Marcin Juszkiewicz - timeline

2023 summary

2024-01-11T13:42:00+01:00

In past years I was writing some kind of summary of previous year. In form of kind of timeline, with info about each month etc. Time to write something about previous year but in other form.

SBSA Reference Platform

At work my main project in 2023 was SBSA Reference Platform. In QEMU, Trusted Firmware (TF-A) and Tianocore EDK2 projects.

In May I gathered feedback from Leif, Shashi and others about how do we plan to version the platform. There were plans for upgrades but those had to be done in some sensible way.

More about it is in Versioning of sbsa-ref machine blog post. We managed to do several version bumps and finally got it done in proper way.

There was a time when wrong USB controller was given by firmware compared to what hardware had. And as it was on non-discoverable system bus some operating systems ignored it and worked (Linux) while some (BSD) complained and hang.

More about it in Testing *BSD post.

November brought TF-A 2.10 and EDK2 202311 releases which gave us official firmware for our platform. Where everything works as expected on all operating systems we checked (*BSD, Linux, MS Windows).

We are quite close to SBSA level 3 compliance.

Personal projects

software ones

My system calls table project got several updates as Linux kernel got some new entries. There were several code cleanups to not list calls which are preset in kernel but not implemented. Or were already removed and I missed it.

Also merged my Python system-calls project into above one. It made my life easier as they duplicated each other. Now script which generates my Linux kernel system calls for all architectures table uses Python class so I have less code to maintain.

More AArch64 SoCs appeared in AArch64 SoC features table. Nice to see that there are more and more Arm v8.2 SBCs and newer and newer cores appear in Android phones/tablets.

Wrote ArmCpuInfo application to be able to check which cpu features are supported from EFI shell level. Feedback from community was positive.

hardware ones

After several attempts I got ‘virtual kick in a butt’ and finally ordered new furniture to my kitchen. It just got mounted so I am now in a middle of handling changes but it will be nice improvement.

Other thing was move from Ikea Trådfri to HomeAssistant with Zigbee dongle. Lot of cursing later things (usually) work as intended. Some interesting upgrades done, some areas have different level of light depending on time of day/night. Some buttons switch lights in several areas at once.

Travels

2023 was Europe only. One of reasons was Linaro Connect which took place just once (and it will stay that way) and I did not attended any out-of-Europe conferences.

FOSDEM

Great as usual.

The Netherlands

February in the Netherlands was time nice spent. I took my daughter to visit (again) friends in Eindhoven. Carnival time was nice. All those dressed people…

While there we went to Amsterdam to visit Anne Frank House museum and it was time well spent. This place is “a must visit” if you are in area.

As our Museumcaards from our summer 2022 trip were still valid we went to NEMO science museum. “Would you like to see dead fetuses” was the question of a visit as there was an exhibition of human fetuses in formalin(?).

As we had some time between NEMO and Anne Frank museums we got some good ramen in same place as in 2022 (Vatten Ramen Zeedijk restaurant). After food we visited Koninklijk Paleis Amsterdam (Royal Palace). Interesting place. Especially for 0€ price ;D

Return trip involved visiting Warsaw so we met some friends there, visited Copernicus Science Centre and went back home.

Linaro Connect London

I was in London before so it was kind of ‘meh’ trip when it comes to sightseeing.

Was great to meet co-workers, people from all those projects where Linaro is involved and discuss random things with them. Discussed SBSA Reference Platform future steps with other developers.

And on way from hotel to airport I visited Imperial War Museum. It was interesting to look at World War I/II from other perspective. Have to visit similar museum in Germany.

Vacations

In Poland, by car. As usual. Met family (we are quite spread through the country), long-time-no-see friends and rested a bit.

Several museums again. There was small automotive one in Gdynia, large one in Babki Oleckie, one small one with American cars in Kościerzyna.

We saw some cemetery in a middle of a forest, visited church were The Holy Grail was present few centuries ago, some other old churches.

