On 2020-02-03, Paul Wise wrote: > On Sun, Feb 2, 2020 at 5:51 PM Phil Endecott wrote: > >> What do you know about Armbian? What do you think? > > Only what I see on their site and derivatives census page: > > https://www.armbian.com/ > https://wiki.debian.org/Derivatives/Census/Armbian > > I think they are a useful source of workarounds for devices that are > not yet supported in the mainline versions of bootloaders, the Linux > kernel or in Debian itself. Nicely put! > Image-based installation methods are currently very hacky. After > installing packages, you will have system-specific files created (like > /etc/machine-id or OpenSSH private keys). The Debian live/cloud images > have to workaround that by deleting the files after the install is > created. Probably that set of deletions needs to be synced between > Debian live/cloud and any future ARM images (not sure if they are > synced yet). The correct way to do this would be for packages to have > a "generically installed" state in dpkg/apt, which would prevent them > from creating system-specific files. More info about this is in the > linked discussions: > > https://wiki.debian.org/ReproducibleInstalls > https://wiki.debian.org/SystemBuildTools#Discussions I have been meaning to explore making live images for arm devices using the concatenateable images method used by debian-installer. Though, that method has limitations too, as some devices load files off of a partition, some off of raw device offsets, some a combination of those methods. Some require MBR partition tables, some require GPT... it's a big world out there. The great thing about standards, is... It's also possible to have bootloader on one media that is device specific, which doesn't take much space, and on a larger media image a common rootfs, maybe also with EFI bootable grub-efi on it or something. The U-boot support for EFI is coming along quite well. > The other problem with image-based installation methods is that there > are a ridiculous number of devices, so you have to either limit your > device support, produce a prohibitively large amount of > device-specific images, or figure out how to create one image that > works on all devices (which won't be possible due to bootloader > diversity on ARM), or a compromise of a limited number of images that > each work on a range of devices. A great talk from last year's fosdem addressing this issue with some success: https://archive.fosdem.org/2019/schedule/event/one_image_to_rule_them_all/ live well, vagrant
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