Last week I participated the OpenPower Summit. I enjoyed it, even if I was on sick leave with a fever. There were many interesting talks, ranging from open source and education through Power10 to instruction development. All sessions were recorded. Hopefully recordings will also be shared, as I did not have the strength to visit all the sessions I wanted. And, as usual, some of the interesting talks were given in parallel.

Keynotes

James Kulina, Executive Director of the OpenPower Foundation, opened the conference with a short overview of the topics. The keynote talks were given by the sponsors of the event. It was a pleasant surprise: even if companies and product names were mentioned, most of the talks were not marketing talks but deeply technical. As someone, who is involved in open source, I especially enjoyed two of the talks:

• Michael Gielda of Antmicro talked about “Software-driven Hardware in the Data Center: LibreBMC, Renode, RowHammer Test Platform and more”
• Rob Mains of CHIPS Alliance talked about “Building an Open Source Hardware Ecosystem: From Foundations to Rooftops”

Education

The next talk I listened to was given by Wu Feng of Virginia Tech: A Vision for Transforming 21st-Century Pedagogy via Open Standards: OpenPOWER. He gave an overview of computer architecture education for the past few decades and then introduced us to his latest work: a new curriculum based on the POWER architecture. The POWER ISA is not the new kid on the block, but as you can see from the Power10 and the Libre-SOC talks, it is still continuously evolving. Small scale testing of the new curriculum starts already early next year!

Libre-SOC

I am not a hardware engineer, but it was still fascinating listening to Luke Leighton talking about his work on Libre-SOC: Draft SVP64 in-place Matrix Multiply and FFT / DCT for OpenPOWER. He is working on extending the Power ISA with various instructions.

Open source laptop

Prepare yourself to switch computing to Open Hardware Power Architecture was a talk by Roberto Innocenti. He talked about the open source laptop he is working on, of course with a POWER CPU at its heart. Due to the pandemic they are quite behind schedule. Some parts to build the first working prototypes are still missing.

OpenPOWER working groups

The last talk I joined was given by Toshaan Bharvani, who talked about the various existing and planned working groups of the OpenPOWER foundation. There are a number of working groups I found interesting and worth to join, however there was one which really sparked my interest: the POWER π working group. As you might have guessed from the name: they are working on a small single board computer, probably still larger than a Raspberry Pi. It will feature a POWER CPU and have a $150 price point.

Summary

When talking about POWER I’m sometimes accused that I’m beating a dead horse. As you can see from just a small selection of talks at the OpenPOWER Summit 2021, the community around POWER is quite lively. Curriculum, new instructions and various new hardware are under development. If all goes well, POWER will be a lot more accessible to users and developers hopefully already next year!

The release manager for openSUSE Leap has announced the release of the first quarterly iso image update for the 15.3 release

Dubbed as respins, these updates refresh the iso images based on General Availability (GA) release and contain all the updates for the past quarter.

“The openSUSE release team has over time received quite some requests to provide regular refreshes of install media,” wrote release manager Lubos Kocman in an email to the project. “Some of these 15.X requests date back to the 15.2 development cycle.”

Respins allow users to take advantage of the latest bug fixes and updates immediately, which helps reduce bandwidth use of the download and online updates after an installation.

As both Leap and SUSE Linux Enterprise, which also had a quarterly rebuild, are connected, a rebuild of Leap 15.3 became available. More information about the release of the quarterly builds can be found on the Leap Roadmap or in the email written by Kocman.

Users can download the updated iso at get.opensuse.org.

For the first time ever I actually finished a monthly challenge.

Off to the Nodevember!

Dear Tumbleweed users and hackers,

Despite a few technical difficulties (openQA workers were updated to Leap 15.3), we managed to release 4 snapshots to the public (built and tested 7). You have received snapshots 1021, 1024, 1025, and 1027.

