Hello embedded world, FAI 5.4 is out now!

[lange at debian.org]

A year ago, FAI entered the cloud when it introduced support for the
creation of disk images. The new FAI release 5.4 will now enter the
embedded world. You can create cross architecture disk images, for
e.g. build an image for 64-bit ARM (aarch64) on a host running 64-bit
x86 Linux (amd64). The creation of chroot environments (or rootfs) for
a foreign architecture is supported by the 'fai dirinstall' command.

The new FAI version also adds support for eMMC storage during
installation. LVM partitions can now be created inside disk images,
even if the host system already uses LVM. The default URL to access
the Debian package repositories is the new deb.debian.org mirror
network (CDN).

Instead of calling debootstrap - which takes a long time - FAI can use
a minimal tarball called basefile. You can download pre-created
basefiles for several architectures from
https://fai-project.org/download/basefiles/

fai-cd has a new option -s for adding additional disk space onto the
boot media. fai-chboot can print the full path  to the PXE config file
for a given host or a list of hosts using the option -q.

A detail list of all changes can be found at
http://metadata.ftp-master.debian.org/changelogs/main/f/fai/unstable_changelog

The new packages are tested with Debian 9 (aka stretch) and are
available when using this line in sources.list

   deb https://fai-project.org/download stretch koeln

Several variants of the FAI CD images are available at
http://fai-project.org/fai-cd/

-- 
regards Thomas