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Archive for February, 2017

Highlights of YaST development sprint 31

February 20th, 2017 by

As we announced in the previous report, our 31th Scrum sprint was slightly shorter than the usual ones. But you would never say so looking to this blog post. We have a lot of things to talk you about!

Teaching the installer self-update to be a better citizen

As you may know, YaST includes a nice feature which allows the installer to update itself in order to solve bugs in the installation media. This mechanism has been included in SUSE Linux Enterprise 12 SP2, although it’s not enabled by default (you need to pass an extra option selfupdate=1 to make it work).

So after getting some feedback, we’re working toward fixing some usability problems. The first of them is that, in some situations, the self-update mechanism is too intrusive.

Consider the following scenario: you’re installing a system behind a firewall which prevents the machine to connect to the outside network. As the SUSE Customer Center will be unreachable, YaST complains about not being able to get the list of repositories for the self-update. And, after that, you get another complain because the fallback repository is not accessible. Two error messages and 2 timeouts.

And the situation could be even worse if you don’t have access to a DNS server (add another error message).

So after some discussion we’ve decided to show such errors only if the user has specified SMT or a custom self-update repository (which is also possible). In any other case, the error is logged and the self-update is skipped completely.

You can find further information in our Self-Update Use Cases and Error Handling document.

During upcoming sprints, we’ll keep working on making the self-update feature great!

Configuring workers during CaaSP installation

While CaaSP release approaches, our team is still working hard to satisfy the new requirements. Thankfully, YaST is a pretty flexible tool and it allows us to change a lot of things.

For CaaSP installation, YaST features a one-dialog installation screen. During this sprint, configuration of the Worker role has been implemented, including validation of the entered URL and writing the value to the installed system. You can check the animated screenshot for details.

The CaaSP worker configuration

New desktop selection screen in openSUSE installer

The world of Linux desktop environments change relatively quick, with new options popping-up and some projects being abandoned. Thanks to the openSUSE’s community of packagers we have a lot of these new desktop environments available on the openSUSE distributions. But the status of those packages for openSUSE is also subject to changes: some desktop environments are poorly maintained while others have a strong and active group of packagers and maintainer behind.

The YaST Team does not have enough overview and time to watch all these desktop environment and evaluate which one is ready or not for being in the installer’s desktop selection screen. So the openSUSE Release Team decided to replace this dialog with something a bit more generic but still useful for newcomers.

They asked the YaST Team to come up with a new dialog featuring the two openSUSE main desktops (KDE Plasma and GNOME) and allowing the easy selection of other environments without reworking the dialog in the future. The goal of that new dialog was to replace the existing one you can see in the following screenshot.

The old desktop selection screen

We decided the new dialog should rely on patterns for several reasons. The main one is that the set of patterns is under the close control of the openSUSE community, which looks more closely than us to the desktop environments and their integration into the distribution. Moreover, each pattern specifies its own icon and description that can be somehow re-used by the installer.

We also took the opportunity to merge this almost empty and outdated dialog with the new one.

The old additional repositories screen

Addons are no longer produced for openSUSE, so only the second checkbox made any sense nowadays. Moreover, the functionality of that second checkbox directly influence the available selection of patterns, so it made more sense to merge everything in a single screen that keeping an extra step in the installation just to accommodate a checkbox.

So we sent a proposal for the new dialog to the opensuse-factory mailing list and, after implementing many of the ideas discussed there (like better wording or using a button instead of a checkbox for the online repositories), this is the new dialog that replaces the two ones mentioned above.

The new desktop selection dialog

Selecting “custom” will take the users to the already existing patterns selection screen. Just in case you don’t remember how that screen looks like, you can check this image.

The patterns selection screen

If these screenshots are not enough to make your mind about the change, you can check the following animation, in which KDE Plasma is initially chosen to be changed at a later point (going back in the workflow) to LXQt.

Desktop selection animation

It will take some time before the changes hit the Tumbleweed installer, since they obviously have a non-trivial impact on the openQA tests, that will need some adaptation.

We would like to thank everybody that contributed to this new feature by providing feedback and suggestions through the mailing list. Once again, the openSUSE community has proved to be simply awesome!

Storage reimplementation: improved handling of logical partitions

Our reimplementation of the storage layer keeps getting improvements here and there. With the base x86 case working, we are now implementing the tricky parts, like the partitions renumbering that takes place when dealing with logical partitions in a MBR style partition table.

With GPT partition tables or with primary partitions in a MBR partition table, the partition gets a number (like sda1) when it’s created and keeps that number for its whole lifetime. But logical partition gets constantly renumbered when other partitions are created and destroyed. We need to know in advance what device name every partition will get in order to configure everything beforehand and only commit the changes to the disk when the user clicks in the “install” (during the installation process) or “commit” (if running the expert partitioner).

Now, libstorage-ng is able to simulate in memory the re-numbering process, so we can calculate all the settings related to partitioning (like the configuration of the bootloader) before really touching the disk.

Making kdump work in CaaSP

When you enable the Kernel Crash Dump (kdump), you probably expect that you will get a kind of core dump, like you do for regular processes. What you might not expect is an automatic reboot. That is a nice bonus. If you are tired of waiting for an actual kernel crash, you can test your kdump setup by triggering a crash yourself. Just run this as root:

echo c > /proc/sysrq-trigger

The way kdump works is by allocating some extra memory at boot time and putting a second kernel+initrd there. When the main kernel realizes it is crashing, it transfers control (by kexec) to the other one, which has only one purpose, to dump the memory of the crashed kernel.

In the upcoming Containers as a Service Platform, kdump was not working because the root filesystem is read-only there and we were not able to create the kdump initrd. We fixed it by creating it just after the RPMs are installed, when the FS is still read-write.

Fixes for Snapper in CaaSP

Kdump was not the only component affected by the fact of having a read-only filesystem in CaaSP. Snapper was also running into problems when trying to execute the rollback and cleanup operations. Now the problems are fixed. While working on that we did enough interesting findings to deserve a separate blog entry. So you can expect a new entry in the Snapper.io blog soon.

Snapshot-related improvements in the expert partitioner

While we work on the new storage system, we are still taking care and improving the current one that will continue to be shipped with SLE12-SP3, SUSE CaaSP and openSUSE Leap 42.3. During this sprint we introduced a couple of usability improvements in the expert partitioner related to Btrfs subvolumes.

First of all, we moved the “Enable Snapshots” checkbox that was pretty much hidden in the “Subvolume Handling” dialog to the place where it really belongs – below the selector of the file-system type.

New location for enabling snapshots

In addition, we added the warning you can see in the screenshot below for users enabling snapshots in a potentially problematic setup.

Warning for snapshots in a small partition

Bring back the beta warning on CaaSP

And talking about warnings, we improved the CaaSP installation dialog to show the Alpha/Beta product warning at the beginning. After changing the CaaSP installation to use the all-in-one dialog described in our previous post, this feature was lost as it is part of the initial EULA dialog. Now it is back and the users should now properly see the current product status.

The CaaSP alpha/beta warning pop-up

Storage reimplementation: encrypted LVM proposal

Back to our storage layer reimplementation, the new system is now able to propose a setup with encrypted LVM. Since some sprints ago, we were already able to propose a partition-based and a LVM setup. That means the new proposal is now feature-pair with the old one, with the only exceptions of Btrfs sub-volumes (that shouldn’t be a big challenge) and s/390 storage (that is still not properly managed by the underlying libstorage-ng).

The bright part is that the new code is written with re-usability in mind, which means implementing an encrypted partition-based proposal (with no LVM) would be trivial. The new code is 100% covered by automatic unit tests and scores to the top in all the automatic quality checkers we have run (like Rubycritics, CodeClimate, and Rubocop).

So now we are prepared for whatever the future brings, having lost no single feature in the way.

Storage reimplementation: prototype if the UI for the proposal settings

The next challenge is to make the power of that new storage proposal available to the users through the user interface. In the previous post we presented the document describing the general ideas we wanted to discuss with UX experts.

It’s our pleasure to announce we met the experts and we very easily reached an agreement on how the user interaction should be. During this sprint we already implemented a prototype of the future proposal settings wizard that is, as usual, included in our testing ISO.

Now that we have solid foundations, it’s very likely that the following sprint will result in the fully working wizard, with almost-final wording and design.

Support for CaaSP added to the AutoYaST integration tests

While fixing a problem with AutoYaST and CaaSP, we decided to extend our AutoYaST integration testing tool to support CaaSP. But, as a side effect, we also made some additional improvements that were long overdue (like improving the procedure to download ISOs, reducing timeouts, etc.).

Now, our internal Jenkins instance takes care of running AutoYaST integration tests for the development version of CaaSP (as it already does for SLE 12 SP2).

Services manager moved to first auto-installation stage

AutoYaST allows to define a set of services to be enabled/disabled in the installed system, applying this configuration during the 2nd stage (after the first reboot).

Unfortunately, this approach won’t work for CaaSP because, in that case, the 2nd stage won’t be available. For that reason, during this sprint, we have adapted AutoYaST to write services configuration during 1st stage.

As usual, not only CaaSP, but other future (open)SUSE versions will benefit of this change.

Faster YaST installation when the release notes cannot be downloaded

Sometimes a very small simple change in a program makes a very noticeable impact in its everyday use. That’s the case of a fix implemented during this sprint. YaST usually re-tries to download the distribution release notes several times if the first attempt was unsuccessful. Although that’s correct from a general point of view, there are cases in which retrying makes no sense and only delays the installation. We have now added failed DNS resolution to that list of cases, which should result in a noticeable faster installation in many scenarios.

Moreover, in the case of AutoYaST we now skip downloading the release notes completely. Downloading them don’t make us much sense in the kind of unattended scenarios handled by AutoYaST and skipping this step and all the possible associated problems result in a more robust process.

Better continuous integration for Libyui

In the previous sprint we switched to Docker at Travis so we could build and test our packages in the native openSUSE system instead of the default Ubuntu. This sprint we did the same change also for the Libyui library which implements the UI part of YaST.

Originally we could not build the Libyui packages at Travis as either the required build dependencies were missing or were present at a very old unusable version. With this switch we can easily use the latest packages from openSUSE Tumbleweed and thus enable Travis builds for all Libyui packages.

See you after Hack Week!

As already mentioned, this week is Hack Week 15! So our Scrum process will be on hold for some days. That doesn’t necessarily mean the YaST development will stall. Since there are quite some YaST-related projects in the Hack Week page, you can expect YaST to simply go in unexpected directions. 🙂

And remember Hack Week is not a SUSE internal initiative, we are open to collaboration from anybody within or outside the company. So jump in and have fun with us!

Fun things to do with driver updates

February 16th, 2017 by

Today: update the update process!

Yesterday a colleague asked me if it would be possible to apply a driver update (DUD) to the rescue system. He wanted to use a new btrfsprogs package.

My immediate reaction was: no, you can’t do it. But then, there’s no technical reason why it shouldn’t be possible – it actually nearly works. The updates are downloaded as usual – just not applied to the rescue system.

So I thought: “Why not make a driver update so driver updates work also for the rescue system?”

Here’s how I did it.

First, let’s find out how driver updates are usually applied. The code is here:

https://github.com/openSUSE/installation-images/blob/master/data/root/etc/inst_setup#L84-L87

We need just these three lines:

for i in /update/[0-9]*/inst-sys ; do
  [ -d "$i" ] && adddir "$i" /
done

linuxrc downloads the driver updates and stores them in an /update directory. One (numbered) subdirectory for each update.

It obviously uses some adddir script. So we’ll need it as well. Luckily, it’s not far away:

https://github.com/openSUSE/installation-images/blob/master/data/root/etc/adddir

Next, we’ll have to find the spot where the rescue system is set up. It’s done in this script:

https://github.com/openSUSE/installation-images/blob/master/data/initrd/scripts/prepare_rescue

Let’s do some copy-and-paste programming and insert the above code near the end of the script. It then might look like this

# driver update: add files to rescue system
if [ -d /mounts/initrd/update ] ; then
  cp -r /mounts/initrd/update /
  for i in /update/[0-9]*/inst-sys ; do
    [ -d "$i" ] && /mounts/initrd/scripts/adddir "$i" /
  done
fi

Some notes:

  • You have to know that prepare_rescue is run as the last thing before we exec to init. So everything is already in place, the left-over files from initrd are mounted at /mounts/initrd and will be removed at the end of the script.
  • This means we have to copy our updates into the new root directory, else they will be lost.
  • Also, we plan to make the adddir script available at /scripts/adddir by our driver update (see below).

Now let’s create the driver update:

mkdud --create dud_for_rescue.dud \
  --dist tw --dist leap42.1 --dist leap42.2 --dist sle12 \
  --name 'Apply DUD also to rescue system' \
  --exec 'cp adddir prepare_rescue /scripts' \
  adddir prepare_rescue

Here’s what this call does, line-by-line:

  • the fix works for all current SUSE distributions, so let’s support them
  • give the driver update some nice name
  • this command is run right after the driver update got loaded; we copy the scripts out of the driver update to their final location
  • add adddir and our modified prepare_rescue script

Here is the result: dud_for_rescue.dud.

