Whoops: water resilient Linux

I forgot my motorola android phone in my pocket while sitting in the hot spring pool yesterday, I quickly realized
though, rushed it out of the water, disassembled, removed the battery in a hurry. Funilly the display did stay on as "normal" but the system didn't like this. Dried it and kept the pieces overnight on the UPS to dry out thoroughly, and replugged SIM and battery this morning ... working :-) . Except for that incident the hot spring trip was great, and Cheng definitely loves playing in the water !

libxml2

In the category of stable software, libxml2 is relatively quiet though I need to do a release incorporating various XPath bugs. I'm quite slow at the maintenance those days (which I think is fine considering the project is really in maintenance mode), but I should get that release out ! Someone kick me :-)

libvirt

In contrast libvirt development is *not* slowing down as I was expected. We still roll a release a month, each incorporating 300+ patches, and the trend is that the patch number is still increasing, leading to more volume on-list. I was naively thinking that since most APIs were done, the volume would start to decrease around one year ago, but nope, people still want more features, better hypervisors support, etc... and that's just fine :-)

libstoragemngt

One of the new library project I am looking at now is libStorageMgmt the goal is to provide management APIs for those external storages arrays like SANs. Right know they each have their own specific ways to manage partitionning, provisionning, etc... and we hope to be able to improve that, but it will take a while. The project is starting and currently looking at design options, if that field interrest you, get on the list and provide some feedback, it may be more useful to you when it gets usable :-)

Ouch, it seems I didn't wrote any blog entry for nearly 2 years, since our wedding. Well I would say that I have been fairly busy :-) !

Baby Cheng 程

Our son is born end of last august, so obviously this tends to keep the parents busy, but it's such a pleasure too !

libvirt project

this has been a wild ride ! The project has grown a lot, in community and contributor size, as well as code and features during the last couple of years. It acquired support for most well known virtualization hypervisors (QEmu/KVM, Xen, ESX, VitualBox, ...) the only notable exception being Microsoft Hyper-V I think. Our latest release is 0.8.0 so we are not at 1.0 yet, but we are really getting closer, for example this release now adds snapshotting support which was a big feature request.

About updates to Fedora

There was a discussion last month about forbidding direct built to the stable branches, and I really think this makes sense, except for security erratas, one really should not push directly an updated build onto the users without some testing. But on the other hand we entered beta on Fedora 13 and apparently it's too late to push libvirt latest release and features, meaning users who don't try to update either via the virt-preview special repository or by rebuilding from the source rpm, will see libvirt features when Fedora 14 is being released i.e around the end of the year. I see people bouncing between both extreme of the features vs. stability tradeoff, and I wonder if there isn't a better way than building absolute rules. Maybe a general profile per machine where the user indicates whether he want updates, just bug fixes or just security errata, and let him do the picking. This would require some policy from package builders, and some changes at the repo level I guess, but having the user ultimately in control might be worth it.

A new release: libvirt-0.4.3

After two months a lot of patches had accumulated, including a lot of improvements for Xenner and Linux container support. But this release brings a massive set of code cleanup, and just looking at the patches there there is a lot of obscure case failures which should now be properly handled (or at least better handled, like out of memory situations). I'm pushing testing updates for F-8 and F-9 if you have time and use virtualisation please review them, thanks !

A new name ?

I got married to Miss Wei LI last saturday, it was kept a simple family event with just a few close friends, everything went well except for a bit of rain ! For the name I wouldn't mind being called Mr Li, but it's probably not very practical at this point (ah and good luck getting the li.com domain, and I guess hijacking li.org would not be well accepted either ;-)

A very simple picture, people interested for more should know where to look for already. Oh it also made me fight with the Panasonic HDC-SD9 'new' MPEG-4 output, to get videos to render properly on that other OS, I didn't expect to learn so much about video format so quickly. I will post recipe and scripts later.

