Re: systemd woes continue

On 7/17/19 11:54, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote:
> 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:
>>> 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.

Very unfortunate.

>>> 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.

If you want to use e100 (e.g. DE602) and tg3 (e.g. DEGXA) driven NICs
during installation, these should be added here, too.

I actually wanted to provide a write-up of my in-depth testing of some
older ISOs from Adrian on DS20E, DS25 and ES45, but I didn't find the
time yet and there are already newer ISOs available to try, so I'll just
put some parts of what I learned here, as it seems to fit the discussion:

What I saw during my testing (when a Qlogic SCSI controller (e.g. KZPBA)
is used - mainly relevant for ES45 which has no integrated SCSI
controller, DS20E and DS25 instead have integrated Adaptec SCSI
controllers which aren't affected) is, that the qla1280 driver gets
loaded during startup of the installer (kernel) automatically. It
doesn't work though due to missing firmware. Then when you provide the
firmware DEBs to the installer it takes multiple attempts to actually
install the required firmware for the Qlogic SCSI controller. When it
finally succeeds (I actually don't remember if it succeeded at all, or
if I manually put the firmware in place), the qla1280 driver is unloaded
and then reloaded (this time with firmware in place). But unfortunately
the Qlogic SCSI controller is no longer responsible. I don't know if
this is due to the first load w/o firmware or due to the unloading, but
it doesn't matter, providing the firmware as intended by the installer
doesn't work for such a configuration.

The only way to get it working was to blacklist the qla1280 module
during startup, manually mount a prepared firmware directory to
`/lib/firmware` and manually load the qla1280 module afterwards but
before entering the partitioning step.

Similar for the NIC modules, when using e100 or tg3 driven NICs on Alpha.

BTW here other architectures differ, e.g. an rx2660 (ia64) with two tg3
driven NICs works perfectly fine w/o firmware available and I've also
seen it working perfectly with e100 driven NICs on x86 IIRC.

If you have a tulip driven NIC and/or a sym53c8xx driven SCSI controller
(e.g. KZPCA) you're fine, as these don't require firmware. Same for
machines with Adaptec controllers, though the integrated NICs of the
DS25 still require firmware to operate correctly.

****

To sum things up: what Adrian intends to do for Alpha - pre-include the
firmware on the installer discs - seems to be the only way to get this
problem fixed w/o manual intervention during installation.

> 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.

JH Chatenet once created a debootstrap "addon" (see [1] for details)
that merges "unstable" and "unreleased" suites, maybe functionality from
that addon can be reused here?

[1]: https://lists.debian.org/debian-alpha/2014/06/msg00012.html

Cheers,
Frank