Search Results: "Manuel A. Fernandez Montecelo"

22 April 2017

Manuel A. Fernandez Montecelo: Debian GNU/Linux port for RISC-V 64-bit (riscv64)

This is a post describing my involvement with the Debian GNU/Linux port for RISC-V (unofficial and not endorsed by Debian at the moment) and announcing the availability of the repository (still very much WIP) with packages built for this architecture. If not interested in the story but you want to check the repository, just jump to the bottom. Roots A while ago, mostly during 2014, I was involved in the Debian port for OpenRISC (or1k) about which I posted (by coincidence) exactly 2 years ago. The two of us working on the port stopped in August or September of that year, after knowing that the copyright of the code to add support for this architecture in GCC would not be assigned to the FSF, so it would never be added to GCC upstream unless the original authors changed their mind (which they didn't) or there was a clean-room reimplementation (which didn't happen so far). But a few other key things contributed to the decision to stop working on that port, which bear direct relationship to this story. One thing that particularly influenced me to stop working on it was a sense of lack of purpose, all things considered, for the OpenRISC port that we were working on. For example, these chips are sometimes used as part of bigger devices by Samsung to control or wake up other chips; but it was not clear whether there would ever be devices with OpenRISC as the main chip, specially in devices powerful enough to run Linux or similar kernels, and Debian on top. One can use FPGAs to synthesise OpenRISC or1k, but these are slow, and expensive when using lots of memory. Without prospects of having hardware easily available to users, there's not much point in having a whole Debian port ready to run on hardware that never comes to be. Yeah, sure, it's fun to create such a port, but it's tons of work to maintain and keep it up to-date forever, and with close to zero users it's very unrewarding. Another thing that contributed to decide to stop is that, at least in my opinion, 32-bit was not future-proof enough for general purpose computing, specially for new devices and ports starting to take off on that time and age. There was some incipient work to create another OpenRISC design for 64-bits, but it was still in an early phase. My secret hope and ultimate goal was to be able to run as much a free-ish computer as possible as my main system. Still today many people are buying and using 32-bit devices, like small boards; but very few use it as their main computer or servers for demanding workloads or complex services. So for me, even if feasible if one is very austere and dedicated, OpenRISC or1k failed that test. And lastly, another thing happened at the time... Enter RISC-V In August 2014, at the point when we were fully acknowledging the problem of upstreaming (or rather, lack thereof) the support for OpenRISC in GCC, RISC-V was announced to the world, bringing along papers with suggestive titles such as Instruction Sets Should Be Free: The Case For RISC-V (pdf) and articles like RISC-V: An Open Standard for SoCs - The case for an open ISA in EE Times. RISC-V (as the previous RISC-n marks) had been designed (or rather, was being designed, because it was and is an as yet unfinished standard) by people from UC Berkeley, including David Patterson, the pioneer of RISC computer designs and co-author of the seminal book Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach . Other very capable people are also also leading the project, doing the design and legwork to make it happen see the list of contributors. But, apart from throwing names, the project has many other merits. Similarly to OpenRISC, RISC-V is an open instruction set architecture (ISA), but with the advantage of being designed in more recent times (thus avoiding some mistakes and optimising for problems discovered more recently, as technology evolves); with more resources; with support for instruction widths of 32, 64 and even 128 bits; with a clean set of standard but optional extensions (atomics, float, double, quad, vector, ...); and with reserved space to add new extensions in ordered and compatible ways. In the view of some people in the OpenRISC community, this unexpected development in a way made irrelevant the ongoing update of OpenRISC for 64-bits, and from what I know and for better or worse, all efforts on that front stopped. Also interestingly (if nothing else, for my purposes of running as much a free system as possible), was that the people behind RISC-V had strong intentions to make it useful to create modern hardware, and were pushing heavily towards it from the beginning. And together with this announcement or soonly after, it came the promise of free-ish hardware in the form of the lowRISC project. Although still today it seems to be a long way from actually shipping hardware, at least there was some prospect of getting it some day. On top of all that, about the freedom aspect, both the Berkeley and lowRISC teams engaged since very early on with the free hardware community, including attending and presenting at OpenRISC events; and lowRISC intended to have as much free hardware as possible in their planned SoC. Starting to work on the Debian port, this time for RISC-V So in late 2014 I slowly started to prepare the Debian port, switching on and off. The Userland spec was frozen in 2014 just before the announcement, the Privilege one is still not frozen today, so there was no need to rush. There were plans to upstream the support in the toolchain for RISC-V (GNU binutils, glibc and GCC; Linux and other useful software like Qemu) in 2015, but sadly these did not materialise until late 2016 and 2017. One of the main reasons for the delay was due to the slowness to sort out the copyright assignment of the code to the FSF (again). Still today, only binutils and GCC are upstreamed, and Linux and glibc depend on the Privilege spec being finished, so it will take a while. After the experience with OpenRISC and the support in GCC, I didn't want to invest too much time, lest it all became another dead-end due to lack of upstreaming so I was just cross-compiling here and there, testing Qemu (which still today is very limited for this architecture, e.g. no network support and very limited character and block devices) and trying to find and report bugs in the implementations, and send patches (although I did not contribute much in the end). Incompatible changes in the toolchain In terms of compiling packages and building-up a repository, things were complicate, and less mature and stable than the OpenRISC ones were even back in 2014. In theory, with the Userland spec being frozen, regular programs (below the Operating System level) compiled at any time could have run today; but in practice what happened is that there were several rounds of profound or, at least, disrupting changes in the toolchain before and while being upstreamed, which made the binary packages that I had built to not work at all (changes in dynamic loader, registers where arguments are stored when jumping functions, etc.). These major breakages happened several times already, and kind of unexpectedly at least for the people not heavily involved in the implementation. When the different pieces are upstreamed it is expected that these breakages won't happen; but still there's at least the fundamental bit of glibc, which will probably change things once again in incompatible ways before or while being upstreamed. Outside Debian but within the FOSS / Linux world, the main project that I know of is that some people from Fedora also started a port in mid 2016 and did great advances, but from what I know they put the project in the freezer in late 2016 until all such problems are resolved they don't want to spend time rebootstrapping again and again. What happened recently on the Debian front In early 2016 I created the page for RISC-V in the Debian wiki, expecting that things were at last fully stable and the important bits of the toolchain upstreamed during that year I was too optimistic. Some other people (including Debian folks) have been contributing for a while, in the wiki, mailing lists and IRC channels, and in the RISC-V project mailing lists you will see their names everywhere. However, due to the combination of lack of hardware, software not upstreamed and shortcomings of emulators (chiefly Qemu) make contributions hard and very tedious, nothing much happened recently visible to the outside world in terms of software. The private repository-in-the-making In late 2015 and beginning of 2016, having some free time in my hands and expecting that all things would coalesce quickly, I started to build a repository of binary packages in a more systematic way, with most of the basic software that one can expect in a basic Debian system (including things common to all Linux systems, and also specific Debian software like dpkg or apt, and even aptitude!). After that I also built many others outside the basic system (more than 1000 source packages and 2000 or 3000 arch-dependent binary packages in total), specially popular libraries (e.g. boost, gtk+ version 2 and 3), interpreters (several versions of lua, perl and python, also version 2 and 3) and in general packages that are needed to build many other packages (like doxygen). Unfortunately, some of these most interesting packages do not compile cleanly (more because of obscure or silly errors than proper porting), so they are not included at the moment. I intentionally avoided trying to compile thousands of packages in the archive which would be of nobody's use at this point; but many more could be compiled without much effort. About the how, initially I started cross-compiling and using rebootstrap, which was of great help in the beginning. Some of the packages that I cross-compiled had bugs that I did not know how to debug without a live and native (within emulators) system, so I tried to switch to natively built packages very early on. For that I needed many packages built natively (like doxygen or cmake) which would be unnecessary if I remained cross-compiling the host tools would be used in that case. But this also forced me to eat my own dog food, which even if much slower and tedious, it was on the whole a more instructive experience; and above all, it helped to test and make sure that the the tools and the whole stack was working well enough to build hundreds of packages. Why the repository-in-the-making was private Until now I did not attempt to make the repository available on-line, for several reasons. First because it would be kind of useless to publish files that were not working or would soon not work, due to the incompatible changes in the toolchain, rendering many or most of the packages built useless. And because, for many months now, I expected that things would stabilise and to have something stable really soon now but this didn't happen yet. Second because of lack of resources and time since mid 2016, and because I got some packages only compiled thanks to (mostly small and unimportant, but undocumented and unsaved) hacks, often working around temporary bugs and thus not worth sending upstream; but I couldn't share the binaries without sharing the full source and fulfill licenses like the GNU GPL. I did a new round of clean rebuilds in the last few weeks, just finished, the result is close to 1000 arch-dependent packages. And third, because of lack of demand. This changed in the last few weeks, when other people started to ask me to share the results even if incomplete or not working properly (I had one request in the past, but couldn't oblige in time at the time). Finally, the work so far: repository now on-line So finally, with the great help from Kurt Keville from MIT, and Bytemark sponsoring a machine where most of the packages were built, here we have the repository: The lines for /etc/apt/sources.list are: 
 deb [ arch=riscv64 signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/debian-keyring.gpg ] http://riscv.mit.edu/debian unstable main
 deb-src [ signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/debian-keyring.gpg ] http://riscv.mit.edu/debian unstable main
The repository is signed with my key as Debian Developer, contained in the file /usr/share/keyrings/debian-keyring.gpg, which is part of the package debian-keyring (available from Debian and derivatives). WARNING!! This repository, though, is very much WIP, incomplete (some package dependencies cannot be fulfilled, and it's only a small percentage of the Debian archive, not trying to be comprehensive at the moment) and probably does not work at all in your system at this point, for the following reasons: The combination of all these shortcomings is specially unfortunate, because without glibc provided it will be difficult that you can get the binaries to run at all; but there are some packages that are arch-dependent but not too tied to libc or the dynamic loader will not be affected. At least you can try one the few static packages present in Debian, like the one in the package bash-static. When one removes moving parts like the dynamic loader and libc, since the basic machine instructions are stable for several years now, it should work, but I wouldn't discard some dark magic that prevents even static binaries from working. Still, I hope that the respository in its current state is useful to some people, at least for those who requested it. If one has the environment set-up, it's easy to unpack the contents of the .deb files and try out the software (which often is not trivial or very slow to compile, or needs lots of dependencies to be built first first). ... and finally, even if not useful at all for most people at the moment, by doing this I also hope that efforts like this spark your interest to contribute to free software, free hardware, or both! :-)

