It was reported and confirmed in LP bug #1875400
(https://bugs.launchpad.net/cloud-images/+bug/1875400) that on the public
KVM cloud image there exists a large list of packages marked for auto-removal.
This should never be the case on a released cloud image.
These packages are marked for auto-removal because in the KVM image binary hook
we removed both initramfs-tools and busybox-initramfs packages. Due to package
dependencies this also removed:
busybox-initramfs* cloud-initramfs-copymods* cloud-initramfs-dyn-netconf*
cryptsetup-initramfs* initramfs-tools* initramfs-tools-core* multipath-tools*
overlayroot* sg3-utils-udev* ubuntu-server*
But it did not remove all the packages that the above list depended on.
This resulted in all those packages being marked for auto-removal because they
were not manually installed nor did they have any manually installed packages
that depended on them.
The removal of initramfs-tools and busybox-initramfs was to avoid the
generation of initramfs in images that should boot initramfsless.
This requirement is obsolete now because the initramfsless boot handling
is now handled via setting GRUB_FORCE_PARTUUID in /etc/default/grub.d/40-force-partuuid.cfg.
In test images I have verified that GRUB_FORCE_PARTUUID is set and that
boot speeds have not regressed.
LP: #1875400
Vagrant images were previously put at 10G, but this was a regression
from Trusty, in which they were 40G. This made it a tough sell for
users to upgrade if they were using a Ubuntu desktop experience.
This change does not impact disk usage as Vagrant with the virtualbox
provider dynamically allocates space with the VMDK. On a test system,
the VMDK took up 1.1G of disk space according to df, and after
creating a 2G file in Vagrant, the VMDK grew to 3.1G.
Therefore, users who are running on a system with little free space will
not see adverse effects if they upgrade to a new vagrant image
With the removal of snap-tool failures are seen in image builds that do
not have the 'core' snap included by the seed. This is the case for the
minimized subproject of the ubuntu-cpc project where lxd/core is removed.
In that subproject, any binary hook which adds a snap that is based
on 'core' will not add 'core' and fail 'snap debug validate-seed'.
snap-tool included the following logic in the 'snap-tool info' when
determining snap bases:
# Have "base" initialized to something meaningful.
if self.is_core_snap():
snap_data["snap"]["base"] = ""
elif snap_data["snap"].get("base") is None:
snap_data["snap"]["base"] = "core"
The snap store does not return a base if the base is core which makes
this necessary. This patch looks for the base in 'snap info' output
and if none is found (and the snap is not snapd or core) it assumes the
base is 'core' and installs it. This restores the behavior lost in the
migration from snap-tool to snap cli.
