vagrant-alpine

Overview

I wanted to build a slimmer Alpine image for use with Vagrant while learning some new tooling. I learned some new tooling but I wasn't able to build the Vagrant images.

Prequisites

I didn't track system deps, so you'll potentially have to hunt them down.

• Vagrant
• Virtual Box
• libvirt + qemu
• libguestfs
• {s,}fdisk
• chroot and losetup should be ubiquituous

Usage

compile.sh

This is the primary script.

1. Creates, partitions, and formats a raw QEMU image
2. Creates a chroot
   1. Installs alpine's minirootfs
   2. Installs necessary chunks from alpine's netboot as minirootfs does not have a kernel
   3. Sets up Vagrant users
   4. Installs and configures openssh for Vagrant use
   5. Attempts to properly configure syslinux
3. Displays info about run
4. Provides kvm test shortcut

It generates alpine.im, a raw QEMU image that is. unfortunately, not actually bootable.

generate-virtualbox.sh

1. Converts alpine.img to alpine.vmdk
2. Creates a new VM
3. Sets up storage access
4. Assigns alpine.vdmk

As alpine.img is not bootable, neither is the created VBox.

unmount-all.sh

Convenience script to unmount all the things I normally had mounted while developing compile.sh.

Failure

No matter what, I was unable to get the image to boot. At a glance, it looks like it should work. I tried both MBR and GPT (with preformatting for sfdisk in mbr.out and gpt.out, respectively). I tried a slew of configurations.

• Is the loop device the problem?
• Is the chroot the problem?
• Is the bootloader the problem?
• Is the fs the problem?
• Is the kernel the problem?
• Is the operator the problem?

If you have any insight, I'd love to hear from you! PRs, comments, and issues are very welcome.

External Resources

• Grub + scripting things I didn't know I could