More news out of UDS. As many know Canonical demoed Android running on Ubuntu on the x86 architecture. As was noted quite a bit did not work because the demo was running a stock Ubuntu kernel. For some background you can read an article on Ars Technica about the demo.
Today we held an open session on Incorporating Android Into the Ubuntu Kernel. It was decided that we would make an Android Enabled Ubuntu kernel available. The kernel will be available on x86 and ARM architectures.
We will be forming up the spec over the next few weeks and I'll keep updating it here as well.
For the curious.... You can find more info on Android here:
Thursday, May 28, 2009
Wednesday, May 27, 2009
Daily upstream "crack of the day"
Announcing "crack of the day" kernel builds... Yes it's true, plain ol' upstream kernel builds of Linus' daily tree. For those of you feeling like testing some new bits, running the bleeding edge or just like pain, these kernels are for you. We make no guarantee if you'll get one every day due to the shape of the upstream tree, if it compiles you'll get it.
You can find em' here:
http://kernel.ubuntu.com/~kernel-ppa/mainline/daily/
You can thank Andy Whitcroft, its all his fault :-)
More of the UDS outcomes for the kernel over the next few days....
You can find em' here:
http://kernel.ubuntu.com/~kernel-ppa/mainline/daily/
You can thank Andy Whitcroft, its all his fault :-)
More of the UDS outcomes for the kernel over the next few days....
Sunday, February 22, 2009
More kernel bits...
As of Jaunty Alpha 5 we have enabled kernel oops reporting on both our normal kernels and our vanilla kernel builds. Thanks to Jef for pointing out we should do it on our vanilla builds as well.
We have also made ext4 available for those users that would like to try it. I need to point out it is not the default option, but you can get to it thru the installer or convert to ext4 thru the commandline. Why is it not the default? At UDS in Dec, Ted Ts'o recommended that we don't make it default for this release. He felt it was very stable but not yet ready for mass consumption. I have been running it since Alpha 3 and its been working great for me, however your mileage may vary.
late edit: Amber asked what is the difference between "normal kernels and vanilla kernels". Normal kernels are upstream kernels that Ubuntu patches with code that we need in order to integrate the kernel in the distribution for example we add AUFS to make the live cd work, we at Ubuntu call these patches "Sauce". Vanilla kernels are pure unpatched upstream kernels. As stated in a previous blog post, we provide no support on the vanilla kernels, they are there there to assist users who want to test the latest upstream kernel on Ubuntu, and they also help us as Ubuntu kernel developers to find where our "sauce" patches might be breaking something.
My wife Amber is still hanging in there with Ubuntu, we are on about two weeks and counting. So far she is doing quite will. She has even found IRC and is in the Ubuntu channels. She has filed a few bugs in Launch Pad and is participating in the Jaunty Test Day. The only thing she really seems to be lacking is iMovie/iDVD equivalent applications. Linux has various apps that claim to do the same thing, none of them have the ease of use and integration. For those who are interested you can follow her exploits here: http://amber.redvoodoo.org
~pete
We have also made ext4 available for those users that would like to try it. I need to point out it is not the default option, but you can get to it thru the installer or convert to ext4 thru the commandline. Why is it not the default? At UDS in Dec, Ted Ts'o recommended that we don't make it default for this release. He felt it was very stable but not yet ready for mass consumption. I have been running it since Alpha 3 and its been working great for me, however your mileage may vary.
late edit: Amber asked what is the difference between "normal kernels and vanilla kernels". Normal kernels are upstream kernels that Ubuntu patches with code that we need in order to integrate the kernel in the distribution for example we add AUFS to make the live cd work, we at Ubuntu call these patches "Sauce". Vanilla kernels are pure unpatched upstream kernels. As stated in a previous blog post, we provide no support on the vanilla kernels, they are there there to assist users who want to test the latest upstream kernel on Ubuntu, and they also help us as Ubuntu kernel developers to find where our "sauce" patches might be breaking something.
