Re: Next team meeting: 2024-06-12 20:00 UTC
My notes from today's meeting follow:
# Debian cloud team meeting notes - 2024-06-12
## Attendees:
Bastian B. (Debian)
Noah M. (Debian)
Amy C. (Google)
Zach M. (Google)
Andrew J. (Google)
## Kernels
### cloud kernel driver support
Zach raised the question of GCE support in the cloud kernel. The
topic has been discussed in the past, and there are open requests from
Google to enable additional hardware support for there cloud
environment. https://bugs.debian.org/1067908 and
https://lists.debian.org/debian-kernel/2024/05/msg00255.html
Currently the cloud kernel is a pretty simple rebuild based on
different configs. It turns off a number of modules to reduce size.
In order to keep the size down, we've mostly focused on enabling only
drivers for Amazon EC2 and Microsoft Azure.
Bastian has plans that should allow us to distribute the kernel
modules in separate packages, with only a single actual kernel build
required. In this model, there would be a single linux-image package
containing no modules, with modules being distributed in a separate
package. This would allow us to ship a linux-modules-gce,
linux-modules-azure, linux-modules-generic, etc. package containing a
targeted set of modules, which should address Google's needs.
There are some unsolved problems here related to how secure boot
signing happens, and this will need to be solved before we can move
forward.
### availability of -headers packages
Andrew noted that some Google customers have been impacted by the
removal of old linux-headers packages from the security archive.
Bastian noted that this is happening because the security archive is
now removing old packages in order to save space.
We discussed ideas to address this. Pre-installation of the
linux-headers packages has previously been ruled out because their
dependencies on a full toolchain make the on-disk footprint very
large. Noah suggested the use of snapshot.debian.org, which is
something that Google has previously recommended to customers.
## backports
We discussed the situation around the backports repository, and Noah
gave an update about the status of the cloud-init backport that we
ship in our Azure images. The release team has accepted the idea
discussed at the previous meeting about moving the cloud-init backport
into the security archive as a versioned packaging, allowing it to
co-exist with the existing unversioned package for the lifetime of the
bullseye LTS release.
Zach asked if there are any plans to change the scope or approach to
LTS in Debian in general. Nobody present was aware of any.
## google credits
Bastian asked about credits for Google cloud services. The lack of
clarity here limits Debian's ability to work on GCE support. Andrew
suggested that Google may be able to contact SPI to work through some
of the administrative details directly.
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