Operating Systems

Our operating system images are built on regular basis from the metal-images repository.

All images are hosted on GKE at images.metal-stack.io. Feel free to use this as a mirror for your metal-stack partitions if you want. The metal-stack developers continuously have an eye on the supported images. They are updated regularly and scanned for vulnerabilities.

Supported OS Images

The operating system images that we build are trimmed down to their bare essentials for serving as Kubernetes worker nodes. Small image sizes make machine provisioning blazingly fast.

The supported images for worker nodes currently are:

The supported images for firewalls are:

Building Your Own Images

It is fully possible to build your own operating system images and provide them through the metal-stack.

There are some conventions though that you need to follow in order to make your image installable through the metal-hammer. You should understand the machine provisioning sequence before starting to write your own images.

1. Images need to be compressed to a tarball using the lz4 compression algorithm
2. An md5 checksum file with the same name as the image archive needs to be provided in the download path along with the actual os image
3. A packages.txt containing the packages contained in the OS image should be provided in the download path (not strictly required)
4. Consider semantic image versioning, which we use in our algorithms to select latest images (e.g. os-major.minor.patch ➡️ ubuntu-19.10.20191018)
5. Consider installing packages used by the metal-stack infrastructure
   • FRR to enable routing-to-the-host in our network topology
   • go-lldpd to enable checking if the machine is still alive after user allocation
   • ignition for enabling users to run user-specific initialization instructions before bootup. It's pretty small in size, which is why we use it. However, you are free to use other cloud instance initialization tools if you want to.
6. You have to provide an install.sh script, which applies user-specific configuration in the installed image
   • This script should consume parameters from the install.yaml file that the metal-hammer writes to /etc/metal/install.yaml
   • Please check this contract between image and the metal-hammer here
7. For the time being, your image must be able to support kexec into the new operating system kernel, the kexec command is issued by the metal-hammer after running the install.sh. We do this because kexec is much faster than rebooting a machine.
8. We recommend building images from Dockerfiles as it is done in metal-images repository.