pop-desktop dependency on raspi kernel

[sfgvieira]

I have a virtual machine setup on my MacBook Pro M2 that I did following this guide.

All has been working fine and I have been updating the underlying ubuntu kernel. However the latest update of pop-desktop (which depends on pop-server) seems to now have a hard dependency on the kernel version for the raspberry pi which is a bit unfortunate since that kernel doesn't work on my virtual machine (on this arch).

In order to keep things working I've marked the pop-desktop package as hold. Is this a dependency that will be there going forward? Or is it perhaps some side effect of something else?

It would be fine to have a arm64 build of pop-os that is not bound to the raspberry pi only (at some point hopefully) 😃.

[jacobgkau]

Hi, the only official arm64 build of Pop!_OS has always been targeted to the Raspberry Pi 4 specifically, as a technical preview only. We don't have any official support for Apple Silicon at this time, and as a hardware manufacturer selling x86_64 (amd64) machines, that architecture is obviously prioritized. However, it's not our intention to make it more difficult than necessary to run on unsupported hardware.

What specific kernel package(s) are you using? If there was a linux-apple package (which there's not), it looks like we could stick it in as an alternative dependency on this line:

desktop/debian/control

Line 211 in fda3f07

linux-system76 [amd64] | linux-raspi,

...but we need to be careful not to add any alternatives that might end up pulling amd64 users off of our own kernel unintentionally.

I see that before the recent changes, pop-desktop-raspi hard-depended on linux-raspi and pop-desktop, and pop-desktop still hard-depended on linux-system76 [amd64] only, with the [amd64] piece specifying that the dependency only applied on amd64. So before, it would have been possible on any platform other than amd64 to end up with no kernel at all; now, linux-raspi is basically a fallback. (I'm not sure why the guide you linked directed you to install pop-desktop-raspi in the first place rather than pop-desktop, since removing linux-raspi as it states would also have removed pop-desktop-raspi and left its dependencies prone to being autoremoved.)

Perhaps we could add another alternative dependency with an [arm64] specifier so it won't be considered as an alternative to linux-system76 on amd64 machines (and possibly duplicate the linux-raspi dependency in pop-desktop-raspi again so those machines don't accidentally get the new alternative.)

[sfgvieira]

Hi @jacobgkau,
You have fair priorities :)
As for the guide, I believe it might have been written through trial and error, I think the only relevant thing is to install pop-desktop (which is a dependency of pop-desktop-raspi) which is what my VM ends up having at the end.
I think that it is as you said, before the recent changes made, because pop-desktop only depended on linux-system76 [amd64] kernel wise, my VM was ending up without a kernel alternative, however it picks up instead the ubuntu provided one (after all this is set up with ubuntu server as a base), I believe the ubuntu kernel package comes from linux-image-generic, would it be a matter of adding this as an alternative for arm64?

On a more theoretical side (and given how it was working before these recent changes), is it necessary for pop-server to have an (alternative) dependency on linux-raspi? Wouldn't that be guaranteed anyway since a raspi user installs pop-desktop-raspi (which already has the dependency there)?