List of differences between standard and cloud systems

The goal of this page is to list the differences, and organize which and how to resolve them. Here, standard refers to Debian systems installed with DebianInstaller with the default settings, following the instructions in http://www.debian.org/releases/stable/installmanual.

Eventually, we should converge on a consensus that the remaining differences, if any, do not prevent us to claim that the cloud images are genuine Debian systems (706052).

Distribution Binary images

Debian CD (standard image)

AWS

Azure

GCP

Openstack

Oracle

Tool for generating images

DebianInstaller

bootstrap-vz

openstack-debian-images

bootstrap-vz

openstack-debian-images

bootstrap-vz

Archive components available by default

main

main

main

main

main

main

Images available for Debian releases (suites)

stable

stable

stable1

stable, testing

stable

stable

Kernel

default

default

default

default

unknown

custom

Installed packages (default image)

packages with priority important (debootstrap and higher (plus user choice if any [tasksel])

packages from debootstrap plus:
cloud-init,
apt-transport-https,
awscli

unknown

packages from debootstrap plus:
google-compute-engine,
google-compute-engine-init,
google-config,
google-cloud-sdk

unknown

unknown

Packages installed from outside of Debian archive

none

none

none

see2

unknown

unknown

Default system account

none

admin

debian

none3

debian

opc

Images description schema

debian-<release version>-<architecture>-<CD number|desktop configuration>.iso

3791011027354/debian-<codename>-<architecture>-<YYYYMMDD>

debian-<release version>-<YYYYMMDD>-openstack-<arch>.qcow2

debian-<release version>-<codename>-v<YYYYMMDD>

unknown

unknown

kernel runtime params (sysctl)

none (this is a reference setup for other images)

vm.swappiness = 0
vm.dirty_ratio = 80
vm.dirty_background_ratio = 5
vm.dirty_expire_centisecs = 12000
net.core.somaxconn = 1000
net.core.netdev_max_backlog = 5000
net.core.rmem_max = 16777216
net.core.wmem_max = 16777216
net.ipv4.tcp_wmem = 4096 12582912 16777216
net.ipv4.tcp_rmem = 4096 12582912 16777216
net.ipv4.tcp_max_syn_backlog = 8096
net.ipv4.tcp_slow_start_after_idle = 0
net.ipv4.tcp_tw_reuse = 1
net.ipv4.ip_local_port_range = 10240 65535
kernel.sysrq = 0

unknown

See sysctl variables from google-config package.5

unknown

unknown

  1. Discussions are under way (independently for DebianInstaller and cloud images) to list stable backports by default (installation of backport packages will still be manual, but updates become automatic) (1)

  2. Cloud/GoogleComputeEngineImage (2)

  3. https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/compute-image-packages (3)

  4. AMI owner AWS account ID (4)

  5. https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/compute-image-packages/blob/master/google_config/sysctl/11-gce-network-security.conf (5)