RHEL Cloud images appear to reject cloud-init when deployed to a physical machine.

Issue

• We are working with OpenStack, deploying RHEL systems via Ironic. The desired outcome is that cloud-init runs to configure the system on first boot, and uses the provided metadata service to get its cloud-init config.

• Instead, cloud-init is not running at all, unless a config-drive is attached to the system. We have not been able to find any indication that a config drive is the only supported mechanism for deploying in this fashion, so we suspect that this is instead a bug in the logic which cloud-init's ds-identify uses to determine what platform it is running on, and whether it should skip cloud-init or not.

• We tested this on ubuntu images as well, and those work as expected (cloud-init still fires, and reads the metadata service URL).

• This also affects our RHEL 8 images.