Notices by Natanael Copa (ncopa@fosstodon.org)

@marcan @Foxboron @Sobex

> but I think the number of people who can help out with such a problem is quite a bit larger than the number of people that can help with the core Asahi RE/kernel work.

That is probably true, but you need to find people that:

- can
- have time
- want

In reality you can usually only pick two of the above.
#AlpineLinux is in similar situation, even if we have good ARM support. And yes, it is not a good place to be in.

@fossdd 6 of them. sure. but its gonna take time.

@craftyguy @fossdd yup. they do got the regression: https://github.com/RsyncProject/rsync/issues/697#issuecomment-2591892385

@craftyguy @fossdd Then they have backported the regression and have a broken `rsync -aH`.

Regression introduced with the fix for
https://security-tracker.debian.org/tracker/CVE-2024-12087

Someone else added a test to the test suite, good enough to help me git bisect and fix the issue.
PR submitted: https://github.com/RsyncProject/rsync/pull/705

The obvious answer is:

- add the regression to the testsuite
- fix the regression
- submit a pull request
- move on

Too bad I have meetings...

@dalias what will break if I do that?

rsync has some really serious CVEs[1], but the 3.4.0 release with the fixes has regressions[2] that will break things for people. What to do?

[1]: https://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2025/01/14/3
[2]: https://github.com/RsyncProject/rsync/issues/702

It seems like we need to replace some unstable NVMe's for our Milk-V Pioneer RISC-V CI and builder machines. Would be grateful if anyone would like to contribute one or two 1TB NVMe M.2 SSD of good quality.

#AlpineLinux #RISCV

@jarkko it is the only board I know that runs nicely with vanilla 6.12 kernel, which is also why we officially can support it

5) Unmount the SD card and boot it.

doas umount /mnt

You should be able to see it boot from a debug UART

#Linux #VisionFive2 #RISC-V #AlpineLinux

4) Install U-Boot

Write SPL to partition 1 and ITB to partition 2:

doas dd if=/mnt/u-boot/starfive_visionfive2/u-boot-spl.bin.normal.out of=/dev/sde1
doas dd if=/mnt/u-boot/starfive_visionfive2/u-boot.itb of=/dev/sde2

How to create a bootable #AlpineLinux SD-card for VisionFive2 #RISCV:

1) Partition the card. In this example I use /dev/sde. WARNING: Make sure you have the right device.

doas parted /dev/sde --script mklabel gpt \
mkpart primary 2MiB 4MiB set 1 bios_grub on \
mkpart primary 4MiB 6MiB \
mkpart primary 6MiB 100% set 3 boot on

3) Mount the boot partition and extract Alpine tarball:

doas mount /dev/sde3 /mnt
curl -s https://dl-cdn.alpinelinux.org/alpine/v3.21/releases/riscv64/alpine-uboot-3.21.1-riscv64.tar.gz | doas tar -C /mnt -zxv

2) Create vfat filesystem on 3rd partition:

doas mkfs.vfat /dev/sde3

Compile time of same linux kernel on different hardware:

- milkv pioneer: 0h 52m 20s
- hifive premiere: 3h 32m 20s

The pioneer has 64 CPU cores while the premiere only has 4.

#RISCV #Linux

Xfce 4.20 on alpine Linux edge with Wayland

#XFCE #AlpineLinux #Wayland

#AlpineLinux 3.21 is now listed under "Other general-purpose OS" in rpi-imager.

#RaspberryPi

#AlpineLinux rleease candidate 4 is out. This includes 6.12 kernels for Raspberry Pi. Would be nice with some help with testing.

Hopefully this is the last release candidate.

Turns out that it boots! 🎉