The SpacemiT K1 is a rather interesting RISC-V SoC, found for instance on boards like the Banana Pi BPI-F3 board. It's one of those platforms that looked promising on paper, but took a bit of time before things really started to move upstream. Things have clearly accelerated over the last few months. Linux 7.0 brings, among other things PCIe support, making the board quite capable as a development…
On the riscv64 port, the default boot method is UEFI, with U-Boot typically used as the firmware. This approach aligns more closely with other architectures, which avoid developping riscv64 specific code. For advanced users, booting using U-Boot and extlinux is possible, thanks to the kernel being built with CONFIG_EFI_STUB=y . The same applies to the Debian Installer, which is provided as ISO…
It would be fantastic if all those AI companies dedicated some time to make their web crawlers smarter (what about using AI?). Noawadays most of them still stupidly follow every link on a Git frontend. Hint : Changing the display options does not provide more training data!
After many years of effort, I am happy to announce that Debian riscv64 is now an official architecture ! This milestone is not the end of the journey but rather the beginning of a new one: the port will need to be rebootstrapped in the official archive, build daemons will have to be reinstalled and handed over to DSA , many bugs will need to be fixed. If everything goes well, the architecture will…
Over the years, the Debian GNU/kFreeBSD port has gone through various phases. After many years of development, it was released as technology preview with the release of Squeeze and eventually became an official architecture with the release of Wheezy . However it ceased being an official architecture a couple of years later with the release of Jessie, although a jessie-kfreebsd suite was available…
A few months ago, I switched my backup server to an ODROID-M1 SBC . It uses a RK3568 SoC with a quad-core Cortex-A55 and AES extensions (useful for disk encryption), and I added a 2 TB NVME SSD to the M2 slot. It also has a SATA connector, but the default enclosure does not have space for 2.5" drives. It's not the fastest SBC, but it runs stable and quite well as a backup server, and it's fanless,…
For over 15 years, I've hardly made any updates to my website, and it remains low on my priority list. So I made a radical decision to replace it entirely with my blog. The content of the website has been reduced to just two additional pages . But nothing has been lost: nowadays, Wikipedia is a much better platform for sharing knowledge than random websites. And it happens that they already cover…
For quite some time, many people asked for a riscv64 porterbox. Now we've got one called debian-riscv64-porterbox-01.debian.net . A big thanks to SiFive for providing the HiFive Unmatched board and OSUOSL for assembling the hardware and hosting it.
The GNU libc version 2.34 has just been accepted into unstable. Getting it ready has been more challenging than other versions, as this version integrates a few libraries (libpthread, libdl, libutil, libanl) into libc. While this is handled transparently at runtime, there are a few corner cases at build time: For backwards compatibility, empty static archives (e.g. libpthread.a ) are provided, so…
The long awaited James Webb Space Telescope has finally been successfully launched today. It is a Xmas gift for many people who have been waiting for it for many years. On a more personal side, I am happy and proud to have contributed to a tiny part of a tiny piece of software of this huge project over the last 15 years: the Instrument Performance Simulator of the NIRSpec instrument .
I joined the Debian GNU libc team and did my first glibc upload . At that time source-only upload were far from existing, and I was using a HP 9000 model 715/80 HPPA workstation for my Debian builds. Still it seems to me like yesterday.