8 February 2017

Manuel A. Fernandez Montecelo: FOSDEM 2017: People, RISC-V and ChaosKey

This year, for the first time, I attended FOSDEM. There I met... People ... including: I met new people in: ... from the first hour to the last hour of my stay in Brussels. In summary, lots of people around. I also hoped to meet or spend some (more) time with a few people, but in the end I didn't catch them, our could not spend as much time with them as I would wish. For somebody like me who enjoys quiet time by itsef, it was a bit too intensive in terms of interacting with people. But overall it was a nice winter break, definitely worth to attend, and even a much better experience than what I had expected. Talks / Events Of course, I also attended a few talks, some of which were very interesting; although the event is so (sometimes uncomfortably) crowded that the rooms were full more often than not, in which case it was not possible to enter (the doors were closed) or there were very long queues for waiting. And with so many talks crammed into a weekend, I had so many schedule clashes with the talks that I had pre-selected as interesting, that I ended up missing most of them. In terms of technical stuff, I have specially enjoyed the talk by Arun Thomas RISC-V -- Open Hardware for Your Open Source Software, and some conversations related with toolchain stuff and other upstream stuff, as well as on the Debian port for RISC-V. The talk Resurrecting dinosaurs, what can possibly go wrong? -- How Containerised Applications could eat our users, by Richard Brown, was also very good. ChaosKey Apart from that, I have witnessed a shady cash transaction in a bus from the city centre to FOSDEM in exchange for hardware, not very unlike what I had read about only days before. So I could not help but to get involved in a subsequent transaction myself, to get my hands laid upon a ChaosKey.

18 June 2016

Manuel A. Fernandez Montecelo: More work on aptitude

The last few months have been a bit of a crazy period of ups and downs, with a tempest of events beneath the apparent and deceivingly calm surface waters of being unemployed (still at it). The daily grind Chief activities are, of course, those related to the daily grind of job-hunting, sending applications, and preparing and attending interviews. It is demoralising when one searches for many days or weeks without seeing anything suitable for one's skills or interests, or other more general life expectations. And it takes a lot of time and effort to put one's best in the applications for positions that one is really, really, interested in. And even for the ones which are meh, for a variety of reasons (e.g. one is not very suitable for what the offer demands). After that, not being invited to interviews (or doing very badly at them) is bad, of course, but quick and not very painful. A swift, merciful end to the process. But it's all the more draining when waiting for many weeks when not a few months with the uncertainty of not knowing if one is going to be lucky enough to be summoned for an interview; harbouring some hope one has to appear enthusiastic in the interviews, after all , while trying to keep it contained lest it grows too much ; then in the interview hearing good words and some praises, and feeling the impression that one will fit in, that one did nicely and that chances are good letting the hope grow again ; start to think about life changes that the job will require to make a quick decision should the offer finally arrives ; perhaps make some choices and compromises based on the uncertain result; then wait for a week or two after the interview to know the result... ... only to end up being unsuccessful. All the effort and hopes finally get squashed with a cold, short email or automatic response, or more often than not, complete radio silence from prospective employers, as an end to a multi-month-long process. An emotional roller coaster [1], which happened to me several times in the last few months. All in a day's work The months of preparing and waiting for a new job often imply an impasse that puts many other things that one cares about on hold, and one makes plans that will never come to pass. All in a day's (half-year's?) work of an unemployed poor soul. But not all is bad. This period was also a busy time doing some plans about life, mid- and long-term; the usual and some really unusual! family events; visits to and from friends, old and new; attending nice little local Debian gatherings or the bigger gathering of Debian SunCamp2016, and other work for side projects or for other events that will happen soon... And amidst all that, I managed to get some work done on aptitude. Two pictures worth (less than) a thousand bugs To be precise, worth 709 bugs 488 bugs in the first graph, plus 221 in the second. In 2015-11-15 (link to the post Work on aptitude): aptitude BTS Graph, 2015-11-15 In 2016-06-18: aptitude BTS Graph, 2016-06-18 Numbers The BTS numbers for aptitude right now are: Highlights Beyond graphs and stats, I am specially happy about two achievements in the last year:
  1. To have aptitude working today, first and foremost Apart from the abandon that suffered in previous years, I mean specifically the critical step of getting it through the troubles of the last summer, with the GCC-5/C++11 transition in parallel with a transition of the Boost library (explained in more detail in Work on aptitude). Without that, possibly aptitude would not have survived until today.
  2. Improvements to the suggestions of the resolver In the version 0.8, there were a lot of changes related with improving the order of the suggestions from the resolver, when it finds conflicts or other problems with the planned actions. Historically, but specially in the last few years, there have been many complaints about the nonsensical or dangerous suggestions from the resolver. The first solution offered by the resolver was very often regarded as highly undesirable (for example, removal of many packages), and preferable solutions like upgrades of one or only a handful of packages being offered only after many removals; and keeps only offered as last resort.
Perhaps these changes don't get a lot of attention, given that in the first case it's just to keep working (with few people realising that it could have collapsed on the spot, if left unattended), and the second can probably go unnoticed because it just works or it started to work more smoothly doesn't get as much immediate attention as it suddenly broke! . Still, I wanted to mention them, because I am quite proud of those. Thanks Even if I put a lot of work on aptitude in the last year, the results of the graph and numbers have not been solely achieved by me. Special thanks go to Axel Beckert (abe / XTaran) and the apt team, David Kalnischkies and Julian Andres Klode who, despite the claim in that page, does not mostly work python-apt anymore... but also in the main tools. They help with fixing some of the issues directly, or changing things in apt that benefit aptitude, testing changes, triaging bugs or commenting on them, patiently explaining to me why something in libapt doesn't do what I think it does, and good company in general. Not the least, for holding impromptu BTS group therapy / support meetings, for those cases when prolonged exposure to BTS activity starts to induce very bad feelings. Thanks also to people who sent their translation updates, notified about corrections, sent or tested patches, submitted bugs, or tried to help in other ways. Change logs for details. Notes [1] ^ It's even an example in the Cambridge Dictionaries Online website, for the entry of roller coaster:
He was on an emotional roller coaster for a while when he lost his job.

