Weekly Changes – 12/12/2022
This is the last weekly release for 2022. There are just a few changes this week, the work on the new installer has now mostly calmed down although there is continuing work on improving the new fstab component. Here are all the notable changes…
fstab component
Development work on the new fstab component for Ubuntu has continued, with further work on restoring support for previous functionality and also the addition of new features.
The fstab component only partitions, formats and mounts partitions automatically at system install time. If extra disks are installed at a later point then they may be configured using the adddisk
component method. Support for this feature is now almost complete, it can partition and format extra disks as required. The only part missing now is support for merging any new fstab and crypttab entries.
There is new support for specifying the mode for mount point directories when they are created. The items in the partitions
and entries
now both support a new mode_<tag>
resource. Any missing parent directories will also be created, the mode for those directories will be similar to that of the mount point but without any group/other write access or special bits enabled. If the mode is not specified then, for security, the directory will be created with 0700
. Note that this does not affect existing installations only newly created mount points.
Support for the ancient updfstab facility has been removed. This was designed to keep /etc/fstab
consistent with the removable devices plugged into your system. It appears to have last been supported in Redhat 9 (note, that is NOT RHEL 9). Although the fstab component contained code to manage the configuration it was not actually enabled so this feature has not been functional for a long time. The resources have been removed to avoid confusion.
Ubuntu installer
Support has been restored for specifying the LCFG profile server using the lcfg.url
kernel command line argument. This may be used when you don’t have the ability to specify a user-class
option in the DHCP configuration.
A fix has been made for a subtle bug in the generation of the /etc/resolv.conf
file which resulted in the file only being readable by root.
lightdm
The minimum-vt
option has been changed from 1 to 7 for Ubuntu. Note that this is currently hardwired into the lightdm.debian.tt
template, we will convert it into an LCFG resource at some point.
KVM guests
DICE Ubuntu KVM guests will now have the qemu-guest-agent
package installed. This allows for synchronising the time between the host and guest, which is particularly useful when a guest is recovering from being suspended. To be effective it requires an appropriate virtio-serial channel with name ‘org.qemu.guest_agent.0
‘.
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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