The KR49 repo holds KDE SC 4.9 packages for openSUSE users. For information on how to update please refer to the openSUSE wiki.

UPnP support was disable for the KR49 packages since it causes lots of crashes (if Windows shares are present on the network) and seems unmaintained within KDE, i.e. no fix to look forward to.

Kudos

Packaging-wise kudos go to Todd, Nico and everybody else doing the packaging in KR49.  If you find any packages missing in KR49 compared to KR48 please submit them via the buildservice or  drop a note on the opensuse-kde mailinglist.

KDE-wise I would like to thank especially Laurent Montel who contributes a lot to fixing-up kmail2, including adding email backup and import functionality. András Manţia is another developer who helps to get kmail2 into shape and re-worked the filtering for 4.9.  (There are of course many more who contribute to KDE!) Since AFAIK both work for KDAB, it is good to see that there are still developers payed to work on KDE while most distros seem to overload their so called KDE-team with non-KDE stuff, resulting in little or no contribution to KDE and just enough time to get packaging done, if at all.

Things I noticed with KDE SC 4.9 so far

In dolphin one can now add extra information to the main view, i.e. next to each item. Actually a nice feature. The sad thing is that it only works for indexed folders. The user cannot know about this and is presented with lots of “-” below each icon instead of just not showing anything if there is nothing to show. Enabling the additional information will block dolphin’s GUI for some time proportional to the amount of items in the current folder. Indexing still has some issues, e.g. nepomuk re-indexes movie and some sound files after every log-in. On top of that instead of just checking the length etc. it reads the whole file, i.e. hundreds of MB just to  start all over again after the next log-in.

The places pane presents some new items, i.e. you can add searches to it. While some default searches do not seem to be of any use, i.e. e.g. just list all audio files or pictures from all over the computer, the time-related queries can be quite useful if you are willing to invest the GB needed to build up an index for 70 000 files.

Regarding mail loss, the bugs were unfortunately not fixed yet for online IMAP. There are two issues. a) You lose email if you move it to a local folder and the internet connection breaks down while kmail2 is still downloading the message. b) You also lose email if you pipe the emails in your imap folders through external apps such as bogofilter. For the latter a workaround exists. If you open the properties of the imap folders and enable “always retrieve full message” you will not lose emails because of piping unless a) kicks in.

Apper seems to become more stable. While it still suffers from a – let’s say – incomplete zypper backend for PackageKit on openSUSE, it lets PackageKit processes die within reasonable time and does not block zypper forever anymore.

Changes for upcoming openSUSE

As a result of my previous 2 second post I have submitted few changes to openSUSE to be included in a next release.

1. purge-kernels.service patch has been accepted by our brave mkinitrd package maintainer
2. requested a split of mkinitrd setup script from splashy package, so users can freely remove the initrd integration without breaking resume et al
3. I opened feature 313851 to make NM the default network tool at least for laptops, because this expects a little more changes than add a package to laptop pattern

Run NetworkManager on demand

That is very uncommon user-case for *nix machines, but makes a perfect sense for consumer devices. My Amazon Kindle or today’s smartphone or tables works in the same way – device starts without a network connection and there’s a button or magic tap enabling it. On my laptop I already have such button – it is the Fn+F2 with a antenna symbol printed. This is the rfkill button turns my wlan card on and off.

So what I want is once I turn wifi on, NetworkManager should start and work. With systemd and it’s udev integration this is so simple, that I was not able to find a good howto for it. So here we are with a small howto for udev/systemd newbiew like me.

We need to know a sysfs name of wlan0 – simple find /sys/ -name 'wlan0' will say us all we need. Then udevadm info will tell you more

udevadm info --path=/sys/class/net/wlan0 --attribute-walk | less
...
  looking at device '/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1c.2/0000:01:00.0/net/wlan0':
    KERNEL=="wlan0"
    SUBSYSTEM=="net"
    DRIVER==""

That is all you need to know how to write a rule will match for all wlan cards.

