I’ve been recently using the new QEMU image to deploy Balena on Virtual devices. I’m wondering if there’s a way to pre-update the image because it currently comes with 9.X. I’ve had to do manual updates on each VM before deploying them to our customers and would love to be able to skip this step.
Hello @mike.dean, thank you for raising this. Indeed, I see that balenaCloud offers the QEMU image based on a now 2 year old OS version. On your behalf I created the following GitHub issue on the relevant repository to release a new version: Update, test and release a new version · Issue #153 · balena-os/balena-qemu · GitHub
I’m also pinging our devices team internally about this.
Having said these, let me share the notes from our balenaOS maintainer. Internally balena team uses the generic-amd64 images from balena-generic to run with QEMU. We have internal discussions pending on the next steps here. There is a possibility to graduate our internal generic-amd64 image as an officially supported device type.
You can follow the progress on that front here: Replace the `generic_x86_64-ext` device type with the `generic-amd64` · Issue #374 · balena-os/balena-intel · GitHub
We took an internal note of your potential interest in this path as well.
Ah ok, thank you. I was using the qemu image for Virtual Machines but if the generic image works then I’m happy to use it.
Thank you again
I wanted to post an update here @gelbal, I tried the generic-x86-64 image and it’s not working for me. I can’t get it to boot or flash onto a Virtual Machine. With the qemu image I can just convert it to a Virtual Hard Disk file using VBoxManage and boot it up as a new device. The generic image doesn’t seem to do anything when I try it
Just a thought on this one Mike… The generic-x86-64 image is a “flasher” type, meaning it is meant to be written to a USB stick and then inserted into a PC and booted. When the PC boots from the USB stick, a small script is run that mounts the PC’s internal storage, and copies the contents of the stick (payload) onto the PC’s storage (hard drive, SSD, etc).
When used in a VM, you might needs to add a secondary storage device, perhaps a virtual CD-ROM, and boot from that instead. The VM will boot from the secondary device, find the virtual hard drive, and then copy the contents to it.
At the end, eject the virtual media, and reboot from virtual hard drive. See if that works.