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jimfehligXen live migration in OpenStack Grizzly
I recently experimented with live migration in an OpenStack Grizzly cluster of Xen compute nodes and thought it useful to write a short blog post for the benefit of others interested in OpenStack Xen deployments.
My OpenStack Grizzly cluster consisted of three nodes: One controller node hosting most of the OpenStack services (rabbitmq, mysql, cinder, keystone, nova-api, nova-scheduler, etc.) and two Xen compute nodes running nova-compute, nova-network, and nova-novncproxy. All nodes were running fully patched SLES11 SP2. devstack was used to deploy the OpenStack services.
For the most part, I used the OpenStack documentation for configuring live migration to setup the environment. The main configuration tasks include
- Configuring shared storage on the compute nodes involved in live migration. I took the simple approach and used NFS for shared storage between the compute nodes, mounting an NFS share at /opt/stack/data/nova/instances in each compute node.
- Ensure that the UID and GID of your nova (or stack) and libvirt users are identical between each of your servers. This ensures that the permissions on the NFS mount will work correctly.
- Ensure the shared directory has ‘execute/search’ bit set, e.g. chmod o+x /opt/stack/data/nova/instances
- Ensure firewall is properly configured to allow migrations. For Xen, port 8002 needs to be open. This is the port xend listens on for migration requests.
In addition to the steps described in the OpenStack documentation, the following configuration needs to be performed on the Xen compute nodes
- Enable migration (aka relocation) in /etc/xen/xend-config.sxp: (xend-relocation-server yes)
- Define a list of hosts allowed to connect to the migration port in /etc/xen/xend-config.sxp. To allow all hosts, leave the list empty: (xend-relocation-hosts-allow ”)
- Set the ‘live_migration_flag’ option in /etc/nova/nova.conf. In the legacy xm/xend toolstack, xend implements all of the migration logic. Unlike the libvirt qemu driver, the libvirt legacy xen driver can only pass the migration request to the Xen toolstack, so the only migration flags needed are VIR_MIGRATE_LIVE and VIR_MIGRATE_UNDEFINE_SOURCE: live_migration_flag=VIR_MIGRATE_LIVE,VIR_MIGRATE_UNDEFINE_SOURCE
- Set the live_migration_uri option in /etc/nova/nova.conf. The default for this option is ‘qemu+tcp://%s/system’. For Xen, this needs to be ‘xenmigr://%s/system’: live_migration_uri = xenmigr://%s/system
After these configuration steps, restart xend and nova-compute on the Xen compute nodes to reload the new configuration. Your OpenStack Xen cluster should now be able to perform live migration as per the OpenStack Using Migration documentation.
On my small cluster, xen71 is the controller node and xen76 and xen77 are the Xen compute nodes. I booted an instance of a SLES11 SP2 Xen HVM image that was provisioned on xen76.
