Open Stack

> for the run_validation=False issue, you are right, because z/VM driver
> only support config drive and don't support metadata service ,we made
> bad assumption and took wrong action to disabled the whole ssh check,
> actually according to [1] , we should only disable
> CONF.compute_feature_enabled.metadata_service but keep both
> self.run_ssh and CONF.compute_feature_enabled.config_drive as True in
> order to make config drive test validation take effect, our CI will
> handle that

Why don't you support the metadata service? That's a pretty fundamental
mechanism for nova and openstack. It's the only way you can get a live
copy of metadata, and it's the only way you can get access to device
tags when you hot-attach something. Personally, I think that it's
something that needs to work.

> For the tgz/iso9660 question below, this is because we got wrong info
> from low layer component folks back to 2012 and after discuss with
> some experts again, actually we can create iso9660 in the driver layer
> and pass down to the spawned virtual machine and during startup
> process, the VM itself will mount the iso file and consume it, because
> from linux perspective, either tgz or iso9660 doesn't matter , only
> need some files in order to transfer the information from openstack
> compute node to the spawned VM.  so our action is to change the format
> from tgz to iso9660 and keep consistent to other drivers.

The "iso file" will not be inside the guest, but rather passed to the
guest as a block device, right?

> For the config drive working mechanism question, according to [2] z/VM
> is Type 1 hypervisor while Qemu/KVM are mostly likely to be Type 2
> hypervisor, there is no file system in z/VM hypervisor (I omit too
> much detail here) , so we can't do something like linux operation
> system to keep a file as qcow2 image in the host operating system,

I'm not sure what the type-1-ness has to do with this. The hypervisor
doesn't need to support any specific filesystem for this to work. Many
drivers we have in the tree are type-1 (xen, vmware, hyperv, powervm)
and you can argue that KVM is type-1-ish. They support configdrive.

> what we do is use a special file pool to store the config drive and
> during VM init process, we read that file from special device and
> attach to VM as iso9660 format then cloud-init will handle the follow
> up, the cloud-init handle process is identical to other platform

This and the previous mention of this sort of behavior has me
concerned. Are you describing some sort of process that runs when the
instance is starting to initialize its environment, or something that
runs  *inside* the instance and thus functionality that has to exist in
the *image* to work?

--Dan