Qactus, a Qt-based OBS notifier, is out in the wild. Version 0.4.0 is the first release.
I started it a long time ago together with Sivan Greenberg as a personal project for learning Qt. And now it’s back into life

It features
– Build status viewer
– Row editor with autocompleter for project, package, repository and arch
– Submit requests viewer
– Bugs

This application is possible thanks to Marcus ‘darix’ Rueckert. He has helped me getting further knowledge of the OBS API.

I think this version is usable. So, why don’t you give it a try?
The source code is hosted on GitHub.

There’s a new build published today for the AMD FGLRX drivers.

It include the new patch made by Sebastian Siebert supporting Kernel 3.19x series you could have on 13.1, 13.2 and Tumbleweed openSUSE distribution.

The server just got the new rpms, so you should be able to update with zypper ref -f && zypper up

Have fun.

In this article I would like to describe how pass variables(configuration) to application and core of libgreattao. Writing about core I have in mind the main libgreattao librarary – without backends. Core configuration can be separated into shell configuration and window classes configuration.

Each sub chapter I begun with describing how invoke application, giving t o it application’s configuration, shell’s configuration and window classes configuration.

Configuration can went from files or command line. Additionally, application’s configuration can went from arguments(command line) after three additional decorators and additionally from configuration window. Configuration window is automatically generatedby libgreattao. In future I would like to add configuration coming from network. I would like to add to libgreattao web serwer and wrote client. Of course, network source will be less important, so there’s no additional risk to application.

Application domain

Configuration from file


./our_program --tao-app-config-from-file /path/to/first/file,/path/to/second/file

Libgreattao will read configuration from files in giving order. Files read in future will override file read in past. There’s the same rules than in user’s file for specified application for selecting user’s application directory(~/.tao/apps), so options are assembled with spaces, name, equal signs and value. Name and value must be divided by equal sign not preceded with backslash character. Using of escape characters are allowed, like ‘\ ‘, ‘\n’, ‘\=’. Using sentences are allowed too.

Configuration from command line – line


./our_program --tao-app-config-from-line first_variable=first_value,second_variable=second_val

In this case application’s parameters are separated by commas. Each parameter are assembled by variable(variable’s name) and value.

Configuration from command line – tao-switch


./our_program --tao-app-config-tao-switch-first-option first_value --tao-app-config-tao-switch-second-option second_value

In this case you should use for all option –tao-app-config-tao-switch- and name of option. You should put value as next argument.

Long option – equivalent to getopts syntax


./our_program --first-option first_value --second-option second_value

It’s equivalent to long option getopts syntax. We here put two dash and next name of option.You should put option’s value as next argument. Difference between this and previous method is in handling way. In this case option with value are not removed from arguments list(char **argv, char *argv[]). As you can guess, in previous case, we remove option decorator and value from arguments list. It’s indented, because this syntax is also used by getopts and application can support custom options, so we cannot remove it on libgreattao_initialize.

Character-switch – (not) equivalent to getopts syntax


./our_program -a first_value -b second_value

In this case it looks like previous way. Decorator and value are not removed from list. As getopts short arguments, you can puts dash and letter as decorator. In difference to getopts you cannot put this characters together and after each decorator you must put value.

Reading order

In first position libgreattao tries to read files. As I explain above, files are read in order as given, so values in files read in future will override, what was read in past. In second step command line are read. In last step window with options are generated. For each command-line parameter application can select decorators for each option, so libgreattao can search for tao-switches, long switches, short switches. Tao command line switch(there, where you put options separated by commas) are always enabled to command-line source. Order for command line switches are described below:

• tao-switches option
• Long decorators
• Characters(short) decorators
• Tao line

For each option used decorators are determined by used flags for option. Values read in future overlapped values read in past.

