Install Fedora CoreOS using FAI

[Andrew Ruthven]

Hey,

I've spent the last couple of days trying to deploy Fedora CoreOS to
some physical hardware for a colleague using the official PXE
installer. It wasn't very pleasant, and just wouldn't work reliably.

A few interesting aspects I encountered:

1) The PXE installer for it has a 618MB initrd file. This takes quite
   a while to transfer via tftp!
2) It can't build software RAID for the main install device, and it 
   seems very finicky to build other RAID sets for other partitions. 
3) And, well, I just kept having problems where the built systems 
   would hang during boot for no obvious reason.
4) The time to do an installation was incredibly long.

During the night I got feed up with that and wrote a FAI profile that'd
do it instead. I can now use setup-storage using our standard
disk_config files. A big bonus is that a rebuild, timed from typing
reboot to a fresh login prompt is 10 minutes - and this is on physical
hardware so includes BIOS POST and RAID controller set up, twice each.

The FAI Profile I developed for this is located here:
  https://github.com/catalyst-cloud/fai-profile-fedora-coreos

I thought this might be of interest to other people, and is potentially
a good example of how we can easily deploy other operating systems
using FAI.

Cheers,
Andrew

-- 
Andrew Ruthven, Wellington, New Zealand
andrew at etc.gen.nz              | linux.conf.au 2021, Canberra, AU
Catalyst Cloud:                |   http://lca2021.linux.org.au/
   https://catalystcloud.nz    |