The Fedora 27 Atomic Host now supports multiple architectures! Along with the x86_64 architecture, Atomic Host is also available on 64-bit ARM (aarch64) and PowerPC Little Endian (ppc64le). Both aarch64 and ppc64le architectures receive Atomic OSTree updates in the same way x86_64 does.

Atomic Host provides an immutable operating system tree (OStree) with a rollback facility. To learn more, see the Project Atomic website.

Download the Fedora 27 Atomic Host

Fedora Atomic Host for aarch64 and ppc64le are available in both ISO and cloud image formats:

Installation

You can install Fedora 27 Atomic Host where you want it — on bare metal, virtual machine, or cloud. If you have some aarch64 or ppc64le hardware, take Atomic Host for a spin. One quick way is to run virt-install on one of these platforms.

The virt-install command line tool creates a virtual machine based on the QEMU emulator. It offers KVM hardware acceleration managed by libvirt on top. To get started using virt-install in graphical or console mode, install the virtualization group of packages using sudo:

sudo dnf install @virtualization

Next, start the libvirtd service if not already running:

sudo systemctl start libvirtd

Now use virt-install to run the Atomic Host image:

sudo virt-install --name fedora-27-atomic --ram 2048 --vcpus 2 --disk path=/var/lib/libvirt/images/Fedora-Atomic-27..qcow2 --os-type linux --os-variant fedora26 --network bridge=virbr0 --graphics vnc,listen=127.0.0.1,port=5901 --cdrom /var/lib/libvirt/images/init.iso --noautoconsole

The example assumes the Fedora Atomic qcow2 image and init.iso file are both available in the /var/lib/libvirt/images/ directory. The file init.iso is a metadata ISO that provides critical data when Atomic Host boots. Check out this article on the Project Atomic website to create it. You might need to make other adjustments to the virt-install command line above depending upon your requirement.

Limitations with aarch64

64-bit ARM is available for a variety of hardware. Installation should work as expected on server class hardware. However:

  • On aarch64 machine, Atomic Host ISO can be installed only in UEFI mode.
  • Installation is not yet supported on single board computer, such as RPi3 or Pine64.

Features

Atomic Host provides various features such as:

  • Immutable Host
  • Package Layering – Install additional package(s) on top of base Atomic Host using package layering:
    sudo rpm-ostree install elfutils
  • Running containers – Run a container image available locally or from a registry. For example, running a hello-world container image from the docker.io registry on ppc64le machine:
    sudo docker run --rm docker.io/ppc64le/hello-world
  • Atomic Update and Rollback – Atomic Host receives update in the form of a new Atomic OSTree:
    sudo rpm-ostree upgrade

    Since each operation is atomic, it is also possible to undo changes with the rollback feature:

    sudo rpm-ostree rollback

Getting help

Go ahead and try it out! For any queries, contact the Atomic team: