The biggest issue I have with
fossil scm is that
it's not
git - there are just too many advanced tools
which I got used to with git over time, which probably will never be
implemented in fossil just because of it's "lean single binary" philosophy.
And things get even worse when you need to bridge git-fossil repos - common
denominator here is git, so it's either constant "export-merge-import" cycle
or some hacks, since fossil doesn't support incremental export to a git repo
out of the box (but it does have
support for full import/export), and git
doesn't seem to have a plugin to track fossil remotes (yet?).
I thought of migrating away from fossil, but there's just no substitute
(although
quite a lot of attempts to implement that) for distributed issue tracking and
documentation right in the same repository and plain easy to access format
with a sensible web frontend for those who don't want to install/learn scm and
clone the repo just to file a ticket.
None of git-based tools I've been able to find seem to meet this (seemingly)
simple criterias, so dual-stack it is then.
Solution I came up with is real-time mirroring of all the changes in fossil
repositories to a git.
- watching fossil-path with inotify(7) for IN_MODIFY events (needs
pyinotify for that)
- checking for new revisions in fossil (source) repo against tip of a
git
- comparing these by timestamps, which are kept in perfect sync (by
fossil-export as well)
- exporting revisions from fossil as a full artifacts (blobs),
importing these into git via git-fast-import
It's also capable to do oneshot updates (in which case it doesn't need anything
but python-2.7, git and fossil), bootstrapping git mirrors as new fossil repos
are created and catching-up with their sync on startup.
While the script uses quite a low-level (but standard and documented here and there) scm
internals, it was actually very easy to write (~200 lines, mostly simple
processing-generation code), because both scms in question are built upon
principles of simple and robust design, which I deeply admire.
Limitation is that it only tracks one branch, specified at startup ("trunk",
by default), and doesn't care about the tags at the moment, but I'll probably
fix the latter when I'll do some tagging next time (hence will have a
realworld test case).
It's also trivial to make the script do two-way synchronization, since fossil
supports "fossil import --incremental" update right from git-fast-export, so
it's just a simple pipe, which can be run w/o any special tools on demand.
Script itself.
fossil_echo --help:
usage: fossil_echo [-h] [-1] [-s] [-c] [-b BRANCH] [--dry-run] [-x EXCLUDE]
[-t STAT_INTERVAL] [--debug]
fossil_root git_root
Tool to keep fossil and git repositories in sync. Monitors fossil_root for
changes in *.fossil files (which are treated as source fossil repositories)
and pushes them to corresponding (according to basename) git repositories.
Also has --oneshot mode to do a one-time sync between specified repos.
positional arguments:
fossil_root Path to fossil repos.
git_root Path to git repos.
optional arguments:
-h, --help show this help message and exit
-1, --oneshot Treat fossil_root and git_root as repository paths and
try to sync them at once.
-s, --initial-sync Do an initial sync for every *.fossil repository found
in fossil_root at start.
-c, --create Dynamically create missing git repositories (bare)
inside git-root.
-b BRANCH, --branch BRANCH
Branch to sync (must exist on both sides, default:
trunk).
--dry-run Dump git updates (fast-import format) to stdout,
instead of feeding them to git. Cancels --create.
-x EXCLUDE, --exclude EXCLUDE
Repository names to exclude from syncing (w/o .fossil
or .git suffix, can be specified multiple times).
-t STAT_INTERVAL, --stat-interval STAT_INTERVAL
Interval between polling source repositories for
changes, if there's no inotify/kevent support
(default: 300s).
--debug Verbose operation mode.
xdiskusage(1) is a simple and useful
tool to visualize disk space usage (a must-have thing in any admin's
toolkit!).
Probably the best thing about it is that it's built on top of "du" command, so
if there's a problem with free space on a remote X-less server, just "ssh
user@host 'du -k' | xdiskusage" and in a few moments you'll get the idea
where the space has gone to.
Lately though I've had problems building fltk, and noticed that xdiskusage is
the only app that uses it on my system, so I just got rid of both, in hopes
that I'll be able to find some lite gtk replacement (don't have qt either).