My wife Amber is still hanging in there with Ubuntu, we are on about two weeks and counting. So far she is doing quite will. She has even found IRC and is in the Ubuntu channels. She has filed a few bugs in Launch Pad and is participating in the Jaunty Test Day. The only thing she really seems to be lacking is iMovie/iDVD equivalent applications. Linux has various apps that claim to do the same thing, none of them have the ease of use and integration. For those who are interested you can follow her exploits here: http://amber.redvoodoo.org
~pete
Sunday, February 15, 2009
To the hills and some observations
This weekend I took the family to the mountains of western North Carolina. That is where my wife was born and raised and we will be moving there when the kids get of school in June.
The weather was a bit crappy today and that gave my wife lots of time to continue her investigation of Ubuntu. If you want to read its here: http://amber.redvoodoo.org
I find it very enlightening reading it. She has not been asking for my help and I have to deliberately stay away so I don't volunteer. One thing I found very informational is the Ubuntu help. To be honest I never bothered to read it. Watching her use it she was grumbling about sudo. That caught my attention so I listened more... "Why do I care what sudo does?, why do I care about a command line?" were some of the statements I heard her utter. The one that really struck me was "on my Mac I *never* use command line..." Hmmmm, it was at that point I realized we (techies) assume everyone will need to sudo and use a terminal, if we did a better job of designing interfaces they wouldn't need to. In fact you have to hunt for the terminal application on a Mac. We have it in the accessiories menu. Something to think about.
At Red Hat I managed the Base OS group and that dealt with primarily userspace & plumbing so I never really thought about how to make it better. At Canonical I manage the Kernel Team and again I don't give the desktop much thought. I have been using Linux so long I remember when you had to configure FVWM to launch your applications. Anything that was easier than that to me has been a big win. I just take it for granted you need to do things different than Windows & Mac users do. Watching Amber struggle to understand things has given me a whole new appreciation as to the work we as a community need to do.
Amber managed to get on Freeenode and join #ubuntu-women and join the ubuntu-women mailing list (her first mailing list subscription ever!). The folks in the channel were very patient and supportive of her endvour with Linux. She is very much enjoying the community aspect of it all.
~pete
The weather was a bit crappy today and that gave my wife lots of time to continue her investigation of Ubuntu. If you want to read its here: http://amber.redvoodoo.org
I find it very enlightening reading it. She has not been asking for my help and I have to deliberately stay away so I don't volunteer. One thing I found very informational is the Ubuntu help. To be honest I never bothered to read it. Watching her use it she was grumbling about sudo. That caught my attention so I listened more... "Why do I care what sudo does?, why do I care about a command line?" were some of the statements I heard her utter. The one that really struck me was "on my Mac I *never* use command line..." Hmmmm, it was at that point I realized we (techies) assume everyone will need to sudo and use a terminal, if we did a better job of designing interfaces they wouldn't need to. In fact you have to hunt for the terminal application on a Mac. We have it in the accessiories menu. Something to think about.
At Red Hat I managed the Base OS group and that dealt with primarily userspace & plumbing so I never really thought about how to make it better. At Canonical I manage the Kernel Team and again I don't give the desktop much thought. I have been using Linux so long I remember when you had to configure FVWM to launch your applications. Anything that was easier than that to me has been a big win. I just take it for granted you need to do things different than Windows & Mac users do. Watching Amber struggle to understand things has given me a whole new appreciation as to the work we as a community need to do.
Amber managed to get on Freeenode and join #ubuntu-women and join the ubuntu-women mailing list (her first mailing list subscription ever!). The folks in the channel were very patient and supportive of her endvour with Linux. She is very much enjoying the community aspect of it all.
~pete
Friday, February 13, 2009
Ubuntu and the New User
I had no sooner got home from Europe when my wife Amber has the idea that she wants to use Ubuntu. (Thats what I get for getting her an Ubuntu T-Shirt with "Linux for Human Beings" on the back.)
My wife was a die hard windows user for years. When I got tired of being her personal admin, we moved to a Mac. For me a Mac was close enough to Linux in that I could ssh in, do most thing remotely... As of yesterday I couldn't pry a Mac out of her cold dead hands...
Over the years I had tried to move here to various Red Hat flavors since I worked at Red Hat, we tried RHL, Fedora, RHEL WS, and every time it met with abysmal failure. Usually it manifested itself as some sort of failure when I was out of town, she couldn't print, WIFI wouldn't work, or just her plain impatience when it comes to button clicking. If something doesn't immediately return she keeps clicking, selecting more and more menu choices until the computer grinds to a halt with 10,000 dialog boxes all over the screen with wording she does not understand.
