mirage/qubes-mirage-firewall

Remove dummy kernel files

talex5 opened this issue · 10 comments

talex5 commented

The mirage-firewall distribution includes dummy modules.img and initramfs files. These were needed on Qubes 3 for it to accept something as a kernel.

On Qubes 4 (according to https://www.qubes-os.org/doc/managing-vm-kernel/):

All the files besides vmlinuz are optional.

We should remove these dummy files from the build and installation instructions.

marmot1791 commented

As of today on Qubes R4.0 with all updates dom0 still requires the dummy initramfs to start a mirage qube, but modules.img is not required.

marmot1791 commented

Opened question of whether this is a bug or a docs issue over at qubes-issues: QubesOS/qubes-issues#5516

  • 👍1
marmot1791 commented

This is partially blocked until Qubes R4.1. Until that is released initramfs is still required.

hannesm commented

Since Qubes 4.0 is end of life now, IMHO it would be good to remove the initramfs file. This also means that our packaging and install instructions can be much simpler (we'll only distribute a single binary, and no need for tar).

Does this make sense @palainp?

palainp commented

This should be right according to the documentation, but I was unable to boot without it some times algo :/

palainp commented

This is still the case, I have the following:

$ qvm-start mirage-fw
Missing file: /var/lib/qubes/vm-kernels/mirage-fw/initramfs
hannesm commented

Thanks @palainp for your investigations :)

palainp commented

QubesOS/qubes-issues#5516 has been resolved now. This will works with the next Qubes update, and we can remove that dummy file for the next release :)

palainp commented

With dom0 updated we can remove initramfs (QubesOS/qubes-core-admin#586).
The PR in documentation is pending: QubesOS/qubes-doc#1402
We can release only vmlinuz and a hashsum file now :)