blog/data/2014-02-03-debian-hurd-sysvinit.txt

   1 Title: Testing sysvinit from experimental in Debian Hurd
   2 Tags: english, debian, bootsystem
   3 Date: 2014-02-03 13:40
   4
   5 <p>A few days ago I decided to try to help the Hurd people to get
   6 their changes into sysvinit, to allow them to use the normal sysvinit
   7 boot system instead of their old one.  This follow up on the
   8 <a href="https://teythoon.cryptobitch.de//categories/gsoc.html">great
   9 Google Summer of Code work</a> done last summer by Justus Winter to
  10 get Debian on Hurd working more like Debian on Linux.  To get started,
  11 I downloaded a prebuilt hard disk image from
  12 <a href="http://ftp.debian-ports.org/debian-cd/hurd-i386/current/debian-hurd.img.tar.gz">http://ftp.debian-ports.org/debian-cd/hurd-i386/current/debian-hurd.img.tar.gz</a>,
  13 and started it using virt-manager.</p>
  14
  15 <p>The first think I had to do after logging in (root without any
  16 password) was to get the network operational.  I followed
  17 <a href="https://www.debian.org/ports/hurd/hurd-install">the
  18 instructions on the Debian GNU/Hurd ports page</a> and ran these
  19 commands as root to get the machine to accept a IP address from the
  20 kvm internal DHCP server:</p>
  21
  22 <p><blockquote><pre>
  23 settrans -fgap /dev/netdde /hurd/netdde
  24 kill $(ps -ef|awk '/[p]finet/ { print $2}')
  25 kill $(ps -ef|awk '/[d]evnode/ { print $2}')
  26 dhclient /dev/eth0
  27 </pre></blockquote></p>
  28
  29 <p>After this, the machine had internet connectivity, and I could
  30 upgrade it and install the sysvinit packages from experimental and
  31 enable it as the default boot system in Hurd.</p>
  32
  33 <p>But before I did that, I set a password on the root user, as ssh is
  34 running on the machine it for ssh login to work a password need to be
  35 set.  Also, note that a bug somewhere in openssh on Hurd block
  36 compression from working.  Remember to turn that off on the client
  37 side.</p>
  38
  39 <p>Run these commands as root to upgrade and test the new sysvinit
  40 stuff:</p>
  41
  42 <p><blockquote><pre>
  43 cat > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/experimental.list &lt;&lt;EOF
  44 deb http://http.debian.net/debian/ experimental main
  45 EOF
  46 apt-get update
  47 apt-get dist-upgrade
  48 apt-get install -t experimental initscripts sysv-rc sysvinit \
  49     sysvinit-core sysvinit-utils
  50 update-alternatives --config runsystem
  51 </pre></blockquote></p>
  52
  53 <p>To reboot after switching boot system, you have to use
  54 <tt>reboot-hurd</tt> instead of just <tt>reboot</tt>, as there is not
  55 yet a sysvinit process able to receive the signals from the normal
  56 'reboot' command.  After switching to sysvinit as the boot system,
  57 upgrading every package and rebooting, the network come up with DHCP
  58 after boot as it should, and the settrans/pkill hack mentioned at the
  59 start is no longer needed.  But for some strange reason, there are no
  60 longer any login prompt in the virtual console, so I logged in using
  61 ssh instead.
  62
  63 <p>Note that there are some race conditions in Hurd making the boot
  64 fail some times.  No idea what the cause is, but hope the Hurd porters
  65 figure it out.  At least Justus said on IRC (#debian-hurd on
  66 irc.debian.org) that they are aware of the problem.  A way to reduce
  67 the impact is to upgrade to the Hurd packages built by Justus by
  68 adding this repository to the machine:</p>
  69
  70 <p><blockquote><pre>
  71 cat > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/hurd-ci.list &lt;&lt;EOF
  72 deb http://darnassus.sceen.net/~teythoon/hurd-ci/ sid main
  73 EOF
  74 </pre></blockquote></p>
  75
  76 <p>At the moment the prebuilt virtual machine get some packages from
  77 http://ftp.debian-ports.org/debian, because some of the packages in
  78 unstable do not yet include the required patches that are lingering in
  79 BTS.  This is the completely list of "unofficial" packages installed:</p>
  80
  81 <p><blockquote><pre>
  82 # aptitude search '?narrow(?version(CURRENT),?origin(Debian Ports))'
  83 i   emacs                   - GNU Emacs editor (metapackage)
  84 i   gdb                     - GNU Debugger
  85 i   hurd-recommended        - Miscellaneous translators
  86 i   isc-dhcp-client         - ISC DHCP client
  87 i   isc-dhcp-common         - common files used by all the isc-dhcp* packages
  88 i   libc-bin                - Embedded GNU C Library: Binaries
  89 i   libc-dev-bin            - Embedded GNU C Library: Development binaries
  90 i   libc0.3                 - Embedded GNU C Library: Shared libraries
  91 i A libc0.3-dbg             - Embedded GNU C Library: detached debugging symbols
  92 i   libc0.3-dev             - Embedded GNU C Library: Development Libraries and Hea
  93 i   multiarch-support       - Transitional package to ensure multiarch compatibilit
  94 i A x11-common              - X Window System (X.Org) infrastructure
  95 i   xorg                    - X.Org X Window System
  96 i A xserver-xorg            - X.Org X server
  97 i A xserver-xorg-input-all  - X.Org X server -- input driver metapackage
  98 #
  99 </pre></blockquote></p>
 100
 101 <p>All in all, testing hurd has been an interesting experience. :)
 102 X.org did not work out of the box and I never took the time to follow
 103 the porters instructions to fix it.  This time I was interested in the
 104 command line stuff.<p>