Had to do a fresh install on my third M300 due to some weirdness caused by systemd/sysvinit stuff moving between init systems and back, but I decided to use the new bookworm rootfs from November.
Noticed a few things with the bookworm rootfs:
- There's a number of packages apt reports as "are installed and are no longer required" which seems to take up about 50MB of space. These should be shedded off to make the rootfs bzip smaller. The user will likely do the 'apt autoremove' anyway as instructed, but the fact is, the packages shouldn't have been there from the start if they're not required for the stock installation for minimum size constraints (and dropbox bandwidth!).
- Certain kernel modules are not enabled by default at boot with this new stock rootfs. This includes kirkwood_thermal for the two kirkwood cores that have it, orion_wdt for the orion/kirkwood watchdog timer, and marvell_cesa for hardware crypto. While all three of these are of mixed importance and the system runs without any of them enabled, the fact they're not starting at boot by default is slightly concerning for a universal flattened-device-tree rootfs. I understand they're either missing by accident or by design for memory savings, but a note should be made if it's the latter as some users do use these (especially those with the higher-end kirkwoods with the thermal sensor!) to drop them into /etc/modules to re-enable them.
These are all very minor issues but I haven't seen any posts making note of any of them, and the first point about the 50MB of space that could be saved affects the overall size of the initial image download and load-up.
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as a closing note, I'm also noticing popularity-contest still isn't installed and enabled by default as it really should be, or there should be a note somewhere to install this optionally instead of just ignoring it. Debian devs and maintainers make note of how many devices on a specific port are reporting in to help bolster whether a port is worth keeping on the official branch or moved back to unofficial aside from any issues with compilation. Given everyone using the kernels from this forum are probably the majority of armel users still left, it'd be a good idea to make mention of it on the rootfs post at the very least (if not included in the rootfs) if we want to see official support in the next couple of major Debian releases. The only distro that still supports armel aside from Debian is Gentoo, and if Debian drops armel, that's all that will be left unless Debian is forked for just-armel or someone bribes Devuan to support armel until it's dropped by the kernel for good.
At time of writing, armel on popcon totals 227 users. I'm sure that only counts a miniscule fraction of the users that have installed any rootfs archives from this forum and the number can be much higher, at least into the 300-350 range by my own estimations (especially taking into account the number of sales of Kace M300s in the past couple years). with the small talk of armel possibly being retired from official with Debian 13, it's indeed crucial to get as many devices on that number count as possible, and it's imperative to either make note of it or enable this as a default package that takes next to nothing for space, and runs on a monthly cron job to anonymously report to Debian about the architecture of the device and which debian-released packages are on the system. Adding this in either as a side note on the rootfs release post or as a preinstalled package in a fixed rootfs is nothing bad and everything good for the sake of the port all kirkwood boxes run on.
I know there's not a whole lot of incentive to roll a new rootfs to fix all of this, but I'm still bringing it up so it doesn't get brought up any closer to the end of the 12.x release lifecycle.
EDIT: I'm aware of the CESA module issues with regard to drive encryption and am monitoring that, so the fact it's not enabled by default right now is a good thing.
Noticed a few things with the bookworm rootfs:
- There's a number of packages apt reports as "are installed and are no longer required" which seems to take up about 50MB of space. These should be shedded off to make the rootfs bzip smaller. The user will likely do the 'apt autoremove' anyway as instructed, but the fact is, the packages shouldn't have been there from the start if they're not required for the stock installation for minimum size constraints (and dropbox bandwidth!).
- Certain kernel modules are not enabled by default at boot with this new stock rootfs. This includes kirkwood_thermal for the two kirkwood cores that have it, orion_wdt for the orion/kirkwood watchdog timer, and marvell_cesa for hardware crypto. While all three of these are of mixed importance and the system runs without any of them enabled, the fact they're not starting at boot by default is slightly concerning for a universal flattened-device-tree rootfs. I understand they're either missing by accident or by design for memory savings, but a note should be made if it's the latter as some users do use these (especially those with the higher-end kirkwoods with the thermal sensor!) to drop them into /etc/modules to re-enable them.
These are all very minor issues but I haven't seen any posts making note of any of them, and the first point about the 50MB of space that could be saved affects the overall size of the initial image download and load-up.
====
as a closing note, I'm also noticing popularity-contest still isn't installed and enabled by default as it really should be, or there should be a note somewhere to install this optionally instead of just ignoring it. Debian devs and maintainers make note of how many devices on a specific port are reporting in to help bolster whether a port is worth keeping on the official branch or moved back to unofficial aside from any issues with compilation. Given everyone using the kernels from this forum are probably the majority of armel users still left, it'd be a good idea to make mention of it on the rootfs post at the very least (if not included in the rootfs) if we want to see official support in the next couple of major Debian releases. The only distro that still supports armel aside from Debian is Gentoo, and if Debian drops armel, that's all that will be left unless Debian is forked for just-armel or someone bribes Devuan to support armel until it's dropped by the kernel for good.
At time of writing, armel on popcon totals 227 users. I'm sure that only counts a miniscule fraction of the users that have installed any rootfs archives from this forum and the number can be much higher, at least into the 300-350 range by my own estimations (especially taking into account the number of sales of Kace M300s in the past couple years). with the small talk of armel possibly being retired from official with Debian 13, it's indeed crucial to get as many devices on that number count as possible, and it's imperative to either make note of it or enable this as a default package that takes next to nothing for space, and runs on a monthly cron job to anonymously report to Debian about the architecture of the device and which debian-released packages are on the system. Adding this in either as a side note on the rootfs release post or as a preinstalled package in a fixed rootfs is nothing bad and everything good for the sake of the port all kirkwood boxes run on.
I know there's not a whole lot of incentive to roll a new rootfs to fix all of this, but I'm still bringing it up so it doesn't get brought up any closer to the end of the 12.x release lifecycle.
EDIT: I'm aware of the CESA module issues with regard to drive encryption and am monitoring that, so the fact it's not enabled by default right now is a good thing.