gmane.linux.ubuntu.devel.discuss

[RFC] zswap for Precise, with script

John Moser — 2012-05-17T13:55:52

Any thoughts on this?  I wrote it on a whim after installing an SSD and 
completely disabling all swap.  Haven't checked to see if Ubuntu 
supports hibernate to file yet (creating a hibernation file on demand 
would be optimal for me...)

This works with kernel 3.2.0 ... 3.0 used num_devices as the parameter 
for zram, while 2.6.32 used num (I think).  They keep changing the 
parameter name!

This init script (sorry, I have no clue how to write an upstart job) 
will load zram, set one of its devices to a given size, create swap on 
it, and turn that swap on.  It'll also deactivate the swap and free the 
associated RAM.

Accepted sizes are "half" and "quarter" of installed RAM as gotten by 
MemTotal in /proc/meminfo; any size in bytes; or suffixed K, M, G sizes.


/etc/default/zswap can contain the following variables:

# Set to 1 to disable
ZSWAP_DISABLED=0

# Number of /dev/zramX devices
ZRAM_NUM_DEVICES=4

# Swap device is /dev/$ZSWAP_DEVICE
ZSWAP_DEVICE="zram0"

# Size
ZSWAP_SIZE="quarter"
#! /bin/sh
###

Questions and patches related to casper.

Ben Greear — 2012-05-16T22:40:54

I have been having issues trying to do a persistent-usb image for
Ubuntu 12.04.

*  /cow is not checked with fsck on startup.  (casper patch to fix this attached)

* /cow is not visible in / by default.  I think this is required if
   we are ever to be able to unmount /cow cleanly.
   (fixed by attached casper patch).

* /cow cannot be cleanly un-mounted on shutdown

   I've made some attempts, but have not gotten this working.
   The attached '/etc/init.d/umountroot' contains my attempts.


I'd love to get this working cleanly....so please let me know if you
have any suggestions.

I'm not sure if Ubuntu uses 'signed-off-by' for this type
of thing, but if so, consider it:

Signed-off-by:  Ben Greear <greearb< at >candelatech.com>

Thanks,
Ben

12.04 - question/feedback on "sound settings"

Edwin Günthner — 2012-05-14T11:25:30

Power off not really working on system with EFI BIOS

Aleksandar Milivojevic — 2012-05-12T21:21:13

I've an Gateway FX6850-51u desktop.  This is an EFI system, and until few
Ubunutu releases ago, there was a kernel bug that caused kernel to crash on
shutdown or reboot.  This bug was fixed some time ago, and my system
reboots correctly (see
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/721576).  However on
shutdown kernel now only displays "Power down." message on console, but it
does not power down the system.  It's kind of odd.  Are there some settings
to fiddle with or diagnostic I could run?

Problems with setuid app in Ubuntu 12.04

Paul Smith — 2012-05-09T23:27:58

Hi all.  I've recently installed Ubuntu 12.04 64bit.

I'm using a proprietary VPN utility from Juniper Networks on my Linux
system.  In previous versions of Ubuntu, it worked just fine.  In the
current version of Ubuntu, I'm getting failures.  For some reason it's
not letting me invoke a setuid application.

The way it is deployed is it unpacks into a hidden directory under
$HOME, then the main VPN program needs to be made setuid root so that it
can be invoked by me but do root-y things.

Then, you can either run the tool directly from the command line or you
can run a little Java control window which manages the VPN.  If I run
the program directly from the command line, the setuid works and the VPN
comes up and works fine.  But, I can't control it or see how long it's
been up.

Whenever I try to use the Java control panel the GUI comes up and tries
to run the setuid program, but it fails and then the whole thing
crashes.  I get this error:

  Failed to setuid to root. Error 1: Operation not permitted

But I

questions about current ways of work in Ubuntu release process

Sivan Greenberg — 2012-05-09T15:30:24

Hi All,

 Some of you might remember me, some of you won't. I used to be part
of the Ubuntu community and loved every minute of it. I've been drawn
to some other open source projects since then, but the apparent
quality boost I'm experiencing with 12.04 has left me eager and
curious about things, not to mention Mark's helped to engage this
curiosity[0].