One day we went to see żubry. In English they are called “European bison” but we had discussion that maybe American bison should rather be called “American żubr” :D

Manga/anime/fantasy events

My daughter is manga/anime fan. So on her birthday I gave her 3rd book from 乙嫁語り (Otoyomegatari) series. In Japanese as one of my friends was in Tokyo, bought it and brought to FOSDEM. There was some laugh and book landed on shelf next to previous ones in Polish.

June meant Pyrkon (fantasy convent) in Poznań. I was tough due to climate conditions. Friends, talks, discussions, cosplayers… Nice time. The good thing is that in 2024 Mira will go there with her mother instead of me. I am tired of Pyrkon already ;D

In August we went for Mizukon convent in Przecław, close to Szczecin (public transport reachable). It was great event. Met some interesting people, had nice discussions, watched several talks. I even managed to win “Anime in 90s” quiz despite not watching anime at that time (did not had access to satellite tv).

October brought Japan Fest in Szczecin. I had a feeling that it was organized by mostly the same people as Mizukon. It was fun to see that people recognize me from previous event.

Summary

In the end it was quite nice year. There were tough times but amount of good ones was much higher. Looking forward to 2024 ;D

2021 timeline

2022-01-17T11:04:00+01:00

2021 ended so let me try to mark some interesting moments.

January

Started looking for a new flat. This time to buy not to rent.
As kind of experiment I started working on I/O plate for APM Mustang as it never had one. After several hours and versions finally I got something usable. Not perfect but good enough.

February

Online FOSDEM happened. It was the best online conference so far.
Friend found me a nice flat. Went, saw, decided to buy.
Jon Nettleton from SolidRun asked do I have any interest in a HoneyComb. We discussed and few days later I got HoneyComb at home. Bought things like case and ram for it, used spare nvme and got it working. I use it as build machine for countless projects.
Replaced old Netgear router with EspressoBin. I got that SBC from a friend, printed 3d case and sorted out fresh firmware. Now it boots straight from SPI flash and reads operating system from microsd card.
After several discussions with developers I wrote how AArch64 perception change when all you used are SBC (compared to being used to AArch64 servers).

March

Another ‘let me explain’ post. This time on U-Boot and generic distro boot as it turned out to be hard to understand/decode for some people.
I got an offer of Ampere eMag system. But due to my flat move and shipping/customs issues nothing came from it.

April

Bought flat. Agreed with previous owners on moving date. They started painting walls.
Five years at Linaro passed. Still waiting for that glass award.
I wrote one tweet and it was enough to get extra AArch64 nodes for Opendev CI.
I got “Mars 2020 Helicopter Contributor” badge on GitHub. As one of ~12000 developers.
First dose of COVID-19 vaccine.

May

Moved to my own flat. With help from my friends and moving company. Still have a few unpacked boxes.
As my daughter had 3 free days in a middle of a week we went for nice trip through museums.
Spent some time on designing new structure for home network. EspressoBin got replaced with very small x86-64 system (4 “igb” network interfaces). Finally reached 1Gbps speed on home link.

June

Organizing my new home. Looking for good office furniture ended with buying VS 901 desk and organizer.
Second dose of COVID-19 vaccine.

July

Got two Sharp Zaurus palmtops: SL-5500 (collie) and SL-5600 (poodle) from a friend. First model was a device which brought me to working full time on FOSS.
My 13 years old daughter asked me what “that huge phone with printer” she saw in anime was. Took me a moment or two to find out that it was fax machine…
Crashed my car. No one got hurt. Insurance paid what they had to and I later sold what was left of the car.

August

Vacations! Rented Opel Astra combi and we went for a tour. Met some friends, visited new places (and some old ones). Good time.
Friends managed to organize demoscene party in COVID-19 times. So I went to Katowice, Poland and spent great time at Xenium 2021.

