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Guest Blog: Rares Aioanei – Weekly Kernel Review (openSUSE Flavor)

June 18th, 2010 by

Hello, and welcome! Looks like just after I finished my article, 2.6.35-rc3 was announced, so I will have to make the announcement in this week’s edition. Let’s begin.

-LWN.net’s Jonathan Corbet posted an article titled “Kernel Prepatch 2.6.35-rc3” , marking the announcement of the 3rd release candidate. Link is here : http://lwn.net/Articles/391864/rss .

-Michal Marek posted kbuild fixes, while Dominik Brodowski posted also some small fixes for PCMCIA (-rc3), David Miller has his usual dose of fixes for networking, Rafael J. Wysocki posted a resume fix for x86 (the pm tree) and Len Brown posted ACPI patches for -rc3.

-Jeffrey Merkey annonced the 11.06.2010 release of the Open Cworthy Linux libraries with the following changelog : “FIXES

Corrected pthread concurrency issues with ncurses and ncursesw.  These libraries are not pthread safe on linux 2.6.33 and later kernels and require mutexes for access to any of the screen refresh() calls or they will corrupt the video display removed vitriolic messages from the code and comments this version supports multiple update panels with pthread safe calls to ncurses libraries.  Supports VT100, VT220, XTerm, and Linux terminals.  Dumb terminal and ANSI still have some issues but these problems are ncurses related.  Sample IFCON program included.

This version was tested on a 4 processor Opteron HP Proliant Server.”

-Here comes, ladies and gentlemen, the offcial announcement of 2.6.35-rc3, made, of course,  by Linus Torvalds : “So I’ve been hardnosed now for a week – perhaps overly so – and hopefully that means that 2.6.35-rc3 will be better than -rc2 was. Not only do we have a number of regressions handled, we don’t have that silly memory corruptor that bit so many people with -rc2 and confused people with its many varied forms of bugs it seemed to take, depending on just what random memory it happened to corrupt.

One effect of being strict is that this is likely the smallest -rc3 we’ve had in a long long time. The diffstat summary line for the week
looks like this:

165 files changed, 1624 insertions(+), 859 deletions(-)
from 159 commits, and even then the biggest single change was due to moving some functions around in iwl-agn.c, rather than a lot of actual changed lines.

So give it a good testing.

Linus”

-Benjamin Herrenschmidt posted a small group of powerpc fixes for 2.6.35, Takashi Iwai has sound fixes for 2.6.35-rc4, Chris Mason has also some btrfs fixes,  Tomi Valkeinen has two fixes for the OMAP framebuffer driver, Paul E. McKenney  posted some RCU-lockdep splat fixes, and John W. Linville announced a series of fixes for the wireless tree : “Here is another passel of of fixes intended for 2.6.35. Included are some build warning fixes, a PCI identifier, a fix for premature IRQs during hostap initialization, a fix for a warning caused by failing to cancel a scan watchdog in iwlwifi, a fix for a null pointer dereference in iwlwifi, and a fix for a race condition in the same driver.  Also included is the MAINTAINERS change for the orphaning of the older Intel wireless drivers.  All but the last few warning fixes have spent some time in linux-next already.”

And…that’s it for this week! Have a sunny and enjoyable weekend!

Tags: ,
Posted in Base System, Kernel | Comments Off on Guest Blog: Rares Aioanei – Weekly Kernel Review (openSUSE Flavor)

OpenOffice_org 3.2.1 bugfix release available for openSUSE

June 18th, 2010 by

I’m happy to announce updated OpenOffice.org 3.2.1 packages for openSUSE. They are available in the Build Service OpenOffice:org:STABLE project and provide some useful fixes. The most critical one is the crash in non-Oxygen KDE4 themes that affects openSUSE-11.3 and Factory KDE4 users. Please, check also the older announce for more details about OpenOffice.org 3.2.1 release.

The openSUSE OOo team hopes that you will appreciate this update. We kindly ask you to report any other bugs so that we could fixed them in the future releases.

Posted in Desktop, OpenOffice.org | Comments Off on OpenOffice_org 3.2.1 bugfix release available for openSUSE

Hackweek V: mkdiststats

June 16th, 2010 by

When Coolo mentioned that he is looking into improving the rebuild time of Factory
I couldn’t resist to try the script he was using myself. It turned
out that the script was extremly slow, it took about 15 minutes for
the calculation on my computer. The script was originally written a
long time ago for the old autobuild with a much lower number of
packages and dependencies to take care of. The ad-hoc method used
for the ‘rebuild simulation’ just didn’t scale well. Hackweek was a
good opportunity to improve the performance and to add some more
options.
(more…)

Posted in Build Service, Hackweek | Comments Off on Hackweek V: mkdiststats

Hackweek V: osc bash completion

June 15th, 2010 by

During last week , I was working on my Hackweek V project: bash completion for osc. It’s still far from being complete, but IMHO it is usable already, so here we go.

