Ignition platform parameters

Ignition uses platform identifiers to locate and retrieve configuration payloads during early boot. Identifying the correct platform parameter ensures that Ignition targets the appropriate metadata service or boot media.

The ignition.platform.id kernel argument specifies the configuration source, such as qemu, aws, or metal.

When you build or provision a bootc image, you can pass this parameter directly by using the boot loader or embed it into the image configuration.

Table 1. Ignition platform parameters
Platform ID Description Configuration source

metal

Bare-metal servers without cloud metadata.

Boot partition: /boot/ignition/config.ign

qemu

QEMU/KVM virtual machines.

fw_cfg: /etc/ignition/config.ign or virtio-blk device

aws

Amazon Web Services EC2 instances.

EC2 instance user data

azure

Microsoft Azure virtual machines.

Azure instance metadata service

gcp

Google Cloud Platform Compute Engine.

GCP metadata server

virtualbox

Oracle VirtualBox virtual machines.

Guest properties

vmware

VMware vSphere/ESXi virtual machines.

vSphere guestinfo
Architecture-specific parameters
Different CPU architectures require specific configuration delivery methods:
Table 2. Architecture-specific parameters
Architecture Preferred delivery method

x86_64

fw_cfg (-fw_cfg name=opt/com.coreos/config,file=config.ign)

AArch64

fw_cfg (-fw_cfg name=opt/com.coreos/config,file=config.ign)

s390x

virtio-blk device with Ignition configuration

ppc64le

virtio-blk device with Ignition configuration
Kernel command line examples
The following examples show how to set Ignition parameters in the kernel command line:
Bare metal
ignition.platform.id=metal ignition.firstboot
QEMU with fw_cfg
ignition.platform.id=qemu ignition.firstboot
AWS EC2
ignition.platform.id=aws ignition.firstboot