September

Programmers’ Day! So I wrote about programming languages I used so far.
Created Python package for system calls information. So far no one reported using it. I learnt few new things so mission accomplished.
Upgraded home wireless network from 802.11n to 802.11ax standard. Or WiFi 6 if you prefer new names.

October

Left some projects maintained by Arm employees. Open source with closed development process is not something I am fan of. Especially when there is no serious review done on code contributions.
I got information that moderators on “Arm Software Developers” Discord are not fans of my comments there. Went through history, dropped most of my posts and left server. Was asked to go back some time later. No longer taking part of conversations there.

November

I was positive! Too bad that it was result of COVID-19 test. 2 weeks of isolation as a result. Boring time with flu-like symptoms. Friends handled my shopping needs.
Migrated from Pocketbook Touch HD to Onyx Boox Poke 3. Just to migrate to Onyx Boox Nova 2 three weeks later. Reading books on 7.8” screen is the other experience.

December

Polish demoscene became official Polish cultural heritage.
Wrote post about 25 years of using the Internet.
Started playing with configuration of my router to get native IPv6/IPv4 setup working. Took far too many attempts and curses but got it done (in 2022).
Third dose of COVID-19 vaccine (this time Moderna instead of Pfizer).

2019 review: FOSS projects

2020-01-23T08:47:00+01:00

“Whatever you do, do it upstream” is IMHO one of mottos worth following. So I went upstream wherever possible.

Python

2020 came, Python 2 is no more. So 2019 was full of cleaning and patching. I filled several bugs on projects, created patches to mark some Python packages as Py2 only (or <Py3.5 only). Some projects just dropped support for Py2 packages due to it.

pbr story

With move to Python 3 came some issues with Unicode characters in README files of packages used by OpenStack components. Filled some bugs, created patches and then, after several emails, someone found out that it is a bug in ‘pbr’ and fixed it ;D

manylinux2014

Installing Python packages on AArch64 can be painful. While “pip install numpy” takes few seconds on x86-64 machine it can take an hour on Arm64 + extra time to find out which libraries and compilers need to be installed.

So Python developers created PEP-599 to sort out situation and create ‘manylinux2014’ target which can be then used to build ‘wheels’ (aka binary Python packages) not only for x86(-64) but also for 32-bit Arm, 64-bit Arm, 64-bit Power (big and little endian) and Z/Arch (s390x).

Somehow I managed to be involved in it. Went through pull request on GitHub, build checked, fixed dependencies and some other issues, filled CentOS bugs, discussed with CentOS developers on fixes and then one day all that stuff got merged.

Now you can fetch “manylinux2014” images from “pypa” account on Quay.io container registry and build ‘wheel’ binaries for different architectures. If you lack target hardware then consider services like Travis CI which provide access (free for FOSS projects).

CirrOS

Speaking of Travis CI… Near the end of the year I got task from one of Linaro teams to update CirrOS images with kernels from Ubuntu 18.04 or later.

I fetched current source, built images and started wondering how to do it best. So started discussing with Scott Moser (main developer) and we agreed that such move have sense and that some changes are needed in this project.

In December we moved it from Launchpad/cirros to GitHub/cirros-dev/cirros. Opened several issues to not forget what we planned and I started looking at some of them.

Project is now using Travis CI service for tests. With all builds being run parallel we have checks done in less than and hour. Including boot test for aarch64, arm, i386 and x86_64 architectures (ppc/ppc64/ppc64le need work).

Doing releases on GitHub is one of next tasks. Current service will redirect.

Linaro ERP

After ERP 18.12 release we decided that there will be no more releases and Debian ‘buster’ will be used as it is (ERP based on Debian ‘stretch’). So I spent some time on working with Debian kernel maintainers.

Most important part? Merging kernel configuration changes. We had about twenty extra enabled to get our servers supported. Everything worth using got merged. In meantime we even found a bug in Linux-stable tree which took some time to fix.

We were ready for Debian ‘buster’ release. And it worked out of the box on all machines we supported ;D

Big Data

Bleh. Java, protobuf 2.5 and other madness… But as build engineer I get such stuff from time to time.

