Marcin Juszkiewicz

Some people asked me which events I plan to attend in next months. Currently there are two of them: OEDEM and FOSDEM.

OEDEM is not yet decided when and where it will be. There was suggestion from OpenBossa conference organizers to make it there but it would costs us too much (travels, hotels). We are considering Berlin (as all previous meetings were there) but we lack place for it. And I suggested Szczecin, Poland. But where and when? Not decided yet.

FOSDEM will be in Brussels, Belgium like it was always. Probably it will be 21-22 February 2009 and I hope that it will get confirmed soon so I will be able to buy cheap plane tickets for BerlinBrussels flights (today it would be EasyJet with 52EUR for total cost). OE developers not decided yet which hotel will get our blessing so I did not yet checked this.

Will I attempt other events? It depends on when and where they will be as this generate costs which I have to care about.

Recently I started merging interesting stuff from OpenedHand’s Poky into OpenEmbedded. Now, with OE using GIT as storage for metadata it is much, much easier then it was in Monotone times.

I have over 3 thousands of revisions exported (using git format-patch) from Poky and I am reviewing them and adapt to add into OE. Useful ones are changed by simple shell script which adapts paths, change authors informations (I use Poky via git-svn so no real names/emails) and adds “(from Poky)” message to end of patch description. Then just git am and patch lands in OpenEmbedded.

For now I added newer APT and DPKG package tools, newer QEMU (not the latest but working with ARMv6/v7 instructions), U-Boot mkimage tool which does not use lot of Openmoko patches (just one is needed), Shared MIME Info which does not need any processing on target device and some tweaks here or there.

Next in queue are Maemo4 cleaned recipes (Diablo ones), binary locales for Angstrom powered ARMv6/7 based machines and miscellaneous tweaks or updates.

One of great things which OpenedHand use to get Poky into working state is buildbot. But it is available only over VPN so recently I started my own buildbot for my projects.

Currently there are few build configurations enabled:

• Poky build from scratch — qemuarm, c7x0, om-gta01, qemux86 images
• Poky incremental (same targets as above)
• Ångström incremental with same machines and base, console and x11 images

Soon more configurations will get added, some will change (probably will drop Poky ones). I am also wondering about providing public access to waterfall display but without rights to stop/start builders.

I hope that this will allow to catch some bad commits.

Long time no post — I wonder does someone wondered what happened :)

Job situation change

15th October was my last day of work for OpenedHand (which was acquired by Intel two months earlier). Since then I am free to work for anyone and I have few offers of cooperation in discussion. I will still have my own company (HaeRWu) but probably will change name of it as this is very hard to pronounce for English speakers.

I have to admit that I will miss atmosphere of OpenedHand. That company had great people with many ideas, there was lot of interesting projects (sane and insane ones), interesting hardware which no one had idea of existence etc. I hope that our future roads will cross one day and we will meet on some conferences or in some projects.

OpenEmbedded switched to GIT from Monotone

After long time of git trail we finally switched to GIT. I hope that Monotone guys will not be sad (we were one of biggest projects according to their wiki) but this system was too slow to handle our metadata.

I was using GIT during my work with Poky (by git-svn). It really change a way how does people work. Ok, Monotone also has local branches support but it is too slow compared to git.

During near time I plan to merge some interesting stuff from Poky to OpenEmbedded — for example updates to Maemo libraries and applications.

Other websites

My profile on LinkedIn is updated. Got connected to companies which I was working with during my OpenedHand times, got some recommendations etc. BTW - I am in “Szczecin Area, Poland” not “Lublin Area, Poland” (as listed in LI profile) but due to the bug in the system I can not fix it ;(

After long time Ohloh service managed to handle aliases in OpenEmbedded project so I can claim all my commits in OE repository as mine. The result can be seen in my profile there.

During recent discussions we got into common developer problem — there is no such thing as enough disk space… Later it also expanded to RAM size.

My current desktop machine has 4GiB of memory and two hard disks with 820GB (763GiB real) of total capacity. And I have only 90GiB of free space on them. So what took most of space? Usual suspects: Poky and OpenEmbedded builds (du -hs took one hour with “160GiB used” result).

Which get us back to the subject — how much disk space is enough today for development? It depends on area — some people will be fine with less then 100GB, some not. Laptop which I will soon send back to Intel has only 80GB hdd and this is really not enough for me for Poky development (if it has to be the only machine). I know that few persons started to look for 320GB (or larger) disks for their laptops ;D

OK, with “rm_work” class I was able to do Poky builds with few gigabytes of free space. But small hard drive forced me to forget about using VirtualBox for testing in other distributions then Debian ‘sid’ (which I use on all machines). Currently ~/.Virtualbox on my desktop uses about 70GiB as I have there Fedora 8, Fedora 9, Ubuntu 8.04 and few other distributions which I use for testing does Poky works under them.

Other thing is doing strange builds… In past I did lot of them — record one took 270GiB of space (and two weeks of building). And I do not like to be space limited when doing them (“rm_work” is not always good way). I still plan to make such big ones from time to time as they allow to check does everything works (and also show new bugs to fix).

But how much RAM is enough? My previous desktop had 2.1GiB RAM, laptop which I use for x86 builds has only 1GiB. Current desktop has 4GiB of DDR2 (low price made it affordable) and for OpenEmbedded or Poky builds it is more then enough (as no one use BitBake from times when 512MiB ram was not enough to just parse metadata). My machine usually maxx at 2.5-3GiB of used memory during heavy builds. When it will be not enough… I still have 2 slots for RAM free :)

How it is for other people?

Today is second day of Maemo Summit 2008. I had the presentation about running Maemo in QEMU’s N8x0 emulation.

From what people told me after it was made fine. I think that this is good as this was my first presentation in English :)

All materials are of course available to download:

• presentation itself
• patch to get Diablo booting in N810 emulation
• kill debugs patch

Today I unpacked new Ethernet switch — D-Link DSG-1008D “green” edition. It has 8 GbE ports so I hooked my devices:

• Linksys WRT54GS
• desktop with on-board Realtek 8111/8168 card
• Lenovo T61 with Intel 82566M card
• Dell D400 with Broadcom BCM5705M card

In theory only router is 100Mbps — rest are 1GbE devices. But not quite… I was unable to get Intel adapter (which use “e1000e” driver) to switch to full speed — it used only 100Mbps speed. Tried ethtool -s eth0 speed 1000 but it refuses :(

What was a reason? Wrong cable… I tested all my Ethernet cables and it looks like I am out of real cat5e cables… This will have to wait then until I will end organizing my workplace as there will be rewiring of everything done.

And the Lenovo T61 working on 100Mbps only is not a problem as this machine soon goes back to it’s owner.

As some of you probably noticed from time to time comment which you enter is not visible on site. This does not always mean that it got into moderation queue — sometimes it is somewhere but I do not have idea where and why.

Maybe it is because of software setup which I use: WordPress MultiUser + SpamKarma, maybe it has other reason. This does not change a fact that sometimes some comments just do not land.

And the funny part is that I am getting e-mails with those comments contents without problems…