Understanding the "BASIC-CLOUDINIT" Images

B

BookmarkManager

Hello everyone,

As stated in the title, I'm trying to understand the "BASIC-CLOUDINIT" images offered by FreeBSD here: https://download.freebsd.org/releases/VM-IMAGES/14.1-RELEASE/amd64/Latest/ (specifically the one labeled "FreeBSD-14.1-RELEASE-amd64-BASIC-CLOUDINIT-zfs.qcow2.xz")

My biggest point of confusion is that cloud-init doesn't actually appear to be installed by default on these images (and thus they won't actually run any cloud-init scripts). I've found some others that referencing it too. For context on why I find this confusing: I'm coming from the Linux side and I'm used to being able to download a cloud image and immediately have it work with cloud-init.

Additionally, I don't see any documentation about this on either official mentions of cloud-init. The 2023 post references the first steps in supporting cloud-init, and the 2024 post is about improvements to the code. If I use the search function on the "Documentation" page, there's no results for either "cloud-init" or "cloudinit".

So my questions:
  • Is there a different, official image that does support cloud-init out of the box?
  • If so, is there a reason why that one isn't as clearly labeled or pointed to?
  • If not, why aren't the images labeled with "BASIC-CLOUDINIT" set up to allow cloud-init by default? I thought that was their purpose.
 
Let me second your confusion.

Someone suggested that I try "nuage-init" but the documentation for that seems equally sparse. From what I've found:
  • it's a subset of "cloud-init"
  • it may be baked-in to some of the images (maybe all?)
  • I have not yet found anything to indicate what is supported from cloud-init and what is not
I'll follow-up here if I'm able to find anything on either cloud-init or nuage-init.
 
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