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Weekly Kernel Review with openSUSE Flavor: 15th Week

April 16th, 2010 by

Guest Blog from:  Rares Aioanei <suse.listen@gmail.com>

Hi everyone, and welcome to this week’s edition of the kernel news – OpenSUSE style! The news are as follows :
-Ryusuke Konishi pushed some trivial fixes to the NILFS2 tree (mostly fixing of typos)
-Masami Hiramatsu posted a patch regarding perf-probe. In his own words, “This series improves data structure accessing.
In this version, I added ‘removing x*()’patches.”
-Chris Mason posted some improvements in the btrfs-unstable tree, among others fixing an oops and other impovements.
-Linus Torvalds announced the release of the 2.6.34-rc4 kernel : “It’s been two weeks rather than the usual one, because we’ve been hunting
a really annoying VM regression that not a lot of people seem to have
seen, but I didn’t want to release an -rc4 with it. So we had the choice
of either reverting all the anon-vma scalability improvements, or finding
out exactly what caused the regression and fixing it.”
This rc also contains various bugfixes and changes regarding drivers – a new network driver (cxbg4) and updates to radeon and nouveau.
Kerneltrap : http://kerneltrap.org/Linux/2.6.34-rc4_Hunting_A_Really_Annoying_VM_Regression
H-Online : http://www.h-online.com/open/features/Kernel-Log-Coming-in-2-6-34-Part-1-Network-Support-975937.html
and lwn.net : http://lwn.net/Articles/383199/rss
-Also, Luis R. Rodriguez announced an updated wireless tree in regard of the release of 2.6.34-rc4 (backported).
See it here : http://www.orbit-lab.org/kernel/compat-wireless-2.6-stable/v2.6.34/compat-wireless-2.6.34-rc4.tar.bz2
-David Miller posted various fixes in the networking- and sparc trees.
-Michal Simek wrote to celebrate one year of Linux on the Microblaze (Tuesday, the 13th of April 2010)
-And some news from the opensuse-kernel team :
Jiri Kosina noticed that commit 5246824c7ea3313c8e4f42f9b19d9e6f0b51861a introduced CONFIG_DEBUG_BLOCK_EXT_DEVT as set on master kernels
(non-{debug,trace} kernels). The problem has been solved and now this option is disabled on master kernels.
This has a related fix upstream introduced by Rafael J. Wysocki.
-Steven Rostedt announced the release of trace-cmd version 1.0
-Trond Myklebust announced fixes for the nfs tree.
-Jean Delvare posted fixes for the hwmon (hardware monitoring) tree for the upcoming 2.6.34 kernel
-Ingo Molnar posted fixes for the perf tree including build fixes on Debian and others.
-Douglas Gilbert announced sdparm 1.05 as of 15.04.
-Stephen Rothwell announced that Thursday’s linux-next (next-20100415) will be the last until the 27th of April, when he’ll return from his vacation.
-Dmitry Torokhov posted updates for the input tree for -rc4.
-Also Thomas Gleixner mailed some updates for x86-fixes.
-Fixes to the Firewire tree, along with documentation updates, were pushed by Stefan Richter.
-John W. Linville posted a pull request for the wireless tree intended for
2.6.34 .
-Also, patches of mmotm have been released against 2.6.34-rc4 .
-Guilt v0.33 is available as of 16.04.2010 .
-Patches for bkl/ioctl, sound (for -rc5), watchdog have been released .

That’s it for this week, see ya!

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Posted in Kernel | Comments Off on Weekly Kernel Review with openSUSE Flavor: 15th Week

Solving typical problems of BCM4312 802.11b/g

March 22nd, 2010 by

The problem 1: I have a new Broadcom Wireless that doesn’t work with the driver B43, even when I download the firmware.

The problem 2: I don’t wanna use the Broadcom WL driver because its buggy, closed source, and doesn’t support aircrack.

The solution:

After a while working with this solution, i must say that the wireless range its improve and everything else working perfectly.

So, this works for some of those BCM4311-, 12- and those weird cards that don’t work with only the B43 and the Firmware.

