Hello Simon,
On 25/11/2025 10:43, Simon Josefsson wrote:
Roland Clobus <[email protected]> writes:
I was offline for the last two weeks. Let me give you some additional
pointers:
Thank you! I'll digest this and split up answers.
* You want to officially publish the generated images (as I see on
debian-devel), are you ready to the the quality assurance of them?
Keeping up with all nine versions (times four, for oldstable,
stable, testing and sid) keeps our openQA instance [2] rather busy.
Luckily, given that the test environment in openQA currently does not
contain any firmware-specific simulated hardware, all existing tests
would probably show exactly the same output if the Libre images were
to be tested.
How many image variants are you planning to publish? You are currently
at 3 sizes time 2 architectures.
My focus is on trixie on arm64+amd64 to facilitate OS installation.
I'm wondering if a live image is what you actually want...
If you are focussing on the installation of Debian, without non-free
firmware, there is already a question in the netinst installer (at a
priority below normal) that asks whether you would like to have
non-free-firmware included (which is then followed by questions about
'non-free and contrib').
If you use that option, you will have a fresh installation of Debian,
with a minimal set of packages.
The live-installer tries to strip the live-specific parts from the
installed image after it have copied the live squashfs file to the HD,
but since the live image typically contains all translations, you'll end
up with a non-minimal set of packages. (Removing the various
language-specific packages is not easy).
Thus I don't really care about the live image part, I added the
standard+gnome images just to see if I could build them in a GitLab
pipeline, and was somewhat surprised it just worked (well done!).
On the other side: The benefit of having a live image lies in the
ability to test whether all works, before you actually install to the
HD. It should be possible to have a netinst-like installer instead of
the live-installer.
In short: The current netinst image already provides an installer that
allows for an installation based purely on main.
I would like to add riscv64 and ppc64el support. I saw a riscv64 merge
request. What is the status on adding that?
At DebConf25 in Brest I got the impression that RISC-V hardware is
unfortunately currently not powerful enough to run a full-blown desktop
environment (I might be wrong).
I haven't heard about ppc64el support yet; would that kind of hardware
be suitable to running a desktop environment like GNOME?
Would sponsoring you with riscv64/ppc64el OpenQA hardware make this
easier? I could setup a VM and give a SSH root key, but alas I do not
know anything about OpenQA.
Only if that hardware is actually running natively, not using e.g.
qemu-system-PLATFORM to emulate the hardware, as emulation will be
terribly slow.
Such hardware needs to be pretty powerful, since building live images is
rather I/O intensive, whereas doing functionality tests with openQA is
rather memory intensive.
With kind regards,
Roland Clobus
(Also co-maintainer for the openQA instance)
