as part of my cross-distro work I am also working on getting the CI infrastructure we have for snapd work on other distributions so we can run tests for any PR somebody creates against all supported distributions equally and see when one breaks. There is a lot of work towards that and I decided to start with the lowest hanging fruit which is Debian as it is naturally very similar to Ubuntu.
I have a branch (rough, not finished yet or ready for review) which adjusts multiple things in the existing spread infrastructure to allow us running all tests on a Debian image. As a base I use one of the openstack debian images for the current testing branch (upcoming Debian 9 - stretch) as that is the only one we support with snapd today next to unstable.
A next step is to get a proper base image onto our Linode infrastructure which is based on testing. @niemeyer asked me to give a summary here so we can discuss the next steps for this.
Note that the very first image baked will likely be based on a pre-existing Linode image such as āDebian 8ā, and those use a custom kernel from Linode, so the ākernel: GRUB 2ā line above needs to be temporarily commented out and after the image boots the real distribution kernel must be installed.
After the final image is baked, we drop that image line and always use GRUB 2 so that the kernel inside the image itself is used.
@niemeyer I wanted to perform these steps today but I donāt have a Linode auth key yet. Are you the right person to get me one?
Also Linode doesnāt list any other existing image than debian-7 or debian-8 as available images so where does the debian-sid one you mention come from?
That image ended up pretty large at around 1600MB. Do you know why the increase in space needs? For comparison, the previous debian-sid was 1024MB and the ubuntu-16.04-64 one is at 610MB (!).
The PR needs to be updated so it drops the image: line since weāll be baking that image with its real name, per note above at the end.
linode:debian-unstable-64 /# du -hs *
8.1M bin
57M boot
0 dev
4.3M etc
20K home
0 initrd.img
0 initrd.img.old
404M lib
4.0K lib64
16K lost+found
8.0K media
4.0K mnt
4.0K opt
0 proc
304K root
2.9M run
5.8M sbin
4.0K srv
0 sys
28K tmp
634M usr
30M var
0 vmlinuz
0 vmlinuz.old
The two biggest items are
/lib
/usr
/lib covers kernel modules for multiple kernels and I removed those which are not in use and have corresponding debian packages. Two remain which seem to come from Linode but donāt have corresponding debian packages:
/lib/modules/4.4.0-x86_64-linode63
/lib/modules/4.5.5-x86_64-linode69
Both donāt cover much same (4K) so we can ignore those.
The image size should be down to ~940M now. @niemeyer Is that enough for now? I can look further tomorrow to see what we can strip out but would like to get a first snapshot to start testing my spread setup on Linode. Is that ok for you?
@niemeyer If you want to do the same for a fedora 25 based image, can I use just image: fedora-25 and spread will automatically figure out to take the existing image provided by Linode as a base?
@morphis You can use that as a name, but then use the āimage:ā field with the distribution name as made available by Linode. In this specific case, āFedora 25ā might do.
Image is a bit large at 1800MBā¦ can we get it down a bit somehow? Note that the restore logic in spread.yaml drops data such as packaging information and packages themselves which were downloadedā¦ that needs tweaking for fedora and other rpm based distros. This may be part of the bloat there.
We do that already. The image seems bloated by itself as I didnāt do much
on the image. Only a ādnf upgrade && dnf cleal-allā and it was on that size
already before. Will see tomorrow what of the installed software (most
space is consumed by /usr) can be dropped.