stack@xen71:~> nova list
+--------------------------------------+------------------------+--------+--------------------+
|ID | Name | Status | Networks |
+--------------------------------------+------------------------+--------+--------------------+
| 6b45baa2-3dc2-420c-a7ab-aad25fc1aa2a | sles11sp2-xen-hvm-test | ACTIVE | private=10.4.128.2 |
+--------------------------------------+------------------------+--------+--------------------+
stack@xen71:~> nova show 6b45baa2-3dc2-420c-a7ab-aad25fc1aa2a
+-------------------------------------+----------------------------------------------------------+
| Property | Value |
+-------------------------------------+----------------------------------------------------------+
| status | ACTIVE |
| updated | 2013-04-05T17:27:16Z |
| OS-EXT-STS:task_state | None |
| OS-EXT-SRV-ATTR:host | xen76 |
| key_name | None |
| image | SLES11SP2-xen-hvm (5b39e6b3-bc3f-4fb0-81a0-b115cb8ada80) |
| private network | 10.4.128.2 |
| hostId | cca619a77da34c0c26001fb2438d7cce6a5da6408ae8ec111401f627 |
| OS-EXT-STS:vm_state | active |
| OS-EXT-SRV-ATTR:instance_name | instance-0000000a |
| OS-EXT-SRV-ATTR:hypervisor_hostname | xen76.virt.lab.novell.com |
| flavor | m1.tiny (1) |
| id | 6b45baa2-3dc2-420c-a7ab-aad25fc1aa2a |
| security_groups | [{u'name': u'default'}] |
| user_id | 86b77dee688e4eff957865205d27464a |
| name | sles11sp2-xen-hvm-test |
| created | 2013-04-05T17:10:04Z |
| tenant_id | 0833047bb70d4b38874328aad83b7140 |
| OS-DCF:diskConfig | MANUAL |
| metadata | {} |
| accessIPv4 | |
| accessIPv6 | |
| progress | 0 |
| OS-EXT-STS:power_state | 1 |
| OS-EXT-AZ:availability_zone | nova |
| config_drive | |
+-------------------------------------+----------------------------------------------------------+
Now let’s migrate the instance to the xen77 compute node
stack@xen71:~> nova live-migration 6b45baa2-3dc2-420c-a7ab-aad25fc1aa2a xen77
While the migration is in progess, we can see the status and task state as migrating
stack@xen71:~> nova show 6b45baa2-3dc2-420c-a7ab-aad25fc1aa2a
+-------------------------------------+----------------------------------------------------------+
| Property | Value |
+-------------------------------------+----------------------------------------------------------+
| status | MIGRATING |
| updated | 2013-04-05T20:16:27Z |
| OS-EXT-STS:task_state | migrating |
| OS-EXT-SRV-ATTR:host | xen76 |
| key_name | None |
| image | SLES11SP2-xen-hvm (5b39e6b3-bc3f-4fb0-81a0-b115cb8ada80) |
| private network | 10.4.128.2 |
| hostId | cca619a77da34c0c26001fb2438d7cce6a5da6408ae8ec111401f627 |
| OS-EXT-STS:vm_state | active |
| OS-EXT-SRV-ATTR:instance_name | instance-0000000a |
| OS-EXT-SRV-ATTR:hypervisor_hostname | xen76.virt.lab.novell.com |
| flavor | m1.tiny (1) |
| id | 6b45baa2-3dc2-420c-a7ab-aad25fc1aa2a |
| security_groups | [{u'name': u'default'}] |
| user_id | 86b77dee688e4eff957865205d27464a |
| name | sles11sp2-xen-hvm-test |
| created | 2013-04-05T17:10:04Z |
| tenant_id | 0833047bb70d4b38874328aad83b7140 |
| OS-DCF:diskConfig | MANUAL |
| metadata | {} |
| accessIPv4 | |
| accessIPv6 | |
| OS-EXT-STS:power_state | 1 |
| OS-EXT-AZ:availability_zone | nova |
| config_drive | |
+-------------------------------------+----------------------------------------------------------+
Once the migration completes, we can see that the instance is now running on xen77
stack@xen71:~> nova show 6b45baa2-3dc2-420c-a7ab-aad25fc1aa2a
+-------------------------------------+----------------------------------------------------------+
| Property | Value |
+-------------------------------------+----------------------------------------------------------+
| status | ACTIVE |
| updated | 2013-04-05T20:11:37Z |
| OS-EXT-STS:task_state | None |
| OS-EXT-SRV-ATTR:host | xen77 |
| key_name | None |
| image | SLES11SP2-xen-hvm (5b39e6b3-bc3f-4fb0-81a0-b115cb8ada80) |
| private network | 10.4.128.2 |
| hostId | cabdc8468130edd0f85440f1b2922419b359b3da36a40de98713dbda |
| OS-EXT-STS:vm_state | active |
| OS-EXT-SRV-ATTR:instance_name | instance-0000000a |
| OS-EXT-SRV-ATTR:hypervisor_hostname | xen76.virt.lab.novell.com |
| flavor | m1.tiny (1) |
| id | 6b45baa2-3dc2-420c-a7ab-aad25fc1aa2a |
| security_groups | [{u'name': u'default'}] |
| user_id | 86b77dee688e4eff957865205d27464a |
| name | sles11sp2-xen-hvm-test |
| created | 2013-04-05T17:10:04Z |
| tenant_id | 0833047bb70d4b38874328aad83b7140 |
| OS-DCF:diskConfig | MANUAL |
| metadata | {} |
| accessIPv4 | |
| accessIPv6 | |
| progress | 0 |
| OS-EXT-STS:power_state | 1 |
| OS-EXT-AZ:availability_zone | nova |
| config_drive | |
+-------------------------------------+----------------------------------------------------------+
You might notice a small bug here in that OS-EXT-SRV-ATTR:hypervisor_hostname is not updated with the xen77 host now running the instance. A minor issue that I will add to my list of bugs needing investigation.
