Intel's Clear Linux optimizations
by František Zatloukal
Hi,
Phoronix recently release article[1] about Intel's Clear Linux with some
cool graphs showing nice performance gain compared to Xubuntu.
I didn't have time to dig in and look how it's performing against Fedora,
but I'd assume Fedora can be compared to Xubuntu in terms of compiler
settings.
I think i'll be interesting to look into it and find out if Fedora can't
tweak compiler settings (eg use LTO for critical things like Mesa, Kernel,
...). I think it could be interesting fo Fedora users to have this enabled
if there are not any disadvantages other than compile time, compile memory
usage and so on.
What do you think?
[1]
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=intel-clr-opengl&num=1
--
Best regards / S pozdravem,
František Zatloukal
Project Coordinator
Red Hat
2 years, 2 months
Python3 will be in next major RHEL release, please adjust %if
statements accordingly
by Troy Dawson
Hello,
Python3 will be in the next major RHEL release. I don't mean RHEL
7.6, but with numbers higher than 7.
There are many, many packages with something like the following
if 0%{?fedora}
%define with_python3 1
%endif
If you have something like that, please change it to something like this.
if 0%{?fedora} || 0%{?rhel} > 7
%define with_python3 1
%endif
Thank You
2 years, 6 months
kcov: code coverage for programs and python/shell scripts
by Dridi Boukelmoune
Greetings developers,
I just submitted a review request [1] for kcov [2] that I recently
discovered. It has no relation to Linux's kcov and is more akin to
lcov, except that all it needs is a binary with DWARF debuginfo
instead of requiring compile-time instrumentation.
I came across kcov when I was looking for a way to measure code
coverage in a Rust project and I'm impressed. It supposedly has a low
overhead, but so far I've been monitoring small single-threaded
programs so I can't really tell. I haven't tested python and shell
support, although I have cases where it would be relevant, but I don't
have time yet.
The package itself is simple, but it bundles javascript and doesn't
build on all main platforms so I may have to be granted an exception
from some group starting with an F. Been busy lately, I'm a little
behind on anything Fedora. If that's the case, please RTFM me a link
to the wiki, and if you want to take the review I'll gladly take one
in return.
Cheers,
Dridi
[1] https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=kcov
[2] https://simonkagstrom.github.io/kcov/index.html
2 years, 8 months
Reliability test for hard drives and SSD
by Andrey Ponomarenko
Hi there!
Good news for all interested in hardware compatibility and reliability.
I've started a new project to estimate reliability of hard drives and SSD in real-life conditions based on the SMART data reports collected by Linux users in the Linux-Hardware.org database since 2014. The initial data (SMART reports), analysis methods and results are publicly shared in a new github repository: https://github.com/linuxhw/SMART. Everyone can contribute to the report by uploading probes of their computers by the hw-probe tool!
The primary aim of the project is to find drives with longest "power on hours" and minimal number of errors. The following formula is used to measure reliability: Power_On_Hours / (1 + Number_Of_Errors), i.e. time to the first error/between errors.
Please be careful when reading the results table. Pay attention not only to the rating, but also to the number of checked model samples. If rating is low, then look at the number of power-on days and number of errors occurred. New drive models will appear at the end of the rating table and will move to the top in the case of long error-free operation.
Thanks to ROSA, Fedora, Ubuntu, Debian, Mint, openSUSE, Arch, Gentoo users and others who had made this work possible by contribution to the database!
2 years, 8 months
Intent to orphan Python 2
by Petr Viktorin
tl;dr: Unless someone steps up to maintain Python 2 after 2020, we need
to start dropping python2 packages now.
Python 2.7 will reach end of upstream support on 1st of January, 2020,
after almost 10 years (!) of volunteer maintenance.
Fedora still has more than 3000 packages depending on python2 – many
more than we can support without upstream help.
We (rightly) don't have the authority to say "please drop your unneeded
python2 subpackages, or let us drop them for you" [0].
The next best thing we *can* say is: "if Fedora is to keep python2
alive, we won't be the ones doing it – at least not at the current
magnitude".
Here are the details.
The current maintainers of python2 would like to "orphan" the python2
package in 2020 (~ Fedora 30):
- Charalampos Stratakis (cstratak)
- Tomáš Orsava (torsava)
- Miro Hrnočok (churchyard)
- Petr Viktorin (pviktori)
- Iryna Schcherbina (ishcherb)
- Michal Cyprian (mcyprian)
- Bohuslav Kabrda (bkabrda)
- David Malcolm (dmalcolm)
- Thomas Spura (tomspur)
As with any orphaning, that leaves two options:
- someone else agrees now to take over in 2020 (keeping in mind this is
a security-critical package and will be abandoned upstream), or
- dependent packages drop support for Python 2.
