fetch directly a ready-to-use image for podman machine on Windows

[benoitf]

Is this a BUG REPORT or FEATURE REQUEST? (leave only one on its own line)

/kind feature

On macOS, when perfoming podman machine init it fetches a pre-built fedora-coreos-36*-qemu.x86_64.qcow2.xz file and then it unpacks it and start machine from there.

But on Windows, it's fetching a fedora-35-x86_64.tar.xz file and then we're entering in updates/installation of RPM packages.

I would expect to have a ready-to-use image, and not going to the process of updating/installing standalone RPM files.
In case of offline mode, I can't do podman machine init step even if I've locally the fedora-35-x86_64.tar.xz file.

Also it's taking a very long time to perform all these small update/install process.
And creating another machine, we go to all these steps again and again.

Steps to reproduce the issue:

1. podman machine init on Windows

2. creates another machine, podman machine init foo
   it'll try to install packages, etc again.

Describe the results you received:
Installing packages, updating fedora, etc.

Describe the results you expected:
Just boot the prebuilt VM, ready-to-use, no need to have post-start actions

Additional information you deem important (e.g. issue happens only occasionally):

Output of podman version:

4.1.1

Output of podman info --debug:

(paste your output here)

Package info (e.g. output of rpm -q podman or apt list podman):

(paste your output here)

Have you tested with the latest version of Podman and have you checked the Podman Troubleshooting Guide? (https://github.com/containers/podman/blob/main/troubleshooting.md)

Yes/No

Additional environment details (AWS, VirtualBox, physical, etc.):

[baude]

@n1hility what say you?

[Sebbiedu]

would be much appreciated #14589

[n1hility]

That’s definitely where we want to go. Previously this wasn’t an option since we needed to pull from copr to upgrade F35 to podman 4, but now that it’s in f36 it’s doable but it requires that the fedora folks are on board with providing an additional rootfs stream (which receives updates similar to the base we are using today) that has Podman included.

[n1hility]

(I plan to reach out and chat with them about it. I’ll also update the base to f36 soon)

[n1hility]

@Sebbiedu proxy support is high priority for me (expect this sooner than rolling out and consuming the new Fedora stream)

[gbraad]

@n1hility Will work with you on this. We have to collect the list of packages that need to be prepped for sure, hosting location (perhaps pull from a registry; we do this for CRC soon as it allows to re-target an alternative location).

[gbraad]

Have a prepped image that reduces the whole install time to below 1min when the image has been cached, and otherwise can be around 1 - 2 mins depending on the download speed.

Still wanna perform some cleanup as at the moment the init still wants to check the image size to determine if complete or cached. This would prevent and airgapped scenario. Alternatively this can be specified with --image-path .\podman-wsl-f35.tar.gz.

Note: the phrase (this may take 5+ minutes on a new WSL install) will be modified for the PR as this is not the case anymore 🤭

Note2: update to f36 is also possible. Checked and works.

[gbraad]

A follow-up issue is to provide better feedback on what is downloaded:

At the moment rootfs.tar.xz is the only information that is shown. It would be nice if the actual redirected version, eg v0.0.2 is shown instead of the latest.

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Created as: #15002

[gbraad]

@n1hility I remember you mentioning updating the man pages as the imagestream is not used (but instead an imagepath).

[brainbytes42]

(I'm not sure if this is exactly the same issue - but maybe someone can tell?)

We're trying to run podman (v. 4.2.1) on a development-machine running Windows without internet connection. (We push files only manually.)
Even when using a local --image-path, it wouldn't work, as it tries to download several packages.

Any help how to use completely offline on Windows would be much appreciated. Thanks!

[mheon]

That sounds like it would be worth a fresh discussion, please open one