30 May 2016

Reproducible builds folks: Reproducible builds: week 57 in Stretch cycle

What happened in the Reproducible Builds effort between May 22nd and May 28th 2016: Media coverage Documentation update Toolchain fixes Packages fixed The following 18 packages have become reproducible due to changes in their build dependencies: canl-c configshell dbus-java dune-common frobby frown installation-guide jexcelapi libjsyntaxpane-java malaga octave-ocs paje.app pd-boids pfstools r-cran-rniftilib scscp-imcce snort vim-addon-manager The following packages have become reproducible after being fixed: Some uploads have fixed some reproducibility issues, but not all of them: Patches submitted that have not made their way to the archive yet: Package reviews 123 reviews have been added, 57 have been updated and 135 have been removed in this week. 21 FTBFS bugs have been reported by Chris Lamb and Santiago Vila. strip-nondeterminism development tests.reproducible-builds.org Misc. This week's edition was written by Reiner Herrmann and Holger Levsen and reviewed by a bunch of Reproducible builds folks on IRC.

22 May 2016

Reproducible builds folks: Reproducible builds: week 56 in Stretch cycle

What happened in the Reproducible Builds effort between May 15th and May 21st 2016: Media coverage Blog posts from our GSoC and Outreachy contributors: Documentation update Ximin Luo clarified instructions on how to set SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH. Toolchain fixes Other upstream fixes Packages fixed The following 18 packages have become reproducible due to changes in their build dependencies: abiword angband apt-listbugs asn1c bacula-doc bittornado cdbackup fenix gap-autpgrp gerbv jboss-logging-tools invokebinder modplugtools objenesis pmw r-cran-rniftilib x-loader zsnes The following packages have become reproducible after being fixed: Some uploads have fixed some reproducibility issues, but not all of them: Patches submitted that have not made their way to the archive yet: Reproducibility-related bugs filed: Package reviews 51 reviews have been added, 19 have been updated and 15 have been removed in this week. 22 FTBFS bugs have been reported by Chris Lamb, Santiago Vila, Niko Tyni and Daniel Schepler. tests.reproducible-builds.org Misc. This week's edition was written by Reiner Herrmann and Holger Levsen and reviewed by a bunch of Reproducible builds folks on IRC.

21 March 2016

Lunar: Reproducible builds: week 47 in Stretch cycle

What happened in the reproducible builds effort between March 13th and March 19th 2016:

Toolchain fixes
  • Petter Reinholdtsen uploaded naturaldocs/1.51-1.1 which makes the output reproducible. Original patch by Chris Lamb.
  • Damyan Ivanov uploaded libpdf-api2-perl/2.025-2 which will make internal font ID reproducible.
  • Christian Hofstaedtler uploaded ruby2.3/2.3.0-5 which sets gzip embedded mtime field to fixed value for rdoc-generated compressed javascript data.

Packages fixed The following packages have become reproducible due to changes in their build dependencies: diction, doublecmd, ruby-hiredis, vdr-plugin-epgsearch. The following packages became reproducible after getting fixed: Some uploads fixed some reproducibility issues, but not all of them: Patches submitted which have not made their way to the archive yet:
  • #818128 on nethack by Reiner Herrmann: implement support for SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH, set LC_ALL to C, and ensure deterministic build order when running parallel builds.
  • #818111 on debian-keyring by Satyam Zode: fix the order of files in md5sums.
  • #818067 on ncurses by Niels Thykier: strip trailing whitespaces introduced when using dash as system shell.
  • #818230 on aircrack-ng by Reiner Herrmann: build assembly code as a separate .o file.
  • #818419 on mutt by Daniel Shahaf: use C locale when listing files to be put in README.Patches.
  • #818430 on ruby-coveralls by Dhole: ensure UTC is used as the timezone when generating the documentation.
  • #818686 on littlewizard by Reiner Herrmann: use the C locale in the script for iterating over the files.
  • #818704 on strigi by Reiner Herrmann: sort keys when traversing hashes in makecode.pl.

Package reviews 44 reviews have been removed, 40 added and 5 updated in the previous week. Chris Lamb has reported 16 FTBFS.

2 January 2016

Lunar: Reproducible builds: week 33 in Stretch cycle

What happened in the reproducible builds effort between December 6th and December 12th: Toolchain fixes Reiner Herrmann rebased our experimental version of doxygen on version 1.8.9.1-6. Chris Lamb submitted a patch to make the manpages generated by ruby-ronn reproducible by using the locale-agnostic %Y-%m-%d for the dates. Daniel Kahn Gillmor took another shot at the issue of source path captured in DWARF symbols. A patch has been sent for review by GCC upstream to add the ability to read an environment variable with -fdebug-prefix-map. Packages fixed The following 24 packages have become reproducible due to changes in their build dependencies: gkeyfile-sharp, gprbuild, graphmonkey, gthumb, haskell-yi-language, ion, jackson-databind, jackson-dataformat-smile, jackson-dataformat-xml, jnr-ffi, libcommons-net-java, libproxy, maven-shared-utils, monodevelop-database, mydumper, ndesk-dbus, nini, notify-sharp, pixz, protozero, python-rtslib-fb, slurm-llnl, taglib-sharp, tomboy-latex. The following packages became reproducible after getting fixed: Some uploads fixed some reproducibility issues, but not all of them: These uploads might have fixed reproducibility issues but could not be tested yet: Patches submitted which have not made their way to the archive yet: reproducible.debian.net Files created with diffoscope now have diffoscope in their name instead debbindiff. (h01ger) Hostnames of first and second build node are now recorded and shown in the build history. (Mattia Rizzolo) Exchanges have started with F-Droid developers to better understand what would be required to test F-Droid applications. (h01ger) A first small set of Fedora 23 packages is now also being tested while development on a new framework for testing RPMs in general has begun. A new Jenkins job has been added to set up to mock, the build system used by Fedora. Another new job takes care of testing RPMs from Fedora 23 on x86_64. So far only 151 packages from the buildsys-build group are tested (currently all unreproducible), but the plan is to build all 17,000 source packages in Fedora 23 and rawhide. The page presenting the results should also soon be improved. (h01ger, Dhiru Kholia) For Arch Linux, all 2223 packages from the extra repository will also be tested from now on. Packages in extra" are tested every four weeks, while those from core every week. Statistics are now displayed alongside the results. (h01ger) jenkins.debian.net has been updated to jenkins-job-builder version 1.3.0. Many job configurations have been simplified and refactored using features of the new version. This was another milestone for the jenkins.debian.org migration. (Phil Hands, h01ger) diffoscope development Chris Lamb announced try.diffoscope.org: an online service that runs diffoscope on user provided files. Screenshot of try.diffoscope.org Improvements are welcome. The application is licensed under the AGPLv3. On diffoscope itself, most pending patches have now been merged. Expect a release soon! Most of the code implementing parallel processing has been polished. Sadly, unpacking archive is CPU-bound in most cases, so the current thread-only implementation does not offer much gain on big packages. More work is still require to also add concurrent processes. Documentation update Ximin Luo has started to write a specification for buildinfo files that could become a larger platform than the limited set of features that were thought so far for Debian .buildinfo. Package reviews 113 reviews have been removed, 111 added and 56 updated in the previous week. 42 new FTBFS bugs were opened by Chris Lamb and Niko Tyni. New issues identified this week: timestamps_in_documentation_generated_by_docbook_dbtimestamp, timestamps_in_sym_l_files_generated_by_malaga, timestamps_in_edj_files_generated_by_edje_cc. Misc. Chris Lamb presented reproducible builds at skroutz.gr.

