Provide the ability to choose HWE as default kernel for deployment

[Nick Niehoff]

With MAAS it is possible to specify the default minimum kernel version (i.e. HWE vs GA) for commissioning. It is also possible to choose the default OS used for OS deployment but is not possible to choose the minimum kernel version. This is a feature request to allow the user to choose a default kernel version for deployment. Ideally MAAS could know automatically based on commissioning if it used the HWE kernel or if the HWE kernel was necessary for the deployment hardware.

[khb (khbkhb)]

Pseudo code in case this helps make our intent clearer:

For-hw: dellBOSS (pseudo code, meaning, if this system has a Dell BOSS boot drive)

distro: Ubuntu 16.* : use HWE
distro: Ubuntu * : use GA (for all others)

I'm agnostic about whether like ssh config the general comes last or first. I don't know that ubuntu should need to be specified (there's no direct equiv for CentOS/RH is there?) but the core idea is to identify specific hw that's problematic (I think that's most typically going to be whatever the boot disk is, if the kernel can't recognize / handle the boot drive, game is over. If the system can at least boot ... post processing (ansible, salt, etc.) can probably cope.

I suppose a "automatic" approach would be for MAAS to recognize some metadata from the HWE (surely someone had to create the HWE based on some set of HW that wasn't handled and therefore has a good clue (better than I at least) what hw ought to require it ... so I'd think that by default MAAS could easily know when to try HWE rather than GA ;>

[Adam Collard (adam-collard)]

https://maas.io/docs/cli-kernel-management#heading--set-a-minimum-deploy-kernel-for-a-machine ?

[Adam Collard (adam-collard)]

Please clarify why the existing API/CLI documented above is not suitable.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

[Expired for MAAS because there has been no activity for 60 days.]