search

ucberkeley / bce

Berkeley Common Environment provides a common Linux computational environment for classwork and research.
Apache License 2.0
13 stars 6 forks source link

QCOW2 images for KVM? #20

Open jamesgao opened 9 years ago

jamesgao commented 9 years ago

Hi, What would it take to get packer to create a kvm-compatible image (qcow2)?

ryanlovett commented 9 years ago

We have never created a kvm image before, but one way to build it would be to modify the Makefile https://github.com/ucberkeley/bce/blob/master/provisioning/Makefile as well as enter a new builder in the packer json https://github.com/ucberkeley/bce/blob/master/provisioning/BCE-14.10-amd64.json. I would think that the builder could be configured in much the same way as the virtualbox builder.

https://www.packer.io/docs/builders/qemu.html

A short cut would be to extract the vmdk disk image from the BCE-2015-spring.ova https://berkeley.box.com/s/2g9x9c3q7qwhb9e4trwc (via "tar xvf BCE-2015-spring.ova) then convert it to qcow via something like:

qemu-img convert -O qcow2 BCE-2015-spring-disk1.vmdk bce.qcow2

I've never done that before with BCE but it should work without much fuss. VMWare is able to successfully import the BCE ova file and run it so I imagine kvm will be fine as well.

Just let us know if you do build a kvm image. I'd be happy to integrate your changes. If you have an immediate use case for it and need assistance I can devote some time to it.

Ryan

On Fri, Feb 20, 2015 at 2:52 PM, James Gao notifications@github.com wrote:

Hi, What would it take to get packer to create a kvm-compatible image (qcow2)?

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub https://github.com/ucberkeley/bce/issues/20.

aculich commented 9 years ago

@jamesgao Did you end up converting/generating a QCOW2 image to test out BCE on your experimental OpenStack implementation?

jamesgao commented 9 years ago

Actually I did, I intended to open a pull request to add that build functionality but I haven't had a chance.

However one of the biggest limitations of this distro is the lack of any sort of optimized BLAS library, per #12

paciorek commented 9 years ago

Hi James, we'll be putting openBLAS in the next release. You can also easily install openBLAS on a BCE VM by running the following using sudo:

apt-get update apt-get install -y libopenblas-base

(In addition, a shell script that adds various parallel tools can be found here: bce.berkeley.edu/downloads.html in the material under the heading "scripts to add functionality".

-Chris

On Thu, Mar 19, 2015 at 4:16 PM, James Gao notifications@github.com wrote:

Actually I did, I intended to open a pull request to add that build functionality but I haven't had a chance.

However one of the biggest limitations of this distro is the lack of any sort of optimized BLAS library, per #12 https://github.com/ucberkeley/bce/issues/12

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub https://github.com/ucberkeley/bce/issues/20#issuecomment-83798972.

jamesgao commented 9 years ago

Thanks! I look forward to it. I know this is taking the issue rather off track, but have you guys considered releasing a headless version of this without Xfce? This would be a great starting point for a cluster environment.

ryanlovett commented 9 years ago

Hi James,

Yes, the future probably lies with a small base image with extra interoperating containers for various workflows including a UI. I haven't had much time to look into that yet.

Ryan

On Thu, Mar 19, 2015 at 4:54 PM, James Gao notifications@github.com wrote:

Thanks! I look forward to it. I know this is taking the issue rather off track, but have you guys considered releasing a headless version of this without Xfce? This would be a great starting point for a cluster environment.

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub https://github.com/ucberkeley/bce/issues/20#issuecomment-83812890.