Use your distro's kernel in OBS

The Open Build Service has the nifty feature that you can tell it to use a specific kernel to boot the worker VMs that build your software. To use that, you don't need any special setup, just a package which contains a kernel and an initrd:

   /.build.kernel.kvm # used by KVM workers
   /.build.kernel.xen # used by Xen workers
   /.build.initrd.kvm
   /.build.initrd.xen

So you just need this package and make sure it is installed in the VM using the VMinstall: tag in the project config.
If the build service worker script detects that after preparing the VM, such a kernel and initrd are present, they will be used for booting the worker VM that finally builds your package or image. If it is *not* detected, then the kernel the worker server is running with (usually a SUSE kernel) will also be used for the VM.

In the openSUSE Buildservice instance, all "recent" SUSE distributions are configured for that: they use the kernel-obs-build package, which gets created automatically when building the kernel rpms.

Now I am right now using a buildservice instance for cross-distribution package- and imagebuilds. The challenges of trying to build RHEL/CentOS 7 images with KIWI in OBS warrant at least one additional blog post, but one thing I noticed was, that some of the kiwi stuff, when done with a CentOS 7 userland, apparently also needs a CentOS kernel, otherwise kiwi's parted calls, for example, will exit with code 1 (without issuing an error message, btw).
So I have built a kernel-obs-build from the CentOS 7 kernel and configured my OBS instance to use it, which brought me quite some steps further to building CentOS images with KIWI in OBS.
The code (or rather: the spec files) to "convert" the CentOS kernel to an OBS kernel is at https://github.com/seife/kernel-obs-build, a short README on how  to use it is included.

Note that right now it only works with KVM workers as I was not able to get the worker code to boot the kernel correctly in a Xen VM, even though drivers are all there, the reason is probably that the obs worker scripts rely on some of the specifics of a Xen-specific kernel (e.g. the device name of the block devices being passed through to the VM from the config, which is not true for a generic PV-capable kernel).
But I guess this will improve soon, now that openSUSE has dropped the kernel-xen package, they will face the same issues and hopefully someone will fix them ;)