So, I'm terribly curious about:

1) "we’ll ratchet up the continuous integration" - What sort of
continues integration system Ubuntu is using now? I guess its based on
Jenkins ? I'd love to read the gory details somewhere.
2) "smoke testing" - is it done by hand by Ubuntu members, or also
taken care of by the CI system?
3) "automated benchmarking of the release" - How's that done? Again,
happy to read the gory details somewhere ;)
4) "..both qualitative and quantitative, with user research and
testing continuing to shape our design decisions.." - How is user
research being conducted? for testing, I suppose there's the community
QA team the has the test cas

Where is libgcr-3-common:i386?

Paul Smith — 2012-05-08T15:19:22

I'm trying to run a program under Wine in my Ubuntu 12.04 64bit fresh
installation.  When I run it I get this error:

        p11-kit: couldn't load
        module: /usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/pkcs11/gnome-keyring-pkcs11.so: /usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/pkcs11/gnome-keyring-pkcs11.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

I've discovered that the 64bit version of that file lives in
gnome-keyring and so I tried to "sudo apt-get install
gnome-keyring:i386".  I found some libraries it requires and those
require other libraries, all of which do exist, until I get down to a
requirement for:

        $ sudo apt-get install libgcr-3-common:i386
        Package libgcr-3-common:i386 is not available, but is referred
        to by another package.
        This may mean that the package is missing, has been obsoleted,
        or
        is only available from another source
        
        E: Package 'libgcr-3-common:i386' has no installation candidate

However it's odd because if I go to the Ubuntu site t

Major Page Fault Handler in the Linux Kernel

Alfred Zhong — 2012-05-04T01:07:42

Hi Dear Ubuntu developers and kernel hackers,

I am wondering where is the major page fault handler.

I wrote an algorithm to minimize page faults in the kernel. So I need to
record something whenever a page fault happens. I currently record a page
fault happen at do_page_fault(...) in arch/x86/mm/fault_32.c

However, it seems both minor and major page fault will go to
do_page_fault(...) ...
And minor page faults happen all the time and messed up the algorithm.

I guess I only want to record stuff when a major page_fault happens. So,
kernel hackers, would you please tell me where should I put my code? Which
file and which function.


By the way, I am hacking kernel 2.6.24

Thank you very much!
Alfred

mysql-server ships with user *

Jeroen Ooms — 2012-05-02T22:14:07

After upgrading to Ubuntu 12.04 my install script broke, which turns
out to be related to the default * users in MysQL. When I installed
mysql-server on a brand new fresh Ubuntu 12.04 install, it had two
'wildcard' users, which wasn't the case on 11.10 / 5.0:

mysql> select host, user from mysql.user;
+---------------+------------------+
| host          | user             |
+---------------+------------------+
| 127.0.0.1     | root             |
| ::1           | root             |
| jeroen-ubuntu |                  |
| jeroen-ubuntu | root             |
| localhost     |                  |
| localhost     | debian-sys-maint |
| localhost     | root             |
+---------------+------------------+
7 rows in set (0.00 sec)

These wildcard users allow a client to login with an arbitrary
username. However, it will also match for any existing user. Hence a
problem occurs after additional users are inserted into the table:

INSERT INTO mysql.user
VALUES('%','myroot','','Y','Y','Y','Y','Y','Y','Y','Y','Y','Y','

Linux (or Ubuntu specific) tools to measure number of page faults

Alfred Zhong — 2012-05-01T01:53:35

Dear Ubuntu Developers, especially Kernel Hackers,


This may be a stupid question, please excuse my ignorance.

I am doing a project on Linux scheduler that trying to minimize number of
page faults.

I finished the algorithm implementation and I need to measure the effect. I
am wondering if Linux provides tools to record number of page fault
happened during the whole execution process?

