Introducing mkosi

After blogging about casync I realized I never blogged about the mkosi tool that combines nicely with it. mkosi has been around for a while already, and its time to make it a bit better known. mkosi stands for Make Operating System Image, and is a tool for precisely that: generating an OS tree or image that can be booted.

Yes, there are many tools like mkosi, and a number of them are quite well known and popular. But mkosi has a number of features that I think make it interesting for a variety of use-cases that other tools don't cover that well.

What is mkosi?

What are those use-cases, and what does mkosi precisely set apart? mkosi is definitely a tool with a focus on developer's needs for building OS images, for testing and debugging, but also for generating production images with cryptographic protection. A typical use-case would be to add a mkosi.default file to an existing project (for example, one written in C or Python), and thus making it easy to generate an OS image for it. mkosi will put together the image with development headers and tools, compile your code in it, run your test suite, then throw away the image again, and build a new one, this time without development headers and tools, and install your build artifacts in it. This final image is then "production-ready", and only contains your built program and the minimal set of packages you configured otherwise. Such an image could then be deployed with casync (or any other tool of course) to be delivered to your set of servers, or IoT devices or whatever you are building.

mkosi is supposed to be legacy-free: the focus is clearly on today's technology, not yesteryear's. Specifically this means that we'll generate GPT partition tables, not MBR/DOS ones. When you tell mkosi to generate a bootable image for you, it will make it bootable on EFI, not on legacy BIOS. The GPT images generated follow specifications such as the Discoverable Partitions Specification, so that /etc/fstab can remain unpopulated and tools such as systemd-nspawn can automatically dissect the image and boot from them.

So, let's have a look on the specific images it can generate:

1. Raw GPT disk image, with ext4 as root
2. Raw GPT disk image, with btrfs as root
3. Raw GPT disk image, with a read-only squashfs as root
4. A plain directory on disk containing the OS tree directly (this is useful for creating generic container images)
5. A btrfs subvolume on disk, similar to the plain directory
6. A tarball of a plain directory

When any of the GPT choices above are selected, a couple of additional options are available:

1. A swap partition may be added in
2. The system may be made bootable on EFI systems
3. Separate partitions for /home and /srv may be added in
4. The root, /home and /srv partitions may be optionally encrypted with LUKS
5. The root partition may be protected using dm-verity, thus making offline attacks on the generated system hard
6. If the image is made bootable, the dm-verity root hash is automatically added to the kernel command line, and the kernel together with its initial RAM disk and the kernel command line is optionally cryptographically signed for UEFI SecureBoot

Note that mkosi is distribution-agnostic. It currently can build images based on the following Linux distributions:

1. Fedora
2. Debian
3. Ubuntu
4. ArchLinux
5. openSUSE

Note though that not all distributions are supported at the same feature level currently. Also, as mkosi is based on dnf --installroot, debootstrap, pacstrap and zypper, and those packages are not packaged universally on all distributions, you might not be able to build images for all those distributions on arbitrary host distributions.

The GPT images are put together in a way that they aren't just compatible with UEFI systems, but also with VM and container managers (that is, at least the smart ones, i.e. VM managers that know UEFI, and container managers that grok GPT disk images) to a large degree. In fact, the idea is that you can use mkosi to build a single GPT image that may be used to:

1. Boot on bare-metal boxes
2. Boot in a VM
3. Boot in a systemd-nspawn container
4. Directly run a systemd service off, using systemd's RootImage= unit file setting

Note that in all four cases the dm-verity data is automatically used if available to ensure the image is not tampered with (yes, you read that right, systemd-nspawn and systemd's RootImage= setting automatically do dm-verity these days if the image has it.)

Mode of Operation

The simplest usage of mkosi is by simply invoking it without parameters (as root):

# mkosi

Without any configuration this will create a GPT disk image for you, will call it image.raw and drop it in the current directory. The distribution used will be the same one as your host runs.

Of course in most cases you want more control about how the image is put together, i.e. select package sets, select the distribution, size partitions and so on. Most of that you can actually specify on the command line, but it is recommended to instead create a couple of mkosi.$SOMETHING files and directories in some directory. Then, simply change to that directory and run mkosi without any further arguments. The tool will then look in the current working directory for these files and directories and make use of them (similar to how make looks for a Makefile…). Every single file/directory is optional, but if they exist they are honored. Here's a list of the files/directories mkosi currently looks for:

1. mkosi.default — This is the main configuration file, here you can configure what kind of image you want, which distribution, which packages and so on.

2. mkosi.extra/ — If this directory exists, then mkosi will copy everything inside it into the images built. You can place arbitrary directory hierarchies in here, and they'll be copied over whatever is already in the image, after it was put together by the distribution's package manager. This is the best way to drop additional static files into the image, or override distribution-supplied ones.