Last year it was mostly Apache Drill and Apache Arrow. In both cases I worked on their Debian packaging (not in-Debian one) to add/fix AArch64 support.

Other projects still wait for ‘let us move to newer protobuf’ but it will take years…

2019 review: OpenStack

2020-01-21T14:53:00+01:00

Another year passed so let me try to summarize it. And a lot of things happened so it will be set of posts.

Kolla

We did two releases: ‘stein’ in July and ‘train’ in December. As usual a bit later than most of OpenStack projects as we have to wait for their releases, then for distributions to provide their binary packages, test everything etc.

2019 was also a year of moving to Python 3 in our project. Images went in rounds — first some in Stein, then rest in Train cycle. We managed to remove Python 2 support from Kolla-Ansible but have to wait for TripleO project before we drop Py2 in Kolla itself.

Also, we removed OracleLinux support. No one from active developers had access to it and jobs were failing on random moments. CentOS 7 support covered all needs in our opinion.

CentOS 8 was hoped to be ready for cloud use. But it was not due to many changes needed in build infrastructure. Now, after 8.1.1911 release, there is a hope that situation will change and SIGs will be able to build their packages.

On the other hand, we added support for IPv6 deployments. Linaro developers helped with testing as our second Linaro Developer Cloud will be IPv6 only and all resources will be provided for OpenStack infrastructure.

There was new OpenStack project called Kayobe. It used both Kolla and Kolla-Ansible (and some other projects) to deploy containered OpenStack on bare metal. Including provisioning. We accepted it as subproject of Kolla as some of our members work in all those projects.

Infrastructure

During 2019 I got huge amount of help from OpenStack infrastructure team. We changed mirroring of CentOS, Debian, Ubuntu and several external repositories for any of those distributions. AArch64 was added where it was needed, changes got reviewed quickly. Perfect job!

Continuous Integration

After long fight with issues we finally have working AArch64 CI for OpenStack projects. Linaro provided some vcpu in Linaro Developer Cloud, infrastructure admins created some nodes from it and then created ‘check-arm64’ pipeline on Zuul.

This way any OpenStack project can add tests on 64-bit Arm hardware without impacting their standard set of tests. We went that way due to low amount of nodes and it turned out to be very good move. Kolla(-ansible) itself is able to saturate all of them during developer heavy days.

More nodes are coming. Managed by Linaro on sponsored hardware. Pure IPv6!

2017 timeline

2018-01-03T20:16:00+01:00

January

Quiet time. Just after Linaro ERP release was done.

February

FOSDEM as usual. This time with CentOS/RDO meeting.
Took my daughter Mira to Touluse, France for winter holidays. There was about 17°C which was nice change after week of snow. Visited Aerospace museum and Space city. Nice trip.
Started working on Kolla. Took few months to get non-x86 support merged and then I became core reviewer. Learnt a lot during those months.

March

Linaro Connect in Budapest. Met friends, saw some nice places in a city. Arrow company presented several boards compatible with 96boards specifications including Enterprise Edition one.
“Root Linux” conference in Kiev, Ukraine. Gave a talk about OpenStack on AArch64 (youtube video).
OpenStack Day in Warsaw, Poland. Few interesting prelections, lot of talks with other developers.

April

OpenStack, OpenStack and OpenStack. And rewriting patches all over again and again.

May

Support for non-x86 support finally landed in Kolla. My goal was to get AArch64 supported and got POWER8/LE support as free bonus.

June

With a friend we went for Sandra concert. Somehow I remembered city name wrong and instead of 1 hour drive it was 4 hour one. Still fun.
Went for long weekend trip to Cologne, Paderborn, Düsseldorf. Ok, main reason was Paderborn where I visited Heinz Nixdorf MuseumsForum (described as biggest computer museum in the world) and Universität Paderborn where main Aminet server was hosted when I started my Amiga adventure. Museum was nice but I enjoyed Computer History Museum more.
Built first set of OpenStack ‘Pike’ container images for Debian/AArch64.
Started working on DPDK related issues. Then we got assignee to work on it and I only provided updated packages.

