Appliance lab

Appliance Installer Evidence

The installer boots and completes for real in QEMU across HTTP/PXE, ISO, and Ventoy-on-FAT paths, plus failure-path and rescue scenarios.

Appliance

Four native QEMU actions cover the installer end to end: the PXE/HTTP chain boots the installer kernel and initrd, serves the image over HTTP, and asserts serial success markers before rebooting into the written disk and logging in over SSH. The ISO path wraps the same image in a bootable ISO and also verifies GPT layout and power-off-not-reboot behaviour. The Ventoy path proves the installer finds the appliance ISO as a file on a FAT/exFAT data partition rather than as burned boot media. The scenarios action covers what the other three do not: a forced mid-init panic recovering cleanly, MAC-based install pinning on multi-homed boxes, and rescue console access.

The installer kernel is operator-supplied by design; Ze neither ships nor builds it. Set ZE_INSTALL_KERNEL to its path.

Proves Installer boots and completes for real across HTTP/PXE, ISO, and Ventoy paths, plus fault, pinning, and rescue scenarios

Environment QEMU only, no Docker (the installer initrd is pure Go, no BusyBox)

Requires An operator-supplied installer kernel with IP_PNP_DHCP, VIRTIO_NET, VIRTIO_BLK, EXT4 built in

Source docs/guide/ze-install.md

appliance-install

# HTTP/PXE install chain
$ ./le qemu install-test

# bootable ISO chain
$ ./le qemu install-iso-test

# Ventoy ISO-on-FAT path
$ ./le qemu install-ventoy-test

# fault/pin/rescue scenarios
$ ./le qemu install-scenarios-test

Prerequisites

QEMU and an operator-supplied installer kernel (ZE_INSTALL_KERNEL=/path/to/vmlinuz); each native QEMU action reports a clear skip when none is usable.

internal/le/qemu native QEMU evidence