Linux is my primary operating system. I used it on the servers, desktops, laptops, netbooks, and even mobile phones since approximately 1997. I’ve tried a number of distributions over the years, and even created a couple myself. I still look around sometimes to see what others are up to. But most of my machines are running some sort of Red Hat – either a quick and easy Fedora Linux, or a stable and secure Red Hat Enterprise Server, or a cheaper CentOS alternative.
And while by now I am very comfortable in the Linux environment (both graphical and command line), I still discover a lot of new and interesting things about it. When I come across something worthy, I usually share it with the rest of the Open Software world, using this category.
Netflix shares the process they use to quickly assess performance issues on a Linux machine. With these commands you can get a good idea of what’s going on within about 60 seconds:
uptime dmesg | tail vmstat 1 mpstat -P ALL 1 pidstat 1 iostat -xz 1 free -m sar -n DEV 1 sar -n TCP,ETCP 1 top
Read the rest of the article for details and explanations.
Fedora 23 has been released yesterday, and as a big fan and a long time user I had to upgrade my laptop (from Fedora 22) immediately. Or at least try.
Usually, the process is quite simple and doesn’t take much figuring out. This time it was somewhat different though. At first, the recommended upgrade command changed slightly from the nice and simple fedup to dnf system-upgrade.
The first attempt downloaded all packages, ended with a cryptic error along the lines of “No updates for kernel packages were found“. Hmm, weird. I thought maybe this was caused by me forgetting to run “dnf update” before the upgrade process. So I did. Some updates were installed, but there were no kernel packages among them. I rebooted the laptop just in case.
The second attempt for some reason failed to find any of the previously downloaded packages, so I had to wait until the almost 2 GB get pulled down again. Result – same error about missing kernel updates. Hmm, again.
After poking around for a bit, I realized that I had previously configured yum to exclude some packages from updates (kernel, kmod-wl, kmod-VirtualBox, and VirtualBox). These settings were picked up by dnf. Editing both /etc/yum.conf and /etc/dnf/dnf.conf to disable the exclude fixed the issue. “dnf update” now pulled some updates to the kernel. Another reboot.
The third attempt once again lost all the downloaded packages and I had to wait some more. This was annoying, especially at 1am now. The process of downloading finished OK and this time there was no errors. So “dnf system-upgrade reboot” should do the trick now, right? Wrong!
Surprisingly, there was no boot menu for system upgrade upon reboot. So I went with Fedora 22 boot option. Which resulted in a brief screen saying “Preparing for upgrade“. Which then disappeared and the system booted back into Fedora 22. Now that was interesting.
It took me a while to find the issue. The problem was that my Fedora 22 laptop wasn’t a clean install, but an upgrade from Fedora 21. That shouldn’t be a problem, but it is, due to this bug. My /etc/os-release file didn’t have the VARIANT and VARIANT_ID variables (thanks to this blog). So after adding these lines:
VARIANT="Workstation Edition" VARIANT_ID=workstation
I’ve rebooted once again, and started the fourth attempt. Downloaded packages were gone once again, so I had to wait a bit more. This time the faster office Internet connection helped to save some time. Download finished OK. Another reboot. Once again, there is no option to upgrade Fedora, so I’m going into Fedora 22 boot. Finally, now there is the upgrade screen! After some preparation time, the packages were installed, the machine rebooted, and now I’m Fedora 23 user.
Checking my /etc/os-release file I see that both variant variables are gone now. This feels weird, but hopefully won’t cause issues in the future. If it will, I’ll probably Google for three hours before finding this very blog post.
Slashdot links to the story that quotes Linus Torvalds’ address of the LinuxCon 2015:
“2016 will be the year of the ARM laptop”
For those who’s rusty on the CPU hardware side, he’s a very easy to follow article, describing the key difference between ARM and x86 architectures.
A few weeks back, there was this story about Sarah Sharp quitting Linux kernel development due to some issues she had with communications on the Linux kernel mailing list (aka LMKL). I never cared much about this sort of things, so I skipped the story altogether (people disagree, no big deal).
Today I was catching up with my RSS feeds, and the story came up again (via this post and discussion thread in Russian), which linked to this Slashdot comment nicely summarizing the story.
Among all the other comments, there was a link to the related email from Linus Torvalds, where he opens up a bit about the “professional” behavior and communication. I think it’s absolutely brilliant and everybody should read the whole thing. But I’ll leave this small quote here for myself:
Because if you want me to “act professional”, I can tell you that I’m not interested. I’m sitting in my home office wearign a bathrobe. The same way I’m not going to start wearing ties, I’m *also* not going to buy into the fake politeness, the lying, the office politics and backstabbing, the passive aggressiveness, and the buzzwords. Because THAT is what “acting professionally” results in: people resort to all kinds of really nasty things because they are forced to act out their normal urges in unnatural ways.
