Niltze, all- I have been building iterations of Debian-Installer (d-i) enhanced with Reiser4 4.0.1 kernel, disk and filesystem utilities. Thus far I have used a local build on Debian Sid of VirtualBox 5.0.10 environment to test multiple Reiser4 installations.
For flexibility, especially if you are testing in a VM, the following d-i options may help: -Network-console: continue installation remotely using SSH -Openssh-client-udeb: secure shell client for the Debian installer Now: d-i offers three(3) choices: Jessie (stable) Stretch (testing) Sid (unstable) I have verified that *all* can be installed from my custom Reiser4 d-i; Nevertheless Jessie (stable) needs access to testing and/or unstable repositories added at /etc/apt/sources.list in order to fulfill dependencies of the unstable kernel in my d-i. Jessie (stable) also needs to have newer Reiser4 4.0.1 packages because d-i downloads the older (stable) version. I have covered *all* of Jessie conditions by building newer unstable versions of its requirements. The downside of it is that a user needs to manually intervene at the shell, possibly at the expert level. As for Stretch and Sid, manual intervention is required only to modify /etc/initramfs-tools/modules file by adding at the end: crc32c_intel reiser4 *before* installing the custom Reiser4 kernel, thus: dpkg -i linux-image-4.3.0-1-amd64_4.3.3-5_amd64.deb so that initramfs can be appropriately updated *before* rebooting the new Reiser4 installation. Note that GRUBX does not support booting from /boot Reiser4 filesystem; accordingly, a small partition must be provisioned for booting into a Reiser4 -formatted root (/) partition. The d-i partman-reiser4 will format Reiser4 partitions thus: mkfs.reiser4 -yo "create=reg40" <your selected partition> Additionally, user may want to provision a /tmp in a non-Reiser4 partition if the intention is to run MariaDB (MySQL) because -- at the very least -- the DB will complain about /tmp issues if it is formatted in Reiser4 --personal experience ;-) With the above said and warning that this is an alpha effort *without* any explicit and/or implied guarantee that will be risk-free, here is the current yield of of Reiser4 effort: Reiser4 -enabled Debian-Installer (d-i) netboot mini.iso renamed as: http://metztli.it/readOnlyEphemeral//metztli_it-reiser4_d-i.iso Reiser4 -enabled kernel & modules.README_1st: http://metztli.it/readOnlyEphemeral/linux-image-4.3.0-1-amd64_4.3.3-5_amd64.tar Reiser4 -enabled Debian GNU Parted packages (install at the end of installation procedure); please note that those packages under reiser4-parted_3.2-12/misc are optional): http://metztli.it/readOnlyEphemeral/reiser4-parted_3.2-12.tar (after untarring above referenced, install as) cd reiser4-parted_3.2-12 dpkg -i parted_3.2-12_amd64.deb libparted2_3.2-12_amd64.deb Next resource is only needed if Jessie was installed. Package below will replace the older Reiser4 file utilities: http://metztli.it/readOnlyEphemeral/reiser4progs-4.0.1.tar Although I have created patches for most (or all ;-) of the above at GitHub, I realize Debian Unstable (Sid) is a fast moving development effort and within a couple of weeks the kernel referenced above will be outdated and d-i will refuse to install. With the previous statement said, and if anyone is willing, try the above Debian-Installer (d-i) resources while the kernel is fresh... Feedback and/or suggestions welcome. Best Professional Regards P.S I am already preparing some images for Google Compute Engine (GCE) < https://cloud.google.com/compute/ > to add to currently testing Reiser4 images created last year. -- Jose R R http://metztli.it --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Try at no charge http://b2evolution.net for http://OpenShift.com PaaS --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- from our GitHub http://Nepohualtzintzin.com repository. Cloud the easy way! ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