15 November 2015

Manuel A. Fernandez Montecelo: Work on aptitude

Midsummer for me is also known as Noite do Lume Novo (literally New Fire Night ), one of the big calendar events of the year, marking the end of the school year and the beginning of summer. On this day, there are celebrations not very unlike the bonfires in the Guy Fawkes Night in England or Britain [1]. It is a bit different in that it is not a single event for the masses, more of a friends and neighbours thing, and that it lasts for a big chunk of the night (sometimes until morning). Perhaps for some people, or outside bigger towns or cities, Guy Fawkes Night is also celebrated in that way and that's why during the first days of November there are fireworks rocketing and cracking in the neighbourhoods all around. Like many other celebrations around the world involving bonfires, many of them also happening around the summer solstice, it is supposed to be a time of renewal of cycles, purification and keeping the evil spirits away; with rituals to that effect like jumping over the fire when the flames are not high and it is safe enough. So it was fitting that, in the middle of June (almost Midsummer in the northern hemisphere), I learnt that I was about to leave my now-previous job, which is a pretty big signal and precursor for renewal (and it might have something to do with purifying and keeping the evil away as well ;-) ). Whatever... But what does all of this have to do with aptitude or Debian, anyway? For one, it was a question of timing. While looking for a new job (and I am still at it), I had more spare time than usual. DebConf 15 @ Heidelberg was within sight, and for the first time circumstances allowed me to attend this event. It also coincided with the time when I re-gained access to commit to aptitude on the 19th of June. Which means Renewal. End of June was also the time of the announcement of the colossal GCC-5/C++11 ABI transition in Debian, that was scheduled to start on the 1st of August, just before the DebConf. Between 2 and 3 thousand source packages in Debian were affected by this transition, which a few months later is not yet finished (although the most important parts were completed by mid-end September). aptitude itself is written in C++, and depends on several libraries written in C++, like Boost, Xapian and SigC++. All of them had to be compiled with the new C++11 ABI of GCC-5, in unison and in a particular order, for aptitude to continue to work (and for minimal breakage). aptitude and some dependencies did not even compile straight away, so this transition meant that aptitude needed attention just to keep working. Having recently being awarded again with the Aptitude Hat, attending DebConf for the first time and sailing towards the Transition Maelstrom, it was a clear sign that Something Had to Be Done (to avoid the sideways looks and consequent shame at DebConf, if nothing else). Happily (or a bit unhappily for me, but let's pretend...), with the unexpected free time in my hands, I changed the plans that I had before re-gaining the Aptitude Hat (some of them involving Debian, but in other ways maybe I will post about that soon). In July I worked to fix the problems before the transition started, so aptitude would be (mostly) ready, or in the worst case broken only for a few days, while the chain of dependencies was rebuilt. But apart from the changes needed for the new GCC-5, it was decided at the last minute that Boost 1.55 would not be rebuilt with the new ABI, and that the only version with the new ABI would be 1.58 (which caused further breakage in aptitude, was added to experimental only a few days before, and was moved to unstable after the transition had started). Later, in the first days of the transition, aptitude was affected for a few days by breakage in the dependencies, due to not being compiled in sequence according to the transition levels (so with a mix of old and new ABI). With the critical intervention of Axel Beckert (abe / XTaran), things were not so bad as they could have been. He was busy testing and uploading in the critical days when I was enjoying a small holiday on my way to DebConf, with minimal internet access and communicating almost exclusively with him; and he promptly tended the complaints arriving in the Bug Tracking System and asked for rebuilds of the dependencies with the new ABI. He also brought the packaging up to shape, which had decayed a bit in the last few years. Gruesome Challenges But not all was solved yet, more storms were brewing and started to appear in the horizon, in the form of clouds of fire coming from nearby realms. The APT Deities, which had long ago spilled out their secret, inner challenge (just the initial paragraphs), were relentless. Moreover, they were present at Heidelberg in full force, in or close to their home grounds, and they were Marching Decidedly towards Victory: apt BTS Graph, 2015-11-15 In the talk @ DebConf This APT has Super Cow Powers (video available), by David Kalnischkies, they told us about the niceties of apt 1.1 (still in experimental but hopefully coming to unstable soon), and they boasted about getting the lead in our arms race (should I say bugs race?) by a few open bug reports. This act of provocation further escalated the tensions. The fierce competition which had been going on for some time gained new heights. So much so that APT Deities and our team had to sit together in the outdoor areas of the venue and have many a weissbier together, while discussing and fixing bugs. But beneath the calm on the surface, and while pretending to keep good diplomatic relations, I knew that Something Had to Be Done, again. So I could only do one thing jump over the bonfire and Keep the Evil away, be that Keep Evil bugs Away or Keep Evil APT Deities Away from winning the challenge, or both. After returning from DebConf I continued to dedicate time to the project, more than a full time job in some weeks, and this is what happened in the last few months, summarised in another graph, showing the evolution of the BTS for aptitude: aptitude BTS Graph, 2015-11-15 The numbers for apt right now (15th November 2015) are: The numbers for aptitude right now are: The Aftermath As we can see, for the time being I could keep the Evil at bay, both in terms of bugs themselves and re-gaining the lead in the bugs race the Evil APT Deities were thwarted again in their efforts. ... More seriously, as most of you suspected, the graph above is not the whole truth, so I don't want to boast too much. A big part of the reduction in the number of bugs is because of merging duplicates, closing obsolete bugs, applying translations coming from multiple contributors, or simple fixes like typos and useful suggestions needing minor changes. Many of remaining problems are comparatively more difficult or time consuming that the ones addressed so far (except perhaps avoiding the immediate breakage of the transition, that took weeks to solve), and there are many important problems still there, chief among those is aptitude offering very poor solutions to resolve conflicts. Still, even the simplest of the changes takes effort, and triaging hundreds of bugs is not fun at all and mostly a thankless effort althought there is the occasionally kind soul that thanks you for handling a decade-old bug. If being subjected to the rigours of the BTS and reading and solving hundreds of bug reports is not Purification, I don't know what it is. Apart from the triaging, there were 118 bugs closed (or pending) due to changes made in the upstream part or the packaging in the last few months, and there are many changes that are not reflected in bugs closed (like most of the changes needed due to the C++11 ABI transition, bugs and problems fixed that had no report, and general rejuvenation or improvement of some parts of the code). How long this will last, I cannot know. I hope to find a job at some point, which obviously will reduce the time available to work on this. But in the meantime, for all aptitude users: Enjoy the fixes and new features! Notes [1] ^ Some visitors of the recent mini-DebConf @ Cambridge perhaps thought that the fireworks and throngs gathered were in honour of our mighty Universal Operating System, but sadly they were not. They might be, some day. In any case, the reports say that the visitors enjoyed the fireworks.

9 November 2015

Lunar: Reproducible builds: week 28 in Stretch cycle

What happened in the reproducible builds effort this week: Toolchain fixes Chris Lamb filled a bug on python-setuptools with a patch to make the generated requires.txt files reproducible. The patch has been forwarded upstream. Chris also understood why the she-bang in some Python scripts kept being undeterministic: setuptools as called by dh-python could skip re-installing the scripts if the build had been too fast (under one second). #804339 offers a patch fixing the issue by passing --force to setup.py install. #804141 reported on gettext asks for support of SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH in gettextize. Santiago Vila pointed out that it doesn't felt appropriate as gettextize is supposed to be an interactive tool. The problem reported seems to be in avahi build system instead. Packages fixed The following packages became reproducible due to changes in their build dependencies: celestia, dsdo, fonts-taml-tscu, fte, hkgerman, ifrench-gut, ispell-czech, maven-assembly-plugin, maven-project-info-reports-plugin, python-avro, ruby-compass, signond, thepeg, wagon2, xjdic. The following packages became reproducible after getting fixed: Some uploads fixed some reproducibility issues but not all of them: Patches submitted which have not made their way to the archive yet: Chris Lamb closed a wrongly reopened bug against haskell-devscripts that was actually a problem in haddock. reproducible.debian.net FreeBSD tests are now run for three branches: master, stable/10, release/10.2.0. (h01ger) diffoscope development Support has been added for Free Pascal unit files (.ppc). (Paul Gevers) The homepage is now available using HTTPS, thanks to Let's Encrypt!. Work has been done to be able to publish diffoscope on the Python Package Index (also known as PyPI): the tlsh module is now optional, compatibility with python-magic has been added, and the fallback code to handle RPM has been fixed. Documentation update Reiner Herrmann, Paul Gevers, Niko Tyni, opi, and Dhole offered various fixes and wording improvements to the reproducible-builds.org. A mailing-list is now available to receive change notifications. NixOS, Guix, and Baserock are featured as projects working on reproducible builds. Package reviews 70 reviews have been removed, 74 added and 17 updated this week. Chris Lamb opened 22 new fail to build from source bugs. New issues this week: randomness_in_ocaml_provides, randomness_in_qdoc_page_id, randomness_in_python_setuptools_requires_txt, gettext_creates_ChangeLog_files_and_entries_with_current_date. Misc. h01ger and Chris Lamb presented Beyond reproducible builds at the MiniDebConf in Cambridge on November 8th. They gave an overview of where we stand and the changes in user tools, infrastructure, and development practices that we might want to see happening. Feedback on these thoughts are welcome. Slides are already available, and the video should be online soon. At the same event, a meeting happened with some members of the release team to discuss the best strategy regarding releases and reproducibility. Minutes have been posted on the Debian reproducible-builds mailing-list.

