Smoke test VM images are getting outdated

[kke]

Footloose is essentially dead. There are no responses to issues, PRs are not merged, no new images are pushed and the old ones aren't being fixed.

There probably exists some better option, k0sctl and k0s are not the only projects who need quick-deploy micro-vms for CI that preferably can run on standard github workers.

[till]

I like footloose as well, but it's over. 😕 I have been playing with Docker containers, but there's no ssh. I mean, in theory you can start ssh in it and then use that to provision? I have a POC for Flatcar to do that. Should be possible with others, but it requires maintaining custom images.

[kke]

You can run systemd + sshd and so on in the container. That's pretty much what footloose does + adds a handy cli for spinning those up.

We could just build and maintain our own images for footloose or ditch footloose and run the images directly.

https://github.com/weaveworks/footloose/tree/master/images here you can see how to create such images.

[till]

I am doing something like that for flatcar linux:
https://github.com/Luzilla/flatcar-linux-oci/blob/main/rootfs/Dockerfile

And then it just needs something like this:

SSH_PORT?=2222

run:
    docker run -it \
		--mount type=tmpfs,destination=/run \
		--mount type=tmpfs,destination=/run/lock \
		--mount type=tmpfs,destination=/tmp \
		--volume /sys/fs/cgroup:/sys/fs/cgroup:ro \
		--privileged \
		-p $(SSH_PORT):22 \
		--rm \
		--name $(_name) \
		$(REGISTRY)$(IMAGE):$(CHANNEL)

... and you can ssh in.

I do like the API around it that footloose provides. But maybe running a few containers all that is needed.