Older blog entries for dwmw2 (starting at number 166)

I find it difficult to find words to express how much I disagree with Bryan's rant about "Don't Do What I Want".

Some questions are only hard for the developer to answer in advance because the developer accepts that some users might actually be individuals and want different things. So we have to ask.

I appreciate that GNOME might manage a 'one size fits all' policy, where a set of geeks somewhere attempt to guess what the majority of their users will want, and then force 100% of users to accept that solution without any way to make the software behave differently. But that really isn't a good thing, and Bryan's rant is very misguided, in my opinion. Especially as he makes reference to SSL certificates. I want to hear about invalid SSL certificates, thank you very much.

You'll note the bloody great checkbox at the bottom of his mocked-up dialog box, with the "Do not show this warning again" option. But that's an option, so I'm guessing the GNOME-hacker brain probably doesn't even register it?

Bryan, if you don't like being asked that question, then click the little box at the bottom and it won't ask you again. Do not attempt to take away my choice.

30 Apr 2007 (updated 30 Apr 2007 at 11:04 UTC) »

Konstantin writes:

"The only thing that still annoys me to no end is the fact that an extra 200 or so x86 packages are installed, even though I would prefer to keep this system purely x86_64. I'd much rather install them manually later for things like nspluginwrapper, since that requires at most about a dozen of x86 packages, not 200 of them. But anyway, there's probably a reason why this is the default, annoying as it is. :)"

No, there's no good reason for installing all those packages of the wrong architecture. It's Red Hat bug #235756, one of the primary dependencies of the multilib tracker bug: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/showdependencytree.cgi?id=multilib

It's too late to fix it for Fedora 7 now, although the fix should be harmless and we could do installer spins with it fixed. Hopefully it will get fixed in rawhide as soon as development is open for Fedora 8 though.

26 Apr 2007 (updated 26 Apr 2007 at 19:15 UTC) »

I've discovered an amazing fact today. Did you know that the Linux kernel has a built-in firewalling capability, even simpler than iptables?

Without having to configure iptables to match the set of services which you're running on the machine, you can get Linux to reject connections to any port you like!

It's really easy to do -- all you have to do is just refrain from calling bind() and listen() to listen on the port in question. And then the kernel will reject connections automatically, giving a RST to TCP connections and ICMP port unreachable to UDP probes.

Isn't that amazing?

Advanced users (or distributions) could probably even configure SElinux to prevent them from accidentally binding to certain sockets. Then they'd get nice useful audit messages when they try to start a dæmon which listens on a non-permitted socket, rather than the silent failures which happen when iptables blocks incoming connections. It'd also solve the problems with trying to automatically poke holes in iptables rules when a service is legitimately started.

The BBC News web site has a shocking example of the difference in standards of maths education between the UK and China.

I'm not sure what concerns me most -- the decline in standards in our schools, or the fact that I would have been able to answer that first question without batting an eyelid a few years ago, and now I'd have to think quite hard about it.

As of today's second spin, I think everything needed for Fedora rawhide to be installable on PS3 is merged. So the instructions I posted before can be reduced somewhat...

  1. Referring to Sony's instructions, install the bootloader from http://david.woodhou.se/otheros.bld.
    (Hopefully we'll soon be able to spit this out as part of the normal distro build so you can just install it from the CD/DVD image, but for now it needs to use the old 2.6.16 kernel so it remains separate.)
  2. Boot into the installer. Either:
    • Boot the rawhide boot.iso to start a network install
    • If you already have Linux installed, copy the vmlinuz and ramdisk.image.gz from the ppc/ppc64 directory of the install tree and set up /etc/yaboot.conf to point at them. Then do a network install.
    • Boot from a DVD such as the Fedora 7 test 4 PPC DVD when it comes out, or write the rawhide install tree to a DVD with growisofs and use that.
    Note that it'll come up in the 480i video mode (unless you do something special) -- we need to sort out a way for GameOS to store the preferred video mode in the OtherOS information area, so that Linux gets this right.
  3. Do the install as normal, still making sure you use proper partitions instead of the silly LVM default scheme.
  4. Once you've finished the install, you can add an argument to your kernel command line in /etc/yaboot.conf to set the video mode which the kernel comes up in -- for example "video=1080p". That won't make the petitboot boot loader come up in the mode you specify; just the distribution kernel. To fix the boot loader we need the stored preference as mentioned above.
15 Apr 2007 (updated 16 Apr 2007 at 10:33 UTC) »

Completed the first install of Fedora rawhide on PlayStation 3 today, from the tree at rsync://bombadil.infradead.org/ps3-rawhide-20070415/

The rawhide kernel works on PS3; all I needed to change was a few things in the installer and related packages. There are updated rhpl, booty, kudzu and anaconda packages, for which the source is in the SRPMS/ directory. All the patches have been filed in bugzilla, findable from the PS3 tracker bug.

There's a bootloader image in PS3/otheros/otheros.bld where the PlayStation will find it if it's burned to DVD. I created it manually with the old 2.6.16 kernel because kexec isn't yet working in the 2.6.21 kernel, but it uses the initrd automatically generated from anaconda with petitboot, which is in Extras.

The biggest issue I have at the moment is that the graphical installer uses a fixed resolution of 800x600 -- which doesn't work too well on a 480i screen, and we default to 480i on PS3. For now, I just added a few options for different video modes into the bootloader configuration in he install tree, and added 'text' to the arguments for the 480i option.

