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Immediate fallouts from the big linux changes, and actions



Hi,

This is mostly for information: linux went through a lot of big changes,
initially staged in experimental, and uploaded to unstable as of linux
6.6.8-1. These impacted the installer in different ways. This is a
summary of the obvious impacts, there might be some others down the line
(just by glancing at hw-detect's massaging of module list by stripping
the .ko suffix).

- kernel-image-* packages are now shipping /boot/vmlinuz-* (or
  /boot/vmlinux-* depending on the arch), instead of just /boot/vmlinuz
  (respectively /boot/vmlinux). I didn't dive into all the changes but
  I'm not sure whether that was on purpose or a side effect of the big
  changes. In any case, on the short term, since the build system was
  relying on a single file there, that should be moved out of the way,
  I decided to unversion those files to restore the old names. If kernel
  maintainers decide to go back to unversioned files, two reverts should
  be enough:
    https://salsa.debian.org/installer-team/debian-installer/-/commit/c17360e632b6f133d4b43a47461944b6203ed730
    https://salsa.debian.org/installer-team/debian-installer/-/commit/865c66e497d8e809872bad04aa2269d2a9f889c8

- Modules are compressed now, so the drm workaround needed an updated to
  cope with the extra .xz suffix:
    https://salsa.debian.org/installer-team/debian-installer/-/commit/bd0f1106f90756e6f4514108492d71e1f2e695ea

- I'm skipping two commits regarding the new way the ABI is written
  down, that's in line with what was announced initially.

- YIL: If you don't see anything move in the graphical installer (no
  keyboard, no mouse), if your video is garbled, and if you can't load a
  NIC module in the text installer, you might have a totally broken
  support for kernel modules in your installer. This required adjusting
  src:xz-utils to get a liblzma udeb and src:kmod to enable xz support
  in its udebs; “thankfully” the former is NMU-maintained, plus the ftp
  team speed-reviewed it from NEW; thankfully Marco ACK'd my NMU-ing
  kmod so that we unbreak things ASAP. Everything should be sorted out
  in unstable. Plus an extra commit to be extra careful between the
  kmod upload and the cronned daily builds (which were going to start
  before the 01:52Z dinstall):
    https://tracker.debian.org/news/1489255/accepted-xz-utils-545-02-source-amd64-all-into-unstable/
    https://tracker.debian.org/news/1489268/accepted-xz-utils-545-03-source-into-unstable/
    https://salsa.debian.org/md/kmod/-/merge_requests/13
    https://tracker.debian.org/news/1489283/accepted-kmod-3020230601-21-source-into-unstable/
    https://salsa.debian.org/installer-team/debian-installer/-/commit/c65bdb8128bc68cb566b302feb46267e5c177eb4

- Finally, the armel build fails because it can't find its kernel. The
  marvell flavour seems to have been dropped entirely (at least that's
  how I read the linux changelog for 6.6.3-1~exp1:
    https://tracker.debian.org/news/1482751/accepted-linux-663-1exp1-source-into-experimental/

I didn't investigate the last point and I'd appreciate it if porters
could double check that we really want to drop marvell at this point,
and maybe submit (or commit) patches to drop it from the installer:
  https://salsa.debian.org/installer-team/debian-installer

Various netboot and netboot-gtk checks on amd64 seem very positive
after those changes, but I haven't built a netinst image and checked
on actual hardware with the combination of Secure Boot + firmware
packages + reloading of kernel modules. The latter should primarily work
by using module *names* and firmware *paths* as seen in kernel logs, so
having different module *paths* shouldn't make a difference, but that's
just my gut feeling based on my recollection (so nobody should trust
me on this), and seeing how \.ko$ stripping appears in some other files,
I cannot be certain until it's been actually tested.

Feel free to reply to this thread if you spot other fallouts. Of course,
as usual, the best way to report installer bugs is to file them against
the relevant component, X-Debbugs-Cc-ing this list; but leaving an
explicit reference in this thread wouldn't hurt.


Cheers,
-- 
Cyril Brulebois (kibi@debian.org)            <https://debamax.com/>
D-I release manager -- Release team member -- Freelance Consultant

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