Prevent maas from changing kernel in the user supplied image and/or be flexible

Features
1

Pain point: Maas during the deployment process installs a newer kernel than what we baked into our images, how can this be turned off??

I currently have a hacky script that runs at the end of the install to pretty much undo what maas is doing but it wastes a good 10-15 minutes per machine (because our image has a custom version of ZFS baked into it and changing the kernel by maas forces DKMS to rebuild it which is very time consuming)

Maas should have options for the following:

  1. Leave it alone (solves my problem)
  2. Update to specific GA release
  3. Update to current GA
  4. Update to specific HWE release
  5. Update to current HWE
  6. Update to specific Edge release
  7. Update to current Edge
2

Hi @dandruczyk - hope you’re well.

Guess what? 3.1 has that feature although not everything you listed. At least, it will leave your kernel alone. Check: https://maas.io/docs/snap/3.1/ui/whats-new-in-maas#heading--static-ubuntu-images

(NB: the beta just got released the other day).

3

I did see that and look into it but the documentation on how to leverage it is currently is lacking and ambiguous at best and needs significant improvement. Make an ELI 5 edition and have your non-techie friend read it and at least make sense of what he/she would need to do.

I have been building images for maas that (possibly) predates both of those projects using packer with openstack, so it’s unclear what exactly I would need to adapt into my images to make them fully functional with this change. The docs around the curtin portions are lacking of needed details, what is actually needed, where it goes, what purpose it serves, etc.

My images that I currently make ALREADY work in maas just fine, its just that maas changes the kernel when I don’t want it to forcing me to code in workarounds that waste many minutes per machine built…

4

Is this a problem only for Ubuntu? Or this also happens for other OSes, like CentOS?

@dandruczyk is this issue still happening with the newer versions of MAAS?

5

I have t upgraded MaaS past 2.9.2 yet because of stuff in the release notes that may make my current images not work at all.

6

I’m also worried about the newer versions, specially because there’s no more bugfix releases. This makes it hard for us to have MAAS in our production environment.

We might be in the same boat :confused: