Recent content on Martin Pitt
In December 2016 I left Canonical with one sad and one happy eye, with lots of good memories. Now it’s time to revisit some more! Starting at Red Hat back then was quite a cultural shock, of course. I got used to the new headwear fashion quickly: But never really to the rest of the formal dress attire: The drinking habits I was familiar with, and I quickly learned enough Czech to get…
Summary from 2022 Back then, I evaluated Google Cloud Platform for running Cockpit’s integration tests. Nested virtualization on GCE was way too slow, crashy, and unreliable for our workload. Tests that ran in 35-45 minutes on bare metal (my laptop) took over 2 hours with 15 failures, timeouts, and crashes. The nested KVM simply wasn’t performant enough. On today’s Day of…
Today is another Red Hat day of learning. I’ve been hearing about MCP (Model Context Protocol) servers for a while now – the idea of giving AI assistants standardized “eyes and arms” to interact with external tools and data sources. I tried it out, starting with a toy example and then moving on to something actually useful for my day job. First steps: Querying photo EXIF…
During this quarter, all employees are asked to become familiar with using AI technologies. In the last months I explored using AI for code editing and pull request reviews, but I wrote about that separately. But today is another Red Hat day of learning, so I looked at something more hands-on: Install and run InstructLab on my own laptop again, and experiment with it. TL/DR: This just reinforced…
Goal In the Cockpit team we spend a lot of our time on PR reviews. That’s time well spent – we all learn from each other, it keeps the code quality high and ourselves honest. But most certainly there is room for optimization: There are always silly or boring things like typos, inconsistent formatting, or inefficient algorithms; and humans also have selective and subjective sight, i.e.…
Today at Red Hat is day of learning again! I used the occasion to brush up my knowledge about web components and taking a look at PatternFly Elements. I’ve leered at that for a long time already – using “regular” PatternFly requires React, and thus all the npm, bundler, build system etc. baggage around it. In Cockpit we support writing your own plugins with a simple static…
For the last quarter I have worked in Red Hat’s Testing Farm (TFT) and “Operating System CI” (OSCI) and teams, on a temporary rotation. TFT develops and runs the Testing Farm (TF) infrastructure, an API which you tell “go run a test with $these parameters, it allocates a bunch of cloud instances, sets them up, runs your test, and returns the result. OSCI builds upon this to…
I spent this day of learning on evaluating the three popular high-level Rust frameworks for HTTP/websocket servers. At some point we want/need to rewrite Cockpit’s web server, and Rust feels like a natural choice for this (besides Python). My goal was to write a little webserver which can do the following: /hello: simple http GET, with optional User-Agent: header inspection: curl…
I recently found myself needing to write a dynamic reverse HTTP/websocket proxy. After some prototyping it is now time to write something real. To prepare myself for that, I devoted today’s Red Hat Day of Learning to another aspect of Rust: asynchronous programming, and learning about tokio. There is really no getting around tokio in the Rust world of networking. I started with the small…
Today was another Red Hat Day of Learning. Half a year ago I started learning Rust, but have not really done much with it since then. I did try to port simple-term, but that was quickly thwarted by the unmaintained and broken vte Rust binding for GTK3 – that issue is still way over my head, I didn’t make much progress after two hours of monkey patching. I have used gtimelog to track my…
Cockpit CI demands Testing Cockpit is not an easy task – each pull request gets tested by over 300 browser integration test cases on a dozen operating systems. Each per-OS test suite starts hundreds of virtual machines, and many of them exercise them quite hard: provoking crashes, rebooting, attaching storage or network devices, or changing boot loader arguments. With these requirements we…
Why Rust? I had spent the last two rainy days of my summer vacation on learning Rust. Rust is becoming ever-more popular and is even making its way into the Linux kernel – so it feels like something I should know a little about. There have been a lot of new languages in the recent years, like Kotlin or Go. None of them are particularly attractive to me personally, as their strenghts and…
In the Cockpit team we recently started to generate and export metrics about our CI, and collect/graph them by a Red Hat internal Prometheus and Grafana instance. But I am not happy with this yet, as it does not yet answer all the questions that we have for it. Also, it is not accessible outside of Red Hat. On today’s Red Hat Day of Learning I wanted to get to know how to deploy these…
Email: A source of stress Email has been a significant source of stress for me. Canonical, Red Hat, Debian and free software projects all are a firehose of announcements, discussions, bug reports, review requests, questions, and work tasks every day. I am fairly good and efficient at quickly deleting the 90% irrelevant email, but the type of “10 seconds for the sender to write, half a day of…
Today is another Red Hat Day of Learning. A while ago I heard about snowpack, a new contender for the trusty old webpack to build modern web projects. Today I finally managed to take a quick look at it. Even with webpack --watch one often needs to wait several seconds up to half a minute with some larger cockpit pages, so the promised split-second builds certainly sound attractive. At first sight…
Work rotation Today is may last day at work for this year. I spent the last quarter working in the Red Hat Installer team, on a temporary rotation. They needed some help with their testing workflows and CI, it was a good chance of reducing “bus factor 1” activities in my home team (Cockpit), and for me personally it was a great opportunity to make new friends and learn new stuff.