Wallpaper Proposal for openSUSE 13.1
The artwork team is now taking submissions for a default wallpaper and a wallpaper collection package for the upcoming openSUSE 13.1. However, you may be wondering, why now? 12.3 was just released!
The reason is that artwork being the face of openSUSE on the desktop needs a long time to mature. It will be a while before the team decides on what will go for defaults and so on, therefore we need to submit our ideas early enough to allow the whole process to evolve and be ready for prime time.
Take into account that submitting images is not a simple task, the format measures need to be met and the image will likely need tweaking, even after it has been chosen as part of the final distribution. Also, the wallpaper has generally marked the main source of inspiration for the rest of the distribution, splash screens, login screens, KDE plasma theme, all depend on the good communication they can have with the wallpaper.
For now, I am leaving this proposal with you and hope that you can also make your submissions soon. Please write and link your image to opensuse-artwork@opensuse.org
Thank you
Andy (anditosan)
A two-dimensional interval over integers
A two-dimensional interval over integersHmm, two-dimensional, but bounded by a lower and an upper value? And the Wikipedia article it refers to says that
This is most easily depicted as a set of integers, bounded by a lower and an upper value - but excluding the upper value. All inbetween values are included in the set. (see also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interval_%28mathematics%29)
In mathematics, a (real) interval is a set of real numberswhile the above talks about integers. But oh well.
Got it yet? There's more:
The set is half-open, i.e. the lower bound is included, the upper bound not (if you're used to the notation - we're talking about [a,b) here, compared to closed [a,b] or fully open intervals (a,b)).This again sounds a bit one-dimensional, but let's put that down as a case of copy/paste joy, and let's assume that the reader is able to extrapolate into two dimensions.
Does it sound familiar yet? Oh well, finally it says:
Alternatively, consider this a rectangle, where the rightmost pixel column and the bottommost pixel row are excludedOh. Sure, the concept of "rectangle" is so unfamiliar to programmers that it isn't worth mentioning except after some impressive-sounding mathematics jargon (that perhaps is not really useful in the case of finite, integer, ranges, but I digress). And yeah, let's mention pixels, too, all of a sudden. Of course, giving what apparently tries to be a strict mathematical definition, no need to mention whether the pixels here are centered on integer coordinates, or bounded by them. But I guess it's the former, as otherwise it would make little sense, or would it?
And what is right here, and especially, what is bottom? In mathematics, the y axis usually is depicted as pointing upwards, isn't it?
To make it even more fun, the data structure that this documents contains neither "range" or "rectangle" in its name, but "box"...
Interview with Jos Poortvliet
Jos Poortvliet , tell us about yourself. Who are you?
Hey, I’m a Dutch Free Software enthusiast living in Berlin with my Brazilian
wife Camila. I’ve been around Free and Open Source for over 10 years, mostly
active around marketing and community related things.
I’m active in marketing, helping the project communicate to the outside
world. But also internally and between SUSE and openSUSE. I am also active
on the governance side of the project, with strategy or board related things
and helping to handle conflicts if they arise.
