Search Results: "Steve McIntyre"

1 August 2015

Steve McIntyre: New UEFI team in Debian

We've just started a new team in Debian for maintaining our UEFI packages together, with git repositories in a shared project on alioth etc. We're just working out the exact details of how we're going to manage things, but for now we've moved the following packages under the team's umbrella: and in the future we'll clearly end up adding more. We've also started a new IRC channel (#debian-efi) on irc.debian.org aka irc.oftc.net. New members always welcome to help with the work here!

31 July 2015

Steve McIntyre: Linaro VLANd v0.3

VLANd is a python program intended to make it easy to manage port-based VLAN setups across multiple switches in a network. It is designed to be vendor-agnostic, with a clean pluggable driver API to allow for a wide range of different switches to be controlled together. There's more information in the README file. I've just released v0.3, with a lot of changes included since the last release: VLANd is Free Software, released under the GPL version 2 (or any later version). For now, grab it from git; tarballs will be coming shortly.

22 July 2015

Cyril Brulebois: D-I Stretch Alpha 1

Time for a quick recap of the beginning of the Stretch release cycle as far as the Debian Installer is concerned: (On a related note, I ve started tweeting rather regularly about my actions, wins & fails, using the #DebianInstaller hashtag. I might try and aggregate my tweets as @CyrilBrulebois into more regular blog posts, time permitting.) Executive summary: D-I Stretch Alpha 1 is released, time to stretch a bit! Stretching cat (Credit: rferran on openclipart)

1 July 2015

Steve McIntyre: Quick trip to Sweden

Jo and I spent a few days in Sweden and had an awesome time! The main reason for being there was Leif and Maria's wedding way up north in Skellefte . They cunningly organised their ceremony for the Midsummer weekend, which was an excellent plan - we had a full weekend of partying while we were there. :-) the happy couple We had some time to ourselves while we were there, so we wandered about a little and got to see some of the beautiful coastal countryside. Trund n Then on the way home we stopped off in Ume to visit Mattias Wadenstein (maswan) and his wife Melanie, and he showed me around some of the machines that he's been admining on behalf of Debian. Maybe I'm a sad geek, but I feel quite a bond with one of the machines there, pettersson.debian.org. It's the official CD build machine for Debian, and I've been responsible for thrashing it really hard for the last 5 years or so... :-) Pettersson and friends Massive thanks to the University of Ume and their Academic Computer Club for hosting Debian machines and serving all the CD images for us! maswan and a lot of disks The only downsides from the trip were the massive tiredness (midnight sun is pretty, but notconducive to sleep!) the mosquito bites and the nasty plague^Wcold that we picked up while we were there... Ah well. :-)

11 June 2015

Steve McIntyre: Debian-branded USB keys

I've had some 8GB USB keys made, with the Debian swirl and text. By buying a reasonable number, I've got what I think is a good price for nice high-quality keys (metal body with a solid loop for attaching to a keyring). I'm now selling these for 7 pounds each, and I'm planning on bringing some to DebConf 15 too, where they'll be 10 EUR. USB key They're selling faster than I expected - if you're interested in buying one (or several!), please let me know. If there's enough demand, I may order more.

19 May 2015

Steve McIntyre: Easier installation of Jessie on the Applied Micro X-Gene

As shipped, Debian Jessie (8.0) did not include kernel support for the USB controller on APM X-Gene based machines like the Mustang. In fact, at the time of writing this that support has not yet gone upstream into the mainline Linux kernel either but patches have been posted by Mark Langsdorf from Red Hat. This means that installing Debian is more awkward than it could be on these machines. They don't have optical drives fitted normally, so the neat isohybrid CD images that we have made in Debian so far won't work very well at all. Booting via UEFI from a USB stick will work, but then the installer won't be able to read from the USB stick at all and you're stuck. :-( The best way so far for installing Debian is to do a network installation using tftp etc. Well, until now... :-) I've patched the Debian Jessie kernel, then re-built the installer and a netinst image to use them. I've put a copy of that image up at http://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/unofficial/arm64-mustang/ with more instructions on how to use it. I'm just submitting the patch for inclusion into the Jessie stable kernel, hopefully ready to go into the 8.1 point release.