  1. Install build essentials with: sudo zypper in -t pattern devel_basis devel_kernel
  2. Download the package compat-wireless from http://wireless.kernel.org/
  3. Unpack the package somewhere: tar xvzf compat-wireles.tar.gz
  4. Enter in the new directory, and execute: make && make install
  5. Wait for a while, and when it ends should say something like “do make unload” DON’T DO THAT.
  6. As root exec: install_bcm43xx_firmware, this script should be in your system path, but only as root. This will download the firmware to /lib/firmware/b43.
  7. Reboot. I found that its more safe to do a clean reboot than write make unload, because i got a kernel panic if i do that. So reboot and your wireless card should be working now with b43. Remember to remove the WL driver so you don’t have conflict between them.

I did this for my Aspire One D150 and some HP Laptops and works without problems.

I hope this information is useful.

Cheers.

Posted in Kernel, Network | 3 Comments »

Xen para-virtualized openSUSE 11.2

February 10th, 2010 by

I had to install Xen para-virtualized openSUSE 11.2 (PVM), lucky for me 11.2 DVD iso has broken xen kernel so it does not install, the live CDs do not have any xen kernel at all so they are not useful either. After reading up all the posts on the bugzilla and forums about the subject, found the way to get it done, here is a howto for anyone else who is looking for the solution.

1. Set up http installation source

Install web-server pattern from yast to install apache2 in Dom0

Edit apache configuration /etc/apache2/default-server.conf to follow symlinks, it should look something like this:

#Options none
Options Indexes FollowSymLinks

Mount the DVD iso and copy all the files to your webserver root.

mount openSUSE-11.2-DVD-i586.iso /mnt -o loop
mkdir -p /srv/www/htdocs/suse-11.2
cp -ar /mnt/* /srv/www/htdocs/suse-11.2/
cd /srv/www/htdocs/suse-11.2/boot/i386/
rm *-xen*
wget http://download.opensuse.org/distribution/11.2/repo/oss/boot/i386/initrd-xen
wget http://download.opensuse.org/distribution/11.2/repo/oss/boot/i386/vmlinuz-xen
ln -s initrd-xen initrd-xenpae
ln -s vmlinuz-xen vmlinuz-xenpae
cd /srv/www/htdocs/
wget http://download.opensuse.org/update/11.2/rpm/i586/kernel-xen-2.6.31.12-0.1.1.i586.rpm (or the latest)
mv kernel-xen-2.6.31.12-0.1.1.i586.rpm kx.rpm
rcapache2 start

2. Start installation via “yast2 vm-install”, select para-virtualization and as installation source use http://dom0IP/suse-11.2/
3. The hack part:
When the install is about 80%  or “Stop” the reboot after the completion of first stage install, switch to tty2 by using “Sendkey > ctrl+alt+F2”.

chroot /mnt
rpm -Uvh http://dom0IP/kx.rpm –force

Reboot and let the install run its course, at the end of it there should be working domU

Edit: If you have fast internet connection available during install, add the update repository as “Addon product”, with that in place the above hack will not be necessary.

Edit2: If the image still don’t boot, mount the disk image to edit grub’s menu.lst:

mount -o loop,offset=32256 /full/path/to/image/disk0 /mnt
cd /mnt
ln -s vmlinuz-….-xen vmlinuz-xen
ln -s initrd-…..-xen.img initrd-xen
vi /mnt/grub/menu.lst #to look like below:

title XEN
root (hd0,0)
kernel /vmlinuz-xen root=…..
initrd /initrd-xen

Posted in Documentation, Kernel, openSUSE 11.2, Virtualization | 2 Comments »

First post / First whishes

December 20th, 2009 by

Dear Santa-Claus, can you provide us a real full kvm solutions for next year.
So I didn’t have to fight with Esx .

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Posted in Kernel, Virtualization | Comments Off on First post / First whishes

Install Multiple Kernel Versions using the YaST Qt Package Manager

December 8th, 2009 by

You might want to install multiple kernel versions on your system.
The YaST Qt Package Selector provides a nice user interface that allows to manage multiple package versions now.

yast2-qt-pkg 2.18.19 or later supports this feature. You can find packages in my Build Service repository.