The main changes included were:

• librsvg 2.25.2
• systemd 249.5
• KDE Plasma 5.23.1
• file 5.41
• Virtualbox 6.1.28
• Linux kernel 5.14.14
• RPM 4.17.0
• Mozilla Thunderbird 91.2.1
• PHP 7.4.25

Quite a few staging projects are currently in use, and these items are being tested:

• Meson 0.59.3
• KDE Plasma 5.23.2
• X.Org server 21.1.0
• Bison 3.8.2: breaks gdb (boo#1191612)
• Coreutils 9.0: blocked by nodejs16 (sr to devel prj pending for 2 weeks)
• openSSL 3.0.0: no active progress

This is more like a self-written notes post about a problem I’m facing, since my laptop’s web camera is starting to deteriorate. I’ll update the post if I find more useful bits of how to tweak with USB. For the first few weeks I was suspecting a Tumbleweed problem, but eventually I booted up Ubuntu LTS from USB stick and managed to see the problem also there.

dmesg goes like follows

[46253.245741] input: Integrated_Webcam_HD: Integrate as /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:14.0/usb1/1-5/1-5:1.2/input/input195
[46254.233519] usb 1-5: USB disconnect, device number 97
[46254.234502] uvcvideo 1-5:1.1: Failed to resubmit video URB (-19).
[46254.687974] usb 1-5: new high-speed USB device number 98 using xhci_hcd
[46254.895417] usb 1-5: New USB device found, idVendor=0bda, idProduct=58f4, bcdDevice=72.79
[46254.895422] usb 1-5: New USB device strings: Mfr=3, Product=1, SerialNumber=2
[46254.895424] usb 1-5: Product: Integrated_Webcam_HD
[46254.895425] usb 1-5: Manufacturer: XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
[46254.895426] usb 1-5: SerialNumber: XXXXXXXXXXXX
[46254.899284] usb 1-5: Found UVC 1.50 device Integrated_Webcam_HD (0bda:58f4)
[46254.906277] input: Integrated_Webcam_HD: Integrate as /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:14.0/usb1/1-5/1-5:1.0/input/input196
[46254.907449] usb 1-5: Found UVC 1.50 device Integrated_Webcam_HD (0bda:58f4)
[46254.909691] input: Integrated_Webcam_HD: Integrate as /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:14.0/usb1/1-5/1-5:1.2/input/input197
[46256.877289] usb 1-5: USB disconnect, device number 98
[46256.878499] uvcvideo 1-5:1.1: Failed to resubmit video URB (-19).
[46256.882484] uvcvideo 1-5:1.1: Failed to resubmit video URB (-19).
[46256.886482] uvcvideo 1-5:1.1: Failed to resubmit video URB (-19).
[46256.890482] uvcvideo 1-5:1.1: Failed to resubmit video URB (-19).
[46256.894500] uvcvideo 1-5:1.1: Failed to resubmit video URB (-19).
[46258.187945] usb usb1-port5: Cannot enable. Maybe the USB cable is bad?
[46259.167940] usb usb1-port5: Cannot enable. Maybe the USB cable is bad?
[46259.167971] usb usb1-port5: attempt power cycle
[46260.235968] usb usb1-port5: Cannot enable. Maybe the USB cable is bad?

I tried opening the laptop and using some duct tape to the cable running to the camera, but while it seemed better at first, it seems it now continues to be as it was before. The camera still works from time to time, especially if I don’t touch the laptop by any means, using external keyboard and mouse. But when it breaks, it sometimes causes a stall of a few seconds.