Maybe I do suck at googling (or just giving up too early), but
filelight (kde util),
baobab (gnome util) and
philesight (ruby) are pretty much the only
alternatives I've found. First one drags in half of the kde, second one - half
of gnome, and I don't really need ruby in my system either.
And for what? xdiskusage seem to be totally sufficient and much easier to
interpret (apparently it's a lot easier to compare lengths than angles for me)
than stupid round graphs that filelight and it's ruby clone produce, plus it
looks like a no-brainer to write.
There are some CLI alternatives as well, but this task is definitely outside
of CLI domain.
So I wrote this tool. Real source is
actually coffeescript, here, JS is compiled from it.
Initially I wanted to do this in python, but then took a break to read some
reddit and blogs, which just happened to push me in the direction of a
web. Good thing they did, too, as it turned out to be simple and
straightforward to work with graphics there these days.
I didn't use (much-hyped) html5 canvas though, since svg seem to be much more
fitting in html world, plus it's much easier to make it interactive (titles,
events, changes, etc).
Aside from the intended stuff, tool also shows performance shortcomings in
firefox and opera browsers - they both are horribly slow on pasting large text
into textarea (or iframe with "design mode") and just slow on rendering
svg. Google chrome is fairly good at both tasks.
Not that I'll migrate all my firefox addons/settings and habits to chrome
anytime soon, but it's certainly something to think about.
Also, JS calculations can probably be made hundred-times faster by caching
size of the traversed subtrees (right now they're recalculated gozillion times
over, and that's basically all the work).
I was just too lazy to do it initially and textarea pasting is still a lot
slower than JS, so it doesn't seem to be a big deal, but guess I'll do that
eventually anyway.
Working with a number of non-synced servers remotely (via fabric) lately, I've found the need to push updates to a set of
(fairly similar) files.
It's a bit different story for each server, of course, like crontabs for a web
backend with a lot of periodic maintenance, data-shuffle and cache-related
tasks, firewall configurations, common html templates... well, you get the
idea.
I'm not the only one who makes the changes there, and without any
change/version control for these sets of files, state for each file/server
combo is essentially unique and accidental change can only be reverted from a
weekly backup.
Not really a sensible infrastructure as far as I can tell (or just got used
to), but since I'm a total noob here, working for only a couple of weeks,
global changes are out of question, plus I've got my hands full with the other
tasks as it is.
So, I needed to change files, keeping the old state for each one in case
rollback is necessary, and actually check remote state before updating files,
since someone might've introduced either the same or conflicting change while
I was preparing mine.
Problem of conflicting changes can be solved by keeping some reference (local)
state and just applying patches on top of it. If file in question is important
enough, having such state is double-handy, since you can pull the remote state
in case of changes there, look through the diff (if any) and then decide
whether the patch is still valid or not.
Problem of rollbacks is solved long ago by various versioning tools.
Combined, two issues kinda beg for some sort of storage with a history of
changes for each value there, and since it's basically a text, diffs and
patches between any points of this history would also be nice to have.
It's the domain of the SCM's, but my use-case is a bit more complicated then
the usual usage of these by the fact that I need to create new revisions
non-interactively - ideally via something like a key-value api (set, get,
get_older_version) with the usual interactive interface to the history at
hand in case of any conflicts or complications.
Being most comfortable with
git, I looked for
non-interactive db solutions on top of it, and the simplest one I've found
was
gitshelve.
GitDB seem to be more powerful, but
unnecessary complex for my use-case.
Then I just implemented patch (update key by a diff stream) and diff methods
(generate diff stream from key and file) on top of gitshelve plus writeback
operation, and thus got a fairly complete implementation of what I needed.
Looking at such storage from a DBA perspective, it's looking pretty good -
integrity and atomicity are assured by git locking, all sorts of replication and
merging possible in a quite efficient and robust manner via git-merge and
friends, cli interface and transparency of operation is just superb. Regular
storage performance is probably far off db level though, but it's not an issue
in my use-case.
Here's gitshelve
and state.py, as used in my fabric
stuff. fabric imports can be just dropped there without much problem (I use
fabric api to vary keys depending on host).
