Marcin Juszkiewicz - travels

Linaro Connect MAD24

2024-06-14T13:04:00+02:00

Nowadays we have only one Connect per year. And this year we met in Madrid, Spain.

How did it go for me? Good, better than the previous one.

I attended most of the talks I wanted to see, spoke with countless people, and met most of the people on my “to meet” list.

SystemReady related talks

For me, the main topic at Linaro Connect was SystemReady. There was a track for SystemReady IR on the first day and the next days included additional presentations.

Does SystemReady IR “Just Work”?

Jon Humphreys from Texas Instruments gave an introduction what SystemReady is. Explained how systems operated before it, the definition of “Just Works”, and some aspects of testing. He then discussed issues with the current certification process, such as missing firmware files used during testing and problems with errata documents. He also offered recommendations on how to improve the situation.

Looking back on SystemReady IR

Vincent Stehlé from Arm spoke a lot about of history and timelines of involved specifications, the U-Boot features timeline and several statistics about SystemReady certifications along with lessons learned.

30.9% of certified systems were for IR band (only SR was higher with 36%), mostly for older versions of the specification.

We learned that there are three certification labs besides Arm itself. And the plan is to eventually remove Arm from this role.

It was interesting to see which distributions were used during IR certification. Fedora Linux leads with 33.9%, followed by openSUSE at 33% and Debian at 21.1%. Other distributions include Ubuntu, SLES, Rocky Linux and RHEL.

U-Boot for SystemReady IR — Status and struggles

Ilias Apalodimas from Linaro presented the history of U-Boot getting features required for SystemReady IR support. He highlighted some common issues and offered suggestions for improvement.

This talk nicely expanded on the topics mentioned in the previous two talks.

SystemReady as default option for BSPs: Findings from the last SystemReady IoT workshop

Ilias Apalodimas, Pere Garcia Gutiérrez and Peter Robinson presented conclusions from SystemReady’s Advisory Committee workshop.

One idea was that SoC vendors should provide BSP setup in a way that the resulting firmware would already be SystemReady compliant. This would make it easier for OEM/ODM vendors, with some following their own paths while others adhered to the guidelines.

Qualcomm and SystemReady IR, an overview of Qualcomm support in U-Boot and what the future

Caleb Connolly from Linaro shared the story how Qualcomm support in U-Boot improved from terrible to good. He mentioned several quirks and issues encountered along the way.

Arm System Architecture and SystemReady Update

Dong Wei from Arm provided updates on changes to the SystemReady specifications.

I somehow missed that session. It was on my list, but I got distracted by a discussion.

He explained how changes are managed and reminded us how SystemReady bands depend on specifications. Then presented planned changes to BSA, such as creation of VBSA for virtual environments and increase of requirements for future versions.

Another change mentioned was that the SystemReady LS and LBBR recipe of BBR might be deprecated due to lack of interest.

There will be some changes for the SBSA requirements. So far there are no plans to create SBSA level 8, but if a silicon vendor can fulfil all future requirements, Arm may consider publishing SBSA level 8.

The BBSR (Boot Base Security Requirements) specification may become a requirement for future SystemReady versions.

SBSA Reference Platform in QEMU status update

I gave a talk presenting what we achieved in the past year regarding the SBSA Reference Platform in QEMU, Trusted Firmware and EDK2 projects.

I discussed changes to virtual hardware, firmware and the methods we use to transfer configuration data between layers. I explained why I use “Datatree” term instead of “Devicetree” and outlined our plans for the future.

Other sessions

I attended other sessions as well and watched several ones I missed due to discussions or schedule conflicts. Here I want to write about some of them.

TianoCore community update

Leif Lindholm provided an introduction and updates on the TianoCore EDK2 project.

He covered which specifications it implements, how repositories are structured, the licenses used and the communication methods. Also discussed updates to SSL/TLS libraries and toolchain profiles, contribution rules and recent changes to there rules.

Additionally, he outlined plans for changes to edk2-platforms such as creating stable tags and implementing automated CI.

An Arm laptop project conclusion

Johan Hovold shared information about the state of Linux on the Lenovo Thinkpad x13s laptop (which comes with Windows for Arm by default).

The good part is that most of the support is already merged into upstream projects and the required kernel configuration changes have been included in several distributions.

The bad part? There is still a lot of work to be done. I wonder when vendors will learn how to write proper ACPI tables (x13s uses Devicetree to run Linux).

Rethinking the kernel system call entry

Arnd Bergmann from Linaro spoke about his work on rethinking the Linux kernel system call entry.

He covered how system calls are currently defined now in the Linux kernel. Then showed how he changed it to be more readable.

