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Bleg - db4 and autoconf [01 Dec 2009|01:32pm] Hate to admit that I completely fail at googling, but here it is: I seem to be unable to auto-configure db4 properly. Every time Fedora revs db4, we have to add another layer of this: AC_CHECK_LIB(db-4.8, db_create, DB4_LIBS=-ldb-4.8, AC_CHECK_LIB(db-4.7, db_create, DB4_LIBS=-ldb-4.7, AC_CHECK_LIB(db-4.6, db_create, DB4_LIBS=-ldb-4.6, AC_CHECK_LIB(db-4.5, db_create, DB4_LIBS=-ldb-4.5, AC_CHECK_LIB(db-4.4, db_create, DB4_LIBS=-ldb-4.4, AC_CHECK_LIB(db-4.3, db_create, DB4_LIBS=-ldb-4.3, [AC_MSG_ERROR([Missing required libdb 4.x])])))))) The nested AC_CHECK_LIB in configure.ac is bad enough, but what's worse, the crash before we understand that we ought to add another layer is completely unrelated. Fedora ships a compat package, but the <db.h> header is always new, so we (tabled) build with newest header and link the compat libdb, then crash. At best. UPDATE: Diego Pettenò suggested AC_SEARCH_LIBS by e-mail. The problem with it, the best I can come up with is this: AC_CHECK_HEADERS([db.h], [], [AC_MSG_ERROR(Missing required db.h)]) dnl We do not use sequence objects. This is a trick to force db4.3 or later. dnl We suppress -ldb from LIBS and use DB4_LIBS in order to not link with dnl db4 where not necessary. DB4_LIBS_SAVE="$LIBS" LIBS="" AC_SEARCH_LIBS(db_sequence_create, [db], DB4_LIBS="$LIBS", [AC_MSG_ERROR(Missing required libdb)]) LIBS="$DB4_LIBS_SAVE" It looks pretty clumsy. [link] 3 comments|post comment

Mako and Open Source [28 Nov 2009|02:04pm] Mako wrote a post today, which gives me an excuse to ride my favourite horse. Research has shown that the vast majority of FLOSS projects fizzle [citation needed — zaitcev]. A advocate who argues that FLOSS is inherently better is left trying to explain this fact and make excuses. Good thing I'm not an advocate, then. However, do I even care about "research"? My own life experience demonstrates very convincingly that working in an area of Open Source is highly beneficial for a mediocore programmer like me, for the reason of code reuse. The reuse actually works in two major ways: the job-spanning and waste reduction. It's inevitable that a programmer grows some moss in the career. Some of it is in the head, but not all. There's a bunch of little tools and scripts, but more importantly, certain approaches, encoded in the old code. In the proprietary world, all this baggage was strictly illegal (yet commonplace -- because it's so useful). In Open Source world, you post a patch, you can always find it later, even if you change jobs. But the bigger issue is the waste. Even if "research" that Mako mentioned is legitimate, I know one thing: in the span of 20-some years I was a programmer, every proprietary project on which I worked was cancelled and never reached its user (with the sole exception of the Internet MTA that I wrote back in 1989 for Gamma.ru). In other words, businesses literally wasted millions paying my salary. But since I moved to Red Hat, just about everything I hacked on found its user (e.g. all except the Infiniband stack). Have I become smarter from a job change? Not at all. But what? The reason is, all these "vast" numbers of projects Mako is talking about are either 2-liners, IRC bots, CD players which were essentially training wheels of their creators, or other over-counting (such as: Pidgin is dead, Empathy is forked from it -- hello +1 dead project). But in reality, a serious Open Source project gets continuously developed and adapted to new uses, and new Open Source projects build upon a massive stack of components. This is a far less wasteful way to develop even if bogus metrics look bad. Indeed, Stallman has never suggested that free software will be easier or better. Indeed, he routinely asks people to sacrifice their convenience for freedom. Good luck with that, but I would rather have my life useful to someone. As far as I'm concerned, I'm on a higher moral ground than RMS. What a thought. [link] 5 comments|post comment

