Differentiating platform by ansible variables

We often need to have conditional logic inside the ansible playbooks depending on the OS and hardware platform. This documents the common permutations. We don’t capture all the output of ansible -m setup but this should be enough to serve as a reference. Variables come from an ansible -m setup run using Ansible 2.1.2.0

Hardware Platforms

Ansible Variable	Raspberry PI 4b+	Raspberry Pi3b+	Raspberry Pi Zero W	NanoPi NEO	VirtualBox	AWS	NanoPI NEO3
ansible_architecture	armv8 A72	armv8 A53	armv6l	armv7l	x86_64	x86_64	RockChip A53
ansible_bios_version	NA	NA	NA	NA	VirtualBox	4.2.amazon	NA
ansible_processor_cores	1	1	1	1	(depends)	(depends)	1
ansible_processor_count	4	4	1	4	(depends)	(depends)	4
ansible_virtualization_type	NA	NA	NA	NA	VirtualBox	xen	NA

Processor Specifics

ansible_processor has an inconsistent length but ansible_processor[0] is:

• Raspberry Pi 4b+: ARMv8 Processor rev ? (v72)
• Raspberry Pi 3b+: ARMv7 Processor rev 4 (v7l)
• Raspberry Pi Zero W: ARMv6-compatible processor rev 7 (v6l)
• NanoPi Neo : ARMv7 Processor rev 5 (v7l)
• NanoPi Neo3: ARMv8 A53 Processor rev ? (?)

(Information is too wide to put into the table above)

Operating Systems

Ansible Variable	Jessie	Xenial	Raspbian Jessie	Raspbian Stretch	Armbian Jessie	Armbian Xenial	Armbian Buster
ansible_os_family	Debian	Debian	Debian	Debian	Debian	Debian	Debian
ansible_distribution	Debian	Ubuntu	Debian	Debian	Debian	Ubuntu	Debian
ansible_lsb["id"]	Debian	Ubuntu	Raspbian	Raspbian	Debian	Ubuntu	Debian
connectbox_os	debian	ubuntu	raspbian	???	armbian	armbian	armbian
ansible_lsb["codename"]	jessie	xenial	jessie	stretch	jessie	xenial	Buster
ansible_lsb["major_release"]	8	16	8	9	8	16	5
ansible_lsb["release"]	8.7	16.04	8.0	9.	8.7	16.04	10.y

The release version of Jessie increments based on periodic releases. Xenial does not.

Differentiating an Armbian installation from the corresponding Ubuntu or Jessie release is currently done by checking for the presence of /etc/armbian.txt or /etc/armbian-release