Arguments querying


#include <libgreattao/tao.h>
#include <libgreattao/config.h>

#include <stdlib.h>
#include <string.h>

const struct tao_app_config_option options[4] =
{
{"a", "a", "a", TAO_TYPE_STRING, 'a', TAO_CONFIG_OPTION_ARG_TAO_DECORATOR | TAO_CONFIG_OPTION_ARG_LONG_DECORATOR | TAO_CONFIG_OPTION_ARG_CHARACTER_DECORATOR},
{"b", "b", "b", TAO_TYPE_INT, 'b', TAO_CONFIG_OPTION_ARG_TAO_DECORATOR | TAO_CONFIG_OPTION_ARG_LONG_DECORATOR | TAO_CONFIG_OPTION_ARG_CHARACTER_DECORATOR},
{"c", "c", "c", TAO_TYPE_UINT, 'c', TAO_CONFIG_OPTION_ARG_TAO_DECORATOR | TAO_CONFIG_OPTION_ARG_LONG_DECORATOR | TAO_CONFIG_OPTION_ARG_CHARACTER_DECORATOR},
{"file", "file", "file", TAO_TYPE_FILE_PATH, 0, 0}
};

struct tao_app_config_result results[4];

void close_window(void *mesh, void *mesh2)
{
tao_close();
}

int main(int argc, char **argv)
{
char *buffer;
void *message_window;
int length;
int number;

tao_initialize("tao options demonstration", "", &argc, argv);

tao_get_app_configuration(options, results, 4, TAO_APP_CONFIG_FROM_LINE | TAO_APP_CONFIG_FROM_FILE) ;

buffer = (char *) malloc(sizeof("Error getting string\n") - 1
+ sizeof("Error getting integer\n") - 1
+ sizeof("Error getting unsigned\n") - 1
+ sizeof("Error getting file path"));

buffer[0] = '';
if (results[0].error) {
strcat(buffer, "Error getting string\n");
}
if (results[1].error) {
strcat(buffer, "Error getting integer\n");
}
if (results[2].error) {
strcat(buffer, "Error getting unsigned\n");
}
if (results[3].error) {
strcat(buffer, "Error getting file path");
}

if (buffer[0] != '') {

message_window = tao_new_window("/desktop/dialogs/message_dialog");
tao_add_handler(message_window, "/message", NULL, 0);
tao_add_handler(message_window, "/:abort", close_window, 0);
tao_set_hint(message_window, "/message", HINT_NAME, buffer);
tao_handle_events();
tao_release_window(message_window);
}

length = sizeof("\"\" \"\"\n");
length += 2; /* Two numbers */
if (!results[0].error) {

length += strlen(results[0].result);
}
else {
length += sizeof("(null)") - 1;
}
if (!results[1].error) {

number = (int) results[1].result;
while (number /= 10) {
++length;
};
}
if (!results[2].error) {

number = (int) results[2].result;
while (number /= 10) {
++length;
}
}
if (!results[3].error) {

length += strlen(results[3].result);
}
else {
length += sizeof("(null)") - 1;
}

if (length > (sizeof("Error getting string\n") - 1
+ sizeof("Error getting integer\n") - 1
+ sizeof("Error getting unsigned\n") - 1
+ sizeof("Error getting file path"))) {

free(buffer);
buffer = (char *)malloc(sizeof(*buffer) * (length+1));
}
snprintf(buffer, length+1, "\"%s\" %d %d \"%s\"\n",results[0].result,results[1].result,results[2].result,results[3].result);
if (buffer[0] != '') {

message_window = tao_new_window("/desktop/dialogs/message_dialog");
tao_add_handler(message_window, "/message", NULL, 0);
tao_add_handler(message_window, "/:abort", close_window, 0);
tao_set_hint(message_window, "/message", HINT_NAME, buffer);
tao_handle_events();
tao_release_window(message_window);
}
free(buffer);
}

This is simple program, which obtain options and next displaying, which options are not passed and next displaying all option’s values. Most important is tao_get_app_configuration. It have pointer for option description as first argument. This structures are not modified by function. As next argument, there’s pointer for structure of results, which will be modified by this function. Program must result structures by 0 before calling this function. As next argument we have count of parameters and results structures. The numbers of parameter structures and result structures must match. As next argument we have flags. We can use these flags:

• TAO_APP_CONFIG_FROM_FILE
• TAO_APP_CONFIG_FROM_LINE
• TAO_APP_CONFIG_INTERACTIVE
• TAO_APP_CONFIG_INTERACTIVE_FORCE

First flag makes reading from files. Configuration came from files are read in libgrattao_initialize method – not in tao_get_app_config. Next flag makes reading form command line. Last two flags makes libgrattao display configuration window. The difference is flag with suffix _FORCE causes displaying all options – filled options too. Additional difference is flag without this suffix don’t display configuration window in case, when all options are filled.