Pity I'm far more used to git than pure-py solutions like
mercurial or
bazaar,
since it'd have probably been much cleaner and simpler to implement such
storage on top of them - they probably expose python interface directly.
Guess I'll put rewriting the thing on top of hg on my long todo list.
Had IPv6 tunnel from
HE for a few years now, but
since I've changed ISP about a year ago, I've been unable to use it because
ISP dropped sit tunnel packets for some weird reason.
A quick check yesterday revealed that this limitation seem to have been
lifted, so I've re-enabled the tunnel at once.
All the IPv6-enabled stuff started using AAAA-provided IPs at once, and that
resulted in some problems.
Particulary annoying thing is that
ZNC IRC bouncer
managed to loose connection to
freenode about five
times in two days, interrupting conversations and missing some channel
history.
Of course, problem can be easily solved by making znc connect to IPv4
addresses, as it was doing before, but since there's no option like "connect
to IPv4" and "irc.freenode.net" doesn't seem to have some alias like
"ipv4.irc.freenode.net", that'd mean either specifying single IP in znc.conf
(instead on DNS-provided list of servers) or filtering AAAA results, while
leaving A records intact.
Latter solution seem to be better in many ways, so I decided to look for
something that can override AAAA RR's for a single domain (irc.freenode.net in
my case) or a configurable list of them.
I use dead-simple dnscache resolver from
djbdns bundle, which doesn't seem to be capable of such
filtering by itself.
ISC BIND seem to have "filter-aaaa"
global option to provide A-only results to a list of clients/networks, but
that's also not what I need, since it will make IPv6-only mirrors (upon which
I seem to stumble more and more lately) inaccessible.
Rest of the recursive DNS resolvers doesn't seem to have even that capability,
so some hack was needed here.
Useful feature that most resolvers have though is the ability to query
specific DNS servers for a specific domains. Even dnscache is capable of doing
that, so putting BIND with AAAA resolution disabled behind dnscache and
forwarding freenode.net domain to it should do the trick.
But installing and running BIND just to resolve one (or maybe a few more, in
the future) domain looks like an overkill to me, so I thought of
twisted and it's names component, implementing DNS
protocols.
And all it took with twisted to implement such no-AAAA DNS proxy, as it turns
out, was these five lines of code:
class IPv4OnlyResolver(client.Resolver):
def lookupIPV6Address(self, name, timeout = None):
return self._lookup('nx.fraggod.net', dns.IN, dns.AAAA, timeout)
protocol = dns.DNSDatagramProtocol(
server.DNSServerFactory(clients=[IPv4OnlyResolver()]) )
Meh, should've skipped the search for existing implementation altogether.
That script plus "echo IP > /etc/djbdns/cache/servers/freenode.net" solved the
problem, although dnscache doesn't seem to be capable of forwarding queries to
non-standard port, so proxy has to be bound to specific localhost interface, not
just some wildcard:port socket.
Code, with trivial CLI, logging, dnscache forwarders-file support and redirected
AAAA-answer caching, is here.
I've heard about how easy it is to control stuff with a parallel port, but
recently I've been asked to write a simple script to send repeated signals to
some hardware via lpt and I really needed some way to test whether signals are
coming through or not.
Googling around a bit, I've found that it's trivial to plug leds right into
the port and did just that to test the script.
Since it's trivial to control these leds and they provide quite a simple way for
a visual notification for an otherwise headless servers, I've put together
another script to monitor system resources usage and indicate extra-high load
with various blinking rates.
Probably the coolest thing is that parallel port on mini-ITX motherboards comes
in a standard "male" pin group like usb or audio with "ground" pins exactly
opposite of "data" pins, so it's easy to take a few leds (power, ide, and they
usually come in different colors!) from an old computer case and plug these
directly into the board.
Making leds blink actually involves an active switching of data bits on the
port in an infinite loop, so I've forked one subprocess to do that while
another one checks/processes the data and feeds led blinking intervals'
updates to the first one via pipe.
