GitLab

Our security concept doesn't allow us to move artifacts built in non-secure environments to secure environments.
This means we'll have to make sure that the boxes we release are built on a runner marked as
'secure'.

Replace packer with two custom shell scripts

See merge request !118

... and use readonly, local and adding a few more comments.

Running QEMU without hardware virtualization is very slow, so the
timeout is set very high.

Especially running qemu-img is very slow (the compression isn't
helping):
qemu-img convert -c -f raw -O qcow2 cloud-img.img Arch-Linux-x86_64-cloudimg-2020-08-31.qcow2

A machine-id is never generated, as the system isn't booted.

Using actual VMs to build VMs is slow and error-prone (you need to use
VNC to see what is going on, and booting takes over +110 seconds as we
wait to be sure Arch Linux is ready).

build.sh can build all three images in ~135 seconds (assuming all the
packages is cached), we still need to use a VM for the actually building
in GitLab CI (as that is the only safe way it can be done at the
moment), which is a bit slower (~22 min vs ~13 min (Packer)), but that
isn't really a big issue.

In the future we can hopefully switch to Kate Containers[1] and reduce
the build time significantly.

[1] infrastructure#108

Perform publish via cli instead of packer

See merge request !119

Build the VirtualBox image with the qemu builder and convert it

Closes #108 and #106

See merge request !114

Kristian Klausen authored Aug 15, 2020 and Sven-Hendrik Haase committed Aug 16, 2020

Fix #108

Attempt to use tcg instead of kvm as qemu accelerator

Closes #106

See merge request !115