In this paragraph I will describe option description structure. First field of this structure is name of option. It is used to add suffix of switches in command line and it’s also used to searching in command line. Second field is name displayed to user in configuration window. Third field is description displayed to user in configuration window. Fourth filed is option type. In example I uses all allowed types, like string, natural number, integer and file’s path. File path are handled in the same way as string, but for file path(in config window) there’s displayed additional button, which allows to select file. Next filed is character, which are used to short-switches(character decorators). Last argument are flags, which allows to select decorators allowed for current option.

Explained program don’t uses configuration window. To change this you should add flag to last argument of tao_get_app_configuration. It makes this function not returning, while passed data are incorrect. Configuration window guards to all option are correct and filled. Only in case, when user close configuration window, this function assign error to all options.

Shell configuration


./our_program --tao-shell-config-from-file /path/for/configuration/file/1,/path/for/configuration/file/2

It’s similar to application configuration. Files are parsed in giving order and have similar syntax as application configuration files.
Second case:

./our_program --tao-shell-config-from-line first_option=first_value,second_option=second_value

It’s similar to application configuration too

Of course, options given in command line are more important from that reading from files.

I will now show, how uses this data.

=fromconfig variable_name configuration_option_name

This command writes to variable with name given as first argument configuration option with name given as second argument.

Windows classes configuration


./our_program --tao-design-config-from-file /path/for/configuration/file/1,/path/for/configuration/file/2

It’s similar to application configuration. Files are parsed in giving order and have similar syntax as application configuration files.
Second case:

./our_program --tao-design-config-from-line first_option=first_value,second_option=second_value

This is similar as configuration of application.
Now, I will show how use this:

<root>

<fromconfig name="instance_id" configuration="instance_id" />
<label>
<attr-connect name="label" variable="instance_id" />
</label>
<label dir-for="label" path="/message" />
<label dir-for="description" path="/message" />

<hbox>
<template path="/actions/*">
<button label="ok" dir-for="event,label">
<attr-connect name="label" function="last-dir" />
</button>
</template>
</hbox>

</root>

We are using here fromconfig element. Name means variable name, which will be created/overwritten. Configuration is configuration option’s name of window classes. In next step we assign variable’s value to label element.

That’s all!

Since the release of the 3.19 kernel in openSUSE Tumbleweed the vmnet module will fail to build for VMware Workstation 11.0.x

VMware community message

Credit for the patch

patch available at 1

Execute the following steps to patch your VMware Workstation 11.0.x
Download the patch to /tmp:

Hi Geekos, here a small summary of our Thursday February 19th openSUSE miniSummit event here at SCale 13x.

Located in Century AB room, a 80 seats room. The average attendance rate was varying between 50% and 85%.
Qualifying the attendance 50% or more were not related to SUSE / openSUSE, which was a good experience of question and feedback.

The day started by a talk about openSUSE / SUSE Xen and openstack by Peter Linnel and Russel Pavlicek.
One hour later Manu Gupta has presented all the bolts and nuts about GSOC at openSUSE.

We then go for lunch, and corridor exchanges.

I’ve opened the afternoon with my talk “them + me = we” about breaking mythic frontier
Then just after a small break, Mark Fasheh member of filesystem SUSE Labs group has talk about the project Duperemove: dedupe on btrfs (have a look on github the source are there, and package available on obs)

The day continue with a Town Hall talk co-animated by myself and Peter running an open discussion with attendees. With interesting remarks and feedback from openSUSE users, and also complete foreigners. For example, the way systemd was introduced in openSUSE distribution was appreciated (having choice during 2 versions). It was an unstressfull, open and positive exchange.

To follow, Bryan Lunduke and Peter animated a talk about “the 10 things you would love about SUSE and openSUSE if you only you knew…”
I did really enjoy the way they numbered the slides …
Freschy, punchy, funky, the kinda talk I would like to see again at OSC15.

To finalize the day, Markus Feilner​ for Linux Magazine (de) talked about openQA.

I found interesting the perfect mix we’ve done between openSUSE and SUSE during this day, confirming the excellent partnership we have.
Let the sponsors of this day be warmly thanked to make it happened.

