[arch-releng] My archiso TODO/ideas (_draft_)

[Gerardo Exequiel Pozzi]

Hello,

This is a draft of some sorts of ideas, future changes, and fixes for 
archiso that I have in mind:

FEATURES:

* UEFI boot support (FS#20419)
At some time I want to support UEFI boot. But I do not have any real 
hardware to test it. Neither UEFI firmware for qemu (two versions 
tested) or virtualbox works fine, testing with some UEFI compatible 
mediums without happy results.

* syslinux keymaps (FS#21725)
I worked on this some time ago, but I want some feedback from people 
that needs this, we need a trivial lilo patch for keymaps generation.

* syslinux helps
For now, put boot options that are on the new README.

* md5sum
Self check of all files (mostly important *.sfs), as boot option, 
executed at initramfs stage. $install_dir/checksums.md5

* swap on zram (FS#18463)
A boot options that setup a zram storage for swap space. (I done some 
tests with my custom build and works nice, helps a lot on machine with 
512MiB of RAM). This feature will be experimental since zram is in 
linux/stage.

* dm-snapshots cow on zram
Currently *.cow files are store on a a single tmpfs filesystem 
/cowspace. We can setup one zram device for each cow device directly 
without any filesystem.

* cow options (cowdevice=/cowpath=)
Allow to setup a device and path where cow files will be stored, this 
can be usefull for persistent feature. Live distros based on archiso can 
benefit.

* mount options for images based on dm-snapshot.
Allow to specify mount options in some place. Maybe in aitab (per image) 
or via bootparam (global). For example for using noatime (save fews 
megabytes on cow dev).

* build.sh allows execute from absolute path (implemented on my 
experimental branch)
Instead of copying all files from /usr/share/archiso/config/%blah-blah% 
to some place and work on it. Allow to execute directly from 
/usr/share/archiso/config/%blah-blah% and use current directory as 
working dir.


FIXES:

* configs/releng/build.sh:
  Needs a better error-recovery for download core repo (wget). Try again 
if fails, maybe pacman can be used instead of wget (FS#18959)

* console serial port.
  Needs better command line parsing, current implementation works 
partially. (example console=ttyS0 does not work, needs at least speed 
[console=ttyS0,9600]). (FS#16232)


Feedback is welcomed, good luck!

-- 
Gerardo Exequiel Pozzi
\cos^2\alpha + \sin^2\alpha = 1