debian-installer: cdrom vs. netboot
Hi!
I just created a new NETINST installer image for sparc64 after I
realized our current method of creating the image [1] contained
a fundamental flaw in the configuration.
To cut a long story short, we were using the wrong version of debian
installer, namely the netboot version by setting DI_DIR in debian-cd's
CONF.sh to the netboot directory of debian-installer (see the patch
further down in [1]) instead of the cdrom directory.
To quickly explain: debian-installer is contained in the initrd of the
installer image and depending on whether one uses the cdrom or netboot
version of debian-installer, the generated initrd contains network
drivers and cdrom/pata/sata/usb storage drivers or just network drivers
plus a d-i component called cdrom-retriever in the case of cdrom which
is required to detect a cdrom drive and load packages from CD.
Since we build the NETINST CD with netboot instead of cdrom, we were
basically combining a version of debian-installer for netboot, that is
pure network installation with d-i components and packages downloaded
from a mirror, with a CD image which is, of course, non-sense, as this
meant d-i was never using any components from the CD image (both the
SATA/PATA drivers and cdrom-retriever were missing).
I actually found this bug by closely comparing the installation logs of
our sparc64 image and a regular amd64 testing NETINST image and it turns
out, the amd64 installer was running cdrom-detect and cdrom-retriever
and ours was not. The rest was a matter of grepping for cdrom-retriever
and realizing our d-i version was not including the cdrom-retriever
component because we were using the netboot configuration ;).
In any case, I'm home now, my sparc64 machine is at work and I won't be
able to test until tomorrow. So anyone else here gets the honour to test
this image which should work much better now.
Cheers,
Adrian
> [1]
https://parisc.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/How_to_create_Debian_unstable_iso_images
> [2]
https://people.debian.org/~glaubitz/debian-cd/debian-9.0-sparc64-NETINST-1.iso
--
.''`. John Paul Adrian Glaubitz
: :' : Debian Developer - glaubitz@debian.org
`. `' Freie Universitaet Berlin - glaubitz@physik.fu-berlin.de
`- GPG: 62FF 8A75 84E0 2956 9546 0006 7426 3B37 F5B5 F913
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