[10:45] <meena> why are we trying to read the system-serial-number on NoCloud? What info could that possibly contain?
[13:50] <falcojr> meena: it's a hacky way to provide ds configuration. See https://bugs.launchpad.net/cloud-init/+bug/1691772
[13:50] <falcojr> and https://bugs.launchpad.net/cloud-init/+bug/1753558 is a long time open bug proposing an alternative
[13:53] <meena> how do you even assign a serial number? i don't have one in my libvirt
[13:54] <meena> oh, it's right there in the bug
[13:55] <meena> I guess what i wanna know is how to do that virt-manager
[13:56] <falcojr> personally, I have no idea :P
[13:59] <meena> my laptop is too far away
[13:59] <meena> but either way, using a thing called serial *number* to provide a URL feels very icky
[14:02] <minimal> meena: there's other way to provide it, i.e. add "ds=nocloud-net;s=<base url>" to /proc/cmdline
[14:03] <meena> minimal: i don't think FreeBSD has that
[14:03] <meena> or any BSD, for that matter
[14:04] <minimal> meena: right, not sure about that. Or you could add "NoCloud:\nseedfrom: <base url>" to /etc/cloud/cloud.cfg
[14:05] <falcojr> yeah, looks like they wanted to add it without having to modify an image
[14:06] <minimal> falcojr: I realise that, that way is sort of a halfway house, the image is modified to add a base url but the meta-data/user-data/network-config is not inside the image
[14:08] <meena> and no one could decide on a standard IP to go check?
[14:09] <falcojr> yeah...
[14:09] <minimal> meena: so even a "standard" hostname, e.g. if the url was "http://metadata/" then your local network could resolve "metadata" to whatever you want
[14:11] <meena> smbios.system.vendor=SomeCloud, smbios.system.serial=1654, means fetch from 10.2.64.17/$serial
[14:11] <meena> minimal: or that
[14:15] <minimal> meena: what about loader.conf? the manpage says "THrought it you can specify the kernel to be booted, parameters to be passed to it", couldn't that be used in a similar way to Grub/Syslinux passing stuff to /proc/cmdline on Linux?
[14:17] <meena> minimal: is that how people do that with grub, too? in a Cloud setting? 
[14:18] <minimal> meena: I thought we were talking about NoCloud rather than in a Cloud setting
[14:18] <minimal> typically I'd expect a Cloud to either have a metadata server or else provide a NoCloud/ConfigDrive ISO/fs
[14:34] <meena> minimal: right
[14:43] <meena> minimal: i just thought i had seen other cloud providers' code also read from /proc/cmdline
[14:56] <minimal> meena: from a quick grep I only see Scaleway (checking for presence of "scaleway" in cmdline) and Vultr (checking for "vultr" presence for their Baremetal machines) using cmdline
[14:59] <meena> so, how i pass parameters to the kernel? (without modifying the image?)
[15:03] <minimal> meena: wellI assume you can't as the act of passing parameters would involve changing the bootloader config in some fashion
[15:04] <minimal> unless you consider something like Grub where you can interrupt it at the boot menu to modify what it passes on without any change being stored (i.e. a temporary change)
[15:15] <holman> With qemu there's an argument that gets passed to the kernel.
[15:19] <minimal> I guess I'm confused as to what meena is trying to achieve and in which environment (specific Cloud Provider, specific hypervisor, etc)
[15:32] <meena> holman: I'll try that and see if it arrives
[15:45] <meena> qemu has -append, i wonder if I can add that thru virt-manager without editing XML
[15:50] <meena> https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=688060 yes, but carefully
[15:56] <falcojr> blackboxsw: Oracle PR up https://github.com/canonical/cloud-init/pull/1735