Releases

I pushed a bunch of releases on Tuesday, trying to catch the Fedora-9 train (I nearly missed it, it led to a not so fun curl_is_failing_to_upload debug session which led to nss3 for firefox3 is not compatible with nss3 for fedora8 curl), thanks to everybody who helped catch that train !

The releases are mostly bugfixes, libvirt-0.4.2 leading the pack, but libxml2-2.6.23 has a lot of fixes too thanks to various people reporting bug and giving patches, notably the Huawei team. Libxslt-1.1.23 includes the dozen or so fixes since last summer.

Developments

Clearly libxml2 and libxslt are in maintance mode, the focus is on libvirt, maybe I will just add support for the latest Proposed Recommendation of XML-1.0 in libxml2 before the Summer.

For libvirt, clearly we need to extend the number of hypervisor supported, maybe update and clean up the OpenVZ support too. IBM is actively contributing the Linux Container driver, I just commited a second set of patches today, you can expect good support in Fedora 10 I guess. On the high end side Sun just posted the patches for the lDOM virtualization on their Niagara based machines, lot of patch reviews those days. I also want to get a complete set of bindings for Java integrated, and now that Fedora java packaging guidelines are out, this is a good opportunity to add this.

History meme

that one is interesting, here is my contribution, as you can see I'm an old fashionned old fart, main workstation at home:

paphio:~ -> history | awk '{a[$2]++ } END{for(i in
a){print a[i] " " i}}'|sort -rn|head
319 vi
257 ssh
255 cd
156 cvs
130 make
125 ls
79 svn
60 scp
48 su
43 ping
paphio:~ ->

and on my second workstation in Annemasse:

wei:~ -> history | awk '{a[$2]++ } END{for(i in
a){print a[i] " " i}}'|sort -rn|head
362 vi
263 cd
262 make
136 cvs
115 svn
105 ssh
78 ls
67 scp
40 xmllint
38 grep
wei:~ ->

Happy new Year

yeah it's either really late or a bit too early for Chinese New year, proof that I should blog more often !

backlog

I have been away for the last month and a half, first vacation in China, and then in Paris for Solution Linux expo. As a result an awful lot of mail piled up in various folders that I didn't really had time to process, I am slowly trying to go though them, so if you get replies from a mail in November that's normal, or if you didn't get a reply, it's probably a good idea to ask again !

libvirt and Co.

libvirt development is progressing fast thanks to DanB, Rich, Jim and the many people porting, testing and using it. I really hope we will soon have easy support for most platform - including Windows and OS-X - at least as a client to remotely access the virtualization servers, Rich did most of the work. The development of the CIM provider seems to be progressing nicely thanks to DanS and the IBM'ers :-). During last week Solution Linux i got asked a few times about P2V tools i.e. tools allowing to automatically save the state of a server to allow to start it as a virtualized domain, Rich just released virt-p2v 0.9.1, it is still experimental, what it needs now is a wider range of testing to find and remove limitations, give it a try and provide feedback, thanks !

For libvirt core we still have a number of pending extensions, like support for new hypervisors, adding APIs for storage management which have been worked on by DanB, we also need to finalize a good XML scheme for 'partition' based virtualization, probably update OpenVZ, and add sound and more USB support. I will post on the list soon to try to clarify the roadmap, much work ahead !

Solution Linux

SL 08 was last week, it's the Linux event of the year where I'm sure to go, it was good seeing people around the Fedora and Gnome booth, and of course Red Hat one. My presentation on virtualization went well, even if it was more than 2 hour long, the PDF is available and a lot of people seems to have fetched it already, I assume it's a positive feedback from the audience :-)

China

I was for a month in China, what a blast! It's impossible to try to describe in just a few lines, but we went from the very cold Dalian and Beijing to tropical Xishuanbanna, most of the time within the chinese family and environment, picking only a few selected tourist spot. Things like Shanghai museum, the Great Wall or the Forbidden city are definitely must-go, but to me the most amazing was to stay and live with the chinese inside the family. The cultural gap is huge, there is so much to learn, too bad mandarin is so hard to an occidental brain (and ears), very challenging, but also very fun and enjoyable !