System load data is easy to acquire from "/proc/loadavg" for cpu and as
"%util" percentage from "sar -d" reports.
And the easiest way to glue several subprocesses and a timer together into an
eventloop is
twisted, so the script is
basically 150 lines sar output processing, checks and blinking rate settings.
Obligatory link to the source. Deps
are python-2.7, twisted
and pyparallel.
Guess mail notifications could've been just as useful, but quickly-blinking leds
are more spectacular and kinda way to utilize legacy hardware capabilities that
these motherboards still have.
Systemd does a good job at monitoring and restarting services. It also keeps
track of "failed" services, which you can easily see in systemctl output.
Problem for me is that services that should be running at the machine don't
always "fail".
I can stop them and forget to start again, .service file can be broken (like,
reload may actually terminate the service), they can be accidentally or
deliberately killed or just exit with 0 code due to some internal event, just
because they think that's okay to stop now.
Most often such "accidents" seem to happen on boot - some services just
perform sanity checks, see that some required path or socket is missing and
exit, sometimes with code 0.
As a good sysadmin, you take a peek at systemctl, see no failures there and
think "ok, successful reboot, everything is started", and well, it's not, and
systemd doesn't reveal that fact.
What's needed here is kinda "dashboard" of what is enabled and thus should be
running with clear indication if something is not. Best implementation of such
thing I've seen in openrc init system, which comes with baselayout-2 on Gentoo
Linux ("unstable" or "~" branch atm, but guess it'll be stabilized one day):
root@damnation:~# rc-status -a
Runlevel: shutdown
killprocs [ stopped ]
savecache [ stopped ]
mount-ro [ stopped ]
Runlevel: single
Runlevel: nonetwork
local [ started ]
Runlevel: cryptinit
rsyslog [ started ]
ip6tables [ started ]
...
twistd [ started ]
local [ started ]
Runlevel: sysinit
dmesg [ started ]
udev [ started ]
devfs [ started ]
Runlevel: boot
hwclock [ started ]
lvm [ started ]
...
wdd [ started ]
keymaps [ started ]
Runlevel: default
rsyslog [ started ]
ip6tables [ started ]
...
twistd [ started ]
local [ started ]
Dynamic Runlevel: hotplugged
Dynamic Runlevel: needed
sysfs [ started ]
rpc.pipefs [ started ]
...
rpcbind [ started ]
rpc.idmapd [ started ]
Dynamic Runlevel: manual
Just "grep -v started" and you see everything that's "stopped", "crashed",
etc.
Implementation uses extensive dbus interface provided by systemd to get a set
of all the .service units loaded by systemd, then gets "enabled" stuff from
symlinks on a filesystem. Latter are easily located in places
/{etc,lib}/systemd/system/*/*.service and systemd doesn't seem to keep track
of these, using them only at boot-time.
Having some experience using rc-status tool from openrc I also fixed the main
annoyance it has - there's no point to show "started" services, ever! I always
cared about "not enabled" or "not started" only, and shitload of "started"
crap it dumps is just annoying, and has to always be grepped-out.
So, meet the systemd-dashboard tool:
root@damnation:~# systemd-dashboard -h
usage: systemd-dashboard [-h] [-s] [-u] [-n]
Tool to compare the set of enabled systemd services against currently running
ones. If started without parameters, it'll just show all the enabled services
that should be running (Type != oneshot) yet for some reason they aren't.
optional arguments:
-h, --help show this help message and exit
-s, --status Show status report on found services.
-u, --unknown Show enabled but unknown (not loaded) services.
-n, --not-enabled Show list of services that are running but are not
enabled directly.
