You may be aware that openSUSE Leap 42.2 is now in the release candidate stage, and there’s a lot of activity aimed at squashing those pesky bugs before they hit the final release. One particular bug proved to be quite tough to fix, and it was only solved thanks to the “heroes” mentioned in the title. This is the history of the bug.

The report

October 6th, 2016 - A bug iss reported against Plasma reporting a hard freeze of Plasma when using the Noveau driver, but not with the closed NVIDIA blob. Although the effect is deleterious to Plasma and not other desktop environments, there is evidence that the issue is in the driver itself, but there’s only partial indications, and no conclusive proof.

The problem is that no one of the current KDE team members has access to a NVIDIA card so it’s hard to determine what is actually going on. After thinking over it for a while, I decided it was time to call in the pros. And in KDE, Martin Graesslin of KWin fame is the best bet when graphics and KWin interactions are involved. He suggested to get a backtrace of the freezes and crashes to ensure what exactly is happening. At the same time, Antonio Larrosa from the KDE team tried to get hold of a test system to investigate the cause.

Antonio eventually managed to reproduce the problem with a specific NVIDIA card and Noveau, and his initial results pointed at issues in interactions between the Noveau driver and KWin itself. Martin, being a nice person, also subscribed to the report, and once the bactraces came in he was able to find a solution to the riddle: when using OpenGL, Mesa waited for a buffer and in turn blocked KWin. The net result was an apparent freeze of the workspace when logging in.

Patches had been proposed to fix the issue, but according to upstream Noveau developers, they just made matters worse (instability).

As an aside, Noveau, despite the heroic efforts from its developers, has still several issues when using apparently “normal” workflows: for example any application using QWebEngine will crash on Noveau because while the driver does work well with multi-threaded rendering, the Blink engine uses different threads even when Qt is using single-threaded rendering.

Once the problem was found, the 5 eurocent question was: what can we do to fix the situation?

The hunt for a solution

One major problem with this issue was that not all NVIDIA cards were affected. Only specific models exhibited the problem, which meant blanket-disabling OpenGL for KWin when using Noveau was too restrictive. But at the same time, the only environment affected was Plasma. The situation was extremely dire for the default desktop in openSUSE.

But two of our today’s heroes did not give up. Martin and Antonio sat around a virtual table and tried to work out a solution. Martin suggested to use the same mechanism that KWin used normally to determine if the use of OpenGL is “unsafe” when starting up, disabling it if any problems arose. It didn’t work in the specific case only because the freeze occurred when rendering started, that is past this checkpoint.

The discussion was fruitful. Across the several hypotheses mentioned, Fabian Vogt, also from the openSUSE KDE team, thought about a “dead man’s switch”: KWin would get killed and restarted if a freeze occurred, but disabling OpenGL after the restart. That was enough for Antonio and Martin to come up with a strategy: checking with a timer if KWin was frozen during rendering. If the timer went off, KWin would get killed and restarted automatically, but disabling OpenGL (more technically, activating the “OpenGL unsafe protection”), and now would be able to continue without freezes. Antonio posted his patch for review and that is where we meet another hero of the day, David “d_ed” Edmundson. During the patch review, he asked Antonio what kind of card exhibited the issue, and promptly acted to get one to run tests himself.

Patches went back and forth for a number of days, scrapping one solution after the other, until Martin was finally able to accept the final revision, which was merged by Antonio in the Plasma/5.8 branch of kwin (meaning, everyone will benefit from it). Fabian then proceeded to submit these patches to openSUSE Leap and to openSUSE Tumbleweed.

As final icing on the cake, Antonio was able to come up with a patch to QWebEngine to disable the GPU if Noveau was detected, preventing crashes at the price of reduced performance (and adding two environment variables to force or disable the behavior, respectively).

The bottom line

What could I say: upstream-downstream collaboration is truly awesome, and even more so when such a difficult bug is tackled and fixed. The way my fellow KDE team members acted is truly commendable, and so the behavior of upstream KDE (despite the false “they don’t listen” mantra) that helped and offered assistance in getting a proper solution out.

So if you ever meet Antonio, David, Fabian, and Martin, please offer them a beverage of their choice. They’re the heroes Free Software deserves.

Bottom note

Other noteworthy people need to be mentioned here due to their involvement:

• Dominique Leuenberger and Ludwig Nussel, namely the Tumbleweed and Leap release managers, for keeping up at their jobs (that is, ensuring that awesome software is released timely and properly);
• The SUSE X11 developers, for their assistance on the Mesa side of things;
• The openSUSE community for bug reporting and testing, or this bug would’ve never been discovered.

I am proud to announce the launch of the new crowbyte.org websites.

Over half a year passed by since my last post on the crowbyte.org blog and I am happy to give some sign of life of crowbyte.org and myself alike.

A lot has happened in such a long period of time.

So lets sum up the most important cornerstones since the last activities here:

• I moved from Berlin to Schleswig Holstein due to a new job in Hamburg
• crowbyte.org is now reached over a secured https connection with certificate...

