Peters emphasized the point that users often have no control over, and even limited access to, data that they have provided to web applications. While Gmail, for example, straightforwardly allows users to download contacts and messages, many other services (notably Twitter and Facebook) do not. While LinuxCon attendees understand the question of data control and have at least some concern, the average user is only beginning to understand the issue.
Even those who aren't concerned about privacy or having copies of some of their data should be worried about being denied access to their accounts due to technical failures or vendor lock-out. Users tend to panic when shut out of their main email accounts.
Linux in general and Gnome in particular must do better at providing open alternates to proprietary services. Notably Identica offers an open alternative to Twitter and Firefox Sync allows browser settings to be stored to and accessed from the Cloud. Gnome is planning Tomboy Online, an auto-syncing note-taking service.
Desktop integration with the Cloud is essential for the future of Linux and Gnome. Writing the middleware that makes the integration possible can be a hard sell for developers, who prefer to write cool desktop or web applications. [Notably Peters did not comment on Ubuntu One, Canonical's cloud-sync offering.]
[The Linux kernel team has selected KVM as its virtualization framework, effectively replacing Xen after its purchase by Citrix.]
The KVM hypervisor performs all device I/O via Qemu, exemplifying Linux code reuse at its best. Memory barriers are currently supported in KVM, although they appear to be about to leave the kernel. Right now virtual guest machines can read and write at > 80% native speed via asynchronous I/O.
Qemu was designed to emulate embedded systems and has been significantly repurposed to work with KVM. Qemu_kvm is a rapidly evolving part of KVM and efforts to upstream changes to the Qemu project are underway. A fundamental part of Qemu_kvm is QMP, the Qemu Monitor Protocol, whose default paradigm is one machine (the host) controlling another (the guest) rather than the typical Qemu model of a human at a serial console controlling a target machine.
Qemu runs in user space. Virtio relays messages from qemu and the network to the kernel. More of virtio code has been moved into kernel mainline recently, meaning fewer context switches in a running KVM instance. Two guests on the same host may now send each other packets through a virtual network via a virtual switch in the hypervisor. SR_IOV can directly assign hardware to a guest. PowerPC will be a supported guest on KVM soon.
Scheduling and locking in a guest's VCPUs can create problems, as the host can decide to take resources away from the guest right after a thread has taken a lock. The host knows little about the guest's state and how to interrupt it with minimal performance degradation. Guests need to communicate their lock needs better to the host. KVM may borrow some code from Xen to solve the problem. One way to improve performance is lazy swapping of registers.
KVM supports direct PCI device assignment to a guest. Some PCI cards have virtualization on-board via SR_IOV. Card-level virtualization requires EPT/NPT. Hardware virtualization interfaces include VT_X for x86 and AMD_V for AMD CPUs.
[Jason Wessel is one of the most enthusiastic presenters I've seen in some time. His excitement makes the most jaded audience members want to run out and try kdb.]
kgdb and kdb are debugging tools of last resort. Smart kernel developers will try JTAG/ICE, emulators and KVM, printk, trace_printk, kprobe, jprobes, ftrace, etc. first, but kgdb and kdb are useful when all else fails. The SIMICS emulator that allows reverse execution is particularly useful. kdb was just incorporated into the mainline kernel as of 2.6.35.
Recently, incorporation of more of the graphics stack into the
kernel has been the particular cause of difficult debugging problems.
To trap bugs, program execution must revert back to a text console.
kdb can help here. After running backtrace to find the address where
the hang occurs, lsmod can identify loaded drivers, and
add-symbol-file <badmodule.ko> <0xbadaddress>in regular gdb can be used to view source. kdb is not a source-level debugger as kgdb and gdb are. Use bph command to get a hardware breakpoint or single-step trap.
kdb runs directly on the target and communicates back to the host over the serial port, while kgdb executes on the host and talks to the target over the serial port. A convenient new feature is agent_proxy, which enables serial port multiplexing. The serial port is used alternately by kgdb and by kdb without disconnecting.
An EHCI Debug Port can be used with a special USB port when there is no serial port on a device. "Atomic mode kernel setting" is needed for EHCI Debug support. Unlike source-level debugging, kdb can run even with highly optimized code. [kdb sounds very useful for reverse-engineering, although of course the DMCA has taught us that reverse-engineering is wrong.]
The fact that USB support for a keyboard is not always available in the kernel is a difficulty for kdb. Atomic level kernel mode setting is a solution. kdump can show source code listing at the address where a backtrace shows an error. kdump can even be invoked from a watchdog timer. Interruption of the target by kdb almost always means a subsequent reboot. To watch the normal flow of control, use an emulator instead.