I have received two MIPS Creator CI20 boards , thanks to Imagination Technologies . It's a small MIPS32 development board: As you can see it comes in a nice packaging with a world-compatible power adapter. It uses a Ingenic JZ4780 SoC with a dual core MIPS32 CPU running at 1.2GHz with a PowerVR SGX540 GPU. The board is fitted with 1GB of RAM, 8GB of NOR flash, HDMI output, USB 2.0 ports, Ethernet…
Last time I changed my desktop computer I bought a CPU from the Intel Haswell family, the one available on the market at that time. I carefully selected the CPU to make sure it supports as many instructions extensions as possible in this family (Intel likes segmentation, even high-end CPUs like the Core i7-4770k do not support all possible instructions). I ended-up choosing the Core i7-4771 as it…
Five years ago Debian and most derivatives switched from the standard GNU C Library (GLIBC) to the Embedded GLIBC (EGLIBC) . Debian is now about to take the reverse way switching back to GLIBC, as EGLIBC is now a dead project, the last release being the 2.19 one. At the time of writing the glibc package has been uploaded to experimental and sits in the NEW queue. EGLIBC is dead for a good reason:…
I will never understand the point of using autotools, cmake or whatever configure system, when later the code uses an hardcoded list of architectures to determine the size of a pointer... Unfortunately for porters this pattern is quite common. Update: As people keep asking, the way to check for the size of a given type is explained in the autoconf manual . To check for the size of the pointer, the…
Following the release of Debian Wheezy, I have (finally) updated my set of Debian QEMU images for both Squeeze (6.0.8) and Wheezy (7.3). The following images are now available: amd64 (Squeeze and Wheezy) armel (Squeeze and Wheezy) armhf (Wheezy) i386 (Squeeze and Wheezy) mips (Squeeze and Wheezy) mipsel (Squeeze and Wheezy) powerpc (Squeeze and Wheezy) Each of these directories contains a GPG…
Sometimes building the same code on multiple architectures is useful to detect horrors like: ExEnv :: err0 () << sprintf ( "AtomInfo: invalid name: %s \n " , name . c_str ()); This code builds using -Werror=format-security with only a few warnings on most architectures , while GCC is correctly detects the issue on some others . This has been reported as bug#728249 .
# dpkg --add-architecture kfreebsd-amd64 # dpkg -i libc0.1-dev_2.13-32_kfreebsd-amd64.deb Selecting previously unselected package libc0.1-dev. (Reading database ... 446113 files and directories currently installed.) Unpacking libc0.1-dev (from libc0.1-dev_2.13-32_kfreebsd-amd64.deb) ... dpkg: error processing libc0.1-dev_2.13-32_kfreebsd-amd64.deb (--install): trying to overwrite…
Date: Mon, 18 Mar 2002 18:22:10 +0000 From: James Troup <troup@samosa.debian.org> To: Aurelien Jarno <aurelien@aurel32.net> Cc: da-manager@debian.org Subject: New Debian maintainer Aurelien Jarno [ This is a long (automatically-generated) mail, but it contains important information, please read it all carefully. ] Dear Aurelien Jarno! An account has been created for you on developer-accessible…
I am the happy owner of a new netbook with an AMD Fusion E-450 APU , which includes a Radeon graphics card. I am using the open-source driver on it, that is a 3.2-rc7 kernel for KMS, and xserver-xorg-video-radeon package from sid. I have to say I am not really happy about the performances. No I don't speak about the graphical performances that are pretty good (especially compared to my Intel Atom…
During Debconf 11 , I got access to a fast s390 machine, and I have started to work on a Debian s390x port, the 64-bit version of the s390 port . One of my goal was to help the SPARC64 port , as some of the issues are the same: both are 64-bit big-endian, don't support unaligned access and behave differently between -fpic and -fPIC. Why such a port? When talking about 64-bit ports, we usually…
Thanks to the versatility of the Linux kernel, Debian has always been known for supporting a large number of architectures. It has also often been criticized for that as it is said to slow down the development of Debian. Among these architectures, the ARM one was considered dead a few years ago, and some people wanted to get rid of it. Today all major distributions now have an ARM port, one of…
A few months ago the netbase package started to install the /etc/sysctl.d/bindv6only.conf file to switch the default bindv6only value from 0 to 1 . A lot of people are not happy with this change, but it is not my goal to give my opinion here. On the other hand, people have propagated the rumour that it has been done as the FreeBSD kernel, used in the kfreebsd-amd64 and kfreebsd-i386 ports of…
This has been roughly one year since Debian switched from GLIBC to EGLIBC, so it's probably the time to make a small report about this change. First of all, on the GLIBC upstream side, things has improved a bit since we now have regular stable release, thanks to Petr Baudis aka Pasky . The good point is that the stable releases are imported into the EGLIBC stable repositories. On the EGLIBC side…
Thanks to the great work of Nobuhiro Iwamatsu and others, Debian has an unofficial SH4 port which is close to complete ( > 90% of the packages built ). In order to help developers to fix bugs on this architecture, I have produced an SH4 QEMU image which is available at the same location as my other QEMU images . You will need a recent GIT HEAD QEMU to use it. Previous versions suffer from bugs in…
Contrary to what lucas announced (I don't know where he got this info), we plan to release Squeeze with eglibc 2.11. It is already packaged in experimental and is ready on all architectures except hppa where there are a few major regressions in the testsuite to fix. This is what prevent us to upload it to unstable.