Installing Fedora rawhide on PlayStation 3:

  1. Fetch the install tree:
    
    mkdir rawhide-ps3
    cd rawhide-ps3
    rsync -avz rsync://bombadil.infradead.org/rawhide-ps3-20070415/ .
    
    (If you have an existing copy of PPC rawhide lying around already, use that to seed the rsync by copying it into your rawhide-ps3 directory first.)

  2. Burn the tree to DVD. From the rawhide-ps3-20070415 directory:
    
    growisofs -Z /dev/dvd -R -J .
    
    If you don't have a DVD writer, you can use the CD image in images/boot.iso to boot and then do a network installation instead. Just export the tree you've downloaded by NFS or HTTP or FTP, and then boot the CD and point it at your export
  3. Boot into Game OS and use the self-update procedure to make sure you're running the latest firmware (1.60 at time of writing). Also use the Format Tool to ensure your disk is partitioned such that the "Other OS" is permitted some space. Then install the boot loader and run it as described in the "Performing the Installation" and "Starting the Bootloader" stages of the Sony instructions.
    You might want to note what it says at the bottom about how to get back to Game OS.
  4. You should find yourself in the petitboot graphical bootloader. Insert the CD/DVD and within a few seconds, you should see it turn up the screen, with options for different video modes. Select the one you want, or wait 5 seconds and the default (720p) will start.
  5. Now you're in the Fedora installer. It should all Just Work™. As is normal on anything but servers where you actually expect to change disks around, make sure you don't use the silly Fedora default partitioning scheme which uses LVM -- choose the option 'Custom' and just make normal partitions on the drive instead. Petitboot isn't yet tested with LVM.
  6. When it finishes, it should reboot and petitboot should let you boot from the hard drive. Rebooting doesn't always work yet in the current kernel, so you may need to power cycle when it wants to reboot.
  7. When it comes up, run 'yum install smolt' and then 'smoltSendProfile' to let us know that you're running Fedora on PS3.
Note that I've removed all the pointless 64-bit userspace packages which the installer usually installs by default (bug #233427). If for some strange reason you actually want some 64-bit userspace, you'll need to install it yourself later.

All of this is fairly trivial and should land in Fedora rawhide fairly soon, with the possible exception of the otheros.bld bootloader. That currently needs a kernel with working kexec, and a patch to anaconda which doesn't seem to have been received favourably. And even then it may end up producing an image which is too large to fit -- it's possible that we'll need to build a special minimal kernel for use in the bootloader image.

10 Apr 2007 (updated 10 Apr 2007 at 17:37 UTC) »
thl writes:
"All this IMHO for a small benefit: to be able to develop i386 packages on a x86_64 host. How big is the number of users doing that? And does it really work in practice? A lot of configure scripts and apps (including rpm) in my experience seem to get confused if you try to compile something for i386 on a x86_64 host (even when remembering to use setarch). So it's really the best and the safest to use a chroot (e.g. mock) for this purposes as far as I can see.

"So in other words: is installing *-devel.i386 packages on x86_64 really a sane default for Fedora? I really doubt it."

Apparently, you're wrong. Building stuff for the secondary arch does "Just Work(tm)", allegedly. I relay this 'information' despite the fact that my own experience is the same as yours -- installing *-devel.ppc64 on ppc64 (which uses all 32-bit userspace by default, since ppc32 isn't as broken an architecture as i386 was) really doesn't make much sense.

This is just one of a bunch of problems with the way we currently handle multilib -- it's time we stopped burying our head in the sand and whining that "multilib hurts", and started actually fixing some of the stupidities which make it hurt. It really doesn't have to be as painful as we have made it for ourselves.

Fedora release 6.92 Rawhide)
Kernel 2.6.20-1.3035.fc7 on an ppc64

ps3 login:

Wheee. The Fedora rawhide kernel finally boots on PlayStation 3. There are a few more details we need to address, like the fact that kexec and reboot aren't working right now, but it looks like we should be in reasonable shape for Fedora 7.

We'll need a bootloader. Ideally that would be petitboot, which the ozlabs folks should have ready any day now, but given the Fedora 7 feature freeze is already upon us I have a horrid suspicion we're going to be making an 'otheros.bld' (flash bootloader for PS3) which we make available separately, and which just has a horrid hack to interpret and obey /etc/yaboot.conf from the hard drive.

When we have more scope to play -- and once kexec actually works in our kernel so it can boot other kernels, which is sort of important for a bootloader -- we'll look at building the bootloader blob properly.

Hm, that 'on an ppc64' still bugs me. I'm sure I submitted a patch to fix it once, long ago when it happened on Alpha.

Again the Fedora release looms and I set about installing rawhide on every PowerPC machine I can find. And again I can't find much wrong with it that's specific to PowerPC.

We thought we'd found one when the kernel wouldn't boot on 32-bit Macs, but that turned out to be a generic memory allocation bug which just happened to be triggered with our configuration by the PowerMac IDE driver. If it hadn't been relatively easy to reproduce in the ppc32 testing, it might have taken much longer to find it.

It's not the first time that the existence of Fedora on PowerPC has had a beneficial effect across all architectures.

There is a petition at http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/iplayer/ imploring the Prime Minister to "prevent the BBC from making its iPlayer on-demand television service available to Windows users only".

While the government doesn't have any direct control over the BBC, they can certainly raise questions about the commercial impartiality which the BBC is supposed to practise.

I'd encourage all UK citizens, even Windows users, to sign up. The problems with the BBC's existing proposals run far deeper than merely restricting access to Windows users.

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