Add Garden Linux template

[fwilhe]

I work on Garden Linux, an open-source, debian-derived Linux system with a focus on running container workloads (Kubernetes) and virtualisation.

Garden Linux is part of the NeoNephos foundation, a sub-foundation of the Linux Foundation Europe.

As of recently, we've added a lima-capable image, its usage is described here.

Would you accept a PR to add a Garden Linux template to this repo?

I think this would ne nice as the container focus of Garden Linux matches the use-case of lima quite well.

[afbjorklund]

We don't want to add more templates to the core, but it would be nice if there was an area with available third-party templates

Could take some more consideration, how that would work and be designed... Ironically the links could go in the repo ("website")

EDIT: You might not even need a full yaml template (unless you want to), your use case might almost be a oneliner...

There is a --containerd=none now, but no good way to set images (without using yq). And os: Linux is default.

[fwilhe]

Hi @afbjorklund

I see. From my perspective, the benefit of having it added to the core would be that it is accessible via the options menu that shows up if you don't select a template on your own, I'd love to see Garden Linux in there in a unmodified build of lima.

But I understand that you want to limit the number of templates in the core repo. Might it still be possible to be in that list, even for images that are externally maintained? I see that this might be problematic if you don't fully trust the third party that controls those images.

I don't insist on maintaining my own full yaml template, that's why I thought it would be nice to add it to the images list of upstream lima.

How much of limactl start --name gardenlinux https://images.gardenlinux.io/gardenlinux.yaml would that one-liner be able to reduce? I assume I'd still need to provide the full path to the qcow2 file, so that would not really be a difference.

Thanks,
Florian

[jandubois]

I just wrote #4097 as a suggestion to make third-party templates more discoverable without imposing ongoing maintenance burden on the Lima maintainers.

[afbjorklund]

And there could be some syntax improvements, like being able to specify an image (including arch). Or adding a template to the list, with some user extension of the default directory?

[jandubois]

If we expand the rules for github: locators in #3937 a bit more, so that github:ORG means github:ORG/lima.yaml/lima.yaml then you could use github:gardenlinux as the template URL, which looks pretty good and canonical to me.

We could even go one step further and check if ORG/lima.yaml exists, and fall back to ORG/ORG/lima.yaml, so the template could be in gardenlinux/gardenlinx/lima.yaml in the default branch, and the short locator would still work.

I'm hesitant to make the rules too complex, but this feels like a reasonable extension to avoid adding an extra repo just for the template.

limactl start -y github:gardenlinux

[AkihiroSuda]

We don't want to add more templates to the core

I think we can still add popular distros, but the popularity of Garden Linux might be still limited: https://github.com/gardenlinux/gardenlinux (199 stars)

We can revisit this proposal in future