In the last weeks, I stopped being motivated to work on the eglibc package , it's not fun as it was before. Maintaining this package is taking a lot of my (free) time, and I am not anymore able to follow the bug rate, especially for RC bugs or bugs that I consider high priority. In turn it does not give me time to integrate eglibc 2.11 or other wishlist features I would have liked to see (rework…
New features usually come with new versions. Before reporting a bug for a new feature, it may be a good idea to make sure you are using the latest version. apt-get can be really useful for that.
While testing EGLIBC 2.10.1 on all Debian architectures, I have discovered that the testsuite on IA-64 fails for the new POSIX 2008 math tests. I have reported the problem both upstream and on debian-ia64@lists.debian.org , but without success. IA-64 being one of the last architecture (with HPPA) on which EGLIBC 2.10.1 fails to build from sources, I have decided to spend my day fixing the problem…
If you want to see your country coloured on the map, you can invite me for my next holidays ;-).
pub 4096R/1DDD8C9B 2009-05-09 Key fingerprint = 7746 2642 A9EF 94FD 0F77 196D BA9C 7806 1DDD 8C9B uid Aurelien Jarno <aurel32@debian.org> uid Aurelien Jarno <aurelien@aurel32.net> uid Aurelien Jarno <aurelien@jarno.fr> sub 4096R/C3FCA1A8 2009-05-09 I'll get it signed by other Debian Developers tomorrow, during the Debian France meeting.
I have just uploaded Embedded GLIBC (EGLIBC) into the archive (it is currently waiting in the NEW queue ), which will soon replace the GNU C Library (GLIBC) . The EGLIBC is a variant of the GLIBC which stays source and binary compatible with the original GLIBC. While primarily targeted for embedded architectures, it has some really nice points: More friendly upstream (especially with regard to…
Following the release of Debian Lenny , I have updated my set of Debian QEMU images . The following images are now available: AMD64 (Etch and Lenny) ARM (Etch and Lenny) ARMEL (Lenny) i386 (Etch and Lenny) MIPS (Etch and Lenny) MIPSEL (Etch and Lenny) PowerPC (Etch and Lenny) SPARC (Etch) There is no Debian Lenny SPARC image available, as QEMU does not fully support SPARC64 yet, and Debian Lenny…
The hotel we are staying in for FOSDEM is providing an expensive wireless access limited to 15kB/s. For a faster access the solution is to use IP-over-DNS for a rate up to 48kB/s. Moreover it's free...
Wouter , I really doubt that the decision of having a Xen build daemon has been taken in a team, and the fact is that it's causing problems. The only goal of my post is to show we have double standards.
There has been a few flam\^Wdiscussions about emulated build daemons, each time coming to the conclusion that we should not upload packages built on an emulated machine to the archive. However Debian has started to use at least one paravirtualized (Xen) build daemon, the i386 experimental one. The result is that one of the tests of the GNU libc testsuite is failing . On the other hand, the GNU…
For a few weeks Laurent Vivier , Blue Swirl and myself have been working on getting QEMU PowerPC working correctly with recent distributions. QEMU used to rely on OpenHackWare for the OpenFirmware implementation on PowerPC. It is a very limited implementation (for example it as no Forth support), which is unable to boot most 2.6.x kernels with the OldWorld emulation. It is able to boot recent…
As already announced by Julien Blache, I successfully passed my PhD defense today, and I am now a doctor. During my PhD, I designed and implemented an optical simulator for the MUSE instrument, an integral field spectrograph which will be installed on one of the large European telescopes of the VLT .
