Re: [Tails-dev] Tails for arm64 (with support for Apple Sili…

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Author: noisycoil
Date:  
To: n9iu7pk
CC: NoisyCoil via Tails-dev
Subject: Re: [Tails-dev] Tails for arm64 (with support for Apple Silicon)
Hi n9iu7pk,

Good to know you were able to build the images! The nvme will surely help, I/O is terrible on RPis (but then, this is expected).


So first of all, no, you don't have new images to compare the shasums at the moment. I think from now on, unless there are major new features from my part which merit early sharing, I will only upload pre-built images on new Tails point releases (uploading takes quite some time and a single upload of 2x3 images takes away around half my available space).


In general, only images built on tagged commits are reproducible. In case you don't know (if you do I apologize, I have little knowledge of the Tails community), when the commit is not tagged, the /etc/apt/sources.list and /etc/apt/sources.list.d/bullseye.list files contain entries like

```
deb http://time-based.snapshots.deb.tails.boum.org/debian-security/2024041403 bookworm-security main contrib non-free non-free-firmware
```

with last-snapshot timestamps which change multiple times a day (4, I believe). However, I must have been lucky enough to start a new 6.2/arm64 build while the debian-security snapshot was the same as yours so I got the same sha256sums as you! Not so lucky with asahi and raspi, which you had built earlier and I built later. Nonetheless, I compared today's contents with yesterday's and can confirm that the only difference is precisely those timestamps.


"tests: on raspi image -> 206 fails, 1460 skipped, 342 passed -> reproduceable." As you can see, most of the tests are skipped: the raspi image never boots (it cannot be virtualized), so it fails early and skips the other steps. arm64 and asahi, on the other hand, should work.


Thanks for the estimate. I initially thought that Tails was snapshotting the whole debian archive, but soon realized that they don't need to do so since when booted the images use the actual live debian archive instead of snapshots. Making arm64 snapshots would be far less costly than I initially thought (nonetheless, I have no plans to set up my own: the images already contain far too many binaries provided by myself!)


Best,

NC