I have the option to disable web camera in UEFI setup, but I’d rather find a way to power it off and on during runtime. I’ve tried eg

echo '1-5' | sudo tee /sys/bus/usb/drivers/usb/unbind

But the device does not seem to exist. Meanwhile, I mixed up the bus/device/port concepts since Bus 001 Device 005 in lsusb is actually the Bluetooth device:

# Bus 001 Device 005: ID 0489:e0a2 Foxconn / Hon Hai

But at least I managed to try out the usb_modeswitch trick found from the web, which I’d like to apply to the webcam too:

> sudo usb_modeswitch -v 0489 -p e0a2 --reset-usb
Look for default devices ...
 Found devices in default mode (1)
Access device 005 on bus 001
Get the current device configuration ...
Current configuration number is 1
Use interface number 0
 with class 224
Warning: no switching method given. See documentation
Reset USB device .
 Device was reset
-> Run lsusb to note any changes. Bye!

Rolling release users had a variety of package updates this week to include updates of rpm, Plasma, rsyslog, webkit2gtk3, systemd, AppStream and more, which were updated throughout the week’s four openSUSE Tumbleweed snapshots.

The latest snapshot to be released, 20211027, updated eight packages. Mozilla Thunderbird 91.2.1 increased the memory required per threads for AArch64 to avoid an out of memory state and the email client also had Link Time Optimization enabled for Tumbleweed. The php7 7.4.25 update was a security release focusing on bug fixes like one that affected high memory usage during encoding detection and another fix addressed Common Vulnerabilities and Exposure–2021-21703. The 9.22 version of the real-time web framework perl-Mojolicious added a referer method and fixed the response status log message to use the trace log level instead of debug. A second release this week of mpg123 updated the package to version 1.29.2, which had a single fix for a non-live-decoder safeguard. AppStream, which is a cross-distribution package for standardizing software component metadata, updated to version 0.14.6; the new version updated documentation and added support for source locales. The package also added support for image and video screenshot handling and the changed states that it added Fedora to the continuous integration environment.

Snapshot 20211025 had an update of rpm 4.17.0. The update had many improvements, new translations and python generators and debuginfo extraction have been split into a separate upstream project. The rsyslog had two updates in Tumbleweed this week and this snapshot brought in version 8.2110.0, which fixes a couple of bugs affecting configurations. The 5.14.14 Linux Kernel had a whole bunch of fixes for Advanced Linux Sound Architecture and Btrfs. There were also several 4.2.20 library updates for libyui , which implemented the C++17 standard for package plugins. Another update in the snapshot was the update of the Free Remote Desktop package freerdp 2.4.1; the package update addressed two CVEs and one of those was an improper client input validation for gateway connections that would allow to overwrite memory.

Snapshot 20211024 provided the Plasma 5.23.1 update. This first minor update had a fix for its Discover app store to prevent a Flatpak crash when a source is disabled. KDE’s Plasma X Window Manager and Wayland Compositor KWin fixed the downloading software-rotated textures for PipeWire handling. Plasma Desktop fixed the “clear emoji history” action. The 6.1.28 version update of virtualbox fixed some audio issues and brought more administrative control over network ranges. The hypervisor also fixed a virtual machine black screen issue that happened on first resize after restoring from saved state. An update of webkit2gtk3 2.34.1 fixed a couple crashes affecting the WebKit rendering engine; one of the crashes would happen when loading videos on reddit. Several patches were removed from Ian Darwin’s open-source reimplementation of the file(1) command tool in version 5.41; the package added a new flag and requires that the match is a full word and not a partial word match. A version jump from libstorage-ng 4.4.44 to version 4.4.51 brought translations for Czech, Japanese and Slovak languages. The storage package also simplified parted flag handling. Other packages to update in the snapshot were acpica 20210930, java-11-openjdk 11.0.13.0, graphic visualization package graphviz 2.49.1 and more than a dozen other packages.

