fidzu : Linux

How to try and use the Firefox add-ons on the new web extension support in GNOME Web 43 (Epiphany) web browser.

01 Jul 2022 10:40pm GMT

One day earlier this year, I looked up a song in my Mac's music library that's been there since 2001. I received an error message, "This song is not currently available in your country or region." I thought this might be just a glitch on my iPhone, so I tried the desktop app. No go. I opened up my media drive, and there was the music file. To check if it played, I hit the spacebar, and it began to play immediately. Hrmph. I have the file, I thought. Why won't the Music app play it?

01 Jul 2022 8:28pm GMT

Here are the latest updates to our compilation of recommended software. For this month, we have hugely expanded our features on games. But there are also new articles in the areas of coding, audio, utilities, and documents.

01 Jul 2022 6:16pm GMT

The Raspberry Pi Foundation launched yesterday a new tiny platform based on the RP2040 silicon. The new device is called the Raspberry Pi Pico W and it provides connectivity by integrating the CYW43439 Wi-Fi/Bluetooth module from Infineon. The Raspberry Pi Pico W uses the same processor as its predecessor, the Raspberry Pi Pico. The RP2040 […]

01 Jul 2022 4:05pm GMT

With this release, Nitrux 2.2.1 ships with the default 5.18.6 XanMod kernel, which is the successor to 5.17.12, which was not implemented with the previous release 2.2.0 due to the failure of the package broadcom-sta-dkm while building, but with this release, you can have the stable version of the 5.18.6 XanMod kernel.

01 Jul 2022 2:53pm GMT

Would you like your Linux PC to interact with you by voice command like something out of a SciFi movie? If so, check out this article to find out how you can help make that happen!

01 Jul 2022 1:39pm GMT

One of the first projects I noticed after starting at the Linux Foundation was AgStack. It caught my attention because I have a natural inclination towards farming and ranching, although, in reality, I really just want a reason to own and use a John Deere tractor (or more than one). The reality is the closest I will ever get to being a farmer is my backyard garden with, perhaps, some chickens one day.

01 Jul 2022 12:25pm GMT

Vivaldi is a non-FOSS multi-platform web browser that is available for all major platforms like Windows, macOS, and Linux. It is very compelling to use and has many features that might tempt you to replace your old browser with Vivaldi.

01 Jul 2022 11:10am GMT

REMI is a third-party repository that provides us with the latest PHP versions on RHEL-derived systems. In the following tutorial, you will learn how to import and enable the repository on CentOS 9 Stream.

01 Jul 2022 9:56am GMT

The Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC), a non-profit focused on free and open source software (FOSS), said it has stopped using Microsoft's GitHub for project hosting - and is urging other software developers to do the same.

01 Jul 2022 8:42am GMT

Unity Desktop Environment is a graphical shell for the GNOME designed and maintained by Canonical for Ubuntu. It was beautiful and innovative, but Canonical threw it out in 2017. So, Unity 7.6 is the first major version of the Unity desktop in six years, with the previous release in May 2016. Here's what is new!

01 Jul 2022 7:27am GMT

Ubuntu Unity and Unity desktop maintainer Rudra Saraswat released today Unity 7.6 as the first major update to Ubuntu's old desktop environment in the last few years.

01 Jul 2022 6:13am GMT

Sublime Merge is a git client software that comes with various features to help make working with git repositories easier. In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install Sublime Merge on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS.

01 Jul 2022 4:59am GMT

Here's how to configure Linux superuser access so that it's available to those who need it-yet well out of the way of people who don't need it.

01 Jul 2022 3:44am GMT

Old school editor fans, rejoice: some two and a half years after version 8.2, Vim 9 is here with a much faster scripting language.

01 Jul 2022 2:30am GMT

When you install an application, you're usually installing a package that contains the executable code for an application and important files such as documentation, icons, and so on. On Linux, applications are commonly packaged as RPM or DEB files, and users install them with the dnf or apt commands, depending on the Linux distribution. However, new Python modules are released virtually every day, so you could easily encounter a module that hasn't yet been packaged. And that's exactly why the pyp2rpm command exists.

01 Jul 2022 1:16am GMT

Datamation: Geeks must realize that non-geeks simply don't understand some very basics things.

11 Nov 2011 11:00pm GMT

AddictiveTip: Ubuntu 11.10 does not come with a default screen saver, and even Gnome 3 provides nothing but a black screen when your system is idle.

11 Nov 2011 10:00pm GMT

MakeUseOf: As far as Linux goes, customization is king

11 Nov 2011 9:00pm GMT

Red Hat: The Fedora Scholarship is awarded to one student each year to assist with the recipient's college or university education.

11 Nov 2011 8:00pm GMT

Datamation: New report from Dept. of Commerce shows that the 'have nots' - continue to have not when it comes to Internet.

11 Nov 2011 7:00pm GMT

It is something I have done many times under many different operating systems. You write something into the startup scripts, take the system down, then regain control at startup. So I planned to take this approach for my KVM-based rcutorture setup: Mount the image file, deposit a test script in the startup scripts, unmount the image file, start qemu, then analyze the results (either deposited in the filesystem or dumped to the console). What could be easier?

So I manually mounted the file I use as the qemu disk image, my plan being to manually create simple tests as a first step towards automation.

Hmmm... Everything looks very strange and unfamiliar. Ah, yes, this is upstart. No problem, the Internet is but a mouse-click away, right? But wait, the documentation says that upstart and the more-familiar (to old guys like myself, anyway) sysvinit can co-exist on the same system. And what about this new systemd thing that I keep hearing about?

So my tests are going to have to inspect the filesystem and figure out which of these three things is installed. And maybe someone installed one of them, then switched to the other, leaving traces of their earlier choice lying around. How is my script supposed to figure all that out? Of course, if it was just me running the tests, I could simply make sure that a pre-selected boot-up mechanism was installed. But that is silly - anyone anywhere should be able to test RCU. So I need to be able to deal with any of the three boot-up mechanisms. But wait, it is far worse than that: What is my script supposed to do when someone else comes up with a fourth, fifth, or sixth boot-up mechanism? Ouch!!!

It is clearly time to just say "no"! After all, my main test (rcutorture) is coded in the kernel, so it is clearly going to be far easier to translate my driver scripts to Linux kernel code than to code up a script that can outwit all present and future perpetrators of bootup mechanisms. In-kernel coding will allow me to fully control the test using kernel boot parameters, and thus happily ignore which of sysvinit, upstart, systemd, or whatever is installed. Some times you just have to get a horse!

11 Nov 2011 6:12pm GMT

The Register: Thunar rather than later...

11 Nov 2011 6:00pm GMT

Between the Lines: "It's a bold statement, but it's the ethos that Mullenweg admirably stuck to, pointing out that sites like Wikipedia replaced Encyclopedia Britannica, and how far Android has gone for mobile."

11 Nov 2011 5:02pm GMT

LXer: "Before I had a cell phone I did not realize that I needed one. As of one week ago, I did not realize that I needed a tablet either but I can sense that it might be a similar experience."

11 Nov 2011 4:01pm GMT

IT World: "IP attorney Edward J. Naughton is repeating his arguments that Google's use of Linux kernel header files within Android may be in violation of the GNU General Public License (GPLv2), and tries to discredit Linus Torvalds' thoughts on the matter along the way."

11 Nov 2011 3:04pm GMT

Softpedia: "When asked why there's no uTorrent client version of Linux users out, BitTorrent Inc. said that the company has other priorities at the moment."

11 Nov 2011 2:01pm GMT

Linux Magazine: "There are quite a few server monitoring solutions out there, but most of them are overkill for keeping an eye on a single personal server."

11 Nov 2011 1:03pm GMT

InternetNews: From the 'Date and Time' files:

11 Nov 2011 12:00pm GMT

Editors' Note: You can't make this stuff up...

11 Nov 2011 10:00am GMT

LinuxPlanet: There are many things to explore on the Linux Planet. This week, a new Fedora release provides plenty of items to examine. The new Fedora release isn't the only new open source release this week, as the Linux Planet welcomes new KDE and Firefox releases as well.

11 Nov 2011 9:00am GMT

Planet Orion: Firefox 8 now includes the Orion code editor in its scratchpad feature.

11 Nov 2011 6:00am GMT

Chris Siebenmann mentioned in e-mail to me that a new terminal window opens if one Ctrl-clicks on it in Activities in GNOME 3 (there are more tips in comments of his blog post). Previously, I found that right-click there brings up a menu that can open new windows, but this takes it to the new level. Owen Taylor, you are so devious!

Back in 1985 or so, a company where I worked obtained a very expensive and unique piece of equipment: an IBM PC with a hard drive. Someone installed a game on it, called "Leisure Suit Larry" one or the other, and the office took turns playing it. The game was a quest with "quasi-natural" command input. At some point in the game, the player has a dull knife that does not cut. Someone heard from someone that it needs to get sharpened, but nothing we tried worked. Nobody in the firm knew English, so I remember trying "make knife sharp", "knife sharp", "sharp knife", and any other permutation including "knife sharp do". The right answer was "sharpen knife".

GNOME 3 reminds me of that quest. Random inputs that make complete sense to Owen, same as the conjugation into imperative made complete sense to an English speaker, but entirely opaque and mysterious to people who are not in on the secret.

