What is in this article
NB These instructions are out of date since the release of Debian 11 (Bullseye). Some parts of these guide will need to be updated to the new Debian release.
Overview
- Create a non-EFI (old school) ARM hardfloat virtual machine for Libvirt/KVM using packer to automate a repeatable process. The resulting image is meant to be used along with subsequent Packer provisioning to create a Libvirt base image, not be be used directly (although you can).
- See Four ARMs for Libvirt/KVM virtualisation for prerequisites, why, and other alternatives.
Get the Installer Images
NB Instead of vmlinuz and initrd.gz as the filenames you should use filenames that include the debian version and architecture (e.g. call vmlinuz debian-10.6.0-armhf-vmlinuz).
- Get
[Debian Buster armhf kernel](https://deb.debian.org/debian/dists/buster/main/installer-armhf/20190702+deb10u6../../assets/images/cdrom/vmlinuz) - Get
[Debian Buster armhf initrd](https://deb.debian.org/debian/dists/buster/main/installer-armhf/20190702+deb10u6../../assets/images/cdrom/initrd.gz) - Get
[Debian Buster armhf CD#1 image](https://mirror.csclub.uwaterloo.ca/debian-cd/10.6.0/armhf/iso-cd/debian-10.6.0-armhf-xfce-CD-1.iso)
Subsequent instructions assume you have the renamed files in /home/user/Downloads.
Create and Use the Images
Conclusion
This is a little more involved than the first two posts in this series where we just did a standard Debian install, but it has the advantage that you can now repeatably produce base virtual machine images. If you learn Ansible (or one of the other provisioners for which Packer has a plugin) you can have the virtual machine preconfigured to suit your needs, and if you need to you can tweak and rebuild knowing you haven’t missed some provisioning step (which is a hazard with manual provisioning).