I have my system calls table but had never looked how kernel code for them looks. Turned out that it can be quite intimidating with macros expanded to macros resulting in complex C code.

Arnd showed that it can be made readable. I hope that his work will land in the Linux kernel soon.

End words

Linaro Connect MAD24 was a success. I got ideas for blog posts, met people who read my posts.

And if you want to watch more talks from conference then there is official Linaro Connect MAD24 playlist on YouTube.

Visit Linaro Resources Hub for video recordings and presentation slides.

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

I am tired of online conferences

2022-08-12T10:46:00+02:00

About two and half year passed since start of COVID-19 pandemic. A time when most of conferences got cancelled or went online (with different level of success).

A conference which should have been a YouTube playlist

There is saying “a meeting which should have been an email”. For meetings which were complete waste of time for most of attendees. During pandemic several events were “a conference which should have been a YouTube playlist”. Never mind did talks were interesting or not.

Far too often there was no way to chat with speakers or other “attendees”. Or there was one chat channel per whole conference or track. Also without threading (just one long list of messages) and no way to mention names.

Life kicks in

Some time ago one online conference took place. Three days of talks about things which interest me. I had plans to attend several of them. Then life happened — video calls and local stuff. Also several hours of time difference was a problem.

Good part is that organizers recorded all talks so I can watch them later. I “just” missed a way to get part in chat and Q&A session at the end.

Started to ignore

I started to ignore most of invites to such events. Sooner or later videos from them land online so I pick those which interest me.

Sitting in front of a screen and watching people talking is boring. Especially after over two years of doing it because there was no other way.

Red Hat Platform Enablement meeting week

2018-11-20T12:54:00+01:00

Last week I was in Vancouver, Canada again. At the time when Linux Plumbers conference took place. But it was not the main reason as I went there to meet people from Platform Enablement team at Red Hat.

Linux Plumbers

The idea was simple — gather everyone in one place at same time and let them talk. Conference was selected to give something else to do at same time. And we were visible — for 473 attendees about 60 was from Red Hat.

Red Hat team before going for team dinner

I was talking with most of RH people to find out who they are, what they are working on etc. It ended in a lot of interesting discussions. Also many talks with non-RH people. The ‘so you are IBM now’ phrase happened just a few times.

There were funny moments too. Like one when Dave Airlie responded with “ah, you are the ‘arm64 + radeon guy’” ;D

Vancouver

As there was no breakfast option in ‘The Burrard’ hotel I went for a walk to find some. Davie street is full of bars, diners, restaurants (but most of them open at 11:00). Interesting graffiti, cannabis stores (as it is now legal in Canada) and lot of LGBT rainbows everywhere.

Band graffiti

Some “Safe space” monument

Tanning salon

Cannabis Store

Fountain

Shore

A-maze-ing Laughter

Toronto

Due to one of my flights being cancelled I had to choose: weekend in Vancouver, weekend in Toronto or rebooking whole trip. So I decided to go to Toronto and meet friend there.

On Saturday I meet Karol and we had long walk. It was good to not discuss about ARM or OpenStack — we went for visual effects instead as this is Karol’s area of expertise. Maya, Houdini, Renderman, Mr. X, ILM, Pixar and other names were going over. I was told “they work on Houdini in that building” and later “here Maya is developed” ;D

So I asked about photo realistic movies — are they possible now? Turns out that yes, they are. But it is too expensive to make.

During weekend I did over 20 kilometers by just walking through the city. Some random photos below:

Thimble monument

Pink Panther graffiti

Dog graffiti

Rabbits graffiti

Leslieville graffiti

Together sidewalk graffiti

Halloween decorations

Small house between bigger ones

TORONTO city sign with buildings

TORONTO city sign

Me and TORONTO city sign

It was great week. Despite sleep deprivation ;D

Apple Museum Poland is a magical place

2018-07-27T10:24:00+02:00

You may noticed that I am trying to visit computer museums when there is a chance. Recently I visited Apple Museum Poland in small village near Warsaw, Poland.

Museum is open during weekends and visits need to be arranged earlier (as it is in private house). It is easy to get there (Google Maps or other navigation) and totally worth it. Never mind are you an Apple fan or not.

What’s there? Apple computers from replica of Apple I, through misc Apple II/III models to Lisa, Macintosh machines, Powerbooks, iMacs etc. Some clones too. Some old terminals. Apollo Computer Graphic Workstation. And that’s not all.

There is a lot of attention given to details. Same monitors as in original commercials. Same setups.

Apple II with Sanyo monitor and disk drive

Apple III with dedicated monitor and some peripherals

First Apple modem under AT&T phone

As ARM developer I could not notice that there was a shelf filled with first ARM powered Apple devices: Newton in several models.