Links :
SCale picture album day 1 : by Françoise on G+

openSUSE miniSummit day album :
Bruno’s Album on G+

Follow the news on G+ channel

Stay tuned for more news during this week-end.

In the past I've posted several articles on various tweaks to improve Power Management on Intel Sandy/Ivybridge hardware, based on my experiments with my Lenovo X220

With more recent releases of openSUSE, I've been experimenting with my old tweaks, and found that they NO LONGER help with power management - In fact, they seem to increase it

So, my advice at the moment - if you want a Linux OS that has good Power Management on a Lenovo X220 or similar laptop.. install openSUSE Tumbleweed, and don't change the default settings :)

HTH

Open voting is available for all session submissions until February 23rd at 5pm CST. This is a great way for the community to decide what they want to hear.

 I have submitted a handful of sessions which I hope will be voted for. Below are some short summary's and links to their voting pages.

• Accelerate OpenStack deployment with OpenStack Admin Appliance ( Speaker: Cameron Seader ) 

In an effort to make OpenStack available to the non-tech user and appear much less of a heavy lifting project, I have created the SUSE OpenStack Cloud Admin Appliance. However, no matter if your an OpenStack Noob, Professional, Expert or Developer...

https://www.openstack.org/vote-vancouver/Presentation/accelerate-openstack-deployment-with-openstack-admin-appliance

• Deploying SUSE OpenStack Cloud with the Xen Project Hypervisor ( Speakers: Cameron Seader, Russell Pavlicek, Stefano Stabellini ) 

Its all about choice these days when it comes to selecting your OpenStack hypervisor. But what makes for a good choice of hypervisor? And why should you consider the Xen Project Hypervisor when there are other possible selections? ...

FOSDEM 2015

It was another great FOSDEM this year. Even with their 5-10.000 attendants, the formula of being absolutely free, with limited sponsorship, and while only making small changes each year is an absolute winner. There is just no conference which comes even close to FOSDEM.

For those on ICE14 on Friday, the highspeed train from Frankfurt to Brussels south at 14:00, who were so nice to participate in my ad-hoc visitor count: 66. I counted 66 people, but i might have skipped a few as people were sometimes too engrossed in their laptops to hear me over their headphones. On a ~400 seat train, that's a pretty high number, and i never see the same level of geekiness on the Frankfurt to Brussels trains as on the Friday before FOSDEM. If it didn't sound like an organizational nightmare, it might have been a good idea to talk to DB and get a whole carriage reserved especially for FOSDEM goers.

With the Graphics DevRoom we returned to the K building this year, and i absolutely love the cozy 80 people classrooms we have there. With good airflow, freely movable tables, and an easy way to put in my powersockets, i have an easy time as a devroom organizer. While some speakers probably prefer bigger rooms to have a higher number of attendants, there is nothing like the more direct interaction of the rooms in the K buildings. With us sitting on the top floor, we also only had people who were very actively interested in the topics of the graphics devroom.

Despite the fact that FOSDEM has no equal, and anyone who does anything with open source software in the European Union should attend, i always have a very difficult time recruiting a full set of speakers for the graphics DevRoom. Perhaps the biggest reason for this is the fact that it is a free conference, and it lacks the elitarian status of a paid-for conference. Everyone can attend your talk, even people who do not work on the kernel or on graphics drivers, and the potential speaker might feel as if he needs to waste his time on people who are below his own perceived station. Another reason may be that it is harder to convince the beancounters to sponsor a visit to a free conference. In that case, if you live in the European Union and when you are paid to do open source software, you should be able to afford going to the must-visit FOSDEM by yourself.

As for next year, i am not sure whether there will be a graphics devroom again. Speaker count really was too low and perhaps it is time for another hiatus. Perhaps it is once again time to show people that talking in a devroom at FOSDEM truly is a privilege, and not to be taken for granted.

Tamil "Driver" talk.

My talk this year, or rather, my incoherent mumble finished off with a demo, was about showing my work on the ARM Mali Midgard GPUs. For those who had to endure it, my apologies for my ill-preparedness; i poured all my efforts into the demo (which was finished on Wednesday), and spent too much time doing devroom stuff (which ate Thursday) and of course in drinking up, ahem, the event that is FOSDEM (which ate the rest of the weekend). I will try to make up for it now in this blog post.

Current Tamil Status.

