Marcin Juszkiewicz

Some time ago was a day when I reached “ten” years at Linaro. Why “”? Because it was 3 + 7 rather than 10 years straight. First three years as Canonical contractor now seven years at Red Hat employee assigned as Member Engineer.

My first three years at Linaro

NewCo or NewCore? Or Ubuntu on ARM?

In 2010 I signed contract with Canonical as “Foundation OS Engineer”. Once there I signed another paper which moved me to NewCo project (also called NewCore but NewCo name is on paper I signed).

On 30th April 2010 I got “Welcome to Linaro” e-mail.

Read more…

Three years ago I wrote blog post about naming company laptops. Last week I got new one. So new name was needed.

Quest for Arm laptop

Many things changed during last years. Qualcomm released Snapdragon SoC line for laptops. All were running Microsoft Windows (for Arm) with bastard version of ACPI tables. Took some time for Linux community to get Linux running on those systems. In Device Tree mode as ACPI tables were so bad that it was easier to ignore them.

Apple released laptops and mini desktops with M1 SoC (in many variants) and then M2 (also with variants). With MacOS on them. Again, Linux community started working on getting Linux running there. Device Tree again.

Read more…

Last week I had some discussions about future and projects where I am involved. And as kind of break I started yet another personal project for fun…

AArch64 SoC features table

Let make a table showing which AArch64 SoCs support which processor features. And how bad situation is.

Read more…

There are moments when developers want to make changes in other FOSS projects. Which usually means dealing with patch reviews. On mailing list, on Gerrit, GitHub or any other collaboration platform etc. And it can take quite a long time.

One note at start: I am giving code patches as examples but post applies to any type of contributions (code, docs, examples, tests etc.).

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Each time I update my Fedora desktop to new release (usually around Beta) I give a try to Wayland. Which shows that I still use X11.

My setup

My desktop has Ryzen cpu and NVidia GTX 1050 Ti graphics card. Only one monitor (34” 3440x1440). I use binary blobs as this generation of GPU chipset is not really usable with FOSS driver (nouveau).

For desktop environment I use KDE. Which means Plasma desktop/panel, Konsole and few KDE apps. Firefox and Chrome as web browsers, Thunderbird for mail, Steam for gaming and Zoom (or Google Meet) for most of video calls.

Read more…

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.

It was yet another boring week. I got some thanks for work we did to get Tensorflow running on AArch64 and was asked is there any other Python project which could use our help.

I had some projects already on my list of things to check. And then found “Top PyPI Packages” website…

Let install 5000 Python packages

So I got an idea — let me grab list of top5000 PyPI packages and check how many of them have issues on AArch64.

The plan was simple. Loop over list and do 3 tasks:

• create virtualenv
• install package
• destroy virtualenv

This way each package had the same environment and I did not had to worry about version conflicts.

Virtualenv preparation

To not repeat creation of virtualenv five thousand times I did it once:

/opt/python/cp39-cp39/bin/python3 -mvenv venvs/test
. venvs/test/bin/activate
pip install -U pip wheel setuptools
deactivate
cp -a venvs/test venvs/clean

This way I had newest versions of “pip”, “wheel” and “setuptools” as part of virtualenv. For a bit of speed “venvs” directory was mounted as “tmpfs”.

Everything happened inside of “manylinux2014_aarch64” container (so CentOS 7 as OS) with Python 3.9 as interpreter.

Phase 1

First phase was simple installation of package wheel as it was available on PyPI:

pip --only-binary :all: --no-compile ${name_of_package}

So if package provided only source tarball/zip then it was marked as failed.

There were 1569 packages which failed to pass this phase. Common issues (other than missing some development headers):

• INFO: pip is looking at multiple versions of PACKAGE_NAME to determine which version is compatible with other requirements. This could take a while.
• INFO: pip is looking at multiple versions of <Python from Requires-Python> to determine which version is compatible with other requirements. This could take a while.
• INFO: This is taking longer than usual. You might need to provide the dependency resolver with stricter constraints to reduce runtime. See https://pip.pypa.io/warnings/backtracking for guidance. If you want to abort this run, press Ctrl + C.
• ERROR: Cannot install OTHER_PACKAGE_NAME because these package versions have conflicting dependencies.
• ERROR: Could not find a version that satisfies the requirement OTHER_PACKAGE_NAME (from versions: none)
• ERROR: Could not find a version that satisfies the requirement OTHER_PACKAGE_NAME==N.V.R (from ANOTHER_PACKAGE_NAME) (from versions: x.y, x.y.z, x.z.z)
• ERROR: No matching distribution found for OTHER_PACKAGE_NAME

Note that failure at this phase is allowed as I just want ready to use wheel files.

Whole process took about 20 hours on Honeycomb.

Phase 2

The main difference was getting rid of “—only-binary” and “—no-compile” options from pip install calls.

Still no additional development packages installed. Cache from phase 1 in use to not re-download/re-build existing wheel files.

