Reproducible XFS Filesystems Builds for VMs

[Luca DiMaio]

On Tue, Apr 15, 2025 at 4:54 PM David A. Wheeler <dwheeler at dwheeler.com> wrote:
>
> May I suggest collecting this general advice for creating reproducible *images*
> and posting it on the reproducible builds website?
>
> Once there's a common spot for it, others may provide suggestions on how to
> improve it further. It's fine if you want to collect ideas into the best first try,
> but I'd hate it if this mailing list was the only place to find this out.
>
> Few people will create reproducible images - or ask for them - if it's a mystery
> how to create them.
>
> Thanks!

On Wed, Apr 16, 2025 at 9:12 AM Holger Levsen <holger at layer-acht.org> wrote:
>
> indeed and we have https://reproducible-builds.org/docs/system-images/ already.
>
> source: https://salsa.debian.org/reproducible-builds/reproducible-website.git
> and in there in _docs/system_images.md

For sure! I'm carrying the conversation in the XFS mailing list, hopefully we'll
have a less hacky way to make reproducible XFS disks, I'll then update the doc
site

On Wed, Apr 16, 2025 at 11:51 AM Roland Clobus <rclobus at rclobus.nl> wrote:
>
> @Luca DiMaio: earlier in this thread you mentioned
> 'deterministic_rng.so'. Is that something similar to the code I wrote in
> 2000-reproducible-function-uuid_generate_random.hook.chroot [2]
> and use in 2001-reproducible-fontconfig.hook.chroot [3]? Do you have
> your code available somewhere?
>
> Would it make sense to have the de-randomisation code in a more
> prominent location?
>

It was just a workaround for now, but I'll for sure update the docs when I have
something more concrete in hand.

At the moment I've opened an RFC in the XFS mailing list, to improve their
prototype file functionality, in particular to carry over the inode's timestamps
from source:

https://lore.kernel.org/linux-xfs/20250416144400.940532-1-luca.dimaio1@gmail.com/T/#t

Eager to know your thoughts on this

L.

On Wed, Apr 16, 2025 at 9:12 AM Holger Levsen <holger at layer-acht.org> wrote:
>
> On Tue, Apr 15, 2025 at 10:54:32AM -0400, David A. Wheeler via rb-general wrote:
> > May I suggest collecting this general advice for creating reproducible *images*
> > and posting it on the reproducible builds website?
> >
> > Once there's a common spot for it, others may provide suggestions on how to
> > improve it further. It's fine if you want to collect ideas into the best first try,
> > but I'd hate it if this mailing list was the only place to find this out.
> >
> > Few people will create reproducible images - or ask for them - if it's a mystery
> > how to create them.
>
> indeed and we have https://reproducible-builds.org/docs/system-images/ already.
>
> source: https://salsa.debian.org/reproducible-builds/reproducible-website.git
> and in there in _docs/system_images.md
>
>
> --
> cheers,
>         Holger
>
>  ⢀⣴⠾⠻⢶⣦⠀
>  ⣾⠁⢠⠒⠀⣿⡁  holger@(debian|reproducible-builds|layer-acht).org
>  ⢿⡄⠘⠷⠚⠋⠀  OpenPGP: B8BF54137B09D35CF026FE9D 091AB856069AAA1C
>  ⠈⠳⣄
>
> "I like beautiful people. I don't care about their looks."