Step By Step Procedure To Build A CBL-Mariner ISO Image!

Are you a developer working on Microsoft’s cloud platforms like Azure? Then, you should read this post. Microsoft has released a new open-source Linux project, ‘CBL-Mariner’, an internal Linux distribution for Microsoft’s cloud infrastructure as part of an open-source initiative. Well, this is not the first initiative project by Microsoft. It has contributed its investments in developing various Linux-based technologies, such as SONiC, Azure Sphere OS, and Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL). Now, you might want to know where should I download the CBL-Mariner ISO file. Microsoft didn’t release a bootable ISO file for the public. You have to build a CBL-Mariner ISO Image on your own. Let’s explore how to build a CBL-Mariner ISO Image in this demo.

Table of Contents

What Is CBL-Mariner?

Let’s clear the concept, CBL-Mariner is an open-source internal Linux distribution developed for Microsoft’s cloud infrastructure and edge products and services. It is not the OS developed for end-users like Ubuntu, Debian, and Mint Linux distributions. It is designed to provide a consistent platform for cloud services. Visit this git page to read more about CBL-Mariner.

Prerequisites To Build CBL-Mariner ISO Image:

Microsoft didn’t release installable files like its ISO, VHDX, or VMDK. We will show you how to build ISO images on your own and also share pre-built ISO images to make you more convenient. We are going to build a CBL-Mariner ISO image on Ubuntu Linux for demonstration purposes. Let’s quickly install the required packages on the Ubuntu on which we are going to build the CBL-Mariner ISO file.

Packages Required to Build CBL-Mariner ISO file:

How to Build CBL-Mariner ISO Image?

Tutorial

Step 1. Run this command to add a backports repo to install the necessary version of Go on Ubuntu:

$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:longsleep/golang-backports
$ sudo apt-get update

Step 2. Run this command to install make, tar, wget, curl, rpm, qemu-utils, golang-1.15-go, genisoimage, python-minimal3.8, bison, and gawk packages on Ubuntu:

$ sudo apt -y install make tar wget curl rpm qemu-utils golang-1.15-go genisoimage python-minimal bison gawk

Step 3. Run this command to install pigz on Ubuntu. This is an optional package to install. It is recommended but not required to have:

$ sudo apt -y install pigz

Step 4. Create a soft link of go inside the user’s bin directory to fix the go 1.15 link:

$ sudo ln -vsf /usr/lib/go-1.15/bin/go /usr/bin/go

Step 5. Run these commands to install the Docker engine on Ubuntu:

$ curl -fsSL https://get.docker.com -o get-docker.sh
$ sudo sh get-docker.sh
$ sudo usermod -aG docker $USER

Log out and Login after this to save the permission changes.

Step 6. Install git on Ubuntu if not installed:

$ sudo apt install git

How to Build CBL-Mariner ISO Image?

After installation of all the required packages. Let’s see how to build CBL-Mariner ISO Image.

Step 1. Clone CBL-Mariner to your local disk:

$ git clone https://github.com/microsoft/CBL-Mariner.git

Step 2. Check out the desired release branch. Sync to the latest stable build.

$ git checkout 1.0-stable

Step 3. Change your directory to CBL-Mariner/toolkit/ and build ISO bootable image using this command:

$ cd CBL-Mariner/toolkit/
$ sudo make iso REBUILD_TOOLS=y REBUILD_PACKAGES=n CONFIG_FILE=./imageconfigs/full.json

Note: This process may take 1 to 2 Hrs. Wait to complete the process.

You will see bootable CBL-Mariner ISO Image inside /CBL-Mariner/out/images/full:

Download the Pre-Built CBL-Mariner ISO file:

We are going to share the CBL-Mariner ISO file which we have created. You can download the bootable CBL-Mariner ISO file from here.

CBL-Mariner ISO fileDownload

As promised, we have shown a step-by-step procedure to build a CBL-Mariner ISO image along with a prebuilt ISO file which would save you time to build a CBL-Mariner ISO from scratch.

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