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sprezzatech blog #000F

Dirty South Supercomputers and Waffles
UNIX, HPC, cyberwarfare, and chasing perf in Atlanta.

SprezzOS Weeklyish Oblations, Objections, and News (SWOON) Vol. 1 Issue 1.
Wed, 30 Jan 2013 01:08:05 -0500

SprezzOS Weeklyish Oblations, Objections, and News (SWOON)

Volume I, Issue 1. 2013-01-30. Editor: Nick Black.



I. INTRODUCTORY RITES

“Whereas Charles Stuart, King of England, is and standeth convicted, attainted, and condemned of High Treason and other high crimes, and sentence upon Saturday last was pronounced against him by this court to be put to death by the severing of his head from his body, of which sentence execution yet remaineth to be done, these are therefore to will and require you to see the said sentence executed in the open street before Whitehall, upon the morrow, being the thirtieth day of this instant month of January, between the hours of ten in the morning and five in the afternoon of the same day, with full effect. And for so doing, this shall be your sufficient warrant. And these are to require all officers, soldiers, and others, the good people of this nation of England, to be assisting unto you in this service.”
354 years ago today, Charles I was beheaded at the behest of Cromwell and his New Model Army, his "fourth cervical vertebrae…cut through its substance transversely…by a heavy blow, inflicted with a very sharp instrument." His penultimate words were an appeal plaintive yet proud:
I go from a corruptible, to an incorruptible Crown; where no disturbance can be, no disturbance in the World.
Sic transit gloria mundi. He did better than the Queen of Scots, whose head was separated only with much roughness -- and, in a different way, better too than Louis XVI, through whom Jacques de Molay was avenged. Several centuries later, British rockers would reform the New Model Army, releasing The Ghost of Cain in 1986. Sepultura would later cover that album's first track, a feel-good number by the name The Hunt:



Its bridge's lyrics speak to the motivation behind SprezzOS:
and we could spend our whole lives waiting for some thunderbolt to come,
and we could spend our whole lives waiting for some justice to be done...
AT LAST WE MAKE OUR OWN!
I personally sang this as I removed Enlightened Sound Daemon support from yet another package, imagining myself a lusty knacker, hacking out old cruft to be boiled down into glue.

Then again, I would myself eschew any glues distilled from the Enlightened Sound Daemon.

Κύριε, ἐλέησον.


II. LITURGY OF THE WORD


The biggest Project news this week was the release of our 1.0.3 installer. This installer features the newest 3.7.5 kernel, a more readable GRUB bootup screen, and best of all no broken initramfs on the resulting machine ejecting one to a crippled limboshell. There are still significant problems with SprezzOS 1 as installed, due to a number of services suffering from absent or incomplete systemd support. Furthermore, systemd 197's adoption of biosdevname results in NIC names changing between the busybox-driven install and the systemd-driven startup, resulting in an /etc/network/interfaces with useless entries (and no network on startup). These issues are the top priorities for this week of SprezzOS development. See bug 596, bug 600, and a few others.

The missing systemd support will be pretty trivial, but is spread among a number of packages. The devname issue is slightly suckier -- I'll likely spend a day trying to drive the installer via systemd, and if that doesn't work out, resort to more hackish means (sticking a udeb in the installer process that calls biosdevname and rewrites the freshly-written interfaces file, or much better yet just hacking up netcfg-udeb and solving the issue at its source). I hate investing time into installer issues, especially given the Project's laughable understaffing, but if your installer's broken nobody will bother to see what's behind it. Le sigh!

The other major goal with high visibility this week is to restore ZFS support to the installer, which currently lacks 3.7.5-compatible spl and zfs modules. Also, I need fix a few minor growlight issues that can be annoying during install, primarily a failure to reflect filesystem wiping in the UI. See bug 594 and bug 609.

Aside from that, digikam 3.0 is likely to drop this week, and we'll pick that up promptly. Rebuilding of the Haskell and Perl ecosystems continues in response to introduction of 7.6.1 and 5.16, respectively. Mesa 9.0.2 emerged and was packaged. Bluez 5.1 was packaged, upgrading from the 4 series. CodeBlocks 12.11 was released, upgrading from the 10 series. I still cannot build webkit due to its grotesquely oversized archives blowing out a 32-bit value; attempts with three different binutils versions have all met with failure. I found a RedHat patch which might resolve the issue, and will try that out; libwebkit segfaults currently result in a lot of gvfs-http entries in my logs, not that I've ever in my many years been able to ascertain the exact purpose of gvfs, even as it spawns still more backend processes. Umm, GTKpod is built using an entirely refreshed imobiledevice stack. I'm packaging today's release of XBMC 12 "Frodo" in another terminal as I type this.

καὶ εἰς ἕνα Κύριον Ἰησοῦν Χριστὸν τὸν υἱὸν τοῦ Θεοῦ τὸν Μονογενῆ.


III. LITURGY OF THE EUCHARIST


Major initiatives of this development epoch (to result in SprezzOS 2, "Kolmogorov") presently include:

Mysterium fidei.


IV. COMMUNION RITE


SprezzOS patches were accepted to the following upstream projects this week:

Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi, miserere nobis.


V. CONCLUDING RITE


Ite, missa est.

Rock over London, Rock over Chicago
Maxwell House: Good to the last drop.

Per ardua ad astra.
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