2 May 2015

Niels Thykier: The release of Debian Jessie from an RM s PoV

It was quite an experience to partake in the Jessie release and also a rather long Saturday . This post is mostly a time line of how I spent my release day with doing the actual release. I have glossed over some details the post is long enough without these. :) We started out at 8 (UTC) with a final dinstall run, which took nearly 2 hours. It was going to take longer, but we decided to skip the synchronisation to coccia.debian.org (the server hosting the DD-accessible mirror of release.debian.org). The release itself started with the FTP masters renaming the aliases of Squeeze, Wheezy and Jessie to oldoldstable, oldstable and stable respectively. While they worked, the release team reviewed and double checked their work. After an hour (~11), the FTP masters reported that the stable releases were ready for the final review and the SRMs signed the relevant Release files. Then the FTP masters pushed the stable releases to our CD build server, where Steve McIntyre started building the installation images. While Steve started with the CDs, the FTP masters and the release team continued with creating a suite for Stretch. On the FTP/release side, we finished shortly before 12:30. At this point, our last ETA from Steve suggested that the installation media would take another 11 and a half hours to complete. We could have opened for mirror synchronisation then, but we decided to wait for the installation media. At 12:30, there was a long intermission for the release team in the release process. That was an excellent time to improve some of our tools, but that is for another post. :) We slowly started to resume around 22:20, where we tried to figure out when to open for the mirror synchronisation to time it with the installation media. We agreed to start the mirror sync at 23:00 despite the installation media not being completely done then. They followed half an hour later, when Steve reported that the last CD was complete. At this point, all that was left was to update the website and send out the press announcement. Sadly, we were hit by some (minor) issues then. First, I had underestimated the work involved in updating the website. Secondly, we had no one online at the time to trigger an out of band rebuild of the website. Steve and I spent an hour and a half solving website issues (like arm64 and ppc64el not being listed as a part of the release). Unsurprisingly, I decided to expand our the release checklist to be slightly more verbose on this particular topic. My Saturday had passed its 16th hour, when I thought we had fixed all the website issues (of course, I would be wrong) and we would now just be waiting for the an automatic rebuild. I was tempted to just punt it and go to bed, when Paul Wise rejoined us at about 01:25. He quickly got up to speed and offered to take care of the rest. An offer I thankfully accepted and I checked out 15 minutes later at 01:40 UTC. That more or less covers the Jessie release day from my PoV. After a bit of reflection inside the release team, we have found several points where we can improve the process. This part certainly deserves its own post as well, which will also give us some time to flesh out some of the ideas a bit more. :)
Filed under: Debian, Release-Team

23 April 2015

Steve McIntyre: Ready for Jessie! (aka bits from the debian-cd team)

