Sunday, 24 October 2004

Tonight Sarah and I, along with Beth, Kylie and Andrew and Alice, went around to Denise's for dinner.

Denise made a trifle for dessert, along with all the trimmings. What caught my attention was what was printed on the can of (light) whipped cream:

Dairy Whip Lite contains 48% less fat than cream containing 35% fat

Must be the latest marketing ploy. Bewilder the consumer into assuming it's not that bad for you...

Today I had one of those rare wins with d-i, where I identified something it didn't do, that I wanted it to do, and could actually do something about it.

As I thought yesterday, it was relatively easy to add the ability to create a RAID1 array consisting of one 1 active device. I just had to remove the logic that said "thou must specify two devices if you've said there are two active devices" and duplicated the existing logic used for hot spare devices where if you specified less hot spare devices than what you initially indicated, it assumed the rest were missing.

The slowest part has been testing the patch. The upside of testing the install inside qemu is I could have mdcfg open in gvim in one window, hack it with nice syntax highlighting, then pop over to the qemu window, and duplicate the changes to the live mdcfg with nano, then fiddle with my md devices. Rinse and repeat, until it was all working.

Thanks also to Joey's terrific instructions, building a full d-i image to test my modified udeb was a breeze. Pity I couldn't say the same for performing the install in qemu. It's running exceptinally slow, compared to yesterday. It only took about three hours to do a complete install with LVM on RAID1, but today, with the monolithic mini.iso I built from a current checkout of d-i, it's 51% through installing the base system on a single degraded RAID1 device, some 5-6 hours after I started it off.