July

Visited Linaro office in Harston for a release sprint. And we celebrated my birthday in a pub. Was great.

August

Helped organizing Ingress Anomaly in Szczecin, Poland. We got aroung 1200 agents from many countries. My job was to take care of missions, mosaics and Mission Day. It was exhausting and we have a lot of fun.

September

Attended Riverwash demoscene party.
Went with a friends for a week in Bieszczady mountains. Nearly out of any civilisation related stuff.
Another Linaro Connect. This time around San Francisco. And new 96boards Enterprise Edition hardware — this time in MicroATX form factor: Socionext SynQuacer with 24 cores.
Spent a day in Computer History Museum and still have a feeling that it was not enough time to see everything ;D

October

Attended Retrokomp/Load Error event.
Donated blood for a first time. Will repeat.
Started playing with Bigtop project. Lot of Java stuff, Docker images and porting issues. Reported several bugs, replaced their old AArch64 build slave with two new ones (all three run in Linaro Developer Cloud).

November

Became core reviewer in Kolla project
Another Ingress Anomaly — this time Berlin.

December

Attended Silly Venture demoscene party. It is amazing what people can get running on those old Atari machines.

2015 timeline

2016-01-04T21:06:00+01:00

2016 started so it is a good moment for post about previous year. I did that every year except last one (for several reasons).

January

After sorting out hardware issues I started X11 on AArch64. On old, crappy Matrox G550 card but it was a start. Now I use Radeon HD5450 and have 2D/3D acceleration ;D
Became “proven packager” in Fedora which means that I can commit changes to any package there.
One of my friends asked for Realtek 8029 (10Mbps Ethernet card) for his retro machine. I asked few people and ended with sending 20kg package to Piotr. Few computers, hard drives, optical drives, floppy drives, few GB of memory of different type etc. But no RLT8029…
Managed to visit some strange places just because I drove with Google Maps in the night… It does not handle “turn around and drive back” method ;(

February

Bought LG G3 phone as my Nexus 5 was driving me nuts. Few months later I got new N5 from Google (sold it to friend), replaced battery in broken one and gave it to my wife.
Attended FOSDEM (again) and Devconf.cz conferences. Walked a lot thought Brno, visited Red Hat Czech office where I met few coworkers.
Sold Wandboard Quad board.
Linaro announced 96boards project and presented HiKey. I wrote few words about it and have to admit that I am still sceptical when it comes to this project.
Ate burger in a doughnut on Fat Thursday. Interesting, tasty. Hope to repeat one day.

March

Visited Hannover, Germany to play Ingress. Lot of fun and driving.
Pinkiepie (APM Mustang, my AArch64 devmachine) needed 7 minutes to boot due to some PCI error ;D

April

Attended Open Source Day conference in Warsaw. Nice hallway track talks — especially one with IBM guy about POWER8 and ppc64le.
I was asked “How do you run VMS on AArch64???” few times after I wrote how to run virtual machines on Fedora/AArch64. All because of url ;D

May

Started playing Resources game. After few days made page with some helpers ;D
Bought new tablet — Lenovo S8 (Intel Atom powered, Android). Was good decision.
Saw amazing demo called “8088 MPH” which requires real IBM 5160 PC with CGA. Now I have CGA at home but still not PC/XT machine.
This month we got something more enterprise with AArch64 support — CentOS/AArch64. So I had to test and post about it.
Fedora 22 got released with working AArch64 installer.

June

Visited Poznań, Poland to play Ingress. Lot of fun and meetings with old friends.
As Flock (Fedora conference) was in USA I started planning my US/CA vacations.
Made use of Minnowboard Max board and finished “media player for my wife” project. Runs Ubuntu 15.10 with Kodi. Controlled with one of those wireless remotes.
RHEL Server for ARM Development Preview was announced and my AArch64 work became available in yet another distribution.
First set of leaks of Huskey board arrived so I wrote about it. It was officially announced some time later but even now it is not available.

