bug#33639: ISO installer image is broken on i686

[Thomas Schmitt]

Hi,

> Oops, that was an omission that I’ve just fixed.

Sometimes you need a clueless test user to clean the pipes. 

I now succeeded in running the ISO production command, but the truncation
problem is not reproducible here.

Please re-consider local reasons ... yada yada ... my main suspect would
be the immediate end of VM after the xorriso run. Maybe some buffers don't
get flushed down to the real disk ?

------------------------------------------------------------------------
What i did in detail:

I removed /gnu and /var/guix to get to a halfways clean state for
repeating steps 2 and 7 of
  https://www.gnu.org/software/guix/manual/en/html_node/Binary-Installation.html
I.e. i unpacked the tarball, moved the trees to /gnu and /var/guix,
and authorized ci.guix.info.pub.

Then i did step 8
  guix package -i glibc-locales
This lasted 12 minutes (mainly with building 7 packages).

Now the proposed command to "confirm that Guix is working":
  guix package -i hello
lasted only about 30 seconds.

Scrolling back in my mailbox to
  Date: Thu, 06 Dec 2018 16:34:02 +0100
  Message-ID: <address@hidden>

> Then you would need to run “guix pull” to get a current Guix (0.15.0
> itself didn’t have this bug.)

Do i still need this ? My tarball was already "0.16.0":
  guix-binary-0.16.0.i686-linux.tar.xz

I bet on omitting this step and go on with:

>   guix system disk-image --file-system-type=iso9660 \
>    -s i686-linux \
>    ~/.config/guix/current/share/guile/site/2.2/gnu/system/install.scm

After 5 minutes i see boot messages of a Linux kernel.
Oh. Qemu running on qemu. (The local power plant shifts one gear up.)

12 minutes elapsed and xorriso has started. Sloowly adding files:

  registering 302 items
  GNU xorriso 1.5.0 : RockRidge filesystem manipulator, libburnia project.
  ...
  45981 files added in 94 seconds
  ...
  xorriso : UPDATE : Thank you for being patient. Working since 265 seconds.
  ISO image produced: 500069 sectors
  Written to medium : 500069 sectors at LBA 0
  Writing to 'stdio:/xchg/guixsd.iso' completed successfully.

So far the xorriso run looks ok.
  ...
  /gnu/store/a8wwjfihb161maww0c8x4r797prdn8rr-image.iso

So this is where the ISO ended up.

  # ls -l /gnu/store/a8wwjfihb161maww0c8x4r797prdn8rr-image.iso
  -r--r--r-- 2 root root 1024141312 Jan  1  1970 
/gnu/store/a8wwjfihb161maww0c8x4r797prdn8rr-image.iso

  # expr 1024141312 / 2048
  500069

  # xorriso -indev /gnu/store/a8wwjfihb161maww0c8x4r797prdn8rr-image.iso
  ... no complaints about size mismatch ...
  Media summary: 1 session, 500069 data blocks,  977m data, 3052m free

Well, then with
  guix pull
and then again
  guix system disk-image ...
lasts 30 minutes,

  # time guix system disk-image --file-system-type=iso9660 \
    -s i686-linux \
    ~/.config/guix/current/share/guile/site/2.2/gnu/system/install.scm
  ...
    GUILEC   gnu/packages/emacs.go
  GC Warning: Failed to expand heap by 8388608 bytes
  ...
  GC Warning: Out of Memory! Heap size: 943 MiB. Returning NULL!
  ...
  guix system: error: build failed: build of 
`/gnu/store/vr5mhnh430qabrrc1a82pv954b89axws-guix-0.16.0-4.60b0402.drv' failed
  
  real    21m55.875s
  user    0m5.816s
  sys     0m1.384s
  #

Looks like my VM needs more memory for that stunt.
So again with 2 GiB.

... it seems that "guix pull" brought back the addiction to world building.
I abort after 50 minutes while it is doing some qemu tests.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Have a nice day :)

Thomas