Weekly Changes – 21/11/2022
This is another week where the majority of changes are related to the work of integrating the new Ubuntu installer configuration. We are optimistic that the new installer will be ready for wider testing after the next stable release on Wednesday 30th November. Here are all the details…
fstab component
The handling of the disk alignment in the new fstab component has been corrected to make it compatible with the previous expectation that it was specified in bytes. The new component now also supports specifying the desired units (e.g. kB, MB).
Selecting the boot partition
There is a new header – lcfg/options/boot-partition.h – which can be used to select the correct boot partition for all supported platforms, installers and boot modes (i.e. legacy or UEFI). This may be included multiple times to override previous settings when the boot mode has been changed from the default.
Note that with the new installer a boot partition should not be specified when booting in legacy mode, instead, the label resource for the primary disk should be specified as gpt-bios. Also, the new schema uses names as tags (rather than partition devices), so when booting in UEFI mode the boot partition will now be referred to using the esp tag.
Selecting the grub install device
There is a new header – lcfg/options/select-grub-installdev.h – which can be used to select the correct grub bootloader install device for the primary disk. This may be included multiple times to override previous settings when the disk type has been changed from the default (e.g. an NVME disk rather than SCSI).
Disk Layout
Work has begun on adding support for the new Ubuntu installer to the lcfg/options/primary-disk-partitions.h header. The standard macros (e.g. FSTAB_PARTITION) are available and can be used to create a bespoke layout, currently, there is no default partition layout. We expect to complete all the necessary changes for this header before the next weekly release.
Note that the new installer defaults to using LVM for the partitions on the primary disk, this is likely to be what most sites want and matches with the old Ubuntu installer. If sites would prefer not to use LVM we could add support for that later.
One benefit of the new approach is that it is no longer necessary to include it again after changing the primary disk type, a change of disk type now requires just a simple change to a couple of resources, the partitioning scheme would be unchanged.
NVME
The dice/options/nvme-root.h header has been tweaked to ensure that the correct disk alignment is used for NVME SSD drives.
Alternative syslog daemon
A new header has been added – lcfg/options/syslog-inetutils.h – which will replace the standard rsyslog with the alternative syslog daemon from the GNU network utilities project. This is a much simpler service that uses the traditional syslog configuration style. It is used in the new Ubuntu installer because rsyslog does not work well with union filesystems. Note that this header removes the LCFG rsyslog component but does NOT include the ancient LCFG syslog component, to use the service you would need to provide your own configuration file.
The logging infrastructure in the new installer has been configured to use syslog as well as printing to the main console. This means that all messages are stored and can be found later, once the install has been completed, in the /var/log/install directory.
Manual Pages
User-accessible Ubuntu systems now have a greater selection of common manual pages with the inclusion of the manpages-dev and manpages-posix packages.
Header Tidying
A few ancient and unused headers, particularly related to the use of the scsiroot.h header, have been deleted for clarity.
Changes to headers and package lists
Members of the Informatics Computing team can browse all the changes to the headers and package lists.
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