Add kdump support for COS

[xueweiz]

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[xueweiz]

This pull request is to add kdump support in COS, which is the third commit in this series.
The first two is necessary as the context, and are being reviewed at #1419

[xueweiz]

Sorry, I submitted the code against the wrong branch. Discarding this pull request. Will create a new one.

[bmr-cymru]

You're going to want a PackageManager for this policy, or few plugins will be triggered to execute.

[xueweiz]

Hi Bryan, the problem is that COS is a locked-down OS, without any PackageManager. It is similar to CoreOS in this way. You can see the documentation at [1]. Basically since COS should only be used to run docker/k8s containers, it simply don't have a package manager.

I think for now, only triggering the "whitelisted" plugins on COS is good enough for now. Later I can do a through scan, and get a more complete list of plugins that works on COS. Thanks!

[1] https://cloud.google.com/container-optimized-os/docs/concepts/features-and-benefits#features_and_benefits

[bmr-cymru]

Hi Bryan,

It's Bryn - no 'a'.

COS is a locked-down OS, without any PackageManager

It will still have a set of installed packages - much like e.g. Atomic with RPMOSTree (albeit by a different mechanism).

The policy should emulate this - if necessary by providing or obtaining a static list of all packages and their versions, and exposing this through the sos.policy.PackageManager abstraction. You don't need to shell out to an actual package manager command for this, you just need to provide the data. It's hard for me to believe that an operating system provides no way to identify the software and its versions that are included - it'd be a nightmare to audit for a start.

I think for now, only triggering the "whitelisted" plugins on COS is good enough for now. Later I can do a through scan, and get a more complete list of plugins that works on COS. Thanks!

It's more a matter of having a policy and plugin set that fits in with the overall sos scheme - the current COS policy is far too minimal and will not deliver the experience that our users expect. It needs to improve.

[bmr-cymru]

ChromiumOS is the development version of ChromeOS, so it is based on Gentoo, which uses the Portage package manager: there should be files available in the read-only root file system that will provide the information that sos needs.

Note that even after doing this, working on this OS may be challenging since most commands and higher level tools are containerised. You can look at the work that we did for Atomic to get an idea of what is involved but it is non-trivial to support this kind of system today.