Yes, I started a few weeks ago after a (too long) hiatus. 2.6.30 kernel, which is looking nice. (SquashFS is now included in mainline. That means UnionFS is now the only kernel patch that is absolutely required.) The latest Debian testing stuff itself is pretty stable, but managed to break pretty much all of Finnix's init scripts in one way or another, but it's coming along. Unfortunately Debian's base packages are a little larger, and the kernels have ballooned between 2.6.26 and 2.6.30, so this will probably be the largest Finnix to date, about 125MiB for x86 at current estimates. It's still well under Finnix's long term goals (never to exceed 185MiB, the size of a mini-CD), but unfortunately there really isn't anything to trim.

Still, I'm happy with what the next release is shaping up to be. Looks good!

Hopefully a release announcement will be made tomorrow; otherwise it will be next week, as I will be on vacation for the Thanksgiving holiday. Finnix 92.1 will be a maintenance release, with a dist-upgraded environment, a "new" kernel, 2.6.26 (2.6.27 has not yet entered Debian due to the Lenny freeze, and I didn't deem it important enough to break with procedure and use a vanilla kernel this time around), and a few small fixes.

Also, a little teaser: This will not be released with Finnix 92.1 -- it will be sometime after release -- but I will be announcing Finnix on a new architecture. Which one? It's a secret... One hint is it is an architecture I have discussed in relation to Finnix before.

(No, it's not that iPod April Fools port from 2006.)

There have been suggestions for a new boot menu for awhile now. I liked the idea in theory, but there were various problems with most implementations (no graphics; graphics, but no fallback to text mode; no easy way to add boot options, such as toram, testcd, etc; no way to default to 64-bit boot options). Debian's recent announcement of debian-installer for lenny beta 2 introduced a new installer boot menu system based on bootmenu.c32, which looked very nice and solved most of the problems I mentioned. However, no default 64-bit option on multi-arch CDs, which the announcement mentioned and lamented.

I used Debian's configs as a base for a Finnix test. The results were very nice, and I was ready to do as Debian did and accept that the improvements were worth the loss of 64-bit autodetection. However, an acquaintance encouraged me to look into it ("Sounds like it's time for some OPEN SOURCE MAGIC"), and within a few hours, I had a working patch.

The debian-installer guys loved it and had the patch applied within an hour, and as well, it will be in Finnix 92.0. Here's a development screenshot:

On the trademark front, everything is now complete! Finnix is now a registered trademark. I'll be updating graphics on the site where appropriate.

Core Duo Mac Minis and Core Duo Macbook Pros boot fine, however. I would assume the Core Solo variants work fine as well. I've also been able to boot Finnix successfully and easily on several non-Mac Core Duo laptops, as well as the latest and greatest Athlon X2 systems.

---

Development is coming along well. In addition to udev and netbooting support, the next Finnix will support autodetection of dm-crypt/LUKS partitions, and md software RAID sets. Additionally, I am 99% sure I will be including an AMD64 kernel (bootable as "finnix64" instead of "finnix") along with the normal 586 kernel. There are two main reasons for doing this:

• Current x86 Finnix kernels are not PAE enabled, which means they cannot utilize more than 4GB RAM. This is done because PAE tends to be problematic on hosts with 4GB RAM or less. Native 64-bit kernels (on an AMD64/EM64T CPU, of course) have a much higher limit (petabytes?). Granted, the average machine still has less than 4GB RAM these days, but I have had to use Finnix on 6GB/8GB machines before. (Non-PAE kernels still boot, they just display the installed RAM as 4GB.)
• While the Finnix userland will still be 32-bit, booting a 64-bit kernel will allow you to run static-compiled 64-bit programs, and more importantly, chroot into pure 64-bit environments. This will become increasingly important as more and more distros offer native AMD64 userlands as an option (Fedora, RHEL, SuSE, and soon Debian).

However, another kernel means a larger distro. In order to cut down on size, I have decided to remove the finnix-uml package (AKA Finnix-on-Finnix) from the main distribution. Finnix-on-Finnix was created as a way to prototype and test Finnix virtualization support (by acting as both the host and guest, you test two birds with one stone), and virtualization support has proven to be incredibly stable the last few releases. However, once a Finnix release is gold, Finnix-on-Finnix itself becomes little more than a novelty, which very few people use, and takes up previous megabytes. The finnix-uml package will still be maintained and available in the apt repository, so it is little more than an "apt-get install finnix-uml" away if you still want to use it.

After all is said and done, it's looking like the final compressed distro size will be about 110MiB after adding the AMD64 kernel. While still much lower than the project's target ceiling of 185MiB, I had been trying to keep x86 under the magical 100MiB number. Oh well.

The latest snapshot has been uploaded recently. It is mostly functional, with the biggest problem being some mount points/fstab entries are not being created automatically. NFS/TFTP booting is pretty stable, and has been confirmed working on the PPC platform. I will be writing documentation for NFS booting soon.

First up, for post-88.0 development, the new codename is Oshkosh, a city of about 60,000, on the west side of Lake Winnebago. Oshkosh is the original home of OshKosh B'Gosh, a popular line of children's clothing. Oshkosh is also home to the world's busiest airport... for one week, that is. The EAA AirVenture Fly-In is a yearly gathering of experimental aircraft enthusiasts, and the single airfield handles 10,000 to 15,000 aircraft during the week-long show.

