Advogato: Personal info for davej

davej is currently certified at Master level.

Name: Dave Jones
Member since: 2000-03-23 09:44:32
Last Login: 2008-03-15 06:06:54

Homepage: http://www.codemonkey.org.uk

Notes: Look here instead for blog stuff.

Projects

Lead Developer on Powertweak-Linux
Lead Developer on Sourcery
Lead Developer on x86info
Developer on Linux Kernel Janitor
Developer on Linux
Developer on Evangelism
Lead Developer on BIOS Explorer
Developer on OProfile
Contributor on Spamfilter
Developer on pciids
Developer on PCI Utilities
Developer on Linuxperf
Developer on CPUFreq
Helper on The XFree86 Project
Contributor on Direct Rendering Infrastructur
Developer on Red Hat
Developer on Fedora Project

Recent blog entries by davej

Syndication: RSS 2.0

4 Oct 2008 »

cheap usb memory sticks & livecds.

This seems ridiculously cheap.
A number of times in the last week I've ordered stuff from amazon where the shipping has cost more than the item. (I have amazon prime, so get free shipping, but this doesn't work for 3rd party sellers using Amazon as a storefront).

Curiosity got the better of me, and even with the shipping making it ~$10, it still seemed like a great deal for 4GB, so I ordered one. The Fedora livecd-iso-to-disk script makes it pretty simple to create a bootable usb stick preloaded with Fedora. 4GB is a pretty usable amount of space. (It's that same that I had on my first eeepc, which proved more than adequate). Hopefully it's not something substandard with a low number of write-cycles, or slow speed or the like. I guess I'll know in a week. If this works out though, I think I'll never have to bother carrying a rescue CD with me every time I travel.

Syndicated 2008-10-04 20:29:59 from Dave Jones recollection of stuff that happened.

24 Sep 2008 »

bugtrackers and lots of comments.

Some things I'd really love to see to improve the usefulness of bugzilla (and other bugtrackers)

Comment nesting.
Basically multiple "Reply to this comment" buttons, one after each post, instead of one "post a new comment" button.
A "collapse this thread in *my* view of this bug".
Useful for ignoring inconsequential stuff that people may post to the bug. "HEY! I SAW A KERNEL OOPS ONCE TOO!"
(going a bit crazy now). Comments Points/Moderation/Scoring.
Vote down a comment so it gets auto-collapsed in everyones view of the bug.

(This is beginning to sound like the bastard child of bugzilla & digg/slashdot, so I'll stop here).

I've had these thoughts a few times over the last few years triaging kernel bugs for Fedora. I think they would be worth additions especially for the instances of a single bug that gets many people jumping on it. Especially high profile issues like the current e1000e scare that has a bunch of people worried.
(Though the Fedora bug tracking that problem is quite tame in comparison to the ubuntu one right now. I actually pity those guys having to wade through all those comments, with so much not-directly-useful-or-relevant commentary).

But we've had issues in the past in Fedora where we've easily had over 100 comments. Trying to keep up with what's going on when there are 16 different people all with slightly different (or even completely different in some cases) problems is nearly impossible after a point. On a number of occasions, I've just closed the bug with a comment along the lines of "guys, this is madness, please file individual bugs, and we'll work through them".

Part of the problem is context. If all I had to do was look at that one bug, and work on it, it wouldn't be such a big deal. Due to there being more bugs than developers (in any distro), time-slicing occurs, and regaining 'state' when loading up a bug again takes a while. When there's pages and pages of comments, it's sometimes impossible to regain the full picture just due to the amount of noise.

Syndicated 2008-09-24 22:54:16 from Dave Jones recollection of stuff that happened.

22 Sep 2008 »

initrd clarifications.

After reading some of the comments at lwn about my sessions last week at kernel summit/plumbers conf about writing a 'make initrd' target for the kernel that would work on every distro, I feel some clarifications are in order.

What I am not doing.

Dropping the Fedora mkinitrd script into the kernel.org tree and hoping other distros will make it work for them.
Obsoleting the existing mkinitrd from Fedora for a considerable amount of time. (Think RHEL7 timeframe).

What I am doing.

