Making a bootable CD-ROM/ISO from virt-builder

virt-builder can throw out new virtual machines with existing operating systems in a few seconds, and you can also write these directly to a USB key or hard disk:

# virt-builder fedora-20 -o /dev/sdX

What you’ve not been able to do is create a bootable CD-ROM or ISO image.

For that I was using the awful livecd-creator program. This needs root and is incredibly fragile. You can have a kickstart that works one day, but not the next, and requires massive hacks to get working … which is the exact reason why I set off to find out how to make virt-builder create ISOs.


The background as to why this is difficult: CDs are not writable.

You can take all the files from a Fedora guest built by virt-builder and turn them into an ISO, and put ISOLINUX on it but such a guest would not be able to boot, or at least, it would fail the first time it tried to write to the disk. One day overlayfs (which just went upstream a few days ago) will solve this, but until that is widely available in upstream kernels, we’re going to need something that creates a writable overlay at boot time.

Boot Time

I have chosen dracut (another tool I have a love/hate, mainly hate, relationship with), which has a useful module called dmsquash-live. This implements the boot side of making a live CD writable, for Fedora and RHEL. It’s what livecd-creator uses.

dmsquash-live demands a very particular ISO layout, but it wasn’t hard to reverse engineer it by reading the code carefully and a lot of trial and error.

It requires that we have a filesystem containing a squashfs in a particular location on the CD:


That squashfs has to contain inside it a disk image with this precise name:


and the disk image is the root filesystem.

The Script

The script below creates all of this, and effectively replaces livecd-creator with something manageable that doesn’t require root, and is only 100 lines of shell (take that OO/Python!)

Update: Kashyap notes that the script will fail if you’re using tmp-on-tmpfs, so you might need to disable that or modify the script to use /var/tmp instead.

Once you’ve run the script you can try booting the image using:

$ qemu-kvm -m 2048 -cdrom boot.iso -boot d

The Future

One improvement to this script would be to remove the dependency on dmsquash-live. We don’t need the baroque complexity of this script, and could write a custom dracut module (perhaps even, a tiny self-contained initramfs) which would do what we need. It could even use overlayfs to simplify things greatly.

#!/bin/bash -

set -e

# Make bootable ISO from virt-builder
# image.
# This requires the Fedora
# squashfs/rootfs machinery.  See:
# /lib/dracut/modules.d/90dmsquash-live/

cd /tmp

# Build the regular disk image, but also
# build a special initramfs which has
# the dmsquash-live & pollcdrom modules
# enabled.  We also need to kill SELinux
# relabelling, and hence SELinux.
cat > postinstall <<'EOF'
#!/bin/bash -
version=` rpm -q kernel | sort -rV | head -1 | sed 's/kernel-//' `
echo installed kernel version: $version
dracut --no-hostonly --add "dmsquash-live pollcdrom" /boot/initrd0 $version

virt-builder fedora-20 \
    --install kernel \
    --root-password password:123456 \
    --edit '/etc/selinux/config:
        s/SELINUX=enforcing/SELINUX=disabled/' \
    --delete /.autorelabel \
    --run postinstall

# Extract the root filesystem (as an ext3/4 disk image).
guestfish --progress-bars --ro -a fedora-20.img -i \
    download /dev/sda3 rootfs.img

# Update /etc/fstab in the rootfs (but NOT in the original guest)
# so it works for the CD
virt-customize -a rootfs.img \
  --write '/etc/fstab:/dev/root / ext4 defaults 1 1'

# Turn the rootfs.img into a squashfs
# which must contain the layout
# /LiveOS/rootfs.img
rm -rf CDroot
rm -f squashfs.img
mkdir -p CDroot/LiveOS
mv rootfs.img CDroot/LiveOS
mksquashfs CDroot squashfs.img

# Create the CD layout.
rm -rf CDroot
mkdir -p CDroot/LiveOS

cp squashfs.img CDroot/LiveOS/

mkdir CDroot/isolinux

# Get the kernel (only) from the disk
# image.
pushd CDroot/isolinux
virt-builder --get-kernel ../../fedora-20.img
mv vmlinuz* vmlinuz0
rm init*

# Get the special initrd that we built
# above.
guestfish --ro -a fedora-20.img -i \
    download /boot/initrd0 CDroot/isolinux/initrd0

# ISOLINUX configuration.
cat > CDroot/isolinux/isolinux.cfg <<EOF
prompt 1
default 1
label 1
    kernel vmlinuz0
    append initrd=initrd0 root=CDLABEL=boot rootfstype=auto console=tty0 rd_NO_PLYMOUTH

# Rest of ISOLINUX installation.
cp /usr/share/syslinux/isolinux.bin CDroot/isolinux/
cp /usr/share/syslinux/ldlinux.c32 CDroot/isolinux/
cp /usr/share/syslinux/libcom32.c32 CDroot/isolinux/
cp /usr/share/syslinux/libutil.c32 CDroot/isolinux/
cp /usr/share/syslinux/vesamenu.c32 CDroot/isolinux/

# Create the ISO.
rm -f boot.iso
mkisofs -o boot.iso \
    -J -r \
    -V boot \
   -b isolinux/isolinux.bin -c isolinux/ \


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4 responses to “Making a bootable CD-ROM/ISO from virt-builder

  1. This is great, would it be possible to do the same PXE bootable live image? Currently what we do is livecd-creator with turning it to PXE init ram disk using livecd-to-pxe-boot utility if I remember that right which require whole ISO in memory. I am seeking for a better approach. Thanks.

  2. Doesn’t look like it’s UEFI bootable.

    This looks like one of those cases where you make something ‘much simpler’ than an existing thing, only it turns out it’s missing half the capabilities, and once you’ve given it all the same capabilities, it’s just as complex…

    bcl already has a replacement for livecd-creator named livemedia-creator, note, but we can’t use it for Fedora purposes ATM because of incompatibilities between how it works and how Koji works (that’s the tl;dr version, apply to bcl/dgilmore for details).

    • rich

      I’ve not tried it (I don’t have any UEFI x86 machines, or the ones I do operate in BIOS mode) but as far as I can see from the ISOLINUX page, that should boot on UEFI too.

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