News:

• Debian kernel 2.4.21-2 with XFS 1.3 bits available: http://www.physik.tu-cottbus.de/~george/debian/

  Also available with apt. Add the following line to sources.list:

  deb http://www.physik.tu-cottbus.de/~george/debian i386/
  

• Netinst ISO images
• If you miss some features or find a bug, please mail me and I'll see what I can do about that. School is my top priority and I have downgraded my computer activity from "hacking with debian" to "using Debian". I had three main reasons for doing that:
  • There is another boot-floppies set, which seems to be actively maintained. (For a small amount the guy is ready to integrate LVM in the main installation system :))
  • I didn't like boot-floppies from the start. The new debian-installer is more on my taste, or will be when it will be released :).
  • With filesystem and RAID & LVM support in the kernel, you can do almost any kind of setup you can imagine.

    Bootstrap a Debian system in the swap partition, reboot, setup the RAID, LVM whatsoever, copy the files to the real root partition, setup initrd, ready. I have already made a RAID1 setup with the standard woody ISO.

  • And last, but not least, Python :)

Hi,

Everybody wants a journaling filesystem on his bleeding edge home computer. I wanted one too. While there are being lots of journaling filesystems out there (XFS, JFS, ReiserFS, ext3 ...), I stopped at XFS and ReiserFS. XFS because I'm a great SGI fan and it's been around for some time. ReiserFS because it seems to be very fast on special purposes. Cool. But I also wanted Debian. And there wasn't any Debian installer out there that also had XFS support. Following the UNIX tradition, I built my own installer.

The Kernel

I took a vanilla 2.4.17 and applied the following patches:

• sched-O1-2.4.17-rmap-12c-K3.patch
• preempt-kernel-rml-2.4.18-rc1-ingo-K3-1.patch
• linux-2.4.17-seekdir.dif
• linux-2.4.17-xfs-2002-02-10.cvs-patch.bz2
• o1-sched-kdb.patch

Please don't ask me about the order because I don't remember :).

When making menuconfig I had one thing in mind. One must have a root filesystem mounted as soon as possible. Therefore the provided kernel comes with support for most of the IDE chipsets, some SCSI adapters and some ethernet cards (for getting the rest of the drivers). RAID0/1 has been compiled into the kernel. RAID5 as module. I don't think someone would put a root filesystem one RAID5. But YMMV. Here is the .config.

I strongly suggest that you compile your own kernel after installing the base system. The boot kernel has lots of drivers and almost no features (such as APM, ACPI, ECN ...) compiled in ! Here is the source I used:

• kernel-source-2.4.17-bf2.4xfs_xfs.1.0.2-2_all.deb
• kernel-image-2.4.17-bf2.4xfs_xfs.1.0.2-2_i386.deb. This is the kernel image I used.
• pcmcia-modules-2.4.17-bf2.4xfs_3.1.31-7+xfs.1.0.2+2_i386.deb

The Beast: boot-floppies

I am not the ultimate fan of boot-floppies, but I must admit it wasn't that hard to add xfs support. Given the existing support for 2.4 kernels, all I had to do was to add supplementary entries for xfs. In the end it builds without too much trouble.

User tools

• xfsprogs-bf (mkfs.xfs)
• reiserfsprogs (mkreiserfs)
• raidtools2 (mkraid, mkpv, raidstart etc.)
• lvm10 (I have removed some utilities such as *rename to fit on a normal 1440k floppy)

The Files

• resc1440bf2.4xfs.bin. 1.44M boot floppy.
• root1440bf2.4xfs.bin. The root disk.
• drv14bf2.4xfs-1.bin. Drivers. 1^st disk.
• drv14bf2.4xfs-2.bin. Drivers. 2^nd disk.
• drv14bf2.4xfs-3.bin. Drivers. 3^rd disk.
• drv14bf2.4xfs-4.bin. Drivers. 4^th disk.
• resc2880bf2.4xfs.bin. 2.88M boot image for use with boot CD's. See the debian-cd package for that.
• driversbf2.4xfs.tgz
• modulesbf2.4xfs.tgz
• tftpboot-bf2.4xfs.img

Or just burn all of them on a CD: woody_xfs_netinst.iso (44M).

How to install.

Install the system as you usually do. The Debian installer (dbootstrap) has now support for XFS and ReiserFS so you don't neet to switch the console anymore.

If you have need to load supplementary drivers to get the root filesystem mounted, you can put them on a floppy disk (see the Installation Manual for how to do that) and tell dbootstrap to look for them there. The drivers are here: driversbf2.4xfs.tgz.

Have fun,
Ionut Georgescu