Re: Everything's broken (was: Debian GNU/Hurd 2023 released!)

[Samuel Thibault]

Sergey Bugaev, le mer. 14 juin 2023 18:40:15 +0300, a ecrit:
> The qemu command line I used was
> $ qemu-img create -f qcow2 debian-hurd-2023.qcow2 100G
> $ qemu-system-i386 -m 1G -hda debian-hurd-2023.qcow2 -cdrom 
> debian-sid-hurd-i386-NETINST-1.iso -enable-kvm

It seems that for whatever reason, the 100G size + qcow2 is the
trigger. I always test only with 10G with raw format, never with 100G
with qcow2. LBA28 is supposed to handle <= 128GB disks just fine, but
possibly there is a bug somewhere that we just never triggered.

> Please tell me if you need even more details, such as what exact
> choices I made at each particular screen. I could even record a video.

Basically the needed details is whatever choice that is not just taking
the default or what is written in the README. Here, notably the size and
the qcow2 format. I cannot reproduce the issue with 100G raw image, and
not either with 10G, 64G, or even 80G qcow2 images, so it really seems
to be the 100G size + qcow2 combination that poses problem, for whatever
reason.

> Is there any reason to assume that I (or those other people) have not
> read the readme?
> 
> It does say "To give Debian GNU/Hurd a try, it is probably easier to
> simply run the preinstalled image", not "it is really recommended to
> use the preinstalled image, since the system you get after using the
> installer doesn't boot". People certainly have their reasons why they
> want to install the system from scratch.

Sure, but they could perhaps reckon that yes, our workforce being
what it is, we don't try installation in all kinds of combinations of
cases, and the preinstalled image is probably *worth* a try rather than
assuming that it's just *all* broken and that for sure we haven't even
tested the ISO image at all before publishing it.

> Rather than blaming it on the users, let's fix the bug.

Sure, but without actually seeing the bug by knowing which condition
triggers it, we can't really fix it.

> > And most people just forgetting that it's just the same with *any*
> > OS that doesn't have a huge testing team. Any departure from what is
> > actually tested will get issues, very obviously. One just can't test the
> > whole world of virtualfoo etc.
> 
> Well, if there was, say, a call for pre-release testing,

Well, Debian did ask for testing.

I guess I should explicitly tell debian-hurd@ "hey that's a matter for
*us* too".

> So the installed system is not to blame, it must be that the installer
> is corrupting the FS somehow.

Possibly some missing disk cache flush. I believe we have done fixes
there in the past, but possibly some things are still missing...
Or perhaps.

Samuel