Now, back to the original problem: how to use this to update a package in the rescue system? That’s easy:

mkdud --create new_btrfs.dud \
  --dist sle12 \
  dud_for_rescue.dud btrfsprogs.rpm

creates a driver update (for SLE12) that updates btrfsprogs also in the rescue system.

Highlights of YaST development sprint 30

February 3rd, 2017 by

This is our first post in 2017 and looks like we must start apologizing. In our previous post we promised news about this blog, but the administrative part slowed us down and the surprise is still not ready. On the bright side, we have quite some news about YaST. So let’s go for it!

One-click system installation for CaaSP

As you may know, SUSE has been working on making containers easier, with SUSE Container as a Service Platform. We have referred to it in several previous posts using the CASP acronym, although nowadays the correct one is CaaSP (maybe we could sell the new “a” as a shiny feature 😉 ).

Part of this upcoming product is also an interactive installation option using the good old YaST. CaaSP uses a limited subset of the SLE possibilities and we wanted to make the installation simpler to reflect that. So we reduced the number of dialogs you have to click through… to one!

One-click installation in CaaSP

As you can see, it is at the expense of stuffing the screen with more widgets than usual. Still, the only part where you must make a decision is the root password.

We expect that most of the CaaSP installations will actually not use this, because they will be done automatically with AutoYaST. But still this should be useful when you are only getting started.

Refining the read-only installation proposals

It was possible to make a proposal “read-only” for some time already. However, its black-and-white logic was not sufficient for some use cases. So, it was redesigned and you can mark a proposal hard read-only or soft read-only. The difference is that users will never be able to change hard read-only proposal. However their will be able to modify a soft read-only proposal if the proposal reports an error. It can be useful e.g. for error recovery in software proposal. It has been implemented originally for CaaSP, but it will be available for SLE-12-SP3 and Leap 42.3 too.

Installing directly from a repomd repository

When you install (open)SUSE you have up to now needed a specially prepared install repository. In addition to the repository with the RPM packages, it needed a bunch of specially prepared files containing the installation system and our beloved YaST installer.

That’s all gone now!

You can now point the installer to any plain repomd repository. For this to work you have to point the installer to the repomd repository and to the installation system (they can be completely separate now).

For example:

install=http://download.opensuse.org/tumbleweed/repo/oss instsys=disk:/boot/x86_64/root

In that example, we install Tumbleweed from the openSUSE website and use the installer from some local media (maybe the NET iso).

To make things even easier there is now a regular package (tftpboot-installation-openSUSE) that contains the installation system and some sample config files.

Check out this linuxrc documentation for technical details.

Storage reimplementation: removing stones from the installation path

In our latest post, we presented the dedicated openQA instance contantly testing the new storage layer implementation. It still doesn’t run exactly the same tests than openQA.opensuse.org because not all technologies and operations are supported yet in the new yast2-storage. But now we are a couple of steps closer to run the full-blown tests also in our dedicated instance.

During this sprint, the partitioning proposal gained the ability to deal with disks not containing a partition table in advance (it always proposes to create a GPT one in that scenario) and the software selection proposal learned how to use the new storage API, so it can properly inspect the system and the associated error pop-ups are gone from the installation workflow.

More power to the system roles

We keep extending the capabilities of the system roles, now with the ability to specify some systemd services to enable. As the roles can define which software gets installed in the system, it made sense for them to also be able to specify the desired status for the services included in that software

For example, it would be possible for a given product (let’s say a customized openSUSE) to define a “static web server” role. Choosing that role during installation would result in a system with a HTTP server already installed and enabled, so the user just need to copy the files to be served into the right directory.

Expert partitioner is now less restrictive with encryption

Setting up an encrypted LVM was always pretty easy when using the automated storage proposal – simply select “encrypted LVM” at the proposal settings and you are done.

But doing that manually was almost impossible: The expert partitioner wouldn’t allow any of the system mount points (“/”, “/usr”, “/var”, …) on any encrypted partition, and it also wouldn’t allow to encrypt, but not format a partition of type “LVM” for use as an LVM physical volume.

Both restrictions are now lifted; you can now create an LVM physical volume with encryption, or you can do the encryption layer on the logical volume if you prefer. And you can create an encrypted plain partition with a filesystem directly on it without LVM.