I'm happy with the progress we've made for debian-installer and related packages for the Jessie release. We're going to end up with a release that's better in a number of ways than what we've had before. 1. Big EFI enhancements I've already blogged a lot about the stuff I've worked on here, so I'll just summarise for now some of the improvements we've got over Wheezy.
  1. A fix for systems that (badly) dual-boot in EFI and BIOS mode such that after installing Debian you wouldn't get a sensible choice of which OS to boot (#763127).
  2. A workaround for broken EFI implementations: an option to install the grub-efi bootloader to the removable media path in case the system firmware does not load grub-efi from the correctly registered boot path. (#746662).
  3. Addition of 32-bit EFI to our i386 installation images, to support both some older systems and some brand new systems that need it. This has unfortunately stopped those i386 images from working on some of the oldest Intel-based Apple Mac machines, so we've added an extra Mac-only flavour of i386 netinst without EFI in case people need it.
  4. Significantly better support for Intel-based Apple Macs in general, to the point that installing Debian on lots of these machines should now be much easier and doesn't depend on extra third-party software such as rEFIt or rEFInd. I've massively updated the Debian wiki page at https://wiki.debian.org/MacMiniIntel with more details for specific models of Mac Mini. I'm hoping to provide similarly updated information for Mac laptops too - see below!
    Massive thanks to the lovely folks at Mythic Beasts for providing me with a range of machines to test with here!
  5. Support for mixed-mode EFI systems like the Intel Bay Trail: a 64-bit platform crippled with a 32-bit EFI firmware. I believe Jessie will be the first release of a Linux distribution to support these machines fully!
2. Openstack images In collaboration with Thomas Goirand, we now have amd64 Openstack Jessie image builds being produced every week, and there will be an official image made to go with the Jessie release too. See http://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/openstack/testing/ for the current image. 3. Debian-live images As of a few weeks ago, we've also added started doing weekly builds of live Debian images for amd64 and i386, using software and configuration from the Live Systems Project. See http://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/weekly-live-builds/ for the current weekly images. These will be produced in sync with the Jessie release too. 4. New architectures We've added installation media for the two new architectures added in Jessie: arm64 and ppc64el. I'm particularly proud of the arm64 images. With help from Ian Campbell, Leif Lindholm and Thomas Schmitt I've managed to make EFI-compatible CD images in an isohybrid design that means they should also work when copied directly to a USB stick. Hopefully this will help this new platform to become just as easy to install as any x86 PC is today. Hopefully post-Jessie we'll even be able to start providing live images and openstack images for more architectures too. More help needed yet! First of all, we're planning to release Jessie as Debian 8 this coming Saturday (25th April). Help with testing the installation and live images as they're produced would be lovely - please join us on the #debian-cd channel on irc.debian.org and we'll co-ordinate there. Secondly, there's an almost endless variety of machines out there. I've updated information about how Debian installation works on some of the more awkward Mac Mini machines, but we don't yet cover all the bases even there. It would be great to update the information about other machines such as the Macbook range as well - currently a lot of these pages are well out of date and won't be helpful for new users. Please test on machines if you have them, and help improve Debian's documentation here.

8 April 2015

Steve McIntyre: More arm64 hardware for Debian - Applied Micro X-Gene

As a follow-up to my post about bootstrapping arm64 in Debian, we've had more hardware given to Debian for us to use in porting and building packages for arm64. Applied Micro sent me an X-Gene development machine to set up and use. Unfortunately, the timing was unlucky and the machine sat on my desk unopened for a few weeks while I was on long holiday in Australia. Once I was back, I connected it up and got it working. Out of the box, a standard Jessie arm64 installation worked using network boot (dhcp and tftp). I ran through d-i as normal and installed a working system, then handed it over to the DSA and buildd folks to get the machine integrated into our systems. Easy! The machine is now up and running as arm-arm-03.debian.org and has been building packages for a few weeks now. You can see the stats here on the buildd.debian.org site. In terms of installation, I also got the machine to boot using one of our netinst images on a USB stick, but that path didn't get very far. The USB drivers for this hardware have only quite recently gone into the mainline kernel, and haven't been backported to the Debian Jessie kernel yet. I'm hoping to get those included shortly. There's also an option to replace the U-Boot firmware that came with the X-Gene with UEFI instead, which would be much more helpful for a server platform like this. I'll look into doing that upgrade soon too, but probably after the Jessie release is done. I don't want to jinx things just now. *grin* Thanks to APM for their generous donation here, and particularly to Richard Zenkert for his help in getting this machine shipped to us.

30 March 2015

Steve McIntyre: UEFI Debian installer work for Jessie, part 6

One final update on my work for UEFI improvements in Jessie! All of my improvements have been committed into the various Debian packages involved, and the latest release candidate for Jessie's debian-installer build (RC2) works just as well as my test builds on the Bay Trail system I've been using (Asus X205TA). Job done! :-) I'm still hoping to maybe get more hardware support for this particular hardware included in Jessie, but I can't promise. The mixed EFI work has also improved things for a lot of Mac users, and I'm planning to write up a more comprehensive list of supported machines in the Debian wiki (for now). There's now no need to use any of the older test installer images - please switch to RC2 for now. See http://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/jessie_di_rc2/ for the images. If you want to install a 64-bit system with the 32-bit UEFI support, make sure you use the multi-arch amd64/i386 netinst or DVD. Otherwise, any of the standard i386 images should work for a 32-bit only system. Upstreaming My kernel patch to add the new /sys file was accepted upstream a while back, and has been in Linus' master branch for some time. It'll be in 4.0 unless something goes horribly wrong, and as it's such a tiny piece of code it's trivial to backport to anything remotely recent too. I've also just seen that my patch for grub2 to use this new /sys file has been accepted upstream this week. Again, the change is small and self-contained so should be easy to copy across into other trees too. Mixed EFI systems should now have better support across all distros in the near future, I hope.