# cat /etc/udev/rules.d/95-start-nm-on-wlan.rules
SUBSYSTEM=="net", NAME=="wlan?", TAG+="systemd", ACTION=="add", ENV{SYSTEMD_WANTS}="NetworkManager.service"

To explain it – SUBSYSTEM and NAME are taken from previous output and means that following rule matches for all devices in net subsystem named wlan-something. We should append tag systemd, because systemd sees tagged devices only. The ACTION=="add" says the rule will be evaluated only in case device will be added and the last part says to systemd which service should be started.

In case you will want to stop NM, the

SUBSYSTEM=="net", NAME=="wlan?", TAG+="systemd", ACTION=="remove", ENV{SYSTEMD_WANTS}="NetworkManager-stop.service"

# cat /etc/systemd/system/NetworkManager-stop.service
[Unit]
Description=Stops NetworkManager
Conflicts=NetworkManager.service

[Service]
ExecStart=/bin/true

WLAN cards

For onboard wlan cards following thing won’t work as they appear in a tree from early phase. Unfortunately I’ve found only one way how kernel exports the fact cable is plugged in and that’s changed /sys/class/net/eth0/carrier. But inotify does not work with a quantum-like fs like sysfs is. The trouble is values appears in time of read, but inotify react on writes, which never appear.

How much the removal of getting IP address from boot saved the time?

# systemd-analyze
Startup finished in 2719ms (kernel) + 4333ms (userspace) = 7052ms

which is about half of second.

Too much mounts in a parallel

The one thing surprised me was a long time until trivial mounts like debugfs were finished. The reason is that systemd (at least 44, recent version use generator+ .mount units) behaves differently to .mount units and things in /etc/fstab. In the first case, it executes the /bin/mount. Which means a lot of ld, stats, mmap, and the big delay of the system start.

So move things to fstab, or disable the systemd mount unit (I did that for sys-kernel-debug.mount and sys-kernel-security.mount). I already masked the remount-rootfs.mount, which calls /bin/mount -o remount /< only. That seems to me like a barrier for other mount units – iow this will be done as a last one. But who cares with a fast boot we have?

Way more changes

Then the systemd-modules-load.service delay a boot as it block sysinit.service, when basic boot ends. I read strace carefully, but it only load microcode_ctl module, but that took few seconds to be done. Thus I gently masked it.

The next change is backport from Factory package – this reduce the delay caused by all those tty devices to appear. Fortunately this will be part of next openSUSE as it is an upstream patch.

And as a last thing I wrote a simple xdm.service, instead of a big xdm init script. It will definitely need more love, but for me just works

cat /etc/systemd/system/xdm.service
[Unit]
Description=X Display Manager
After=dbus.socket

[Service]
Type=simple
ExecStart=/usr/bin/xdm -nodaemon
Restart=always

[Install]
WantedBy=graphical.target

Voilà!

#systemd-analyze
Startup finished in 2698ms (kernel) + 1513ms (userspace) = 4212ms

Using dracut

Because our brave systemd maintainer, Fréderic Crozat, chooses dracut as his hackweek project, I was curious if dracut can make some gain for me. I installed dracut and rebuilt and installed hardlink from his branches and try to investigate it. I would say the biggest advantage over mkinitrd is that dracut is configurable from command line. This is in a contrast with mkinitrd, where you have mostly no way how to exclude something – at least I did not find anything.