The main issue is how single threaded pip install is. Nevermind that Honeycomb has 16 cpu cores — only one is used (and this is Cortex-A72 so nothing fancy). This makes building times higher than they suppose to be:

Building wheels for collected packages: pandas, typing
  Building wheel for pandas (setup.py): started
  Building wheel for pandas (setup.py): still running...
  Building wheel for pandas (setup.py): still running...
  Building wheel for pandas (setup.py): still running...
  Building wheel for pandas (setup.py): still running...
  Building wheel for pandas (setup.py): still running...
  Building wheel for pandas (setup.py): still running...
  Building wheel for pandas (setup.py): still running...
  Building wheel for pandas (setup.py): still running...
  Building wheel for pandas (setup.py): still running...
  Building wheel for pandas (setup.py): still running...
  Building wheel for pandas (setup.py): still running...

There were 313 packages which failed to pass this phase. Issues were similar to those in phase 1 with one exception (as building packages was allowed):

• ERROR: Could not build wheels for OTHER_PACKAGE_NAME, which is required to install pyproject.toml-based projects

This phase took about 13 hours on Honeycomb.

Phase 3

About 6% packages left. Now it is time to install some development headers:

• blas-devel
• bzip2-devel
• cairo-devel
• cyrus-sasl-devel
• gmp-devel
• gobject-introspection-devel
• graphviz-devel
• gtk3-devel
• httpd-devel
• krb5-devel
• lapack-devel
• libcap-devel
• libcurl-devel
• libicu-devel
• libjpeg-devel
• libmemcached-devel
• mariadb-devel
• ncurses-devel
• openldap-devel
• openssl-devel
• poppler-cpp-devel
• postgresql-devel
• protobuf-compiler
• unixODBC-devel
• xmlsec1-devel

I created this list by checking how packages failed to build. It should be longer but CentOS 7 (base of “manylinux2014” container image) does not provide everything needed (for example up-to-date Rust compiler or LLVM).

Before starting phase 3 run I removed all entries related to “pyobjc” as they are MacOS related so there is no need to waste time again.

After 3.5 hours I had another 54 packages built.

Phase 4

Some packages are not present in CentOS 7 but are present in EPEL repository. So after enabling EPEL (yum install -y epel-release) I installed another set of development packages:

• augeas-devel
• boost-devel
• cargo
• gdal-devel
• leptonica-devel
• leveldb-devel
• suitesparse-devel
• portaudio-devel
• proj
• protobuf-devel
• rust
• zbar-devel

Some of those packages should be installed in previous step. I did not caught them because build processes failed earlier.

Before starting round I went through logs and removed everything:

• failed with “No matching distribution for PACKAGE_NAME“
• failed with “use_2to3 is invalid” (aka “I need old setuptools”)
• requiring Bazel
• requiring tensorflow

At the end I had about one hundred of failed to build packages. For different reasons:

• missing build dependencies
• expecting newer libraries than “manylinux2014” (CentOS 7) has
• not listing all dependencies (everyone has “numpy” installed, right?)
• being Python 2.7 only
• using removed modules or classes
• breaking install to say “this module is deprecated, use OTHER_NAME”
• not supporting AArch64 architecture

Summary

One hundred of top five thousand packages equals two percent of failures. There were 13 failures in top 1000, another 14 in second thousand.

Is 2% acceptable amount? I think that it is. Some improvements can still be made but nothing requiring shown. OK, would be nice to get Tensorflow for AArch64 released by upstream under same name (instead of “tensorflow_aarch64” builds done by team at Linaro).

How to run it?

After my tweet I had several comments and people wanted to run this test on other architectures, operating systems or devices. So I wrote simple script:

#!/bin/bash

echo "cleanup after previous runs"
rm -rf venvs/* logs/*

echo "Prepare clean virtualenv"
python3 -mvenv venvs/test
. venvs/test/bin/activate
pip install -U pip wheel setuptools
deactivate
cp -a venvs/test venvs/clean

echo "fetch and prepare top5000 list"
rm top-pypi-packages-30-days.*
wget https://hugovk.github.io/top-pypi-packages/top-pypi-packages-30-days.json
grep project top-pypi-packages-30-days.json \
    |sed -e 's/"project": "\(.*\)"/\1/g' > top-pypi-packages-30-days.text

echo "go through packages"
mkdir -p logs
for package in `cat top-pypi-packages-30-days.text`; do
    echo "processing ${package}"
    rm -rf venvs/test
    cp -a venvs/clean venvs/test
    source venvs/test/bin/activate
    pip install --no-input \
        -U --upgrade-strategy=only-if-needed \
        $package | tee logs/${package}.log
    deactivate
    echo "-----------------------------------------------------------------"
done

It should work on any operating system capable of running Python. All build dependencies need to be installed first. I suggest mounting “tmpfs” over “venvs/” directory as there will be lot of temporary i/o going on there.

Once it finish just run grep to check how many packages were installed with success:

grep "^Successfully installed" logs/*|wc -l

Please share your results. Contact page lists several ways to catch me.

Due to current events it was hard to concentrate on work lately. So I decided to learn something new but still work related.