Orange Star strikes again [28 Nov 2009|10:45am] As I mentioned before, it's impossible to get rid of the Orange Star. It was impolite, but not too bad -- only copying the worst ideas of proprietary software and behaving like iTunes or Acrobat on Windows. But now (in Fedora 12) the Orange Star started to post notifications too. Look guys, I'm perfectly capable of running my "yum update", thanks. Filed a bug (542179) to see if that helps. [link] 2 comments|post comment

F11 to F12 with yum [26 Nov 2009|08:04pm] Upgraded a random 64-bit box today (a Chunk node in the home cloud, actually) from Fedora 11 to 12 using Seth's instructions. Some of them are a bit odd (yum update 'rpm*' will pull glibc, so the next step is superfluous, and it's unclear just why it's necessary to update python separately (observe that the new yum is being executed by the old python), or even kernel). There was no trouble, but I had to force relabelling with touch /.autorelabel, or else /root was not writeable for root. Dunno what's up with that. [link] post comment

Abort Abrt Abt [22 Nov 2009|06:53pm] A couple of days ago my company sent me a new Thinkpad T400 since my 5-year old Dell D600 was kinda getting obsolete (IOW not KVM capable). I installed Fedora 12 with no incident, copied my files over, and continued to work... And made a mistake somewhere, which resulted in a program crash. There was no core left though. Oh yes, ulimit -c 1000000, re-running tests... Still nothing. Well, perhaps the clean-up in the harness killed it? No, apparently not. etc. etc. After admitting utter defeat and writing it up for a kernel bug, I noticed the following in the /var/log/messages (unreadable for unpriveleged users by default): Nov 22 17:53:46 lembas kernel: lt-load-file-ev[24029]: segfault at 459f0062 ip 0000000000400b12 sp 00007fff8366a6b0 error 6 in lt-load-file-event[400000+2000] Nov 22 17:53:46 lembas abrt: saved core dump of pid 24029 to /var/cache/abrt/ccpp-1258937626-24029/coredump Nov 22 17:53:47 lembas abrtd: Executable doesn't belong to any package Nov 22 17:53:47 lembas abrtd: Corrupted or bad crash, deleting... Wow. Talk about surprises. I'm sure the intentions were noble, same as with the installation through PolKit... [link] 2 comments|post comment

Raising in rage against Eucalyptus in Fedora [16 Nov 2009|01:24pm] At leat at present junction, it's a "no", although of course I cannot stop confused people from packaging it. Things that concern me about Eucalyptus: * Lack of any kind of willingness to work with the outsiders, unless they are of course Ubuntu. It's even documented. You want to eat crumbs off someone's else table? I sure don't. * Crazy Xensource-like premature commercialization with Eucalyptus.com. I expect trouble getting understanding (in addition or in explanation of the above). * We already have all sorts of management stuff with oVirt, sVirt, libvirt, etc. Eucalyptus is a direct competitor for all that, not a complement to it! * Maybe their compute cloud is the second coming of Christ, but on the storage cloud side, their S3 is worse than what I have today (except in bugginess, perhaps). And I'm sure Jeff Garzik is happy to accept patches, which is the key, goddamit. All these points are subject to reconsideration in the future, but for now it's pretty obvious to me. I am surprised Greg doesn't think so. UPDATE: Greg comments further. His is a different view, he wants a coherent cloud story now. But I remember too well how much of steamroller Xen seemed a few short years ago, and where did it go? So, I tend to think we need good code more than coherent story. Perhaps I'm unduly idealistic. And yes, our patchwork of projects and packages is frustrating. [link] 3 comments|post comment

Is there A20 Gate in Litl? [15 Nov 2009|11:36am] Havoc's post explains his vision for the way a consumer would interact with Litl in the same condescending way Steve Jobs wants us to enjoy iPhone. This should certainly sound familiar to anyone who heard of Mac: The software is finely-tuned to the hardware, and the flippable hardware inspires one of litl OS's core features [...] But what is in it for me? Them main issue is if Litl is hackable. Is there hardware documentation? What about software and firmware, is it GPL? 100% legacy-free. No caps lock. HDMI, not VGA. etc. Is there no BIOS? No A20? Note: Comments about A20 will be deleted. This post is about Havoc's indiffierence to hackerdom, not A20. Go to mjg59's post to discuss A20. UPDATE: Havoc commented with: There is no TPM chip or "tivoization" since there's no subscription contract. If you want to replace with Linux it's fine with us. There's nothing too unusual about the hardware from a driver perspective. The custom wheel and button are hooked up as keyboard keys. A netbook distribution of your choice probably runs, or runs with trivial fixes, though I haven't tried on the final production hardware. If you have questions then ask one of the litl developers. [link] 4 comments|post comment