3. mkosi.build — This executable file is supposed to be a build script. When it exists, mkosi will build two images, one after the other in the mode already mentioned above: the first version is the build image, and may include various build-time dependencies such as a compiler or development headers. The build script is also copied into it, and then run inside it. The script should then build whatever shall be built and place the result in $DESTDIR (don't worry, popular build tools such as Automake or Meson all honor $DESTDIR anyway, so there's not much to do here explicitly). It may also run a test suite, or anything else you like. After the script finished, the build image is removed again, and a second image (the final image) is built. This time, no development packages are included, and the build script is not copied into the image again — however, the build artifacts from the first run (i.e. those placed in $DESTDIR) are copied into the image.

4. mkosi.postinst — If this executable script exists, it is invoked inside the image (inside a systemd-nspawn invocation) and can adjust the image as it likes at a very late point in the image preparation. If mkosi.build exists, i.e. the dual-phased development build process used, then this script will be invoked twice: once inside the build image and once inside the final image. The first parameter passed to the script clarifies which phase it is run in.

5. mkosi.nspawn — If this file exists, it should contain a container configuration file for systemd-nspawn (see systemd.nspawn(5) for details), which shall be shipped along with the final image and shall be included in the check-sum calculations (see below).

6. mkosi.cache/ — If this directory exists, it is used as package cache directory for the builds. This directory is effectively bind mounted into the image at build time, in order to speed up building images. The package installers of the various distributions will place their package files here, so that subsequent runs can reuse them.

7. mkosi.passphrase — If this file exists, it should contain a pass-phrase to use for the LUKS encryption (if that's enabled for the image built). This file should not be readable to other users.

8. mkosi.secure-boot.crt and mkosi.secure-boot.key should be an X.509 key pair to use for signing the kernel and initrd for UEFI SecureBoot, if that's enabled.

How to use it

So, let's come back to our most trivial example, without any of the mkosi.$SOMETHING files around:

# mkosi

As mentioned, this will create a build file image.raw in the current directory. How do we use it? Of course, we could dd it onto some USB stick and boot it on a bare-metal device. However, it's much simpler to first run it in a container for testing:

# systemd-nspawn -bi image.raw

And there you go: the image should boot up, and just work for you.

Now, let's make things more interesting. Let's still not use any of the mkosi.$SOMETHING files around:

# mkosi -t raw_btrfs --bootable -o foobar.raw
# systemd-nspawn -bi foobar.raw

This is similar as the above, but we made three changes: it's no longer GPT + ext4, but GPT + btrfs. Moreover, the system is made bootable on UEFI systems, and finally, the output is now called foobar.raw.

Because this system is bootable on UEFI systems, we can run it in KVM:

qemu-kvm -m 512 -smp 2 -bios /usr/share/edk2/ovmf/OVMF_CODE.fd -drive format=raw,file=foobar.raw

This will look very similar to the systemd-nspawn invocation, except that this uses full VM virtualization rather than container virtualization. (Note that the way to run a UEFI qemu/kvm instance appears to change all the time and is different on the various distributions. It's quite annoying, and I can't really tell you what the right qemu command line is to make this work on your system.)

Of course, it's not all raw GPT disk images with mkosi. Let's try a plain directory image:

# mkosi -d fedora -t directory -o quux
# systemd-nspawn -bD quux

Of course, if you generate the image as plain directory you can't boot it on bare-metal just like that, nor run it in a VM.

A more complex command line is the following:

# mkosi -d fedora -t raw_squashfs --checksum --xz --package=openssh-clients --package=emacs

In this mode we explicitly pick Fedora as the distribution to use, ask mkosi to generate a compressed GPT image with a root squashfs, compress the result with xz, and generate a SHA256SUMS file with the hashes of the generated artifacts. The package will contain the SSH client as well as everybody's favorite editor.

Now, let's make use of the various mkosi.$SOMETHING files. Let's say we are working on some Automake-based project and want to make it easy to generate a disk image off the development tree with the version you are hacking on. Create a configuration file:

# cat > mkosi.default <<EOF
[Distribution]
Distribution=fedora
Release=24

[Output]
Format=raw_btrfs
Bootable=yes

[Packages]
# The packages to appear in both the build and the final image
Packages=openssh-clients httpd
# The packages to appear in the build image, but absent from the final image
BuildPackages=make gcc libcurl-devel
EOF

And let's add a build script:

# cat > mkosi.build <<EOF
#!/bin/sh
./autogen.sh
./configure --prefix=/usr
make -j `nproc`
make install
EOF
# chmod +x mkosi.build