Right now, nothing but decompressing. Last week was pretty intense, with a lot of feedback to take in.

What I've done

I've looked at other distros initrd's & creation tools. They all suck equally. Really. If you disagree, you either haven't looked hard enough, or you have emotional attachment issues. There is really nothing amazing about your distros tools over any others. (Which is why I'm of the opinion that "do it right, once, upstream" is the right answer.
Written very little code. A few dozen lines of shell on the planeride home. I'm not posting anything until it at least is limping[1] along.

What I'll do next

Yes, I'm starting afresh. I'll be borrowing some bits from various distros initrd's as I stumble into "hmm, how _does_ this currently work" territory, but this is going to be done with baby steps, first of all just booting off simple setups with /dev/[hs]da, no root on nfs/iscsi/nbd etc.
At least in part, I'm starting with something completely new for political reasons. It's the only way to get anyone to agree on how to make progress. With everyone so invested in their current working solutions, "just use the debian one" or "just use the fedora one" isn't going to get us anywhere.

How is this going to work?

For Fedora systems, we'll be building an additional initrd. Currently we only build it at kernel RPM install time, tailored for that system. Going forward, a one-size-fits-all initrd will be made during the package build process. Which gets used will depend on an /etc/sysconfig/kernel/ setting. This way, we can continue to use the crufty mkinitrd until this thing is ready, and the bleeding edge lunatics and people actually wanting to work on this can set the variable and have the new hotness.
The very first step however is recovering from some of the fallout of the boot/init session of plumbersconf. Reviewing our CONFIG options. It's likely that use of 'make initrd' will imply that certain options should be set certain ways.

Once I'm feeling a little more on my feet[2], I'll make some more posts on what I intend to do, and how. Until then, continue to speculate wildly.

[1] Trapped sciatic nerves are the _worst_.
[2] Seriously. Screw flying anywhere for a while. I'm staying home.

Syndicated 2008-09-22 19:38:43 from Dave Jones recollection of stuff that happened.

13 Sep 2008 »

bandwidth limit.

Just got this mail from comcast..

On October 1, 2008, we will post an updated AUP that will go into effect at that time. In the updated AUP, we clarify that monthly data (or bandwidth) usage of more than 250 Gigabytes (GB) is the specific threshold that defines excessive use of our service. We have an excessive use policy because a fraction of one percent of our customers use such a disproportionate amount of bandwidth every month that they may degrade the online experience of other customers. 250 GB/month is an extremely large amount of bandwidth and it's very likely that your monthly data usage doesn't even come close to that amount. In fact, the threshold is approximately 100 times greater than the typical or median residential customer usage, which is 2 to 3 GB/month. To put it in perspective, to reach 250 GB of data usage in one month a customer would have to do any one of the following: * Send more than 50 million plain text emails (at 5 KB/email); * Download 62,500 songs (at 4 MB/song); or * Download 125 standard definition movies (at 2 GB/movie).

I guess I won't be syncing rawhide packages on a daily basis any more.
Or doing complete package tree checkouts.

I wonder what other bandwidth excesses I take for granted I'll have to cut back on.

Syndicated 2008-09-13 21:22:35 from Dave Jones recollection of stuff that happened.

13 Sep 2008 »

NIN live visuals running on Linux.

'all the onscreen video is rendered by Moment Factory's custom rig, a trio of Linux-based devices collectively known as "the brain.".'

And for the record, that light show kicks so much ass. Some truly impressive effects. Some of which are on youtube, but cellphone captures really don't do them justice. If you get the chance to see this tour, even if you aren't a huge NIN fan, I really recommend it. I remember 20 years ago, people were saying similar things about Pink Floyds lightshows. This is all that, and so much more. (And apparently still being refined/enhanced, making me eager to see them again. Vegas at xmas maybe?)

Also, that wired article has confirmation that the 'nine inch fail bsod was intentional. Well duh.

I'm curious to find other stuff the moment factory guys have been responsible for. They're based in Montreal. Maybe we can get them to keynote next years OLS :)

Syndicated 2008-09-13 15:51:00 from Dave Jones recollection of stuff that happened.

483 older entries...

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