New builds are up on the snapshots server. Here are the major developments being worked on:

• udev support. The primary benefit of udev for Finnix is automatic generation of fstab entries. If you were to partition a hard drive, the new partitions will immediately show up in fstab, with /mnt directories created automatically.
• Network booting. Finnix is now capable of being booted via PXE/bootp, expanding the possiblities of a sysadmin in need. Additionally, a new script is available, finnix-netboot-server, which takes care of configuring and starting TFTP and NFS servers from within Finnix itself. All you have to do is add a few lines to your DHCP server's config.
• toram and testcd functionality has been reverted back to its "classic" file-based operations. Block-based operation was nice, but the drawbacks outweighed the benefits.
• A new kernel is available on the x86 image, 2.6.17-3-x86-finnix, based on Debian's 2.6.17-8, which is based on 2.6.17.11 vanilla. Nothing special, it was mainly to test a new kernel build method. Future releases will have Debian-style kernel source/header packages available, which will make it easier to compile 3rd-party modules and remaster the kernel portion.

• knoppix-hotplug is one of the last remaining throwbacks from Finnix 84/85, which were Knoppix remasters. The only reason the file is still around is because it's never needed to be modified. However, post-88.0, I will be switching from hotplug to udev, which will make this process obsolete.
• The first 5 seconds of "nothing" seem to be in init itself, and can't be overridden. I may look into the source to see what is causing that delay.
• The 7-second sleep is for "settling", most notably because after USB storage devices are initialized, the kernel module sleeps for 6 seconds before making the partition table available. Post-88.0, I will look into parallelization, putting tasks that don't relate to disks between the initialization and the partition table scanning (such as mouse services). Then I would take the delta and sleep (for example, if other tasks take 3 seconds, it would sleep for 4 more seconds before scanning partition tables).
• 20 seconds is still rather impressive. Let's see what we can shave off that.
]]> http://blog.finnix.org/2006/07/16/finnix-and-bootcharts/feed/ 0 http://blog.finnix.org/2006/07/02/cia-no-not-that-cia/ http://blog.finnix.org/2006/07/02/cia-no-not-that-cia/#comments Mon, 03 Jul 2006 03:36:46 +0000 Ryan Finnie http://www.finnix.org/blog/2006/07/02/cia-no-not-that-cia/ In addition to an RSS feed, new Finnix development ISO builds are now being announced via the CIA system. The easiest way to see this is to join irc.freenode.net #commits.
]]> http://blog.finnix.org/2006/07/02/cia-no-not-that-cia/feed/ 0 http://blog.finnix.org/2006/07/02/development-development-development-development/ http://blog.finnix.org/2006/07/02/development-development-development-development/#comments Sun, 02 Jul 2006 10:13:56 +0000 Ryan Finnie http://www.finnix.org/blog/2006/07/02/development-development-development-development/ News from the development front...

First, a clarification about codenames. Namely, they will only be used during development. Currently, the daily builds are tagged as "Finnix version dev (Pulaski)", with "Pulaski" indicating "after 87.0 release, but before 88.0". When 88.0 is released, it will simply be called "Finnix version 88.0".

As you may have heard 2 sentences ago, yes, the next version will be numbered 88.0. The vitals are looking like the following: Linux 2.6.17 (as of this writing, Debian's 2.6.17-2), UnionFS 1.3 (no more CVS snapshots...), SquashFS 3.0. Finnix 88.0 will look a great deal like 87.0, but behind the scenes, a LOT has been done. As I mentioned before, PCI module autodetection has been completely rewritten to be much faster, "toram" and "testcd" are now more effective (in particular, "testcd" now tests the entire CD on a block level), Xen is now completely supported (both as a domU and now as a dom0, though no dom0 kernels will be distributed with the CD), and more.

I have finalized on which DOS disk I will be using for the "dos" profile. It is FreeDOS ODIN 0.7, which is essentially the DOS floppy equivalent of a LiveCD. I got the idea of including DOS after using a Caldera DR-DOS utility disk image that comes with Nero Burning ROM. Obviously I can't distribute DR-DOS, and FreeDOS itself does not directly distribute a non-installation disk, but thankfully I came across ODIN. It works just like the DR-DOS utility disk, even better in some places, and is only 900k compressed.

In non-development news, I have migrated some services from Sourceforge to in-house. The mailing list and bug system is gone, replaced by a forums system. Older news items have been backported from Sourceforge into the "Announcements" section of the blog, and the home page now points to this instead of Sourceforge. (New version announcements will continue to be copied to Sourceforge.) I am currently looking at integrating the snapshots system to announce to CIA.

Oh, I guess you are wondering when 88.0 will be released. I'm thinking early August at this point, coinciding with DEF CON, which I will be attending for the 4th year. Nothing official, but I'll probably be handing out stacks of CDs. Let me know if you plan on attending.

If 4 months between releases is not good enough for you, remember that there are always the snapshots, which are almost always (but not guaranteed to be) stable. Right now the uploads are triggered manually, every weekday or so. (I have many machines at work that I can test on, so I usually start uploading before I leave for work, download from work, then test.) So, at this point, if I uploaded it, it's a pretty good indication I expect it to at least boot.

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