First of all you need to tell libzypp that your kernel is a package which is multiversion-enabled by adding this line to your /etc/zypp/zypp.conf:

multiversion = provides:multiversion(kernel)

Start your YaST Software Management. The versions tab shows check boxes for multiversion packages instead of radio buttons.
This enables you to install multiple versions of the same package.

There is also a package group of multiversion packages that list all packages that can be installed in multiple versions.

YaST Qt Package Manager with Multiversion Kernel Packages

Posted in Kernel, Software Management | 7 Comments »

reiser4 for openSuSE-11.2

November 15th, 2009 by

grab the “reiser4-kmp-$flavor” modules and required “reiser4progs” from:

openSuSE-11.2 Update repo

openSuSE-11.2 Standard repo

regards,
have fun

Posted in Kernel | Comments Off on reiser4 for openSuSE-11.2

Interview with Greg Kroah-Hartmann

August 14th, 2009 by

The openSUSE Weekly News are pleased to publish an little Interview with one of Novells Kernel-Hackers: Greg Kroah-Hartmann.

(more…)

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Posted in Kernel, Miscellaneous | Comments Off on Interview with Greg Kroah-Hartmann

28 Partitions on a Single Disk? No Problem!

August 5th, 2009 by

So far it was only possible to have upto 16 device nodes for a single disks. This restricted the number of usable partitions. As a workaround kpartx could be used to create device mapper mappings for further partitions but that was never fully integrated in openSUSE.

With version 2.6.28 the kernel supports upto 256 device nodes per disk, much more than the partition table allows. But since the implementation is not straightforward, the additional device nodes are assigned dynamically, user-space programs may need to be adapted.

For openSUSE 11.2 Milestone 5 YaST was extended to support this new kernel feature.

Some quick tests showed only problems with LVM. If you are interested in this feature and have the possibility please give it a try so that we find remaining bugs.

Posted in Base System, Kernel, openSUSE 11.2, YaST | 1 Comment »

LiveCD Performance (clicfs vs. SquashFS)

May 15th, 2009 by

When Coolo looked into how to get rid of (Another) UnionFS for Live CDs and came up with the DoenerFS (now clicfs) idea, I remembered that my friend Arnd has workded on fake write support for cramfs. So I took his code and ported it to SquashFS to see how that goes. My expectation was that it might be faster than Coolo’s clicfs using FUSE. Here are some results using openSUSE-KDE4-LiveCD-i586-i686-Build0098 booting into runlevel 3:

  • clicfs: 637MB ISO Image booting in 1:28 min (0:24 min from RAM)
  • squashfs-rw: 751M ISO Image booting in 1:50 min (0:28 min from RAM)

The difference in the sizes of the ISO images are due to the fact that clicfs is using LZMA compression while SquashFS is still using the in-kernel GZIP implementation. Surprisingly the clicfs image isn’t only smaller but is also faster booting on real media and from RAM (using KVM). So even if we ignore the fact that clicfs is optimized for limiting the number of seeks on disk the SquashFS implementation is still slower. It would be interesting to see if it is just the LZMA compression that is making the difference or something completely different.

The patches for the SquashFS fake write support are here: http://git.infradead.org/users/jblunck/linux-2.6.git?a=shortlog;h=refs/heads/squashfs-rw-v1.

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Posted in Base System, Kernel | 5 Comments »

Do You Want Multiple Kernels on Your System?

February 3rd, 2009 by

Today, I’d like to mention another rather hidden feature of openSUSE 11.1. The package management is finally able to keep multiple versions of packages, if they support installation of parallel versions. A typical example of this is of course kernel. A lot of people want to keep the old, functional, kernel around when installing a kernel update and now there is a way to do it.

Open /etc/zypp/zypp.conf in your favorite editor and change this value:

multiversion = kernel-default,kernel-default-extra,kernel-default-base,kernel-source

The list contains names of packages to be installed via ‘rpm -i’ instead of ‘rpm -U’. Just adopt it to your the kernel flavor you are using.

Of course, there is a catch – there are no means to limit the number of package versions to be installed this way. The reasoning is that there is no automatic way to guess which versions to remove (in case of kernel, everyone has its own definition of working kernel) So you have to uninstall additional kernels you don’t need anymore manually.

Enjoy!

Posted in Kernel | 5 Comments »

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