Over the years, Grub2 learned how to do that, so you don’t even need a /boot partition anymore. For the time being, you’ll need to enter the encryption password twice, though: once at the Grub2 prompt and once later at the graphical console so systemd can mount those filesystems. Our base system developers are working on a secure solution to avoid that.

Migrate Travis CI to Docker

That’s actually not a change in YaST itself, but in its development infrastructure. Still, we believe it would be interesting for the average reader of our blog.

So far we used Travis CI for building and testing the commits and pull requests at GitHub. But the problem was that by default Travis runs Ubuntu 12.04 or 14.04 at the build workers. That had several drawbacks for us, since compiling and testing YaST on Ubuntu is not trivial and the result is not always 100% equivalent to openSUSE. All this meant extra maintenance work for us.

Fortunately Travis allows using Docker containers at the workers and that allows using basically any Linux distribution. This sprint we spent some time converting the Travis configuration to use a dockerized openSUSE Tumbleweed at Travis.

From Github to Travis thanks to Docker

The work was successful, we switched all YaST modules to use this new builds and the result is already paying off at several levels, although it took us over 100 pull requests (all of them manually tweaked and reviewed) to make it happen.

The current solution is documented and we had also a short internal presentation about this change. The notes from the presentation are available here.

Improved continuous integration for Snapper

We also enabled Travis integration with Docker for Snapper. As you may know, Snapper is a portable software that has always offered packages for many Linux distributions in the filesystems:snapper OBS repository.

So we took the continuous integration one step further and enabled Travis builds on more distributions, currently we build for openSUSE Tumbleweed, openSUSE Leap 42.2, Fedora 25, Debian 8 and Ubuntu 16.10. You can see an example build here or more details in the documentation.

Example build result of Snapper at Travis

That means we can ensure that the package still builds on all these distributions even before merging a pull request!

Better integration with systemd for YaST Services

Systemd recognizes many possible states for a service beyond the classic Unix enabled/disabled and running/stopped, and that list of possible states grows with every systemd release. In the past YaST have had some issues displaying the services status.

Now the problems are fixed by delegating to systemd the conversion from the concrete state to the good old known Unix equivalent. So the user now gets more precise information about all services running on the system.

Storage reimplementation: redesigning the installation user experience

In the latest post we showed you the document we were using as a base to discuss the new expert partitioner UI with usability experts. Now it was turn for the proposal settings dialog. We collected the current state, had a very productive discussion and ended up with a proposal for a new interface. You can check the resulting document covering all that.

As mentioned, the SUSE UX experts will use that document as a starting point to design the final interface. But we want the process to be as open as everything around YaST, so feel free to provide feedback.

Reading product renaming information from libzypp

When performing an upgrade, YaST needs to know whether a product is renamed or replaced by a another one. For example, in the past, the Subscription Manager Tool (SMT) lived in its own product but it’s included in SUSE Linux Enterprise 12. So YaST needs to know that the suse-smt product was just replaced by sles.

This information is usually provided by the SUSE Customer Center (SCC). But what happens if, for example, we are performing an offline upgrade? Until now, YaST used a hard-coded fallback list.

From now on, before falling back to such a list, YaST will ask libzypp for that information so, hopefully, it will avoid some problems while upgrading extensions and it will reduce the hassle of maintaining a hard-coded list.

Storage reimplementation: Making sure to install storage-related packages

The YaST storage subsystem has been taking care about storage-related software packages for a long time. For example, when a specific filesystem type like Btrfs or XFS is used by the system, we need to make sure that necessary support packages like btrfsprogs or xfsprogs are installed.

Figuring out what features are used is now done by the new libstorage. In this sprint, we created one Ruby class that maps those features to respective packages and one class that handles package installation itself. One interesting technical aspect is how Ruby introspection capacities are used to avoid duplicating the list of defined features from the C++ part (i.e. libstorage).

Power the chameleon

Apart from all those changes in YaST, and many more we have not included in this summary, we have something else to celebrate. On February 1st the YaST Team at SUSE has grown with the addition of a new member, Iván, who will allow the project to evolve even faster and better… and that will not be the last announcement in that direction, so stay tuned.

But don’t forget you can also help YaST, and openSUSE in general, to keep moving. This week we added several ideas for Google Summer of Code projects to the openSUSE mentoring page, including one idea to contribute to YaST. Do you have a better plan for this summer?

See you in less than three weeks, since the next sprint will be slightly shorter due to Hack Week 15.