Simple invocation will show what's not running while it should be:
root@damnation:~# systemd-dashboard
smartd.service
systemd-readahead-replay.service
apache.service
Adding "-s" flag will show what happened there in more detail (by the grace of
"systemctl status" command):
root@damnation:~# systemd-dashboard -s
smartd.service - smartd
Loaded: loaded (/lib64/systemd/system/smartd.service)
Active: failed since Sun, 27 Feb 2011 11:44:05 +0500; 2s ago
Process: 16322 ExecStart=/usr/sbin/smartd --no-fork --capabilities (code=killed, signal=KILL)
CGroup: name=systemd:/system/smartd.service
systemd-readahead-replay.service - Replay Read-Ahead Data
Loaded: loaded (/lib64/systemd/system/systemd-readahead-replay.service)
Active: inactive (dead)
CGroup: name=systemd:/system/systemd-readahead-replay.service
apache.service - apache2
Loaded: loaded (/lib64/systemd/system/apache.service)
Active: inactive (dead) since Sun, 27 Feb 2011 11:42:34 +0500; 51s ago
Process: 16281 ExecStop=/usr/bin/apachectl -k stop (code=exited, status=0/SUCCESS)
Main PID: 5664 (code=exited, status=0/SUCCESS)
CGroup: name=systemd:/system/apache.service
Would you've noticed that readahead fails on a remote machine because the kernel
is missing fanotify and the service apparently thinks "it's okay not to start"
in this case? What about smartd you've killed a while ago and forgot to restart?
And you can check if you forgot to enable something with "-n" flag, which will
show all the running stuff that was not explicitly enabled.
Code is under a hundred lines of python with the only dep of dbus-python
package. You can grab the
initial (probably not updated much, although it's probably finished as it is)
version from here or a
maintained version from fgtk repo (yes,
there's an anonymous login form to pass).
If someone will also find the thing useful, I'd appreciate if you'll raise
awareness to the issue within systemd project - I'd rather like to see such
functionality in the main package, not hacked-up on ad-hoc basis around it.
Update (+20d): issue was noticed and will probably be addressed in
systemd. Yay!
Update 2019-10-02: This still works, but only for old cgroup-v1 interface,
and is deprecated as such, plus largely unnecessary with modern systemd -
see cgroup-v2 resource limits for apps with systemd scopes and slices post for more info.
Linux control groups (cgroups) rock.
If you've never used them at all, you bloody well should.
"git gc --aggressive" of a linux kernel tree killing you disk and cpu?
Background compilation makes desktop apps sluggish? Apps step on each others'
toes? Disk activity totally kills performance?
I've lived with all of the above on the desktop in the (not so distant) past and
cgroups just make all this shit go away - even forkbombs and super-multithreaded
i/o can just be isolated in their own cgroup (from which there's no way to
escape, not with any amount of forks) and scheduled/throttled (cpu
hard-throttling - w/o cpusets - seem to be coming soon as well) as necessary.
Some problems with process classification and management of these limits seem to
exist though.
Systemd
does a great job of classification of everything outside of user session
(i.e. all the daemons) - any rc/cgroup can be specified right in the unit
files or set by default via system.conf.
And it also makes all this stuff neat and tidy because cgroup support there is
not even optional - it's basic mechanism on which systemd is built, used to
isolate all the processes belonging to one daemon or the other in place of
hopefully-gone-for-good crappy and unreliable pidfiles. No renegade processes,
leftovers, pids mixups... etc, ever.
Bad news however is that all the cool stuff it can do ends right there.
Classification is nice, but there's little point in it from resource-limiting
perspective without setting the actual limits, and systemd doesn't do that
(
recent thread on systemd-devel).
Besides, no classification for user-started processes means that desktop users
are totally on their own, since all resource consumption there branches off
the user's fingertips. And desktop is where responsiveness actually matters
for me (as in "me the regular user"), so clearly something is needed to create
cgroups, set limits there and classify processes to be put into these cgroups.
libcgroup project looks like the remedy at
first, but since I started using it about a year ago, it's been nothing but
the source of pain.
First task that stands before it is to actually create cgroups' tree, mount
all the resource controller pseudo-filesystems and set the appropriate limits
there.
libcgroup project has cgconfigparser for that, which is probably the most
brain-dead tool one can come up with. Configuration is stone-age pain in the
ass, making you clench your teeth, fuck all the DRY principles and write
N*100 line crap for even the simplest tasks with as much punctuation as
possible to cram in w/o making eyes water.
Then, that cool toy parses the config, giving no indication where you messed
it up but the dreaded message like "failed to parse file". Maybe it's not
harder to get right by hand than XML, but at least XML-processing tools give
some useful feedback.
Syntax aside, tool still sucks hard when it comes to apply all the stuff
there - it either does every mount/mkdir/write w/o error or just gives you the
same "something failed, go figure" indication. Something being already mounted
counts as failure as well, so it doesn't play along with anything, including
systemd.
Worse yet, when it inevitably fails, it starts a "rollback" sequence,
unmounting and removing all the shit it was supposed to mount/create.
After killing all the configuration you could've had, it will fail
anyway. strace will show you why, of course, but if that's the feedback
mechanism the developers had in mind...
Surely, classification tools there can't be any worse than that? Wrong, they
certainly are.
Maybe C-API is where the project shines, but I have no reason to believe that,
and luckily I don't seem to have any need to find out.
Luckily, cgroups can be controlled via regular filesystem calls, and thoroughly
documented (in Documentation/cgroups).
Anyways, my humble needs (for the purposes of this post) are:
- isolate compilation processes, usually performed by "cave" client of
paludis package mangler (exherbo) and occasionally shell-invoked make
in a kernel tree, from all the other processes;
- insulate specific "desktop" processes like firefox and occasional
java-based crap from the rest of the system as well;
- create all these hierarchies in a freezer and have a convenient
stop-switch for these groups.
So, how would I initially approach it with libcgroup? Ok, here's the
cgconfig.conf:
### Mounts
mount {
cpu = /sys/fs/cgroup/cpu;
blkio = /sys/fs/cgroup/blkio;
freezer = /sys/fs/cgroup/freezer;
}
### Hierarchical RCs
group tagged/cave {
perm {
task {
uid = root;
gid = paludisbuild;
}
admin {
uid = root;
gid = root;
}
}
cpu {
cpu.shares = 100;
}
freezer {
}
}
group tagged/desktop/roam {
perm {
task {
uid = root;
gid = users;
}
admin {
uid = root;
gid = root;
}
}
cpu {
cpu.shares = 300;
}
freezer {
}
}
group tagged/desktop/java {
perm {
task {
uid = root;
gid = users;
}
admin {
uid = root;
gid = root;
}
}
cpu {
cpu.shares = 100;
}
freezer {
}
}
### Non-hierarchical RCs (blkio)
group tagged.cave {
perm {
task {
uid = root;
gid = users;
}
admin {
uid = root;
gid = root;
}
}
blkio {
blkio.weight = 100;
}
}
group tagged.desktop.roam {
perm {
task {
uid = root;
gid = users;
}
admin {
uid = root;
gid = root;
}
}
blkio {
blkio.weight = 300;
}
}
group tagged.desktop.java {
perm {
task {
uid = root;
gid = users;
}
admin {
uid = root;
gid = root;
}
}
blkio {
blkio.weight = 100;
}
}
Yep, it's huge, ugly and stupid.
Oh, and you have to do some chmods afterwards (more wrapping!) to make the
"group ..." lines actually matter.
So, what do I want it to look like? This:
path: /sys/fs/cgroup
defaults:
_tasks: root:wheel:664
_admin: root:wheel:644
freezer:
groups:
base:
_default: true
cpu.shares: 1000
blkio.weight: 1000
tagged:
cave:
_tasks: root:paludisbuild
_admin: root:paludisbuild
cpu.shares: 100
blkio.weight: 100
desktop:
roam:
_tasks: root:users
cpu.shares: 300
blkio.weight: 300
java:
_tasks: root:users
cpu.shares: 100
blkio.weight: 100
It's parseable and readable YAML, not
some parenthesis-semicolon nightmare of a C junkie (you may think that because
of these spaces don't matter there btw... well, think again!).
Didn't had to touch the parser again or debug it either (especially with - god
forbid - strace), everything just worked as expected, so I thought I'd dump it
here jic.
Configuration file above (YAML) consists
of three basic definition blocks:
"path" to where cgroups should be initialized.
Names for the created and mounted rc's are taken right from "groups" and
"defaults" sections.