As some might remember, in September and October 2013, i did some preliminary work on the Mali T-series. I spent about 3 to 3.5 weeks building the infrastructure to capture the command stream and replay it. At the same time I also dug deep into the Mali binary driver to expose the binary shader compiler. These two feats gave me all the prerequisites for doing the job of reverse engineering the command stream of the Mali Midgard.

During the Christmas holidays of 2014 and in January 2015, i spent my time building a command stream parser. This is a huge improvement over my work on lima, where i only ended doing so later on in the process (while bringing up Q3A). As i built up the capabilities of this parser, i threw ever more complex GLES2 programs at it. A week before FOSDEM, my parser was correctly handling multiple draws and frames, uniforms, attributes, varyings and textures. Instead of having raw blobs of memory, i had C structs and tables, allowing me to easily see the differences between streams.

I then took the parsed result of my most complex test and slowly turned that into actual C code, using the shader binary produced by the binary compiler, and adding a trivial sequential memory allocator. I then added rotation into the mix, and this is the demo as seen on FOSDEM (and now uploaded to youtube).

All the big things are known.

For textures. I only have simple texture support at this time, no mipmapping nor cubemapping yet, and only RGB565 and RGBA32 are supported at this time. I also still have not figured out how to disable swizzling, instead i re-use the texture swizzling code from lima, the only place where I was able to re-use code in tamil. This missing knowledge is just some busywork, and a bit of coding away.

As for programs, while both the Mali Utgard (M-series) and Midgard (T-series) binary compilers output in a format called MBS (Mali Binary Shader), the contents of each file is significantly different. I had no option but to rewrite the MBS parser for tamil.

Instead of rewriting the vertex shaders binaries like ARMs binary driver does, i reorder the entries in the attribute descriptor table to match the order as described by the shader compiler output. This avoids adding a whole lot of logic to handle this correctly, even though MBS now describes which bits to alter in the binary. I still lay uniforms, attributes and varyings out by hand though, i similarly have only limited knowledge of typing at this point. This mostly is a bit of busywork of writing up the actual logic, and trying out a few different things.

I know only very few things about most of the GL state. Again, mostly busywork with a bit of testing and coding up the results. And while many values left and right are still magic, nothing big is hiding any more.

Unlike lima, i am refraining from building up more infrastructure (than necessary to show the demo) outside of Mesa. The next step really is writing up a mesa driver. Since my lima driver for mesa was already pretty advanced, i should be able to re-use a lot of the knowledge gained there, and perhaps some code.

The demo

The demo was shown on a Samsung ARM Chromebook, with a kernel and linux installation from september 2013 (when i brought up cs capture and exposed the shader compiler). The exynos KMS driver on this 3.4.0 kernel is terrible. It only accepts a few fixed resolutions (as if I never existed and modesetting wasn't a thing), and then panics when you even look at it. Try to leave X while using HDMI: panic. Try to use a KMS plane to display the resulting render: panic.

In the end, i used fbdev and memcpy the rendered frame over to the console. On this kernel, i cannot even disable the console, so some of the visible flashing is the console either being overwritten by or overwriting the copied render.

The youtube video shows a capture of the Chromebooks built in LCD, at 1280x720 on a 1366x768 display. At FOSDEM, i was lucky that the projector accepted the 1280x720 mode the exynos hdmi driver produced. My dumb HDMI->VGA converter (which makes the image darker) was willing to pass this through directly. I have a more intelligent HDMI->VGA adapter which also does scaling and which keeps colours nice, but that one just refused the output of the exynos driver. The video that was captured in our devroom probably does not show the demo correctly, as that should've been at 1024x768.

The demo shows 3 cubes rotating in front of the milky way. It is 4 different draws, using 3 different textures, and 3 different programs. These cubes currently rotate at 47fps, with the memcpy. During the talk, the chromebook slowed down progressively down to 26fps and even 21fps at one point, but i have not seen that behaviour before or since. I do know of an issue that makes the demo fail at frame 79530, which is 100% reproducible. I still need to track this down, it probably is an issue with my job handling code.

linux-exynos.org

With Lima and Tamil i am in a very unique position. Unlike on adreno, tegra or Videocore, i have to deal with many different SoCs. Apart from the difference in kernel GPU drivers, i also have to deal with differences in display drivers and run into a whole new world of hurts every time i move over to a new target device. The information for doing a proper linux installation on an android or chrome device is usually dispersed, not up to date, and not too good, and i get to do a lot of the legwork for myself every time, knowing full well that a lot of others have done so already but couldn't be bothered to document things (hence my role in the linux-sunxi community).

