Some news from auxiliary debian packages concerning debian-live

[daniel at debian.org (Daniel Baumann)]

Hi,

in the last days since 2.6.24 upload to sid, I was giving some love to
the kernel modules. Some comments wrt/ debian-live:

  * aufs is usable and working for normal setups (newer aufs seems to
    have issues with nfs and plain images, though. not fully
    investigated about this yet). prebuild binary modules are in the
    archive.

    any tests and bug reports welcome, please fill bugs directly against
    the aufs package if it is not related to a bug in live-helper or
    live-initramfs. i'm subscribed to aufs, so i'll help distinguish
    in case of live specific bugs/help/$whatever.

  * squashfs as of 3.3-3 has lzma default-off, which means, it produces
    non-corrupted normal images again. there's no need for the -no-lzma
    workaround anymore. prebuilt binary modules are in the archive.

    as of squashfs version 3.3, there seems to be new, other issues
    unrelated to lzma. those are not investigated yet. as with aufs,
    any tests/bugs welcome, but send them against squashfs package
    directly.

    squashfs plus lzma enabled seems to be unusable, both because it's
    too bugy and because it's not integrated well in debian (e.g. no
    prebuilt lzma-modules). i've tried to integrate it, but wasn't
    welcome to do so. so, i personally wont care about this anymore.

  * unionfs 2.2.3 is now in sid, but it needs a kernel patch, which
    i've applied. so, for the time beeing until 2.6.24-4 makes it into
    sid, unionfs will not work (module is refused to be loaded).

    the recommended combination of modules for lenny/sid is still
    aufs and squashfs.

Other things:

  * user-setup 1.18 is now in testing. Thanks again to Jordi for
    discovering the regression. Bugs like 'there's no user
    created in my live system' are fixed with this, the workaround
    of putting the 1.18 .deb into config/chroot_local-packages is
    not needed anymore.

  * Probably for linux 2.6.26, we'll see a read-only bindmount
    implementation. The lack of it has always been a mayor problem in
    debian-live, as it requires to copy around the chroot in order
    to built clean, not-hostsystem-tainted images.

    If we have ro-bindmounts, image buildtime decreases dramatically
    from about 20min to 5min for a kde image on my system.

    As ro-bindmounts are a new thing and will require a new enough
    kernel version on the host system, this will be third, additional
    method to manage the build (currently we have just two,
    chrooted-with-full-copy and unchrooted).

    More information:
    http://marc.info/?l=linux-kernel&m=120250983819585&w=2

Regards,
Daniel

-- 
Address:        Daniel Baumann, Burgunderstrasse 3, CH-4562 Biberist
Email:          daniel.baumann at panthera-systems.net
Internet:       http://people.panthera-systems.net/~daniel-baumann/