Bzip2 1.0.7 has been released by Mark Wielaard. We have a slight change of plans since my last post:

• The 1.0.x series is in strict maintenance mode and will not change build systems. This is targeted towards embedded use, as in projects which already embed the bzip2-1.0.6 sources and undoubtedly patch the build system. Right now this series, and the tagged 1.0.7 release, live in the sourceware repository for bzip2.

• The 1.1.x series has Meson and CMake build systems, and a couple of extra changes to modernize the C code but which were not fit for the 1.0.7 release. This is targeted towards operating system distributions. This lives in the master branch of the gitlab repository for bzip2.

Distros and embedded users should start using bzip2-1.0.7 immediately. The patches they already have for the bzip2's traditional build system should still apply. The release includes bug fixes and security fixes that have accumulated over the years, including the new CVE-2019-12900.

Once 1.1.0 is released, distributions should be able to remove their patches to the build system and just start using Meson or CMake. You may want to monitor the 1.1.0 milestone — help is appreciated fixing the issues there so we can make the first release with the new build systems!

ATTENTION ALL DISTRIBUTIONS: this is for you. THE SONAME MAY CHANGE!

I am preparing a bzip2-1.0.7 release. You can see the release notes, which should be of interest:

• Many historical patches from various distributions are integrated now.

• We have a new fix for the just-published CVE-2019-12900, courtesy of Albert Astals Cid.

• Bzip2 has moved to Meson for its preferred build system, courtesy of Dylan Baker. For special situations, a CMake build system is also provided, courtesy of Micah Snyder.

What's with the soname?

From bzip2-1.0.1 (from the year 2000), until bzip2-1.0.6 (from 2010), release tarballs came with a special Makefile-libbz2_so to generate a shared library instead of a static one.

This never used libtool or anything; it specified linker flags by hand. Various distributions either patched this special makefile, or replaced it by another one, or outright replaced the complete build system for a different one.

Some things to note:

• This hand-written Makefile-libbz2_so used a link line like $(CC) -shared -Wl,-soname -Wl,libbz2.so.1.0 -o libbz2.so.1.0.6. This means, make the DT_SONAME field inside the ELF file be libbz2.so.1.0 (note the two digits in 1.0), and make the filename of the shared library be libbz2.so.1.0.6.

• Fedora patched the soname in a patch called "saneso" to just be libbz2.so.1.

• Stanislav Brabec, from openSUSE, replaced the hand-written makefiles with autotools, which meant using libtool. It has this interesting note:

Incompatible changes:

soname change. Libtool has no support for two parts soname suffix (e. g. libbz2.so.1.0). It must be a single number (e. g. libbz2.so.1). That is why soname must change. But I see not a big problem with it. Several distributions already use the new number instead of the non-standard number from Makefile-libbz2_so.

(In fact, if I do objdump -x /usr/lib64/*.so | grep SONAME, I see that most libraries have single-digit sonames.)

In my experience, both Fedora and openSUSE are very strict, and correct, about obscure things like library sonames.

With the switch to Meson, bzip2 no longer uses libtool. It will have a single-digit soname — this is not in the meson.build yet, but expect it to be there within the next couple of days.

I don't know what distros which decided to preserve the 1.0 soname will need to do; maybe they will need to patch meson.build on their own.

Fortunately, the API/ABI are still exactly the same. You can preserve the old soname which your distro was using and linking libbz2 will probably keep working as usual.

(This is a C-only release as usual. The Rust branch is still experimental.)

On the 22nd of May, openSUSE released (1) Leap 15.1. A couple of days later I took the plunge to update my laptop and desktop from openSUSE Leap 15.0. In this blog, I will detail my update experience.

Updating my laptop

My laptop is a ASUS VivoBook X402NA-FA112T. This is a laptop with an Intel Pentium N4200 processor, 4 GB of RAM and a 128 GB SSD. The upgrade to Leap 15.1 went flawless.

I have used the SUSE studio image writer to burn the Leap 15.1 ISO to a USB thumb drive. This is an excellent program that does just one thing and does it right. After plugging in this USB drive, I checked the UEFI menu to make sure that I would boot from the USB drive instead of the SSD harddrive.

To start the upgrade, just select the right option from the USB boot menu.

Then accept the license agreement, which states that this is free and open source software! You own it outright, but you have to share the source code if you want to distribute or change it.

The installer kicks off and finds my previous installation of openSUSE Leap 15.0.

The next thing to do is to Disable the additional repositories. The default setting is for these repositories to be Removed. I don’t want to re-enter these additional repositories from scratch. So I simply disable them. After installation, I open YaST and then Software Repositories. And I change the name of the URL from Leap 15 to Leap 15.1. For example:

https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/mozilla/openSUSE_Leap_15.0/

becomes

https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/mozilla/openSUSE_Leap_15.1/

After that, I set the repository to Enabled and Auto-refresh.

Most of these repositories were available from the get go. The only exception were 2 gaming repositories which took 2 more days to become available.

The ‘update settings’ page stated that there were package conflicts that couldn’t be resolved automatically. So I needed to go in and make these decisions manually. The amazing thing is, that even with all additional package repositories disabled, the installer still goes out of its way to find an updated package from various additional package repositories and proposes to install it. Its these kind of little things that make a big difference!

After I went through the list with all the proposed changes, I got a nice summary of everything that would happen. This is the default YaST Software Manager installation overview. But its a nice touch to present the user with such a summary.

Once I clicked on Accept, I was returned to the ‘update settings’ page. After clicking install, there is no way back.