2 November 2015

Lunar: Reproducible builds: week 27 in Stretch cycle

What happened in the reproducible builds effort this week: Toolchain fixes Packages fixed The following packages became reproducible due to changes in their build dependencies: maven-plugin-tools, norwegian, ocaml-melt, python-biom-format, rivet. The following packages became reproducible after getting fixed: Some uploads fixed some reproducibility issues but not all of them: The following package is currently failing to build from source but should now be reproducible: Patches submitted which have not made their way to the archive yet: reproducible.debian.net A quick update on current statistics: testing is at 85% of packages tested reproducible with our modified packages, unstable on armhf caught up with amd64 with 80%. The schroot name used for running diffoscope when testing OpenWrt, NetBSD, Coreboot, and Arch Linux has been fixed. (h01ger, Mattia Rizzolo) Documentation update Paul Gevers documented timestamps in unit files created by the Free Pascal Compiler. reproducible-builds.org is now live. It contains a comprehensive documentation on all aspects that have been identified so far of what we call reproducible builds . It makes room for pointers to projects working on reproducible builds, news, dedicated tools, and community events. Package reviews 206 reviews have been removed, 171 added and 196 updated this week. Chris Lamb reported 28 failing to build from source issues. New issues identified this week: timestamps_in_pdf_content, different_encoding_in_html_by_docbook_xsl, timestamps_in_ppu_generated_by_fpc, method_may_never_be_called_in_documentation_generated_by_javadoc. Misc. Andrei Borzenkov has proposed a fix for uninitialized memory in GRUB's mkimage. Uninitialized memory is one source of hard to track down reproducibility errors. Holger Levsen presented the efforts on reproduible builds at Festival de Software Libre in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico.

25 August 2015

Lunar: Reproducible builds: week 17 in Stretch cycle

A good amount of the Debian reproducible builds team had the chance to enjoy face-to-face interactions during DebConf15.
Names in red and blue were all present at DebConf15
Picture of the reproducible builds talk during DebConf15
Hugging people with whom one has been working tirelessly for months gives a lot of warm-fuzzy feelings. Several recorded and hallway discussions paved the way to solve the remaining issues to get reproducible builds part of Debian proper. Both talks from the Debian Project Leader and the release team mentioned the effort as important for the future of Debian. A forty-five minutes talk presented the state of the reproducible builds effort. It was then followed by an hour long roundtable to discuss current blockers regarding dpkg, .buildinfo and their integration in the archive. Picture of the reproducible builds roundtable during DebConf15 Toolchain fixes Reiner Herrmann submitted a patch to make rdfind sort the processed files before doing any operation. Chris Lamb proposed a new patch for wheel implementing support for SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH instead of the custom WHEEL_FORCE_TIMESTAMP. akira sent one making man2html SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH aware. St phane Glondu reported that dpkg-source would not respect tarball permissions when unpacking under a umask of 002. After hours of iterative testing during the DebConf workshop, Sandro Knau created a test case showing how pdflatex output can be non-deterministic with some PNG files. Packages fixed The following 65 packages became reproducible due to changes in their build dependencies: alacarte, arbtt, bullet, ccfits, commons-daemon, crack-attack, d-conf, ejabberd-contrib, erlang-bear, erlang-cherly, erlang-cowlib, erlang-folsom, erlang-goldrush, erlang-ibrowse, erlang-jiffy, erlang-lager, erlang-lhttpc, erlang-meck, erlang-p1-cache-tab, erlang-p1-iconv, erlang-p1-logger, erlang-p1-mysql, erlang-p1-pam, erlang-p1-pgsql, erlang-p1-sip, erlang-p1-stringprep, erlang-p1-stun, erlang-p1-tls, erlang-p1-utils, erlang-p1-xml, erlang-p1-yaml, erlang-p1-zlib, erlang-ranch, erlang-redis-client, erlang-uuid, freecontact, givaro, glade, gnome-shell, gupnp, gvfs, htseq, jags, jana, knot, libconfig, libkolab, libmatio, libvsqlitepp, mpmath, octave-zenity, openigtlink, paman, pisa, pynifti, qof, ruby-blankslate, ruby-xml-simple, timingframework, trace-cmd, tsung, wings3d, xdg-user-dirs, xz-utils, zpspell. The following packages became reproducible after getting fixed: Uploads that might have fixed reproducibility issues: Some uploads fixed some reproducibility issues but not all of them: Patches submitted which have not made their way to the archive yet: St phane Glondu reported two issues regarding embedded build date in omake and cduce. Aur lien Jarno submitted a fix for the breakage of make-dfsg test suite. As binutils now creates deterministic libraries by default, Aur lien's patch makes use of a wrapper to give the U flag to ar. Reiner Herrmann reported an issue with pound which embeds random dhparams in its code during the build. Better solutions are yet to be found. reproducible.debian.net Package pages on reproducible.debian.net now have a new layout improving readability designed by Mattia Rizzolo, h01ger, and Ulrike. The navigation is now on the left as vertical space is more valuable nowadays. armhf is now enabled on all pages except the dashboard. Actual tests on armhf are expected to start shortly. (Mattia Rizzolo, h01ger) The limit on how many packages people can schedule using the reschedule script on Alioth has been bumped to 200. (h01ger) mod_rewrite is now used instead of JavaScript for the form in the dashboard. (h01ger) Following the rename of the software, debbindiff has mostly been replaced by either diffoscope or differences in generated HTML and IRC notification output. Connections to UDD have been made more robust. (Mattia Rizzolo) diffoscope development diffoscope version 31 was released on August 21st. This version improves fuzzy-matching by using the tlsh algorithm instead of ssdeep. New command line options are available: --max-diff-input-lines and --max-diff-block-lines to override limits on diff input and output (Reiner Herrmann), --debugger to dump the user into pdb in case of crashes (Mattia Rizzolo). jar archives should now be detected properly (Reiner Herrman). Several general code cleanups were also done by Chris Lamb. strip-nondeterminism development Andrew Ayer released strip-nondeterminism version 0.010-1. Java properties file in jar should now be detected more accurately. A missing dependency spotted by St phane Glondu has been added. Testing directory ordering issues: disorderfs During the reproducible builds workshop at DebConf, participants identified that we were still short of a good way to test variations on filesystem behaviors (e.g. file ordering or disk usage). Andrew Ayer took a couple of hours to create disorderfs. Based on FUSE, disorderfs in an overlay filesystem that will mount the content of a directory at another location. For this first version, it will make the order in which files appear in a directory random. Documentation update Dhole documented how to implement support for SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH in Python, bash, Makefiles, CMake, and C. Chris Lamb started to convert the wiki page describing SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH into a Freedesktop-like specification in the hope that it will convince more upstream to adopt it. Package reviews 44 reviews have been removed, 192 added and 77 updated this week. New issues identified this week: locale_dependent_order_in_devlibs_depends, randomness_in_ocaml_startup_files, randomness_in_ocaml_packed_libraries, randomness_in_ocaml_custom_executables, undeterministic_symlinking_by_rdfind, random_build_path_by_golang_compiler, and images_in_pdf_generated_by_latex. 117 new FTBFS bugs have been reported by Chris Lamb, Chris West (Faux), and Niko Tyni. Misc. Some reproducibility issues might face us very late. Chris Lamb noticed that the test suite for python-pykmip was now failing because its test certificates have expired. Let's hope no packages are hiding a certificate valid for 10 years somewhere in their source! Pictures courtesy and copyright of Debian's own paparazzi: Aigars Mahinovs.