As Fréderic also pointed me, there is a --hostonly switch, which include only things needed for boot of current machine only. For instance dracut module kernel-modules will pull only things needed to mount rootfs (and if usrmount is included, then it will add things for /usr as well). Then I have excluded at least everything I can to have a working initramfs via -o, --nofsck and --strip. And that is the resulting time

# systemd-analyze
Startup finished in 726ms (kernel) + 1609ms (initramfs) + 1581ms (userspace) = 3917ms

Disabling way more things

As we are now versed in a looking at diagrams, there are still few ms we can save, even those changes are not sane ;-). The first one follows the NetworkManager.service – now sshd.service delays the boot a lot, because it systemd-update-utmp-level.service waits on it’s finish. So let’s start it on demand

# cat /etc/udev/rules.d/95-start-nm-on-wlan.rules
SUBSYSTEM=="net", NAME=="wlan?", TAG+="systemd", ACTION=="add", ENV{SYSTEMD_WANTS}="NetworkManager.service sshd.service"

and disable it. Then mask all few remaining things – systemd-login.service, systemd-remount-api-vfs.service, systemd-user-session.service and rc-local.service. But only in case you are pretty sure what you are doing, because you might loose an important functionality, especially if you use a DE expected such things.

And that is the last time I will post

# systemd-analyze 
Startup finished in 726ms (kernel) + 1502ms (initramfs) + 1112ms (userspace) = 3341ms

With a kernel with SATA+ext support builtin, I would reach the two second goal – 1839ms. Of course on a system, which functionality was extremely cut down, but my goal was to boot as fast as possible. In reality, hunting of ms does not makes your feeling better a lot (until you will type systemd-analyze, of course)

This is the diagram of the really fast boot

Hi,

here’s a small summary of the 10th (coding) week. Last week I worked
mostly on the new fetcher code which I finally pushed into the git
repo. Apart from this I did some refactoring here and there.
The todo for this and the next week is to start with the new osc
user interface (that is the client code). As I already wrote in the
proposal the new osc client will be based on python’s argparse module
and the Jinja2 template engine.

Marcus

• Day 1:

• cleaned up dracut package (done by trenn), to meet openSUSE standard, remove any Fedora specific stuff in it and update it to latest dracut package, available at https://build.opensuse.org/package/show?package=dracut&project=home%3Afcrozat%3Abranches%3ABase%3ASystem in openSUSE:Factory.
  

• update hardlink package (available atm in Java:base, will move it to Base:System), needed for dracut at runtime. Available at https://build.opensuse.org/package/show?package=hardlink&project=home%3Afcrozat%3Abranches%3AJava%3Abase in openSUSE:Factory too.

• modified my own grub2 configuration to add a additional dracut menu entry (hard coded atm)
• succesfully booted a 12.2 VM with dracut image !
• Day 2:
• discussed with upstream if they would accept "compatibility" patches to team dracut about openSUSE / SLE own initrd command line and got no as an answer, because they don't want to maintain compability cruft on their own side.
• worked on a separate module which is able to convert at boot time SUSE initrd commands into dracut one (when they are available). Works fine for "shell=1" "linuxrc=trace" and "sysrq". Upstream proposed to review the module for mistake when we are done with it
• asked upstream if they were interested in "sysrq" feature for dracut. No response yet
• worked on separate journal (reiserfs / XFS). Need to create VM to test it and ask upstream if they want to integrate it
• Day 3:
• got trenn cflags patch merged upstream
• continue digging into dracut internals
• journaldev is working on boot command line (tested with XFS)
• need improvement to configure initrd with system fstab value, when available and try to use a more generic term (root.journaldev)
• Day 4:
• subscribed to initramfs mailing list
• got my first patch merged upstream (journaldev support)
• added cmdline support for mduuid and isci (TargetAddress / TargetPort / TargetName), untested (don't have the right setup)
• ran test suite, found some issues: some in dracut upstream (fixed immediatly by upstream), some in our package (fixed mdadm and device-mapper to not call blkid binary but use udev builtin-blkid, will be faster and we save some fork ;)
• Day 5:
• sr mdadm and device-mapper fixes
• tried to get all test suite to pass
• some fixes were made to dracut, with more test passing
• still getting issue with network based test (NFS, iSCSI, etc..). Partially working (DHCP server is working now in test suite), partially not (impossible to mount stuff in server test image, getting "EUID=1000" for root, even when booting the image with init=/bin/sh .. No clue to fix that and upstream never got this issue either, if you have an idea, I'm all ears..)