brd’s notes » FreeBSD 2013-05-21 16:58:17

First thing we will need a clone of https://github.com/xaque208/puppet-pkgng into /usr/local/etc/puppet/modules/.

This will be pushed out to the clients as long as: pluginsync = true

For me the next step is to create a manifests/init.pp in the new module directory. This is important to me because I want to sync out a /usr/local/etc/pkg.conf to all my machines so that they point to my internal poudriere repos. So I end up with something like this:

file { "/usr/local/etc/pkg.conf":
        mode => 755,
        owner => root,
        content => "packagesite: http://pkg/91-web/
",
}

Once that is done it is easy to use pkgng packages via:

package { "www/apache22":
        ensure => installed,
        provider => pkgng,
        require => File['/usr/local/etc/pkg.conf'],
}

PC-BSD Hardware Store

Josh Smith has announced the initial launch of the PC-BSD hardware store. This resource is meant to make it easier to find hardware that has been tested to work on PC-BSD.  The store itself is here. If you have hardware that you know works and which you don’t see listed, please add it to the Hardware section of the wiki so that it can be included.

brd’s notes » FreeBSD 2013-05-17 19:47:19

This is a bunch of links to the tools I talk about in my presenation

Tools:

Collectd: https://collectd.org/

Graphite: http://graphite.wikidot.com/
Nagios: http://www.nagios.org/

Poudriere: http://fossil.etoilebsd.net/poudriere

Config Management:
Salt Stack: http://saltstack.com/
Chef: http://www.opscode.com/chef/
Puppet: http://puppetlabs.com/

Subversion: http://subversion.apache.org/

LogStash: http://logstash.net/
Audit: http://www.freebsd.org/handbook/audit.html

CARP: http://www.freebsd.org/handbook/carp.html

OATH: http://www.openauthentication.org/

Serial Console: http://www.freebsd.org/handbook/serialconsole-setup.html

Generic Resources:
FreeBSD Handbook: http://freebsd.org/handbook
Everything Sysadmin Blog: http://everythingsysadmin.com/resources.html

bsdtalk225 – PC-BSD with Kris Moore

Interview during BSDCan 2013 with Kris Moore from iXsystems.  We talk about some of the new features of PC-BSD.

File Info: 12Min, 6MB.

Ogg Link
http://cis01.uma.edu/~wbackman/bsdtalk/bsdtalk225.ogg

What keramida said… » FreeBSD 2013-05-16 17:04:58

Regular expressions are a powerful text transformation tool. Any UNIX geek will tell you that. It’s so deeply ingrained into our culture, that we even make jokes about it. Another thing that we also love is having a powerful extension language at hand, and Lisp is one of the most powerful extension languages around (and of course, we make jokes about that too).

Emacs, one of the most famous Lisp applications today, has for a while now the ability to combine both of these, to reach entirely new levels of usefulness. Combining regular expressions and Lisp can do really magical things.

An example that I recently used a few times is parsing & de-humanizing numbers in dstat output. The output of dstat includes numbers that are printed with a suffix, like ‘B’ for bytes, ‘k’ for kilobytes and ‘M’ for megabytes, e.g.:

----system---- ----total-cpu-usage---- --net/eth0- -dsk/total- sda-
     time     |usr sys idl wai hiq siq| recv  send| read  writ|util
16-05 08:36:15|  2   3  96   0   0   0|  66B  178B|   0     0 |   0
16-05 08:36:16| 42  14  37   0   0   7|  92M 1268k|   0     0 |   0
16-05 08:36:17| 45  11  36   0   0   7|  76M 1135k|   0     0 |   0
16-05 08:36:18| 27  55   8   0   0  11|  67M  754k|   0    99M|79.6
16-05 08:36:19| 29  41  16   5   0  10| 113M 2079k|4096B   63M|59.6
16-05 08:36:20| 28  48  12   4   0   8|  58M  397k|   0    95M|76.0
16-05 08:36:21| 38  37  14   1   0  10| 114M 2620k|4096B   52M|23.2
16-05 08:36:22| 37  54   0   1   0   8|  76M 1506k|8192B   76M|33.6

So if you want to graph one of the columns, it’s useful to convert all the numbers in the same unit. Bytes would be nice in this case.

