Roboxes

Generic base boxes, providing a variety of operating systems, and available across a number of different virtualized platforms.

Website

https://roboxes.org

Vagrant Boxes

https://app.vagrantup.com/generic
https://app.vagrantup.com/lavabit
https://app.vagrantup.com/lineage

Podman / Docker Images

https://hub.docker.com/u/roboxes/
https://hub.docker.com/u/lavabit/
or
https://quay.io/organization/roboxes
https://quay.io/organization/lavabit

Pending Additions/Updates

Add support for the new "architecture" flag. This means adding "386" or "amd64" as appropriate. And it means we need to add "arm64" boxes to the pipeline.

Upcoming Additions

Oct 23rd, 2023 / FreeBSD 14.0

* Repo updated. ** Beta/pre-prerelease added.

Pending Tasks

^{_{We would welcome community help (as a pull request) with any of the following tasks.}}
Generate docker variants for the Ubuntu/Debian/Alpine configurations
Incorporate the upload/delete/release scripts into the robox.sh script as functions.
Add vagrant user password randomization logic to the bundled Vagrantfiles.
Improve the unit box validation/check script with SSH command tests/checks. Start building ARM variants for some virtual machines/boxes.
^-- WE NEED A HARDWARE DONATION TO MAKE ARM64 IMAGES
THIS SHOULD, WE HOPE, IN THE WORKS --^

Operating System Requests

The following variants of existing builds have been requested, and will be added at a future date, when time allows (or someone submits a pull request).

Fedora Rawhide
OpenSUSE Tumbleweed

This operating system has been requested, but at present doesn't apppear to have sufficient interest. If that changes, it could be easily added by adapting the existing Debian/Ubuntu configurations.

Pop!_OS

The following operating systems have been requested by a member of the Robox community, but require a volunteer to generate a configuration, before they can be incorporated into the workflow.

Haiku
Minix
Parrot
SmartOS

Operating System Candidates

The following operating systems are potential candidates. They may be added in the future.

Manjaro
Mint
OpenSolaris
Slackware

MacOS
Darwin

ReactOS
Windows

Tails
Kali

Adding Boxes

Submit a pull request with your favorite distro.

Building a Box

To build a Robox locally, run the following:

git clone https://github.com/lavabit/robox && cd robox
./robox.sh box generic-BOX-PROVIDER

You will to replace the BOX and PROVIDER placeholders in the example above.

A configuration for all of the distros is available for every provider, EXCEPT Docker. At present we have only adapted a subset of the configurations to build Docker/Podman images.

The above presumes you already have packer and the hypervisor for the targeted provider installed. The res/providers/providers.sh script may provide guidance on the steps required to setup a Linux build host for VMWare/Virtualbox/Docker/libvirt. Please note that this scripts was written for RHEL/CentOS 7. You will then need to adapt the package names and CLI commands to your environment.

VirtualBox Disks

Enabling the discard/nonrotational options with our VirtualBox configs, appears to improve performance, but only on build robots equipped with SSDs or NVMe drives, and then only if the virtual machine is configured with VDI virtual disks. This combination allows guests to utilize discard/unmap/trim. However, if a virtual machine is deployed onto traditional magnetic hard disks with discard/nonrotational enabled, performance will drop significantly ( 1/50th of normal in some cases ).

Furthermore, while Packer appears to use VDI disk image files, when the virtual machine is exported and converted into a Vagrant box, the disk gets converted into the VMDK format. The discard/nonrotational options are preserved, and the result is that when the base box is deployed, it results in a virtual machine with the discard/nonrotational options enabled with an unsupported VMDK virtual disk.

As a result, we are currently not using the following options in our Packer config files.

"hard_drive_discard": true,
"hard_drive_nonrotational" : true,

A handful of relevant messages from VirtualBox when a Vagrant box is deployed with this issue.

File system of 'generic-debian8-virtualbox/generic-debian8-virtualbox_default_1649216430418_60259/generic-debian8-virtualbox-disk001.vmdk' is xfs
  Format              <string>  = "VMDK" (cb=5)
  Path                <string>  = "generic-debian8-virtualbox/generic-debian8-virtualbox_default_1649216430418_60259/generic-debian8-virtualbox-disk001.vmdk" (cb=154)
VMSetError: /home/vbox/vbox-5.2.44/src/VBox/Storage/VD.cpp(5662) int VDOpen(PVDISK, const char*, const char*, unsigned int, PVDINTERFACE); rc=VERR_VD_DISCARD_NOT_SUPPORTED
MSetError: VD: Backend 'VMDK' does not support discard
AIOMgr: Endpoint for file 'generic-debian8-virtualbox/generic-debian8-virtualbox_default_1649216430418_60259/generic-debian8-virtualbox-disk001.vmdk' (flags 000c0723) created successfully
AIOMgr: generic-debian8-virtualbox/generic-debian8-virtualbox_default_1649216430418_60259/generic-debian8-virtualbox-disk001.vmdk

The performance degradation leads to write timeouts, and the logs become filled with messages like the following.

VD#0: Write request was active for 36 seconds
VD#0: Aborted write (524288 bytes left) returned rc=VERR_PDM_MEDIAEX_IOREQ_CANCELED
AHCI#0P0: Canceled write at offset 82372182016 (524288 bytes left) returned rc=VERR_PDM_MEDIAEX_IOREQ_CANCELED

Donate

The roboxes are maintained by volunteers, and provided for free. As such we rely on donations to cover the cost of the hardware, and bandwidth. If you find this project useful, and would like to see it grow, please help by making a Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Monero or monetary donation. If you represent a public cloud, and would like to provide infrastructure support, please contact us directly, or open a ticket.

Monero 8B3BsNGvpT3SAkMCa672FaCjRfouqnwtxMKiZrMx27ry1KA7aNy5J4kWuJBBRfwzsKZrTvud2wrLH2uvaDBdBw9cSrVRzxC

Bitcoin 3NKSTPEeTGmuA95CGGqnyi3zPASSApLZbE

Bitcoin Cash qqxyedtn68jg84w4mkd3vsw2nu6pgkydnudza0ed0m

Roboxes is maintained by Ladar Levison, with infrastructure provided by Lavabit LLC.

lavabit / robox

readme