In OpenStack Kolla project we provide images with Collectd, Grafana, Influxdb, Prometheus, Telegraf to give people options for monitoring their deployments. I never used any of them. Until now.

Local setup

At home I have some devices I could monitor for random data:

• TrueNAS based NAS
• OpenWRT based router
• OpenWRT based access point
• HoneyComb arm devbox
• other Linux based computers
• Home Assistant

All machines can ping each other so sending data is not a problem.

Software

For software stack I decided to go for PIG — Prometheus, Influxdb, Grafana.

I used instruction from blog posts written by Chris Smart:

• Setting up a monitoring host with Prometheus, InfluxDB and Grafana
• Monitoring OpenWRT with collectd, Influxdb and Grafana

Read both — they have more details than I used to mention. Also more graphics.

OpenWRT

Turned out that OpenWRT devices can either use “collectd” or Prometheus node exporter to gather metrics. I had first one installed already (to have some graphs in webUI). If you do not then all you need is this set of commands:

opkg update
opkg install luci-app-statistics collectd collectd-mod-cpu \
             collectd-mod-interface collectd-mod-iwinfo \
             collectd-mod-load collectd-mod-memory \
             collectd-mod-network collectd-mod-uptime

/etc/init.d/luci_statistics enable
/etc/init.d/collectd enable

TrueNAS

TrueNAS already has reporting in webUI. Can also send data to remote Graphite server. So again I had everything in place for gathering metrics.

Next step was sorting out data collector and visualisation. There is community provided “Grafana & Influxdb” plugin. Installed it, gave jail a name, set to request own IP and got “grafana.lan” running in a minute.

Configuration

At this moment everything is installed for both gathering and visualisation of data. Time for some configuration.

Logged into jail (“sudo iocage console grafana”) and fun started.

Influxdb

First Influxdb needed to be configured to accept both “collectd” data from OpenWRT nodes and “graphite” data from TrueNAS. Simple edit of “/usr/local/etc/influxd.conf” file to have this:

[[collectd]]
  enabled = true
  bind-address = ":25826"
  database = "collectd"
  # retention-policy = ""
  #
  # The collectd service supports either scanning a directory for multiple types
  # db files, or specifying a single db file.
  typesdb = "/usr/local/share/collectd"
  #
  security-level = "none"
  # auth-file = "/etc/collectd/auth_file"

and that:

[[graphite]]
  # Determines whether the graphite endpoint is enabled.
  enabled = true
  database = "graphite"
  # retention-policy = ""
  bind-address = ":2003"
  protocol = "tcp"
  consistency-level = "one"

Save, restart Influxdb (by “service influxd restart”). Next step was creation of databases (add username and password if needed):

# influx
> create database collectd
> create database graphite
> exit

And data should be gathered from both OpenWRT (collectd) and TrueNAS (graphite) nodes.

OpenWRT

Here are two ways to do configure OpenWRT based system:

First one is visiting webUI -> Statistics -> Setup -> Output plugins, then enabling “network” plugin and giving IP of InfluxDB server.

Second one is simple edit of “/etc/collectd.conf” file:

LoadPlugin network
<Plugin network>
        Server "192.168.202.183" "25826"
</Plugin>

No idea why it wants IP address instead of FQDN.

TrueNAS

TrueNAS is simple — visit webUI -> System -> Reporting and give address (IP or FQDN) of remote graphite server.

I enabled both “Report CPU usage in percent” and “Graphite separate instances” checkboxes because of Grafana dashboard I use.

Grafana

Logged into http://grafana.lan:3000, setup admin account and then setup data sources. Both will be “InfluxDB” type — one for ‘collectd’ database keeping metrics from OpenWRT nodes, second for ‘graphite’ one with data from TrueNAS.

Use “http://localhost:8086” as URL, provide database names and name each data source in a way telling you which one is which.

Visualisation

Ok, software installed on all nodes, configuration files edited. Metrics flow to InfluxDB (you can check them using “show series” in Influx shell tool). Time to setup some dashboards in Grafana.

This is moment where I went for ready ones:

• 3484 for OpenWRT
• 12921 for TrueNAS

OpenWRT dashboard

Hard to tell will I keep it as it provides lot of data on same graphs:

I plan to take a look at it and keep what I really need, use some aliases to see WiFi network names instead of interface names, etc.

TrueNAS dashboard

Here some editing was needed. Dashboard itself needed timezone change, 24 hours clock, adding ‘da0’ hard disk to graphs and setting ZFS pool names.

The other edit was in InfluxDB configuration (in “graphite” section) to get some metrics renamed:

  templates = [
    "*.app env.service.resource.measurement",
     "servers.* .host.resource.measurement.field*",
  ]

Effect was nice:

This one looks like good base. Also suggests me to visit my server wardrobe and check fans in NAS box.

Future

I need to alter both dashboards to make them show some really usable data. Then add some alerts. And more nodes — there is still no Prometheus in use here gathering metrics from my generic Linux machines. Nor my server.