Future plans for kgdb include an earlyprint mode to debug suspend/resume problems with acpi. kgdb allows must avoid preemption or it will hang. kdb will even allows setting of a breakpoint in a module that has not yet been loaded.
Can use gdb with kvm guest via
gdb> tar rem localhost:2222if guest connects to port 2222.
Qualcomm's new membership in the Linux Foundation is a sign of progress.
Kernel 2.6.35 included 4574 drivers, with an average of 170 new drivers per release. New support for memory defragmentation not only makes big mallocs easier but also can save power, as less of address space will need to be scanned for a given allocation. 2.6.35 also includes CPU idle pattern and timer slack detection.
The Android wakelock controversy is a symptom of a larger probelm with embedded. The result is out-of-tree code and lack of community input.
The kernel now incorporates prof, gprof and perf-profilers tracing tools. perf and ftrace will be mainlined soon. 2.6.36 will see incorporation of AppArmor and fanotify for virus scanning. kernelnewbies has helpful explanations of what release notes mean.
Surprisingly, it's Wall Street, not embedded, that drives the development of real-time kernel extensions. Real-time extensions represent the largest and most important patch set. Real-time development is important because it is usually the arena in which scalability problems are identified.
Deadline scheduling will eventually be merged into the mainline kernel. The SCHED_DEADLINE extension includes as parameters a deadline, a period and worse-case execution time. The SMP scalability of SCHED_DEADLINE remains an unanswered question.
Bird began by confessing that his hope when he submitted the abstract was to figure out a way to greatly speed up Android boot time before the conference. While he managed to change the amount of time that various parts of the boot sequence took, he was not able to shorten the overall execution time. [Nonetheless his presentation offered interesting insights into the boot-up of the curious chimera that is Android.] Bird cited a toothpaste-tube frustration metaphor, where lots of squeezing changes the shape of the tube but does not decrease the volume by ejecting any paste. Idea for future: preload only stubs of classes, with subsequent full loads on demand.
Hardware used in study: HTC Android Developer Phone 1 (unlocked HTC G1); unlocked Nexus One; OMAP evaluation board. Tools used: plain old stopwatch; message loggers like grabserial (on OMAP), printks, android system log; bootchart; ftrace and strace; Dalvik method tracer (didn't actually work). The Android logs contain statistics that are generated by the controversial wakelock patch. The verbosity of the messages is controlled by a kernel flag such as Printk_times=1 at boot. The detailed results of Bird's testing are available. Messages show up in a file in /sys. Messages written to /dev/kmsg by custom test scripts show up in the kernel log. Also change "loglevel 3" to "loglevel 7" in /init.rc to increase the verbosity. strace is part of Android since Eclair (2.0). bootchart is enabled via a kernel compile option (Bird's results). Use logcat to see system messages from the adb console.
Android's boot sequence starts out in a very ordinary way, with a bootloader starting the kernel, which then runs init, whose params are specified in /init.rc and /init.<platform>.rc. The static logo display at first power-on corresponds to the bootloader running. Next the Java initializer Zygote loads classes and the package manager. All Java apps that run subsequently are new Zygote instances (JVMs) forked from the initial Zygote process. The service manager is next to start. Init starts the radio daemon that talks to the baseband processor, the graphics subsystem and any other drivers. A lot of system files are memory-mapped at boot.
Results: HTC G1 got to home screen in 57 seconds; Nexus 1 took 36 seconds running Froyo (2.6.32). The kernel load in both cases takes about 6 seconds, which should be faster. Most of boot time is occupied by Zygote, which takes 20 seconds to start plus 20 seconds further for package scanning. Zygote's start is followed by a low-CPU, high I/O period, which one would think could somehow be interlaced with Zygote's CPU-intensive, low-I/O initialization. The HTC G1/ADP1 has 1514 pre-loaded classes while the N1 has 1942, and all these packages are scanned. Class pre-loading is the main contributor to boot time but skipping it results in longer execution time when the classes are needed.
The class invocation itself appears a bit inefficient. Just to read 4 B from the manifest file, a sequence of 25 Java and C# classes must be invoked. The entire manifest is then unzipped and is paged in. Running the Music.apk package loads a whole bunch of optional wallpapers!
[Ironically preloading of Java classes is one the technologies that Oracle claims is covered by a patent that Google is infringing.]