10 Nov 2011 7:16pm GMT

This is mostly for my own reference, but since it might be useful to others:

By "Properly booting" I mean "Integrating into the boot system as well as Mac OS X does". The device should be visible from the boot picker menu and should be selectable as a startup disk. For this to happen the boot should be in HFS+ format and have the following files:

• /mach_kernel (can be empty)
• /System/Library/CoreServices/boot.efi (may be booted, if so should be a symlink to the actual bootloader)
• /System/Library/CoreServices/SystemVersion.plist which should look something like

  <xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
  <plist version="1.0">
  <dict>
          <key>ProductBuildVersion</key>
          <string></string>
          <key>ProductName</key>
          <string>Linux</string>
          <key>ProductVersion</key>
          <string>Fedora 16</string>
  </dict>
  </plist>
  

That's enough to get it to appear in the startup disk boot pane. Getting it in the boot picker requires it to be blessed. You probably also want a .VolumeIcon.icns in / in order to get an appropriate icon.

Now all I need is an aesthetically appealing boot loader.

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09 Nov 2011 10:06pm GMT

At the end of October I've been to Prague, Czech Republic to take part in this year Bluetooth Summit to discuss the issues and the future developments of the BlueZ Project. It was the biggest BlueZ meeting we ever had, in total there was 21 people attending our summit.

The discussions were dominated by the next steps in the Low Energy, Bluetooth 3.0 + High Speed and BlueZ 5.0 (our next major release). On the LE energy side the discussion were in all parts of its stacks, there are pending patches for the interleaved discovery, Management commands for LE, RSSI and Tx power handling. and the development on GATT was one of the most discussed things.

On the BlueZ 5.0 side we are going to drop a lot of old stuff like pand and dund daemons, IPC mechanism for audio as well some of our DBus API we already marked as deprecated. In the management API side the idea is to finish it as soon as possible and enable it by default in the kernel, then some day in the future we can get rid of hciops and raw access to HCI sockets in bluetoothd.

My summit tasks are finish the L2CAP separation in sock and core parts and move the Bluetooth subsystem to use workqueues instead of tasklets. ;-)

After the Bluetooth Summit I attended the open day of the kernel summit, you can find nice reports of it in LWN here and here.

On Wednesday both LinuxCon Europe and Embedded Linux Conference Europe started. It was certainly a good idea to put both conferences together in the same place at the same time, I had the opportunity to meet people and see talks from both conferences. Some of the talks I took part were "Demystifying HTML5″ by Sulamita Garcia & Gustavo Barbieri, "The Linux NFC Subsystem" by Lauro Ramos Venancio & Samuel Ortiz. "systemd Administration in the Enterprise" by Lennart Poettering & Kay Sievers. "Linux for In-Car Infotainment" by Matt Jones.

Finally, I would like to thank ProFUSION to sponsor my travel to Prague.

09 Nov 2011 7:27pm GMT

It seems I'm really getting too lazy to update this blog more frequently, which is a pity. Last week I was in Stockholm attending the Erlang User Conference 2011. This was the first Erlang conference I ever went to, and it was the first conference in many, many years where I was not speaking but merely a normal attendee.

Some of the readers of this blog will already have noticed my microblogging updates on identi.ca and Twitter that I made during the conference. They were not overly excited about the conference. Let me write some more details here. I have no idea how many technical conferences I have attended, but I am typically speaking at something like 10 to 14 every year, which I believe qualifies me as a "professional conference participant" ;)

Let me start with some positive feedback: There have been excellent and technical presentations, particularly by Kostis Sagonas (PropEr), Melinda Toth (Change impact analysis) and also the talk on Hashes/Frames/Structs as new built-in Erlang data types by Kenneth Lundin.

However, apart from those, i have quite a bit of criticism:

• Some presentations ended way ahead of their schedule.
  This is a pity, as it means that some hundred-odd highly paid software developers are then sitting in a room and wasting time. If you hold a presentation at a conference, you should make sure that this time is used in the most efficient way. If you have been allocated a 45 minute slot, please don't make a 15 minute presentation + 5 minute questions session. That's not what the audience expects!
• Keynote presentation by Ulf Wiger contained lots of hot air
  If I go to a technical conference aimed at Erlang users (i.e. software developers who write programs using the Erlang language, libraries and runtime system), then I expect it to be loaded with brilliant, technical content. I want to get excited about new developments, Erlang software projects, etc. The last thing that I'd want is having a real Erlang guru on stage talking about superficial, trivial aspects of embedded computing. Of course I respect the commercial decision of Ulf and/or Erlang Solutions to try to create a market for Erlang in the embedded sphere. But what is the technical relevance of this to the Erlang community? Ulf did not talk about great new schemes of optimizing the Erlang VM for battery-powered CPUs, or how he has extended powertop to give function or line-level accuracy on which of your Erlang code lines burn most CPU cycles or cause the highest number of CPU wake-ups from low power mode. That would have been exciting.
• Erlang/OTP Road-map presentation without much technical details
  When I see a slide with "Some SCTP improvements" then I want to see what exactly are those improvements. I think there was more than enough time to go into more details, if Kenneth would have spoken faster and put more content into the available time. Once again, the audience is a room full of intelligent, highly-paid professional software engineers. If you get their attention for whatever amount of time, I believe you should pack it as full with information as possible, rather than bore them with slowly and carefully reading each line from a slide...
• No Internet available at the Tutorials Can you believe it? In 2011, a technical conference aimed at software developers hosts tutorials inside a facility owned by one of the largest communications equipment suppliers (Ericsson) and then there is no provision for Internet access. It's really ironic, especially since at least some of the tutorial trainers expected the attendees would be able to clone git repositories on their laptops during the workshops.

In my hallway conversations with other attendees (who also have a background outside of Erlang and are more familiar with other conferences in the FOSS community), they independently observed those very same issues and agreed with my assessment.

All in all, the conference was a good trigger for me to finally sit down and start to use dialyzer on the various Osmcoom Erlang-language projects such as osmo_ss7, osmo_sscp and signerl. I'm already adding type specifications all over the code and am looking forward to soon starting with some PropEr test cases in the next couple of days.

08 Nov 2011 1:00am GMT

Recently I had been invited by the Korean Open Source Software (KOSS) Law Center to attend their 2011 KOSS conference scheduled for November 17 and 18 in Seoul, Korea.

This conference is organized by the KOSS Law Center with support by the Korean Government (National IT Industry Promotion Agency). Its primary purpose is to share best practises in terms of FOSS licensing, license compliance but also FOSS community interaction within the Korean IT industry and the public sector.

I'm happy to present on Beyond Legal Compliance - Embracing the FOSS community, where I will outline that the primary focus should not be on to-the-letter legal compliance, but to a proactive way of interacting with the FOSS community. After all, collaborative development is what FOSS is all about...

However, due to a schedule conflict with the DeepSec 2011 conference in Vienna (where I'm giving a two-day GSM security workshop), I'm only able to attend the second day of the KOSS conference.

The speaker line-up for the KOSS conference is quite impressive, and it includes Karsten Gerloff (FSFE), Till Jaeger (JBB), Carlo Piana (FSFE), Keith Bergelt (OIN), Armijn Hemel (gpl-violations.org/Tjaldur) and others.

Unfortunately there seems to be no homepage, at least none with an English language title that Google would be able to find. Carlo Piana has mentioned the event in his blog four days ago.

UPDATE: There now is a conference page, although in Korean language only ;)

08 Nov 2011 1:00am GMT

Sunday morning I woke up to this sight. An entire tree top, about 20-25ft long, had come down and blocked both garage doors. I borrowed a saw from the neighbors across the street (thank you) and ended up spending most of Sunday sawing this treetop into pieces and dragging those pieces off the driveway. Luckily the damage to the roof was absolutely minimal.

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04 Nov 2011 8:28pm GMT

This story has been floating around for a week or so. The summary is that someone bought a system that has UEFI and is having trouble installing Linux on it. In itself, not a problem. But various people have either conflated this with the secure boot issue or suggested that UEFI is a fundamentally anti-Linux technology.

Right now there are no machines shipping to the public with secure boot enabled. None at all. If you're having problems installing Linux on a machine with UEFI then it's not because of secure boot. So what is actually causing the problem?

UEFI is a complicated specification, with 2.3.1A being 2214 pages long. It's a large body of code. There's a lot of subtleties. It's very easy for people to get things wrong. For example, we've seen issues where calling SetVirtualAddressMap() resulted in the firmware referencing boot services code, a clear violation of the spec on the firmware authors' part. We've also found machines that failed to boot because grub wasn't aligning its stack properly, a clear violation of the spec on our part.

Software is difficult. People make mistakes. When something mysteriously fails to work the immediate assumption should be that you've found a bug, not a conspiracy. Over time we'll find those bugs and fix them, but until then just treat UEFI boot failures like any other bug - annoying, but not malicious.

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03 Nov 2011 5:47pm GMT

As people have probably noticed, last week we published a white paper on the UEFI secure boot issue. This was written in collaboration with Canonical and wouldn't have been possible without the tireless work of Jeremy Kerr. It's the kind of problem that affects the entire Linux community, and I'm glad that we've both demonstrated that being competitors is less important than working together for the benefit of everyone.