July

Vacations part I. Took my daughter for a trip. Visited dinosaurs park, some old castles and visited family. While we were in Olecko I added set of Ingress missions there. Doing them was fun ;)
Visited one retro computing event.

August

Vacations part II. First Reykjavík, Iceland for a day — met local Ingress players, visited what was possible in short amount of time. Then Boston/Cambridge/Salem, Massachusetts for nearly a week — again lot of walking. Met Jon Masters, drank some crazy “beer with ice cream shake” and had lot of fun.
Next was Flock conference in Rochester, NY. Lot of Fedora people from USA/Canada who never went for European conferences. Played “Cards against humanity” — have to finally buy a set.
Then Niagara Falls, Canada for 24 hours. Crazy trip, lot of photos, free flu ;D
Toronto was fun as well. Went for few interesting walking trips, visited local hackerspace. Even had good beer!
Created table with syscall number for different architectures — contact me if it needs updates.
Found out why XServer does not start automatically on AArch64 with PCIe gfx card and digged into it again and again.

September

Visited “Riverwash” demoscene party in Kraków, Poland.
Week with AArch64 as a desktop machine: day one, day two, last day. We are not there yet.
Few posts “from the diary of AArch64 porter”: POSIX.1, PAGE_SIZE, VFP precision.
Google released Pixel C — first laptop-like device with AArch64. Too expensive for development machine.

October

Visited “Retrokomp” event and “Load Error” demoscene party in Gdańsk, Poland. Saw next set of old Polish computers. Time to switch to computers from 50-70s as retro ;D
Hacked broken USB cable to be power/reset buttons for APM Mustang.

November

Visited Hamburg, Germany to play Ingress. Lot of fun and driving. Met Alexander Sack under his house just after he left home for a smoke ;D
Passed ten thousand of visited portals in Ingress. After two and half year of playing.
Went for Microsoft Expert Summit conference and then for Jesień Linuksowa (“Linux Autumn”). Why me on MS one? Friend had a talk there and we were sharing a car ;)
RHEL Server for ARM 7.2 Development Preview got released
Wrote short note why Fedora 23 does not support several popular boards.
Got Roseapple/Pi developer board. 3.10 kernel only, ancient U-Boot, no signs of any activity. Went to drawer.

December

Bought myself a TV set. Then hacked it to work with my bluetooth headphones so I can watch movies when other people sleep ;D
After few years switched theme on blog.

2013 timeline

2014-01-06T18:16:00+01:00

Another year so time for summary post. Mostly spent around AArch64. Changed job. But let go with usual month-by-month style.

January

XTerm on AArch64 before anyone else got X11 working ;D Few months passed and we got that stuff merged and provided by other distributions.
Samsung tried to hire me but I refused. Would feel bad working in a company which ignores external developers so often.
Published my script to easy boot of AArch64 models. Current version supports also UEFI boot.

February

FOSDEM 2013 of course. Had interesting chat with Peter Robinson from Fedora about ALSA UCM profiles. Took me few months but in May I finally sent them and got it merged. So now all distributions should be able to ship them.
Retired my old Dell D400 — Ania got Acer netbook instead.
Spent more time with Chromebook. From testing Chrubuntu install script to Ubuntu updates and real life usage.

March

My blog is now EU cookie crap compliant.
Visited Hong Kong again for Linaro Connect Asia. Nice city, good conference. Hint: if you go for street shopping wait for seller to give price and start from 20-40% of it.

