Finnix Blog

Finnix is a small, self-contained, bootable Linux CD distribution for system administrators, based on Debian testing. Today marks the release of version 87.0 for the x86, PowerPC, UML/Xen, and iPod platforms.

Finnix 87.0 contains new features, including Linux kernel 2.6.16, full automatic LVM detection, console mouse support, SMP support for the PowerPC release, dynamic filesystem overlays, improved IDE DMA support, and a utility to assist with creating a bootable USB thumb drive with Finnix. Finnix can now also be installed on the popular iPod hardware, for a total of 5 platforms Finnix can be run on, though this new platform is still considered experimental.

Home page: http://www.finnix.org/
SourceForge page: http://www.sourceforge.net/projects/finnix/
Download: http://www.finnix.org/Download
Release notes: http://www.finnix.org/Finnix_87.0_Release_Notes
Finnix for iPod: http://www.finnix.org/Finnix_for_iPod

Kernel 2.6.16 has made the cut, and final CD images have been mastered. One final round of testing, and Finnix 87.0 should be released Friday!

One small new feature made it through at the last moment. One feature I always liked is in the Windows installation CDs. When you boot from the CD, it says something to the effect of “Press any key to boot from CD.” If you don’t press a key within a few seconds, the CD moves on to booting the first hard drive.

In previous versions of Finnix, if you did not type anything at the boot prompt, it would eventually just boot Finnix. Now, if no input is detected in 60 seconds, the CD simply boots the first hard disk. This way, you can reboot Finnix remotely, and have your normal OS load if you have a CDROM drive that likes to suck the CD back in during BIOS POST.

As of right now, the number of SourceForge downloads is at 10,003. This includes all final builds from Finnix 0.03 to present. However, this does not include Finnix 0.03 downloads directly from the original site, or Finnix 86.x pre-releases. Counting those, the count is around 17,000.

Still, this is reason enough to celebrate!

2.6.16 will most likely be in Finnix after all. Realistically, the biggest reason against going to 2.6.16 was that I didn’t expect Debian to have an updated config for 2.6.16 available in such a short time (I usually take configs from Debian because they offer the best general purpose kernel config), but I was wrong. The 2.6.16 kernels have been built and are being tested now. Note that the current snapshots are much larger than they should be, because there are currently both 2.6.16 and 2.6.15 kernels on there.

This does not necessarily mean 2.6.16 is guaranteed. There is still more testing to be done, and if I find any problems, I’ll just revert back to 2.6.15.

I have officially run out of items on the To-Do list. I guess that means we’ll have a release soon!

Oh, and I’ve been tight lipped about this, but expect a new surprise with Finnix 87.0. That’s all I’m saying until it’s released…

One of the problems with today’s Finnix is that when the initrd scans for IDE drives, it is using the IDE system compiled into the kernel, which is “generic”. This is the most stable solution (I have yet to find an IDE CDROM drive that is not recognized), but unfortunately, there is almost no DMA support in the generic driver, so even when the system is booted with “finnix dma”, there is a good chance DMA support will not be enabled for either the CDROM or any disks. On top of that, even if you were to load the appropriate specialized IDE module for your chipset, the channels are already registered to the generic driver, and there appears to be no way to reverse that.

With the upcoming 87.0, I decided to modularize the IDE system, with the idea that the base IDE module would be loaded, then each specialized chipset module would be loaded, with the generic module loaded last. This would give the more specialized drivers a chance to load first, at which point DMA could be turned on by the user if desired. An unintended consequence was that it appears many chipset drivers automatically enable DMA if the channel supports it.

There lies the problem. It didn’t take me long to find a CDROM drive that, when DMA mode was enabled and data read from it, would freeze the system. Booting from another CDROM drive on the same channel did not have this problem, so it was a problem with the driver interacting with the drive itself, not the channel or chipset. It was then that I decided to combine this new funcionality with the “dma” boot parameter. With Finnix 87.0, the plan is now to load specialized drivers, and enable DMA mode, but only if the “dma” boot parameter is given. Without that parameter, Finnix will load just as it did in previous versions.

It’s sad that I’m choosing not to make this new functionality default, as the speed increase from DMA mode is considerable, but in this case I would prefer stability on a wider range of hardware to be preferable over speed. Of course, it’ll be available… Just do “finnix dma”, or you could boot into debug mode and manually modprobe your chipset’s drivers, which will be available on the initrd.

