Wednesday, February 12, 2020

Yesterday was extremely windy. We were completely on the edge of Ciara tempest, but we could see the trees moving. Some colleagues lost electricity for the day. The north of France and central europe were hit much harder than we were.

Today is just beautiful weather. I really love the view I have from my desk. Tried to resume my daily walk, first time after the surgery. Was still significantly slower than usual (about 13min/km instead of 10), but at least I could complete the usual round, and my knee did not hurt. After the walk, I was quite tired, though.

Linux kernel tests / ZFS issues

I'm still trying to get my stupid little experiment with the Linux kernel. It's really nothing, but I'm running into issues with ZFS, which I use for tons of storage, so I really can't go without it.

I remember a time (around Linux 2.6) where building a Linux kernel and rebooting was really fast. Nowadays, the build time itself is really not negligible, and my test machine has 6 cores / 12 threads.

Finally simply bypassed dkms entirely, and rebooted without ZFS. One problem at a time. Simple test works, so I shared the idea on the KVM list.

Of course, after reboot I lost ZFS, and now the usual "quick trick" of modprobe and remount does not work.

[  265.946958] zfs: Unknown symbol kmem_strfree (err -2)

[  265.947573] zfs: Unknown symbol spl_kmem_cache_inuse (err -2)
[  265.948299] zfs: Unknown symbol kmem_strdup (err -2)
[  265.949332] zfs: Unknown symbol spl_kmem_cache_entry_size (err -2)

Ended up having to completely remove all traces of the local builds, uninstalling, rebooting, reinstalling, rebooting once more, but finally got things back in shape (including with dkms I believe).

Something is a bit fishy in this interface.

Browser wars, renewed

Giving a whirl to "time-saving browsers" like Brave and Dissenter. Basically the same thing, Dissenter having forked over how to reward users who accept to watch ads, preferring Bitcoin over some unknown point system.

VirtioFS slides

If you have not seen them, the PDF slides for Stefan's talk about VirtioFS are quite informative.

Self-virtualizing Linux on x86

Saw this video fly in my inbox recently: