Posted
1 day
ago
gfcombinefs is a side project I did some work on a few weeks ago. It
combines several "shares" of a secret file previously split using Shamir
secret sharing, to produce the original secret, and presents it as a file in
a FUSE filesystem.
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It uses libgfshare for the actual mathematics, and
expects its input to have been split with the gfsplit tool shipped with
libgfshare.
At this stage of development, I suggest not trusting it with important data,
like the GnuPG secret keyrings it's designed for. However, I hope that with
some feedback from others I can get it into a state where it's ready to
be released and packaged (perhaps I'm being unnecessarily conservative, but
for something that deals with GnuPG keys, it seems wise to be careful).
Source code is available in a git repository, and I'd welcome contributions,
bug reports (other than the limitations that are already listed in the
documentation) and in particular, a systematic code audit from someone (the
good news is that there isn't very much code, so that shouldn't actually
take long). [Less]
Posted
2 days
ago
I've just done a 1.6.0 release of radeontool from my personal repo, it contains both
radeontool and avivotool, and is probably full of ugly but whats in distros now is older
and worse.
radeontool (and avivotool) are lowlevel tools to
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tweak register and dump state on radeon
GPUs, they also can parse parts of the BIOS data tables.
Tarballs are at
http://people.freedesktop.org/~airlied/radeontool/
git://people.freedesktop.org/~airlied/radeontool.git [Less]
Posted
3 days
ago
The past year or so I’ve been working a lot on gnome-disk-utility and DeviceKit-disks^Wudisks and I haven’t really blogged anything about it. Time to fix that!
First of all, given that the main DeviceKit daemon was killed by
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libudev (if you are using GLib you want GUdev instead!), we (that is, myself and other contributors) decided to rename the project - most people were cool with that; see this message for more reasons. One improvement in this area is that we’re committing to limited ABI stability - hopefully this will make things easier on distributors.
Most of the work in the udisks project been triggered by features we want in the Palimpsest Disk Utility - which is the most prominent part of gnome-disk-utility - the other part includes various desktop shell integration bits that I don’t have room to cover in this post.
On the Disk Utility side, we’re now using an user interface that scales better with many disks - in the old user interface, we used to show all partitions as children of each disk in the tree view. In the new user interface, we’re using a grid to convey the partitioning:
Also see bgo #579211
While this interface isn’t optimal for the laptop or the machine-with-only-a-single-disk cases, it works a lot better for machines with many disks
Bunch of disks
The Disk Utility also have somewhat complete support for MD RAID (aka Software RAID on Linux) - we’ll show you running arrays and also arrays not yet running. There’s a way to add/remove components and currently I’m working on creating the UI for Online Capacity Expansion (e.g. dynamically expand a RAID-5 array from 4 to 8 drives).
The SMART stuff has been revamped and there is now a way to turn off the desktop shell notifications. As it turns out a lot of our current users are like “I’m fine with using a disk that is about to fail” - kinda shocking but there you go. Another change is that we don’t consider a disk to be failing if there’s only a couple of bad sectors - the disk will have to have many bad sectors to be considered failing. This helps with all the false positives the SMART warnings generated in e.g. Fedora 11. Anyway, it seems like the desktop notifications are useful - more than a handful of people have pinged me on IRC thanking me and Lennart for this feature. Woot!
We also now have rudimentary support for showing the SAS topology - this is really useful since machines with many disks typically use dedicated disk enclosure shelves. Currently we only show SAS Expanders but the plan is to peek (and poke!) SES-2 Enclosures (and in the future also SGPIO ones) to get information about bay numbering and to toggle the FAILURE and LOCATE leds. Ideally we want to turn on the FAILURE led if a member of a RAID array is kicked or if SMART status indicates that the disk is about to fail. Ideally, we also want to do (sensible!) things like starting a RAID rebuild if a kicked RAID member is replaced by a uninitialized and same-size disk. As always, we have to be really careful about automatically doing policy things like this - especially on Linux where it is hard to make any assumptions on how the system is used.
The goal of the udisks effort is to be useful to users. For example, if you do video editing or a lot of photography, you care about IO performance. So I added a way to easily benchmark drives and RAID arrays:
RAID-6 FTW!
This feature was inspired by various similar Windows programs (a pastime on big storage forums such as this one involves trading benchmark screenshots) and the zcav program. It’s pretty cute, actually; I learned that my Intel 80GB G1 SSD only gives me 140MB/s on my Lenovo Thinkpad X61 while I get a full 270MB/s on my workstation (connected via SAS). Looks like the X61 is only using SATA 150 MB/s - a search on the tubes confirmed this. Gee! This feature is also useful when experimenting with RAID setups - for example, a 10K 36.7GB SAS disk benchmarks like this but when you put three of them together in Software RAID-5 it turns that writing is really slow. I know it’s supposed to be slow when writing to software RAID… but, really, this slow? Maybe I need to tweak some kernel tunables (which would be bad - we should be fast out of the box etc etc).
