Re: Centris 650 Debian 10 SID Installation
On Thu, 13 Jun 2019, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote:
> > I'm no expert with the debian installer, but I suspect you should be
> > using the initrd for the netinst method (?)
>
> There is no "netinst" initrd. There are initrds for "cdrom" and
> "netboot".
>
> NETINST is a normal CD-ROM installation image. It just comes with less
> packages than the full CD-ROM sets which provide all packages on the
> installation media.
>
> NETINST and netboot are two completely distinct things and not to be
> confused.
>
I see. Thanks for the clarification.
>
> >> I next tried booting using a serial console (console=ttyS0,9600n8).
> >> After the expected slowness of systemd bringing everything up (about
> >> eight minutes),
> >
> > Right, systemd is hopeless on these machines. Not just because the CPU
> > is slow, but because systemd sets short timeouts on it's own units
> > which those units can't live up to. That means that systemd enforces
> > policy that excludes slow hardware.
>
> I haven't seen any particular slowness issues except for the login delay
> with systemd on elgar.
>
The timeout problem I was referring to has come up before on m68k systems.
https://lists.debian.org/debian-68k/2016/06/msg00000.html
I don't claim that systemd is "slow". It's just that it does a lot of work
that's not needed on small systems. If it was more modular, like the
kernel, all of that extra functionality wouldn't be a burden. Instead, to
run systemd at all, I had to actually enable extra kernel modules, which
just adds to the bloat problem.
https://lists.debian.org/debian-68k/2016/02/msg00064.html
While I do think alternatives to systemd should be encouraged, I don't
expect the Debian project to provide them. Adding alternatives can only
lead to more work for all debian maintainers whose packages interact with
those alternatives. That seems like a huge amount of effort compared with
a small number of users running Debian on small systems like these.
--
> Adrian
>
>
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