Basically, I want something like $ pfstat ./a.out page faults: 3 Execution
Time: 1003 ms

Is there such a tool? I want to make sure before deciding to write one by
myself, which will be a lot of work...

Thanks a lot!

Alfred

Tor & application-firewall support

Paul Campbell — 2012-04-24T12:49:49

There's been some discussion on this mailing list about application-firewalls, and I wanted to say a word about Ubuntu's inability to filter internet connections at the application-level.


I work as a freelance journalist. On many occasions I recommend the use of Tor to sources in middle eastern and southeast Asian countries. For their own safety, they need an anonymous way to upload things to the internet and in general to communicate online.

I am a strong proponent of open-source software and am a fan of Debian and Ubuntu; however, I caution my sources against running the Tor client on Ubuntu because of Ubuntu's lack of support for application-firewalls. I often advise Microsoft Windows be used because application-firewall software exists that allows users to create a "Tor Profile": a firewall-settings profile that not only filters DNS lookups but also only allows outbound connections from the Tor client. All other applications are blocked from connecting to the internet while this profile is active.


W

hang in failsafe.conf on precise

Christoph Mathys — 2012-04-24T10:39:44

I just encountered some problems with very long boottimes on precise.
failsafe.conf just hangs until the timeout has elapsed.

The culprit seems to be that I define interfaces in
/etc/network/interfaces that do not exist when I'm testing in kvm
(ifup -a fails). This then seems to prevent static-network-up to be
emitted. I'm not quite sure why this event is never emitted. Is
static-network-up only emitted, if the job networking ("exec ifup -a")
runs successfully? (I've disable network-interface.conf)

As a workaround I think I'll just disable failsafe.conf and write my
own job which immediately emits the static-network-up event.

Christoph

Excessive swapping with 1GB of memory - UBUNTU 12.04 daily build

Gustavo R Leal — 2012-04-24T01:28:54

I believe I've found the solution to excessive swapping with 1GB of memory.

There is a script "/usr/lib/pm-utils/power.d/laptop-mode" that is setting too low values to VM tunable kernel parameters when on AC power:

dirty_background_ratio=5

dirty_ratio=10


The line 69 of the script is the following:

        write_values 0 10 5 500

Changing the line with these values resulted in being able to run the system with 1GB without swap partition and good performance even with many large processes running.

        write_values 0 90 20 500

This sets the VM subsystem with these values:

dirty_background_ratio=20

dirty_ratio=90


I think it needs some attention.

Thanks,
  Gustavo Rybarczyk.

trouble with python-minimal upgrade

Daniel Hollocher — 2012-04-21T02:55:00

Hey folks,
Sorry to ask for support on this list, but I just tried to upgrade to
oneiric, and my computer is in a sorry state.  python-minimal has a
dependency loop problem, and dpkg is complaining more loudly than I'm
used to.

Basically, all the various upgrade commands I have tried result in this:

Actually, as I type this email, I made some progress:
sudo dpkg --remove --force-all python-minimal
sudo apt-get install -f
update-manager > partial upgrade.


Anyway, I got a bit nervous there, since I wasn't sure how much apt
and dpkg depended on python to do their work (ie, removing python
might remove my ability to manipulate packages).  No harm no foul at
this point.

Since I wrote this email, I'm sending it.  For those interested
parties, instead of a bug report, treat this like a transient
notification just like you get in the upper right.

Thanks, bye,
Dan

Recent OpenSSL update that breaks cloudfront and rubygems.org?

Jordon Bedwell — 2012-04-20T17:06:12

The recent update to OpenSSL in Precise has rendered cloudfront.com
unusable (as well as several other hosts which people have noted
throughout other various bugs -- the one I discovered was
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/openssl/+bug/986147). Can we
please get a fix since this breaks downloading from RubyGems.org on
Precise and could potentially break quite a few development machines.
Doing -tls1 or -ssl3 or enforcing a specific cipher allows it to work
but this is a big problem considering it breaks many Python and Ruby
applications like bundler, net/https, rubygems, and eventmachine
(unless you work around it) and libraries and applications that rely
on them.