Yes, that doesn't allow mounting "blkio" resource controller to "cpu"
directory, guess I'll go back to using libcgroup when I'd want to do
that... right after seeing the psychiatrist to have my head examined... if
they'd let me go back to society afterwards, that is.
"groups" with actual tree of group parameter definitions.
Two special nodes here - "_tasks" and "_admin" - may contain (otherwise the
stuff from "defaults" is used) ownership/modes for all cgroup knob-files
("_admin") and "tasks" file ("_tasks"), these can be specified as
"user[:group[:mode]]" (with brackets indicating optional definition, of
course) with non-specified optional parts taken from the "defaults" section.
Limits (or any other settings for any kernel-provided knobs there, for that
matter) can either be defined on per-rc-dict basis, like this:
roam:
_tasks: root:users
cpu:
shares: 300
blkio:
weight: 300
throttle.write_bps_device: 253:9 1000000
Or just with one line per rc knob, like this:
roam:
_tasks: root:users
cpu.shares: 300
blkio.weight: 300
blkio.throttle.write_bps_device: 253:9 1000000
Empty dicts (like "freezer" in "defaults") will just create cgroup in a named
rc, but won't touch any knobs there.
And the "_default" parameter indicates that every pid/tid, listed in a root
"tasks" file of resource controllers, specified in this cgroup, should belong
to it. That is, act like default cgroup for any tasks, not classified into any
other cgroup.
"defaults" section mirrors the structure of any leaf cgroup. RCs/parameters
here will be used for created cgroups, unless overidden in "groups" section.
Script to process this stuff (cgconf) can be run with
--debug to dump a shitload of info about every step it takes (and why it does
that), plus with --dry-run flag to just dump all the actions w/o actually
doing anything.
cgconf can be launched as many times as needed to get the job done - it won't
unmount anything (what for? out of fear of data loss on a pseudo-fs?), will
just create/mount missing stuff, adjust defined permissions and set defined
limits without touching anything else, thus it will work alongside with
everything that can also be using these hierarchies - systemd, libcgroup,
ulatencyd, whatever... just set what you need to adjust in .yaml and it wll be
there after run, no side effects.
cgconf.yaml
(.yaml, generally speaking) file can be put alongside cgconf or passed via the
-c parameter.
Anyway, -h or --help is there, in case of any further questions.
That handles the limits and initial (default cgroup for all tasks)
classification part, but then chosen tasks also need to be assigned to a
dedicated cgroups.
libcgroup has pam_cgroup module and cgred daemon, neither of which can
sensibly (re)classify anything within a user session, plus cgexec and
cgclassify wrappers to basically do "echo $$ >/.../some_cg/tasks && exec $1"
or just "echo" respectively.
These are dumb simple, nothing done there to make them any easier than echo,
so even using libcgroup I had to wrap these.
Since I knew exactly which (few) apps should be confined to which groups, I just
wrote a simple wrapper scripts for each, putting these in a separate dir, in the
head of PATH. Example:
#!/usr/local/bin/cgrc -s desktop/roam/usr/bin/firefox
cgrc script here is a
dead-simple wrapper to parse cgroup parameter, putting itself into
corresponding cgroup within every rc where it exists, making special
conversion in case not-yet-hierarchical (there's a patchset for that though:
http://lkml.org/lkml/2010/8/30/30) blkio, exec'ing the specified binary with
all the passed arguments afterwards.
All the parameters after cgroup (or "-g ", for the sake of clarity) go to the
specified binary. "-s" option indicates that script is used in shebang, so
it'll read command from the file specified in argv after that and pass all the
further arguments to it.
Otherwise cgrc script can be used as "cgrc -g /usr/bin/firefox " or
"cgrc. /usr/bin/firefox ", so it's actually painless and effortless to use
this right from the interactive shell. Amen for the crappy libcgroup tools.
Another special use-case for cgroups I've found useful on many occasions is a
"freezer" thing - no matter how many processes compilation (or whatever other
cgroup-confined stuff) forks, they can be instantly and painlessly stopped and
resumed afterwards.
cgfreeze dozen-liner script addresses this
need in my case - "cgfreeze cave" will stop "cave" cgroup, "cgfreeze -u cave"
resume, and "cgfreeze -c cave" will just show it's current status, see -h
there for details. No pgrep, kill -STOP or ^Z involved.