20 March 2015

Steve McIntyre: Tour of Australia

Jo and I just got back from our massive holiday in Australia. We had an awesome time overall, fitting in lots of stuff in 4 weeks. Time for a quick write-up and some photos! Ayers Rock We flew into Sydney, then straight onto Uluru for the obligatory sunset and sunrise viewings. We didn't climb the Rock, both for sensitivity reasons and (to be more honest!) it looked way too much like hard work in 40-plus degree heat. Ghan train Coach over to Alice Springs, where we had a very quick look around before taking the Ghan train down to Adelaide. The train was fun for a day, and we got to see a lot of desert. In Adelaide, we had a look around the city (lovely colonial feel!) and got a couple of evenings in fun comedy shows at the Fringe. Great fun! Cuddling a sleepy wombat! On to Tasmania, where we did a quick (3 days) run around the island by car: into Hobart, up the east coast. Stopped in Swansea (a nice version!) for some heavenly Devonshire teas, then on up to Grindelwald near Launceston. Visited Trowunna Wildlife Park to see (and cuddle!) lots of local animals, which was amazing - Jo's favourite day of the holiday. Then on to Queenstown and drive back down to Hobart past some impossibly beautiful views around Cradle Mountain. Tassie's gorgeous - like the best bits of Scotland, Wales and Cornwall but with even fewer people and better weather. Sydney Opera House Next, on to Sydney for Harry and Cath's wedding. We stayed up in Chatswood. Not knowing anything about the area beforehand, we were a little surprised to basically find ourselves back in Hong Kong! We spent most of the weekend catching up with friends from the wedding group, and the wedding itself was at Quarantine Station, overlooking the harbour. It couldn't have been a more perfect location / weather / view for our friends' big day! We squeezed in a couple of the open-top bus tours of Sydney on the Sunday, but got caught in the horrendous storm that hit and ended up sheltering downstairs under cover on the bus. I'm told Bondi is lovely, but it all looked grey from the bus. :-P Puffing Billy, Yarra Valley Down to Melbourne on the train (bit of a wasted day, in hindsight), where we wandered around the city quite a bit. Caught up with an old friend who lives there for a day, and we did a wine tour up the Yarra Valley which was fun too. Snorkelling at the Reef - all OK! Up to Port Douglas, where we headed out to the Reef for my highlight of the holiday: a snorkelling tour with some local marine experts who showed us the local flora and fauna. We also visited a local Aboriginal cultural centre, skyrail and scenic railway around Kuranda village. Koala! :-) Down to Hervey Bay and a 1-day tour of Fraser Island - an amazing place in combination with quite a thrill-ride experience just being driven around on the sand tracks. Finally, down to Brisbane where we wandered around and visited both the Lone Pine Koala Sanctuary (more cuddles!) and the Gold Coast. Then the long flights home. Whew! We're knackered now. We knew we could't fit everything in, but we're glad we travelled all over and got tastes of almost everything. Now we can work out where we want to spend more time on our future visit(s). We'll definitely want to head over and see Perth and some of WA next time, and definitely more time in Tasmania, Sydney and Adelaide.

13 February 2015

Steve McIntyre: Linaro VLANd v0.2

I've been working on this for too long without really talking about it, so let's fix that now! VLANd is a simple (hah!) python program intended to make it easy to manage port-based VLAN setups across multiple switches in a network. It is designed to be vendor-agnostic, with a clean pluggable driver API to allow for a wide range of different switches to be controlled together. There's more information in the README file. I've just released v0.2, with a lot of changes included since the last release: I've demonstrated this code today in Hong Kong at the Linaro Connect event, and now I'm going on vacation for 4 weeks. Australia here I come! :-)

8 February 2015

Steve McIntyre: Yet another reason to not use Windows on your embedded devices...

Seen on an ATM in Hong Kong airport.

