VM images (VirtualBox, VMware, qemu, Parallell, UTM, cloud init)

[sailoz]

Brain storming stage at moment.

One image to start, possibly x86_64 first.
Use Arch provided x86_64 image (1), or create ours specific.
Convert to other format or make specific images.

Effort vs Merit
Cost vs Value

Priority
a. x86_64
b. aarch65

1. https://gitlab.archlinux.org/archlinux/arch-boxes/-/packages

[dylanbr]

Take a look at #786 for working proof of concept using qemu. It uses a qcow2 arch-boxes image, and then runs the install in a second qcow2 overlay.

This is known to work on an Intel Mac and an Apple Silicon Mac. It should work on Linux machines too, I just haven't yet been able to spin up a Linux box to test it. Regardless of the host platform, it currently generates only a x86_64 image. This is purely because I haven't found a reasonable aarch64 base image to use, and would be easy enough to incorporate.

To get other formats, the base and overlay could be merged, and then converted to other formats. For the moment, I'll look at a feature to export the merged base and overlay, so we can get a single distributable qcow2 image.