Introduction One and a half year ago I switched to a self-built OSTree based minimal i3 desktop and never looked back. Despite running Fedora updates-testing and finding/reporting lots of regressions, I have never had a situation where a simple rpm-ostree rollback would not have saved the day. There is zero cruft accumulating, neither due to upgrade drift from config files nor due to piling up…
Last Friday at Red Hat the fourth Day of Learning happened. This time I picked the meson build system. More and more projects have switched to it, like systemd more than 3 years ago, or most of GNOME. Back then I was really impressed by how much faster a systemd build became with meson – but now I actually want to learn it, peek behind the curtain, be able to contribute to projects that use…
Being a paper hater, I have kept all my work and private notes in digital form pretty much forever. The tools have changed over the times of course, but I’m really happy with my current system now. I am a strong proponent of plain-text formats for just about everything, due to being simple, efficient, universal, implemementation/tool agnostic, and effectively trackable in revision control. I…
Motivation Last Friday at Red Hat we have another “Day of Learning”, the third one now. As will all repeated things, as an engineer I want to automate things – so this time I wanted to look into machine learning 😉. This was also an excuse to finally learn about NumPy, as that’s such a generic and powerful tool to have on one’s belt. At school in my 11th grade, I…
Motivation Today at Red Hat we have another “Day of Learning”. To this day I have never touched Android development, just installing various flavours and configuring it. But I’ve been curious about it for a while now, mostly to be able to fix a little thing here and there in all the great things available on F-Droid. So today was an excellent opportunity! SDK Installation The…
Da wacht man nun eines schönen Morgens auf, und schwupps ist man vierzig! Zu meinem 30. gabs damals ein großes Go-Kart-Rennen und eine Party mit Familie und Freunden. Auch dieses Jahr wollte ich das wieder wenigstens ein bisschen feiern, aber wegen der COVID-19-Pandemie und die damit einhergehenden Kontaktsperren und Ausgangsbeschränkungen lief der Tag sehr ruhig ab. Annett hat mir wieder einen…
Motivation Today at Red Hat we have a “Learn something new” day. After so many years of doing software development, I’m quite well versed in tools like strace, gdb, or good old printf() debugging to examine how an individual process (mis)behaves. But I occasionally run into situations where a system-wide scope of examination is necessary. For example, when I was working on…
Background A major future goal for Cockpit is support for client-side TLS authentication, primarily with smart cards. I created a Proof of Concept and a demo long ago, but before this can be called production-ready, we first need to harden Cockpit’s web server cockpit-ws to be much more tamper-proof than it is today. This heavily uses systemd’s socket activation. I believe we are now…
Introduction I’ve always liked a clean, slim, lightweight, and robust OS on my laptop (which is my only PC) – I’ve been running the i3 window manager for years, with some custom configuration to enable the Fn keys and set up my preferred desktop session layout. Initially on Ubuntu, for the last two and a half years under Fedora (since I moved to Red Hat). I started with a minimal…
A year or two ago I bought Lindsey Stirling’s Album Brave Enough. It’s wonderful all around, but I really fell in love with Gavi’s Song. Three weeks ago I took a stab at playing this on my guitar. It’s technically not actually that difficult – After listening to the original and trying to repeat it for several days, I can now actually play through it without too many…
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Three weeks ago I blogged about how to get rid of non-free Google services and moving to free software on my Android phone. I’ve got a lot of feedback via email, lwn, and Google+, many thanks to all of you for helpful hints! As this is obviously important to many people, I want to tie up some lose ends and publish the results of these discussions. Alternative apps and stores Yalp is a free…