And with all that in place we can now build our project into a disk image, simply by typing:

# mkosi

Let's try it out:

# systemd-nspawn -bi image.raw

Of course, if you do this you'll notice that building an image like this can be quite slow. And slow build times are actively hurtful to your productivity as a developer. Hence let's make things a bit faster. First, let's make use of a package cache shared between runs:

# mkdir mkosi.cache

Building images now should already be substantially faster (and generate less network traffic) as the packages will now be downloaded only once and reused. However, you'll notice that unpacking all those packages and the rest of the work is still quite slow. But mkosi can help you with that. Simply use mkosi's incremental build feature. In this mode mkosi will make a copy of the build and final images immediately before dropping in your build sources or artifacts, so that building an image becomes a lot quicker: instead of always starting totally from scratch a build will now reuse everything it can reuse from a previous run, and immediately begin with building your sources rather than the build image to build your sources in. To enable the incremental build feature use -i:

# mkosi -i

Note that if you use this option, the package list is not updated anymore from your distribution's servers, as the cached copy is made after all packages are installed, and hence until you actually delete the cached copy the distribution's network servers aren't contacted again and no RPMs or DEBs are downloaded. This means the distribution you use becomes "frozen in time" this way. (Which might be a bad thing, but also a good thing, as it makes things kinda reproducible.)

Of course, if you run mkosi a couple of times you'll notice that it won't overwrite the generated image when it already exists. You can either delete the file yourself first (rm image.raw) or let mkosi do it for you right before building a new image, with mkosi -f. You can also tell mkosi to not only remove any such pre-existing images, but also remove any cached copies of the incremental feature, by using -f twice.

I wrote mkosi originally in order to test systemd, and quickly generate a disk image of various distributions with the most current systemd version from git, without all that affecting my host system. I regularly use mkosi for that today, in incremental mode. The two commands I use most in that context are:

# mkosi -if && systemd-nspawn -bi image.raw

And sometimes:

# mkosi -iff && systemd-nspawn -bi image.raw

The latter I use only if I want to regenerate everything based on the very newest set of RPMs provided by Fedora, instead of a cached snapshot of it.

BTW, the mkosi files for systemd are included in the systemd git tree: mkosi.default and mkosi.build. This way, any developer who wants to quickly test something with current systemd git, or wants to prepare a patch based on it and test it can check out the systemd repository and simply run mkosi in it and a few minutes later he has a bootable image he can test in systemd-nspawn or KVM. casync has similar files: mkosi.default, mkosi.build.

Random Interesting Features

1. As mentioned already, mkosi will generate dm-verity enabled disk images if you ask for it. For that use the --verity switch on the command line or Verity= setting in mkosi.default. Of course, dm-verity implies that the root volume is read-only. In this mode the top-level dm-verity hash will be placed along-side the output disk image in a file named the same way, but with the .roothash suffix. If the image is to be created bootable, the root hash is also included on the kernel command line in the roothash= parameter, which current systemd versions can use to both find and activate the root partition in a dm-verity protected way. BTW: it's a good idea to combine this dm-verity mode with the raw_squashfs image mode, to generate a genuinely protected, compressed image suitable for running in your IoT device.

2. As indicated above, mkosi can automatically create a check-sum file SHA256SUMS for you (--checksum) covering all the files it outputs (which could be the image file itself, a matching .nspawn file using the mkosi.nspawn file mentioned above, as well as the .roothash file for the dm-verity root hash.) It can then optionally sign this with gpg (--sign). Note that systemd's machinectl pull-tar and machinectl pull-raw command can download these files and the SHA256SUMS file automatically and verify things on download. With other words: what mkosi outputs is perfectly ready for downloads using these two systemd commands.

3. As mentioned, mkosi is big on supporting UEFI SecureBoot. To make use of that, place your X.509 key pair in two files mkosi.secureboot.crt and mkosi.secureboot.key, and set SecureBoot= or --secure-boot. If so, mkosi will sign the kernel/initrd/kernel command line combination during the build. Of course, if you use this mode, you should also use Verity=/--verity=, otherwise the setup makes only partial sense. Note that mkosi will not help you with actually enrolling the keys you use in your UEFI BIOS.

4. mkosi has minimal support for GIT checkouts: when it recognizes it is run in a git checkout and you use the mkosi.build script stuff, the source tree will be copied into the build image, but will all files excluded by .gitignore removed.

5. There's support for encryption in place. Use --encrypt= or Encrypt=. Note that the UEFI ESP is never encrypted though, and the root partition only if explicitly requested. The /home and /srv partitions are unconditionally encrypted if that's enabled.

