The future of partclone and therefore FOG as it is

Junkhacker

@george1421 for reference: I tested with your inits using both bios and uefi configurations using a physical computer and a vmware VM. I had no problems with booting the systems after imaging. all images were compressed with zstd (not that that should make a difference, but putting it out there) and the images ranged from windows 7 to windows 10. imaging done while in uefi mode seemed significantly slower. i don’t know if that’s normal, since i don’t normally use that.

Junkhacker

@george1421 have you had a chance to do any further testing? did you build 32bit versions and have you tried using them?

george1421

@Junkhacker Sorry I haven’t had time between traveling and project deadlines most everything else has got put on back burner. Both you and Quazz say they are working fine. I’m not sure why my images are not. I know at least one I tested with was created with 1.5.4 the rest may be 1.4.4, but I’d have to look at the image creation date to be sure. Everything looks like it deploys correctly with partclone, just when I try to mount the partition and copy the drivers over it says no space left on the device.

Junkhacker

@george1421 No problem. I was just hoping to make progress on this. I found this https://github.com/stevenshiau/clonezilla/issues/31 and wondered if it was related since it was from when clonezilla updated their partclone version.

Quazz

@george1421 Well, potentially that was a resize bug in the inits if you’re using an NVME drive.

Could also be the mount failing for some reason?

Just some ideas.

Quazz

@george1421 Well, we did find a resize bug in the inits, particularily on fast disks.

Might be time to revive this idea soon and test it out again.

george1421

@Quazz Great idea.

I’m rebuilding the inits with partclone 0.3.13 and zstd 1.4.0 using the FOG 1.5.7 base files for the inits. I suspect trouble the first time through compiling this since I’ve forgotten everything that I knew from before. Plus I need to update my test fog server to 1.5.7 so it will be a challenging morning to say the least.

@Sebastian-Roth Are you still using buildroot v2019.02.1 for the inits?

Quazz

@george1421 I don’t believe FOS github has the fix included yet at this point, though shouldn’t be too long.

Still trying to figure out if/when/where the problem exactly started.

As far as I could find it’s supposedly been around for ages (sfdisk - udev conflict), but isn’t necessarily triggered usually.

Sebastian Roth

@george1421 Yeah Quazz is right. I was in a bit of a rush to get some minor issues fixed when releasing the inits and did not push the changes to github yet. I will sort all this in a couple of hours though. Don’t rush into testing partclone yet as we might even think about moving to the latest buildroot in the next days too.

george1421

@Sebastian-Roth OK I’ll hold off until I get the green light from you.

Quazz

I’m preparing a build with Buildroot version 2019.02.4 and one with that Buildroot version + partclone 3.12, will test and post them on Monday probably.

george1421

@Quazz Here are the edits (not in diff format but george shorthand) that junkhacker recommended to take advantage of new features in pigz and zstd for data dedup systems

vi fog.upload
partclone.imager -aX0 -c -s "$hd" -O /tmp/pigz1 -N -f 1

vi funcs.sh
pigz --rsyncable $PIGZ_COMP < $fifo | split -a 3 -d -b 200m - ${file}. &
pigz --rsyncable $PIGZ_COMP < $fifo > ${file}.000 &

zstdmt --rsyncable -B128 --ultra $PIGZ_COMP < $fifo | split -a 3 -d -b 200m - ${file}. &
zstdmt --rsyncable -B128 --ultra $PIGZ_COMP < $fifo > ${file}.000 &

partclone.$fstype -aX0 -n "Storage Location $storage        , Image name $img" -cs $part -O $fifoname -Nf 1

remove --ignore_crc

Quazz

@george1421 Thanks, I had already done some of that, got all of it in there now.

Sebastian Roth

@george1421 said in The future of partclone and therefore FOG as it is:

OK I’ll hold off until I get the green light from you.

Totally forgot to let you know that it’s been done - weeks ago already (ref).

Quazz

Okay, so I can’t believe I never noticed this, but -aX0 is an invalid parameter, it should be -a0

Source: https://github.com/Thomas-Tsai/partclone/blob/master/src/partclone.c

		"    -aX  --checksum-mode=X  Checksum formula to use to add error detection\n"
		"                            where X:\n"
		"                            0: No checksum (no slowdown, smallest image)\n"
		"                            1: CRC32 (Fast to compute, basic detection)\n"

Hopefully the source of the funky problem I was having, rebuilding now.

Quazz

The error I was getting seems to be originating from zstdmt, it doesn’t have an rsyncable option in the included version. Would have thought that would be bundled by now, grrr.

george1421

@Quazz I think in my dev environment I change the BR package to download zstd 1.4.0. My build environment server had bad ssd, so I’m going to rebuild it. I can’t get to the files at the moment to confirm through.

edit: Yes zstd 1.4.0
zstd.mk: ZSTD_VERSION = v1.4.0

Quazz

@george1421 I decided to go for 1.4.2 since it includes a couple of performance improvements and bug fixes.

Took a while longer because I forgot to include the hash file.

It’s finally compiling successfully, time for some more tests.

Quazz

Currently it fails to capture msftres partitions, throwing exit code 139 (presumably zstd’s error code). msftres is captured with partclone.imager

It’s difficult to see what’s going on because the screen breaks up, but it seems to not recognize any size on this type of partition on partclone 3.12 which is a regression compared to 2.89

edit: Adding a strategic debugPause tells me there is a segmentation fault on line 2041 in funcs.sh

Even stranger is that it is talking about line 2053, yet for some reason mentions line 2041???

Though not sure why this occurs…

edit2: Seems to be down to the fact that it writes to /tmp/pigz1

Direct writing to /images works fine

edit3: Welp, it seems to come and go as it pleases, not sure what the actual cause is!

edit4: My suspicion lies on B128 option being the culprit (initial test is promising), recompiling, will test tomorrow.

Quazz

Removing the -B128 option seems to allow it to capture, finally!

64 bit init.xz Buildroot 2019.02.4 + ZSTD 1.4.2 + Partclone 0.3.12 (with APFS support)

32 bit init.xz Buildroot 2019.02.4 + ZSTD 1.4.2 + Partclone 0.3.12 (with APFS support)

Give it a whirl if you’re interested.

Current status:

Specifying the -B128 option gives issues in certain scenarios (special partitions/raw/very small ones???), so we can’t reliably use that.
In order to use --rsyncable, zstd had to be updated to a minimum of 1.3.8 (chosen the latest version of 1.4.2 to include performance improvements and bug fixes)
Minor Buildroot update means config doesn’t have to be updated, it’s just bugfixes
Added APFS support so that we can offer some better support for newer Macs (if they decide to PXE boot that is) (potentially gptfdisk package should be updated to 1.0.4 (adds typecodes for APFS and others), haven’t tested anything in this direction!)

The future of partclone and therefore FOG as it is

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