Broken ATM

27 January 2015

Thomas Goirand: OpenStack debian image available from cdimage.debian.org

About a year and a half after I started writing the openstack-debian-images package, I m very happy to announce to everyone that, thanks to Steve McIntyre s help, the official OpenStack Debian image is now generated at the same time as the official Debian CD ISO images. If you are a cloud user, if you use OpenStack on a private cloud, or if you are a public cloud operator, then you may want to download the weekly build of the OpenStack image from here: http://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/openstack/testing/ Note that for the moment, there s only the amd64 arch available, but I don t think this is a problem: so far, I haven t found any public cloud provider offering anything else than Intel 64 bits arch. Maybe this will change over the course of this year, and we will need arm64, but this can be added later on. Now, for later plans: I still have 2 bugs to fix on the openstack-debian-images package (the default 1GB size is now just a bit too small for Jessie, and the script exits with zero in case of error), but nothing that prevents its use right now. I don t think it will be a problem for the release team to accept these small changes before Jessie is out. When generating the image, Steve also wants to generate a sources.tar.gz containing all the source packages that we include on the image. He already has the script (which is used as a hook script when running the build-openstack-debian-image script), and I am planning to add it as a documentation in /usr/share/doc/openstack-debian-images. Last, probably it would be a good idea to install grub-xen, just as Ian Campbell suggested to make it possible for this image to run in AWS or other Xen based clouds. I would need to be able to test this though. If you can contribute with this kind of test, please get in touch. Feel free to play with all of this, and customize your Jessie images if you need to. The script is (on purpose) very small (around 400 lines of shell script) and easy to understand (no function, it s mostly linear from top to bottom of the file), so it is also very easy to hack, plus it has a convenient hook script facility where you can do all sorts of things (copying files, apt-get install stuff, running things in the chroot, etc.). Again, thanks so much to Steve for working on using the script during the CD builds. This feels me with joy that Debian finally has official images for OpenStack.

11 January 2015

Steve McIntyre: UEFI Debian installer work for Jessie, part 5

Time for another update on my work for UEFI improvements in Jessie! I've spent more time on the integration of 32-bit grub-efi with a 64-bit Debian system, and just published a new test image on pettersson. I've added: These remove the manual steps that were necessary for a 64-bit installation with the previous build. I've just used this exact image (and a network mirror) to install a fully-functional 64-bit Gnome system on the X205TA, simply by selecting "64-bit install" from the GRUB menu and following prompts. Yay! Visit http://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/unofficial/efi-development/jessie-upload3/ to download and test the image. Now, there's no guarantee that the kernel patch I've submitted to the linux-efi folks will be accepted in its current form, and even if it is I'll have to get it and the other code I've written accepted into the various packages and then into Jessie! But for now this image should work just fine for Bay Trail folks I hope! WARNING: this CD is provided for testing only. Use at your own risk! If you have appropriate (U)EFI hardware, please try this image and let me know how you get on, via the debian-cd and debian-boot mailing lists. For now, I'm going to pause development here. The core code I'm using to make these images is all in the debian-cd and d-i repos, and I'll push the other patches once I know they'll work with the kernel. But I've got a slew of other things that I need to work on in the next few weeks, in no particular order: I'm currently not planning to make all of Debian's amd64 images bootable using 32-bit UEFI like this image - I'm happy to leave this as just an option for our multi-arch i386/amd64 images (netinst or DVD only). I think that's a reasonable compromise here, and it's also the easiest thing for me to do with the current debian-cd build system. Finally, apologies if you've asked me questions about the earlier images in this series and I've not responded yet. Fixing that ASAP!

