This article is part of a series on how to setup a bare-metal CI system for Linux driver development. Here are the different articles so far: Part 1 : The high-level view of the whole CI system, and how to fully control test machines remotely (power on, OS to boot, keyboard/screen emulation using a serial console); Part 2 : A comparison of the different ways to generate the rootfs of your test…
This article is part of a series on how to setup a bare-metal CI system for Linux driver development. Here are the different articles so far: Part 1 : The high-level view of the whole CI system, and how to fully control test machines remotely (power on, OS to boot, keyboard/screen emulation using a serial console); Part 2 : A comparison of the different ways to generate the rootfs of your test…
This article is part of a series on how to setup a bare-metal CI system for Linux driver development. Here are the different articles so far: Part 1 : The high-level view of the whole CI system, and how to fully control test machines remotely (power on, OS to boot, keyboard/screen emulation using a serial console); Part 2 : A comparison of the different ways to generate the rootfs of your test…
This article is part of a series on how to setup a bare-metal CI system for Linux driver development. Check out part 1 where we expose the context/high-level principles of the whole CI system, and make the machine fully controllable remotely (power on, OS to boot, keyboard/screen emulation using a serial console). In this article, we will start demystifying the boot process, and discuss about…
Under contracting work for Valve Corporation , I have been working with Charlie Turner and Andres Gomez from Igalia to develop a CI test farm for driver testing (most graphics). This is now the fifth CI system I have worked with / on, and I am growing tired of not being able to re-use components from the previous systems due to how deeply-integrated its components are, and how implementation…
This week was my last week at Intel after over 5.5 years there. My journey at Intel has been really interesting, going from Mesa development to Continuous Integration / Validation, then joining the i915 display team and realizing my vision of production-ready upstream drivers through the creation of the Intel GFX CI system! Finally, my last year at Intel was as the CI/Tooling Architect for the…
A bit over a week ago, I finished hosting the virtual X.Org Developer Conference (XDC) 2020 with my friend Arkadiusz Hiler (AKA Arek / ivyl). This conference has been livestreamed every single year since 2012, but this was the first time that we went fully-virtual and needed to have hosts / speakers present from their homes. Of course, the XDC was not the only conference this year that needed to…
Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA) have been an interest of mine for well over a decade now. Being able to generate complex signals in the tens of MHz range with nanosecond accuracy, dealing with fast data streams, and doing all of this at a fraction of the power consumption of fast CPUs, they really have a lot of potential for fun. However, their prohibitive cost, proprietary toolchains (some…
We have all had this bad experience. You are watching a video of your favorite show or playing your favourite game, and a jumpy horizontal (and/or diagonal) line breaks your immersion and reminds you that this all fiction. This effect is usually called tearing, and you can see an example of this in the following video (already visible in the thumbnail): Another issue that some users have been…
Tl;dr: Quirk for the USB mode is on the way for fixing the problem upstream, force a sampling rate of 48kHz to get sound out in the mean time I received a couple of days ago my nuraphones which I backed on Kickstarter some time ago. So far, I really like the sound quality and they sound a bit better than my monitoring loud speakers. I really like in-ear monitors, so this headset is no issue for…
Foreword: This article has originally been written for the Interdisciplinary Journal of the Environment Tvergastein , and has been published in its 9th edition . Thanks to the journal s commitee for allowing me to re-post it on my blog (great for search engines), but definitely bad for the styling Finally, I would like to thank Outi Pitkänen for motivating me to write this article, reviewing it…
As I said in the previous article, I have dedicated a lot of my spare time on learning Finnish. It is by far the most complex and weird language I have ever encountered. To give you an example, I will explain what are the rules that I need to have in mind to write one word: cheaper. Let s start with the adjective in the nominative form: The shirt is cheap: Paita on halpa (Shirt is cheap) Now, let…
Hey everyone, long time no sign of life! I have been quite busy at Intel , helping here and there on mesa, the kernel or the X-server. I have however recently been focusing on the testing side of the Graphics Stack and got my testing project on Freedesktop ( EzBench ) which I also presented at XDC2015 ( LWN recap ), FOSDEM 2016 and XDC2016 (which I organized in Helsinki with Tuomo Ryynänen from…
I ve needed a tool to draw timelines and dependencies between tasks lately, to help me schedule the studies I m running and writing activities (been told I should publish more, heh!). I ended up using the desktop app GNOME Planner , and changed it a tiny bit to boost my productivity. I haven t bothered with talking to upstream since it s been unmaintained for years, but you can find patches…
As you may have seen, my time has been very limited since my previous blog article. Since my previous articles. I have mostly been busy writing my Ph.D. thesis , organising the XDC 2014 , giving a few talks (most notably at Kernel Recipes 2014 and XDC 2014 ), defending the thesis and moving to Helsinki/Finland! Indeed, I got hired by Intel Finland to work on the performance of their integrated GPU…
This post is a space to discuss some of the assumptions I make when thinking about the security of Linux. It s aimed at being a quick reference so does not include extensive references to refeered papers and actual statistics, though I will at some point write a long version. I ll update the post over time to clarify it. What Computer are we Speaking About? I am designing for desktops, laptops and…
Once Upon a Time Trying my best to make the title sound like one of those tales you d tell your kids when putting them to bed. Those who know me well know that I m doing a PhD, allegedly on activity confinement, and those who know me even better have witnessed me rant every day for three months about how it s impossible (because ethnomethodology, phenomenology, embodied interaction, situated…
1. Introduction After Martin published his article on the security on Wayland, we received plenty of feedback, and among it emerged a discussion on the difficulty of preventing the spoofing of authentication and authorisation dialogs (the former often being used as a by-product for the latter). Such dialogs appear either when you require a privilege escalation ( gksu -like) or access to a…
It s been more than 3 years since my last security-related blog post . One might think I lost interest but the reality is that I just suck at blogging. This blog post is meant as a summary of a debate a few of us had privately and publicly on the Wayland ML. Disclaimer: Although I try to be up to date with everything that surrounds security of X11 and Wayland, what I write in this article may be…
Frama-C is a static analysis tool that does not just match dangerous function names or code patterns like RATS, and that does more than Splint s memory management, control flow checks and reachability analysis. Frama-C uses abstract interpretation to analyse the potential values of variables and detect a whole other bunch of bugs in programs. It also provides a specification language to write…