Things are slowing down now in the project with the holidays coming up, so this might be the last status report in a while, but here are some updates of what happened this week.

* Building images in a VM

The makefile that builds images now has support (enabled via make VM=1) to run the build in a virtual machine. This has some advantages, First it allows you to run the entire build as a non-privileged user, so no sudo is required, and it doesn't affect the host system.

Secondly, it allows you to run the build in a software-emulated non-native architecture VM. For example, you can build an aarch64 image on an x86_64 machine. This is much slower than a native build, but not extremely so. For example, a raspberry pi4 build on my intel desktop takes about 30 minutes. This can be a nice way to e.g. kickstart a raspberry pi image.

As part of this change, the makefile rules and the image filenames changed so that they now have the architecture name in them.

* Non-UEFI booting raspberry pi images

The "direct" version of the images is normally a direct-uefi boot, skipping over grub to be faster. On the raspberry pi however even direct-uefi isn't direct as the firmware is not natively uefi. Instead it was first loading a uefi binary, which then booted the kernel.

This is now changed, so that by default (but you can disable it) it boots the kernel directly from the raspberry pi firmware. This makes cold boot times much faster, with boot-to-login going from 2 minutes to 30 seconds.

* Neptune image updates

There were various updates to the neptune images, which now support both wayland and x11, with new neptune full-screen session options in gdm.

* Working on weekly builds

We are working on producing weekly builds of the images.. Hopefully we will finish this soon and have the builds publically available, until then there are some manual builds here: https://pingou.fedorapeople.org/images/

* Issues with the raspberry pi images

There are some known issues with the kernel graphics drivers in the current images for raspberry pis. The images in the above link should work, but if you build your own from the latest manifests you might run into issues with this graphics not working.