the resulting image to our private cloud.

This was mostly working fine for us ever since we started doing it with CentOS 7, and then with Rocky 8... until 8.7.

[Neil Hanlon (nhanlon)]

Hi Jason,

Apologies for the delay in responding--holidays and the like.

I am taking a look into this and will get back with more info.

Can you provide me with an example of how you invoke DIB to customize the qcow? Additionally, I am presuming that your private cloud is running OpenStack, is that a safe assumption? Any uniqueness about your hypervisor?

Best,
Neil

[Jason Tucker (guzzijason)]

Hi Neil,
Below is an example of the script we're using to invoke disk-image-create. Yes, we're running OpenStack, but I'm not aware of anything special with the hypervisor. I have to admit that I'm not intimately familiar with the inner working of DIB (I basically co-opted this build job from another team and customized it for my purposes). I've customized some elements and occasionally have had to fix things if the job breaks (such as external dependency changes, etc).

The primary purpose for the customization is to bootstrap our config mgmt system (ansible-pull) on the new image, provision ops accounts, etc.

###

IMG_NAME=CDN-Rocky-8

ELEMENTS_PATH=./elements \
  DIB_DEBUG_TRACE=1 \
  DIB_BOOTLOADER_DEFAULT_CMDLINE="nofb nomodeset vga=normal consoleblank=0" \
  DIB_CLOUD_INIT_DATASOURCES="ConfigDrive, OpenStack" \
  disk-image-create -u -a amd64 -t raw \
  --mkfs-options '-i 16384 -E stride=32,stripe_width=128' \
  -p rng-tools,qemu-guest-agent \
  -o images/${IMG_NAME} \
  rocky base vm selinux-permissive cloud-init-datasources \
  dib-custom ansible-pull ansible-pull-cloud-config