Advanced features

Advanced features

Local boot with partition images

Starting with the Kilo release, Bare Metal service supports local boot with partition images, meaning that after the deployment the node’s subsequent reboots won’t happen via PXE or Virtual Media. Instead, it will boot from a local boot loader installed on the disk.

It’s important to note that in order for this to work the image being deployed with Bare Metal service must contain grub2 installed within it.

Enabling the local boot is different when Bare Metal service is used with Compute service and without it. The following sections will describe both methods.

Note

The local boot feature is dependent upon a updated deploy ramdisk built with diskimage-builder version >= 0.1.42 or ironic-python-agent in the kilo-era.

Enabling local boot with Compute service

To enable local boot we need to set a capability on the bare metal node, for example:

ironic node-update <node-uuid> add properties/capabilities="boot_option:local"

Nodes having boot_option set to local may be requested by adding an extra_spec to the Compute service flavor, for example:

nova flavor-key baremetal set capabilities:boot_option="local"

Note

If the node is configured to use UEFI, Bare Metal service will create an EFI partition on the disk and switch the partition table format to gpt. The EFI partition will be used later by the boot loader (which is installed from the deploy ramdisk).

Enabling local boot without Compute

Since adding capabilities to the node’s properties is only used by the nova scheduler to perform more advanced scheduling of instances, we need a way to enable local boot when Compute is not present. To do that we can simply specify the capability via the instance_info attribute of the node, for example:

ironic node-update <node-uuid> add instance_info/capabilities='{"boot_option": "local"}'

Specifying the disk for deployment (root device hints)

Starting with the Kilo release, Bare Metal service supports passing hints to the deploy ramdisk about which disk it should pick for the deployment. The list of support hints is:

  • model (STRING): device identifier

  • vendor (STRING): device vendor

  • serial (STRING): disk serial number

  • size (INT): size of the device in GiB

    Note

    A node’s ‘local_gb’ property is often set to a value 1 GiB less than the actual disk size to account for partitioning (this is how DevStack, TripleO and Ironic Inspector work, to name a few). However, in this case size should be the actual size. For example, for a 128 GiB disk local_gb will be 127, but size hint will be 128.

  • wwn (STRING): unique storage identifier

  • wwn_with_extension (STRING): unique storage identifier with the vendor extension appended

  • wwn_vendor_extension (STRING): unique vendor storage identifier

  • rotational (BOOLEAN): whether it’s a rotational device or not. This hint makes it easier to distinguish HDDs (rotational) and SSDs (not rotational) when choosing which disk Ironic should deploy the image onto.

  • hctl (STRING): the SCSI address (Host, Channel, Target and Lun), e.g ‘1:0:0:0’

  • name (STRING): the device name, e.g /dev/md0

    Warning

    The root device hint name should only be used for devices with constant names (e.g RAID volumes). For SATA, SCSI and IDE disk controllers this hint is not recommended because the order in which the device nodes are added in Linux is arbitrary, resulting in devices like /dev/sda and /dev/sdb switching around at boot time.

To associate one or more hints with a node, update the node’s properties with a root_device key, for example:

ironic node-update <node-uuid> add properties/root_device='{"wwn": "0x4000cca77fc4dba1"}'

That will guarantee that Bare Metal service will pick the disk device that has the wwn equal to the specified wwn value, or fail the deployment if it can not be found.

The hints can have an operator at the beginning of the value string. If no operator is specified the default is == (for numerical values) and s== (for string values). The supported operators are:

  • For numerical values:
    • = equal to or greater than. This is equivalent to >= and is supported for legacy reasons
    • == equal to
    • != not equal to
    • >= greater than or equal to
    • > greater than
    • <= less than or equal to
    • < less than
  • For strings (as python comparisons):
    • s== equal to
    • s!= not equal to
    • s>= greater than or equal to
    • s> greater than
    • s<= less than or equal to
    • s< less than
    • <in> substring
  • For collections:
    • <all-in> all elements contained in collection
    • <or> find one of these

Examples are:

  • Finding a disk larger or equal to 60 GiB and non-rotational (SSD):

    ironic node-update <node-uuid> add properties/root_device='{"size": ">= 60", "rotational": false}'
    
  • Finding a disk whose vendor is samsung or winsys:

    ironic node-update <node-uuid> add properties/root_device='{"vendor": "<or> samsung <or> winsys"}'
    

Note

If multiple hints are specified, a device must satisfy all the hints.

Appending kernel parameters to boot instances

The Bare Metal service supports passing custom kernel parameters to boot instances to fit users’ requirements. The way to append the kernel parameters is depending on how to boot instances.