Separating all columns with ‘|’ characters is a good start, so you can use e.g. a CSV-capable graphing tool, or even simple awk scripts to extract a specific column. ‘C-x r t’ can do that in Emacs, and you end up with something like this:

|     time     |cpu|cpu|cpu|cpu|cpu|cpu|eth0 |eth0 | disk| disk|sda-|
|     time     |usr|sys|idl|wai|hiq|siq| recv| send| read| writ|util|
|16-05 08:36:15|  2|  3| 96|  0|  0|  0|  66B| 178B|   0 |   0 |   0|
|16-05 08:36:16| 42| 14| 37|  0|  0|  7|  92M|1268k|   0 |   0 |   0|
|16-05 08:36:17| 45| 11| 36|  0|  0|  7|  76M|1135k|   0 |   0 |   0|
|16-05 08:36:18| 27| 55|  8|  0|  0| 11|  67M| 754k|   0 |  99M|79.6|
|16-05 08:36:19| 29| 41| 16|  5|  0| 10| 113M|2079k|4096B|  63M|59.6|
|16-05 08:36:20| 28| 48| 12|  4|  0|  8|  58M| 397k|   0 |  95M|76.0|
|16-05 08:36:21| 38| 37| 14|  1|  0| 10| 114M|2620k|4096B|  52M|23.2|
|16-05 08:36:22| 37| 54|  0|  1|  0|  8|  76M|1506k|8192B|  76M|33.6|

The leading and trailing ‘|’ characters are there so we can later use orgtbl-mode, an awesome table editing and realignment tool of Emacs. Now to the really magical step: regular expressions and lisp working together.

What we would like to do is convert text like “408B” to just “408″, text like “1268k” to the value of (1268 * 1024), and finally text like “67M” to the value of (67 * 1024 * 1024). The first part is easy:

M-x replace-regexp RET \([0-9]+\)B RET \1 RET

This should just strip the “B” suffix from byte values.

For the kilobyte and megabyte values what we would like is to be able to evaluate an arithmetic expression that involves \1. Something like “replace \1 with the value of (expression \1)“. This is possible in Emacs by prefixing the substitution pattern with \,. This instructs Emacs to evaluate the rest of the substitution pattern as a Lisp expression, and use its string representation as the “real” substitution text.

So if we match all numeric values that are suffixed by ‘k’, we can use (string-to-number \1) to convert the matching digits to an integer, multiply by 1024 and insert the resulting value by using the following substitution pattern:

\,(* 1024 (string-to-number \1))

The full Emacs command would then become:

M-x replace-regexp RET \([0-9]+\)k RET \,(* 1024 (string-to-number \1)) RET

This, and the byte suffix removal, yield now the following text in our Emacs buffer:

|     time     |cpu|cpu|cpu|cpu|cpu|cpu|eth0 |eth0 | disk| disk|sda-|
|     time     |usr|sys|idl|wai|hiq|siq| recv| send| read| writ|util|
|16-05 08:36:15|  2|  3| 96|  0|  0|  0|  66| 178|   0 |   0 |   0|
|16-05 08:36:16| 42| 14| 37|  0|  0|  7|  92M|1298432|   0 |   0 |   0|
|16-05 08:36:17| 45| 11| 36|  0|  0|  7|  76M|1162240|   0 |   0 |   0|
|16-05 08:36:18| 27| 55|  8|  0|  0| 11|  67M| 772096|   0 |  99M|79.6|
|16-05 08:36:19| 29| 41| 16|  5|  0| 10| 113M|2128896|4096|  63M|59.6|
|16-05 08:36:20| 28| 48| 12|  4|  0|  8|  58M| 406528|   0 |  95M|76.0|
|16-05 08:36:21| 38| 37| 14|  1|  0| 10| 114M|2682880|4096|  52M|23.2|
|16-05 08:36:22| 37| 54|  0|  1|  0|  8|  76M|1542144|8192|  76M|33.6|

Note: Some of the columns are indeed not aligned very well. We’ll fix that later. On to the megabyte conversion:

M-x replace-regexp RET \([0-9]+\)M RET \,(* 1024 1024 (string-to-number \1)) RET

Which produces a version that has no suffixes at all:

|     time     |cpu|cpu|cpu|cpu|cpu|cpu|eth0 |eth0 | disk| disk|sda-|
|     time     |usr|sys|idl|wai|hiq|siq| recv| send| read| writ|util|
|16-05 08:36:15|  2|  3| 96|  0|  0|  0|  66| 178|   0 |   0 |   0|
|16-05 08:36:16| 42| 14| 37|  0|  0|  7|  96468992|1298432|   0 |   0 |   0|
|16-05 08:36:17| 45| 11| 36|  0|  0|  7|  79691776|1162240|   0 |   0 |   0|
|16-05 08:36:18| 27| 55|  8|  0|  0| 11|  70254592| 772096|   0 |  103809024|79.6|
|16-05 08:36:19| 29| 41| 16|  5|  0| 10| 118489088|2128896|4096|  66060288|59.6|
|16-05 08:36:20| 28| 48| 12|  4|  0|  8|  60817408| 406528|   0 |  99614720|76.0|
|16-05 08:36:21| 38| 37| 14|  1|  0| 10| 119537664|2682880|4096|  54525952|23.2|
|16-05 08:36:22| 37| 54|  0|  1|  0|  8|  79691776|1542144|8192|  79691776|33.6|

Finally, to align everything in neat, pipe-separated columns, we enable M-x orgtbl-mode, and type “C-c C-c” with the pointer somewhere inside the transformed dstat output. The buffer now becomes something usable for pretty-much any graphing tool out there:

| time           | cpu | cpu | cpu | cpu | cpu | cpu |      eth0 |    eth0 |  disk |      disk | sda- |
| time           | usr | sys | idl | wai | hiq | siq |      recv |    send |  read |      writ | util |
| 16-05 08:36:15 |   2 |   3 |  96 |   0 |   0 |   0 |        66 |     178 |     0 |         0 |    0 |
| 16-05 08:36:16 |  42 |  14 |  37 |   0 |   0 |   7 |  96468992 | 1298432 |     0 |         0 |    0 |
| 16-05 08:36:17 |  45 |  11 |  36 |   0 |   0 |   7 |  79691776 | 1162240 |     0 |         0 |    0 |
| 16-05 08:36:18 |  27 |  55 |   8 |   0 |   0 |  11 |  70254592 |  772096 |     0 | 103809024 | 79.6 |
| 16-05 08:36:19 |  29 |  41 |  16 |   5 |   0 |  10 | 118489088 | 2128896 |  4096 |  66060288 | 59.6 |
| 16-05 08:36:20 |  28 |  48 |  12 |   4 |   0 |   8 |  60817408 |  406528 |     0 |  99614720 | 76.0 |
| 16-05 08:36:21 |  38 |  37 |  14 |   1 |   0 |  10 | 119537664 | 2682880 |  4096 |  54525952 | 23.2 |
| 16-05 08:36:22 |  37 |  54 |   0 |   1 |   0 |   8 |  79691776 | 1542144 |  8192 |  79691776 | 33.6 |

The trick of combining arbitrary Lisp expressions with regexp substitution patterns like \1, \2 … \9 is something I have found immensely useful in Emacs. Now that you know how it works, I hope you can find even more amusing use-cases for it.

Update: The Emacs manual has a few more useful examples of \, in action, as pointed out by tunixman on Twitter.


Filed under: Computers, Emacs, Free software, FreeBSD, GNU/Linux, Lisp, Open source, Programming, Software Tagged: Computers, Emacs, Free software, FreeBSD, GNU/Linux, Lisp, Open source, Programming, Software

FreeBSD Foundation Announces Ed Maste is New Director of Project Development

The FreeBSD Foundation is pleased to announce Ed Maste's new role as the
Foundation's part-time Director of Project Development.  Ed has served
on the Foundation's board for two years, and has stepped down in order to
accept this new position.

In this position Ed will manage the Foundation's sponsored work,
including projects funded under specific grants, operational support and
project development undertaken by the Foundation's permanent technical
staff.

Working with the Foundation's Board of Directors, Ed will identify
and document specific areas of future project work interest.  This
roadmap planning will include coordination with FreeBSD consumers and
the FreeBSD community.

"2012 represented an inflection point in the Foundation's history,''
said Justin T. Gibbs, President of the FreeBSD Foundation.  "The
Foundation has a stated goal of investing in permanent staff through
2013.  With Ed taking on this new position I'm excited by the
Foundation's increased capacity to manage our project development and
operational support.''