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03 Nov 2011 5:47pm GMT

Thanks to the key-signing last week, -rcu is back on kernel.org, though at a slightly different address: git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/paulmck/linux-rcu.git

02 Nov 2011 5:04pm GMT

Dear lazyweb,

Both on dri-devel and at the most recent Kernel Summit, the idea of a KMS based console program came up yet again. So in the interest of facilitating the lazyweb to write one, I thought I'd provide a review of what it takes to write a simple KMS program that ties in with GL, just in case anyone wants to port the VTE widget and give me my VTs on a cube. :) The ideal situation would be one where a distro could set CONFIG_VT=n and have userspace provide all console services, including support for the various types of input and output that exist in the wild today. The only thing that ought to be left to the kernel is spitting out panic information somehow. That means having a very simple text drawing layer remain, and a way for the kernel to flip to the latest kernel console buffer (today these functions are provided by fbcon and the DRM KMS layer, but if a userspace console service existed, we could likely clean them up quite a bit, and remove the need for the full VT and fb layers to be compiled in).

Initialization

One of the first things any DRM based program must do is open the DRI device:

int fd;
fd = open("/dev/dri/card0", O_RDWR);

You'll need to save that fd for use with any later DRM call, including the ones we'll need to get display resources. The path to the device may vary by distribution or configuration (e.g. with a multi-card setup), so take care to report sensible error strings if things go wrong.

The next step is to initialize the GBM library. GBM (for Generic Buffer Management) is a simple library to abstract buffers that will be used with Mesa. We'll use the handle it creates to initialize EGL and to create render target buffers.

struct gbm_device *gbm;
gbm = gbm_create_device(fd);

Then we get EGL into shape:

EGLDisplay dpy;
dpy = eglGetDisplay(gbm);

We'll need to hang on to both the GBM device handle and the EGL display handle as well, since most of the calls we make will need them. What follows is more EGL init.

EGLint major, minor;
const char *ver, *extensions;
eglInitialize(dpy, &major, &minor);
ver = eglQueryString(dpy, EGL_VERSION);
extensions = eglQueryString(dpy, EGL_EXTENSIONS);

Now that we have the extensions string, we need to check and make sure the EGL_KHR_surfaceless_opengl extension is available, since it's what we'll use to avoid the need for a full windowing system, which would normally provide us with pixmaps and windows to turn into EGL surfaces.

if (!strstr(extensions, "EGL_KHR_surfaceless_opengl")) {
    fprintf(stderr, "no surfaceless support, cannot initialize\n");
    exit(-1);
}

And now we're finally ready to see what outputs are available for us to use. There are several good references for KMS output handling: the DDX drivers for radeon, nouveau, and intel, and testdisplay.c in the intel-gpu-tools package. (The below is taken from eglkms.c in the mesa-demos package.)

    drmModeRes *resources;
    drmModeConnector *connector;
    drmModeEncoder *encoder;
    int i;
 
    /* Find the first available connector with modes */
 
    resources = drmModeGetResources(fd);
    if (!resources) {
        fprintf(stderr, "drmModeGetResources failed\n");
        return;
    }
 
    for (i = 0; i < resources->count_connectors; i++) {
        connector = drmModeGetConnector(fd, resources->connectors[i]);
        if (connector == NULL)
            continue;
 
        if (connector->connection == DRM_MODE_CONNECTED &&
            connector->count_modes > 0)
            break;
 
        drmModeFreeConnector(connector);
    }
 
    if (i == resources->count_connectors) {
        fprintf(stderr, "No currently active connector found.\n");
        return;
    }
 
    for (i = 0; i < resources->count_encoders; i++) {
        encoder = drmModeGetEncoder(fd, resources->encoders[i]);
 
        if (encoder == NULL)
         continue;
 
       if (encoder->encoder_id == connector->encoder_id)
         break;
 
       drmModeFreeEncoder(encoder);
    }

At this point we have connector, encoder, and mode structures we'll use to put something on the display later.

Drawing & displaying

We've initialized EGL, but we need to bind an API and create a context. In this case, we'll use OpenGL.

    EGLContext ctx;

    eglBindAPI(EGL_OPENGL_API);
    ctx = eglCreateContext(dpy, NULL, EGL_NO_CONTEXT, NULL);

    eglMakeCurrent(dpy, EGL_NO_SURFACE, EGL_NO_SURFACE, ctx);

Now we have a fully functional KMS and EGL stack and it's time for a little bit of glue magic. We need to create some buffers using GBM and bind them into EGL images that we can use as renderbuffers.