An updated 1.9.19 version of the audio package JACK was released in snapshot 20211021. The new version added an argument to wait for a soundcard to become available and fixed a collection of documentation. The systemd service manager update to version 249.5 dropped the list of valid net naming schemes and the update allows for extra net naming schemes to be defined during configuration. ImageMagick 7.1.0.10 improved the algorithm for automatic calculation of point size for captions and labels. The 4.7.0 version of iso-codes updated translations for Indonesian; the International Organization for Standardization package also added common names for South Korea and North Korea. The rsyslog package improved the error message output on Transport Layer Security failures in version 8.2108.0; the super-speedy logging system also added parameter ignoreolderthanoption and instructs the Text File Input Module not to ingest a file that has not been modified in the specified number of seconds. Audio player and decoder library mpg123 1.29.1 fixed the reporting of device property flags for buffer libmpg123. Several Python Package Index versions were updated in the snapshot; python-apipkg had a major update to 2.1.0: python-cachetools 4.2.4 added submodule shims for backward compatibility; and python-greenlet fixed a potential crash and a leak in version 1.1.2. Other pckages to update in the snapshot were libzypp 17.28.6, mc 4.8.27, thai-fonts 0.7.3, gnome-clocks 41.0 and more.

As you might have already noticed from my blogs, I am a music maniac. One of the factors influencing your music listening experience is what speakers you use. I was lucky right from the beginning, my parents are music maniacs as well. In this blog I introduce you to the speakers I listened while living at my parents, and three pairs of speakers I bought myself.

I must admit that I never did a really thorough research about speakers and acoustics. I always listened to my ears, how much I like what I hear. This made my journey in listening to music a bit of a crisscross :-)

The early years: Acoustic Research AR 8 LS

While most people in the communist block had only a Sokol radio at home, I had the luxury of listening to a HiFi system imported from the West. Components were carefully chosen based on recommendations from the friends of my father. The speakers were made by Acoustic Research, a pair of AR 8 LS.

I did not know much about speakers at that time: there was no Internet yet, and no magazines about hifi yet (at least not in the remote part of Hungary, where I lived). The only thing I knew that I could not hear this level of sound quality anywhere else. I loved loud music, and even if these were bookshelf speakers, they could easily fill a 5m x 8m room. But when my parents were away and I had the time, I built a small triangle and listened to them just from a meter away.

Many years later I learned that the AR 8 LS was the smallest of a series of speakers. It was built for music enthusiasts, but this particular type was mostly used by professionals in studios as near field monitors. What a coincidence :-)

The university years: Altec Lansing 2.1 system

The AR speakers sounded fantastic, but as I started to listen to music elsewhere I suddenly realized that they did not have much bass. Or rather at that time I did not know yet, that others had too much bass. So, when I had a chance to buy something for myself, I ended up with an Altec Lansing self-powered 2.1 speaker system. Obviously, I did not have much budget, and these I could source at a relatively good price (even if this price was still 5x more than anyone around me would spend on speakers…). I do not remember the exact type any more, but it had a huge sub-woofer and the satellite speakers were two way.

Listening to Pink Floyd was fantastic on these speakers and the explosions in movies sounded terrifying. When we had a 5m x 5m room full with guests dancing, everyone wanted to buy similar speakers for home. However classical music or music with acoustic instruments did not sound nearly as good as on the AR 8 LS.

By that time I had a friend at university who brought me to various hifi events and I quickly became aware of the limitations. I fell in love with Linn and Heed Audio at that time, but as a university student they were out of reach for me.

My first larger salary: JVC EX-A5 wood cone system

When my Altec Lansing 2.1 system died with a bit of smoke I had to look for something new. I remembered reading about JVC wood cone systems earlier, so I visited a JVC show room to listen to one. I liked it, but it was expensive. A few months later, when I got my first relatively good salary for teaching SUSE Linux at a bank, finally I bought an EX-A5 mini system. It is a complete mini system: an amplifier built together with a radio and a CD/DVD player bundled together with a pair of two way wood cone speakers.

It did not have the extreme bass of the Altec Lansing 2.1 systems I had earlier, but for the rest it had a fantastic, well balanced natural sound. Suddenly I had to listen to my whole music collection again: all music had a lot more more detail. The speakers can fill a smaller room if necessary, but best listened to just as the AR speakers: as near field monitors. And many recording studios use them as such.

