NAME

       fai-diskimage - create a disk image for booting a VM

SYNOPSIS

       fai-diskimage imagename

DESCRIPTION

       fai-diskimage  creates  a  disk  image that can be used with Qemu/KVM, VirtualBox, VMware,
       Xen, Android device  or  by  your  cloud  infrastructure.  It  runs  the  Fully  Automatic
       Installation  using  a  list  of  FAI  classes. In the end you have a bootable disk image.
       Following formats are supported: .raw, .raw.xz, .raw.zst, .qcow2, .qcow2.zst, .vdi, .vhdx,
       .vmdk, .simg.

OPTIONS

       -c, --class CLASS[,CLASS]
              Define list of FAI classes

       -h, --help
              Print help

       -N, --new
              This  option  will  be  passed  to  the  fai  call. It then executes the scripts in
              class/[0-9]* for defining classes.

       -S, --size SIZE
              Set size of raw image (suffixes k M G T are supported)

       -s, --cspace URI
              Location of the config space. If location starts with /, the prefix file:// will be
              added. See fai.conf(5) for all supported protocols. Default is /srv/fai/config.

       -u, --hostname name
              Set hostname to name

       -v, --verbose
              Be verbose

EXAMPLES

       First,  setup  the  configuration  space.  You will get an initial configuration including
       several examples.

        # fai-mk-configspace

       You can now build your fist disk image.

        # export FAI_BASEFILEURL=https://fai-project.org/download/basefiles/
        # cl="DEBIAN,BOOKWORM64,AMD64,FAIBASE,GRUB_PC,DHCPC,DEMO,CLOUD,LAST"
        # fai-diskimage -vu cloud3 -S2G -c$cl cloud.raw

       Creates a Debian system with a small set of software packages without a graphical desktop.
       The disk image cloud.raw will be of size 2 GB and the host is called cloud3.

        # export FAI_BASEFILEURL=https://fai-project.org/download/basefiles/
        # export NIC1=ens3
        # cl=DEBIAN,FAIBASE,UBUNTU,JAMMY64,AMD64,GRUB_PC,DHCPC,XORG,DEMO,LAST
        # fai-diskimage -vNu ubuntu -S15G -c$cl ubuntu.qcow2

       Creates  a  disk  image  of size 15GB called ubuntu.qcow2 for a Ubuntu 22.04 desktop.  You
       have to set the variable NIC1 to the name of the network interface inside the  environment
       you  will  run  this  disk image. Here, ens3 is the network name inside a KVM/QEMU virtual
       machine.

NOTES

       fai-diskimage will use  zerofree  if  it's  available  on  the  host  for  getting  better
       compression of the raw images.

       Before creating an image, make sure you have the configuration space available. Create the
       config space for FAI by using the examples from the fai-doc package.

        # fai-mk-configspace

       fai-diskimage is not limited to creating images for virtual machines. The raw  images  can
       also be copied (via dd) onto a real disk for booting bare metal hosts.

       You can start fai-diskimage in a clean shell environment by calling:

        # env -i /usr/sbin/fai-diskimage -vNu cloudhost -S5G -cBULLSEYE64,GCE disk.raw

       You  can  also  build  cross-architecture  disk images using fai-disimage. See the chapter
       "Building cross-architecture disk images" in the FAI guide for details.

SEE ALSO

       This program is part of FAI (Fully Automatic Installation).  See the FAI manual  for  more
       information on how to use fai-monitor.  The FAI homepage is https://fai-project.org.

AUTHOR

       Thomas Lange <lange@cs.uni-koeln.de>