FWN/Issue168

= Fedora Weekly News Issue 168 =

Welcome to Fedora Weekly News Issue 168 for the week ending March 22nd, 2009.

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FWN/Issue168

With the Fedora 11 Beta release slipping by one week Announcements reminds the community about "FUDCon Berlin 2009". In PlanetFedora the recent Red Hat patent acquisitions are among several topics covered. Ambassadors reports on the OLPC XO work at Rochester Institute of Technology. QualityAssurance gets excited about "Test Days" for DeviceKit, Xfce and an upcoming one for nouveau. Developments reflects a lot of anxious upgrading and "How to Open ACLs and Find Non-responsive Maintainers". Translation notes the "Upgraded Transifex" and translation to Cornish. Infrastructure advises in "Change Requests" that the infra team is in freeze and lists all the approved recent changes and hotfixes. Controversy rages in "Artwork" over the choice of Greek temple imagery. Yet again SecurityAdvisories lists packages that you want, really, really want. Virtualization worries about "More Flexible x86 Emulator Choice". Needless to say there's lots more to read this week!

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Paul W. Frields described some of the preparations that the Fedora Marketing team has been making for Fedora 11, including in-depth articles on some of the new features.

Richard Hughes showed off an updated Gnome PackageKit update viewer.

Rob Tiller, Vice President and Assistant General Counsel, IP at Red Hat responded to concerns within the community about Red Hat's patenting efforts and the Red Hat Patent Policy. Paul W. Frields wrote about the response, and a lively discussion in the comments ensued.

David Woodhouse posted about some documentation he had written to support Greylisting and the  package shipped with Fedora.

Jef Spaleta wrote his "most important Fedora blog post ever" which revolves around the "NSF sponsored workshop on Sustainable Cyberinfrastructure". The workshop is important "for people who believe in either the function of basic science research as a catalyst for technical and social progress or people who believe strongly in open development methodologies as a catalyst for deeper and more impactful collaborations. Even more so if you happen to be in the union of those groups and a US citizen and care about how the NSF as a Federal agency goes about funding research and education."

As an interesting aside, Dave Jones mentioned that it takes two days and twenty minutes to run  on his new 1TB hard drives.

Richard W.M. Jones worked on building a minimal Fedora installation and managed to get an installed system down to 225MB. He later responded to a comment about why it makes sense to minimize Fedora as opposed to building a custom minimal distribution. And then he managed to get the minimal distribution down to 15.9MB.

Amit Shah benchmarked various filesystems (including ext4) to find out how well they handled pre-allocation of disk space and the new Linux  support.

from  only presented   as an option and not.

A quick answer posted by Gianluca Sforna mentioned the technical difficulties of tracking the versions of packages included in the alpha release. Paul W. Frields was concerned that anyone trying such an upgrade made sure to update  before upgrading. This latter point spawned a longish thread in which the possibility of making  take care of checking to see whether a newer version of itself or   is available.

Will Woods suggested that running  instead of doing a   avoided all that confusion.

resulted in errors and  also failed he concluded that the instructions on the wiki were flawed.

Seth Vidal and Jesse Keating were sure that "nodata" was not using the correct procedure which they stated as a two stage process with the first step being a: yum update rpm with the  repository enabled and then to enable the   repository and do a general: yum update

Unfortunately this seemed to not work for "nodata" and Michael A. Young's suggestion that a "[...] temporary issue with F10 having a more recent version of audit-libs than rawhide [...]" seemed like a promising lead. "Nodata" resolved problem by using the rescue CD to do a " " and then " ".

would slip by seven days due to several issues mostly related to the rewrite of  storage.

kernel sources by Joe Ovanesian. A quick pointer was given by Tom Diehl:
 * 1) yum install yum-utils


 * 1) yumdownloader --source package_name

Eric Sandeen wondered if it might be better to use the upstream repositories and Joe explained that his objective was to build a new kernel from source and use KGDB to gain familiarity with the source. Todd Zullinger pointed to a goldmine of information on the topic on the wiki.

package. Jon Stanley promised to re-add a ticket dealing with the issue to an upcoming FESCo meeting.

In a separate thread the latest Rawhide Report led Kevin Kofler to ask for an opening of the ACLs on so that it could be fixed for multiple dependent packages. When Jesse Keating asked Alex Lancaster if he started the non-responsive maintainer process the answer appeared to be that it was Jesse himself. In an aside MilosJakubicek provided links to the current process. Alex seemed to demonstrate clearly that the maintainer was inactive.

is an experimental live CD for migrating physical machines to virtual machine guests."

Jonathan Pregler and Nick Haunold asked about a lack of HP and Dell RAID drivers in. No answer was found, but Jonathan Pregler is now working on creating a SUSE live CD with  and the RAID drivers embedded.

stores master config files in SXPR format in. "XenD itself has no knowledge of these files," (in ) "so it can't manage them. They should not be used in Xen >= 3.0.4 If you have existing files in , then you can load them into XenD by doing ' ', at which point both Xend and   will be able to manage them. For Xen < 3.0.4   has some limited support for reading /etc/xen files directly"
 * stores python-like config files in

Using and the   command, the above configuration files are essentially obviated. Instead an intermediate XML configuration can be modified and applied back to.

to "switch the TCP channel to 'data stream' mode."

Chris Lalancette tested the migration code and found the draft secure migration caused a "slowdown of between 1.5 and 3 times". "What I'm going to do early next week is do some additional work to try to get DanB's suggestion of the STREAM_DATA RPC working. Then I'll try benchmarking (both for duration, and CPU usage)".

. Daniel Veillard found this approach "worrying". The merge of and  will make the reliance on a pathname to determine a binary's capabilities even less tenable.

Daniel P. Berrange agreed "this approach we're currently using has pretty much reached the end of its practicality. In particular it is impossible to solve the problem of figuring out whether a plain 'qemu' binary supports kvm natively. To adress that, we'd actually need to run the binary and probe its output. This would require pretty much re-writing this entire capabilities setup logic from scratch. Similarly coping with varying path locations is another problem we can't easily solve with this current code."