Home Home > 2018 > 12
Sign up | Login

Deprecation notice: openSUSE Lizards user blog platform is deprecated, and will remain read only for the time being. Learn more...

Archive for December, 2018

Report from the reproducible builds summit 2018

December 17th, 2018 by

Last week I attended the reproducible builds world summit in Paris.
It was very well organized by Holger, Gunner and their hidden helpers in the background. Very similar to the last 2 summits I attended in Berlin.

Because we were around 50 participants, introductions and announcements were the only things done in the big group. All actual work happened in 5-10 smaller circles.

We had participants from large companies like Google (with bazel), MicroSoft and Huawei, but also from many distributions and open source projects. Even MirageOS as non-Linux OS.

We did knowledge-sharing, refine definitions of terms, evolve concepts like “rebuilders” for verifying builds and allow users to better trust software they install, and such.

I learned about the undocumented DB dump (153 MB) and DB schema

And we had some hacking time, too, so there is now
a jenkins job that renders the list of unreproducible openSUSE Factory packages.

Also, my maintainer tool now has added support for the Alpine Linux distribution, thanks to help by one of its maintainers: Natanael Copa.
This is meant to help all cross-distro collaboration, not just for reproducible builds.

There is still work to be done to make better use of Mitre CPE to map package names across distributions.

I think, one major benefit of the summit was all the networking and talking going on, so that we have an easier time working with each other over the internet in the future.

Tags: , ,
Posted in Distribution, Events, Factory, Security, Toolchain | 2 Comments »

Highlights of YaST Development Sprint 68

December 4th, 2018 by
  • UDF: Share big files with other operating systems
  • Raspberry Pi: Fully customized installation with YaST

Support for UDF file system

UDF (Universal Disk Format) is a file system format widely used for DVDs and newer optical disk formats, replacing ISO 9660. But this technology is not limited to optical media only, in fact it can be perfectly used on flash devices like USB sticks and hard drives too. UDF is one of the best choices when transferring data between platforms. Mostly all modern operating system already support it, including Windows, BSD, MacOS X, Solaris, OS/2 (eComStation), BeOS (Haiku) as well as Linux kernel.

UDF offers several advantages. One of them is the support for quite very large files. With UDF you can create files of several terabytes, making really ridiculous the maximum limitation of 4 gigabytes in VFAT. And not only that, UDF also has optional built-in ability to minimize wearing-off of rewritable media with limited rewrite cycles, such as flash, CD-RW and DVD-RAM.

YaST is starting to support UDF file systems out of the box. The Expert Partitioner now offers the UDF option when formatting a device, see the following screenshot. And this is available even during the installation, so you could create a volume with UDF format and share it between your different operating systems.

Just click "next" to install (open)SUSE in a Raspberry Pi

Anybody who has not been living under a rock for the last five years knows Raspberry Pi. And anyone who has used one of those devices knows the usual way to put an operating system into it is different from what we are used to do in other computers. Instead of installing from a regular ISO, customizing all the options in the process, Raspberry Pi and similar mini-computers are usually loaded with a pre-built image of an operating system (specific for each model) downloaded from the Internet. Many of those precooked Linux systems are purpose-specific and many decisions (like the file-system type to use) are already taken by those who built the image.

But we wanted SLE 15-SP1 and openSUSE Leap 15.1 to be the first multi-purpose operating systems to support a full standard Linux experience in Raspberry Pi. No custom specific ISO to install from, no precooked image to be copied, just taking the standard unmodified SLE or openSUSE ISO image and installing like you would do in any other computer. And we wanted the process to be as easy as pressing "next", "next", "next", "install". With the installer detecting and proposing the set of default configurations that makes sense, as usual.

The main challenge in that regard was the partitioning layout. In order to boot, the Raspberry Pi needs a very specific partition containing the system firmware. So it is important for the installer to detect such a partition and preserve it no matter what, mounting it in /boot/vc to allow the operating system to perform updates of the firmware. In the following screenshot of the installation process performed trough the Raspberry Pi serial console you can see that in action.

The serial console is the method preferred by the experts to manage the Raspberry Pi locally and it works out of the box with the pre-releases of the upcoming SLE-15-SP1 and Leap 15.1. But less advanced users will likely prefer to perform a graphical installation with a keyboard and a screen attached to the device. For it to work flawlessly, the following arguments must be provided to the installer during boot.

textmode=0 modprobe.blacklist=vc4

The second argument prevents the HDMI output to be disconnected shortly after the computer has booted, something that will only happen with some monitors. It happened to us during our testing (that you can see below) and that argument certainly made the problem disappear.

Just one final note if you want to play with this: Take into account Raspberry Pi uses a different internal architecture than usual PCs. So instead of the x86 image of the installer, you will need to use the aarch64 one. The aarch64 architecture is officially fully supported by SLE and also available for openSUSE Leap and Tumbleweed as an unofficial port.

Tags: , , ,
Posted in YaST | 1 Comment »