    EGLImageKHR image;
    struct gbm_bo *bo;
    GLuint fb, color_rb, depth_rb;
    uint32_t handle, stride;

    /* Create a full screen buffer for use as a render target */
    bo = gbm_bo_create(gbm, mode.hdisplay, mode.vdisplay, GBM_BO_FORMAT_XRGB888, GBM_BO_USE_SCANOUT | GBM_BO_USE_RENDERING);

    glGenFramebuffers(1, &fb);
    glBindFramebuffer(GL_FRAMEBUFFER_EXT, fb);

    handle = gbm_bo_get_handle(bo).u32;
    stride = gbm_bo_get_pitch(bo);

    image = eglCreateImageKHR(dpy, NULL, EGL_NATIVE_PIXMAP_KHR, bo, NULL);

    /* Set up render buffer... */
    glGenRenderbuffers(1, &color_rb);
    glBindRenderbuffer(GL_RENDERBUFFER_EXT, color_rb);
    glEGLImageTargetRenderbufferStorageOES(GL_RENDERBUFFER, image);
    glFramebufferRenderbufferEXT(GL_FRAMEBUFFER_EXT, GL_COLOR_ATTACHMENT0_EXT, GL_RENDERBUFFER_EXT, color_rb);

    /* and depth buffer */
    glGenRenderbuffers(1, &depth_rb);
    glBindRenderbuffer(GL_RENDERBUFFER_EXT, depth_rb);
    glRenderbufferStorage(GL_RENDERBUFFER_EXT, GL_DEPTH_COMPONENT, mode.hdisplay, mode.vdisplay);
    glFramebufferRenderbufferEXT(GL_FRAMEBUFFER_EXT, GL_DEPTH_ATTACHMENT_EXT, GL_RENDERBUFFER_EXT, depth_rb);

    if (glCheckFramebufferStatusEXT(GL_FRAMEBUFFER_EXT)) != GL_FRAMEBUFFER_COMPLETE) {
        fprintf(stderr, "something bad happened\n");
        exit(-1);
    }

At this point, you're all ready to start rendering using standard GL calls. Note that since we don't have a window system or a window bound, we won't be using eglSwapBuffers() to display the final renderbuffer. But we still need to make sure the rendering is finished before we display it, so we can use glFinish() or some out of band synchronization mechanism (TBD) to ensure our rendering is complete before we display the new buffer.

Assuming we have something presentable, we can now try to display it:

    uint32_t crtc;

    /* Create a KMS framebuffer handle to set a mode with */
    drmModeAddFB(fd, mode.hdisplay, mode.vdisplay, 24, 32, stride, handle, &fb_id);

    drmModeSetCrtc(fd, encoder->crtc_id, fb_id, 0, 0, connector->connector_id, 1, mode);

In this example, we're assuming a 24 bit depth buffer with 32 bits per pixel. That can of course vary, but what's supported will depend on the chipset (24/32 is fairly common however). The drmModeSetCrtc call will also take care to simply flip to the fb in question if the mode timings are already programmed and are the same as the mode timings passed into the call. This allows for a simple page flipping scheme that simply creates two fbs using AddFB (pointing at different buffers) and flips between them with SetCrtc calls in a loop. Alternately, one can simply draw to the buffer that's being displayed, if the visibility of partial rendering isn't a problem.

DRM master privs and authentication

I forgot to mention that any program like this must drop DRM master privileges if another app, like X, wants to start up and use the DRM layer. The calls for this are drmSetMaster(int fd) and drmDropMaster(int fd). If no other DRM master is present, the SetMaster call should succeed. And before switching away due to a dbus call or whatever, any console program using the DRM layer should call drmDropMaster to allow the next client to get access to the DRM. Alternately, the console program could provide a display management API and make X a slave of that interface. That would also mean providing DRM authentication for other apps wanting to do direct rendering (typically master privs are required for display management, and simple auth privs are required to do command submission). Wayland is a good example of a display manager that provides this kind of functionality.

And that's all there is to it, and should be enough to get someone started on kmscon… :) If you have questions or comments, feel free to bring them up at dri-devel@lists.freedesktop.org, in the comments section here, or via email to me.

31 Oct 2011 10:05pm GMT

The git archive for "Is Parallel Programming Hard, And, If So, What Can You Do About It?" is once again available from git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/paulmck/perfbook.git. A big "thank you" to everyone who worked so hard to get kernel.org back!!!

In addition, Lu Yang, Xie Baoyou, and Yu Chen are working on another translation effort, with much of the book already translated to Chinese. A download is said to be available here, though my Chinese is not up to the task of figuring out exactly how to download it, even with the help of Google Translate.

I am hoping that this group and the group reported earlier will continue to make great progress on this!

