Wednesday, March 22, 2017

In december, I updated the flight recorder in ELFE. This is a tool that would prove useful for some of the ongoing investigations and efforts.

PC Order

Placed request for new HP PC.

Installing Visual Studio

This proved more challenging than I anticipated. I'm logged into Microsoft's web site on the Mac side with my usual Red Hat e-mail address. For some reason, Microsoft implemented their security in such a way that Safari did not record the password in the keychain. So I can't really double-check. But I'm pretty sure of what I typed.

However, from the Windows 10 VM, even the user is not known. How annoying. It looks like the reason is that Microsoft believes there are two accounts behind that name. One is personal, one was "created by my IT department". I thought it had connected the two (and it clearly had, since I have product keys and everything). But if I select the "created by my IT department", then I'm locked out.

The Visual Studio version is quite recent (March 6, 2017!). Unfortunately, the download never seems to start. Will let it simmer a bit, we'll see. (One hour later: you actually need to click on "Save" in Windows 10... So it was just there sitting there waiting for me to confirm the download.

Wow - Enabling the various options for Virtual Studio means Virtual Studio will use over 50G of disk! That's quite a bit more than I anticipated. Will need to resize the disk.

qemu-img resize ~/var/lib/libvirt/images/win10.qcow2 +40G

Bridging

I used a user-session KVM guest for Win10, because I wanted to make sure I could enable 3D acceleration at some point. So far so good. Next step would be to use Microsoft Remote Access to get into it.

Why Remote Access? So far, my Mac Spice clients don't work well yet, so I'm using VNC over the local display, which itself is QXL + Spice. I'm piling up things on the stack, which is not convenient. Another alternative is to run Spice on the local host using X11. But again, that sort of defeats the whole purpose of Spice.

Mesa problem

Updated Red Hat Bugzilla 1030024 to point to my back-port of Marc-Andre's patch. Will need to finish the port to master.

Refresh updates

To know which parts of the screen are updated by remote-viewer, Pavel tells me I can run with

remote-viewer --gtk-debug=updates

Muse is very slow

Muse became very slow and unresponsive. I'm still trying to figure out what happened. The Win10 Visual Studio installation is still ongoing, that may be part of the issue. Connecting to other VMs on the system is a real pain. The QEMU/KVM sessions keep being disconnected.

Apparently, I pushed the system into swapping, and it's not behaving as well as I would have hoped under this kind of load. It has 3G of swap used. Low-memory situations are always a pain. I seem to have 14.9G in use out of 15.6G (not 16G, don't know why).

Powering VM off, restarting it, I get an error stating that the qcow2 file is corrupt.

Will wait until my Win10 install is complete to investigate this. This takes quite a bit of time. Apparently disk is stuck at 100%, with 40M/s sustained transfer rates. That may be the reason Muse is slow

Reconstructing VMs from disk images

I know that I got an answer to one of my status udpates, where I was asking if there was a way to quickly reconstruct a VM from a qcow2 image on the command line. Apparently, there is, I was given the answer, and somehow I can't find it.

Trying to boot my fedora25-qxl VM I reconstructed from the fedora25-qxl.qcow2 file generated a number of strange errors during boot. Tried to reboot, now it tells me there is no boot disk. What happened?

Modularizing build system for ELFE

If I want to isolate the recorder, I may as well isolate the build system for ELFE as well. So I'm going to use git submodules for both the build system and the recorder.

Restored colorization for Emacs console

Restored the colorization of builds in my Emacs console by adding the following to my .emacs:

;; Colorize compilation buffers
(require 'ansi-color)
(defun colorize-compilation-buffer ()
  (toggle-read-only)
  (ansi-color-apply-on-region (point-min) (point-max))
  (toggle-read-only))
(add-hook 'compilation-filter-hook 'colorize-compilation-buffer)