Cloud Images are missing packages required by cloud-init

I tried creating a local VM using QEMU and providing it with cloud-init user-data on startup with the OL8.9 and OL9.3 qcow images from here: https://yum.oracle.com/oracle-linux-templates.html

During testing, I noticed that:

partition isn't grown automatically even though the growpart module runs:

cause: cloud-utils-growpart package is missing

relevant error message from /var/log/cloud-init.log:

2024-03-30 05:47:27,489 - modules.py[DEBUG]: Running module growpart (<module 'cloudinit.config.cc_growpart' from '/usr/lib/python3.9/site-packages/cloudinit/config/cc_growpart.py'>) with frequency always
2024-03-30 05:47:27,489 - handlers.py[DEBUG]: start: init-local/config-growpart: running config-growpart with frequency always
2024-03-30 05:47:27,489 - helpers.py[DEBUG]: Running config-growpart using lock (<cloudinit.helpers.DummyLock object at 0x7fa7a2d486d0>)
2024-03-30 05:47:27,489 - cc_growpart.py[DEBUG]: No 'growpart' entry in cfg.  Using default: {'mode': 'auto', 'devices': ['/'], 'ignore_growroot_disabled': False}
2024-03-30 05:47:27,489 - subp.py[DEBUG]: Running command ['growpart', '--help'] with allowed return codes [0] (shell=False, capture=True)
2024-03-30 05:47:27,490 - subp.py[DEBUG]: Running command ['gpart', 'help'] with allowed return codes [0, 1] (shell=False, capture=True)
2024-03-30 05:47:27,491 - cc_growpart.py[DEBUG]: growpart unable to find resizer for 'auto': No resizers available
2024-03-30 05:47:27,491 - handlers.py[DEBUG]: finish: init-local/config-growpart: SUCCESS: config-growpart ran successfully

cloud-init collect-logs command does not work

cause: tar package is missing

relevant error message:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/lib/python3.9/site-packages/cloudinit/subp.py", line 291, in subp
    sp = subprocess.Popen(
  File "/usr/lib64/python3.9/subprocess.py", line 951, in __init__
    self._execute_child(args, executable, preexec_fn, close_fds,
  File "/usr/lib64/python3.9/subprocess.py", line 1837, in _execute_child
    raise child_exception_type(errno_num, err_msg, err_filename)
FileNotFoundError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: b'tar'

The above exception was the direct cause of the following exception:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/bin/cloud-init", line 33, in <module>
    sys.exit(load_entry_point('cloud-init==23.1.1', 'console_scripts', 'cloud-init')())
  File "/usr/lib/python3.9/site-packages/cloudinit/cmd/main.py", line 1086, in main
    retval = util.log_time(
  File "/usr/lib/python3.9/site-packages/cloudinit/util.py", line 2757, in log_time
    ret = func(*args, **kwargs)
  File "/usr/lib/python3.9/site-packages/cloudinit/cmd/devel/logs.py", line 278, in handle_collect_logs_args
    return collect_logs(args.tarfile, args.userdata, args.verbosity)
  File "/usr/lib/python3.9/site-packages/cloudinit/cmd/devel/logs.py", line 271, in collect_logs
    subp(["tar", "czvf", tarfile, log_dir.replace(tmp_dir + "/", "")])
  File "/usr/lib/python3.9/site-packages/cloudinit/subp.py", line 304, in subp
    raise ProcessExecutionError(
cloudinit.subp.ProcessExecutionError: Unexpected error while running command.
Command: ['tar', 'czvf', '/home/vm/cloud-init.tar.gz', 'cloud-init-logs-2024-03-30']
Exit code: -
Reason: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: b'tar'
Stdout: -
Stderr: -

While the cloud-init collect-logs issue is not critical since it can be worked around by looking at /var/log/cloud-init.log (or installing the tar package if the reason you're looking into those logs isn't due to faulty networking) but the growpart issue seems more serious since it normally would be done automatically during the boot process. There could be some other dependencies missing that I haven't noticed too but I haven't really looked into it further.

For whatever reason, the cloud-init package dropped the dependency on cloud-utils-growpart some time ago.
I have seen and fixed this recently:

oracle-linux/oracle-linux-image-tools/cloud/olvm/provision.sh

Line 76 in ba7a14e

yum install -y "${YUM_VERBOSE}" cloud-init cloud-utils-growpart

I didn't noticed the tar dependency though.
I'll fix this and republish images on the public yum.

Didn't meant to close this issue now 😊