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BTRFS snapshot performance - disk vs SSD
by Russell Coker 16 Dec '12

16 Dec '12

btrfs subvol snapshot -r /home /home/backup/$(date +%Y-%m-%d:%H:%M) The above command takes more than 10 seconds on a system with an Intel 120G SSD but less than 1 second on a system with a hard disk identified as "HITACHI HTS72201 DC2Z". Also I've noticed that every system which uses BTRFS on an Intel 120G SSD gives very poor performance when installing Debian packages (which calls sync()). I'm using the ssd and discard mount options. Does the Intel SSD just suck for the type of writes that BTRFS does when synchronising things or is there some way of tweaking it for performance? -- My Main Blog http://etbe.coker.com.au/ My Documents Blog http://doc.coker.com.au/

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3g NO CARRIER
by James Harper 16 Dec '12

16 Dec '12

I have an OpenWRT box set up on my network that dials up via 3G and then launches an OpenVPN connection to a remote server. The idea of this is so that if something goes wrong with the main router I can connect to the remote server, back through the OpenVPN connection and onto the network. The reason for the OpenVPN connection is that the 3G connection doesn't have a static IP and is also NAT'd by the carrier so isn't externally accessible even if I knew the external IP (eg dyndns wouldn't help me). At some point in the last few weeks it has stopped working though. The last thing I see in the logs when it tries to connect is: Dec 16 15:19:32 bitgw2 local2.info chat[7031]: ATD*99***1#^M^M Dec 16 15:19:32 bitgw2 local2.info chat[7031]: NO CARRIER Dec 16 15:19:32 bitgw2 local2.info chat[7031]: -- failed Dec 16 15:19:32 bitgw2 local2.info chat[7031]: Failed (NO CARRIER) Dec 16 15:19:32 bitgw2 daemon.err pppd[7027]: Connect script failed Dec 16 15:19:33 bitgw2 daemon.info pppd[7027]: Exit. gcom says: Trying list of devices SIM ready Waiting for Registration..(120 sec max) Registered on Home network: "50502",2 Signal Quality: 24,99 Which afaict means that the modem is talking to the base station and that there is some signal available. The next thing I would suspect is the 3G account with the carrier is closed or otherwise broken... is that consistent with a NO CARRIER response or should the modem give some other response? I'm not the account holder so I can't contact the carrier until tomorrow. This was working just fine and nothing has changed so I assume it's an external factor... Is there a command I can send to the modem to find more information? Thanks James

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Likelihood and consequence of MS distributing 'windblows' as a GUI built on Unix/ Linux ?
by Rohan McLeod 14 Dec '12

14 Dec '12

Assembled Illuminati ! Whilst following the thread: "Re: Latest generation laptops with Windows 8 preinstalled, EFI mess.."; the idea occurred that MS might eventually replace or augment Windows; by building it as a GUI plus a Unix / Linux kernel, in the way Apple, now builds the Mac OS as a GUI plus a highly configured FreeBSD kernel (or whatever); is it: 1/ possible 2/ likely and if it happened what would be the consequences ? regards Rohan McLeod

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Re: Latest generation laptops with Windows 8 preinstalled, EFI mess..
by Rick Moen 14 Dec '12

14 Dec '12

Quoting Sam Varghese (sam(a)gnubies.com) > Rick, if you read this guy's article carefully you'll notice that he > makes mention that his installation did not involve secure boot. Ah, good catch. You know, fundamentally, a computer with UEFI Secure Boot enabled _if_ it provides no means in the BIOS to disable that function is just basically not a general-purpose computer, but rather a locked-down single-purpose appliance. If you buy such a thing, you are assuming the risk that your intended repurposing of the machine may be impaired or prevented by the technical measures to prevent unauthorised code running in kernelspace. My own preferred way of dealing with that would be to either (1) replace the BIOS with coreboot, or (2) sell off the offending hardware and get something more suitable. However: Matthew Garrett's shim bootloader and similar solutions provide ways to make UEFI Secure Boot an asset rather than a liability for Linux/BSD/etc. systems, so that's another way around the problem. Anyway, I _still_ continue to think that dual-booting is generally a solution to the wrong problem, and that running alternative OSes (such as MS-Windows ;-> ) in a virtual machine session gives vastly superior operational results. That is, in my experience, users who think they will get good usage out of a dual-boot setup are overly optimistic, and have not stopped to consider how disruptive of one's computing it is to shut everything down and reboot. In the long term, I've noticed, they stay 99.9% of the time in one OS and ignore the other. Which means they've wasted their time and effort. By contrast, a VM approach (given adequate RAM and CPU to make both OSes comfortable) allows and encourages concurrent use of both operating systems.

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Latest generation laptops with Windows 8 preinstalled, EFI mess..
by Jesse Stevens 14 Dec '12

14 Dec '12

Hey people, We're looking at replacing an aging workhorse Samsung laptop we use for lots of video transcoding with Ubuntu and occasionally having to boot into Windows 7 for some ugly BrightAuthor usage. We want to get one of the new Alienware M14x laptops but it appears most come preinstalled with Windows 8 when buying them off the shelf. I remember a while back people talking about secure booting and EFI madness. Does anyone have any information that might help inform this decision as ideally we'd install Ubuntu the moment we bought the laptop, and occasionally still dual boot over to Windows. We may change and start to use VirtualBox in future but for now this is the ideal setup. Does anyone know if simply by coming preloaded with Windows 8 this causes problems with installing Ubuntu and Grub? I've googled of course but I'm looking for real world experience answers rather than links. Especially if anyone has this particular laptop... It's so boring having to think about Windows at all these days.. Jesse

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Re: Latest generation laptops with Windows 8 preinstalled, EFI mess..
by trentbuck＠gmail.com 14 Dec '12

14 Dec '12

Sam Varghese <sam(a)gnubies.com> writes: > No. A Linux distro that can boot on a PC/laptop that has secure boot > enabled would necessarily have obtained a key from Microsoft. AIUI that is wrong. By analogy to x509 TLS, a UEFI SBK environment will trust a set list of CA certs by default. The only one that is guaranteed to be in there is Microsoft's CA cert. You can boot your own OS by getting MS to sign your cert, *OR* you create your own CA and add it to the trusted list. The latter is difficult enough to be effectively inaccessible to most users, but I think it still bears mentioning. > Matthew Garrett is good on the technical details, so is James > Bottomley. I really do not know the answer to this. That's http://mjg59.dreamwidth.org and I think http://blog.hansenpartnership.com/ Thanks, I didn't know about the latter. Of course mjg59's alone is getting me about triple my RDI of facepalms...