My dream speakers: Heed Enigma 5

Do you remember Heed from a few paragraphs earlier? For the last couple of years I am lucky enough to listen to a pair of Heed Enigma 5 speakers. I first listened to them during my university years at a factory visit. I did not know why, but no matter where I was in the room, I felt that instruments are all around me. It was a love at first sight, or rather at first listening. These are non-directional or omnidirectional speakers. The speakers are not directed at the listener, but slightly upwards. What it means that you do not have to sit in a traditional triangle setting to enjoy a perfect sense of spatial sounds.

With the Enigma 5 there are no compromises. Bass sounds perfectly just as everything else. Almost everything sounds much better than anywhere else. Even with speakers costing more than an average car I often had the problem that music came directly from the speaker, there was no sense of having a band in front of you. With ominidirectional speakers this problem is gone. However there are some recordings which do not sound that well on them: some persecution recordings sound strange, and the problems of some low quality recordings are over emphasized by this setup.

What is next?

Most likely nothing :-) Sometimes I think about connecting the wood cone speakers as an alternative to the current system. They sound a lot better with the current amplifier than with the bundled one. However, a switch between the speakers would most likely alter the sound of the system, and I would not want that. Luckily there are really just a very few recordings which do not play well with the Enigma 5. I can listen to them using headphones, and that hides away most of the recording problems as well.

You can read it in English

Hola Geekos.

Los antiguos moderadores DiabloRojo, Karlggest y Victorhck de ForoSuSE, el foro en español de openSUSE, que actualmente no se encuentra disponible tiene el placer de anunciaros en latín:

Habemus Forum!

Forosuse ha sido el lugar de encuentro de la comunidad hispanohablante de usuarios y usuarias de openSUSE durante muchos años. El administrador Riven se encargó de mantener ese sitio en el que aprender, compartir y ser punto de reunión de quienes una de nuestras pasiones es openSUSE.

Creemos que se debe agradecer su labor, por el tiempo y recursos invertidos de manera altruista en mantener forosuse.org durante tanto tiempo. Pero las cosas cambian, en la vida surgen nuevos intereses, nuevos proyectos acaparan nuestro tiempo y es normal que así sea.

Por cuestiones técnicas nuestro querido forosuse ha sufrido contratiempos que lo han mantenido fuera de línea durante los últimos meses, debido a las actualizaciones del software propio del foro y otros problemas con el hosting. Después de muchos meses en los que no se resolvían esos problemas, los antiguos moderadores de forosuse tomamos una decisión.

Hemos decidido crear el nuevo foro dentro de la infraestructura oficial del proyecto openSUSE en lugar de crear un nuevo dominio, de este modo nos centralizamos para ofrecer nuestra ayuda a los usuarios del Geeko y dejamos fuera de nuestras manos el mantenimiento del foro, que será labor de gente más sabia que nosotros.

También cabe destacar y agradecer aquí el papel que han jugado los administradores del foro, que se han mostrado siempre con ganas de ayudarnos y nos han dado las herramientas y han realizado el trabajo relacionado con la administración de sistemas poniendo en marcha el foro y con la interfaz disponible en español.

Estamos emocionados con el nuevo foro y esperamos contar con vuestra ayuda para lograr una comunidad en nuestra lengua de nuestro querido Geeko. Nos tenéis disponibles en:

https://forums.opensuse.org/forumdisplay.php/957-Espa%C3%B1ol-(Spanish)

Dentro del foro propio en español. No dudéis en crearos una nueva cuenta. Este nuevo lugar quiere volver a reunir a la comunidad de openSUSE en español y seguir brindando apoyo mutuo y volver a compartir en torno a openSUSE.

Esperamos que el sitio poco a poco vaya creciendo y mejorando con vuestra ayuda. Sentiros libres para escribir en el nuevo foro, contar lo que te ocurre con el Geeko y sobre todo:

Diviértete un montón!

