Building an Ubuntu image with Packer on MacOS with QEMU and hypervisor-framework

Fetching ubuntu cloud image from https://cloud-images.ubuntu.com/.

Then using the QEMU backend of Packer to customize the image and build a new image out of it:

• https://packer.io
• https://developer.hashicorp.com/packer/plugins/builders/qemu

QEMU is capable of using the MacOS hypervisor-framework to run vm-s with the MacOS-native hypervisor:

• https://developer.apple.com/documentation/hypervisor
• https://wiki.qemu.org/Features/HVF

The build mounts the cloud image of ubuntu, as a system disk, then an initial cloud-init config is run from a cdrom mount to set up a provisioning user so packer can log into the instance and do it's thing:

• https://cloudinit.readthedocs.io/en/0.7.8/topics/datasources.html#no-cloud