macOS and Windows support?

[cdrage]

We use bib a lot in our bootc extension (https://github.com/podman-desktop/extension-bootc)

and this new work is awesome with regards to a CLI.

The reason we use bib is because it'll work universally on windows / macOS / Linux since it's all through a container image.

Although i don't see anything on the documentation, is there support for macOS / Windows? README.md at the moment looks mostly Linux?

EDIT: I didn't see "Discussions" enabled on this repo, so I'm posting this as an issue. Feel free to move it to Discussion if you want :)

[achilleas-k]

The part that requires running on Linux is osbuild, which is what does all the work of building the image. It is very specifically written to run on Linux. Even outside of the stages that do the building (many of which are written to use Linux system and userspace tools), the core of osbuild relies heavily on Linux features to set up the build environment and isolate the stages from the host system.

So no, there's no way to actually run image-builder on Windows or macOS. At least not without running a Linux kernel (whether that's a full blown VM or some kind of container-like-but-actually-pretty-much-VM system like podman machine, docker, or WSL).

[cdrage]

The part that requires running on Linux is osbuild, which is what does all the work of building the image. It is very specifically written to run on Linux. Even outside of the stages that do the building (many of which are written to use Linux system and userspace tools), the core of osbuild relies heavily on Linux features to set up the build environment and isolate the stages from the host system.

So no, there's no way to actually run image-builder on Windows or macOS. At least not without running a Linux kernel (whether that's a full blown VM or some kind of container-like-but-actually-pretty-much-VM system like podman machine, docker, or WSL).

Ahhh, that makes sense, with regards to "native" host builds (via Linux).

I saw this in the documentation however to run it via CLI:

$ sudo podman run --privileged ghcr.io/osbuild/image-builder-cli

Which would give access to macOS and Windows users to run the build process (similarly to how we already run it with bib).

I'm assuming that this is probably the (unintended) way for macOS and Windows users to use the CLI to build the images?

Basically.. Linux = use the native build, macOS + Windows support = use sudo podman run --privileged ghcr.io/osbuild/image-builder-cli, etc. ?

EDIT:

🚀 Success on building ARM images on a mac M1 FYI! So it works there!

https://gist.github.com/cdrage/878373a3eb46a73d1aba7ab046d649cc

Although I did find it odd that it downloaded a bunch of RPM packages though for building? (EDIT2: I see that it's because of the alternative approach in this CLI where we download the RPM's, etc.. with --distro, so that makes sense!)

[lzap]

As you found out, that will work. Tho we do not actively regression tests such setups.

During start, the software will download some DNF metadata and this is what you are seeing I believe. It is unused then, it is on our radar to solve this in the future. Maybe we could lazy-initialize RPM stack?

[ochosi]

@cdrage The general idea is for ibcli to be a drop-in replacement for bib, so there's a unified tool to build package mode and image mode.

[achilleas-k]

Which would give access to macOS and Windows users to run the build process (similarly to how we already run it with bib).

I'm assuming that this is probably the (unintended) way for macOS and Windows users to use the CLI to build the images?

Basically.. Linux = use the native build, macOS + Windows support = use sudo podman run --privileged ghcr.io/osbuild/image-builder-cli, etc. ?

Yes. Though not entirely unintended. We do explicitly support using bootc-image-builder on macOS through the podman desktop extension. We don't test bootc-image-builder macOS support upstream, but we did for a time and I would like to bring it back.

With ib-cli replacing BIB, we intend to keep the same level of support.