I restarted my laptop and Leap 15.1 was successfully installed! Great job openSUSE!

Updating my desktop

My desktop is a HP Pavilion Power 580-146nd. This is a midsize PC with an AMD Ryzen 5 1400 CPU, an AMD Radeon RX 580 GPU, 16 GB of RAM, a 128 GB M.2 SSD and a 1 TB 7200rpm HDD.

I used the same USB thumbstick. After selecting ‘Update’ from the boot menu, the whole screen went black. And then nothing happened. Since I have installed openSUSE many times before, I quickly realized that this must be a graphics issue. I used ‘nomodeset’ in the past to get around that issue. This causes the installer to go back to the most basic graphics settings but it also means I could finish the update.

It used to be a lot easier to edit the boot options. However, this is now hidden. This post on Stack Exchange (2) gives a great explanation how to enable nomodeset, both as a one-time option and as a permanent option.

For the permanent enablement of nomodeset I know an easier way: in YaST look for the module ‘Boot Loader’ and in the Kernel Parameters tab, you can edit the boot command. This was the route that I took to make nomodeset a permanent boot setting.

With nomodeset enabled, I was able to complete the installation. I set the BIOS options to a fixed resolution of 1280 x 1024, which was enough screen real-estate to complete the update.

The black screen issue was also present during regular boot. The permanent nomodeset was a way to work around this. This enabled me to successfully launch into the KDE Plasma 5 desktop environment.

It looks like I am not the only one with this issue. I found other forum posts that describe similar problems. Some describe this problem in Leap 42.3 or Leap 15.0 (3, 4). Some describe this problem in Tumbleweed (5, 6).

I tried to do some troubleshooting by following this article SDB Configuring Graphics Cards (7). When entering the command:

sudo lspci -nnk | grep -A3 VGA

I found that the system detects the AMD GPU and also notes that the kernel driver in use is the amdgpu driver. What I tried so far to resolve the issue:

1. Force reinstall all AMD graphic driver packages
2. Remove all AMD/ATI graphic driver packages except for amdgpu
3. Edit the xorg.conf and 50-device.conf files to force-enable the amdgpu driver

All of the above actions didn’t solve my problem. The next thing that I wanted to try is if this issue was also present in openSUSE Tumbleweed. So I downloaded the latest ISO image and used imagewriter to write it to the USB thumbstick. Unfortunately I encountered the same issue in Tumbleweed.

Next I tried to reinstall openSUSE Leap 15.0. That installation continued without the black screen issue. Because of time constraints, I decided that I would continue to use openSUSE Leap 15.0 for the time being. I will try to troubleshoot this issue by installing Leap 15.1 as a dual-boot option at a later date.

Conclusion

Overall, I really like the openSUSE update experience. Both on my laptop and desktop, the installer found my previous install and I think its great that the installer automatically fetches updated packages from additional package repositories. It also presents the user with an excellent installation overview.

The downside of the update experience is that it might not be very intuitive for new Linux users. I feel that new users might find it difficult to select the right package option manually.

Due to a GPU driver issue I didn’t keep openSUSE Leap 15.1 on my desktop PC and reverted back to Leap 15.0. This driver issue is present both in openSUSE Leap 15.1 and in openSUSE Tumbleweed (of 27 May 2019). I found that multiple people have encountered similar issues. I will try to resolve this driver issue in the future. That is a subject for a future blog post.

Published on: 18 june 2019

So, say you’re running qemu, and decided to use hugepages, nice isn’t it? helps with performace and stuff, however a wild wall appears!

 QEMU: qemu-system-aarch64: can't open backing store /dev/hugepages/ for guest RAM: Permission denied

This basically means that you’re using the amazing -mem-path /dev/hugepages, and that QEMU running as an unprivileged user can’t write there… This is how it looked for me:

sudo -u _openqa-worker qemu-system-aarch64 -device virtio-gpu-pci -m 4094 -machine virt,gic-version=host -cpu host \ 
  -mem-prealloc -mem-path /dev/hugepages -serial mon:stdio  -enable-kvm -no-shutdown -vnc :102,share=force-shared \ 
  -cdrom openSUSE-Tumbleweed-DVD-aarch64-Snapshot20190607-Media.iso \ 
  -pflash flash0.img -pflash flash1.img -drive if=none,file=opensuse-Tumbleweed-aarch64-20190607-gnome-x11@aarch64.qcow2,id=hd0 \ 
  -device virtio-blk-device,drive=hd0

The machine tries to start, but utimately I get that dreadful message. You can simply do a chmod to the directory, use an udev rule, and get away with it, it’s quick and does the job but also there are few options to solve this using libvirt, however if you’re not using hugeadm to manage those pools and let the operating system take care of it, likely the operating system will take care of this for you, so you can look to /usr/lib/systemd/system/dev-hugepages.mount, since trying to add an udev rule failed for a colleague of mine, I decided to use the systemd approach, ending up with the following:

[Unit]
Description=Systemd service to fix hugepages + qemu ram problems.
After=dev-hugepages.mount

[Service]
Type=simple
ExecStart=/usr/bin/chmod o+w /dev/hugepages/

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

As everyone seems to like to put kernel trees up on github for random projects (based on the crazy notifications I get all the time), I figured it was time to put up a semi-official mirror of all of the stable kernel releases on github.com

It can be found at: https://github.com/gregkh/linux and I will try to keep it up to date with the real source of all kernel stable releases at https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux.git/