6 January 2015

Steve McIntyre: Bootstrapping arm64 in Debian

I promised to write about this a long time, ooops... :-) Another ARM port in Debian - yay! arm64 is officially a release architecture for Jessie, aka Debian version 8. That's taken a lot of manual porting and development effort over the last couple of years, and it's also taken a lot of CPU time - there are ~21,000 source packages in Debian Jessie! As is often the case for a brand new architecture like arm64 (or AArch64, to use ARM's own terminology), hardware can be really difficult to get hold of. In time this will cease to be an issue as hardware becomes more commoditised, but in Debian we really struggled to get hold of equipment for a very long time during the early part of the port. First bring-up in Debian Ports To start with, we could use ARM's own AArch64 software models to build the first few packages. This worked, but only very slowly. Then Chen Baozi and the folks running the Tianhe-2 supercomputer project in Guangzhou, China contacted us to offer access to some arm64 hardware, and this is what Wookey used for bootstrapping the new port in the unofficial Debian Ports archive. This has now become the normal way for new architectures to get into Debian. We got most of the archive built in debian-ports this way, and we could then use those results to seed the initial core set of packages in the main Debian archive. Second bring-up - moving into the main Debian archive By the time that first Debian bring-up was done, ARM was starting to produce its own "Juno" development boards, and with the help of my boss^4 James McNiven we managed to acquire a couple of those machines for use as official Debian build machines. The existing machines in China were faster, but for various reasons quite difficult to maintain as official Debian machines. So I set up the Junos as buildds just before going to DebConf in August 2014. They ran very well, and (for dev boards!) were very fast and stable. They built a large chunk of the Debian archive, but as the release freeze for Jessie grew close we weren't quite there. There was a small but persistent backlog of un-built packages that were causing us issues, plus the Juno machines are/were not quite suitable as porter boxes for Debian developers all over the world to use for debugging their packages on the new architecture. More horsepower - Linaro machines This is where Linaro came to our aid. Linaro's goal is to help improve Free and Open Source Software on ARM, and one of the more recent projects in Linaro is a cluster of servers that are made available for software developers to use to get early access to ARMv8 (arm64) hardware. It's a great way for people who are interested in this new architecture to try things out, port their software or indeed just help with the general porting effort. As Debian is seen as such an important part of the FLOSS ecosystem, we managed to negotiate dedicated access to three of the machines in that cluster for Debian's use and we set those up in October, shortly before the freeze for Jessie. Andy Doan spent a lot of his time getting these machines going for us, and then I set up two of them as build machines and one as the porter box we were still needing. With these extra machines available, we quickly caught up with the ever-busy "Needs-Build" queue and we've got sufficient build power now to keep things going for the Jessie release. We were officially added to the list of release architectures at the Cambridge mini-Debconf in November, and all is looking good now! And in the future? I've organised the loan of another arm64 machine from AMD for Debian to use for further porting and/or building. We're also expecting that more and more machines will be coming out soon as vendors move on from prototyping to producing real customer equipment. Once that's happened, more kit will be available and everybody will be able to have arm64-powered computers in the server room, on their desk and even inside their laptop! Mine will be running Debian Jessie... :-) Thanks! There's been a lot of people involved in the Debian arm64 bootstrapping at various stages, so many that I couldn't possibly credit them all! I'll highlight some, though. :-) First of all, Wookey's life has revolved around this port for the last few years, tirelessly porting, fixing and hacking out package builds to get us going. We've had loads of help from other teams in Debian, particularly the massive patience of the DSA folks with getting early machines up and running and the prodding of the ftpmaster, buildd and release teams when we've been grinding our way through ever more package builds and dependency loops. We've also had really good support from toolchain folks in Debian and ARM, fixing bugs as we've found them by stressing new code and new machines. We've had a number of other people helping by filing bugs and posting patches to help us get things built and working. And (last but not least!) thanks to all the folks who've helped us beg and borrow the hardware to make the Debian arm64 port a reality. Rumours of even more ARM ports coming soon are entirely scurrilous... *grin*

Steve McIntyre: UEFI Debian installer work for Jessie, part 4

Time for another update on my work for UEFI improvements in Jessie! I now have a mixed 32- and 64-bit UEFI netinst up and running right now, which will boot and install on the Asus X205TA machine I have. Since the last build, I've added 64-bit (amd64) support and added CONFIG_EFI_MIXED in the kernel so that the 64-bit kernel will also work with a 32-bit UEFI firmware. Visit http://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/unofficial/efi-development/jessie-upload2/ to download and test the image. There are a few other missing pieces yet for a complete solution, but I'm getting there...! WARNING: this CD is provided for testing only. Use at your own risk! If you have appropriate (U)EFI hardware, please try this image and let me know how you get on, via the debian-cd and debian-boot mailing lists.

