hsehic

While normally data is passed to linuxrc (including an AutoYaST profile), modern auto-install tools like Ignition from CoreOS support a very interesting method: the QEMU Firmware Config device. This allows to read from inside the VM a blob by reading /sys/firmware/qemu_fw_cfg/by_name/opt/keyname. The driver is included in recent Linux kernels.

terraform-provider-libvirt supports CoreOS ignition file/content, which end rendered as kernel command line options (the provider does some nice stuff like allowing you to pass the json content and it will take care of putting it into a temporary file). The idea is to:

Most large workloads such as SAP HANA require special, highly optimized configuration to run in a virtual machine. Virtual resources such as memory and CPU must be carefully configured to ensure optimum performance of the virtual machine workload. Default VM configuration created by tools such as virt-install are not optimized and often result in poor performance of large workloads due to memory access latencies and incorrect/incomplete information available to the VM's task scheduler. Currently, users deploying large workloads must manually optimize virtual CPU and memory resources, which can be error-prone and if not done properly can actually degrade performance. This project aims to create a tool that can produce suggested vCPU and vNUMA configuration based on a VM configuration template and capabilities of the target virtual machine host. E.g. something along the lines of