Re: systemd woes continue

On 7/17/19 11:00 AM, Michael Cree wrote:
> On Thu, Jul 11, 2019 at 04:11:44PM +0200, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote:
>> systemd works the same way on my Alpha XP-1000 as it works on my Intel boxes.
> 
> Interesting.  It doesn't work on mine; it fails to mount the
> filesystems even when I recently tried a new install into a
> spare partition (but I did use debootstrap to install, not the
> installer disk).

There isn't really anything specific to the Alpha architecture which
would break that.

>> I assume you are talking about the non-functionality of a separate /usr partition,
>> but this is something that isn't guaranteed to work well on Linux,
> 
> Pardon?  A separate /usr partition has always been supported on
> Linux, so I am not sure what you are tallking about...

It's not really supported anymore:

> https://freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/separate-usr-is-broken/
> https://lwn.net/Articles/670071/

We have recently had a similar discussion on the debian-68k mailing list.

The gist is: A lot of projects don't test their code on systems with separate
/usr partitions anymore, so things get silently broken.

>>> The other question I have is whether or not someone has fixed
>>> the issue with fdisk on the system,
> 
> fdisk is a lost cause.  It no longer supports a BSD partition. I
> believe the maintainer of fdisk was spoken to about this quite some
> time ago but was not interested in fixing it.

I agree. parted is the preferred tool these days.

> It is a while since I have partitioned a disk for Alpha but I think
> parted should work.

Yep. Works fine for me with debian-installer.

>> debian-installer doesn't use fdisk (anymore), it uses partman. Did you try any of
>> the recent installation images, see [1]. Please note these images are currently
>> shipped without proprietary firmware.
> 
> Yeah, that's a problem for any Alpha with a Qlogic SCSI controller.

It's on my TODO list. It's just not trivial since I need to modify debian-cd
to be able to merge the contrib and non-free repositories from the main
FTP servers during CD image build.

I will hopefully solve that issue soon. I have vacation next week so I will
most likely be working on the problem.

Adrian