As I am one of those who have read "able" instead of "unable", I had to find a really cheap flight. This may sound crazy, but an Iberia flight to Buenos Aires from Berlin costs far less than from Lyon (where I live) or even from Madrid: 781.12 EUR from Berlin instead over 1,200.00 EUR from Madrid and over 1,300.00 EUR from Lyon (in both cases with a change in Madrid Barajas). I wonder if Iberia…
Dear lazyweb, I encounter MTU problems with an IPsec setup and NAT. Here is a simplified version of my setup: remote host < --- internet ---> (eth0) gateway (eth1) < --- LAN As you may have guess, the gateway has only one public IP address and thus the hosts on the LAN are connected to the internet through NAT. The connection between the remote host and the gateway is secured using IPsec (kame…
Some of you may have noticed that I was mostly unavailable those last weeks. I was finishing writing my PhD report. It is now submitted, so I have more free time again. I am currently processing the backlog. If you are waiting for an action from my side, you should get some news in the next few days.
Today I upgraded my BIOS in the hope to solve various issues. When I rebooted the machine, it didn't get an IP address through DHCP: the Ethernet MAC address has been changed by the BIOS upgrade. Now compare the old and the new Ethernet MAC addresses: old address: 0:1a:4d:60:72:e0 new address: e0:72:60:4d:1a:0 Time to laugh...
We now have a second GNU/kFreeBSD build daemon building the kfreebsd-amd64 architecture. It has been kindly offered and is hosted in UK by The Positive Internet Company Ltd . It adds redundancy to our buildd network, which is important given that the other kfreebsd-amd64 build daemon machine is on a simple ADSL line, and so less reliable than a machine in a datacenter. For those who want to know…
ldmeqib r9!, {r1, r8, ip}^ ldclsl 3, cr14, [r4, #-364]! stmleda r1, {r0, r2, r6, r7, r9, sl, ip, lr}^ cmpp lr6, #12582912 This program does not work, but it still has a meaning. Hint: Each instruction is 32-bit long, the total length is 128 bits.
Christian, this is the percentage of your blog entries concerning translation ratios in the last two weeks. I am sure you can do better ;-)
I am really upset by the way the ARM build daemons are managed. The packages are not uploaded regularly, with sometimes three days between two uploads. Well it should not be a problem, if packages that have failed to build due to some packages not uploaded fast enough (see for example python-gnome , or rkward ) were requeued, but that's actually not the case. Also last week, the build daemon named…
The NEW queue is almost empty with 7 packages only. Thanks a lot Joerg .
In addition to the ARM platform , it is now possible to emulate a MIPS (big endian) or MIPSEL (little endian) machine running Debian under QEMU. It could be used as a cheap MIPS/MIPSEL development machine to test your packages, provided that you have a not to slow i386, AMD64 or PowerPC computer. Running on an Athlon 64 X2 3800+ the emulated system is around 10% faster than my SGI Indy R4400SC…
Martin, I can't let you say that experimental is autobuilt. I have uploaded a few versions of the glibc to experimental in the last few months and only arm, hppa and alpha have tried to build them. Before the summer mips and mipsel also have tried to build the experimental glibc. And the last version has not been tried on alpha, despite the fact it includes a fix and should now build correctly on…
You want a cheap ARM development machine to test your packages? You can actually have one for free (both as in beer and as in speach :)) provided that you have a not to slow i386, AMD64 or PowerPC computer. The solution is called QEMU , a generic and open source processor emulator which can emulate i386, x86_64, ARM, MIPS, PowerPC and Sparc systems. Running an Athlon 64 3800+ the emulated system…