Re: [Morphix-devel] Feature request

[Paul <pa...@tu...>]

On Monday 26 January 2009, Alex de Landgraaf wrote:
> > There may well be other issues needing to be resolved - The inclusion
> > of assorted SATA/PATA drivers needs to be looked at. Should the h/w
> > specific drivers go in the miniroot, or can we get away with just
> > libata ?
>
> Technically we'd only need the CD/DVD drivers in the miniroot. If you
> have a SATA DVD drive,

I have had problems trying to boot from a SATA connected CDROM drive without 
the h/w specific driver loaded. As the old IDE code becomes deprecated and 
replaced with PATA code, I suspect a similar issue will arise.

> > On the "random notes" front, I had a poke around isolinux (messing
> > with d-i), and wondered if it might be worthwhile running the
> > base.mod as a compressed archive booted with isolinux - If udebs
> > were used (ala d-i) it may well be possible to generate a base
> > ISO in under 10Megs.
>
> It used to be the case that we'd have to do quite a bit of voodoo in the
> base module in order to get the main module configured and purring
> along. This required quite a few dependencies, and a base that was too
> big to push into RAM.

So what do we actually do from within a base module ?

Hardware detection, loading of a few assorted drivers, setting up the 
filesystem with unionfs/aufs and of course, the kernel it's self. The biggest 
chunk of this is the kernel, so some compromise would have to be made if it 
were to whittled down to a minimum - Then there is libc6 and the (relatively) 
bloated support libraries. There are ways and means of stripping these down, 
but as I look in to it further, it gets messy...

> Between xorg autodetection, hal and udev there isn't a lot left nowadays
> for hwsetup to do (aside generous amounts of RAM in even the cheapest
> laptops). Stripping the base and putting it into the initrd is then the
> logical step, what we would be left with would be comparable to
> d-i/debian-live/casper (we could also simply use the debian-live scripts
> and bolt on support for morphix main/mini modules, which would have my
> preference).

Yes - I had a brief flirt with debian-live - Like many projects, it lacks 
documentation. Building a base module with mmaker and adding 
casper/debian-live to the package list works quite well, but it needs a 
little bit of post-build scripting to get a finished CD. I'm not sure the 
tools that come with d-l (live-magic) have the flexability that mmaker has in 
producing a base/main module - That said, mmaker could benefit from a few 
small enhancements[1].


Regards, Paul.



[1] Have added a nostrip option to a base.mod build, another feature that 
would be helpful is the ability to run pre/post commands when installing a 
package.. e.g.

	<package> kernel-image-2.6.32-dohicky
		<pre> mv /etc/kernel-img.conf /tmp</pre>
		<pre> echo do_symlink > /etc/kernel-img.conf</pre>
		<post> mv -f /tmp/kernel-img.conf /etc/</post>
	</package>



>
> Such a step would be quite a break from the past, but it's been a long
> time coming. Hell, any excuse to drop cloop along the way is fine by me.
> There are a few technical open questions (location of lkm's, mainmod
> init scripts etc) but it should bring about a much simpler morphix that
> requires a lot less babysitting.
>
> The main question is if such a switch is worthwhile compared to
> switching to debian-live outright.
>
> cheers,
>
> Alex
>
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