Hail tabled with data replication [14 Nov 2009|01:32am] It's almost there, I can sense it. I posted the patch with the scan daemon and 1-st party copy implementation today. There's still a lot of work remaining, in particular I need Chunk to perform self-tests and 3-rd party transfers. The biggest issue, is, however, tabled itself. Or, actually, its database. In order to support nodes coming down efficiently, it needs to know what keys were at a given node, and the information is not indexed by node. So, the alternative is either changing the whole database scheme, or severely limiting the supported scale so that the limitations of the whole-database scan do not come forward too forcefuly. Given that there's no time, I opted for proclaiming no more than 10 Chunk nodes and 1 million keys. Such small limits make tabled completely useless and a toy (until the new database), but then if anyone thinks otherwise he's deluding himself anyway. [link] post comment

Dehalification [10 Nov 2009|11:33am] Is it just me, or nobody in GNOME/Freedesktop/etc. knew what they were doing for years (press "thread next" for more fun)? I wonder what David Zeuten has to say for himself about HAL. Also, what are the chances that whatever is being done now won't get rejected in, oh, a year? [link] 7 comments|post comment

The litl thing [05 Nov 2009|05:07pm] Apparently, it uses S3. My plan to take over the world is proceeding as I have foreseen. [link] post comment

Blog-resident development in the clouds [30 Oct 2009|01:00pm] In case folks don't know, I'm a massive blogger, but it's not blogging about programming and most especially not blogging while programming. I dabbed in it, but it became very obvious to me that it was a province of douchebags and Rusty Russel (who blogged good things about lguest and other projects). The end of my dabbing occured when jbj declared that he's "taking development of RPM 5 to the blog". Seeing that put a capstone into my communication phylosophy. We kernel programmers do the business on mailing lists, Jon Corbet summarises the results. But it looks like outside of the kernel, a different way of life arose, congealed, or whatever. I cooperate on Hail with Jeff Darcy, and I learned today that he has what is a programming blog. Darcy is not as exceptional as Rusty among kernel hackers. Cloud-y folks, they all blog. But I never knew what to make of that, if it was Sturgeon's law. However, Jeff is not a random wanker, he codes good things. He's also fully versed in good e-mail: no top-posting or HTML from him. Not sure if this blog is going to explode with programming detail, but even if I'm not as cool as Jeff Darcy or Rusty Russel, why the heck not. It may be worth documenting the thinking missing from commit logs. In case anyone asks, I still hate Twitter. [link] post comment

Rumor-mongering, tribal knowledge [20 Oct 2009|07:35am] In a comment to mdomsch's entry about the newly introduced support for PRNG of TPM in rngd, Arjan asks why keep this in userspace. Why, indeed? Please pardon me engaging into rumor-mongering, but I heard that the problem is the maintenance of the quality of the random stream. In other words, lots of sources of the enthropy may go bad (get stuck on a certain value usually, but not only that). Detecting it in kernel would be too difficult. Now, is this credible? It is to me, but I did not look at the source. I'm often on the receiving end of it too. For example, yesterday I wanted to create a wildcard A/AAAA record (it's used for S3 bucket selection in tabled). All examples, without fail, used the fully qualified syntax "*.sub.dom.com.", unlike all other entires in the SOA zone. And why? Nobody knows, they just do it. [link] post comment

LOL of the day [06 Oct 2009|01:58pm] In Eucalyptus FAQ: Q: Can I help develop Eucalyptus? A: For the moment, we are restricting external development contributions for Eucalyptus internals to bug fixes. It is just too complicated to try and keep the code base stable with external developers when we are in this early phase of development. That's a good one. And Ubuntu shipped that? But of course. I was thinking if I should trash tabled and replace it with Walrus (a part of Eucalyptus that's equivalent to tabled), but now I'm not sure if that's a good idea anymore. Sure, they have mature, working code, and Hail has immature, limping one. But jeez, plugging into an upstream like that is a nightmare for any hacker of packager. [link] 1 comment|post comment