Unlike most other orphanings, we have some thousands of dependent
packages, so a lot of time and care is required.
In case no one steps up, we'd like to start dropping Python 2 support
from dependent packages *now*, starting with ported libraries on whose
python2 version nothing in Fedora depends. (We keep a list of those at [1].)
Of course, we're ready to make various compromises with interested
packagers, as long as there's an understanding that we won't just
support python2 forever.
If you are a maintainer of anything at [1] we ask you kindly to consider
removing the python2 subpackages.
You can either do it now in Rawhide, or add a conditional for Fedora >
29. (On the current schedule, Fedora 30 will be the first release still
supported after 2020-01-01.)
If no one steps up to maintain python2 after 2020, we're prepared to
package a "legacy" python27 package, similar to what we do for e.g.
python33 [2], to:
- help developers that still need to test against this version
- support exceptionally important non–security critical applications, if
their upstreams don't manage to port to Python 3 in time
[0] https://pagure.io/packaging-committee/issue/753
[1] http://fedora.portingdb.xyz/#legacy-leaf
[2] https://src.fedoraproject.org/rpms/python33/
2 years, 9 months
Avoiding Jargon: dist-git
by Christopher
Can we stop saying "dist-git" in our docs? Nobody knows what that is.
The service at https://src.fedoraproject.org is clearly branded as "Fedora
Package Sources".
Using the jargon "dist-git" in our documentation is simply confusing, since
it doesn't match what the service calls itself, and doesn't match any user
interface packagers use. As far as I can tell, only people with a deep
understanding of Fedora's infrastructure (which does not seem to be most
packagers) know what this term means.
For example, in
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Infrastructure/WhatHappenedToPkgdb , instead
of saying "Browse to your project on Pagure over Dist-Git (Top Level
link)", we should say: "Browse to your project's Package Source repository
at https://src.fedoraproject.org"
And, instead of saying "How do I request commit access to a dist-git
repo?", we should say: "How do I request commit access to a Package Source
repository?"
Using special/internal/historical jargon, especially when that jargon
doesn't correspond to the current packager experience when interacting with
these services, only leads to confusion and should be avoided.
If we really need to use the term "dist-git" in the wiki, it should at
least link to a glossary page that says "Dist-Git: A term which refers to
the Fedora Package Sources repository hosting service at
https://src.fedoraproject.org built on Pagure (an open source git
repository management service)", instead of just assuming everybody seeing
the term "dist-git" knows what that term is and where it came from.
If we can avoid jargon with this term and other similar terms, it'd be a
big help to our documentation.
If this seems reasonable, I'd be happy to help start editing some of the
wiki pages... but it'd be helpful if everybody maintaining infrastructure
documentation was on the same page.
Thanks,
Christopher
2 years, 10 months
RANT: Packaging is changing too fast and is not well documented
by Richard Shaw
<RANT>
So I went to request a new branch of an existing package only to find out
fedrepo-req-branch, which hasn't been around that long is already
depreceated and the facility brought into fedpkg... so:
$ fedpkg request-branch <branch>
Could not execute request_branch: The "token" value must be set under the
"fedpkg.pagure" section in your "fedpkg" user configuration
Ok, so where does that get stored?
$ man fedpkg
(not in there...)
$ vi /usr/share/doc/fedpkg/README
(not in there...)
I figured out somewhere else that the default config is in
/etc/rpkg/fedpkg.conf (In /etc/rpkg? That's intuitive!) but I didn't want
to add my token to the site wide config so the search continues...
$ rpm -ql fedpkg
(pokes around)
$ vi /usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/fedpkg/__main__.py
...
def main():
default_user_config_path = os.path.join(
os.path.expanduser('~'), '.config', 'rpkg', '%s.conf' % cli_name)
...
Found it!
Now which token do I need? The one from the src.fedoraproject.org pagure or
pagure.io?
Oh and the tokens expire all the time and don't seem to have any helper
scripts to automate updating of the tokens so I have to remember where they
all are and manually edit them every time...
</RANT>
Not coming from a programming background I found the learning curve pretty
steep when I first tried to become a packager, I'm not sure I wouldn't have
given up if I had to do it now.
Thanks,
Richard
2 years, 11 months
