3.2 KiB
LinuxKit with bare metal on Packet
Packet is a bare metal hosting provider.
You will need to create a Packet account and a project to put this new machine into. You will also need to create an API key with appropriate read/write permissions to allow the image to boot.
Linuxkit is known to boot on the Type 0 and Type 1 servers at Packet. Support for other server types, including the Type 2A ARM server, is a work in progress.
Boot
Build an image with moby build. The packet.yml
example file provides a suitable template to start from.
Linuxkit on Packet boots via iPXE. This requires that you have an HTTP server on which you can store your images. At the moment there is no equivalent to "linuxkit push" to upload these images, so you will have to host them yourself. The images can be served from any HTTP server, though in the interest of performance you may want to locate those images near the data center that you're booting in.
Servers take several minutes to provision. During this time their state can be seen from the Packet console.
$ linuxkit run packet --help
USAGE: linuxkit run packet [options] [name]
Options:
-api-key string
Packet API key
-base-url string
Base URL that the kernel and initrd are served from.
-hostname string
Hostname of new instance (default "moby")
-img-name string
Overrides the prefix used to identify the files. Defaults to [name]
-machine string
Packet Machine Type (default "baremetal_0")
-project-id string
Packet Project ID
-zone string
Packet Zone (default "ams1")
Console
If your LinuxKit system does not include an ssh or remote console application, you can still connect to it via the Packet SOS ("Serial over SSH") console. See https://help.packet.net/technical/networking/sos-rescue-mode for details on that mode.
Disks
At this moment the Linuxkit server boots from RAM, with no persistent storage and there is no code that mounts disks. As a result, when the Linuxkit image reboots, all is lost.
Packet supports a persistent iPXE mode through its API which would allow a server to come back up after a reboot and re-start the PXE process. This is great for testing your provisioning scripts. This is not yet available directly through Linuxkit.
Networking
Some Packet server types have bonded networks; the current code does not support that.
Integration services and Metadata
Packet supports user state during system bringup, which enables the boot process to be more informative about the current state of the boot process once the kernel has loaded but before the system is ready for login.