GCE instruction seems outdated

[saturnism]

Hiya,

The instructions for GCE seems a bit outdated. Which image should be used?

Thanks,

[nyh]

Hi, which instructions are you referring to here? In what sense are they outdated?
Perhaps the OSv mailing list would be a more useful place to post your question about which image to use.

[saturnism]

Hiya,

http://osv.io/gce/ points to "Detailed instructions on how to run OSv on GCE can be found on the OSv wiki"

https://github.com/cloudius-systems/osv/wiki/Running-OSv-on-Google-Compute-Engine points to "Download the image from our website"

http://osv.io/downloads/ shows a number of images, but none of them can be used directly with GCE. I also couldn't find the regular ".img" image that can be converted to raw/tar.gz file.

Lastly, I tried to convert qcow2 and the vmdk images (inside of .ova) into raw, then tar.gz - that didn't seem to work either :(

Must I build from source? If so, perhaps the instructions need to be updated.

Thanks!

[nyh]

@asias if I remember correctly, you ported OSv to GCE. Can you please take a look at the two links in the above comment, if they are still up to date, and if not, why not?

@tzach is the person who regularly makes OSv's releases and puts them in downloads/. Tzach, can you please answer on the ".img" question?

Finally, what would you actually expect an image you download from our site to contain? An image with only OSv on it is not very useful in itself - normally you'd want an image to contain both the OSv kernel, and some application of your choice. We currently have two options on how to compose such images: One is "scripts/build" which you can use when compiling OSv from source, and the second is Capstan which takes a pre-compiled OSv image and adds another application to it.

Finally, there should be no problem converting qcow2 to raw with qemu-image. If this failed for you, the only thing I can think of is that you got a qcow2 format newer than your qemu (qemu recently changed the qcow2 format without changing its name...). However, we used to convert our releases on osv.io/downloads to the old qcow2 format to avoid this problem, so this should not have caused you a problem. So I don't know what did.

[saturnism]

Also, using Capstan building GCE image is having issues.
cloudius-systems/capstan#146

Moreover, Capstan is using deprecated gcutil command line. I can help update that, but I'll need help w/ being able to build an image.

[saturnism]

1. So it appears that gs://osv/v0.22/osv.gce.tar.gz is available on Google Cloud Storage.
2. I was able to create an image with it: gcloud compute images create osv-v0-22 --source-uri gs://osv/v0.22/osv.gce.tar.gz
3. Subsequently start a VM with that image - yay!
4. And get its serial output! gcloud compute instances get-serial-port-output myinstance

It'd be great to fix cloudius-systems/capstan#146 so that we can create usable images.