Network boot

Currently, the Bare Metal service supports assigning unified kernel parameters to PXE booted instances by:

  • Modifying the [pxe]/pxe_append_params configuration option, for example:

    [pxe]
    
    pxe_append_params = quiet splash
    
  • Copying a template from shipped templates to another place, for example:

    https://git.openstack.org/cgit/openstack/ironic/tree/ironic/drivers/modules/pxe_config.template?stable%2Focata
    

    Making the modifications and pointing to the custom template via the configuration options: [pxe]/pxe_config_template and [pxe]/uefi_pxe_config_template.

Local boot

For local boot instances, users can make use of configuration drive (see Enabling the configuration drive (configdrive)) to pass a custom script to append kernel parameters when creating an instance. This is more flexible and can vary per instance. Here is an example for grub2 with ubuntu, users can customize it to fit their use case:

#!/usr/bin/env python
import os

# Default grub2 config file in Ubuntu
grub_file = '/etc/default/grub'
# Add parameters here to pass to instance.
kernel_parameters = ['quiet', 'splash']
grub_cmd = 'GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX'
old_grub_file = grub_file+'~'
os.rename(grub_file, old_grub_file)
cmdline_existed = False
with open(grub_file, 'w') as writer, \
       open(old_grub_file, 'r') as reader:
       for line in reader:
           key = line.split('=')[0]
           if key == grub_cmd:
               #If there is already some value:
               if line.strip()[-1] == '"':
                   line = line.strip()[:-1] + ' ' + ' '.join(kernel_parameters) + '"'
               cmdline_existed = True
           writer.write(line)
       if not cmdline_existed:
           line = grub_cmd + '=' + '"' + ' '.join(kernel_parameters) + '"'
           writer.write(line)

os.remove(old_grub_file)
os.system('update-grub')
os.system('reboot')

Trusted boot with partition image

Starting with the Liberty release, Ironic supports trusted boot with partition image. This means at the end of the deployment process, when the node is rebooted with the new user image, trusted boot will be performed. It will measure the node’s BIOS, boot loader, Option ROM and the Kernel/Ramdisk, to determine whether a bare metal node deployed by Ironic should be trusted.

It’s important to note that in order for this to work the node being deployed must have Intel TXT hardware support. The image being deployed with Ironic must have oat-client installed within it.

The following will describe how to enable trusted boot and boot with PXE and Nova:

  1. Create a customized user image with oat-client installed:

    disk-image-create -u fedora baremetal oat-client -o $TRUST_IMG
    

    For more information on creating customized images, see Create and add images to the Image service.

  2. Enable VT-x, VT-d, TXT and TPM on the node. This can be done manually through the BIOS. Depending on the platform, several reboots may be needed.

  3. Enroll the node and update the node capability value:

    ironic node-create -d pxe_ipmitool
    
    ironic node-update $NODE_UUID add properties/capabilities={'trusted_boot':true}
    
  4. Create a special flavor:

    nova flavor-key $TRUST_FLAVOR_UUID set 'capabilities:trusted_boot'=true
    
  5. Prepare tboot and mboot.c32 and put them into tftp_root or http_root directory on all nodes with the ironic-conductor processes:

    Ubuntu:
        cp /usr/lib/syslinux/mboot.c32 /tftpboot/
    
    Fedora:
        cp /usr/share/syslinux/mboot.c32 /tftpboot/
    

    Note: The actual location of mboot.c32 varies among different distribution versions.

    tboot can be downloaded from https://sourceforge.net/projects/tboot/files/latest/download

  6. Install an OAT Server. An OAT Server should be running and configured correctly.

  7. Boot an instance with Nova:

    nova boot --flavor $TRUST_FLAVOR_UUID --image $TRUST_IMG --user-data $TRUST_SCRIPT trusted_instance
    

    Note that the node will be measured during trusted boot and the hash values saved into TPM. An example of TRUST_SCRIPT can be found in trust script example.

  8. Verify the result via OAT Server.

    This is outside the scope of Ironic. At the moment, users can manually verify the result by following the manual verify steps.

Notifications

The Bare Metal service supports the emission of notifications, which are messages sent on a message broker (like RabbitMQ or anything else supported by the oslo messaging library) that indicate various events which occur, such as when a node changes power states. These can be consumed by an external service reading from the message bus. For example, Searchlight is an OpenStack service that uses notifications to index (and make searchable) resources from the Bare Metal service.

Notifications are disabled by default. For a complete list of available notifications and instructions for how to enable them, see the deploy guide.

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