Apple Newton PDA collection

Computers… What about servers? How many people remember that Apple was doing servers? Big, loud machines.

Apple servers: x86 and PowerPC based ones

Of course like each museum that one also have some pearls:

Macintosh Portable in working condition

Duo Dock II docking station for PowerBook Duo

Bell & Howell version of Apple II

Marron Carrel Apple IIe

There were also several non-Apple machines there. From that Apollo Computer Graphic Workstation to Franklin ACE 1200 (and some other Apple II clone). Also some industrial solutions.

Franklin ACE 1200 (Apple II clone)

Apollo Computer Graphic Workstation

NEC PC-8001A with peripherals

There were several other computers, accessories and peripherals exhibited. Lot of interesting stories given by museum owner. Incredible amount of stuff not available outside of Apple dealers network (like official video instructions on laserdiscs).

I could add more and more photos here but trust me — it is far better to see it with own eyes than through blog post.

Again I highly recommend it to anyone. Never mind are you an Apple fan or just like old computers. Just remember to go to Apple Museum Poland on Facebook first to arrange a visit.

Shenzhen trip

2018-03-29T13:54:00+02:00

Few months ago, at the end of previous Linaro Connect gathering, there was announcement that next one will take place in Hong Kong. This gave me idea of repeating Shenzhen trip but in a bit longer version.

So I mailed people at Linaro and there were some responses. We quickly agreed on going there before Connect. Alex, Arnd, Green and me were landing around noon, Riku a few hours later so we decided that we will meet in Shenzhen.

We crossed border in Lok Ma Chau, my visa had the highest price again and then we took a taxi to the Maker Hotel (still called “Quchuang Hotel” in Google Maps and on Booking.com) next to all those shops we wanted to visit. Then went for quick walk through Seg Electronics Market. Lot of mining gear. 2000W power supplies, strange PCI Express expanders etc. Dinner, meeting with Riku and day ended.

I have woken up at 02:22 and was not able to fall asleep. Around 6:00 it turned out that rest of team is awake as well so we decided to go around and search for some breakfast. Deserted streets looked a bit weird.

Back at hotel we were discussing random things. Then someone from Singapore joined and we were talking about changes in how Shenzhen stores/factories operate. He told us that there is less and less of stores as business moves to the Internet. Then some Chinese family came with about seven years old boy. He said something, his mother translated and it turned out that he wanted to touch my beard. As it was not the first time my beard got such attention I allowed him. That surprise on his face was worth it. And then we realized that we have not seen bearded Chinese man on a street.

As stores were opening at 10:00 we still had a lot of time so went for random walk. Including Shenzhen Center Park which is really nice place:

Shenzhen Center Park

Then stores started to open. Fake phones, real phones, tablets, components, devices, misc things… Walking there was fun itself. Bought some items from my list.

Store with floors of small shops

They also had a lot of old things. Intel Overdrive system for example or 386/486 era processors and FPUs.

Intel Overdrive

From weird things: 3.5” floppy disks and Intel Xeon Platinum 8175 made for Amazon cloud only.

brand new 3.5” floppies

Intel Xeon Platinum 8177

Lot and lot of stuff everywhere. Need power supply? There were several stores with industrial ones, regulated ones etc. Used computers/laptops? Piles after piles. New components? Lot to choose from. Etc, etc, etc…

After several hours we finally decided to go back to Hong Kong and rest. The whole trip was fun. I really enjoyed it. Even without getting half of items from my ‘buy while in Shenzhen’ list ;D

And ordered Shenzhen fridge magnet on Aliexpress… They were not available to buy at any place we were.

SnowpenStack in Dublin

2018-03-05T13:36:00+01:00

During last week I was in Dublin, Ireland on OpenStack PTG. It was also the worst weather since 1982. There was snow and strong wind so conference quickly got renamed to SnowpenStack.

The main reasons for me to be there were:

meet all those developers who took some time and looked at my changes
discuss some other changes/plans
share aarch64 knowledge with OpenStack projects

Conference took place in the Croke Park stadium. We used meeting rooms on 4th, 5th, 6th floors. One day by mistake I took wrong stairs and ended on top of the stadium in just T-shirt… Quickly ran to an elevator to get back to proper floor ;D

Croke Park stadium - playing field

The schedule was split into two parts: Monday and Tuesday were for mixed teams sessions while Wednesday — Friday were for discussions in teams. I spoke with Kolla, Nova and Infra teams mostly. There were some discussions with Ironic, Kuryr and some other ones too. Also met several Polish developers so there was a time to speak in native language ;D

On Tuesday I went to the city centre to buy some souvenirs for family (and 99th fridge magnet for myself). Launched Ingress, did one mosaic to see more of a city and after 11 kilometres I was back at the hotel just in time for a small party in GAA museum. And then pub trip with Polish guys. When I finally reached the hotel (about 01:30) there were still discussions in the lobby and I took a part in one of them.