Finally, I did a really cute hack a few weeks ago - I made Palimpsest use D-Bus over TCP/IP over SSH to speak to udisks:
Bunch of servers
With the way this works we leverage SSH for authentication and Avahi for Service Discovery. The feature is still a bit rough - it needs some UI additions (such as a disconnect button) and we probably want to replace the stock OpenSSH dialog with something, uhm, less scary. There’s also the question of authorization - right now you have to connect as root in order to modify things (udisks uses polkit for authorization) - we need to figure out how we want this to work. Right now I’m thinking udisks will ship some polkit configuration bits (a .pkla file) and a udisks-admin group that administrators can add users to. We’ll see.
I’m kinda excited about the remote connectivity bits - it means that the Disk Utility is now very useful for headless server setups and said servers won’t have to run any graphical UI in order to be managed through the Disk Utility. We probably want to make the Disk Utility (e.g. Palimpsest) run on Win32 and OS X too (for users not running Linux on the desktop) for remote connectivity to e.g. Linux boxes running udisks. It shouldn’t be too hard to do this as we mainly depend on GTK and D-Bus.
There’s a bunch of plans for both udisks and Palimpsest. We want to add support (meaning: udisks API and Palimpsest User Interface bits) for the following things: LVM, iSCSI (both target and initiator), Enclosure Management (as mentioned above), Event logging (e.g. “raid5:md2: read error corrected”), Multi-path, Btrfs and many other useful storage technologies. There’s also a few rough edges and missing features (e.g. file system resizing) but we’ll get to that in due time.
FWIW, it’s important to realize that udisks and the Disk Utility complements, but does not replace, existing command-line tools. This means that you can go ahead and keep using your command line tools and scripts and the udisks/GNOME/Palimpsest/etc. stack will react to changes. For example, you can start/stop RAID arrays using mdadm(8), partition your disks using parted(8), create filesystems using mkfs(8), mount/umount filesystems and so on - the UI is kept up to date. While it’s approximately ten times harder (with the 10x figure being 65% accurate) to write software this way, it’s really the only way to do things on something like Linux where our set of users is as diverse as it is. [Less]
Posted
3 days
ago
Then ask your distribution to backport the patches.
This has been fixed in Fedora about a month ago.
Posted
4 days
ago
Going back home for the Yuletide celebrations this Friday and are trying to tie up all lose ends before heading off to Norway. We had a board meeting here yesterday, with Wim, Tim and Edward coming to Cambridge. Started the meeting by summarizing the
... [More]
last few years since the founding of Collabora Multimedia and how we are in a very good place now to take on the next few years. Apart from the general company related stuff we also had a long discussion about how we can help the GStreamer community get GStreamer 1.0 out the door in the coming year. Think we got some workable ideas on how we, and especially Wim, can get to do some of the heavy lifting needed for GStreamer 1.0 and at the same time enable the GStreamer community as a whole to get into gear for pushing 1.0 out through the door. A lot of the general thinking for GStreamer 1.0 was done at this years Gran Canaria Desktop summit, so our discussion was more about the practical issues of who, how and when. Will need to take those discussions to the mailing list once we have crystallized our thoughts a little more first.
There was also the Cambridge Collabora Christmas party yesterday. Every had a great time with good food and drink being served. Also gathered afterwards at Rob McQueens place for some further celebration, although I think Robs neighbours didn’t seem to appreciate the Christmas carols as much as the season might warrant
Ended up having a relaxing lunch with Wim, Tim and Edward around midday today at one of our favourite Cambridge hangouts, The Snug, their Chicken, Brie, Bacon and Cranberry burger always me a happy camper (although probably warrants an extra half hour at the gym too). Afterwards Wim and Edward scurried off towards to train and Stanstead, while Tim jumped in his car to drive home to Bristol.
Anyway, looking foward to a relaxing Christmas vacation and to see my little niece for the first time ever, as she popped out a few weeks early a week ago Also hope to get some Transmageddon hacking done, while some of the Transmageddon plans I have is waiting for the GStreamer Editing Services to get python bindings I do plan on looking into various types of subtitle support as that code will likely be useful also after switching to GES. [Less]
Posted
8 days
ago
Hello, and welcome to this week's episode of "confusing wordcronyms". This time we'll have a look at letter combinations starting with X, ending in org or 86, and referring to a popular windowing system. Hint: the "X Window System" is an umbrella
... [More]
term for a windowing system based on the X protocol.
Here we go:
X
preferred shorthand for lazy typers or people with most of their keyboard missing. Refers to some incarnation of the X Window System. Is also a symlink to the binary of X servers.
X.Org
Official name of the X.Org project. "The X.Org project provides an open source implementation of the X Window System. [...] The X.Org Foundation is the educational non-profit corporation whose Board serves this effort, and whose Members lead this work." [source]
x.org
URL used by the X.Org project. Sometimes used to refer to X.Org by those with a broken Shift key.
