• u-boot on the iMX53 is old and the Linaro image tools have advanced without making allowances for the unsupported mx53loco type.
  • For LAVA, this means that u-boot on the iMX53 does not understand ext4 and although there are guides on updating it, I wanted to stay with the original, at least at the start.
  • Using ext4 will lead to this error:

    mmc0: error 110 whilst initialising SD card
    

• iMX53 quick start boards come with a working Ubuntu installation on an SD card but the release is Lucid Lynx 10.04LTS. LAVA has been on Precise Pangolin 12.04LTS for some time.
  • This causes issues with debootstrap which cannot unpack packages from Debian sid due to changes in the compression format inside the .deb files. It is possible to use wheezy and note that lucid, by default, will produce armel. Use --arch=armhf, then apt-get upgrade and apt-get dist-upgrade to testing and then to sid (not in one single step). Remember to mount proc before starting the upgrade.

diff --git a/lava-create-master b/lava-create-master
index 2e1d0e8..a1e6131 100755
--- a/lava-create-master
+++ b/lava-create-master
@@ -366,7 +366,7 @@ make_master()  
         verbose " * Building vanilla image with linaro-media-create..."
         if ! linaro-media-create \
             --dev $LMC_DEV \
-            --rootfs ext4 \
+            --rootfs ext3 \
             --image-file $CACHE_DIR/pristine-images/$dev-vanilla.img \
             --image-size 1G \
             --align-boot-part \

$ sudo mount /dev/mmcblk0p3 /mnt/
$ pushd /mnt
$ sudo tar -czf /tmp/imx53-rootfs.tgz ./*
$ popd
$ sudo umount /mnt/

$ sudo mkfs.ext3 /dev/mmcblk0p3

$ sudo mount /dev/mmcblk0p3 /mnt/
$ pushd /mnt
$ sudo tar -xzvf /tmp/imx53-rootfs.tgz
$ popd
$ sudo sync
$ sudo umount /mnt/

> run loaduimage
> run mmcboot

> setenv script
> saveenv
> reset

device_type = mx53loco
hostname = imx53-01
connection_command = telnet hobbes 4002
#login_prompt = lucid-desktop login:
#password_prompt = Password:
#username = lucid
#password = lucid
hard_reset_command = /usr/bin/pduclient --daemon localhost --hostname pdu --command reboot --port 05
power_off_cmd = /usr/bin/pduclient --daemon localhost --hostname pdu --command off --port 05
power_on_cmd = /usr/bin/pduclient --daemon localhost --hostname pdu --command on --port 05
testboot_offset = 3

 ** Partition 4 not valid on device 0 **

  setenv bootcmd "fatload mmc 0:4 0x70000000 uImage; fatload mmc 0:4 0x72000000 uInitrd; fatload mmc 0:4 0x71ff0000 board.dtb; bootm 0x70000000 0x72000000 0x71ff0000"

  setenv bootcmd "fatload mmc 0:4 0x70000000 uImage; fatload mmc 0:5 0x72000000 uInitrd; fatload mmc 0:5 0x71ff0000 board.dtb; bootm 0x70000000 0x72000000 0x71ff0000"

 
 "health_check": false,
 "job_name": "iMX53-hacking",
 "logging_level": "DEBUG",
 "device_type": "mx53loco",
 "timeout": 900,
 "actions": [
 
 "command": "deploy_linaro_image",
 "parameters": 
 "image": "file:///home/linaro/lava/mx53loco-ubuntu-desktop.img.gz",
 "rootfstype": "ext3"
 
 ,
 
 "command": "lava_test_shell",
 "parameters": 
 "testdef_repos": [
 
 "git-repo": "git://git.linaro.org/qa/test-definitions.git",
 "testdef": "ubuntu/smoke-tests-basic.yaml"
 ,
 
 "git-repo": "http://git.linaro.org/git/lava-team/hacking-session.git",
 "parameters": 
 "GATEWAY": "10.15.0.1",
 "PUB_KEY": "...."
 ,
 "testdef": "hacking-session-debian.yaml"
 
 ],
 "timeout": 18000
 
 ,
 
 "command": "submit_results_on_host",
 "parameters": 
 "server": "http://sylvester.codehelp/RPC2/",
 "stream": "/anonymous/codehelp/"
 
 
 ]
 

#  ::::
#     TCP port
#            Name   or  number of the TCP/IP port to accept con-
#            nections from for this device.  A port number may
#            be of the form [host,]port, such as 127.0.0.1,2000
#            or localhost,2000.  If this is specified, it will
#            only bind to the IP address specified. Otherwise
#            it will bind to all the ports on the machine.
# 10.15.0.1,4000:telnet:600:/dev/ttyUSB0:115200 8DATABITS NONE 1STOPBIT banner

10.15.0.1,4000:telnet:0:/dev/ttyUSB0:115200 8DATABITS NONE 1STOPBIT banner
10.15.0.1,4001:telnet:0:/dev/ttyUSB1:115200 8DATABITS NONE 1STOPBIT banner

Just saw this in my INBOX:

    B. The default init system for jessie will be a single /etc/rc script
 

I d certainly vote that

New graphs for port metrics By default, a dependency graph is created by arbitrarily choosing an installation set for binary package installation or source package compilation. Installation set vertices and source vertices are connected according to this arbitrary selection. Niels Thykier approached me at Debconf13 about the possibility of using this graph to create a metric which would be able to tell for each source package, how many other source packages would become uncompilable or how many binary packages would become uninstallable, if that source package was removed from the archive. This could help deciding about the importance of packages. More about this can be found at the thread on debian-devel. For botch, this meant that two new graph graphs can now be generated. Instead of picking an arbitrary installation set for compiling a source package or installing a binary package, botch can now create a minimum graph which is created by letting dose3 calculate strong dependencies and a maximum graph by using the dependency closure.

Build profile syntax in dpkg With dpkg 1.17.2 we now have experimental build profile support in unstable. The syntax which ended up being added was:

Build-Depends: large (>= 1.0), small <!profile.stage1>

But until packages with that syntax can hit the archive, a few more tools need to understand the syntax. The patch we have for sbuild is very simple because sbuild relies on libdpkg for dependency parsing. We have a patch for apt too, but we have to rebase it for the current apt version and have to adapt it so that it works exactly like the functionality dpkg implements. But before we can do that we have to decide how to handle mixed positive and negative qualifiers or whether to remove this feature altogether because it causes too much confusion. The relevant thread on debian-dpkg starts here.

Update to latest dose3 git Botch heavily depends on libdose3 and unfortunately requires features which are only available in the current git HEAD. The latest version packaged in Debian is 3.1.3 from October 2012. Unfortunately the current dose3 git HEAD also relies on unreleased features from libcudf. On top of that, the GraphML output of the latest ocamlgraph version (1.8.3) is also broken and only fixed in the git. For now everything is set up as git submodules but this is the major blocker preventing any packaging of botch as a Debian package. Hopefully new releases will be done soon for all involved components.

Writing and reading GraphML Botch is a collection of several utilities which are connected together in a shell script. The advantage of this is, that one does not need to understand or hack the OCaml code to use botch for different purposes. In theory it also allows to insert 3rd party tools into a pipe to further modify the data. Until recently this ability was seriously hampered by the fact that many botch tools communicated with each other through marshaled OCaml binary files which prevent everything which is not written in OCaml from modifying them. The data that was passed around like this were the dependency graphs and I initially implemented it like that because I didnt want to write a GraphML parser. I now ended up writing an xmlm based GraphML parser so as of now, botch only reads and writes ASCII text files in XML (for the graphs) and in rfc822 packages format (for Packages and Sources files) which can both easily be modified by 3rd party tools. The ./tools directory contains many Python scripts using the networkx module to modify GraphML and the apt_pkg module to modify rfc822 files.

Splitting of tools To further increase the ability to modify program execution without having to know OCaml, I split up some big tools into multiple smaller ones. Some of the smaller tools are now even written in Python which is probably much more hackable for the general crowd. I converted those tools to Python which did not need any dose3 functionality and which were simple enough so that writing them didnt take much time. I could convert more tools but that might introduce bugs and takes time which I currently dont have much of (who does?).

Gzip instead of bz2 Since around January 14, snapshot.debian.org doesnt offer bzip2 compressed Packages and Sources files anymore but uses xz instead. This is awesome for must purposes but unfortunately I had to discover that there exist no OCaml bindings for libxz. Thus, botch is now using gzip instead of bz2 until either myself or anybody else finds some time to write a libxz OCaml binding.

Self hosting Fedora Paul Wise made me aware of Harald Hoyer's attempts to bootstrap Fedora. I reproduced his steps for the Debian dependency graph and it turns out that they are a little bit bigger. I'm exchanging emails with Harald Hoyer because it might not be too hard to use botch for rpm based distributions as well because dose3 supports rpm. The article also made me aware of the tred tool which is part of graphviz and allows to calculate the transitive reduction of a graph. This can help making horrible situations much better.

Dose3 bugs I planned to generate such simplified graphs for the neighborhood of each source package on bootstrap.debian.net but then binutils stopped building binutils-gold and instead provided binutils-gold while libc6-dev breaks binutils-gold (<< 2.20.1-11). This unfortunately triggered a dose3 bug and thus bootstrap.debian.net will not generate any new results until this is fixed in dose3. Another dose3 bug affects packages which Conflicts/Replaces/Provides:bar while bar is fully virtual and are Multi-Arch:same. Binaries of different architecture with this property can currently not be co-installed with dose3. Unfortunately linux-libc-dev has this property and thus botch cannot be used to analyze cross builds until that bug is fixed in dose3. I hope I get some free time soon to be able to look at these dose3 issues myself.