2 January 2015

Steve McIntyre: UEFI Debian installer work for Jessie, part 3

Time for another update on my work for UEFI improvements in Jessie! I've got an i386-only UEFI netinst up and running right now, which will boot and install on the Asus X205TA machine I have. I've got the required i2c modules included in this build so that the installer can use the keyboard and trackpad on the machine - useful...! See #772578 for more details about that. Visit http://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/unofficial/efi-development/jessie-upload1/ to download and test the image. There are a few other missing pieces of hardware support for this machine yet, but the basics are there. See the wiki for more information. My initial i386 test CD is not yet going to do an amd64 installation for you, but it should let you get going with Debian on these machines! I'm going to continue working on that 32-64 support next. WARNING: this CD is provided for testing only. Use at your own risk! If you try this on an early Intel-based Mac, it will not work. Otherwise, this should likely work for most folks using 32-bit x86 hardware just like any other Debian Jessie daily netinst build. If you have appropriate (U)EFI hardware, please try this image and let me know how you get on, via the debian-cd and debian-boot mailing lists.

21 December 2014

Steve McIntyre: UEFI Debian installer work for Jessie, part 2

A month ago , I wrote about my plans for improved (U)EFI support in Jessie. It's about time I gave an update on progress! I spoke about adding support for installing grub-efi into the removable media path (#746662). That went into Debian's grub packages already, but there were a couple of bugs. First of all, the code could end up prompting people about EFI questions even when they didn't have any grub-efi packages installed. Doh! (#773004). Then there was an unexpected bug with case-insensitive file name handling on FAT/VFAT filesystems (#773092). I've posted (and tested!) patches to fix both, hopefully in an upload any day now. Next, I mentioned getting i386 UEFI support going again. This is a major feature that a lot of people have been asking for. It's also going to involve quite a bit of effort... Our existing (amd64) UEFI-capable images in Debian use the standard x86 El Torito CD boot method, with two boot images provided. One of these images gives us the traditional isolinux BIOS-boot support. The second option is an alternate El Torito image, including at a 64-bit version of grub-efi. For most machines, this works just fine - the BIOS or UEFI firmware will automatically pick the correct image and everybody's happy. This even works on our multi-arch i386/amd64 CDs and DVDs - isolinux will boot either kernel from the first El Torito image, or the alternate UEFI image is amd64 only. However, I can now see that there's been a long-standing issue with those multi-arch images, and it's to do with Macs. On the advice of Matthew Garrett, I've borrowed an old 32-bit Intel Mac to help testing, and it's quite instructive in terms of buggy firmware! The firmware on older 32-bit Intel Macs crashes hard when it detects more than one El Torito boot image, and I've now seen this happen myself. I've not had any bug reports about this, so I can only assume that we haven't had many users try that image. As far as I can tell, they've been using the normal i386 images in BIOS boot mode, and then struggling to get bootloaders working afterwards. There are a number of different posts on the net explaining how to do that. That's OK, but... If I now start adding 32-bit UEFI support to our standard set of i386 images, this will prevent users of old Macs from installing Debian. I could just say "screw it" and decide to not support those users at all, but that's not a very nice thing to do. If we want to continue to support them and add 32-bit UEFI support, I'll have to add another flavour of i386 image, either a "Mac special" or a "32-bit UEFI special". I'm not keen on doing that if I could avoid it, but the two options are mutually exclusive. Given the Mac problem is only on older hardware which (hopefully!) will be dying out, I'll probably pick that one as the special-case CD, and I'll make an extra netinst flavour only for those users to boot off. So, I've started playing with i386 UEFI stuff in the last couple of weeks too. I almost immediately found some showstopper behaviour bugs in the i386 versions of efivar and efibootmgr (#773412 and #773007), but I've debugged these with our Debian maintainer (Jared Dominguez) and the upstream developer (Peter Jones) and fixes should be in Jessie very soon. As I mentioned last month, the machines that most people have been requesting support for are the latest Bay Trail-based laptops and tablets. There are using 64-bit Intel Atom CPUs, but crippled with 32-bit UEFI firmware with no BIOS compatibility mode. This makes for some interesting issues. It's probably impossible to get a true answer why these machines are so broken by design, but there are several rumours. As far as I can see, most of these machines seem to ship with a limited version of 32-bit Windows 8.1. 32-bit Windows is smaller than 64-bit Windows, so fits much better in limited on-board storage space. But 32-bit Windows won't boot from 64-bit UEFI, so the firmware needed buggering to match. Ugh! To support these Bay Trail machines properly, we'll want to add a 32-bit UEFI installation option to our 64-bit images. I can tweak our CDs so that both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of grub-efi are included, and the on-board UEFI will load the right one needed. Then I'll need to make sure that all the 64-bit images also include grub-efi-ia32-bin from now on. With some extra logic, we'll need to remember that these new machines need that package installing instead of grub-efi-amd64-bin. It shouldn't be too hard, but let's see! :-) So, I've been out and bought one of these machines, an Asus X205TA. Lucas agreed that Debian will reimburse me (thanks!), so I'm not stuck with spending my own money on an otherwise unwanted machine! I can see via Google that none of the mainstream Linux distros support the Bay Trail machines fully yet, so there's not a lot of documentation yet. Initial boot on the new machine was easy using a quick-hack i386 UEFI image on USB, but from there everything went downhill quickly. I'll need to investigate some more, but the laptop's own keyboard and trackpad are not detected by the installer system. Neither is its built-in WiFi. Yay! I had to go and dig out a USB hub to connect the installer image USB key, a keyboard, mouse and a USB hard drive to the machine, as it only has 2 USB ports. I've taken a complete backup of the on-board 32GB flash before I start experimenting, so I can restore the machine back to its virgin state for future testing. I guess I now have a project to keep me busy over Christmas...! In other news, we've been continuing work on UEFI support for and within the new arm64 port. My ARM/Linaro colleague Leif Lindholm has been back-porting upstream kernel features and bug fixes to make d-i work, and filing Debian bugs when silly things break on arm64 because people don't think about other architectures (e.g #773311, doh!). As there are more and more people interested in (U)EFI support these days, I've also proposed that we create a new debian-efi mailing list to help focus discussion. See #773327 and follow up there if you think you'd use the list too! You can help! Same as 2 years ago, I'll need help testing some of these images. For the 32-bit UEFI support, I now have some relevant hardware myself, but testing on other machines too will be very important! I'll start pushing unofficial Jessie EFI test images shortly - watch this space.

20 November 2014

Steve McIntyre: UEFI Debian CDs for Jessie...

So, my work for Wheezy gave us working amd64 UEFI installer images. Yay! Except: there were a few bugs that remained, and also places where we could deal better with some of the more crappy UEFI implementations out there. But, things have improve since then and we should be better for Jessie in quite a few ways. First of all, Colin and the other Grub developers have continued working hard and quite a lot of the old bugs in this area look to be fixed. I'm hoping we're not going to see so many "UEFI boot gives me a blank black screen" type of problems now. For those poor unfortunates with Windows 7 on their machines, using BIOS boot despite having UEFI support in their hardware, I've fixed a long-standing bug (#763127) that could leave people with broken systems, unable to dual boot. We've fixed a silly potential permissions bug in how the EFI System Partition is mounted: (#770033). Next up, I'm hoping to add a workaround for some of the broken UEFI implementations, by adding support in our Grub packages (and in d-i) for forcing the installation of a copy of grub-efi in the removable media path. See #746662 for more of the details. It's horrid to be doing this, but it's just about the best thing we can do to support people with broken firmware. Finally, I've been getting lots of requests for adding i386 (32-bit x86) UEFI support in our official images. Back in the Wheezy development cycle, I had test images that worked on i386, but decided not to push that support into the release. There were worries about potentially critical bugs that could be tickled on some hardware, plus there were only very few known i386 UEFI platforms at the time; the risk of damage outweighed the small proportion of users, IMHO. However, I'm now revisiting that decision. The potentially broken machines are now 2 years older, and so less likely to be in use. Also, Intel have released some horrid platform concoction around the Bay Trail CPU: a 64-bit CPU (that really wants a 64-bit kernel), but running a 32-bit UEFI firmware with no BIOS Compatibility Mode. Recent kernels are able to cope with this mess, but at the moment there is no sensible way to install Debian on such a machine. I'm hoping to fix that next (#768461). It's going to be awkward again, needing changes in several places too. You can help! Same as 2 years ago, I'll need help testing some of these images. Particularly for the 32-bit UEFI support, I currently have no relevant hardware myself. That's not going to make it easy... :-/ I'll start pushing unofficial Jessie EFI test images shortly.

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