Today's WTF [22 Sep 2009|07:24pm] Linux kernel development discussion at LinkedIn.com. God, why? [link] 2 comments|post comment

Nobody uses gvim on Rawhide? [21 Sep 2009|11:15am] The bug 510307 does not get a lot of interest (or any interest), but it's a major problem for me. When I want to edit arch/x86/pci/legacy.c, the fingers type "gvim arch/x86/pci/legacy.c". What's a kernel hacker to do? a - Apply the patch to a locally built gvim, maintain the RPM forever b - Switch to Ubuntu and hope they'll carry the patch forever c - Become a vim contributor, raise to the top through the vicious backstabbing, take over the project and APPLY THE DAMN PATCH AT THE SOURCE d - Switch to Emacs e - Apply for a position at Microsoft [link] 5 comments|post comment

iptables on Fedora with stock kernel [19 Sep 2009|11:26pm] Don't remember why, but I noticed that my laptop was running without any iptables. Sure enough, there was a little message "iptables-restore: line 22 failed". Line 22 is "COMMIT", so that's not useful. By diffing configs between Fedora kernel 2.6.31-2.fc12 and my own 2.6.31, I found that Fedora had "+CONFIG_BRIDGE_NETFILTER=y", an option missing from the stock kernel. So, a likely explanation is that I rebooted into Fedora kernel and a mysterious component added "-I FORWARD -m physdev --physdev-is-bridged -j ACCEPT". I suspect some kind of virtualization daemon. The only fix seems to be to edit /etc/sysconfig/iptables and delete the offending line. Oh well, as long as I don't boot Fedora kernel and use the Linus' kernel exclusively, I should be safe. [link] post comment

Giving up on Twitter [17 Aug 2009|03:33pm] I may come to regret it later, but after making 1733 twits, I had enough of Twitter's "service" with mandatory corruption of URLs and masked 403s. But instead of migrating to Identi.ca or other better Twitter than Twitter (like Plurk), I simply started microblogging at Meenuvia. It's much better. Twitter and Identica center their proposition squarely on the race to increase followers, which I have no chance of winning. Honestly, I'm not sure if I have a desire to participate in the first place — too much responsibility. Therefore, I don't see why I should bother. The downsides are too great. [link] post comment

Vintage Dilbert [04 Aug 2009|02:41pm] I bought the volume 13 of Dilbert because of one specific strip set. It goes like so: TINA: I just read that the average woman is paid 75 cents for every dollar that men make. It's an outrage! ALICE: I'm the highest paid engineer in the company. TINA: That's impossible. The article says "average women" earn less. ALICE: Suddenly, the problem comes into focus. Ah, the days when DouglasScott Adams sucked at punchlines yet wasn't afraid to take on real issues (strips are from March 1998). [link] 2 comments|post comment

Happy Anniversary abort [29 Jul 2009|10:05pm] A bit more than exactly one year passed since Pulse aborted on me, so Lennart was a little forgetful, I guess. [zaitcev@niphredil tmp]$ mpg321 1198-BWB-2009-07-28.mp3 High Performance MPEG 1.0/2.0/2.5 Audio Player for Layer 1, 2, and 3. Assertion 'pthread_mutex_unlock(&m->mutex) == 0' failed at pulsecore/mutex-posix.c:108, function pa_mutex_unlock(). Aborting. Aborted Oh yes, baby. I love you too. [link] 2 comments|post comment

Project Hail [24 Jul 2009|09:22pm] On Wednesday, Jeff Garzik used our cloud forum to report on Hail, a small cornerstone of the open source cloud. I've been hacking on it since January. Interesting stuff, and I wanted to have a good look at the userland for a while. I don't consider going to userland hacking as falling down the order (see Linus and git). Before that, I poked at X a bit, but those people weren't very interested or friendly. Here at least only Jeff stands between me and the master git tree. [link] post comment

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