March 2021 - openSUSE Factory - openSUSE Mailing Lists

YaST: highlights of development sprint 118
by Ancor Gonzalez Sosa 02 Mar '21

02 Mar '21

One week later than expected, here we have a new YaST development report including: - Support to enable and configure SELinux during installation - A revamped interface for configuring wireless network devices - Usability improvements in several areas - A new “hidden level” in the installer with advanced tools ;-) Check the whole report at: https://yast.opensuse.org/blog/2021-03-02/sprint-118 Cheers. -- Ancor González Sosa YaST Team at SUSE Linux GmbH

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[opensuse-factory] Convert from classic to transactional server?
by seroton10＠gmail.com 02 Mar '21

02 Mar '21

Hi, When installing openSUSE (any flavour), the installer offers a choice between the "server" and "transactional server" roles, among others. If I choose to install using the "server" role, is there a (supported) procedure by which I can later convert it into a "transactional server"? (Assume using btrfs for /, and having snapshots.) I tried to do this conversion on a test system running openSUSE Leap 15.2 as follows: * run "zypper install patterns-base-transactional_base" * edit /etc/fstab to make root read-only * reboot This appears to work: The system self-updates, and reboots when needed; /etc has been turned into an overlay filesystem; and zypper up tells me to use the transactional-update tool. However, one of the packages installed during the conversion is "read- only-root-fs", and its description contains a rather stern warning: Files, scripts and directories to run the system with a read-only root filesystem with /etc writeable via overlayfs. This package should never be installed in an already running system! It should only be selected by a system role for a read-only root filesystem with transactional updates. The package will create / modify entries for mounting /etc and /var. Those entries are used by dracut to mount the overlay file systems during the early boot phase. After reading this, I ask myself, was it just dumb luck that the test system wasn't destroyed during the conversion? What can/does go wrong if read-only-root-fs is installed in an already running system, against the advice given? Any clarification on this would be much appreciated. Regards, Olav -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-factory+unsubscribe(a)opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse-factory+owner(a)opensuse.org

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UsrMerge conversion plan
by Ludwig Nussel 01 Mar '21

01 Mar '21

Hi, Soon the last fixes for packages that were incompatible with UsrMerge will enter Factory. Time to think about the conversion plan. I've updated the wiki page¹ to describe how projects in the build service can transition to UsrMerge and how to do the conversion at run time. Instead of triggering it manually in the initrd like Fedora did, the idea here basically is to leverage the renameat2(2) syscall in %pretrans of the file system package. So there is no intermediate, half merged state. Works fine in my test setups at least. It relies on coreutils' cp though. Can we live with that? I'm not a aware of library that could be used instead and obviously don't really want to re-implement cp just for this :-) An open question is file provides. Atm I'm using a provides generator that automatically adds the legacy /bin provides to well known packages. Do we want to do it that way or manually add file provides to packages? cu Ludwig [1] https://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Usr_merge -- (o_ Ludwig Nussel //\ V_/_ http://www.suse.com/ SUSE Software Solutions Germany GmbH, GF: Felix Imendörffer HRB 36809 (AG Nürnberg)

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