Ich bin stolz hiermit die neue Webseite von crowbyte.org anzukündigen.

Über ein halbes Jahr ist seit meinem letzten Post im Blog von crowbyte.org vergangen und ich bin glücklich ein Lebenszeichen von crowbyte.org und mir gleichermaßen zu geben.

Eine Menge ist passiert in eine solch langen Zeit.

Also lasst mich die wichtigsten Eckpunkte seit meiner letzten Aktivität kurz zusammenfassen:

• aufgrund einer neuen Anstellung in Hamburg bin ich von Berlin nach Schleswig-Holstein gezogen
• crowby...

Today the OpenStack Summit started in Barcelona, Spain, with the keynotes.

Looking forward to my talk later today: Vanilla or Distributions: How Do They Differentiate? and a interesting summit the next days.

Llevo ya bastantes años usando Digikam como gestor de álbumes de fotos. Hace ya muchas versión implantaron un módulo llamado “mesa de luz“, que recordando las mesas de luz de las diapositivas permite comparar cómodamente dos imágenes al mismo tiemnpo de forma sincronizada. Es muy útil para comparar dos imágenes casi idénticas y seleccionar la que tenga mejor nitidez, foco, exposición, etc…
La verdad, no lo he usado casi nunca, no le encontré mucha utilidad, hasta ayer, cuando descubrí que es una herramienta fabulosa para comparar dos fotogramas de las cámaras de trampeo y averiguar si por su patrón de manchas la gineta es la misma o no. A la izquierda el macho de gineta que ya viejo conocido (ver post anterior), a la derecha un “desconocida” fotografiada (por los pelos, solo los cuartos traseros) en una ubicación nueva (y bastante remota con respecto a las originales).

Conclusión, la gineta es la misma, y cada día me alucina más las caminatas que estos animales (paticortos) se pegan cruzándose La Muela de una punta a la otra con una regularidad y facilidad que me tiene asombrado.

Sebelumnya saya sudah pernah cerita tentang pengalaman saya menjadi relawan pada openSUSE Asia summit 2016, kalau mau baca bisa ke sini : https://dhenandi.com/opensuse-asia-summit-2016-a-little-stories-from-volunteer/

Dengan perasaan hati senang saya menulis tulisan ini, karena kemarin saya mendapatkan sepatu Fans keren buatan pak Iwan Tahari dari Pak Estu Fardani.

Ketika openSUSE Asia Summit hari kedua, tiba-tiba sepatu saya jebol, alas kakinya mangap haha,. gara-gara saya lari-larian atau mondar-mandir mungkin di hari pertama. Jadi di hari kedua saya stay di Convention Hall sebagai operator karena emang leptop saya ada disana.

Sebelumnya Pak Estu pernah tanya ukuran sepatu saya, dengan harepan Pak Estu nyamperin saya nanyain sepatunya kenapa terus dikasih sepatu baru. Ternyataaaaa… kagak ???

Malem hari kedua waktu saya mah balik ke home stay, pak estu telegram saya, katanya ada sepatu lebih. Nah ini yang ditunggu haha. Alhamdulillah ternyata saya kebagian. Katanya nanti dikirimi ke bekasi.

Di Bekasi saya nunggu sepatu, pas sepatunya sampe, ternyata ukurannya besar sekali. Ukuran saya 39 dapetnya 42 ?.

Sepatu kudu saya terima dengan harepan kaki saya tiba-tiba besar sesuai dengan ukuran sepatu. Kemudian saya kontak Pak Estu buat bilang makasih. Ternyata alhamdulillah emang rezeki saya. Masih ada sisa ukuran 39 nya. Jadi sepatu yang ini saya kasih ke Pak Boss Vavai.

Sekitar seminggu nunggu, alhamdulillah Hari Jum’at sore kemarin sampai bekasi dengan selamat. Tapi sialnya saya udah pulang kantor. Jadi saya titipin ke Fajar, temen kantor yang rumahnya deket sama saya.

Sepatu ini bagus banget dari desainnya. Dapet F-Lock juga yang bisa memudahkan saya buat mengencangkan dan mengendorkan tali sepatu.

Sepatu ini juga sudah saya pakai buat kerja. So far, sepatu ini nyaman digunakan, sumpeh. Saya bukan salesnya sepatu Fans tapi ini beneran sepatunya nyaman. Senyaman perasaanku ke kamu…

Makanya bisa nyesel kalian yang gak ikut acara openSUSE Asia Summit kemarin. Banyak hadiah men!

Sepatu ini diberikan tandanya saya harus lebih banyak memberikan kontribusi ke komunitas dan saya harus banyak belajar dan mempersiapkan diri buat openSUSE Asia Summit 2017 di Jepang (Aaaaaminnnn) :-D.

Okay, sedikit cerita dari saya, thanks. Kalau mau lihat review lengkap sepatu ini bisa kunjungi blognya mas Ary dan kalau anda tertarik dan mau pesen bisa ke Blog nya Pak Estu.

