This virtual machine image based on the Garden Linux Builder is meant for building Garden Linux.

The dev image provides:

• An isolated and reproducible environment optimized for the Garden Linux development workflow
• An environment to contribute to Garden Linux on non-linux hosts (tested on macOS)
• A selection of helpful tools and configuration geared towards the best developer experience

If you are trying to build Garden Linux on your own machine, and it does not work, please try building it inside the dev image. Feel free to open an issue if you face any problems when building Garden Linux.

The dev image supports two modes of operation:

• As a QEMU vm (using the start-vm script)
• As a lima-vm (using the limactl command)

Using lima might be desirable for its life-cycle features, but is entirely optional.

The image can be used in combination with remote development using ssh features by vs code.

To make use of this development environment, your host machine needs at least 16 GiB of memory and 8 CPU cores.

The start-vm script will by default use 8 GiB and 4 cores for running the VM. It's not recommended to lower those settings, but you might want to increase them based on your available hardware and your use-case.

Your host needs to have qemu installed.

Installing lima-vm is optional based on if you prefer to use it.

The image is composed of features. Which features are selected at build time determines what the image contains.

This graph explains how the features are connected to each other.

graph TD;
    base-->dev;
    dev-->imagebuilder;
    dev-->kernelbuilder;
    imagebuilder-->qemu;
    imagebuilder-->lima;
    kernelbuilder-->qemu;
    kernelbuilder-->lima;

Images are built on GitHub Actions and can be downloaded using the gh cli tool.

Check for available artifacts via gh run view or on the web.

Select a variant (imagebuilder or kernelbuilder), a platform (qemu or lima) and an architecture (amd64 or arm64) of your choice.

Download the image, depending the combination of variant, platform and architecture:

gh run download --name [ARTIFACT_NAME]

To build an image, select a variant (imagebuilder or kernelbuilder) and a platform (qemu or lima).

./build imagebuilder-qemu

To run the virtual machine, either build the image or download a pre-built image. Be sure to pick the variant that's suitable for your use-case.

This method makes use of the start-vm script that's part of this GitHub repo. Using this method you will be logged in using the dev user and you can make use of sudo without providing a password.

It's not recommended to work in this shell as the serial console is less reliable than a ssh session.

Both the dev user and the root user don't have a password. After starting the virtual machine, create a ssh key using the make-dev-ssh-key.sh script.

git clone https://github.com/gardenlinux/dev-image
dev-image/bin/start-vm [--userconfig username/repo] path-to/(imagebuilder/kernelbuilder)-(qemu/lima)-(arm/amd)64-trixie-*.raw
# Generate ssh key via `make-dev-ssh-key.sh` inside the vm
# Put the generated ssh key (.ssh/id_rsa in the vm) to $HOME/.gardenlinux/dev-id_rsa on your host
dev-image/bin/devssh

This provides a ssh login to the virtual machine.

To use it with vs code remote ssh, add an entry like this to your .ssh/config file (be sure to replace the path of your home directory):

Host gl-dev
  HostName localhost
  StrictHostKeyChecking no
  IdentityFile /YOUR_HOME_DIR/.gardenlinux/dev-id_rsa
  Port 2223
  BatchMode yes
  User dev

Now you can connect to the gl-dev host and work like you would on your local workstation.

lima-vm is written in go and makes use of QEMU under the hood. It provides advanced provisioning and life cycle management features which might make it more convenient compared to using start-vm.

To use it, get the lima dev vm image (the file ends in qcow2).

Create a gl-dev.yaml manifest file based on this template, and adjust the path to your image:

images:
- location: "./path-to/dev-image.qcow2"

vmType: qemu
os: Linux
memory: 8GiB
containerd:
  system: false
  user: false
provision:
  - mode: system
    script: |
      #!/bin/bash
      set -eux -o pipefail
      export DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive
      apt-get update
      echo Put your root-permission provisioning here (for example installing additional packages using apt-get)
  - mode: user
    script: |
      #!/bin/bash
      set -eux -o pipefail
      echo Put your user-permission provisioning here (for example cloning your dotfiles, making custom aliases, etc)

Create and start the virtual machine:

limactl create --name gl-dev gl-dev.yaml
echo "Include ${LIMA_HOME:-$HOME/.lima}/gl-dev/ssh.config" >> ~/.ssh/config
limactl start gl-dev
limactl shell gl-dev

Connect to host 'lima-gl-dev' in VS Code via the SSH Remote plugin

Perform the required git configuration to be able to commit and push code

• Configure your name and email
• Configure a GitHub personal access token

git config --global user.name "Your Name"
git config --global user.email [email protected]
export GH_TOKEN='YOUR_TOKEN'