My notes from today's meeting follow: # Debian cloud team meeting notes - 2024-06-12
## Attendees: Bastian B. (Debian) Noah M. (Debian) Amy C. (Google) Zach M. (Google) Andrew J. (Google) ## Kernels ### cloud kernel driver support Zach raised the question of GCE support in the cloud kernel. The topic has been discussed in the past, and there are open requests from Google to enable additional hardware support for there cloud environment. https://bugs.debian.org/1067908 and https://lists.debian.org/debian-kernel/2024/05/msg00255.html Currently the cloud kernel is a pretty simple rebuild based on different configs. It turns off a number of modules to reduce size. In order to keep the size down, we've mostly focused on enabling only drivers for Amazon EC2 and Microsoft Azure. Bastian has plans that should allow us to distribute the kernel modules in separate packages, with only a single actual kernel build required. In this model, there would be a single linux-image package containing no modules, with modules being distributed in a separate package. This would allow us to ship a linux-modules-gce, linux-modules-azure, linux-modules-generic, etc. package containing a targeted set of modules, which should address Google's needs. There are some unsolved problems here related to how secure boot signing happens, and this will need to be solved before we can move forward. ### availability of -headers packages Andrew noted that some Google customers have been impacted by the removal of old linux-headers packages from the security archive. Bastian noted that this is happening because the security archive is now removing old packages in order to save space. We discussed ideas to address this. Pre-installation of the linux-headers packages has previously been ruled out because their dependencies on a full toolchain make the on-disk footprint very large. Noah suggested the use of snapshot.debian.org, which is something that Google has previously recommended to customers. ## backports We discussed the situation around the backports repository, and Noah gave an update about the status of the cloud-init backport that we ship in our Azure images. The release team has accepted the idea discussed at the previous meeting about moving the cloud-init backport into the security archive as a versioned packaging, allowing it to co-exist with the existing unversioned package for the lifetime of the bullseye LTS release. Zach asked if there are any plans to change the scope or approach to LTS in Debian in general. Nobody present was aware of any. ## google credits Bastian asked about credits for Google cloud services. The lack of clarity here limits Debian's ability to work on GCE support. Andrew suggested that Google may be able to contact SPI to work through some of the administrative details directly.
