Bug#964579: lsblk not included in busybox version used with installer

2022-05-12 Thread Metztli Information Technology


Niltze- 

On Sun, May 8, 2022 at 2:06 PM Michael Tokarev  wrote:
>
> Control: tag -1 + moreinfo
>
> On Wed, 8 Jul 2020 23:23:51 + Holger Levsen  wrote:
> > Package: busybox
> > Version: 1:1.30.1-4
> > Severity: wishlist
> > x-debbugs-cc: Russell Weber 
> > submitter: Russell Weber 
> >
> > On Wed, Jul 08, 2020 at 02:43:43PM -0600, Russell Weber wrote:
> > > Package: busybox
> > > Version: 1:1.30.1-4
> > > Severity: wishlist
> > > lsblk is a very useful tool for understanding your current disks and block
> > > devices. It can be used to
> > > query lots of information including disk manufacturer, serial number, 
> > > modelb
> > > number, the structure of your disks if the disk is already in use for
> > > another block device. Given that the installer has mission critical goals
> > > associated with the disks, it's a bit of a mystery that lsblk isn't
> > > included into the busy box implementation used in the installer. This is
> > > especially important when seeding automatic/unattended installs for debian
> > > since many of the seed files used will query information from disks in
> > > scripts using the "d-i partman/early_command string" of debconf.  I can 
> > > see
> > > that this issue has been raised in multiple places online: stack overflow,
> > > IRC.  However, scanning older tickets, I was not able to find a ticket
> > > which raises the issue.  Is there any reason that lsblk as a command is 
> > > not
> > > included?  As far as I can tell, the bloat size would only be around 
> > > 20-40
> > > KiB in size.  May I suggest that we start including the lsblk binaries in
> > > the next versions of Debian?
>
> Hi Russel!
>
> Thank you for the detailed bug description.
>
> The only question remain is who will write lsblk for busybox, who
> writes the actual code to do all this?  Can you help with that,
> to collect all the mentioned information in a useful for the user
> form?
>
> This applet is not written.
>
> Thanks,
>
> /mjt
>

Busybox utilities have their limitations. For instance, I had to create 
mount/umount UDEBs
because the d-i busybox equivalents would fail on Reiser4 SFRN4/SFRN5 file 
systems when
installing Debian.

< 
https://metztli.blog/media/blogs/calli/Bullseye-SFRN5/xonecuiltzin-5.13.19-reizer4-sfrn-5.1.3.mp4?mtime=1636642043
 >

Accordingly, probably including an lsblk UDEB in d-i would likely be more 
adequate, i.e.,
the last two(2) UDEBs -- which already exist -- are required for lsblk in d-i:

lsblk-udeb_2.38-4.1_amd64.udeb
libudev1-udeb_250.4-1~bpo11+1_amd64.udeb
libsmartcols1-udeb_2.38-4.1_amd64.udeb

< https://metztli.it/bullseye/netboot-exp/d-i-lsblk.png >


netboot with lsblk UDEB included in d-i:
< https://metztli.it/bullseye/netboot-exp/metztli-reiser4.iso >
< https://metztli.it/bullseye/netboot-exp/metztli-reiser4.iso.SHA256SUM >


Best Professional Regards.

-- 
Jose R R
http://metztli.it
-
Download Metztli Reiser4: Debian Bullseye w/ Linux 5.16.20 AMD64
-
feats ZSTD compression https://sf.net/projects/metztli-reiser4/
-
or SFRN 5.1.3, Metztli Reiser5 https://sf.net/projects/debian-reiser4/
---
Official current Reiser4 resources: https://reiser4.wiki.kernel.org/



Bug#1010878: installation-reports: preseeding passwords doesn't work on mips64el under qemu

2022-05-12 Thread Johannes Schauer Marin Rodrigues
Hi,

Quoting Philip Hands (2022-05-12 10:14:46)
> > So for some reason passwd/root-password-again is ignored. Above recipe
> > works fine for other architectures and for some reason stops with above
> > prompt on mips64el. Why?
> 
> It seems that you are hitting a limit on the length of the command line.
> 
> If you flip to one of the shells (Ctrl-A Ctrl-A 2) and do:
> 
>   cat /proc/cmdline

Ah thank you! I probably missed that in the docs (this is probably screen
running?). This is very helpful. :)

> you'll see that most of your kernel commandline is missing.  I'd guess
> that's a limitation of mips64el.  Probably best to specify a preseed
> file in order to get round this limitation, either by url, or you could
> try this:
> 
>   
> https://wiki.debian.org/DebianInstaller/Preseed/EditIso#Adding_a_Preseed_File_to_the_Initrd

Ouch... that's a very unexpected architecture specific limitation. Thanks a lot
for your very quick help!

I wasn't sure where to direct my d-i "bug" reports to. Context is, that I'm
running d-i inside qemu to create bootable disk images that can then be used
with autopkgtest-virt-qemu. So far amd64, i386, ppc64el and arm64 work well.
I'm running into problems with the network interface on s390x but I'm maybe
just driving QEMU wrongly.

I assume that somebody is already running d-i in QEMU for multiple
architectures somewhere as part of some d-i CI infrastructure? If that already
exists, I'd welcome a pointer because I'm probably re-inventing the wheel here.
:)

Otherwise, feel free to close this bug report.

Thanks!

cheers, josch

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