More documentation Since I started to like the current set of tools and how they work together I ended up writing over 2600 words of documentation in the past few days. You can start setting up and running botch by reading the first steps and get more detailed information by reading about the 28 tools that botch makes use of as of now. All existing articles, thesis and talks are linked from the wiki home.

• Although the comments are styled minimally you can override that with CSS.
• Although the default "Add your reply" form is ugly you can replace it with your own.
  • The reply-form may go above or below the comments.
• If you add an email field then your comments will include a gravitar link.
• Comments are assumed to be in markdown now.
• The commments may be retrieved in newest-first, or oldest-first order.
• There's now a simple anti-spam plugin system present.

• https://github.com/skx/e-comments
• Simple demo & Customized demo.

• public and private Git hosting
• continuous integration (Jenkins)
• code review (Gerrit)
• file sharing (e.g. git-annex + webdav)
• wiki
• issue tracking
• virtual windows systems for Internet Explorer testing
• MySQL / Postgres databases
• PaaS for PHP, Python, Ruby, Java
• staging environment
• Mails, Mailing Lists
• simple calendar, CRM
• monitoring

• The infrastructure itself should be open (but not free of charge), like the OpenStack Project Infrastructure as presented at LCA. I especially like how they review their puppet config with Gerrit.
• The process to become an admin for the infrastructure should work much the same like the process to become a Debian Developer. I'd also like the same attitude towards quality as present in Debian.

#! /bin/sh # Simple script that generates a cmake project file for a Qt project #
# Copyright (c) 2013 Sune Vuorela
#
# Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person
# obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation
# files (the Software ), to deal in the Software without
# restriction, including without limitation the rights to use,
# copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell
# copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the
# Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following
# conditions:
#
# The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be
# included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.
#
# THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED AS IS , WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND,
# EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES
# OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND
# NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT
# HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY,
# WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING
# FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR
# OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.
# CPPFILES= $(ls *.cpp 2>/dev/null) UIFILES= $(ls *.ui 2>/dev/null) QRCFILES= $(ls *.qrc 2>/dev/null) NAME= $(basename $(pwd)) error()
echo ERROR: $@
exit 1
debug()
[ -z "$ DEBUG " ] && return
echo DEBUG: $@ 1>&2
# sanity checks if [ -e "CMakeLists.txt" ]
then
error CMakeLists.txt found. Doing nothing.
fi if [ -z "$ CPPFILES " ]
then
error No cpp files found
fi debug NAME $ NAME
debug CPPFILES $ CPPFILES
debug UIFILES $ UIFILES
debug QRCFILES $ QRCFILES # First part of cmake files
cat >> CMakeLists.txt << __EOHEADER__
project($ NAME ) cmake_minimum_required(VERSION 2.8.11) find_package(Qt5 CONFIG REQUIRED Widgets) set(CMAKE_AUTOMOC ON)
set(CMAKE_INCLUDE_CURRENT_DIR ON) __EOHEADER__ # Handle ui files if any
if [ -n "$ UIFILES " ]
then
cat >> CMakeLists.txt << __EOUI__
set($ NAME _ui $ UIFILES )
qt5_wrap_ui($ NAME _wrapped_ui \$ $ NAME _ui ) __EOUI__ UIWRAPPED="\$ $ NAME _wrapped_ui "
debug prepared UIWRAPPED $ UIWRAPPED
fi # Handle qrc files if any
if [ -n "$ QRCFILES " ]
then cat >> CMakeLists.txt << __EOQRC__
set($ NAME _qrc $ QRCFILES )
qt5_add_resources($ NAME _wrapped_qrc \$ $ NAME _qrc ) __EOQRC__ QRCWRAPPED="\$ $ NAME _wrapped_qrc "
debug prepared QRCWRAPPED $ QRCWRAPPED
fi # Build the actual library
cat >> CMakeLists.txt << __EOCPP__
set($ NAME _src $ CPPFILES ) add_executable($ NAME \$ $ NAME _src $ UIWRAPPED $ QRCWRAPPED ) target_link_libraries($ NAME Qt5::Widgets )
__EOCPP__

As a social problem discussion grows longer in debian-private the probability of some developer proposing a technical solution aproaches one.

• [1] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2012/11/17/geeky-jeans/
• [2] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2012/12/30/samsung-galaxy-camera/

You don t see me complaining that everything on the web is in English, do you?