Some building

Team discussions started on Wednesday. Visited Nova one summarizing ‘Queens’ release. Turned out that it went better than previous ones. The main problem was lack of reviews — not everyone likes to pester developers on IRC to get some attention to patches. I was asked few times for opinion as I was one of few fresh contributors.

Kolla sessions were a bit chaotic in my opinion. Recently chosen PTL was not present and the person supposed to replace him got stuck at home due to weather. One of the discussions I remember was about Ceph: should we keep using our images or rather move to ‘ceph-ansible’ instead. Final idea was to keep as it looked like there were more cons than pros with moving to ‘ceph-ansible’ images.

Discussed Arm64 support with Infra team. We (Linaro) provided them resources on one of our developer clouds to get aarch64 present in OpenStack CI gates. Turned out that machines work and some initial tests were done. I also got informed that diskimage-builder patches to add GPT/UEFI support will be reviewed soon.

And then there were some weather related issues. On Wednesday every attendee got an email with information that Irish government issued the Red Alert which strongly suggest to stay inside if you do not really have to go outside. And as attendance was not mandatory then people should first check are they comfortable with going to Croke Park (especially those who not stayed in the hotel nearby). Next day organization team announced that the venue we used will close after lunch to make sure that everyone is safe. And the whole conference moved to the hotel…

Croke Park stadium - playing field covered with snow

Snow outside of hotel

Imagine developers discussing EVERYWHERE in a hotel. Lobby was occupied by few teams, Infra found a table in library corner, Nova took Neutron and occupied breakfast room. Bar area was quite popular and soon some beers were visible here and there. Few teams went to meeting rooms etc. WiFi bandwidth was gone… Some time later hotel staff created a separate wireless network for our use. And then similar situation was on Friday.

On Wednesday other thing happened too: people started receiving information that their flights are cancelled. There were some connections on Thursday and then nothing was flying on Friday. Kudos to hotel staff to be aware of it — they stopped taking external reservations to make sure that PTG attendees have a place to stay for longer (as some people got rebooked to even Thursday).

And even on Saturday it was hard to get to the airport. No taxi going to the hotel due to snow on a street. But if you walked 500 meters then cab could be hailed on a street. Many people went for buses (line 700 was the only working one). The crowd on the airport was huge. Some of those people looked like they lived there (which was probably true). Several flights were delayed (even by 4-5 hours), other got cancelled but most of them were flying.

Snowy street

Despite the weather sitting in a hotel in Dublin was safe, walking around too as there were about 15-20 centimetres of snow on a street. There were several snowmen around, people had fun playing with snow. But at same time local news were informing that 30 000 homes lacked electricity and some people got stuck in their cars. There was no public transport, no trains, no buses. Much smaller amount of people on streets.

Road covered with snow

Was it worth attending? Yes. Will I attend next ones? Probably not as this is very developer related where I spend most of my OpenStack time around building it’s components or doing some testing.

Devconf.cz? FOSDEM? PTG? Linaro Connect?

2018-01-19T19:29:00+01:00

What connects those names? All of them are conference or team meeting names. Spread over Europe + Asia. And I will be on all of them this year.

First will be in Brno, Czechia. Terrible city to travel to but amount of people I can meet there is enormous. Some guys from my Red Hat team will be there, my boss’ boss (and boss of my boss’ boss) and several people from CentOS, Fedora, RHEL (and some other names) communities. Meetings, sessions… Nice to be there. Will be in A-Sport hotel as it is closest to Red Hat office where I have some meetings to attend.

Then FOSDEM. The only “week-long conference squeezed into two days” I know. Good luck with meeting me probably. As usual my list of sessions covers all buildings and have several conflicts. Will meet many people, miss even more, do some beers. This year I stay in Floris Arlequin Grand-Place hotel.

Next one? OpenStack PTG in Dublin, Ireland. Finally will meet all those developers reviewing my patches, helping me with understanding source code of several OpenStack projects. And probably answering several questions about state of AArch64 support. Conference hotel.

Linaro Connect. Hong Kong again. Not registered yet, not looked at flights. Have to do that sooner than later and checking which airline sucks less on intercontinental connections sucks too. With few members of SDI team I will talk about our journey through/with OpenStack on our beloved architecture. Conference hotel.

What after those? Probably OpenSource Day in Poland, maybe some other ones. Will see.