He, good question. In the beginning, many people expected me to take charge
and play a leadership role. As that is clearly something which does fit
neither openSUSE nor me, I did not do that and made very clear that I did
not see that as my job. Instead, I presented myself as a contributor who had
to earn his place like everybody else. I think I did that, in the last
years, and today people come to me for advice mostly in the areas of
communication, marketing and conflicts – and I happily stay out of
especially technical decisions.
Depends on what you are looking for, what you want to create. If it is
something like the ARM project or a new openSUSE derivative, it SHOULD
affect the project – ARM is adding something to openSUSE, so are the
derivatives. That is good!
So, just announce it as that – a cool, new thing in openSUSE. That is not
particularly hard to communicate. I would not communicate it before it has
something to show for and in most cases that means first gathering some
people who want to work on it and making a ‘first release’, then announcing
where you plan to take it and inviting people to join.
Of course, it would be possible to create a project which might not be
naturally seen as an addition. Say, you want to ‘fork’ openSUSE into a more
stable (or more bleeding edge) version. That is an entirely different thing
and should be handled with a little more care: one can imagine that this
takes up resources which otherwise might be put in openSUSE Factory, for
example. But here, too, I think it is important to first talk to some core
people, get a team up, create a ‘proof of concept’ and simply have a clear
plan. Then, based on what objections you expect, make sure to communicate it
in a non-threatening way.
We have some statistics but these focus around the release, marketing and
user base (number of downloads, page views to our sites, number of active
installations, things like that). And we have some idea about development
(number of commits to Factory, amount of work in devel projects). We have
very little, if any, info on communication related things.
“assigned” tasks per volunteer and successfully finished task per volunteer?
I have very little idea here. First of all, because I am restricting myself
to a subset of the community: the marketing area. Second, because my work
frequently shifts and I don’t always interact with the same people. And
last, because I don’t keep metrics like that – I work very much on a one-on-
one base. I’m not saying that that is the best way to do it but I’m not much
of a number man 
It depends quite a bit in what area and what skills he/she brings. But you
are often looking at quite a long time – a minimum of a month but easily
half a year.
Sometimes, when I’m actually mentoring new people…
I try to catch it myself but often, I delegate based on trust. So if a
volunteer doesn’t do something, well, it doesn’t get done. That is
responsibility, yes?
There are a lot of reasons – but for me, the most important part is the open
mind. Every project has people angry at the world, every project has
friendly and unfriendly people. But overall, openSUSE as a community is very
open to both newcomers and working with others. We’re not such a navel-
gazing community, we pragmatic and willing to look outside our borders,
adopting technologies from other communities and working with them on it.
That is maybe not totally unique, but certainly rare.
Firefox-19.0 Colour Management
Firefox detects since version 17.0 the Linux system profile, which is a great improvement for the operating system. While colour conversions on all platforms still default to on for ICC tagged content, they can be enabled for all other colours. Untagged colours will then default to sRGB instead of omitting monitor compensation for them. To do so go to the famous about:config URL and change gfx.color_management.mode from “2″ to “1″. Then use the installed CMS, e.g. on KDE KolorManager, to set a system monitor profile, and it will be detected after restarting Firefox.
For Android there is no CMS available. That means the ICC monitor profile must be set manually or sRGB will be assumed instead. The settings name in about:config is gfx.color_management.display_profile. Enter into this string the file name with full path, if you are on Android. That procedure is somewhat inconvenient compared to desktops. However the OpenICC group has published some specifications for implementation. This might be even possible for students inside the rewarding Google Summer of Code 2013 program.
For comparison, the Chrome web browser does support colour management on some desktop versions but unfortunately not on Android.
The below false colour test image should look correctly with ICC profile enabled browsers. Look at the colour gradients and then at the colour names and compare.
Enjoy cross platform colour management.
Are you a senior KDE developer? Join openSUSE Team at SUSE
As those of you who are closer to KDE and/or openSUSE know, Will Stephenson has been leading this area the last few years. He is now facing new professional challenges within SUSE so we are looking for somebody that coordinates the openSUSE Team efforts related with KDE together with the openSUSE community, upstream and other SUSE Teams.
