Tested Distributions

diskimage-builder can create many different types of targets composed of many different elements. For any release, the project considers the elements tested by the OpenDev gate continuous-integration jobs as stable.

Practically, this means a change can not commit unless it has successfully built the elements described below under test.

Build Host

The build-host is the platform used to create images. Unfortunately there is no concise answer as to the support status of all possible build-hosts. diskimage-builder has a complex relationship with the build-host depending on which target elements are being built.

Image-based elements take an upstream .qcow2 image, extract and customise it. Since diskimage-builder chroots into an already-complete environment, these elements generally work on any build-host, but there are complexities; for example some images ship an XFS-filesystem with options that some stable-distribution build-hosts can not read (and hence the build-host can not mount and extract the image).

As another example, the -minimal elements run tools such as yum, dnf, apt on the build-host to create an initial chroot environment. Thus some combinations will not work; for example fedora-minimal for the latest versions may require a RPM that is not packaged on current stable versions of Ubuntu. Some versions of Ubuntu ship a debootstrap that has bugs preventing building other distributions, etc.

Finally the containerfile elements use podman to extract a container-image and then customise that. Distributions vary in their podman version and various bugs related to this.

The images used by the OpenDev’s Zuul system are built by Nodepool. Thus the simplest way to have the most supported build-host environment is to use diskimage-buidler installed in the nodepool-builder container image. You can run disk-image-create directly from this container, e.g.

docker run --rm --privileged --network host \
     --env DIB_SHOW_IMAGE_USAGE=1 \
     --env TMPDIR=/opt/dib_tmp \
     -v nested_var_lib_containers:/var/lib/containers \
     -v /var/run/dib_output:/var/run/dib_output \
     -v /opt/dib_tmp:/opt/dib_tmp \
     zuul/nodepool-builder disk-image-create -x -t qcow2 \
     --no-tmpfs \
     -o /var/run/dib_output/image -n <element(s)>

The platform this container image is built upon is by extension the most-supported build host. Inspecting the Dockerfile is a good way to start building customised build-host environments. This is currently based on Debian Bullsye.

Other distributions are not tested as build-hosts in the diskimage-builder gate.

Testing and Targets

The stable targets are those that are tested; as noted no change can commit which would break this testing.

There are two main testing paths:

  • end-to-end tests build an image, import it to an OpenStack environment, boot it and confirm basic operation. These tests use the nodepool-builder container environment to build the image to be tested.

  • functional tests build a complete output image. They do not perform boot tests. These tests run on Debian Bullseye.

The canonical list of tests and the elements they build for any releae is kept in .zuul.yaml/jobs.yaml. If this document differs to the defined tests, the Zuul configuration is correct.

As of Feburary 2022, the default end-to-end testing covers the following elements on x86-64

  • centos-minimal: CentOS 7, 8-stream and 9-stream

  • fedora-containerfile: the latest Fedora.

  • ubuntu-minimal: Ubuntu Xenial, Bionic and Focal

  • opensuse-minimal: Leap 15.3 and Tumbleweed (non-voting)

  • gentoo: (non-voting)

  • debian-minimal: Bullseye

  • rocky-container: Rocky Linux 8

We run functional (build-only) tests on the following elements and versions:

  • containerfile: Ubuntu Focal

  • openeuler-minimal: 20.03-LTS-SP2

  • centos : (image-based build) 8-stream and 9-stream

  • fedora : (image-based build) latest

  • opensuse : 15.3

  • ubuntu : Bionic and Focal

For ARM64, we also run functional tests on

  • ubuntu-minimal : Bionic and Focal

  • debian-minimal : Bullseye

  • centos-minimal : 8-stream and 9-stream

  • openeuler-minimal: 20.03-LTS-SP2

For additional details, see the README file of the relevant elements.

diskimage-builder is used in a range of other projects that do their own testing, separate to the diskimage-buidler CI gate testing. These have different combinations of host/target elements they keep stable. Updates to this document are welcome.