Download

The project is hosted on gitorious.org. To get the sources, use git:

git clone git://gitorious.org/opensuse/osc-bash-completion.git

Installation

You need working and configured osc. I have tested the completion with osc-0.126git, but it should more or less work with older/newer versions too. Naturally, your shell has to be bash (I used bash-4.x). The easiest way how to try the completion is simply to do
~> source osc.shThis will enable the completion for the given shell only – see README for more “persistent” ways how to enable the osc completion.

Features

The script provides support for completing:

  • osc subcommand names (checkout, commit, …)
  • global long osc options (e.g. –quiet, –debug, …)
  • long subcommand options
  • project names
  • package names (in given project)
  • file names (in given project/package)
  • repository names (openSUSE_Factory, …)
  • architectures (i586, x86_64, …)
  • …

Some examples:
osc com<tab><tab> => osc commit
osc --ht<tab><tab> => osc --http-debug
osc build --a<tab><tab> => osc build --alternative-project
osc ls Ar<tab><tab> => osc ls Archiving
osc ls Base:System pa<tab><tab> => osc ls Base:System parted
osc cat Base:System parted ba<tab><tab> => osc cat Base:System parted baselibs.conf
osc buildlog openSUSE_<tab><tab> => osc buildlog openSUSE_
openSUSE_Factory openSUSE_11.0 openSUSE_11.1 openSUSE_11.2
osc buildlog openSUSE_Factory x<tab><tab> => osc buildlog openSUSE_Factory x86_64
osc createrequest -a<tab><tab> => osc createrequest -a
add_role delete change_devel set_bugowner submit
osc ? d<tab><tab> => osc ?
delete deleterequest dependson dif
osc meta a<tab><tab> => osc meta attribute
osc my <tab><tab> => osc my
pkg prj rq sr
osc request <tab><tab> => osc request
accept approvenew co decline checkout
list log revoke show wipe
osc getpac for<tab><tab> => osc gepac fortune

At the moment, the script DOES NOT provide support for completing

  • short options
  • arguments for most of the options
  • some complex combinations of arguments

Caching

To avoid long delays and spamming OBS server too much, the script caches several information:

  • list of projects in OBS
  • list of packages in individual projects (only in those that have been accessed by osc)
  • output of “osc repos prj” (dtto)

Please see the README file for more information about how the caching works and how to customize it (to make the completion significantly faster).

Known issues, TODO

  • The script does not work correctly if there is a long option with argument and there is ‘=’ between the option and argument (–long-option=arg). Please use the ‘–long-option arg’ form instead.
  • For the time being, the script does not recognize alternative apiurl (-A|–apiurl) and thus it works only with default (https://api.opensuse.org) api.
  • Sourcing the script removes the colon from COMP_WORDBREAKS variable to make completion of Build Service projects easier. This was known to break e.g. git completion in the past (however, I didn’t notice any issues). In the future, the script should be fixed so that modifying of COMP_WORDBREAKS is not necessary.
  • The script should dynamically create list of osc subcommands and lists of their options by parsing osc help output (or something similar). Now the lists and logic are hardcoded in the script, which will make it maintenance nightmare when osc changes.
  • Completing of “osc {chroot,build}” is not yet implemented.
  • See TODO file

Testing and feedback

The completion script is very new, tested only by me and mvyskocil for a while, so it definitely has a lot of bugs. Before releasing it as a separate package, I’d like to collect some feedback first (and fix the already known problems and TODOs), so, if you are interested, please give it a try and report any bugs, suggestions or patches directly to me (petr.uzel@suse.cz). Also, feel free to ping me on IRC: ptr_uzl @ freenode.net.

I hope at least somebody (except me 🙂 ) will find the completion useful. Thanks and happy completing.

Tags:
Posted in Build Service, Hackweek | 4 Comments »

Hello Word

June 14th, 2010 by

Hello Word…I’m the new openSUSE  Member.

Use the forçe, USE openSUSE!

“Collaborate attract friends, compete attract enemy”

http://pt.opensuse.org/Usuario:Cabelo

Posted in lizards.openSUSE.org | Comments Off on Hello Word

Hackweek V: Local caching for CIFS network file system

June 14th, 2010 by

Hackweek

It’s that time of the year when SUSE/Novell developers use their Innovation Time-off to do a project of their interest/wish – called as Hackweek. Last week was Hackweek V. I worked on making the Common Internet File System (CIFS) cache aware, i.e. local caching for CIFS Network File System.