Our default openSUSE desktop, KDE, is obviously a relevant piece of our puzzle. But beyond pure KDE work, the selected candidate will also work in other areas of the distribution and will play an important role as openSUSE/SUSE advocate in technical forums.
openSUSE currently ships other desktops too so it will be important for the selected candidate to drive high levels of cooperation with the openSUSE GNOME (and others) team and upstream in cross-distro development efforts.
As a preferred choice, we are looking for a KDE developer willing to move to our Headquarters in Nuremberg, GE or to our office in Prague, CZ.
If you are interested, please check the opening details and send your CV through the SUSE Careers website. Links to your contributions to KDE and contacts for references are welcome.
In a more personal note......
Will, thanks for standing strong and work hard for openSUSE and KDE. Good luck in your new position.
Producing Better Bindings: Completeness
Second Note: if you're reading this from a news aggregator, you might miss the embedded gists. Read the original there.
I'm lately enjoying writing bindings for Xamarin.iOS and Xamarin.Mac, a lot for the fun, very little for profit. The biggest project by far was creating a managed bindings for cocos2d (v2). This library is huge (~2500 public methods), and the API is far from being fixed in stone. The library is so big that at some point I just gave up, until Miguel resumed the effort during end-of-year break.
No chocolate
One of my worst nightmare was that, at the point of completion, the API would probably outdated, and going through every .h at every release to check consistency looked very expensive from a maintenance point of view. Hopefully, Sébastien came up with automated tests, removing a lot of the burden. There was still a missing part. making sure we were not missing any (important) part of the exposed API. In Producing Better Bindings #1, he said:There’s no easy way to test for missing constructors[...]. That would require static analysis (not introspection) in order to be useful.It was very much like a "you can't get chocolate"-day for me. Which means a lot for a Belgian.
Static Analysis
I wanted that feature badly. But I wasn't in the mood of writing (another) .h parser, just to extract the public API (though I could have used the same tools used for generating documentation). So I opted for analysing the generated library, but not at runtime, just after compiling.So I added a step in my Makefile that looks like this:
#static analysis %.selectors: %.a nm -P $< | grep "^[-+]\[.*\] t" > $@
which generate a file containing entries like this:
+[CCLayerColor layerWithColor:] t b84 0 +[CCLayerColor layerWithColor:width:height:] t b1b 0 -[CCLayerColor blendFunc] t 1167 0 -[CCLayerColor changeHeight:] t ecc 0 -[CCLayerColor changeWidth:] t e87 0 -[CCLayerColor changeWidth:height:] t e4b 0 -[CCLayerColor draw] t fa1 0 -[CCLayerColor initWithColor:] t d81 0 -[CCLayerColor initWithColor:width:height:] t c3f 0 -[CCLayerColor init] t bd7 0 -[CCLayerColor setBlendFunc:] t 1182 0 -[CCLayerColor setColor:] t 10b9 0 -[CCLayerColor setContentSize:] t de2 0 -[CCLayerColor setOpacity:] t 1114 0 -[CCLayerColor updateColor] t f10 0
which is all we need (and some more we don't need).
The fixture
Parsing the file
Skipping categories
What's missing ?
If you liked this post, you probably will also like other stuffs I'm doing. Contact me, I'm open for contracting.
openSUSE 12.3 / Lenovo T430
My new Lenovo T430 arrived last week. After delighting in that satisfying new laptop smell, I made recovery DVDs I will presumably never need, then blew away Windows 7 and installed openSUSE 12.3 (full disclosure: I work for SUSE, so my choice of distro may not be entirely unbiased).
Some niceties:
- The textured touchpad is lovely. Much better feel than a pure flat surface.
- As I’d expect, the keyboard is excellent (even if PGUP/PGDN aren’t where I’m used to).
- The openSUSE installer is quick and easy. I’m pretty sure there’s less steps than last time I did a regular openSUSE install from scratch a couple of years ago.