6. Images may be built with all documentation removed.

7. The password for the root user and additional kernel command line arguments may be configured for the image to generate.

Minimum Requirements

Current mkosi requires Python 3.5, and has a number of dependencies, listed in the README. Most notably you need a somewhat recent systemd version to make use of its full feature set: systemd 233. Older versions are already packaged for various distributions, but much of what I describe above is only available in the most recent release mkosi 3.

The UEFI SecureBoot support requires sbsign which currently isn't available in Fedora, but there's a COPR.

Future

It is my intention to continue turning mkosi into a tool suitable for:

1. Testing and debugging projects
2. Building images for secure devices
3. Building portable service images
4. Building images for secure VMs and containers

One of the biggest goals I have for the future is to teach mkosi and systemd/sd-boot native support for A/B IoT style partition setups. The idea is that the combination of systemd, casync and mkosi provides generic building blocks for building secure, auto-updating devices in a generic way from, even though all pieces may be used individually, too.

FAQ

1. Why are you reinventing the wheel again? This is exactly like $SOMEOTHERPROJECT! — Well, to my knowledge there's no tool that integrates this nicely with your project's development tree, and can do dm-verity and UEFI SecureBoot and all that stuff for you. So nope, I don't think this exactly like $SOMEOTHERPROJECT, thank you very much.

2. What about creating MBR/DOS partition images? — That's really out of focus to me. This is an exercise in figuring out how generic OSes and devices in the future should be built and an attempt to commoditize OS image building. And no, the future doesn't speak MBR, sorry. That said, I'd be quite interested in adding support for booting on Raspberry Pi, possibly using a hybrid approach, i.e. using a GPT disk label, but arranging things in a way that the Raspberry Pi boot protocol (which is built around DOS partition tables), can still work.

3. Is this portable? — Well, depends what you mean by portable. No, this tool runs on Linux only, and as it uses systemd-nspawn during the build process it doesn't run on non-systemd systems either. But then again, you should be able to create images for any architecture you like with it, but of course if you want the image bootable on bare-metal systems only systems doing UEFI are supported (but systemd-nspawn should still work fine on them).

4. Where can I get this stuff? — Try GitHub. And some distributions carry packaged versions, but I think none of them the current v3 yet.

5. Is this a systemd project? — Yes, it's hosted under the systemd GitHub umbrella. And yes, during run-time systemd-nspawn in a current version is required. But no, the code-bases are separate otherwise, already because systemd is a C project, and mkosi Python.

6. Requiring systemd 233 is a pretty steep requirement, no? — Yes, but the feature we need kind of matters (systemd-nspawn's --overlay= switch), and again, this isn't supposed to be a tool for legacy systems.

7. Can I run the resulting images in LXC or Docker? — Humm, I am not an LXC nor Docker guy. If you select directory or subvolume as image type, LXC should be able to boot the generated images just fine, but I didn't try. Last time I looked, Docker doesn't permit running proper init systems as PID 1 inside the container, as they define their own run-time without intention to emulate a proper system. Hence, no I don't think it will work, at least not with an unpatched Docker version. That said, again, don't ask me questions about Docker, it's not precisely my area of expertise, and quite frankly I am not a fan. To my knowledge neither LXC nor Docker are able to run containers directly off GPT disk images, hence the various raw_xyz image types are definitely not compatible with either. That means if you want to generate a single raw disk image that can be booted unmodified both in a container and on bare-metal, then systemd-nspawn is the container manager to go for (specifically, its -i/--image= switch).

Should you care? Is this a tool for you?

Well, that's up to you really.

If you hack on some complex project and need a quick way to compile and run your project on a specific current Linux distribution, then mkosi is an excellent way to do that. Simply drop the mkosi.default and mkosi.build files in your git tree and everything will be easy. (And of course, as indicated above: if the project you are hacking on happens to be called systemd or casync be aware that those files are already part of the git tree — you can just use them.)

If you hack on some embedded or IoT device, then mkosi is a great choice too, as it will make it reasonably easy to generate secure images that are protected against offline modification, by using dm-verity and UEFI SecureBoot.

If you are an administrator and need a nice way to build images for a VM or systemd-nspawn container, or a portable service then mkosi is an excellent choice too.

If you care about legacy computers, old distributions, non-systemd init systems, old VM managers, Docker, … then no, mkosi is not for you, but there are plenty of well-established alternatives around that cover that nicely.

And never forget: mkosi is an Open Source project. We are happy to accept your patches and other contributions.

Oh, and one unrelated last thing: don't forget to submit your talk proposal and/or buy a ticket for All Systems Go! 2017 in Berlin — the conference where things like systemd, casync and mkosi are discussed, along with a variety of other Linux userspace projects used for building systems.