Ed has over ten years of experience in companies building products
on FreeBSD, in both technical and managerial roles.  He resides in
Kitchener, Ontario, Canada.

FreeBSD 8.4-RC3 Available

The third RC build for the FreeBSD-8.4 release cycle is now available. ISO images for the amd64, i386 and pc98 architectures are available on most of our FreeBSD mirror sites.

Work in Progress: LCD driver for AM335x evaluation module

I’m trying to wrap up some project I started working on quite some time ago and this is first chunk of clean-up.

Patch contains:

  • Kernel config for AM335x EVM
  • dts file for AM335x EVM with TFT panel info
  • LCD controller driver with some functionality missing: only 24/32 bit depth and only TFT mode is supported
  • Really simple PWM driver. LCD backlight is controlled through eCAS submodule of PWMSS0 module.

I tested it only on evaluation module, although I think with proper panel/pinmux configuration it should work with BeagleBone’s LCD caps too.
Parts missing: adjusting clock to proper pixel frequency, proper allocation of framebuffer memory.

EuroBSDcon 2013

EuroBSDcon 2013 (http://2013.eurobsdcon.org/), Hilton Conference Centre, St. Julian's, Malta 26 - 29 September, 2013. We are happy to announce that the EuroBSDcon 2013 will be held on Saturday 28th and Sunday 29th of September 2013 (tutorials on Thursday 26th and Friday 27th) on Malta (St. Julian's area). The weather is great at about 26°C during the day and 20°C at night. The ocean is still warm from summer. Consider taking you family, wife, kids and spouse with you for a long weekend. The social event on Saturday evening will be a BBQ at a beautiful sandy beach. Family is invited too and children attend for free. A side program with sight seeing and a tour of the island is being organized at cost.

FDT driver skeleton generator

Writing new driver for FDT-based device always involves several simple steps:

  • writing generic newbus driver skeleton
  • Checking for compatibility of node in probe routine
  • Allocate memory/IRQ resources in attach routine

I can’t say for other developers but I just copy existing driver, remove all device-specific stuff and rewrite generic stuff. Which is less time-consuming then writing it from scratch but time-consuming it is. Being huge fan of automation of any kind I decided to let computer do all this dumb work and leave creative part (copy-pasting registers definition from spec to code) to myself. the result is this script.

Developer feeds driver description in YAML format to the script and gets driver skeleton that requires minimal amount of editing to get it compiled. Driver description includes author name, prefix for macroses, prefix for newbus method-functions, FDT compatibility string, driver name and number of IRQ/MEMORY resources. A minute saved is a minute earned.

YAML example:

AUTHOR: Oleksandr Tymoshenko <[email protected]>
PREFIX: am335x_pwm
MACRO_PREFIX: PWM
DRIVER: am335x_pwm
FDT_COMPATIBLE: ti,am335x-pwm
IRQ_RESOURCES: 0
MEM_RESOURCES: 4

FreeBSD Foundation announces second technical staff member and iSCSI project


The FreeBSD Foundation is pleased to announce that Edward Tomasz Napierała has joined as its second member of technical staff. This is a continuation of the Foundation's plan to invest in staff in 2013.

A FreeBSD committer since 2007, Edward previously completed a number of projects under Foundation grants, including safe device removal with mounted filesystems, growing mounted filesystems, and resource containers.

Edward is currently implementing a native in-kernel iSCSI stack (both target and initiator) for this increasingly popular block storage protocol. "Although there are a number of iSCSI target implementations that support FreeBSD, the project lacks a high performance and reliable in-kernel target. As iSCSI gains favor, this stack will be a key element in maintaining FreeBSD's competitive position in enterprise and open-source deployments" said Justin T. Gibbs, president of the FreeBSD Foundation. The project is expected to be completed in October 2013.

Another part of Edward's responsibilities will be assisting the FreeBSD Security Team in preparing security advisories and patches.

Edward lives in Warsaw, Poland.

Today’s Journey: Making AP mode power-save work better

I've been working on improving the net80211 and ath driver support for AP mode power save.

There's a few parts to it:

  • A station can tell an access point it's going to sleep by setting the power mgmt bit to 1 in a TXed frame;
  • The AP will then update the TIM entry in the beacon frames it sends out to reflect whether that station has any traffic queued;
  • A station can signal an AP that it's awake by sending a data frame with the power mgmt bit set to 0;
  • .. or it can request a frame at a time by using PS-POLL;
  • There's also the uAPSD stuff which I haven't yet implemented and won't likely do so for a while.
Now, it shouldn't be that difficult. Except, that it is.