- No problem setting up encrypted LVM, although on my ~500GB drive it defaults to a 20GB root and 25GB
/home, with a whole lotta free space left over in the encrypted partition, so that might want some tweaking. - Entering the passphrase on boot happens on a pretty graphical screen, you don’t get thrown back to a terminal window where random junk is appearing over the passphrase entry prompt.
- Moving my mail over from my old laptop was pretty much just an rsync of the Thunderbird profile directory (and maybe a tweak to
~/.thunderbird/profiles.ini)
Some oddities:
- The Novell GroupWise 8.0.2 client had a couple of problems:
- It claims to need
libXm.so.3(listed in RPM Requires), but works fine without it. This is fortunate, because openSUSE 12.3 doesn’t shipopenmotif22-libs-32bitanymore. - Unless you’ve installed
libpangox-1_0-0-32bit, the GroupWise client will segfault somewhere inlibwebrenderer.so. This is less than obvious. - The YaST disk partitioner seems slightly confused adding new LVs inside my encrypted VG later on (it either locked up or crashed). I haven’t had time to investigate this properly, so I’ve ignored it for the moment and used
lvcreateandmkfsin a terminal instead. - You do need to reboot at least once after initial install for NetworkManager to work properly (this is mentioned in the release notes).
- I’m running GNOME 3.6, and I tried using the tweak tool to have it just blank the screen – not suspend – when closing the laptop lid. Turns out systemd is being too clever for me, so I had to fiddle with that a bit (set
HandleLidSwitch=ignorein/etc/systemd/logind.conf, then runsudo systemctl restart systemd-logind).
Very little else to report so far. Aside from the oddities above everything else seems to Just WorkTM. OTOH, all I’ve really done is web browsing, email and assorted fiddling around in terminals. Maybe listened to a bit of music (the inbuilt speakers are well and truly loud enough, but a bit tinnier than real speakers – can’t say I’m terribly surprised by that though).
Lenovo business Sollbruchstelle?
One year ago I wrote about the Lenovo Thinkpad Tablet based on Tegra II. After 12 months + the device is now pretty doomed. Not only mechanical switches stop working, the power supply gave up around the same time. Looks like Lenovo sells cheap and crappy hardware for business prices. For a ThinkPad labeled device that is far behind any expectations. But the whole concept behind Lenovos business tablets is flawed.
The manufacturer delivered since quite some time no security updates. The device boots only OS kernels digitally signed by Lenovo. So business administrators can not fix anything on their own as is otherwise usual for Android. That lockout makes just junk in a business environment. Further the company decided to build upon a Windows only chipst for the ThinkPad 2 Tablet, without any plans for migration of investments in Android. The minimum would have been a dual boot machine for those, who prefer to continue with, what they have build already. This is a business reset decision inside Lenovo. One simple measure would be to make the kernel signature public available to allow for security and OS updates on the device on a professional base. An other important step is to open up the currently Windows only ThinkPad 2 tablet for Android.
wxRuby is now on BuildService
I am happy to announce that i succeded in compiling wxRuby 2.0.1 on my Buildservice account and it is available to be installed in just one click for openSUSE 12.2 and 12.3.
wxRuby is an old but working library based on wxWidgets toolkit, till some day ago the dependency from SWIG 1.3.38 and some small errors raised during the manual compilation, made the use of this library the worst nightmare for beginners who was looking for a fast approach to GUI based programming in Ruby.
After some day spent to investigate about a possible upgrade of the SWIG dependency to the current 2.0 version, i produced some patches to fix this and the other annoying compiling errors, and finally, thanks to the Buildservice infrastructure, a wxRuby RPM compiled from sources with the relative patches are now availables for all openSUSE users!
As far i googled this should be the first distro to have a precompiled and working wxruby gem among its repositories (being compiled from sources the gem is generated for 32 and 64 bits architecture from Buildservice itself), so Rubyists take a look on software.opensuse.org, select the package coming from my home project account and enjoy!