Marcin Juszkiewicz

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.

I am not writing after people outside of my family die but when I read that Ian Murdock is no longer with us I got a feeling that I have to write few words.

Never met him but lot of things in my FOSS career happened because of his most famous project: Debian. For those who do not know: he was “ian” while “Deb” was from his girlfriend name Debra.

First GNU/Linux distribution installed: Debian. First on Amiga 1200, then on PC (where it was my main operating system for years). My first package was made for Debian (“tex-skak” - already removed from archive). I was considering applying for Debian Developer status but found OpenEmbedded first.

Debian way of handling non-free packages was something which allowed me to freely hack on anything I wanted as I knew that I can because someone else already checked licenses. Try that in PalmOS or Microsoft Windows worlds.

Sure, there were other distributions (Slackware, Red Hat Linux) in 90s but it was Debian which brought me to FOSS world. And still is my favorite (despite working for Red Hat).

From time to time I feel that it is a good moment to change view of my blog — this time to modified “Twenty Sixteen” theme.

What got modified? As usual categories got removed, switched fonts to serif ones, some paddings edited and text got justified. Just to fit better to my taste.

Also got rid of several plugins I used. No more comments from Google+ - want to comment, then standard Wordpress form is present. Also moved to “Autoptimize” plugin for minifying CSS and Javascript files.

This theme has to stay for next few years ;D

I host my blog on small machine somewhere in OVH. As part of package I got IPv6 address for it. Five minutes ago I decided to no longer use it.

My home Internet provider (UPC) does not offer IPv6 addresses so testing is my blog (or other pages/services I host) reachable via IPv6 was always problematic. Ok, I have sixxs.net tunnel setup on one of routers at home but it is not fun when your browser (and other tools) decide to use IPv6 instead of IPv4 and slow down from 250/20 Mbps to tunnel speed.

So when today I got information that something is not reachable via IPv6 I decided to just drop use of it on server. Will fix configs but do not want to get information that something else break on the other day.

When I started working for Red Hat I got a list of packages in RHEL 7.0 which did not built for AArch64. Some time later I worked on merging those fixes in Fedora and upstream. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.0 got released. Then 7.1 followed. Then CentOS developers added AArch64 target based on work we did in RHEL.

Yesterday Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.2 got released. What makes this version special is one paragraph:

Red Hat is also making available Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server for ARM 7.2 Development Preview, which was first made available to partners and their customers in June 2015. This Development Preview enables new partner hardware and additional features for the ARM architecture.

Which means AArch64 port. Working out of box on SBSA/SBBR compliant hardware.

Firmware update usually ends well. Previous (1.15.19) firmware failed to boot on some of Mustangs at Red Hat but worked fine on one under my desk. Yesterday I got 1.15.22 plus slimpro update and managed to get machine into non-bootable state (firmware works fine on other machines).

So how to get APM Mustang back into working state?

• Get a SD card and connect it to an PC Linux machine with reader support.
• Download Mustang software from MyAPM (1.5.19 was latest available there).
• Unpack “mustang_sq_1.15.19.tar.xz” and then “mustang_binaries_1.15.19.tar.xz” tarballs.
• Write the boot loader firmware to the SD card: “dd if=tianocore_media.img of=/dev/SDCARD“.
• Take FAT formatted USB drive and put there some files from “mustang_binaries_1.15.19.tar.xz” archive (all into root directory):
  • potenza/apm_upgrade_tianocore.cmd
  • potenza/tianocore_media.img
  • potenza/UpgradeFirmware.efi
• Power off your Mustang
• Configure the Mustang to boot from SD card via these jumpers change:
  • Find HDR9 (close to HDR8, which is next to PCIe port)
  • Locate pin 11-12 and 17-18.
  • Connect 11-12 and 17-18 with jumpers
• Insert SD card to Mustang SD port
• Connect serial cable to Mustang and your PC.
• Run minicom/picocom/screen/other-preferred-serial-terminal and connect to Mustang serial port
• Power up Mustang and you should boot with SD UEFI firmware:

X-Gene Mustang Board
Boot firmware (version 1.1.0 built at 12:25:21 on Jun 22 2015)
PROGRESS CODE: V3020003 I0
PROGRESS CODE: V3020002 I0
PROGRESS CODE: V3020003 I0
PROGRESS CODE: V3020002 I0
PROGRESS CODE: V3020003 I0
PROGRESS CODE: V3020002 I0
PROGRESS CODE: V3020003 I0
PROGRESS CODE: V3021001 I0
TianoCore 1.1.0 UEFI 2.4.0 Jun 22 2015 12:24:25
CPU: APM ARM 64-bit Potenza Rev A3 1400MHz PCP 1400MHz
     32 KB ICACHE, 32 KB DCACHE
     SOC 2000MHz IOBAXI 400MHz AXI 250MHz AHB 200MHz GFC 125MHz
Board: X-Gene Mustang Board
The default boot selection will start in   2 second

• Press any key to get into UEFI menu.
• Select “Shell” option and you will be greeted with a list of recognized block devices and filesystems. Check which is USB (“FS6” in my case).

