Fedora 19 virtualization test day 2013-05-28

Put it in your calendars .. May 28th is Fedora 19 virtualization test day.

New features include nested virtualization on Intel, new Boxes, new libosinfo, new qemu, KMS-based spice driver, live storage migration and virtio RNG.

Every day is libguestfs test day. Just follow the instructions here.

Some thoughts after 2.5 weeks with the Samsung Chromebook

A couple of months ago I bought a Samsung Chromebook to use while travelling around Japan. So how did that work out?

I need to point out first that I was mostly using Fedora 17 (but could dual-boot into ChromeOS for occasional things like G+ Hangouts). Fedora 17 isn’t the latest release, and it is still using the ChromeOS kernel, not a Fedora-compiled kernel. I’ve marked with an asterisk all the points that I think are caused by the ChromeOS kernel rather than by Fedora or the Chromebook itself.

1. * Suspend pretty much doesn’t work. It suspends OK, but can’t resume. This all works fine on ChromeOS however, and I suspect this is just a kernel issue which will/has been fixed in F18.
2. Trackpad sucks quite a bit. For example, it’s very hard to accurately right click. Left clicking often causes the mouse to zoom around the screen. It works better in ChromeOS. Is this an X server issue and/or does ChromeOS use X?
3. * There is some hardware clock problem I couldn’t quite fathom. Either the h/w clock is set to the local time or else Fedora cannot save the timezone, but either way, unless NTP was running (and hence I had wifi etc) it always flipped back to UTC after rebooting. Almost certainly some sort of kernel issue that has/will be fixed in F18.
4. It’s very light weight. Carrying it around everywhere was no effort at all.
5. Battery lasts “forever”. Well, at least 6 or 7 hours which was the longest I needed it for. XFCE Power Manager was predicting 8+ hours, but I don’t know how accurate that is.
6. A touch screen would have been a really nice addition. But not if it meant increasing the price.
7. It’s pretty robustly built.
8. It’s fast enough, with enough storage, for serious development. While it’s not blazingly fast like x86-64, it’s good enough even for libguestfs development (libguestfs being a very large program).

I’m going to categorize this one as a definite success.

Samsung Chromebook, part 2

Dan’s blog has a post on how to install Fedora 17 ARM on the Chromebook. I’m going to try it out as soon as the 16 GB SD card that I ordered arrives.

Edit: I followed Dan’s instructions and had no problem installing Fedora 17 on my Chromebook.

Thursday is Fedora virt test day

Thursday (1st Nov) is Fedora virtualization test day. Help us out by testing libguestfs!

Fedora 18 has definitely been a struggle. It is possibly the most delayed Fedora release ever. In libguestfs (in Fedora only) we switched to using libvirt to launch the appliance, revealing a lot of bugs and problems in libvirt in the process.

At the same time we’ve added dozens of major new features to libguestfs.

So there’s likely to be a lot of bugs, and you can make a difference.

Fedora virtualization test day is 1st Nov 2012

Get together to test all aspects of Fedora virt (including libguestfs) with like-minded people in about a month’s time.

More information here: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Test_Day:2012-11-01_Virtualization

Tomorrow is Fedora OpenStack test day

Join us in #fedora-openstack on Freenode. More details here …

Status of libguestfs in Fedora, RHEL

Status of libguestfs in Fedora and RHEL including future plans. Thank you Unicode box-drawing characters!

OCaml 4.00.0 beta 2 is in Rawhide

OCaml 4.00.0 betas are available and I’ve packaged it up for Fedora Rawhide.

In other OCaml news, the various “retired” code generators (PPC64, MIPS, IA64, HPPA, Alpha) now have their own repository. Who wants to volunteer to write an s/390x code generator?

Installing Ubuntu 12.04 PowerPPC on qemu

Fedora gave up building on ppc as a primary architecture a while back [edit: see comments], but Ubuntu has a working ppc build. This is useful for testing software because it’s a big endian architecture, and therefore breaks some assumptions made by software that has only seen an Intel (little endian) architecture.

Fortunately it’s very simple to install Ubuntu/ppc as a qemu guest. Here is how I did it:

1. Download mini.iso from here.
2. Compile qemu from git (it’s easy!) so you have a qemu-system-ppc binary with a working bios.
3. Create a virtual hard disk: truncate -s 10G disk.img
4. Boot the ISO: ./qemu-system-ppc -m 1024 -hda disk.img -cdrom mini.iso -boot d
5. At the first prompt, type install and go through the installation.

At the end of the installation, it won’t install a boot loader, so the guest won’t be bootable without an external kernel and initrd. This is easy to arrange:

$ guestfish --ro -a disk.img -m /dev/sda2 \
    download /vmlinux vmlinux : \
    download /initrd.img initrd.img

With the external files vmlinux and initrd.img you can now boot your guest:

$ ./qemu-system-ppc -m 1024 \
    -hda disk.img \
    -kernel vmlinux -initrd initrd.img \
    -append "ro root=/dev/sda3"

Next week: Fedora 17 virtualization test day

Thursday 2012-04-12 is Fedora 17 virtualization test day and you are warmly invited.

You will need: A Fedora 17 pre-release version installed and fully updated, and at least one guest.

Here are the libguestfs tests.