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# System prepended metadata

title: Ignition IONOS PR discussion

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When: Thursday, February 13th 2025 - 3pm UTC+1
Where: https://meet.google.com/udx-vdmk-ucv
Poll: https://framadate.org/sou75JzKyquNaWX7

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Hey folks,

As you noticed this PR: https://github.com/coreos/ignition/pull/1957 is getting traction and attention but no consensus has been reached yet.

Let's exceptionnally have a 1h meeting (basically what we wanted to do at FOSDEM) to discuss it. Meeting notes can be found here: https://hackmd.io/@flatcar/ryhyQ-Wtkx/edit

Let's have all in mind the current issues and proposals based on those resources:
* https://github.com/coreos/fedora-coreos-tracker/issues/1815
* https://github.com/flatcar/Flatcar/issues/1570
* https://github.com/coreos/ignition/pull/1957

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Pre meetings notes:
- https://www.flatcar.org/docs/latest/reference/developer-guides/sdk-disk-partitions/
- https://www.flatcar.org/docs/latest/installing/bare-metal/installing-to-disk/
- https://raw.githubusercontent.com/flatcar/init/flatcar-master/bin/flatcar-install
- https://github.com/flatcar/scripts/pull/2389
- https://github.com/flatcar/bootengine/blob/229e279c1e1e480ccbfb33f254c23068941b1518/dracut/30ignition/ignition-setup.sh#L42

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Meeting notes (Thursday, Feb. 13th 2025 - 3PM UTC+1):

Attendes: Timothée (travier), Jan (tuunit), Yasminm, jlebon

jan:
- did you get time to have a look to the last proposal?
- imds will not be ready before 2y
- cloud offering since 2010 (a lot of technical debt)

travier:
- last approach seems OK and reasonable
- can you summarize how things are working ?

jan:
- before the machine starts there is a tool running going through all partitions
- and it checks for some well known file /etc/cloud directory
- if it finds it, it injects the cloud-init userdata into the correct directory then it actually starts the machine
- so the machine is modified before it runs
- for Ignition, the idea is to reuse this logic and send this data no matter the encoding
- except that we don't check for /etc/cloud-init

travier:
- do you (the platform) control the value of this flag? 

jan:
- user-data-injection-flatcar and user-data-inject-rhcos are the current values - it's actually an empty file

travier:
- so it's not the end user that controls the name / value of this flag

jan:
- this file has to exist before boot, so we build and prepare custom images to inject this file (or we document how a user can achieve this)

travier:
- Ignition is distribution agnostic
- used by opensuse as well
- file name mentionning the distro is not ideal

travier:
- let's move to the PR
- as long as there is IMDS it's not a good idea to have a dedicated Ignition provider so extending the cmdline is a good idea

jan:
- https://github.com/coreos/ignition/compare/main...tuunit:ignition:feat/extend-cmdline-options?expand=1
- no plans for Afterburn for now

jlebon:
- note ignition will reuse the metal platform so not a specific platform id



Meeting notes (Monday, Feb. 10th 2025 - 5PM UTC+1):

- jlebon: discussion about the last proposal (https://github.com/coreos/ignition/pull/1957#pullrequestreview-2419484103)
- travier: reminder about the proposal
- tormath1: it reminds me the OEM support
- what about Afterburn? 
- what injects the injector? other things 
- More generic support for UUID/LABEL/etc.
    - https://github.com/dracutdevs/dracut/blob/master/modules.d/01fips/fips.sh
    - https://github.com/coreos/fedora-coreos-config/blob/2076662b69ab40a18b5913a25a401554f3e279bd/overlay.d/05core/usr/lib/systemd/system-generators/coreos-boot-mount-generator#L64-L84
