Ubuntu Jammy Progress 1
Details of recent progress on the Ubuntu 22.04 (Jammy Jellyfish) platform…
Installs
We have successfully installed a DICE small server system using the LCFG PXE installer. The standard authentication, authorization and filesystem all function as expected. There is a lot more work to be done to check that everything is behaving as expected and does not require tweaks but this is a big step forward.
Software
The effort to add support for Jammy to all our local packages continues. At this point all the packages required to support a DICE small server environment have been successfully built. Work has begun on building all the local packages necessary for the much more complex desktop environment.
Currently we are using different versions for local packages on Focal and Jammy. Once basic testing is complete they will slowly be merged so that we use as few versions as possible to support the various platforms.
So far it seems that the Jammy and Focal platforms are reasonably similar, we have not yet needed to make any substantial code changes to support Jammy.
apteryx
The options which control the behaviour of the apteryx package manager have now been set on Jammy to be the same as for Focal. This means that the packages installed on a system are now fully managed, anything not specified in the profile will be removed. As we do not currently have a local mirror of the upstream repository this does occasionally cause minor issues when they decide to remove a version of a package we’re using (typically related to new security updates being released). As we’re only supporting the live develop release the simple fix for now is to regenerate the updates package lists when that happens.
Package Lists
Whenever we do a platform upgrade we take the opportunity to consider how we might improve package management. These changes have over time made it much easier to port to new platforms.
For Jammy, the LCFG-level base package lists have been restructured. Whereas we previously had packages listed in the base package list it now only includes other package lists, like this:
#include <lcfg_ubu2204_minimal.pkgs> #ifdef DESKTOP_PACKAGES #include <lcfg_ubu2204_desktop.pkgs> #endif #include <lcfg_ubu2204_options.pkgs> #include <lcfg_ubu2204_postship.pkgs>
This introduces a new minimal package list that includes the packages which were previously in the base list. Note also that the options and postship package lists have been removed from the profile.packages resource and are now instead included from this top-level package list. We now have:
profile.packages @lcfg_ubu2204_base.pkgs\
options\
@lcfg_ubu2204_updates.pkgs\
@lcfg_ubu2204_override.pkgs\
@lcfg_ubu2204_kernel.pkgs\
@lcfg_debian_lcfg.pkgs
This new approach improves the way we manage the postship list. As it is now evaluated in the same context as the options list it is much simpler to modify package groups, particularly when they are dependencies of other groups.
Note that this does NOT affect the profile.packages_options resource, updates will still be applied to that list as usual.
Another benefit of this approach is that sites may now replace the LCFG base list with their own site-specific list. Something like this:
!profile.packages mSUBST(lcfg_<%%sysinfo.os_id_full%%>_base,dice_<%%sysinfo.os_id_full%%>_env)
Sites would start by duplicating the functionality of the base list. They can then enable various extra package options (using #define before the inclusion of the options list) which they require for their standard environment.
For Ubuntu Focal, on DICE we used a similar approach but instead replaced the inclusion of the LCFG options with our own local package list. That achieved much of what we required but occasionally caused problems with the postship package list.
Recent comments