#English

Hello Geekos.

Former moderators DiabloRojo, Karlggest and Victorhck of ForoSuSE, openSUSE’s Spanish forum, which is currently unavailable, are pleased to announce to you in Latin:

Habemus Forum!

Forosuse has been the meeting place for the Spanish-speaking community of openSUSE users for many years. The administrator Riven was in charge of maintaining that place where we can learn, share and be a meeting point for those of us who one of our passions is openSUSE.

We believe that his work is to be appreciated, with the time and resources invested altruistically in maintaining forosuse.org for so long. But things change, new interests arise in life, new projects take up our time and it is normal that this is the case.

Due to technical issues, our beloved forosuse has suffered setbacks, due to updates to the forum’s own software and other problems with hosting. After many months of unresolved issues, we former forum moderators made a decision.

We have decided to create the new forum within the official infrastructure of the openSUSE project instead of creating a new domain, in this way we centralize ourselves to offer our help to Geeko users and leave the maintenance of the forum out of our hands, which will be work of people wiser than us.

It is also worth highlighting and thanking here the role played by the forum administrators, who have always been eager to help us and have given us the tools and have carried out the work related to the sys admin by launching the forum and with the interface available in Spanish.

We are excited about the new forum and we look forward to your help to build a community in our language for our beloved geeko. You have us available at:

https://forums.opensuse.org/forumdisplay.php/957-Espa%C3%B1ol-(Spanish)

Within the own forum in Spanish. Do not hesitate to create a new account. This new place wants to reunite the openSUSE community in Spanish and continue to provide mutual support and share around openSUSE again.

We hope that the site will gradually grow and improve with your help. Feel free to write in the new forum, tell what happens to you with the Geeko and above all:

Have a lot of fun!

This article mainly discusses encountered issues and solutions when I installed VirtualBox Guest Additions for OpenEuler 20.03 SP1.

1. After installing openEuler 20.03 SP1, log in to openEuler (I login as root here, if you are a regular user, you may need to use sudo when executing commands below), and then click Device -> Insert Guest Additions CD image... to load the latest version of the Guest Additions CD into the system.
2. Mount the CD:

mkdir -p /run/media/openeuler/VBoxAdditions
mount /dev/sr0 /run/media/openeuler/VBoxAdditions
cd /run/media/openeuler/VBoxAdditions

3. If you choose to install directly as usual, it may prompt an error for extraction because the system lacks the tar extraction program in the case of minimal installation. So install it:

dnf update
dnf install tar

4. Run the installation:

./VBoxLinuxAdditions.run

You can see there exists an error. Let’s take a look at the details of the error:

cat /var/log/vboxadd-setup.log

It can be seen that it is a compilation error. According to Linux kernel documentation, the access_ok function has been changed from passing three parameters to passing two parameters after the Linux kernel version 5. VBoxAdditions judges whether to use three or two parameters by the Linux version number. However, the kernel version number used by openEuler 20.03 SP1 is 4, but the patches later than the Linux kernel version 5 for this have been applied. As a result, the access_ok function only needs two parameters in this case, so we only need to change the VBoxAdditions source code to let it call access_ok with two parameters.

5. Modify the source code of VBoxAdditions (note that the corresponding path is changed according to the version number of VBoxAdditions):

cd /opt/VBoxGuestAdditions-6.1.22/src/vboxguest-6.1.22/vboxguest/r0drv/linux
vi memuserkernel-r0drv-linux.c

Use i to edit, and change the following two places RTLNX_VER_MIN(5,0,0) to RTLNX_VER_MIN(4,0,0):

Then press the ESC key, :wq save and exit.

There is also a same issue in another file, so continue to execute the command:

cd ../../../vboxsf
vi regops.c

Then press the ESC key, :wq save and exit.

6. Finally continue the installation:

/sbin/rcvboxadd setup

Installation is complete!

Finally, the VirtualBox Guest Addition can be used after restarting the system!