4 May 2015

Lunar: Reproducible builds: first week in Stretch cycle

Debian Jessie has been released on April 25th, 2015. This has opened the Stretch development cycle. Reactions to the idea of making Debian build reproducibly have been pretty enthusiastic. As the pace is now likely to be even faster, let's see if we can keep everyone up-to-date on the developments. Before the release of Jessie The story goes back a long way but a formal announcement to the project has only been sent in February 2015. Since then, too much work has happened to make a complete report, but to give some highlights: Lunar did a pretty improvised lightning talk during the Mini-DebConf in Lyon. This past week It seems changes were pilling behind the curtains given the amount of activity that happened in just one week. Toolchain fixes We also rebased the experimental version of debhelper twice to merge the latest set of changes. Lunar submitted a patch to add a -creation-date to genisoimage. Reiner Herrmann opened #783938 to request making -notimestamp the default behavior for javadoc. Juan Picca submitted a patch to add a --use-date flag to texi2html. Packages fixed The following packages became reproducible due to changes of their build dependencies: apport, batctl, cil, commons-math3, devscripts, disruptor, ehcache, ftphs, gtk2hs-buildtools, haskell-abstract-deque, haskell-abstract-par, haskell-acid-state, haskell-adjunctions, haskell-aeson, haskell-aeson-pretty, haskell-alut, haskell-ansi-terminal, haskell-async, haskell-attoparsec, haskell-augeas, haskell-auto-update, haskell-binary-conduit, haskell-hscurses, jsch, ledgersmb, libapache2-mod-auth-mellon, libarchive-tar-wrapper-perl, libbusiness-onlinepayment-payflowpro-perl, libcapture-tiny-perl, libchi-perl, libcommons-codec-java, libconfig-model-itself-perl, libconfig-model-tester-perl, libcpan-perl-releases-perl, libcrypt-unixcrypt-perl, libdatetime-timezone-perl, libdbd-firebird-perl, libdbix-class-resultset-recursiveupdate-perl, libdbix-profile-perl, libdevel-cover-perl, libdevel-ptkdb-perl, libfile-tail-perl, libfinance-quote-perl, libformat-human-bytes-perl, libgtk2-perl, libhibernate-validator-java, libimage-exiftool-perl, libjson-perl, liblinux-prctl-perl, liblog-any-perl, libmail-imapclient-perl, libmocked-perl, libmodule-build-xsutil-perl, libmodule-extractuse-perl, libmodule-signature-perl, libmoosex-simpleconfig-perl, libmoox-handlesvia-perl, libnet-frame-layer-ipv6-perl, libnet-openssh-perl, libnumber-format-perl, libobject-id-perl, libpackage-pkg-perl, libpdf-fdf-simple-perl, libpod-webserver-perl, libpoe-component-pubsub-perl, libregexp-grammars-perl, libreply-perl, libscalar-defer-perl, libsereal-encoder-perl, libspreadsheet-read-perl, libspring-java, libsql-abstract-more-perl, libsvn-class-perl, libtemplate-plugin-gravatar-perl, libterm-progressbar-perl, libterm-shellui-perl, libtest-dir-perl, libtest-log4perl-perl, libtext-context-eitherside-perl, libtime-warp-perl, libtree-simple-perl, libwww-shorten-simple-perl, libwx-perl-processstream-perl, libxml-filter-xslt-perl, libxml-writer-string-perl, libyaml-tiny-perl, mupen64plus-core, nmap, openssl, pkg-perl-tools, quodlibet, r-cran-rjags, r-cran-rjson, r-cran-sn, r-cran-statmod, ruby-nokogiri, sezpoz, skksearch, slurm-llnl, stellarium. The following packages became reproducible after getting fixed: Some uploads fixed some reproducibility issues but not all of them: Patches submitted which did not make their way to the archive yet: Improvements to reproducible.debian.net Mattia Rizzolo has been working on compressing logs using gzip to save disk space. The web server would uncompress them on-the-fly for clients which does not accept gzip content. Mattia Rizzolo worked on a new page listing various breakage: missing or bad debbindiff output, missing build logs, unavailable build dependencies. Holger Levsen added a new execution environment to run debbindiff using dependencies from testing. This is required for packages built with GHC as the compiler only understands interfaces built by the same version. debbindiff development Version 17 has been uploaded to unstable. It now supports comparing ISO9660 images, dictzip files and should compare identical files much faster. Documentation update Various small updates and fixes to the pages about PDF produced by LaTeX, DVI produced by LaTeX, static libraries, Javadoc, PE binaries, and Epydoc. Package reviews Known issues have been tagged when known to be deterministic as some might unfortunately not show up on every single build. For example, two new issues have been identified by building with one timezone in April and one in May. RD and help2man add current month and year to the documentation they are producing. 1162 packages have been removed and 774 have been added in the past week. Most of them are the work of proper automated investigation done by Chris West. Summer of code Finally, we learned that both akira and Dhole were accepted for this Google Summer of Code. Let's welcome them! They have until May 25th before coding officialy begins. Now is the good time to help them feel more comfortable by sharing all these little bits of knowledge on how Debian works.