Missing File

Ray McCrum — 2012-04-20T16:50:23

I am having Trouble getting this through to You.  Something in Your 
System is rejecting because of HTML attachments, which there are none 
that I am putting in here.

This is my 3rd try and I hope the last.  I have told my Thunderbird to 
send this in plain Text, I just hope that works.

Ray McCrum

-----Main text----

This should be an easy fix.

This morning I tried to upgrade my Ubuntu 11.10 to the Ubuntu 12.04 
beta2-desktop-amd64, which did not work.

I went into the Terminal and typed in this Line.....
         ''sudo do-release-upgrade d;''

I tried this several times, both using and not using the "-" between 
words like it is Printed in the PDF I downloaded from the Ubuntu Web 
Site last evening.  I also tried it with and with out the "; " at the 
end of the Line.

The only result I got was a Line that said "no upgrades found''.  I know 
the File has been released, because I downloaded a copy of it last 
evening also.  I do prefer to use the Automatic Upgrade, because it has 
worked so well on

Missing File

Ray McCrum — 2012-04-20T16:25:24

Old Turtle

Alan Jhonn Aguiar Schwyn — 2012-04-19T01:28:03


Hi,
I try to install the TurtleArt in Synaptic and only have the version 98..I have the latest sources (of precise pnagolin)...The latest Turtle are 138!
http://activities.sugarlabs.org/en-US/sugar/addon/4027
Someone can update it?
Regards!
Alan

ld changed linking behaviour in precise?

Christoph Mathys — 2012-04-18T14:18:18

Today, my build suddenly had a linker error out of nowhere. Further
investigations revealed:
The default of the linker flag --as-needed seems to be different
compared to lucid and precise a few days ago. While earlier versions
assumed --no-as-needed by default, now the default seems to be to use
--as-needed. Because of that, some libraries which were needlessly
linked against others were not linked anymore. This later caused
'undefined reference' warnings, because said needlessly linked
libraries were no longer recursivly included in other libraries.

Assuming I diagnosed this correctly, was this change intentional?

And for the future: Where can I find the defaults of such command line
switches for gcc/ld? Are there any distro specific overrides? Because
'man ld' still tells me that --no-as-needed is the default...

Christoph

Toolchain for cross compilation

Thomas Taranowski — 2012-04-16T23:05:05

I've got an embedded target running ubuntu 11.04 (natty), with the
following toolchain:
gcc version 4.5.2 (Ubuntu/Linaro 4.5.2-8ubuntu4)

I'd like to build a corresponding toolchain for my host so I can
reliably cross compile for the embedded ubuntu target.  What's the
best way to go about doing this?  My host is 64 bit oneiric.  Is there
a toolchain source package for a specific Ubuntu release that I can
downloading and build on my host?


Thanks!

Additional info:
#) gcc -v (run on target)
Using built-in specs.
COLLECT_GCC=gcc
COLLECT_LTO_WRAPPER=/usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/gcc/i686-linux-gnu/4.5.2/lto-wrapper
Target: i686-linux-gnu
Configured with: ../src/configure -v --with-pkgversion='Ubuntu/Linaro
4.5.2-8ubuntu4'
--with-bugurl=file:///usr/share/doc/gcc-4.5/README.Bugs
--enable-languages=c,c++,fortran,objc,obj-c++ --prefix=/usr
--program-suffix=-4.5 --enable-shared --enable-multiarch
--with-multiarch-defaults=i386-linux-gnu --enable-linker-build-id
--with-system-zlib --libexecdir=/usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu
--w

ccs_config_validate exits with 191 and broken link for cluster.rng

Christian Brandes — 2012-04-16T13:12:23

Hi all,

I have got a problem with "ccs_config_validate".
I says: "Unable to update relaxng schema: /usr/sbin/ccs_config_validate: line 191: ccs_update_schema: command not found."

cman version is: 3.1.7-0ubuntu2.

This bug is described in "https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/redhat-cluster/+bug/956383" but no solution found yet.

Could anyone help me?

Best regards
Christian