From Grid5000

Adding the support of new hardware for existing Kadeploy environments.

Running everywhere

For an environment to be able to run on every nodes (ie. every hardware) of Grid'5000, its kernel must include all the disk driver used by all the nodes.

When new hardware is added to the platform, existing environments cannot run on it if this new hardware uses a new disk driver. For these environments to stay able to run on every hardware, the new disk driver must be included in their kernel ramdisk.

What disk drivers to include?

There is a wiki page that sum up the disk drivers used by the nodes of each cluster:

Moreover, the disk drivers of the upcoming hardware is also sum up on this page:

How to include drivers in ramdisk?

First, the previously mentioned disk drivers must be put into the file that describe what kernel modules (ie. drivers) the ramdisk must contain:

• /etc/initramfs-tools/modules on recent Debian-based environment
• /etc/modprobe.conf on Fedora-based environment

Then, the ramdisk image must be rebuilt to include the newly referred kernel modules:

• mkinitramfs on recent Debian-based environment
• mkinitrd on Fedora-based environment

For instance, on Debian we build ramdisk the following way:

mkinitramfs -o /boot/initrd.img-2.6.18-3-amd64 2.6.18-3-amd64