21 April 2015

Manuel A. Fernandez Montecelo: About the Debian GNU/Linux port for OpenRISC or1k

In my previous post I mentioned my involvement with the OpenRISC or1k port. It was the technical activity in which I spent most time during 2014 (Debian and otherwise, day job aside). I thought that it would be nice to talk a bit about the port for people who don't know about it, and give an update for those who do know and care. So this post explains a bit how it came to be, details about its development, and finally the current status. It is going to be written as a rather personal account, for that matter, since I did not get involved enough in the OpenRISC community at large to learn much about its internal workings and aspects that I was not directly involved with. There is not much information about all of this elsewhere, only bits and pieces scattered here and there, but specially not much public information at all about the development of the Debian port. There is an OpenRISC entry in the Debian wiki, but it does not contain much information yet. Hopefully, this piece will help a bit to preserve history and give an insight for future porters. First Things First I imagine that most people reading this post will be familiar with the terminology, but just in case, to create a new Debian port means to get a Debian system (GNU/Linux variant, in this case) to run in the OpenRISC or1k computer architecture. Setting to one side all differences between hardware and software, and as described in their site:
The aim of the OpenRISC project is to create free and open source computing platforms
It is therefore a good match for the purposes of Debian and Free Software world in general. The processor has not been produced in silicon, or not available for the masses in any case. People with the necessary know-how can download the hardware description (Verilog) and synthesise it in a FPGA, or otherwise use simulators. It is not some piece of hardware that people can purchase yet, and there are no plans to mass-produce it in the near future either. The two people (including me) involved in this Debian port did not have the hardware, so we created the port entirely through cross-compiling from other architectures, and then compiling inside Qemu. In a sense, we were creating a Debian port for hardware that "does not [phisically] exist". The software that we built was tested by people who had hardware available in FPGA, though, so it was at least usable. I understand that people working in the arm64 port had to work similarly in the initial phases, working in the dark without access to real hardware to compile or test. The Spark The first time that I heard about the initiative to create the port was in late February of 2014, in a post which appeared in Linux Weekly News (sent by Paul Wise) and Slashdot. The original post announcing it was actually from late January, from Christian Svensson (blueCmd):
Some people know that I've been working on porting Glibc and doing some toolchain work. My evil master plan was to make a Debian port, and today I'm a happy hacker indeed! Below is a link to a screencast of me installing Debian for OpenRISC, installing python2.7 via apt-get (which you shouldn't do in or1ksim, it takes ages! (but it works!)) and running a small Python script. http://asciinema.org/a/7362
So, now, what can a Debian Hacker do when reading this? (Even if one's Hackery Level is not that high, as it is my case). And well, How Hard Can It Be? I mean, Really? Well, in my own defence, I knew that the answer to the last two questions would be a resounding Very . But for some reason the idea grabbed me and I couldn't help but think that it would be a Really Exciting Project, and that somehow I would like to get involved. So I wrote to Christian offering my help after considering it for a few days, around mid March, and he welcomed me aboard. The Ball Was Already Rolling Christian had already been in contact with the people behind DebianBootstrap, and he had already created the repository http://openrisc.debian.net/ with many packages of the base system and beyond (read: packages name_version_or1k.deb available to download and install). Still nowadays the packages are not signed with proper keys, though, so use your judgement if you want to try them. After a few weeks, I got up to speed with the status of the project and got my system working with the necessary tools. This meant basically sbuild/schroot to compile new packages, with the base system that Christian already got working, installed in a chroot, probably with the help of debootstrap, and qemu-system-or1k to simulate the system. Only a few of the packages were different from the version in Debian, like gcc, binutils or glibc -- they had not been upstreamed yet. sbuild ran through qemu-system-or1k, so the compilation of new packages could happen "natively" (running inside Qemu) rather than cross-compiling the packages, pulling _or1k.deb packages for dependencies from the repository that he had prepared, and _all.deb packages from snapshots.debian.org. I started by trying to get the packages that I [co-]maintain in Debian compiled for this architecture, creating the corresponding _or1k.deb. For most of them, though, I needed many dependencies compiled before I could even compile my packages. The GNU autotools / autoreconf Problem Since very early, many of the packages failed to build with messages such as:
Invalid configuration 'or1k-linux-gnu': machine 'or1k' not recognized
configure: error: /bin/bash ../config.sub or1k-linux-gnu failed
This means that software packages based on GNU autotools and using configure scripts need recent versions of the files config.sub and config.guess that they ship in their root directory, to be able to detect the architecture and generate the code accordingly. This is counter-intuitive, having into account that GNU autotools were designed to help with portability. Yet, in the case of creating new Debian ports, it meant that unless upstream had very recent versions of config. guess,sub , it would prevent the package to compile straight away in the new architectures -- even if invoking gcc without ado would have worked without problems in most cases for native compilation. Of course this did not only affect or1k, and there was already the autoreconf effort underway as a way to update these files automatically when building Debian packages, pushed by people porting Debian to the new architectures added in 2013/2014 (mips64el, arm64, ppc64el), which encountered the same roadblock. This affected around a thousand source packages in unstable. A Royal Pain. Also, all of their reverse dependencies (packages that depended on those to be built) could not be compiled straight away. The bugs were not Release Critical, though (none of these architectures were officially accepted at the time), so for people not concerned with the new ports there was no big incentive to get them fixed. This problem, which conceptually is easily solvable, prevented new ports to even attempt compile vast portions of the archive straight away (cleanly, without modifications to the package or to the host system), for weeks or months. The GNU autotools / autoreconf Solution We tackled this problem mainly in two ways. First, more useful for Debian in general, was to do as other porters were doing and submit bug reports and patches to Debian packages requesting them to use autoreconf, and NMUing packages (uploading changes to the archive without the official maintainers' intervention). A few NMUs were made for packages which had bug reports with patches available for a while, that were in the critical path to get many other packages compiled, and that were orphan or had almost no maintainer activity. The people working in the other new ports, and mainly Ubuntu people which helped with some of those ports and wanted to support them, had submitted a large amount of requests since late 2013, so there was no shortage of NMUs to be made. Some porters, not being Debian Developers, could not easily get the changes applied; so I also helped a bit the porters of other architectures, specially later on before the freeze of Jessie, to get as many packages compiled in those architectures as possible. The second way was to create dpkg-buildpackage hooks that updated unconditionally config. guess,sub before attempting to build the package in the local build system. This local and temporary solution allowed us in the or1k port to get many _or1k.deb packages in the experimental repository, which in turn would allow many more packages to compile. After a few weeks, I set up many sbuilds in a multi-core machine attempting to build uninterruptedly packages that were not previously built and which had their dependencies available. Every now and then (typically several times per day in peak times) I pushed the resulting _or1k.deb files to the repository, so more packages would have the necessary dependencies ready to attempt to build. Christian was doing something similar, and by April at peak times, among the two of us, we were compiling some days more than a hundred packages -- a huge amount of packages did not need any change other than up-to-date config. guess,sub files. At some point, late April, Christian set up wanna-build in a few hosts to do this more elegantly and smartly than my method, and more effectively as well. Ugly Hacks, Bugs and Shortcomings in the Toolchain and Qemu Some packages are extremely important because many other packages need them to compile (like cmake, Qt or GTK+), and they are themselves very complex and have dependency loops. They had deeper problems than the autoreconf issue and needed some seriously dirty hacking to get them built. To try to get as many packages compiled as possible, we sometimes compiled these important packages with some functionality disabled, disabling some binary packages (e.g. Java bindings) or specially disabling documentation (using DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS=nodoc when possible, and more aggressively when needed by removing chunks of debian/rules). I tried to use the more aggressive methods in as few packages as possible, though, about a dozen in total. We also used DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS=nocheck for speeding up compilation and avoiding build failures -- many packages' tests failed due to qemu-system-or1k not supporting multi-threading, which we could do nothing about at the time, but otherwise the packages mostly passed tests fine. Due to bugs and shortcomings in Qemu and the toolchain --like the compiler lacking atomics, missing functionality in glibc, Qemu entering in endless loops, or programs segfaulting (especially gettext, used by many packages and causing the packages failing to build)--, we had to resort to some very creative ways or time-consuming dull work to edit debian/rules, or to create wrappers of the real programs avoiding or forcing certain options (like gcc -O0, since -O2 made buggy binaries too often). To avoid having a mix of cleanly compiled and hacked packages in the same repository, Christian set up a two-tiered repository system -- the clean one and the dirty one. In the dirty one we dumped all of the packages that we got built, no matter how. The packages in the clean one could use packages from the dirty one to build, but they themselves were compiled without any hackery. Of course this was not a completely airtight solution, since they could contain code injected at build time from the "dirty repository" (e.g. by static linking), and perhaps other quirks. We hoped to get rid of these problems later by rebuilding all packages against clean builds of all their dependencies. In addition, Christian also spent significant amounts of time working inside the OpenRISC community, debugging problems, testing and recompiling special versions of the toolchain that we could use to advance in our compilation of the whole archive. There were other people in the OpenRISC community implementing the necessary bits in the toolchain, but I don't know the details. Good Progress Olof Kindgren wrote the OpenRISC health report April 2014 (actually posted in May), explaining the status at the time of projects in the broad OpenRISC community, and talking about the software side, Debian port included. Sadly, I think that there have been no more "health reports" since then. There was also a new post in Slashdot entitled OpenRISC Gains Atomic Operations and Multicore Support shortly thereafter. In the side of the Debian port, from time to time new versions of packages entered unstable and we started to use those newer versions. Some of them had nice fixes, like the autoreconf updates, so they did not require local modifications. In other cases, the new versions failed to build when old ones had worked (e.g. because the newer versions added support and dependencies of new versions of gnutls, systemd or other packages not yet available for or1k), and we had to repeat or create more nasty hacks to get the packages built again. But in general, progress was very good. There were about 10k arch-dependent packages in Debian at the time, and we got about half of them compiled by the beginning of May, counting clean and dirty. And, if I recall correctly, there were around the same number of arch=all (which can be installed in any architecture, after the package is built in one of them). Counting both, it meant that systems using or1k got about 15k packages available, or 75% of the whole Debian archive (at least "main", we excluded "contrib" and "non-free"). Not bad. By the middle to end of May, we had about 6k arch-dependent packages compiled, and 4k to go. The count of packages eventually reached ~6.6k at its peak (I think that in June/July). Many had been built with hacks and not rebuilt cleanly yet, but everything was fine until the amount of packages built plateaued. Plateauing There were multiple reasons for that. One of them is that after having fixed the autoreconf issue locally in some packages, new versions were uploaded to Debian without fixing that problem (in many cases there was no bug report or patch yet, so it was understandable; in other cases the requests were ignored). The wanna-build for the clean repository set up by Christian rightly considered the package out-of-date and prepared to build the more recent version, that failed. Then, other packages entering the unstable archive and build-depending on newer versions of those could not be built ("BD-Uninstallable"), until we built the newer versions of the dependencies in the dirty repository with local hacks. Consequently, the count of cleanly built packages went back-and-forth, when not backwards. More challenging was the fact that when creating a new port, language compilers which are written in that same language need to be built for that architecture first. Sometimes it is not the compiler, but compile-time or run-time support for modules of a language are not ported yet. Obviously, as with other dependencies, large amounts of packages written in those languages are bound to remain uncompiled for a long time. As Colin Watson explained in porting Haskell's GHC to arm64 and ppc64el, untangling some of the chicken-and-egg problems of language compilers for new ports is extremely challenging. Perl and Python are pretty much a pre-requisite of the base Debian system, and Christian got them working early on. But for example in May, 247 packages depended on r-base-dev (GNU R) for building, and 736 on ghc, and we did not have these dependencies compiled. Just counting those two, 1k source packages of the remaining 4k to 5k to be compiled for the new architecture would have to wait for a long time. Then there was Java, Mono, etc... Even more worrying problems were the pending issues with the toolchain, like atomics in glibc, or make check failing for some packages in the clean repository built with wanna-build. Christian continued to work on the toolchain and liasing with the rest of the OpenRISC community, I continued to request more changes to the Debian archive through a few requests to use autoreconf, and pushing a few more NMUs. Though many requests were attended, I soon got negative replies/reactions and backed off a bit. In the meantime, the porters of other new architectures at the time were mostly submitting requests to support them and not NMUing much either. Upstreaming Things continued more or less in the same state until the end of the summer. The new ports needed as many packages built as possible before the evaluation of which official ports to accept (in early September, I think, the final decision around the time of the freeze). Porters of the other new architectures (and maintainers, and other helpful Debian Developers) were by then more active in pushing for changes, specially remaining autoreconf issues, many of which benefited or1k. As I said before, I also kept pushing NMUs now and then, specially during summer, for packages which were not of immediate benefit for our port but helped the others (e.g. ppc64el needed updates to ltmain.sh for libtool which were not necessary for or1k, in addition to config. guess,sub ). In parallel in the or1k camp, there were patches that needed changes to be sent upstream, like for example Python's NumPy, that I submitted in May to the Debian package and upstream, and was uploaded to Debian in September with a new upstream release. Similar paths were followed between May and September for packages such as jemalloc, ocaml, gstreamer0.10, libgc, mesa, X.org's cf module and cmake (patch created by Christian). In April, Christian had reached the amazing milestone of tracking and getting all of the contributors of the port of GNU binutils to assign copyright to the Free Software Foundation (FSF), all of the work was refreshed and upstreamed. In July or August, he started to gather information about the contributors of the GCC port, which had started more than a decade ago. After that, nothing much happened (from the outside) until the end of the year, when Christian sent a message about the status of upstreaming GCC to the OpenRISC community. There was only one remaining person to assign the copyright to the FSF, but it was a blocker. In addition, there was the need to find one or more maintainers to liaise with upstream, review the patches, fix the remaining failures in the test suite and keeping the port in good shape. A few months after that and from what I could gather, the status remains the same. Current Status, and The Future? In terms of the Debian port, there have not been huge visible changes since the end of the summer, and not only because of the Jessie freeze. It seems that for this effort to keep going forward and be sustainable, sorting out the issues with GCC and Glibc is essential. That means having the toolchain completely pushed upstream and in good shape, and particularly completing the copyright assignment. Debian will not accept private forks of those essential packages without a very good reason even in unofficially supported ports; and from the point of view of porters, working in the remaining not-yet-built packages with continuing problems in the toolchain is very frustrating and time-consuming. Other than that, there is already a significant amount of software available that could run in an or1k system, so I think that overall the project has achieved a significant amount of success. Granted, KDE and LibreOffice are not available yet, neither are the tools depending on Haskell or Java. But a lot of software is available (including things high in the stack, like XFCE), and in many aspects it should provide a much more functional system that the one available in Linux (or other free software) systems in the late 1990s. If the blocking issues are sorted out in the near future, the effort needed to get a very functional port, on par with the unofficial Debian ports, should not be that big. In my opinion, and looking at the big picture, not bad at all for an architecture whose hardware implementation is not easy to come by, and in which the port was created almost solely with simulators. That it has been possible to get this far with such meagre resources, it's an amazing feat of Free Software and Debian in particular. As for the future, time will tell, as usual. I will try to keep you posted if there is any significant change in the future.

