Release v1.3.0

Changes in this release:

• The host image has been updated to Raspbian Buster (specifically, the 10 July 2019 Raspbian Buster with desktop). This (together with the official 64-bit kernel, see next point) allows it to be used in 64-bit mode on the RPi4 B now, as well as (in 64-bit mode) on the RPi3 B and B+ (which remain supported). As shipped, the image has not yet been first-time booted (although the various reflector services etc. have also been installed onto it, using the technique described here, and some additional deps have been installed (via # apt-get update && apt-get -y upgrade && apt-get install -y debootstrap pulseaudio zenity systemd-container file locales sudo libpam-systemd dbus-user-session), so the user will get the 'factory fresh' Raspbian experience (root partition / filesystem auto-expansion etc.)

  • Also using this technique, a guest Debian Buster image has been created at /var/lib/machines/debian-buster-64, using the command # debootstrap --arch=arm64 --include=systemd-container,file,locales,pulseaudio,zenity,firefox-esr,x11-apps,dbus-user-session,libpam-systemd buster,sudo /var/lib/machines/debian-buster-64 https://deb.debian.org/debian/. The guest image has not been first-time booted either, as shipped. All non-vanilla adaptations to it are made by the host-side init-container service / script, when the system is started.

  • For convenience, a tarball of the resulting guest image has been provided as part of this release (debian-buster-64.tar.xz, the sha256sum of which is 5ac118c391bd7ffb36f717273b96e53d64f06b5b9cff66ecef552b6486470868). NB:, this tarball is not required to use the main image (as it has already been installed on there), but may be of interest to those looking to e.g. package the system.

• Switched to using the newly-released official 64-bit kernel, for both the RPi4 and RPi3. Since, following upstream's recommendations, the new kernel was installed using # rpi-update, as a side-effect of the switch the other boot firmware on the image has been freshened also.

  • The installed kernel release name is 4.19.69-v8+ (and should be safely updatable in future, using rpi-update).

  • Added a temporary host-side service to enable rngd (via the rng-tools service) only on the RPi4 (the current official 64-bit kernel does not seem to enable /dev/hwrng properly on the RPi3 yet).

  • For avoidance of doubt, the image has had arm64_bit=1 and dtoverlay=vc4-fkms-v3d set in its /boot/config.txt.

• Added a host-side Xsession.d rule to create a copy of the user's .Xauthority file that has FamilyWild authentication set. This allows it to be used even from within the guest (which has a different hostname). Modified ds64-run and ds64-shell to use this tweaked .Xauthority-allhosts file. This fix also allows sudo to be used with guest GUI applications, where required (this didn't work in the previous release).

• Because the Mesa / libgl versions on the current Debian Buster don't seem to be able to work with the RPi 4/3's vc* GPU correctly (even if /dev/dri is bind-mounted, via an entry in /etc/systemd/nspawn/debian-buster-64.nspawn), set LIBGL_ALWAYS_SOFTWARE=1 by default on the guest (to ensure that accelerated apps, such as Chromium, can at least display), and ensured this is propagated by sudo. This behaviour is parameterized via an entry (GUEST_LIBGL_ALWAYS_SOFTWARE) in /etc/ds64.conf (host-side), so you can easily turn it off again if you wish.

  • For avoidance of doubt, this does not affect host-side (32-bit) applications, which will continue to use hardware-accelerated rendering.

• Added the pulseaudio "glitchy playback" fix (by setting tsched=0 in /etc/pulse/default.pa, on both host and guest side). Credit: Darksky.

• Added USER, LANG, NO_AT_BRIDGE and DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS to the default environment variables passed by ds64-run and ds64-shell, and expanded the default PATH passed by both to include /usr/local/sbin, /usr/sbin and /sbin.

• Updated the install.sh script.

• Other minor stability fixes.