[ added jbailey, inifinity and waldi to the cc list ] On Sat, Nov 12, 2005 at 11:42:26PM +0100, Frans Pop wrote: > I've taken a first look at what is involved in supporting installation of > 2.6.14 kernels in Debian Installer _for the installed system_. > > Note: This is a separate issue from running the installer with a 2.6.14 > kernel. > > During kernel installation sysfs needs to be mounted on /target (at least > for yaird). not needed for initramfs-tools.
> This is currently breaking installations for unstable (and will break > network based base installations for beta1 and daily builds when 2.6.14 > migrates to testing). > /target/proc is currently mounted by apt-install, so this probably needs > to be added there (only for 2.6 kernels). > > The following packages are currently pulled in as dependencies by the > 2.6.14 kernel: > - yaird > - perl (3.3 MB) > - perl-modules (2.2 MB) > - libhtml-template-perl > - libparse-recdescent-perl > These requirements look quite heavy to me and may be a problem for the > netinst. > > If we would install initramfs-tools, we would need: > - busybox > - klibc-utils > - mklibs-copy > - udev > This looks a lot lighter, but the dependency on udev probably means some > manipulation of /target/dev will be required. Using udev in d-i itself > may make that easier. klibc-utils could be replaced by the busybox utils. waldi proposed that. that would reduce the porter work for klibc which is not yet ready for any arch. > Both initrd generators have limitations in what they currently support. We > may have to either always install both, or include logic that > pre-installs one or the other depending on the situation. initramfs-tools is already tested in combination with d-i on ubuntu, i guess it shouldn't be so hard to drop that in. initramfs-tools in debian had a hard time with a much newer busybox (which got fixed) and newer udev (timing troubles). waldi hardcoded the timeout for the dev population to 2 seconds that seems not to be good enough default for all setups. i searched for a nice condition to test against and would be happy to learn one. > Currently we modify the configuration of initrd-tools: > - temporary hardcoding of root partition > - default resume partition > Would we need to do the same for the new initrd generators? the root partion is set on boot by the boot loader. the init from the initramfs-tools reads that directly. the default resume partition should be set in the kernel command line on boot by the boot loaders. but it can be set in initramfs-tools although the boot param will override. no need to do something special. > The dependency on sysfs and udev will make it practically impossible to > install a 2.6 kernel when running the installer with 2.4. We should > probably check for this in base-installer and make sure the option is not > presented to the user. that needs to be shaken out anyway as this is a possible upgrade path from sarge. > Please comment. Any people interested in working on this? please wait for some feedback from aboves cc'ed peoples as they were currently on conf and are on the way back i guess. -- maks -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
