On Thu, 13 Jun 2019, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote: > > I'm no expert with the debian installer, but I suspect you should be > > using the initrd for the netinst method (?) > > There is no "netinst" initrd. There are initrds for "cdrom" and > "netboot". > > NETINST is a normal CD-ROM installation image. It just comes with less > packages than the full CD-ROM sets which provide all packages on the > installation media. > > NETINST and netboot are two completely distinct things and not to be > confused. >
I see. Thanks for the clarification. > > >> I next tried booting using a serial console (console=ttyS0,9600n8). > >> After the expected slowness of systemd bringing everything up (about > >> eight minutes), > > > > Right, systemd is hopeless on these machines. Not just because the CPU > > is slow, but because systemd sets short timeouts on it's own units > > which those units can't live up to. That means that systemd enforces > > policy that excludes slow hardware. > > I haven't seen any particular slowness issues except for the login delay > with systemd on elgar. > The timeout problem I was referring to has come up before on m68k systems. https://lists.debian.org/debian-68k/2016/06/msg00000.html I don't claim that systemd is "slow". It's just that it does a lot of work that's not needed on small systems. If it was more modular, like the kernel, all of that extra functionality wouldn't be a burden. Instead, to run systemd at all, I had to actually enable extra kernel modules, which just adds to the bloat problem. https://lists.debian.org/debian-68k/2016/02/msg00064.html While I do think alternatives to systemd should be encouraged, I don't expect the Debian project to provide them. Adding alternatives can only lead to more work for all debian maintainers whose packages interact with those alternatives. That seems like a huge amount of effort compared with a small number of users running Debian on small systems like these. -- > Adrian > >
