I'm trying to understand the differences in content and support status of Debian cloud images found here [1]. It seems to me that Openstack, generic and genericcloud serve more or less the same purpose - and I'm failing to understand when to use which.
Here is what I've gathered so far: - Openstack image seems to be the go to one for all use cases, even outside of Openstack deployments. It also has a more "official" vibe to it, being grouped into the same section as CD/DVD installer images at this page [2] - Generic and genericcloud images are listed under "misc and unofficial stuff" at [2] and provide no stable URLs for the latest build - that suggests these images are somehow inferior to the Openstack ones. - Image size differs drastically between Openstack (535M) and generic (285M), genericcloud (222M) images. Package list diffs show that openstack adds some packages like aptitude, python2.7 and firmware-linux-free - but I'm not sure that those are enough to account for the twice larger size, especially since generic/genericcloud add some packages too (bridge-utils, curl, chrony, man-db, manpages, ethtool, etc). Maybe there are some differences in the build process? - The only difference between generic and genericcloud seems to be the kernel: linux-image-amd64 in generic and linux-image-cloud-amd64 in genericcloud. For some reason the -cloud kernel is significantly smaller, even though package description [3] makes no mention of omitted modules (drivers?) My use case is pretty simple: I'm just looking for a base image to spawn new virtual machines under libvirt/kvm with cloud-init. I'm inclined to go with smaller genericcloud images, but I'm a little worried that there are some hidden footguns I'm not aware of. Wiki page [4] has no mention of generic cloud images, could someone knowledgeable explain the differences please? [1]: http://cloud.debian.org/images/cloud/ [2]: https://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/ [3]: https://packages.debian.org/buster/linux-image-4.19.0-16-cloud-amd64 [4]: https://wiki.debian.org/Cloud/
