On Thu, Jan 21, 2016 at 09:30:57AM +0100, Reyk Floeter wrote: > On Wed, Jan 20, 2016 at 08:56:25PM -0800, Jonathon Sisson wrote: > > On Wed, Jan 20, 2016 at 02:51:21PM -0800, Simon McFarlane wrote: > > > Hi all, > > > > > > Now that the Xen guest stuff is getting some love, I think it would be fun > > > to toy around with OpenBSD on EC2 (particularly because of EBS -- other > > > VPS > > > providers like the old standby ARP Networks don't allow you to attach > > > copious amounts of storage to a low-spec system). > > > > > > There are a couple public AMIs available, but I'm curious as to how they > > > are > > > built. It'd be pretty cool to be able to build a given snapshot into an > > > AMI, > > > rather than be dependent on whomever is creating the public ones. > > > > > > If the builder of the public AMIs is reading this, I'd love to hear what > > > your process is. > > > > > > Thanks, > > > Simon > > > > > I have a relatively simple process involving the use of vmimport. > > > > Basically, build out the VM how you want (I used VirtualBox, but YMMV), > > then ran something like ec2-import-volume to bring the VHD into AWS. > > Once that was complete, I booted up an Amazon Linux instance, stopped it, > > detached the root volume, attached the OpenBSD volume as /dev/xvda, then > > booted up into OpenBSD. Afterwards, create an AMI of your work. > > > > Also note that OpenBSD won't recognize EBS volumes attached as anything > > other than xvd*. I haven't bothered looking into why. > > > > We don't have a Xen driver for the blkfront disks yet, and we only > support the emulated IDE controller. Nobody has started working on it > yet. The Xen HVPVM layer and the netfront (xnf) driver were necessary > to bootstrap OpenBSD in EC2, the blkfront driver is optional but > needed to mount additional volumes. > > Reyk > Ahh, understood. It wasn't necessarily an issue, as I've been able to mount any EBS volume I want as xvd* devices, so certainly not a concern, it was just behavior I noticed =)
Thanks for the explanation!