Shell> fs6:
FS6:> ls
Directory of: FS6:
08/04/2015  00:28              39,328  UpgradeFirmware.efi
08/27/2015  19:20                  56  apm_upgrade_tianocore.cmd
08/27/2015  19:20           2,098,176  tianocore_media.img

• Flash firmware using “UpgradeFirmware.efi apm_upgrade_tianocore.cmd” command.
• Power off
• Change jumpers back to normal (11-12 and 17-18 to be open).
• Eject SD card from Mustang
• Power on

And your Mustang should be working again. You can also try to write other versions of firmware of course or grab files from internal hdd.

Week ago Fedora 23 got released. Also for ARM and AArch64 architectures. But it does not mean that it supports all possible hardware.

AArch64

There is the installation guide which lists two supported hardware platforms (besides QEMU):

• Applied Micro Mustang
• AMD Seattle

And then we got email from Clive Messer with question why we do not support 96Boards, ie. HiKey and Dragonboard as they are cheap and available.

I am not surprised with such question. It would be great to have support for both boards but their current state makes it quite hard. There is no support for them in mainline kernel, Dragonboard needs some firmware files which license forbids packaging it (note bolded part):

Distribution of the Redistributable Binary Code is subject to the following restrictions: (i) Redistributable Binary Code may only be distributed in binary format and may not be distributed in source code format: (ii) Redistributable Binary Code may not be distributed on a stand alone basis but may be redistributed in conjunction with and as a part of a software application created by you; (iii) the Redistributable Binary Code may only operate in conjunction with platforms incorporating Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. chipsets; (iv) redistribution of the Redistributable Binary Code must include the .txt file setting forth the terms and condition of this Agreement; (v) you may not use Qualcomm Technologies’ or its affiliates or subsidiaries name, logo or trademarks; and (vi) copyright, trademark, patent and any other notices that appear on the Materials may not be removed or obscured.

So even if we get mainline kernel working on it some things will not work without non-free files.

Then we have bootloaders. Hikey can be flashed with UEFI but (according to bootloader install documentation) you need to keep partitions in some magic way. Where is “there has to be one ef00 type partition formatted with FAT” as it is with other UEFI powered machines? Dragonboard 410c uses fastboot ;(

ARM

On ARM side there is common question about “most readily available and used board, with the most units sold and the biggest community” one. I think that developers from that community do not want their board supported in main distributions like Debian or Fedora.

Heresy? Do not think so. What needs to get board supported was told many times. Mainline kernel support, firmware blobs with redistribution license, drivers for graphics and sane bootloader (UEFI, U-Boot, maybe some other too).

Summary

So if you want to have your board supported then spend some time on mainlining your changes/drivers. And then come to us.

Each year you can hear “this is a year of Linux desktop” phrase. After few days with AArch64 desktop I know one thing: it is not a year of ARMv8 Linux desktop.

Web browsing

OK, I can be spoiled by speed of my i7-2600k desktop but situation when Firefox with less than 20 tabs open is unable to display characters I type into textarea fast enough shows that something is wrong (16GB ram machine). And tell me that this is not typical desktop use of web browser…

YouTube. Main source of any kind of videos. Sometimes it works, but most of time I lack patience to wait until it will start (VP9 and h264 codecs support present). And no way to watch “live hangouts”.

And say bye to music streaming services like Deezer or Spotify.

Gaming

I am not a game player. Installed Quake3 (which I never played before) and it worked, SuperTuxKart worked as well. But that does not prove anything as both those games have low requirements.

It probably never will be gaming platform on Linux desktop.

Development

For my style of development it is fine. But all I need is terminal and gVim ;D

Other hardware?

I think that results may be affected by a fact that all I have here is Applied Micro Mustang based on X-Gene 1 cpu. It is one of first ARMv8 processors in Linux world and it is optimized for server use rather than desktop.

One thing is sure: in next year I will try this experiment with other AArch64 hardware. Just hope it will be sooner than in a year from now (which is my feeling after lack of new aarch64 hardware announcements from Linaro members during this week Linaro Connect).