29 Oct 2011 6:01am GMT

I've done everything I can to eliminate incandescent bulbs from my house, relying largely on CFLs. This has helped me dramatically reduce my power bills - but with some drawbacks. One is that outdoor CFLs in the porch light fixtures really do not work too well in the depths of a cold Minnesota winter. CFLs take a fairly long time to warm up to full brightness when it's frigid outside.

But, I've found a good solution. Home Depot recently dropped the price of their 40W equivalent LED bulb to $10. It's kind of a funky bulb; highly directional (top hemisphere) and not the warmest color. It's fine, but not fantastic. But it's perfect for a porchlight. If the fixture points down, the directionality doesn't matter; you don't need to illuminate the sky anyway. And light quality is not super important on a porch light.

Most importantly, it's instant-on, even in the cold. At 8.6W, it's 14% of the power draw of a 60W bulb. You could almost leave it on all night, and not feel too bad about it.

Porch lights are often left on for a long time; sometimes essentially forever. A 60W bulb burning 24/7 uses 44kWh/month; burning 12h a day uses 22kWh/month. I have neighbors who do this; I'm half tempted to drop off one of these bulbs on their porch some day!

Is $10 expensive for a bulb? Sure. But it should last essentially forever, and be honest - you were going to waste that money on something else, anyway, weren't you!

Edit: Matthew Wilcox points out that these are "designed for indoor use only" - I guess I glossed over that part. I have them in mostly- and fully-enclosed fixtures. I guess we'll see how they do!

29 Oct 2011 4:03am GMT

A few years ago I got up on stage and briefly talked about how the Linux community contained far too many people who were willing to engage in entirely inappropriate behaviour, how this discouraged people from getting involved and how we weren't very good at standing up against that sort of behaviour. Despite doing this in front of several hundred people, and despite the video of me doing so then being uploaded to the internet, this got me a sum total of:

• No death threats
• No discussion about any of my physical attributes or lack thereof
• No stalkers
• No accusations that I was selling out the Linux community
• No accusations that I was a traitor to my gender
• No real negative feedback at all[1]

Which is, really, what you'd expect, right? The internet seems intent on telling me otherwise:

Well, she didn't do herself any favors by talking at conferences about women in tech, or setting up a feminist movement. If you wanted to attract abuse, that's a good way to go about it. It should be expected.
(Source)

MikeeUSA is a troll. He has no means to actually harm anyone, and he does it purely for the lulz.

Thus, MikeeUSA trolled a woman, and she took the bait. I just don't get why this is news, I've been trolled before, I don't get a news story.
(Source)

I was going to start a rant about how this behavior is encouraged by the macho men online, but this was just one guy harassing her. "Due to harassment" reads as due to harassment from the community, but she gave in to one idiot. She let him win.
(Source)

The full comment thread has rather more examples. If you stand up and say anything controversial, you should expect abuse. And if you let that abuse change your behaviour in any way, you've let the trolls win.

These attitudes are problematic.

The immediate assumption underlying such advice is that the degree of abuse is related to what you've said, not who you are. I'm reasonably visible in the geek world. I've said a few controversial things. The worst thing that's happened to me has been Ryan Farmer deciding to subscribe me to several thousand mailing lists. Inconvenient, but not really threatening. I haven't, for instance, been sent death threats. Nobody has threatened to rape me. And even if they had done, I wouldn't need to worry too much - there's a rather stronger track record of violent antifeminism being targeted at women than men.

I don't have to worry about this kind of thing. That means I don't get to tell other people that they should have expected it. Nor do I get to tell them that they should ignore it, or that if they don't call the police then they have no grounds to complain. And nor does anyone else.

The trolls don't win because someone decides that getting out of the tech business is more appealing than continuing to face abuse. The trolls win because we consider their behaviour acceptable and then blame the victim for inviting them in the first place. That needs to change.

[1] It was justifiably pointed out that saying all this while standing on stage next to a mostly naked guy wearing a loincloth with a raccoon tail covering his penis may have weakened my message somewhat.

comments

28 Oct 2011 8:21am GMT

Having VLAN at home is quite reasonable, having DNS may be excusable, but to run OSPF one must be a real nerd. Normally, I am not, but at a certain point I made a decision to use routed VM networking, rather than bridged, and things pretty much snowballed from there. The last straw was a weird regression in Fedora 15, which does not accept IPv6 statics which Fedora 14 did.