The ARM chromebook and its broken kms driver is much of the same. Last FOSDEM i complained how badly supported and documented the Samsung ARM chromebook is, despite its popularity, and appealed for more linux-sunxi style, SoC specific communities, especially since I, as a graphics driver developer, cannot go and spend as much time in each and every of the SoC projects as i have done with sunxi.

During the questions round of this talk, one guy in the audience asked what needed to be done to fix the SoC pain. At first i completely missed the question, upon which he went and rephrased his question. My answer was: provide the infrastructure, make some honest noise and people will come. Usually, when some asks such a question, nothing ever comes from it. But Merlijn "Wizzup" Wajer and his buddy S.J.R. "Swabbles" van Schaik really came through.

Today there is the linux-exynos.org wiki, the linux-exynos mailinglist, and the #linux-exynos irc channel. While the community is not as large as linux-sunxi, it is steadily growing. So if you own exynos based hardware, or if your company is basing a product on the exynos chipset, head to linux-exynos.org and help these guys out. Linux-exynos deserves your support.

For some months our MacBook Air was broken. Finally good time to replace, I thought. On the other side, the old notebook was quite useful even 6 years after purchasing. Coding on the road, web surfing, SVG/PDF presentations and so on worked fine on the Core2Duo device from 2008. The first breaking symptoms started with video errors on a DVI connected WUXGA/HDTV+ sized display. The error looked like non stable frequency handling, with the upper scan lines being visually ok and the lower end wobbling to the right. A black desktop background with a small sized window was sometimes a workaround. This notebook type uses a Nvidia 9400M on the logic board. Another non portable computer of mine which uses Nvidia 9300 Go on board graphics runs without such issues. So I expected no reason to worry about the type of graphics chip. Later on, the notebook stopped completely, even without attached external display. It showed a well known one beep every 5 seconds during startup. On MacBook Pro/Air’s this symptom means usually broken RAM.

The RAM is soldered directly on the logic board. Replacing @ Apple appeared prohibitive. Now that I began to look around to sell the broken hardware to hobbyists, I found an article talking about these early MacBook Air’s. This specific one is a 2.1 rev A 2.13 GHz. It was mentioned, that early devices suffered from lead-free soldering, which performs somewhat worse in regards to ductility than normal soldering. The result was that many of these devices suffered from electrical disconnections of its circuitry during the course of warming and cooling and the related thermal expansion and contraction. The device showed the one beep symptom on startup without booting. An engineer from Apple was unofficially cited to suggest, that putting the logic board in around 100° Celsius for a few minutes would eventually suffice to solve the issue. That sounded worth a try to me. As I love to open up many devices to look into and eventually repair them, taking my time for dismounting the logic board and not bringing it to a repair service was fine for me. But be warned, doing so can be difficult for beginners. I placed the board on some wool in the oven @120 ° and after 10 minutes and some more for montage, the laptop started again to work. I am not sure if soldering is really solved now or if the experienced symptoms will come back. I guess that some memory chips on the board were resetted and stopped telling that RAM is broken. So my device works again and will keep us happy for a while – I hope.

Again this year the thirteen annual Southern California Linux Expo is in the starting block.

During 3 days you will be able to visit us at our booth (38,39,40).
Yeah 3 booths cause we co-run the KDE and Gnome booth.
The exhibition hall open Friday afternoon at 2pm.

Drew and Peter are working as daemon to get everything ready to spread, Doug have brought also quite numerous goodies there. I will do my best to inform you here or follow my G+ channel

Whatever the way you come, bring your feet there and shake hands.
On Thursday, no one has to miss our full day of openSUSE mini-summit, room Century AB.
There will be interesting talks and also a full green hallway, We’re looking forward SUSE’s team, working together in this promising adventure.

On our side Geeko is ready to cross 9.000 kilometers tomorrow.
Hey cool first time in the famous Airbus A380…
Demo laptop with Tumbleweed and KF5 is also secured.

See you all in Los Angeles