XFree86
"The XFree86 Project, Inc is a global volunteer organization which produces XFree86®, the freely redistributable open-source implementation of the X Window System continuously since 1992." [source] Due to some not-so-exciting political issues, the code produced by XFree86 was forked and most developers shifted to X.Org instead. Today's code is the continuation of what used to be XFree86 code, though XFree86 itself is mostly dead now.
Xorg
The binary name of the X.Org X server implementation.
xfree86
The DDX name for the commonly used X server. A DDX is the device-dependent part of the X server and together with the device-independent bits (DIX) and some other parts forms your binary. The xfree86 DDX is what loads your video drivers and input drivers (amongst other things). Other well-known DDXs are kdrive, Xnest and Xdmx. All patches you see with xfree86 prefixes or pathnames patch this particular DDX.
xf86
Shorthand for drivers that can be loaded by the xfree86 DDX. For example, xf86-input-evdev, xf86-video-ati, etc.
xorg
Firstname of the xorg.conf server configuration file. Lovingly spelled lowercase because we can.
If you're reading this, chances are that you are running Xorg, the xfree86 DDX from the X.Org X server implementation with various xf86-something drivers. How can that possibly be confusing? Pass the mustard, thanks. [Less]
Posted
10 days
ago
Collabora has been part of developing Maemo from early on and of course been part of Nokia’s effort to use Maemo in their first linux based phone, the N900. To celebrate our involvement and due to the fact that it is a kick ass phone, it was
... [More]
decided that everyone in the company should get one. Today the first batch of 49 phones arrived in the office and we had a little unpacking ceremony as seen in the picture below:
Stack of freshly arrived N900 phones
Much rejoicing is being had [Less]
Posted
11 days
ago
As I mentioned in a quick update to my old post; I got a report of DUN not auto starting reliably, if at all. I did some digging and the cause is that the /var/run/sdp socket created by bluetoothd and needed by sdptool is not present when
... [More]
bluetooth-dun runs.
I’ve now updated the script to wait until the socket appears before continuing. (And as upstart is asynchronous, only the DUN service is delayed by the wait).
Now, the mechanism I used for the wait is a crude ‘while-not-exist’ loop with a one second sleep. The dbus script does this so I felt it was morally acceptable. It’s crude and an inotifywait approach would be better but that utility isn’t installed by default. Finally, the delay should really be in the bluetoothd script so that it doesn’t signal readiness until it really is… [Less]
Posted
12 days
ago
So the attendee's gift at Kernel Summit this year was an Intel X-25M 80G SSD. However as they had only just launched while we were at Kernel Summit, Intel couldn't get supplies to give them away.
So I a package today and lo and behold its
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got my SSD in it!!
So I've no real idea what I'm going to do with it, I have no laptop useful enough to support such a thing, so I've put it
into my desktop in the office for now. I suppose I can migrate all my git trees to it.
Any suggestions for what I should store on it? time for a new laptop sometime next year I suppose :-)
[update- lots of sugggestions to use it for my root partition, however my desktop machine boots rarely and has 6GB
of RAM, so it keeps gcc/firefox/openoffice in cache most of the time. So I suspect I really should use it for
my git trees where I spend a lot of time checking out and merging trees] [Less]
Posted
12 days
ago
More release critical bug squashing of the "week" (fortnight, really):
openarena-data Debian bug #523323 + patch (the necessary changes
in openarena are extensive, so I don't plan to NMU this unless there's no
response for a long
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time)
fuse Debian bug #550334, Debian bug #553015, Debian bug #557143
Removals from testing and proposed removals from unstable:
alien-arena Debian bug #559725 (removal from testing only)
commit-tool Debian bug #558592 (removal from testing only)
gadfly Debian bug #559375
gaim-otr Debian bug #552761 (transitional package)
levee Debian bug #558604
libroxen-adbanner Debian bug #559251
libroxen-diary Debian bug #559250
libroxen-imho Debian bug #559249 (removed from archive)
libroxen-tokenfs Debian bug #559248
mailreader Debian bug #559252
openc++ Debian bug #559111
overkill Debian bug #558669
p3nfs Debian bug #559105
portslave Debian bug #559254
skyutils2 Debian bug #558605 (removed from archive)
whirlpool Debian bug #559255
ziproxy Debian bug #559627
Possible candidates for removal:
bfm (unmaintained upstream since 2004, declining popcon score)
Other drive-by QA:
tse3 Debian bug #524726 marked as done (by a binNMU)
joy2key Debian bug #554521 downgraded to important
nvidia-graphics-drivers Debian bug #525414 noted as probably
fixed, submitter/maintainer pinged for confirmation
Bugs filed about the packages keeping zope3 around in testing:
Debian bug #558204, Debian bug #558205
mail-notification-evolution Debian bug #559106 upgraded to
serious [Less]
