• Features • Build Requirements • Build Options • Quick Start • Customize • Releases •
Garden Linux is a Debian derivate that aims to provide a small, auditable linux image for most Cloud Providers and Bare Metal.
Features:
- easy to use build system for OS images
- builds are repeatable and auditable
- small footprint (based on minbase of Debian)
- subscribes for debian/testing, so no huge (problematic) version jumps needed
- whole setup is purely systemd based (network, fstab etc.) #101 #102
- initramfs is dracut generated #105
- optional complete immutability #104
- regular updates (since the whole build process is completely automated via a Tekton CI) and
- thorough automated testing
- unit tests against the local build and
- integration tests against the various cloud Providers (only rc builds)
- aiming to always integrate the latest LTS kernel #100 (currently 5.15)
- running scans against common issues like
- license violations (we try to be completely open! #1)
- scans for outdated software versions
- project licensed under MIT
- supporting major platforms out-of-the-box
- major cloud providers AWS, Azure, Google, Alicloud
- major virtualizer VMware, OpenStack, KVM
- bare metal
Build Requirements
The entire build runs in a docker container (well a privileged one with extended capabilities - since we need loop back support). We can run on any system supporting Docker and having loopback support and has:
- 2+ GiB (use '--lessram' to lower memory usage)
- 10+ GiB free disk space
- Internet connection (snapshot.debian.org, deb.debian.org, repo.gardenlinux.io, docker.io, golang.org, gopkg.in, github.com)
Required packages for a convenient build (on Debian/Ubuntu):
apt install bash docker.io docker-compose make coreutils gnupg git qemu-system-x86
Required packages for deployment on cloud services:
apt install python3
- Alicloud: Aliyun CLI
- AWS: AWS CLI
- Azure: Azure CLI
- GCP: Cloud SDK, gsutil
- OpenStack: OpenStackCLI
Required kernel modules
ext4, loop, squashfs, vfat, vsock (for VM image builds and extended virtualized tests)
Required packages to configure the CI pipeline
apt install bash git python python-pip
pip install tekton
Build Options
| Option | Description |
|---|---|
| --features | Comma separated list of features activated (see features/) (default:base) |
| --disable-features | Comma separated list of features to deactivate (see features/) |
| --lessram | Build will be no longer in memory (default: off) |
| --debug | Activates basically `set -x` everywhere (default: off) |
| --manual | Built will stop in build environment and activate manual mode (debugging) (default:off) |
| --arch | Builds for a specific architecture (default: architecture the build runs on) |
| --suite | Specifies the debian suite to build for e.g. bullseye, potatoe (default: testing) |
| --skip-tests | Deactivating tests (default: off) |
| --skip-build | Do not create the build container BUILD_IMAGE variable would specify an alternative name |
Quick start
Build all images:
make all
Building specific platform images:
make aws
make gcp
make azure
make ali
make vmware
make openstack
make kvm
make metal
See in .build/ folder for the outcome, there are subdirectories for the platform and the build date.
Related dev images can be created by appending the '-dev' suffix (e.g. "make aws-dev").
Customize builds
Our build is based on a feature system.
The feature system distinguishes between
- Platforms (aws, azure, google ...)
- Features (container host, virtual host ...)
- Modifiers (_slim. _readonly, _pxe ...)
if you want to manually build choose:
build.sh <Platform>,[<feature1>],[<featureX>],[_modifier1],[_modifierX] destination [version]
e.g. build.sh server,cloud,chost,vmware build/
builds a server image, cloud-like, with a container host for the VMware platform. The build result can be found in build/
also look into our Version scheme since adding a date or a Version targets the whole build for a specific date
Garden Linux releases
Garden Linux frequently publishes snapshot releases. These are available as machine images in most major cloud providers as well as file-system images for manual import. See the releases page for more info.
Pipeline Integration
Garden Linux can build in an automated way for continous integration. See ci/README.md for details.