The post Sepatu Keren dari openSUSE Asia Summit 2016 appeared first on dhenandi.com.

Warnings

There’s no warranties the drivers will work, for you!

If you are satisfied with the open-source radeon drivers, don’t risk to break your computer !

Still there will NEVER be a fglrx driver for recent kernel and xorg. So if one of those component change in Leap fglrx will be broken.

Actual situation

Since last december, AMD doesn’t published any update about fglrx so the version is still the 15.12.302 published. A few days ago our beloved Leap release manager Ludwig ask me by email, if there will be an available drivers for Leap 42.2.

Today, after hacking a bit the last Sebastian Siebert’s script I’ve been able to build the drivers for Leap 42.2 RC1, and the driver install fine, and xorg start on my HD5750 (but that’s all what I can tell).

I will rebuild the driver once Leap 42.2 will hit its final stage.

Repository

zypper ar -cfg -n FGLRX http://geeko.ioda.net/mirror/amd-fglrx/openSUSE_Leap_42.2/ FLGRX

zypper -v refresh -f FGLRX

zypper -v install fglrx64_amdcccle_SUSE422 fglrx64_core_SUSE422 fglrx64_graphics_SUSE422  fglrx64_opencl_SUSE422 fglrx64_xpic_SUSE422

Future

AMD has stopped any development for FGLRX, so it is already considered obsolete. But on the other side they make a lot of effort to bring radeon and amdgpu (the free and open source driver) to a decent performance level.

I don’t have that much usage anymore of my AMD gpu powered computer, and my HD5750 is now 8 years old already, so I can’t promise to be able to follow up with changes.

Cleanup

I removed all the obsoletes packages letting only the last one for each openSUSE version still available. Also the server has no more copy of openSUSE github artwork. If this missing to someone, don’t hesitate to ask.

Have fun

One afternoon twenty years ago Matthias Ettrich and Martin Konold sat at a stone table in the cafeteria of the university Tübingen and talked computers. They talked Linux and they talked desktop. They talked about making Linux accessible to everyone. This was the moment where KDE was born. This afternoon they walked away with a mission. Matthias went on to write the call to action to found the KDE project, and Martin to create the very first KDE mailing list kde@fiwi02.wiwi.uni-tuebingen.de.


On October 14th 1996 the famous announcement arrived on the newsgroups comp.os.linux.development.apps, comp.os.linux.misc, and de.comp.os.linux.misc:

    New Project: Kool Desktop Environment. Programmers wanted!

The new project quickly attracted a group of enthusiastic developers and they pushed out code with a frentic pace. kdelibs-0.0.1 was released in November, containing the first classes KConfig and KApplication. In May 1997 the young project presented at the Linux-Kongress in Würzburg. In August Kalle Dalheimer published the famous article about KDE in the German computer magazine c't which attracted a whole generation of KDE developers to the project. On Jul 12th 1998 KDE 1.0 was done and released. The community had not only implemented a friendly face for Linux but also a bunch of applications while going, including a full web browser.


KDE did hundreds more releases over the years, continuously improving and maintaining the growing number of applications and amount of code. The community grew. It started to do annual conferences such as Akademy or the Desktop Summits and focused developer sprints such as the Osnabrück or the Randa meetings. KDE e.V., the organization behind KDE, which was founded as partner for the KDE Free Qt Foundation, grew with the community to be the corner stone of the organizational structure of KDE, using German association law as its secret superpower (read more about this in the book "20 Years of KDE: Past, Present and Future").

Millions and millions of people used KDE software over the years. Thousands of people contributed. KDE made appearances in Hollywood movies, it was subject of theses and scientific studies, and it won many awards. KDE's founder, Matthias Ettrich even received the German Federal Cross of Merit. The timeline of twenty years of KDE is an impressive demonstration of what Free Software is able to achieve.


KDE also was a breeding ground. Many people started their careers there. Hundreds of students went through mentoring programs such as the Summer of Code or the Season of KDE. Whole projects emerged from KDE, such as ownCloud and its sibling NextCloud, Kolab, or KHTML, which turned into WebKit and then Blink, powering most of web browsers on this planet today.

Today Linux has reached world domination in various, sometimes surprising, ways. KDE has contributed its share to that. With Plasma it provides a slick and powerful desktop which does make Linux accessible to everyone. This mission has been accomplished. But there is more. Following KDE's vision of bringing freedom to people's digital life there are amazing projects exploring new areas through Free Software, be it an application such as Krita to bring freedom to digital painters, or a project such as WikiToLearn to create collaborative text books for education. When KDE people meet you can feel the enthusiasm, the openness, and the commitment to change the world to the better just as in the days of the beginning.


I joined KDE in 1999 with my first patch to KOrganizer. I wrote a lot of code, maintained and founded applications, served on the board of KDE e.V. for nine years. Most importantly I found a lot of friends. Neither my personal nor my professional life would be what it is today without KDE. I owe a lot to this community. Thank you for the last twenty years.