I’ve been a professional Free Software developer in the GNU/Linux area for 14 years now, and a hobbyist developer and user for much longer. For some reason that never extended much to the smartphone world, beyond running LineageOS on my older phones (my current Sony Xperia is still under warranty and I’m fine with the officially supported Android), and various stabs at using the Ubuntu…
Being a web interface, Cockpit has a comprehensive integration test suite which exercises all of its functionality on a real web browser that is driven by the tests. Until recently we used PhantomJS for this, but there was an ever-increasing pressure to replace it. Why replace PhantomJS? Phantom’s engine is becoming really outdated: it cannot understand even simple ES6 constructs like Set,…
Annett und ich waren drei Wochen im Nordwesten der USA unterwegs und sind wieder wohlbehalten zuhause gelandet. Die ersten zwei Wochen war eine organisierte Gruppenreise von Wittmann Travel und Karawane, und da wir nun schon mal dort waren haben wir noch eine Woche verlängert. Zentrales Ereignis war die totale Sonnenfinsternis am 21. August, und rundherum die vielen Nationalparks in der Gegend. Es…
Hot on the heels of landing Cockpit in Debian unstable and Ubuntu 17.04, the Ubuntu backport request got approved (thanks Iain!), which means that installing cockpit on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS or 16.10 is now also a simple apt install cockpit away. I updated the installation instructions accordingly. Enjoy, and let us know about problems!
Cockpit has now been in Debian unstable and Ubuntu 17.04 and devel, which means it’s now a simple $ sudo apt install cockpit away for you to try and use. This metapackage pulls in the most common plugins, which are currently NetworkManager and udisks/storaged. If you want/need, you can also install cockpit-docker (if you grab docker.io from jessie-backports or use Ubuntu) or cockpit-machines…
It has now been two and a half months since I started working at Red Hat in the Cockpit team. I just noticed that after yesterday’s 135 release frenzy I now have more than a hundred commits in it! $ git shortlog | grep Pitt Martin Pitt (111): Of course amongst them are lots of trivialities, simple tweaks, and packaging improvements (all this Debian/Ubuntu packaging experience got to be worth…
systemd 233 is scheduled to be released next week, and there is only a handful of small issues left. As usual there are tons of improvements and fixes, but the most intrusive one probably is another attempt to move from legacy cgroup v1 to a “hybrid” setup where the new unified (cgroup v2) hierarchy is mounted at /sys/fs/cgroup/unified/ and the legacy one stays at /sys/fs/cgroup/ as…
My WordPress blog got hacked two days ago and now twice today. This morning I purged MySQL and restored a good backup from three days ago, changed all DB and WordPress passwords (both the old and new ones were long and autogenerated ones), but not even an hour after the redeploy the hack was back. (It can still be seen on Planet Debian and Planet Ubuntu. Neither the Apache logs nor the Journal had…
I ve had the pleasure of working on Ubuntu for 12½ years now, and during that time used up an entire Latin alphabet of release names! (Well, A and C are still free, but we used H and W twice, so on average.. ☺ ) This has for sure been the most exciting time in my life with tons of good memories! Very few highlights: Getting some spam mail from a South African multi-millionaire about a GREAT…
I don’t want to criticize the outcome of the UK’s EU referendum first of all I’m not wiser than everyone else, and second in a democracy you always have the right to decide both ways. Freedom absolutely includes the freedom to hurt yourself and do bad decisions (note, I’m explicitly not saying or even knowing! which is which!). What concerns me though, is how the course of…
Historically, the adt-run command line has allowed multiple tests; as a consequence, arguments like --binary or --override-control were position dependent, which confused users a lot (#795274, #785068, #795274, LP #1453509). On the other hand I don t know anyone or any CI system which actually makes use of the multiple tests on a single command line feature. The command line also was a bit…
