@kparal Nothing major has changed, however I chatted with pwhalen that support for IoT in FMW is in fact something that the IoT team wants, and pwhalen has offered his assistance in making that happen. See this log from last week's IoT meeting for context: https://meetbot.fedoraproject.org/fedora-meeting/2020-02-19/fedora_iot_working_group_meeting.2020-02-19-14.00.log.html

Here's the relevant discussion:

14:38:58 <coremodule> the second thing; we'd like to make IoT easier to install for the end user. we talked about getting it into Fedora Media Writer and arm-image-installer. is this feasible? do you have any thoughts?
14:39:34 <pwhalen> coremodule, works with the installer and I dont see why it wouldnt work with the media writer
14:40:07 <pwhalen> for some aarch64 boards we need to write uboot to an offset, but the Raspberry Pi is all set up and ready to go after a simple dd
14:40:49 <pwhalen> the f-a-i does extra stuff like copies the ssh key to roots home
14:41:24 <coremodule> f-a-i?
14:42:09 <pwhalen> fedora-arm-installer (sorry)
14:42:18 <coremodule> oh! duh. thanks.
14:42:24 <pwhalen> this is a bash script that is begging to be rewritten
14:42:48 <coremodule> is that different from the arm-image-installer?
14:42:52 <coremodule> https://pagure.io/arm-image-installer
14:43:02 <pwhalen> gah, sorry.. one and the same. we renamed it
14:43:42 <coremodule> lol no worries! want to make sure I know what I'm talking about :)
14:44:29 <pwhalen> but the media writer is likely the easiest for most and will work with the Raspberry Pi's

So what we need to do is to test that writing an IoT image actually works with FMW and fedora-arm-installer, and then create new or adjust existing ARM installation test case to cover both these methods. I'll keep this ticket open to track it.

@kparal @coremodule I propose to host a Fedora Media Writer test day, we will primarily test for writing Silverblue image and then we will test writing IoT images?
I also propose to test fedora-arm-installer as a Test case in the upcoming Test Day?

WDY'allT?

We already have a Silverblue test day in #609 and an IoT test day in #607, so let's test FMW support (and fedora-arm-installer support) during those events. A FMW test day would just duplicate that.

@kparal sure :)

So, the IoT test day is under way today and FMW test case is not included in there. Also, I learned today that initial-setup got replaced with ignition, and therefore it might be really hard to support IoT disk images in FMW. Because FMW does a simply copy, it will not handle ignition files. What we still probably can do is to support IoT ISO images in FMW, because those would be copied to a USB stick and act as a standard installer (so, you'd have to boot the IoT device from that USB stick -- I'm not sure how common that use case is).

@coremodule Can you figure out whether the information above is correct and whether this sounds like a good plan to IoT folks?

@kparal Yes, this sounds correct based on the information I have from the IoT folks. I will confirm, but for now, it does sound like FMW might be out without a lot of hacking (I don't know of any ARM boards that can boot from USB).

What we still probably can do is to support IoT ISO images in FMW, because those would be copied to a USB stick and act as a standard installer (so, you'd have to boot the IoT device from that USB stick -- I'm not sure how common that use case is).

I already pondered the necessity of this ticket in the FCOS-related ticket. The same argument applies here.
@coremodule Please try to figure out if IoT WG plans to implement the above in F33. If not, let's just close this ticket (and ask them to ping us in case they change their mind). Thanks.

Currently there is interest in getting FMW compatible with all of the supported IoT boards (and not just the RPi), but I am not sure whether or not this is feasible for F33. Let me poke around and get back to this ticket.

I'm a bit confused. The ISO image is generic, isn't it? Why would it supported just on RPi and not all boards (which can boot from a USB port)? Or can't ARM boards boot from USB in general? Or are you talking about writing SD cards instead (which we somewhat rejected in https://pagure.io/fedora-qa/issue/620#comment-630517)?

I don't know of any ARM boards that can boot from USB.

There aren't any ARM boards that I know of that boot from USB. Not saying they aren't out there, but I have never seen one. The RPi doesn't require additional bits to boot when one flashes the IoT image to an SD card; most/all(?) of the other supported boards require extra hacking on top of just flashing the image. Which is the big hangup with getting FMW to work with IoT. It will need to be modified to allow for user-input specifying the board to which the image is intended for.

Ah, I see. So the installer ISO -> USB is useful just for x86_64, which is probably not that common with IoT. And writing raw disk image to an SD card requires extra bit of knowledge of what board it is.

OK, please poke around, and if FMW changes look likely, let's keep this open to track them, otherwise we can close this and ask them to ping us if the situation changes.

I realized it doesn't make sense to track this here. The functionality is not there, so no work for QA. I filed an upstream IoT ticket here:
https://pagure.io/fedora-iot/issue/32

I'll watch that ticket. If IoT appears in FMW, I'll update our QA tickets and we'll discuss the next steps with regards to testing it regularly.