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LinuxKit with bare metal on Packet

Packet is a bare metal hosting provider.

You will need to create a Packet account and a project to put this new machine into. You will also need to create an API key with appropriate read/write permissions to allow the image to boot.

Linuxkit is known to boot on the Type 0 and Type 1 servers at Packet. Support for other server types, including the Type 2A ARM server, is a work in progress.

The linuxkit run packet command can mostly either be configured via command line options or with environment variables. see linuxkit run packet --help for the options and environment variables.

By default, linuxkit run will provision a new machine and remove it once you are done. With the -keep option the provisioned machine will not be removed. You can then use the -device option with the device ID on subsequent linuxkit run invocations to re-use an existing machine. These subsequent runs will update the iPXE data so you can boot alternative kernels on an existing machine.

Note: The update of the iPXE configuration sometimes may take some time and the first boot may fail. Hitting return on the console to retry the boot typically fixes this.

Boot

LinuxKit on Packet boots the kernel+initrd output from moby via iPXE. iPXE booting requires a HTTP server on which you can store your images. The -base-url option specifies the URL to the HTTP server.

If you don't have a public HTTP server at hand, you can use the -serve option. This will create a local HTTP server which can either be run on another Packet machine or be made accessible with tools like ngrok.

For example, to boot the toplevel linuxkit.yml example with a local HTTP server:

moby build linuxkit.yml
# run the web server
# run 'ngrok http 8080' in another window
PACKET_API_KEY=<API key> linuxkit run packet -serve :8080 -base-url http://9b828514.ngrok.io -project-id <Project ID> linuxkit

To boot a arm64 kernel on a Type 2a machine (-machine baremetal_2a) you currently need to un-compress both the kernel and the initrd before booting, e.g:

mv linuxkit-initrd.img linuxkit-initrd.img.gz && gzip -d linuxkit-initrd.img.gz
mv linuxkit-kernel.img linuxkit-kernel.img.gz && gzip -d linuxkit-kernel.img.gz

Note: It may take several minutes to deploy a new server. If you are attached to the console, you should see the BIOS and the boot messages.

Console

By default, linuxkit run packet ... will connect to the Packet SOS ("Serial over SSH") console. This requires ssh access, i.e., you must have uploaded your SSH keys to Packet beforehand.

You can exit the console vi ~. on a new line once you are disconnected from the serial, e.g. after poweroff.

Note: We also require that the Packet SOS host is in your known_hosts file, otherwise the connection to the console will fail. There is a Packet SOS host per zone.

You can disable the serial console access with the -console=false command line option.

Disks

At this moment the Linuxkit server boots from RAM, with no persistent storage. We are working on adding persistent storage support on Packet.

Networking

Some Packet server types have bonded networks; the current code does not support that.

Integration services and Metadata

Packet supports user state during system bringup, which enables the boot process to be more informative about the current state of the boot process once the kernel has loaded but before the system is ready for login.