support installing with debian-installer

[Michael Hudson-Doyle]

Hi,

It would be occasionally convenient to allow deploying an image with debian-installer-style installs. Most of the bits and pieces needed for this are present: you need to boot with a (job-supplied I guess) kernel and ramdisk and boot it in some way so that d-i gets all the answers it needs automatically -- in LAVA, it might be easiest to munge the ramdisk to have a /preseed.cfg file.

Most of the preseed can be autogenerated (I'm attaching one that has most of what is needed), but probably the job should be able to override auto-supplied values somehow?

I'm just filing the bug to get this written down. I might have a go at implementing it after the refactoring of the dispatcher I hear is due...

[Neil Williams (codehelp)]

Thanks for adding this, it raises important issues which need to be considered during the refactoring, not just afterwards. The lack of testable installers for ARM platforms is a constant problem in the community. It is an extension of the changes needed for using single partition images, implementing grub support in LAVA and supporting SATA deployments (or just avoiding hardcoded mmcblk etc.) which are already planned via cards.