So I'm back aboard the "convert the wife to Linux" train yet again. This time I don't get to help, advise or otherwise participate. I gave her an old laptop the Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid CD and showed her how to "press F12" to get to the boot selection menu.
She is blogging about it if you want to follow the saga you can here:
http://amber.redvoodoo.org
Cuz God knows I'm living it... *sigh*
~pete
My wife was a die hard windows user for years. When I got tired of being her personal admin, we moved to a Mac. For me a Mac was close enough to Linux in that I could ssh in, do most thing remotely... As of yesterday I couldn't pry a Mac out of her cold dead hands...
Over the years I had tried to move here to various Red Hat flavors since I worked at Red Hat, we tried RHL, Fedora, RHEL WS, and every time it met with abysmal failure. Usually it manifested itself as some sort of failure when I was out of town, she couldn't print, WIFI wouldn't work, or just her plain impatience when it comes to button clicking. If something doesn't immediately return she keeps clicking, selecting more and more menu choices until the computer grinds to a halt with 10,000 dialog boxes all over the screen with wording she does not understand.
So I'm back aboard the "convert the wife to Linux" train yet again. This time I don't get to help, advise or otherwise participate. I gave her an old laptop the Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid CD and showed her how to "press F12" to get to the boot selection menu.
She is blogging about it if you want to follow the saga you can here:
http://amber.redvoodoo.org
Cuz God knows I'm living it... *sigh*
~pete
Wednesday, February 11, 2009
Jaunty Kernel Bits
It has been a long few weeks, with that said I'll try and recap some of the more interesting things that have been going on with Ubuntu, specifically the kernel happenings in the Jaunty Jackalope release.
The Platform Team met in Berlin for the Jaunty Platform Sprint for the week of 2-6 Feb. This was an incredible event with the vast majority of the Canonical Engineering teams. We had both cross team and individual sub-team tracks. The kernel track covered all of the release roadmap items and administrative topics.
I'll talk about some of the roadmap items and the most interesting highlights...
Kernel Version
The Jaunty Kernel version will be 2.6.28. We considered 2.6.29, it was not selected however due to all of the major changes. The primary reasons were due to the large number new features that are scheduled to land in it. Regression of functionality is a large concern and there would be a good chance of that happening given when estimated date that Linus will declare it baked. Unfortunately it just doesn't line up with the Jaunty release cycle. On the bright side... for Jaunty+1 we will have time to shake out any issues and are looking towards 2.6.30 or .31
Suspend & Resume
We are making the suspend & resume one of our top priorities for this cycle. We ran a suspend and resume workshop with every notebook at the sprint.
Surprisingly we had a small number of failures. Most of them were on resume with NVidia video. We did not test the priority divers only the free ones. Out of 65 machines tested (various models) there were 12 failures.
We will be issuing a Call For Testing at the Beta release, however for those of you that want to play along at home early you can visit the Suspend/Resume wiki here: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/KernelTeam/SuspendResumeTesting and some more of the background material is here: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/KernelTeam/SuspendResume
Some other notable suspend and resume news for Jaunty...
Starting with Alpha 5 we will have available .deb packaged pure upstream vanilla kernels available.
The primary intent for doing this is to allow our community to test kernels without the Ubuntu "sauce", that is things that we add to the kernel to support the Ubuntu distribution. The goal is to help get wider testing of the upstream kernel source by leveraging interesting Ubuntu Community members.
In addition to Jaunty we are doing this for Hardy, Intrepid and the current active kernel development branch. The planned update schedule for each of these is:
There is a lot more and I'll talk more about them later. As usual I'm on a plane back from Europe and my battery is beginning to run low, so thats prob about enough for this post.
~pete
The Platform Team met in Berlin for the Jaunty Platform Sprint for the week of 2-6 Feb. This was an incredible event with the vast majority of the Canonical Engineering teams. We had both cross team and individual sub-team tracks. The kernel track covered all of the release roadmap items and administrative topics.
I'll talk about some of the roadmap items and the most interesting highlights...
