Updating the Default VM Images

[Brandon Rice]

Hi all,

I’m wondering what the game plan is regarding updating the default VM images you select when submitting your slice. The “default_ubuntu_20” image (and others I suspect) now has many packages that are out of date, so an apt update/upgrade takes much longer than it used to.

Are these images hosted by FABRIC, and if so, are they able to be updated? Might it be an option in the future for users to supply their own images to this database, or maybe submit them for review and integration by the dev team?

Thanks!

[Ilya Baldin]

Brandon,

This is an excellent point. We are discussing within the team both the question of keeping the existing images updated and allowing experimenters to provide their own images. There are of course many pitfalls with the latter, as we test the images to make sure they boot properly and remote debugging of boot issues is difficult. That said we have this in our sights.

At the very least we plan to get on a regular cadence with updating the images we host (we’ve just been too busy to do it)  and potentially we will start allowing experimenters to supply their own images as well.

[Fraida Fund]

As an experimenter, I would prefer if images were not updated so that I could develop experiments against a hosted image, and I wouldn’t have to keep updating experiments to reflect the latest software versions.

(Keeping the images stable gives me two choices: I could update to latest software versions, or I could choose not to. Updating the images means I have no choice.)

This is especially a concern for e.g. education experiments, where we may also record video materials to go along with each experiment, and it’s very time intensive to prepare. I have a strong interest in those experiments staying stable.

Maybe there could be one hosted image for each OS that is updated (e.g. “default_ubuntu_latest” is keep updated and there is an announcement so we know when it is updated), but also keep some stable images (e.g. “default_ubuntu_20” is not updated except for security updates).

[Ilya Baldin]

Yes! The challenge of updating images is that we should not remove or significantly change the images under existing labels, so some form of versioning is necessary with a history of versions going back for some predetermined period of time. This way if you created an experiment with image ubuntu_20_ver_1.0, that image is immutable for the duration of its lifetime (with the exception of mandatory security updates, which must be applied to preserve facility security).

This is exactly why we have so far not rolled out this feature as it requires some thinking and careful deployment.

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