Hi On Thu, Jan 22, 2026 at 2:14 PM Daniel P. Berrangé <[email protected]> wrote: > > On Tue, Jan 20, 2026 at 04:42:38PM -0500, Stefan Hajnoczi wrote: > > Hi Marc-André, > > I haven't seen discussion about the project ideas you posted, so I'll > > try to kick it off here for the mkosi idea here. > > > > Thomas: Would you like to co-mentor the following project with > > Marc-André? Also, do you have any concerns about the project idea from > > the maintainer perspective? > > > > === Reproducible Test Image Building with mkosi === > > > This project proposes using mkosi to build minimal, reproducible test > > images directly from distribution packages. mkosi is a tool for > > building clean OS images from distribution packages, with excellent > > support for Fedora and other distributions. It should be able to > > produces deterministic outputs. > > Aside from what I mentioned already, the other issue I anticipate > with mkosi is the mismatch between what hardware QEMU needs to be > able to cover, vs what hardware the distros actually support. > > Fedora in particular is pretty narrow in its coverage. Debian is > considerably broader. > > Neither will support all the QEMU targets, let alone all the > machine types within the target.
That's right, the goal here is not to cover all possible images though. I picked Fedora here as an example, because it is the best supported distribution in mkosi. > > > While there is value in testing a full blown OS image, IMHO, > for most of what we need it is considerable overkill, and > thus makes functional tests slower than they would otherwise > need to be. mkosi can produce initrd images, which can be small enough and customizable. Although I lack the details of what is possible, this is part of the project research. Imho, building all images from scratch cannot be sustainable.