If an AP has a bunch of frames queued to a station that has gone to sleep, it will keep trying to transmit those frames. That wastes air-time and results in annoying levels of packet loss.

When you're doing 802.11n, there's a whole lot more traffic going on and a lot more room to cause massive traffic issues if you drop frames. But you don't want to keep failing to transmit those frames or you'll end up spending a lot of time transmitting BAR frames to the station.

If the driver maintains a queue of frames (for say, software retransmit) then it also needs to ensure that the TIM bit is set correctly. Otherwise the AP may set the TIM bit to 0 because the net80211 stack has no queued frames to that node; but the driver itself has some frames. Thus, the station won't wake up and you'll see increased packet latency.

When PS-POLL is received, frames need to first be leaked from the driver queue BEFORE it starts leaking frames from the net80211 power save queue. The last thing you want is the wrong set of frames to go out.

So, I've spent the last few months extending the driver and network stack to make this feasible. There's new net80211 driver methods for tying into the TIM update process, the node power save status and the PS-POLL handling. The filtered frames handling in the ath driver is another precursor to this - it means that frames can be failed out very quickly and retried when appropriate.

(No, I'm not implementing software retransmit for non-11n traffic just yet. I will eventually. Just not yet.)

The final bits that I've been working on have been tricky.

When a node goes to sleep, you want to pause the driver transmission to the node - otherwise it will keep trying to transmit whatever is in the driver queue. For 11n this is terrible; it means that frames will keep failing to be transmitted and with enough failures, the traffic will stop whilst a BAR frame is sent. Grr.

Next was figuring out how to send frames whilst the node is "paused". I introduced a per-node "leak" counter which tells the driver transmit path that even though the node is asleep, a single frame should be scheduled. If one isn't available, the next frame sent will be scheduled. This handles the PS-POLL "null" response - ie, if there's nothing in the queue, the net80211 stack will queue a null data response with the MORE bit clear. That way the station will know there's currently nothing to receive.

But then, something odd started happening. Devices would disassociate and re-associate, but they'd still be marked as "asleep". So no traffic would occur. After digging into it a bit, I discovered that the only time a station transitions back to awake is when it receives a DATA frame with the power mgmt bit set to 0. Seeing management/control traffic from the station isn't enough. So for now, I just always transmit management/control frames regardless if the station is asleep or awake - except BAR frames. Those get software queued if the node is asleep. Now that management/control frames are transmitted directly, a station can re-associate and be marked as 'awake.'

Then I found that once a station re-associates, it should have all of its current association state reset. It may have had a bunch of aggregate frames queued to the hardware and those need to finish transmitting before we can start transmitting new data to the re-associated station. It may even have been in the middle of receiving a BAR frame! So, I have to gently (well, "gently") reset the association state to allow for currently queued frames to be cleaned up, but reset things like filtered frame state and BAR TX. Ew, but it needs to be done.

Also, if there's data queued to an asleep station and a BAR frame needs to go out, the BAR frame needs to go into the head of the software queue, not the tail. Otherwise it will have to wait for the queue to be transmitted - which, if there's a gap in the transmit block-ack window (hence needing the BAR), no further transmission will occur. Oops!

I then found that a sufficiently chatty node could end up filling the software queue full of buffers destined to it. This is a general problem in the ath driver which I'll eventually fix, but it became a huge problem with power save enabled. So, I've introduced a per-node maximum queue depth when it's asleep. That should limit the amount of pain that a single sleeping node can cause. I'll eventually introduce a limit for how many buffers an individual node can consume whether it's awake or asleep but that's for another day.

There's likely lots more corner cases that need to be addressed before I can merge this into -HEAD. I'm still seeing my macbook pro occasionally disassociate and not automatically re-associate and I'm not sure why. But things are behaving much, much better with sleeping devices.

FreeBSD Project to participate in Google Summer of Code 2013

The FreeBSD Project is pleased to announce its participation In Google's 2013 Summer of Code program, which funds summer students to participate in open source projects. This will be the FreeBSD Project's ninth year in the program, having mentored over 150 successful students through summer-long coding projects between 2005 and 2012.