Linux FS-Cache

Caching can result in performance improvements in network filesystems where access to network and media is slow. The cache can indirectly improve performance of the network and the server by reduced network calls. Caching can be also viewed as a preparatory work for making disconnected operation (Offline) work with network filesystems.

The Linux Kernel recently added a generic caching facility (FS-Cache) that any network filesystem like NFS or CIFS or other service can use to cache data locally. FS-Cache supports a variety of cache backends i.e. different types of cache that have different trade-offs (like CacheFiles, CacheFS etc.) FS-Cache mediates between cache backends and the network filesystems. Some of the network filesystems such as NFS and AFS are already integrated with FS-Cache.

Making CIFS FS-Cache capable

To make any network filesystem FS-Cache aware, there are a few things to consider. Let’s consider them step by step (though not in detail):

* First, we need to define the network filesystem and it should be able to register/unregister with the FS-Cache interface.
* The network filesystem has to define the index hierarchy which could be used to locate a file object or discard a certain subset of all the files cached.
* We need to define the objects and the methods associated.
* All the indices in the index hierarchy and the data file need to be registered. This could be done by requesting a cookie for each index or data file. Upon successful registration, a corresponding cookie is returned.
* Functions to store and retrieve pages in the cache.
* Way to identify whether the cache for a file is valid or not.
* Function to release any in-memory representation for the network filesystem page.
* Way to invalidate a data file or index subtree and relinquish cookies.

Implementation

I wanted to get the prototype working within a week. So the way I have implemented it is rudimentary and has lot of room for improvement.

The index hierarchy is not very deep. It has three levels – Server, Share and Inode. The only way that I know of identifying files with CIFS is by ‘UniqueId’ which is supposed to be unique. However, some server do not ensure that the ‘UniqueId’ is always unique (for example when there is more than one filesystem in the exported share). The cache coherency is currently ensured by verifying the ‘LastWriteTime’ and size of the file. This is not a reliable way of detecting changes as some CIFS servers will not update the time until the filehandle is closed.

The rudimentary implementation is ready and the cumulative patch can be found here:

http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/jays/patches/

[WARNING: The patch is lightly tested and of prototype quality.]

Here are some initial performance numbers with the patch:

Copying one big file of size ~150 MB.

$time cp /mnt/cifs/amuse.zip .
(Cache initialized)

real 1m18.603s
user 0m0.016s
sys 0m8.569s

$time cp /mnt/cifs/amuse.zip /
(Read from Cache)

real 0m28.055s
user 0m0.008s
sys 0m1.140s

Tags: , , , , ,
Posted in Network | Comments Off on Hackweek V: Local caching for CIFS network file system

openSUSE Edu: Li-f-e theme for 11.3

June 14th, 2010 by

For openSUSE Edu: Linux for Education based on openSUSE 11.3 we will be going with great new default openSUSE 11.3 theme by Jakub “Jimmac”  Steiner with small addition of our own, here is how it looks.

(more…)

Posted in Artwork, Derivative, Education, GNOME, Hackweek, KDE | Comments Off on openSUSE Edu: Li-f-e theme for 11.3

Some wrap-up from LinuxTag

June 14th, 2010 by

Just traveling back by train from LinuxTag, Berlin to Nürnberg. How was LinuxTag? In general it seems to me that LinuxTag may should change their motto “Were .com meets .org” as the event changed over the years more and more to an community project events with a few companies attending and a few business visitors passing by. I wonder who’s willing to pay the bill for LinuxTag ongoing? But that’s not of my business. Apart of the trade show the LinuxTag team served a pretty broad and high quality 4 days conference. For the community guys and girls I’d say it was a pretty good event with much conversation and meeting of people you normally just meet on mailingslists, forums or IRC and with a bunch of poeple new or intersted in Linux and open source.

We had big fun at the openSUSE booth showing mainly the openSUSE Build Service 2.0 and milestone 7 of openSUSE 11.3. Additional of this usual trade show program we served daily 3-4 small hack sessions on the booth to teach people in things like, Roll your first package in the Build Service, Insights into GNOME 3.0 or learning some Inkscape magic.  They all were well attended and gave room for intensive 1:few conversations. The biggest fun we had with “Henne’s handicraft workshop” which took place daily at 5pm at the booth and covered stuff like creating your openSUSE bag, match LinuxNacht dress cody by wearing an openSUSE pin etc.

In the conference I visited a few presentation to get more knowledge about SUSE Studio, Mono, open sourc in companies etc. I visited as well Microsoft’s keynote and I was not alone in the room 😉
The keynote was given by James Utzschneider who’s heading the open source department at Microsoft since less then a year but is with Microsoft for over 15 years. He’s a good talker and it looks to me that he’s a smart guy as well. He was pretty clear on the open source strategy Microsoft is following:

  • Microsoft changed heavily. Everything can be put on the table for disussion today but should be backed with good arguments.
  • Customer are asking that Microsoft products work seamlessly with open source products where ever they are used at customers location. So, main goal here is to follow common standards and improve the interoperability in literally all areas to make the customers confident and stay with Microsoft products.
  • Microsoft is a business company and is mainly driven through business cases – if the open source path is beneficial in $ for Microsoft – Microsoft will take it further down. Its pretty unlikely that things are done for the open source community just to make them happy.

We might get in touch with James as Microsoft could spice up the openSUSE conference in October. Ahh, with regards to that we informed pretty many other projects and developers at LinuxTag about the openSUSE conference and this years motto “Collaboration accross borders” and it was well received and we should be able to cover a number of interesting topics working together with communities other then the openSUSE one. Now it the time to shape the conference, call for papers is open till July 31.

Pavol put up a collection of photos which give a good summary of openSUSE @ LinuxTag 2010. We had fun at LinuxTag 2010, had many good conversations, got new valuable input in many areas and are keen on how LinuxTag evolves in the future.

Posted in Boosters, Build Service, Distribution, Events, Marketing | Comments Off on Some wrap-up from LinuxTag

Some LinuxTag 2010 impressions

June 13th, 2010 by

LinuxTag 2010 has ended, openSUSE had a booth in the community area and we had a number talks. We also released OBS 2.0 on LinuxTag. You know this of course already, but here are some impressions.

openSUSE booth was very well visited. Various workshops and activities created several times actually a big swarm around it. Many people were interessted about OBS in special and I hope we won some more OBS users and developers.

Hennes and mine talk about “how to escape the free software hell” was provocant enough to get quite some people into our room directly after the keynote. I hope we were able to show off the coolness of OBS there.

Read the comments in the picture gallery for some background information.

Posted in Boosters, Build Service, Events | 2 Comments »

Improve Software Quality

June 12th, 2010 by

Today I and some hundred others on LinuxTag in Berlin attended a keynote by Mark Shuttleworth, the “head dreamer” of the ubuntu Linux distribution.

He had pretty few slides with hardly any words on it. The headlines were “Cadence”, “Quality” and “Design”. As I have been working towards openSUSE quality, this interested me most – so this is what this text is going to be about. His thoughts were mostly what I was thinking anyway.

Quality works like this: if Factory (equivalent of Debian/sid or whatever it is called in ubuntu) breaks horribly every other week, few people will feel inclined to keep running on Factory or even on factory-snapshot. Mark spoke about a difference in number of testers of “one or two orders of magnitude” (which would mean a factor of 10-100 in mathematical terms). And having fewer testers during development can only mean lower quality for the final release.

This is why efforts should be taken to ensure a working Factory. Automated testsuites and reviews were specifically mentioned, among others. Some packages like gcc include own test-suites, but most do not. When asked how that was handled in ubuntu, he described an approach with scripts using computer vision, recognizing/clicking buttons which most likely referred to sikuli which has many similarities to what I did, just with a different focus (more user-friendliness) and quite some sophistication. Also for text-mode there is still good old “expect”.

Another thing that was not mentioned there, but which I was always thinking of as an odd shortcoming of openSUSE is that Debian has a “testing” distribution which is not like factory-snapshot. Debian/testing contains only packages migrated from sid after a certain time with no bugs above a certain criticality threshold. Of course, this needs a way to track automatically which bug applies to which package (something that ubuntu does in launchpad).

Launchpad is also nicely integrated with bazaar, so that adding “(LP: #12345)” into a changelog will cause the bug to have a link to the proposed fix and later be automatically closed, once the branch was merged into the main trunk.

This is not only cool, but plain useful. It can save a lot of work and frustration. I think Adrian Schröter will be working into that direction with better integration of buildservice into bugzilla and other openSUSE tools.

There is also a big human component. Especially with testers which are non-technicians. It is not so much about motivating them, but about not demotivating them (which can happen surprisingly easy in some cases). I have seen crash messages along the lines of “xxx has crashed. This is in no way your fault. You could help us by …” which is a very good thing in this regard.

Yet another related note: there are openSUSE-Promo and openSUSE-Biarch DVD iso variants which are so well hidden, that few people even know about their existence, so that there can not be much public testing. However, those are the variants that are given away to hordes of interested people at openSUSE booths around the world, but those are also the variants that are least tested. I still have bad memories of the 11.1 or 11.0 one which was degraded to coaster after three unsuccessful tries on different machines. If bandwidth or mirror-space is a problem, offering them only via bittorrent could be a solution.

Overall, still some way to go, but IMHO we are moving into the right direction.

Posted in Build Service, Factory, Quality Assurance | 1 Comment »

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