Hello
First of all thank you for this amazing software, I've just discovered it (better late than never).
Also, if this mailing list is not the right place for this, I'm sorry.
So, I manage some computer labs and some servers at a University. What I'm trying to accomplish is to create a central installation of a linux distro, probably Arch, and once is convenient and I have stable updates I want to roll out this updated image to computers, so ostree is perfect for this task. Of course I could just do the traditional way of cloning/deploying images, but with ostree I have the possibility to do atomic upgrades, and roll back in case of failure or a non-stable update.
Initially I'm trying to adapt a minimal arch linux installation to use ostree.
To simplify things I created a virtual machine with a single partitioned disk and created a minimal arch installation by the standard way (
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Installation_guide) but on a subdirectory (.arch) and a have used dracut to generate my initramfs with ostree module. Also, I followed the recommends on the docs, adapting my mutable directories to point to /var, creating necessaries symlinks to /var/home, /var/roothome, /var/opt, and so on.
After that, I installed ostree on livecd and initialized the mounted partition with:
ostree admin --sysroot=/mnt/ init-fs
And committed my installation with:
ostree commit --repo=/mnt/ostree/repo --branch=arch /mnt/.arch/
Then I deployed it with:
ostree admin --sysroot=/mnt/ os-init arch
ostree admin --sysroot=/mnt/ deploy --os=arch arch
Finally I've booted my machine passing kernel, initrd and kernel args to boot directly (I didn't understand how ostree is supposed to generate grub scripts yet, so I got the generated entries in /boot/loader/) and I got some errors from systemd saying that a have a readonly /var. Despites the error, my VM has booted and I could check that /var is in fact readonly, but I can't figure out the why. I took a look at ostree source code, and, if I'm not missing something, I think that ostree-prepare-root is the piece of software that bind mount /var to my deploy var, but there is nothing there mounting it readonly. I don't know what is causing this. Some tips here?
Another problem that I barely mentioned is that I don't know how I can integrate ostree with a boot manager. Preferably I would like to use grub because it has good features and I have a heterogeneous environment with BIOS and EFI machines, misc filesystems, mdadm arrays. But this is not set on stone, as I have some autonomy regarding changes of those configurations.
So, am I missing something? I've read the docs but it's not entirely clear to me the process of adapting an existing OS to use ostree.
Thank you for your attention
