Permanent temporary solutions of future past

Permanent temporary solutions of future past

[Nguyễn Gia Phong]

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Hello, friends,

Before I dive into the details, let me clarify that this is
not within the official scope of the loang network, basically
to give me a free pass to move fast and break things.  It also means
that this spin-off project shall not affect the quality of services
officially listed on https://loang.net.

Now you may ask: so what is it and why should we care?  The story
goes way back to the creation of the world.  As you all know,
our good green earth used to be carried by a giant turtle.
That turtle is, in turn, supported by an even larger turtle, and so on.
It's been turtles all the way down, until one day the Oracle of Japan
gave birth to an Italian man named Mario.  Unlike their German allies,
this Japanese corporation and Italian man go around and crush turtles:

> When Mario leaves his place of safety to stomp a turty,
> he knows that he may Die.  And yet, for a man who can purchase lives
> with money, a life becomes a mere store of value.  A tax that can
> be paid for, much as a rich man feels any law with a fine is a price.
> We think of Mario as a hero, but he simply a one percenter
> of a more privileged variety.

Soon, the turtles are no mo.  Mario, the destroyer of turtles,
claimed suppremacy and became a god.  No, the God!  The greatest
of all time, Mario Goatse!  We admins of loang.net have been praying
to this deity and was awarded a RV64 SBC.  Like all others false idols,
this Mario Goatse only gives out curses in the form of a blessing.

This SBC VisionFive 2 has been nothing but a time sink.
Mainline support from Linux (yes the kernel) and {Free,Open,Net}BSD
is getting there, but not actually there.  At the time of writing,
only support for boot loader has been fully upstreamed [0].

Even then, the only two operating systems with official support
for the board are Ubuntu and OpenBSD.  OpenBSD sounds cool on paper,
but it does not support any modern file system with snapshot capability
(and likely never will), and Ubuntu is, well, Ubuntu.  TBH Ubuntu Server
is not _that_ bad, just that its installer doesn't install bootloader
on the eMMC.

Instead of writing the bootloader from StarFive's image, I decided
to be lazy and just clean up and upgrade StarFive's Debian [1]
to current Sid.  This, BTW, might have been a mistake, because unlike
Ubuntu which colaborates with StarFive and applies its patches
on the current kernel, Debian does not and we are stuck with Linux 6.1.
For now, it's doing well enough but a reinstall is almost required
in the foreseeable future, but we all know that

> Nothing is more permanent than a temporary solution.

That should have answered your first question; now we move on
to what the board is to be used for.  My immediate target
is to move services not officially listed on loang.net there.
Although I'd prefer to truely self-host one day, my home network
is IPv4-only and its stability has yet to be attested for.
In addition, the status tracker for services on our node in Brno
should be hosted there as well, for the lack a more flexible solution.

I will also to convert the file system into Btrfs and set up
local backup.  If everything goes well, it will also be used
for backing up our PostgreSQL databases in Brno.

In long term, I would like to gradually transition the RISC-V node
into to Guix System with bcachefs to make best use of the diverse
set of storage types (eMMC flash, NVMe and SATA-over-USB SSD).
For the moment, Guix lacks binary cache substitute for riscv64
(the VisionFive 2 is too weak to build the world) and bcachefs
lacks snapshot transportation and subvolume mounting
for the ease of backup and recovery.

Until then, let's-a go!

0: https://rvspace.org/en/project/JH7110_Upstream_Plan
1: https://debian.starfivetech.com

~cnx

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Re: Permanent temporary solutions of future past

[Nguyễn Gia Phong]

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On 2024-05-11 at 22:35+09:00, Nguyễn Gia Phong wrote:
> [Ubuntu Server's] installer doesn't install bootloader on the eMMC.
>
> Instead of writing the bootloader from StarFive's image, I decided
> to be lazy and just clean up and upgrade StarFive's Debian [1]
> to current Sid.  This, BTW, might have been a mistake, because unlike
> Ubuntu which colaborates with StarFive and applies its patches on
> the current kernel, Debian does not and we are stuck with Linux 6.1.
> For now, it's doing well enough but a reinstall is almost required
> [...]  I will also to convert the file system into Btrfs and set up
> local backup.
>
> 1: https://debian.starfivetech.com

As it turned out, StarFive's kernel doesn't have the Btrfs module
and doing anything with kernels would result in an unbootable disk.

I ended up installing Ubuntu on the NVMe and configuring the SPI flash
to boot from it.

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