Edit: I’ve found the “Use PCI DMA by default when available” option in the kernel config, but I believe I’ll be keeping it as default (”on” as per Debian’s config), and still going with the method described above.

Linux 2.6.16 was released today, and man is it a big update. Some fairly large changes, the one that caught my eye was the inclusion of Oracle’s OCFS2 clustering filesystem. I will definitely be looking at that.

However, 2.6.16 is a BIG update, 5369 commits to be exact. At this point, I don’t feel comfortable incorporating this kernel into Finnix 87.0 without any point releases. Too many new Kconfig features, and the number of commits leaves me weary of lingering bugs. Instead, I will be using Debian testing’s current kernel and patchset, 2.6.15_2.6.15-8, with the following changes (all are standard according to previous Finnix releases):

• x86: Debian’s 2.6.15-1-686-smp_2.6.15-8 config file, modified to run on i486 instead of i686; in short, i486 and above, with SMP support. (Previous versions were lowered to i586, but after doing some research, I determined that there is no speed degredation going from i586 to i486. Of course there is minor degredation going from i686 to i586, but remember that this is a recovery CD, and compatibility is preferred over speed.)
• PowerPC: For 32-bit, Debian’s 2.6.15-1-powerpc-smp_2.6.15-8 config file (previous versions were only uniprocessor for the 32-bit kernel). For 64-bit, Debian’s 2.6.15-1-powerpc64-smp_2.6.15-8 config file.
• x86: SKAS3 v8.2
• x86: Patch to increase the kernel command line to 512 bytes
• Some kernel modules built into the kernel
• Sound and V4L support removed

At the moment, the following tasks are left:

• Finish writing finnix-thumbdrive, a script to assist in formatting a USB thumb drive and copying over necessary files from the CD.
• Add automatic loading of thermal modules for PowerPC during initrd.
• Update shutdown script to copy needed binaries and libraries dynamically. At the moment, the libraries for needed binaries are specified statically in the shutdown script, and could break if library support changes.
• Write documentation for new overlay support.

Development snapshots with the “new” 2.6.15 kernel will be available from snapshots.finnix.org tomorrow afternoon, so give them a try if you can.

Yes, I’m announcing “the competition”. Knoppix 5.0 was released at CeBit this week. While it is not available on the main site yet, there is a 3.5GB torrent available of the DVD given out at the conference. It is the German version though, so for English audiences, you must type “knoppix lang=us” at the boot prompt. Beware though, isolinux is configured for a German keyboard layout, so to type a “=” sign, you must hit Shift-0 (zero). After that, everything should work as expected.

I downloaded and booted a copy, and it is rather slick. I also looked at the init scripts, to see what has changed and if anything can be ported to Finnix. The biggest change is udev support, which may eventually be rolled into Finnix, but at the moment I don’t believe it is worth the extra startup time.

I was also reminded how much Finnix had diverged from Knoppix. As you may know, Finnix 84 and 85.x were “Knoppix remasters”; essentially Knoppix 4.0.2 without X functionality. Finnix 86.0 was a “rewrite”, starting with vanilla Debian testing, and adding support to be booted from a CD. However, a large part of that functionality was in the form of porting Knoppix’s startup scripts. In the course of the next few releases, more and more functionality was changed. Today, Finnix’s initrd is 99% different from Knoppix’s, and if you look at Finnix’s startup script (/etc/init.d/finnix-autoconfig), you will notice it is quite different from Knoppix’s (/etc/init.d/knoppix-autoconfig).

No word yet on a new Finnix release. A lot of development has happened since 86.2, but I’d still like to wait until kernel 2.6.16 is released before I go forward on a release.

Personally, I love the printed Finnix CDs. They look nice and are very durable. This last week, I had been working on the CD cover design for the upcoming 87.0 release. I went to print the CD, and the printer’s self-test failed horribly. Most of the nozzles were clogged. It took about 3/4 of an inkjet cartridge set to get it to print correctly. As it turned out, I had not printed in about 3 weeks, and from Googling around, you should be printing at least every week to avoid this. Remember, this is a FEATURE.

Anyways, this gave me an idea for a contest. I will be giving away a free Finnix CD every week. At a random time during the week, I will flip the switch, and an icon will appear at the top-right corner of the wiki and the blog. If you see this link, simply click on it, fill out your address, and submit. For more information, please see this link.

Oh, and by the way, I just enabled it for this week. Have fun!