This week from Tuesday to Thursday four Canonical Foundations team members held a virtual sprint about the proposed-migration infrastructure. It s been a loooong three days and nightshifts, but it was absolutely worth it. Thanks to Brian, Barry, and Robert for your great work! I started the sprint on Tuesday with a presentation (slides) about the design and some details about the involved…
The last two major autopkgtest releases (3.18 from November, and 3.19 fresh from yesterday) bring some new features that are worth spreading. New LXD virtualization backend 3.19 debuts the new adt-virt-lxd virtualization backend. In case you missed it, LXD is an API/CLI layer on top of LXC which introduces proper image management, seamlessly use images and containers on remote locations,…
Almost every new autopkgtest release brings some small improvements, but 3.14 got some reboot related changes worth pointing out. First of all, I simplified and unified the implementation of rebooting across all runners that support it (ssh, lxc, and qemu). If you use a custom setup script for adt-virt-ssh you might have to update it: Previously, the setup script needed to respond to a reboot…
Wir sind wieder zurück aus unserem tollen Winterurlaub! Es ging nach Lappland in Nord-Finnland und Nord-Norwegen. Das ganze Fotoalbum gibt es auch zu sehen. Am Montag den 16. März starten wir unsere Reise nach Lappland, vom Flughafen München über Helsinki bis nach Ivalo. Auf dem Flug bekommt man schon einen guten Eindruck von Finnland: Außer an den südlichen Küstengebieten ist das Land sehr dünn…
ROS what? Robot Operating System (ROS) is a set of libraries, services, protocols, conventions, and tools to write robot software. It s about seven years old now, free software, and a growing community, bringing Linux into the interesting field of robotics. They primarily target/support running on Ubuntu (current Indigo ROS release runs on 14.04 LTS on x86), but they also have some other…
I m on my way home from Düsseldorf where I attended the LinuxCon Europe and Linux Plumber conferences. I was quite surprised how huge LinuxCon was, there were about 1.500 people there! Certainly much more than last year in New Orleans. Containers (in both LXC and docker flavors) are the Big Thing everybody talks about and works with these days; there was hardly a presentation where these weren t…
It s great to see more and more packages in Debian and Ubuntu getting an autopkgtest. We now have some 660, and soon we ll get another ~ 4000 from Perl and Ruby packages. Both Debian s and Ubuntu s autopkgtest runner machines are currently static manually maintained machines which ache under their load. They just don t scale, and at least Ubuntu s runners need quite a lot of handholding. This…
Last week s autopkgtest 3.5 release (in Debian sid and Ubuntu Utopic) brings several new features which I d like to announce. Tests that reboot For testing low-level packages like init or the kernel it is sometimes desirable to reboot the testbed in the middle of a test. For example, I added a new boot_and_services systemd autopkgtest which configures grub to boot with systemd as pid 1, reboots,…
I have used LaTeX and latex-beamer for pretty much my entire life of document and presentation production, i. e. since about my 9th school grade. I ve always found the LaTeX syntax a bit clumsy, but with good enough editor shortcuts to insert e. g. \begin{itemize} \item...\end{itemize} with just two keystrokes, it has been good enough for me. A few months ago a friend of mine pointed out pandoc to…
Yesterday s autopkgtest 3.2 release brings several changes and improvements that developers should be aware of. Cleanup of CLI options, and config files Previous adt-run versions had rather complex, confusing, and rarely (if ever?) used options for filtering binaries and building sources without testing them. All of those (--instantiate, --sources-tests, --sources-no-tests,…
We currently use completely different methods and tools of building test beds and running tests for Debian vs. Click packages, for normal uploads vs. CI airline landings vs. upstream project merge proposal testing, and keep lots of knowledge about Click package test metadata external and not easily accessible/discoverable. Today I released autopkgtest 3.0 (and 3.0.1 with a few minor updates) which…