I am exploring S390x provisioning support for Foreman and it looks like network booting S390x virtual machines could be a good start. Foreman can be used with or without libvirt compute resource to either run and customize an image via SSH finish template or booting from network.

In QEMU environment, s390-ccw firmware is utilized to boot the operating system which is not as flexible as on Intel, but thanks to the recent work of Red Hat and IBM engineers in 2018 it offers two ways of booting from network via DHCP/BOOTP protocols.

The older method requires kernel and init RAM disk to be concatenated and sligthly modified. Then it’s just matter of configuring DHCP to return the filename option so the firmware can download it via TFTP and load into the memory. This would require calling an external script from Foreman once kernel and image are downloaded from the installation media.

The newer method from 2018 (qemu 3.0 and newer) is radically more simple, the firmware has a limited PXELinux configuration file parser which can recognize both kernel and init RAM disk and download them separately performing the required concatenation on the fly. There are several options available, the simplest one is to return the configuration file directly in the filename DHCP option.

Configuring dnsmasq, which is controlled by libvirt, is easy. Add <tftp> and <bootp> elements and restart the network:

# virsh net-edit default
<network>
  <!-- ... -->
  <ip address="192.168.122.1" netmask="255.255.255.0">
    <tftp root="/var/lib/tftpboot"/>
    <dhcp>
      <!-- ... -->
      <bootp file="pxelinux.cfg"/>
    </dhcp>
  </ip>
</network>

Then create a PXELinux configuration file, make sure it starts with # pxelinux; a magic string preventing executing this as it was a linux kernel.

# cat /var/lib/tftpboot/pxelinux.cfg
# pxelinux
default linux
label linux
kernel kernel.img
initrd initrd.img
append ip=dhcp inst.repo=http://download.xxx.com/RHEL-8.4.0/BaseOS/s390x/os

A second more flexible option is to return a directory via the DHCP filename option, the firmware then searches pxelinux.cfg/ subdirectory using the PXELinux pattern: UUID, MAC address and finally default fallback configuration file. In that case:

# virsh net-edit default
<network>
  <!-- ... -->
  <ip address="192.168.122.1" netmask="255.255.255.0">
    <tftp root="/var/lib/tftpboot"/>
    <dhcp>
      <!-- ... -->
      <bootp file="/"/>
    </dhcp>
  </ip>
</network>

The PXELinux configuration is the same, it don’t even need to have the # pxelinux magic header. Keep in mind that the parser ignores most of the statements, there will be no menu, it will automatically pick the first option. But that’s good enough to automate installations via Foreman where PXELinux is fully supported.

To see it in action:

# virsh start test --console
Domain test started
Connected to domain test
Escape character is ^]
done
  Using IPv4 address: 192.168.122.207
  Using TFTP server: 192.168.122.1
  Bootfile name: '/'
Trying pxelinux.cfg files...
  Receiving data:  0 KBytes
  TFTP: Received /pxelinux.cfg/default (297 bytes)
Loading pxelinux.cfg entry 'linux'
  Receiving data:  5000 KBytes
  TFTP: Received kernel.img (5000 KBytes)
  Receiving data:  40063 KBytes
  TFTP: Received initrd.img (40063 KBytes)
Network loading done, starting kernel...

[    0.114133] Linux version 4.18.0-147.el8.s390x (mockbuild@s390-016.build.eng.bos.redhat.com) (gcc version 8.3.1 20190507 (Red Hat 8.3.1-4) (GCC
)) #1 SMP Thu Sep 26 16:13:34 UTC 2019
[    0.114135] setup: Linux is running under KVM in 64-bit mode

And Linux on S390x is booting up from the network! I haven’t tried this end to end with Foreman yet, but it looks promising. Later, lads.