Kernel Version
The Jaunty Kernel version will be 2.6.28. We considered 2.6.29, it was not selected however due to all of the major changes. The primary reasons were due to the large number new features that are scheduled to land in it. Regression of functionality is a large concern and there would be a good chance of that happening given when estimated date that Linus will declare it baked. Unfortunately it just doesn't line up with the Jaunty release cycle. On the bright side... for Jaunty+1 we will have time to shake out any issues and are looking towards 2.6.30 or .31
Suspend & Resume
We are making the suspend & resume one of our top priorities for this cycle. We ran a suspend and resume workshop with every notebook at the sprint.
Surprisingly we had a small number of failures. Most of them were on resume with NVidia video. We did not test the priority divers only the free ones. Out of 65 machines tested (various models) there were 12 failures.
We will be issuing a Call For Testing at the Beta release, however for those of you that want to play along at home early you can visit the Suspend/Resume wiki here: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/KernelTeam/SuspendResumeTesting and some more of the background material is here: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/KernelTeam/SuspendResume
Some other notable suspend and resume news for Jaunty...
- There is a new testing script to test (and stress test) suspend resume.
- Suspend/Resume script will also be integrated into checkbox (aka System->Administration->System Testing) for ease of testing.
- If a suspend/resume cycle fails it is detected by apport and the user will have the option of filing a bug
Starting with Alpha 5 we will have available .deb packaged pure upstream vanilla kernels available.
The primary intent for doing this is to allow our community to test kernels without the Ubuntu "sauce", that is things that we add to the kernel to support the Ubuntu distribution. The goal is to help get wider testing of the upstream kernel source by leveraging interesting Ubuntu Community members.
In addition to Jaunty we are doing this for Hardy, Intrepid and the current active kernel development branch. The planned update schedule for each of these is:
- Hardy, Intrepid - Upon a stable upstream point release i.e. 2.6.27.3
- Jaunty - Every RC until release final is declared. Then it will fall into the same cycle as Hardy & Intrepid
- Current active devel branch - Currently 2.6.29 updated on every RC release
There is a lot more and I'll talk more about them later. As usual I'm on a plane back from Europe and my battery is beginning to run low, so thats prob about enough for this post.
~pete
Thursday, October 30, 2008
Backing out the procps change... how it works
I've had some questions on how we backed out the procps change, specifically the mechanism that was used. Here is how it works;
Both the kernel package and the procps package are security updates. The procps package removed the file /etc/sysctl.d/10-tcp-timestamps-workaround.conf (at least as long as the user had not modified it; it takes care in its preinst to check for this, since clobbering explicitly modified configuration files would be a clear policy violation). However it does not "undo" the setting on the fly in the running kernel. The new kernel is installed and upon rebooting you will get tcp timestamps turned back on, since the configuration file that turned them off is no longer present.
It's true that it's technically possible for a user to upgrade procps but not the kernel, or vice versa. However, we felt that it wasn't worth the gymnastics required to cope with this, bearing in mind that there are many different kernel package names in 8.10, many of which never suffered from this problem in the first place, and that the TCP timestamps setting is not undone until you reboot. Particularly given that the kernel update doesn't change ABI and therefore doesn't change package name, the overwhelming majority of users will just apply both security updates at once. We made sure that both the kernel and procps were published with all their binaries at the same time.
Thanks to Colin Watson for the technial explination.
~pete
Both the kernel package and the procps package are security updates. The procps package removed the file /etc/sysctl.d/10-tcp-timestamps-workaround.conf (at least as long as the user had not modified it; it takes care in its preinst to check for this, since clobbering explicitly modified configuration files would be a clear policy violation). However it does not "undo" the setting on the fly in the running kernel. The new kernel is installed and upon rebooting you will get tcp timestamps turned back on, since the configuration file that turned them off is no longer present.
It's true that it's technically possible for a user to upgrade procps but not the kernel, or vice versa. However, we felt that it wasn't worth the gymnastics required to cope with this, bearing in mind that there are many different kernel package names in 8.10, many of which never suffered from this problem in the first place, and that the TCP timestamps setting is not undone until you reboot. Particularly given that the kernel update doesn't change ABI and therefore doesn't change package name, the overwhelming majority of users will just apply both security updates at once. We made sure that both the kernel and procps were published with all their binaries at the same time.
Thanks to Colin Watson for the technial explination.
~pete
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
