Migration from CoreOS Container Linux

While Flatcar is compatible with CoreOS Container Linux there are some naming differences you need to be aware of.

NOTE: See Updating from CoreOS Container Linux for additional information on updating an existing cluster.

Installation

Optional: Instead of coreos-installer you should use flatcar-installer.

Kernel command line parameters

Optional: Instead of providing the coreos.first_boot=1 argument via the boot loader you should provide flatcar.first_boot=1. This forces provisioning via Ignition even if the machine (image) was booted already before.

Optional: Instead of providing the coreos.config.url=SOMEURL argument via the boot loader you should provide ignition.config.url=SOMEURL to tell Ignition to download the configuration. The change to a more generic name was done upstream by the Ignition project. Version 0.33 still supports both names and we also do this via the analogous flatcar.config.url option but we encourage the generic name because future versions of Ignition will only support ignition.config.url.

Optional: Instead of providing the coreos.oem.id=NAME argument via the boot loader you should provide flatcar.oem.id=NAME. (A change to the more generic name ignition.platform.id was done upstream by the Afterburn project but is not part of Container Linux yet.)

Recover from or prevent errors with missing OEM settings (e.g., [email protected]): While current releases handle both coreos.oem and flatcar.oem names, previous releases still required flatcar.oem.…. In that case you need to change the variables in the file /usr/share/oem/grub.cfg when you update from CoreOS Container Linux:

# GRUB settings
set oem_id="myoemvalue"
set linux_append="$linux flatcar.oem.id=myoemvalue"

Ignition configuration with QEMU

Optional: Instead of using opt/com.coreos/config in the -fw_cfg name-value argument pair for QEMU/KVM or libvirt you need to use opt/org.flatcar-linux/config. The value in the argument pair specifies the Ignition file to use.

Ignition configuration with VMware

Optional: Instead of coreos.config.data and coreos.config.data.encoding for the VMware guestinfo.VARIABLE command line options you should use ignition.config.data and ignition.config.data.encoding. Same as for the ignition.config.url kernel parameter this change was done upstream by the Ignition project.