Fuchsia GCE Scripts

The scripts in this directory are convenience wrappers around primarily two tools: make-fuchsia-vol that is a host tool in the build, and gcloud which is the command like client for Google Cloud.

The scripts are usable via //scripts/gce/gce as an executable bash script.

Prerequisites

• You have followed the Fuchsia getting started documents: https://fuchsia.googlesource.com/docs/+/master/getting_started.md
• You have installed & configured gcloud(1): https://cloud.google.com/sdk/gcloud/
• You have setup defaults for gcloud, e.g.:

gcloud auth login
gcloud config set project my-awesome-cloud
gcloud config set compute/region us-west1
gcloud config set compute/zone us-west1-a

Building and running an image

The following incantation will create the relevant disk images and boot a Fuchsia instance:

cd $FUCHSIA_ROOT
fx set x86-64 --release
fx full-build
gce create-grub-image
gce create-fuchsia-image
gce create-instance
sleep 60
gce serial

How the sausage is made

gce/env.sh

The gce script suite comes with an env.sh that sets default environment variables used by gce subcommands. The gce entrypoint script sources this. Users can override all of the variables seen in env.sh, for example, altering the name of the GCE instance you create/delete can be done by setting $FUCHSIA_GCE_INSTANCE. See the contents of the script for more options.

Grub and Fuchsia volumes

The approach these scripts use create two disks for your GCE instance. One contains a minimal preconfigured GRUB bootloader that searches for, and boots, a Zircon image in an EFI-style directory layout on any disk in the system.

The Fuchsia disk images are built as standard x86-64 EFI bootable GPT volumes. The Grub image is mostly static and rarely needs to change. It can be shared between members of the same cloud project.

When instances are created, the grub disk is used as a system image (this is copied to the booting machine, and being small it facilitates fast boot times). The Fuchsia image is attached as a new persistent disk.

Command execution

The gce entrpoint script sources env.sh, then looks for a command script in the gce scripts directory that matches the first argument given to it. If it finds one, it shifts the first argument and execs that script.

Commands

• make-fuchsia-image - builds a local image file containing your local fuchsia build
• create-fuchsia-image - builds and uploads a fuchsia image to GCE.
• {make,create}-grub-image - builds grub and a grub boot disk image. The create script uploads that image to GCE. The grub image really only needs to be built once - it contains a grub configuration that searches for our standard EFI partition found in the images made by the make-fuchsia-vol tool.
• serial - attaches to the instance serial port. Note that you will need to have an appropriately configured compute engine ssh key for this to work. If you have a more tuned ssh configuration, you may need to add ~/.ssh/google_compute_engine to your ssh-agent.