April

Spent Easter in alternative way — visited Revision demoscene party. Awesome it was and I plan to do it again.
Wrote my last work on OpenGL ES for Chromebook. Do not ask again cause you will get that link anyway.
Moved from Archos G9 80 Turbo to Nexus 7. Another upgrade probably during this year. Maybe LG Pad 8” this time?
BeagleBone got upgrade so I wrote a post about BeagleBone Black compared to R/Pi. Lot of hate from R/Pi community but also around four thousand visits on one day. This time my blog survived without problems ;)

May

Left Linaro for good due to end of Canonical<>Linaro contract. This also meant leaving Canonical as I did not want to work there. You may want to read my post from start of May and my good bye Linaro one as well.
First discussion with Red Hat about job opportunities.
Visited UK for pleasure. London and Cambridge this time. I saw lot of interesting places, did several beers with local friends. Good spent time.
Sent ALSA UCM profiles and got it merged. One thing less for distributions to carry.

June

The “we pay you but do not require you to do any work” month at Canonical. Nice move from their side.
Visited Pixel Heaven in Warsaw. There was lot of different old computers. One of them was Acorn Archimedes so I was able to play with really old ARM cpus ;)
Started playing Ingress because I had 2 hours to return train…
Spent some time on Arch Linux ARM forums and found some nice hints for Chromebook usage. Also U-Boot for SPI flash…
Wrote post about ARM history which got shared in many places.

July

Another set of calls with Red Hat. Then some paperwork needed to be done.
Made to L8 in Ingress ;D
Played with mainline kernels on Chromebook but went back to 3.4 one to get better hardware support.

August

Got hired by Red Hat as Senior Software Engineer. My wife joked that next position would be Retired Software Engineer ;D
Vacations continued.

September

Started work at Red Hat by moving Chromebook to Fedora. Then moved main desktop to “rawhide”. After few months I can say that distribution is ok but there are many tools which I miss from Debian including packaging UI manager.
Visited SmartDevCon conference. And won Samsung Galaxy S4 (GT-9505) cellphone. TouchWiz suxx very badly.
Moved Chromebook to U-Boot -> NV U-Boot -> Kernel way of booting. This allows me to drop into bootloader and do whatever I need there. One day I will finally get rid of first U-Boot…
Moved from Xen instance to raw hardware for hosting. Atom N2800 is not a rocket but more than enough for my needs.
Suspended my consulting company as I am hired directly now.

October

My father died.

November

Got Python3 working on AArch64. There were many other packages as well but this one I remember ;D
Wrote 2nd part of AArch64 porter diary to complain about some build/packaging issues. First part is also online.

December

Started merging my stack of AArch64 related patches into Fedora. And into upstream of course. Lot of issues it gave.
Got Qt5 nearly complete on AArch64. Still have to get QtWebKit part done but it is close. Good part is that all my patches do not require any contribution agreement papers.

It was quite good year. Changed job from interesting one at Linaro to also interesting one at Red Hat. Still work on AArch64 porting stuff but this time I have access to real hardware so it goes faster.

2012 timeline

2013-01-03T19:58:00+01:00

Another year passed. It was busy one with some job related turbulence… But let me start.

January

Made short research to find out which Android tablet to buy. Month later I bought Archos 80 G9 Turbo.

February

Linaro Connect in Redwood City (San Francisco area) was great event. The walk to Golden Gate was one of best parts of whole trip. Too bad that I decided to not stay for ELC which was few days after — most of US OpenEmbedded developers were there…
Went to New York City on return trip. 36 hours is far too small amount of time to visit this town… Met guys from Bug Labs ;)
Skipped FOSDEM for second time ;(
I bought that Archos 80 G9 Turbo tablet. Most often self asked question during next months was “why???” — it feels slower than my Nexus S… But my daughter likes it as she has some games, books and films on it.
My howto about flashing U-Boot on Efika MX Smartbook got re-used somewhere on Genesi website as many people found it useful.

March

Joined MOTU team in Ubuntu. Not that I use that often…
Due to amount of spam about Raspberry/Pi I wrote a post why I am not interested in R/Pi. I suggested BeagleBone instead.
Published last version of cross compilers for ‘oneiric’ release of Ubuntu.
Wrote post about cross compilation of ARM kernels under Ubuntu 12.04. It is still one of most popular posts.
Went to AmiWawa meeting. Lot of friends from old Amiga times…

April

Easter. Family etc.
Attended local Ubuntu release party.