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Re: Latest generation laptops with Windows 8 preinstalled, EFI mess..
by Chris Samuel 13 Dec '12

13 Dec '12

On 13/12/12 20:29, Sam Varghese wrote: > This solution is for geeks, not your average individual who wants to drop > a CD in and have a look. It's meant to help out the smaller distros which > have few developers and certainly no time to walk through the Microsoft > bureaucracy [1]. Yup, I know, my mention was in the context of it being the method by which Fedora 18 will work on systems with secure boot enabled. The simple solution is don't buy a system with secure boot enabled - if you *must* have Windows 8 I believe you can still install it afterwards, secure boot being enabled is just needed for the logo certification (and hence the M$ marketing dollars) AFAIK. cheers, Chris -- Chris Samuel : http://www.csamuel.org/ : Melbourne, VIC

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Re: Latest generation laptops with Windows 8 preinstalled, EFI mess..
by Chris Samuel 13 Dec '12

13 Dec '12

On 13/12/12 15:16, Sam Varghese wrote: > No. A Linux distro that can boot on a PC/laptop that has secure boot enabled > would necessarily have obtained a key from Microsoft. That would enable it to > boot. Note that I said "you cannot install..." You can very definitely boot > Ubuntu 12.10 64-bit on a PC/laptop on which secure boot is enabled. Note that not all flavours of Ubuntu support secure boot at present: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/QuantalQuetzal/ReleaseNotes/UbuntuServer#QuantalQue… Fedora 18 is planned to support secure boot when it (finally) appears, and Matthew Garrett finally has an MS signed copy of shim which any distribution can use to set up secure boot support for their distro. http://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/20303.html cheers, Chris -- Chris Samuel : http://www.csamuel.org/ : Melbourne, VIC

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Re: Latest generation laptops with Windows 8 preinstalled, EFI mess..
by Peter Ross 13 Dec '12

13 Dec '12

On Thu, 13 Dec 2012, Sam Varghese wrote: > No. A Linux distro that can boot on a PC/laptop that has secure boot enabled > would necessarily have obtained a key from Microsoft. That would enable it to > boot. Note that I said "you cannot install..." You can very definitely boot > Ubuntu 12.10 64-bit on a PC/laptop on which secure boot is enabled. Thanks for clarifying. I really confused "cannot install" with "cannot boot". > I suspect that the inability of Ubuntu to recognise the single hard drive as > having an operating system loaded (see the screenshot in my article) is > due to the new filesystem which is implemented in some versions of Windows 8. > It's called REFS. Ubunu (and other distros) can recognise NTFS. AFAIK ReFS is only available for Windows Server 2012, as http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/hh848060%28v=vs.85%… and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Server_2012#ReFS suggest. It is also not mentioned here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_8 I wonder whether you can boot from CD and mount it under Linux.. >> BTW: Can you still boot the Windows 8 installed with secure boot? > > OTOH> If you're asking whether I can boot Win 8 after installing Ubuntu on a second > hard drive, the answer is yes. It boot by default. To get into Ubuntu you have > to jump through a few hoops, all of which I have described in the article. That was the question I had in mind. Anyway, at the end it may even weaken the Intel/Microsoft alliance further, and for Linux enthusiasts one more reason to avoid the Microsoft tax;-) Thanks for your article and answers Peter

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Re: Latest generation laptops with Windows 8 preinstalled, EFI mess..
by Graeme Cross 13 Dec '12

13 Dec '12

On Thu, Dec 13, 2012, at 03:22 PM, Sam Varghese wrote: > On Thu, Dec 13, 2012 at 12:35:38PM +1100, Roger wrote: > > On 12/13/2012 10:41 AM, Sam Varghese wrote: > > > On Thu, Dec 13, 2012 at 10:00:01AM +1100, Jesse Stevens wrote: > > >> > > >> We're looking at replacing an aging workhorse Samsung laptop we use > > >> for lots of video transcoding with Ubuntu and occasionally having to > > >> boot into Windows 7 for some ugly BrightAuthor usage. > > >> > > >> We want to get one of the new Alienware M14x laptops but it appears > > >> most come preinstalled with Windows 8 when buying them off the shelf. > > > > I've seen one case [1] of a Ubuntu/Win 8 dual-boot on a Lenovo laptop; whether > > > this install was done as ordinary mortals do is not clear. > > > > > > >From my personal experience, you can only have Windows 8 and Ubuntu on the same > > > machine on separate drives [2]. This install was done in the bog standard way. > > > > Frankly that is how I would do it, 2 separate drives. It's arguably more cumbersome > > but when windows fails you still have a working laptop. > > I haven't seen many laptops which can hold a second internal drive unless > you get rid of the optical drive. > For what it's worth: Many Lenovo Thinkpads will take a MSATA drive (replacing the WWAN card) + SATA drive + optical drive. Most of the current crop of Clevo/Metabox/Horize laptops will take two SATA drives + optical. - Graeme

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