KVM host, zebra.conf:

! zebra.conf
hostname simbelmyne.zaitcev.lan
password grumble

interface eth0

interface virbr0
! we have to run radvd because of virsh, so don't interfere into virbr0
  ipv6 nd suppress-ra

log file /var/log/quagga/zebra.log

KVM host, ospfd.conf:

password grumble
!
router ospf
  router-id 192.168.128.10
  network 192.168.0.0/16 area 0
  redistribute connected
!
log file /var/log/quagga/ospfd.log

KVM host, ospf6d.conf:

password grumble

router ospf6
  redistribute connected route-map TBD
  interface eth0 area 0.0.0.0
  interface virbr0 area 0.0.0.0
!!  network fd2d:acfb:74cc::/48 area 0

!ipv6 prefix-list test-prefix seq 1000 deny any
ipv6 prefix-list TBD-prefix permit fd2d:acfb:74cc:3::/64
ipv6 prefix-list TBD-prefix permit 2001:470:86b3:3::/64

route-map TBD permit 10
  match ipv6 address prefix-list TBD-prefix

log file /var/log/quagga/ospf6d.log

Router, zebra.conf:

! zebra.conf
hostname elanor.zaitcev.lan
password grumble

!ipv6 route ::/0 sit1

interface ethmain.5
  ipv6 nd suppress-ra

interface wlanhome
  ipv6 nd suppress-ra

interface ethmain.3
  ipv6 nd suppress-ra

log file /var/log/quagga/zebra.log

Router, ospfd.conf:

password grumble
router ospf
  router-id 192.168.128.1
  network 192.168.0.0/16 area 0
  redistribute connected
  default-information originate
log file /var/log/quagga/ospfd.log

Router, ospf6d.conf:

! ospf6d.conf
password grumble

router ospf6
  router-id 192.168.128.1
!!  redistribute kernel because it's the only way to fetch the default
!!  neither static nor connected work on it for some reason
  redistribute kernel route-map TBD
!  redistribute static
  redistribute connected
  interface ethmain.5 area 0.0.0.0
  interface wlanhome area 0.0.0.0
  interface ethmain.3 area 0.0.0.0

ipv6 prefix-list TBD-prefix permit ::/0
!ipv6 prefix-list TBD-prefix permit fd2d:acfb:74cc::/48
!ipv6 prefix-list TBD-prefix permit 2001:470:1f05:51::/64
!ipv6 prefix-list TBD-prefix permit 2001:470:86b3::/48
!!
route-map TBD permit 10
  match ipv6 address prefix-list TBD-prefix

log file /var/log/quagga/ospf6d.log

The biggest sticking point was the v6 default route. Defining it in zebra.conf and "redistribute static" plainly had no effect. The v4 side has "default-information originate" for that, but it's not documented for v6. Therefore, the weird workarounds with route map.

27 Oct 2011 10:18pm GMT

It took me 2.5 years since the arrival of home router with 1 Ethernet onboard to figure out that VLAN is the way to go [1]. Until today, I got by with USB Ethernet, which actually worked extremely well. However, VLAN offers some advantages, chief of which is the capability to have several networks, including a separate less trusty network for TiVo and Wii. The switch was $114.

The idea of VLAN would probably never occur to me, but I read about it in a book about WRT54, which employs this architecture in order to save on Ethernet ports. And unlike WRT54, I have enough capacity in the single 1GE chip.

The biggest issue thus far was that while it would be very attractive to have the main VLAN untagged in the trunk, it appears impossible. For some weird reason, if you have, say, VLAN 5 untagged (eth0), and VLAN 3 tagged (eth0.3), dhcpd running on eth0 sees traffic arriving to eth0.3 too. Moreover, it manages to reply to it and NAKs requests. For that reason, I had to make all VLANs in the trunk tagged. This precludes emergency replacement of the switch.

UPDATE: The post became a little bit out of date. After sitting on all-tagged setup for a few days, it occured to me that I lose access to the router if switch goes kaputt, and vice versa (due to letting switch acquire its management address with DHCP on a now-tagged LAN). Therefore, now we are back to tagged+untagged, but it's different from it was before.

Before, the untagged was the main Ethernet, legacy. Basically I introduced the switch as a normal switch and then added VLANs on top of it. Perfect if you need constant network access throughout the process.

Now, the untagged VLAN is a special segment with 2 fixed addresses. There is no traffic on it and no DHCP, except the management. It is to be used in case of emergencies. Either router or switch can be easily replaced with a working piece of equipment. Everything else is on tagged VLANs in the trunk. The dhcpd listens on tagged interfaces and avoids the bug.

Finally, for the record, the VLANs are configured by the good old: "cp ifcfg-eth0 ifcfg-eth0.5 && echo VLAN=yes >> ifcfg-eth0.5". It seems strange that the VLAN ID is only configured in the filename, but that appears to be the right way to do it in Fedora 15. There is no VLAN_ID=5 anywhere.

[1] Actually, the box has an internal Mini-PCIe connector, but it is occupied by the WiFi, a b43 scavenged from an old laptop.

25 Oct 2011 4:40am GMT