May

This was busy month — just one weekend for family ;(

Ubuntu Developer Summit in Oakland (San Francisco area again). Did some sight-seeing, went to cinema — had good spent time. As usual did some shopping at Amazon ;)
Attended Tizen Developers Conference as it was just 2 stops from UDS/Q hotel. And some friends from Maemo times were there. And there was great social event on Tuesday…
Got Tizen Developer Platform device, played a bit with it and wrote few words about it. Few months later I sent this brick to some guy in Norway — maybe he will do something interesting with it.
At end of month I went to Hong Kong…

June

There was Linaro Connect q2.12 at Hong Kong. For me it was first visit in Asia. Did some sight-seeing but hope to see more in March 2013 when Linaro Connect Asia will take place at same hotel.
ARMv8 related work started.

July

New stuff, old tools. Or in other words: started using OpenEmbedded again. This time some preparations for ARMv8 work — created some images and Jenkins jobs to build them. Few months later we switched architecture and fun started.
Also unbricked my SheevaPlug after my friend’s play. Now it is un-bootable again ;D

August

Spend few weeks on holidays. Good time it was.
Some people assigned by Canonical to work on Linaro went back and left our teams. I was on a list too, but convinced management that ARMv8 work may need my skills ;D

September

Applied for Debian Maintainer. Got accepted some time later.
Attended SmartDev Conference. I was member of programme committee. Nice event it was. Also met some old friends there ;)
Started ARMv8 work in OpenEmbedded. First with some internal patches so I could not tell too much about progress. And there were sad moments due to that — like when I cross compiled first programs but had to wait 2 more weeks before could say that in public…
Wrote two posts about ARM devices and why I am not interested in anything below Cortex-A9 ones. This time it was more polite than similar post from 2011.

October

ARMv8 sprint in Cambridge. During that week Linaro published glibc patches for AArch64 so I was able to finally share my work with outside world. And as usual met some old friends ;)
3 weeks later everyone was able to run ARMv8 binaries.
Also that month there was decision made that I will move to Canonical at beginning of December. Everything was setup so I sent farewell e-mail to everyone at Linaro. But later it got reverted and I will probably never know why and who made that decision.
Went to Copenhagen for Canonical internal event to meet the team which I planned to join. Got lot of information about company plans which I am not allowed to talk about.
Another Ubuntu Developers Summit took place.
Also Linaro Connect q3.12 started.
And Google + Samsung announced new, ARM based, Chromebook. So I bought one ;D

November

During Linaro Connect Andrew Wafaa gave me my Chromebook and I managed to get Ubuntu running on it. Lot of help came from Olof Johansson — without him it would be much harder work. Managed to fry speakers ;(
Then I went to Barcelona for ELC/E and Yocto developers day. Met friends, had lot of fun.
Got BeagleBone and The Fish River Island 2 devices. Still did not booted second one.
Spent few days at Palamos, Spain. Lovely time to relax after 3 weeks of conferences — thanks to Zygmunt Krynicki and his wife.
Did last update of cross compilers for Ubuntu. Looks like Matthias Klose will take care of them now.

December

My sister gave birth to two daughters! So now I am uncle at my part of family as well :)
Created project and team at Launchpad to unite people hacking on ARM Chromebook support. Mailing list is not so used but we got some bugs and first set of packages. So if you have such device and use Ubuntu on it… join us! If you use other distribution then also join us ;)
Snapdragon S4 Plus APQ8060A based DragonBoard arrived on my desk. Waits in queue…
Got own kernel working on Chromebook. It is now available in PPA.
Went to Silly Venture demoscene party. It was Atari event. Awesome one!

What will 2013 bring? There will be some changes, new projects, devices… But I will write about them at proper time.