30 January 2015

Manuel A. Fernandez Montecelo: Hallo, Planet Debian!

Hi! I just created this blog and asked to get it aggregated to the Debian Planet, so first things first -- in the initial post I wanted to say Hallooooo! to the people in the community and to talk about my work and interests in Debian. Probably most of you never interacted with or even heard of me before. I am contributor/Maintainer since ~2010 and Developer only for ~2 years, and most of the things that I worked in or packages that I maintain are "low profile" or unintrusive, except perhaps for work in aptitude and SDL libraries, if you happen to be interested in these packages or others that I [co-]maintain. More recently, during 2014, I was helping to bootstrap and bring to life a new architecture, OpenRISC or1k. Perhaps I should devote a future post to explain a bit more about the history, status and news --or, lately, lack thereof-- about this port. This is one of the main reasons why I thought that it would be useful to have a blog -- to register activities for which it is difficult to get information by other means. Apart from or1k, as it often happens with porting efforts in Debian, the work done also helped indirectly other architectures added last year (mips64el, arm64, ppc64el). Additionally, a few of my NMUs were directly targetted to help ppc64el to get ready in time for the architecture evaluation. None of the porters working in ppc64el were Debian Maintainers/Developers and some of the patches that they created did not benefit directly the other ports, so in the packages without active maintainers, the requests were not getting much attention in the crucial time before the evaluation. In some cases, these packages were in the critical path to build many other packages or support important user-case scenarios. So I was very pleased when I learnt that arm64 and ppc64el will be in the next stable release --Jessie-- as officially supported architectures. They came without much noise or ceremonious celebrations, but I think that this is a great success story for these architectures and for Debian, and even for the computing world in general. Time will tell. In the meantime, congratulations to all people involved! In addition to porting packages within Debian, I also sent some patches upstream to get the packages that I maintain compiling in the new architectures, and sent upstream patches needed to support or1k specifically (jemalloc, nspr, libgc, cmake, components of X.org...). Enough for the first post. Just to finish, let me say that after about a decade without a personal website or blog (the previous ones not about Debian or even computing), here I am again. Let's see how it goes and I hope to have enough interesting things to tell you to keep the blog alive. Or, in other words... To infinity and beyond!

14 January 2012

Christian Perrier: Aptitude revival

Maybe many people have missed this: Aptitude package manager is undergoing a revival. Two fellows, Daniel Hartwig and Manuel A. Fernandez Montecelo, started triaging bugs and preparing a possible new version. Daniel Burrows, who maintained it for years (and did a really good job in this, given the high exposure of aptitude, which happened to be the recommended package managers during a few years), has currently less free time for doing the work. So, this is really great to see people motivated in taking the job over. In case you want to help, please joing the "aptitude-devel" mailing list on lists.alioth.debian.org. There is an Alioth project but Daniel is currently the only administrator. I might ask for admin privileges so that I can validate new team members. Of course, I personnally can't do much in this (C++ programming, coding, ah ah ah...things that are black magic for me), except my usual help for i18n/l10n. But, at minimum, I can make noise about this effort to encourage the volunteers who commit themselves to revive the project. And, I can certainly help by sponsoring their work (none of them is DD as of now) even if I am not skilled enough to review everything. I don't want to see good work wasted because people insist on nitpicking each and every commit line before "approving" it (any idea what I'm talking about, here? :-)).