Guess I'll direct the next poor soul struggling with libcgroup here, instead of
wasting time explaining how to work around that crap and facing the inevitable
question "what else is there?" *sigh*.
All the mentioned scripts can be found here.
I rarely watch footage from various conferences online, usually because I have
some work to do and video takes much more dedicated time than the same thing
just written on a webpage, making it basically a waste of time, but sometimes
it's just fun.
Watching familiar "desktop linux complexity" holywar right on the stage of
"Desktop on the Linux..." presentation of 27c3 (
here's the dump, available atm, better one
should probably appear in the
Recordings section) certainly
was, and since there are few other interesting topics on schedule (like DJB's
talk about high-speed network security) and I have some extra time, I decided
not to miss the fun.
Problem is, "watching stuff online" is even worse than just "watching stuff" -
either you pay attention or you just miss it, so I set up recording as a sort of
"fs-based cache", at the very least to watch the recorded streams right as they
get written, being able to pause or rewind, should I need to do so.
Natural tool to do the job is mplayer, with it's "-streamdump" flag.
It works well up until some network (remote or local) error or just mplayer
glitch, which seem to happen quite often.
That's when mplayer crashes with funny "Core dumped ;)" line and if you're
watching the recorded stream atm, you'll certainly miss it at the time,
noticing the fuckup when whatever you're watching ends aburptly and the
real-time talk is already finished.
Somehow, I managed to forget about the issue and got bit by it soon enough.
So, mplayer needs to be wrapped in a while loop, but then you also need
to give dump files unique names to keep mplayer from overwriting them,
and actually do several such loops for several streams you're recording
(different halls, different talks, same time), and then probably because
of strain on the streaming servers mplayer tend to reconnect several
times in a row, producing lots of small dumps, which aren't really good
for anything, and you'd also like to get some feedback on what's
happening, and... so on.
Well, I just needed a better tool, and it looks like there aren't much simple
non-gui dumpers for video+audio streams and not many libs to connect to http
video streams from python, existing one being vlc bindings, which isn't probably
any better than mplayer, provided all I need is just to dump a stream to a file,
without any reconnection or rotation or multi-stream handling mechanism.
To cut the story short I ended up writing a bit more complicated eventloop
script to control several mplayer instances, aggregating (and marking each
accordingly) their output, restarting failed ones, discarding failed dumps and
making up sensible names for the produced files.
It was a quick ad-hoc hack, so I thought to implement it straight through
signal handling and poll loop for the output, but thinking about all the async
calls and state-tracking it'd involve I quickly reconsidered and just used
twisted to shove all this mess under the rug, ending up with quick and simple
100-liner.
And now, back to the ongoing talks of day 3.
Some time ago I decided to check out
pulseaudio project, and after a few docs it was controlling all the
sound flow in my system, since then I've never really looked back to pure
alsa.
At first I just needed the sound-over-network feature, which I've extensively
used a few years ago with esd, and pulse offered full transparency here, not
just limited support. Hell, it even has simple-client netcat'able stream
support, so there's no need to look for a client on alien OS'es.
Controllable and centralized resampling was the next nice feat, because some
apps (notably, audacious and aqualung) seemed to waste quite a lot of
resources on it in the past, either because of unreasonably-high quality or
just suboptimal alghorithms, I've never really cared to check. Alsa should be
capable to do that as well, but for some reason it failed me in this regard
before.
One major annoyance though was the abscence of a simple tool to control volume
levels.
pactl seem to be only good for muting the output, while the rest of pa-stuff
on the net seem to be based on either gtk or qt, while I needed something to
bind to a hotkeys and quickly run inside a readily-available terminal.
Maybe it's just an old habit of using alsamixer for this, but replacing it
with heavy gnome/kde tools for such a simple task seem unreasonable, so I
thought: since it's modern daemon with a lot of well-defined interfaces, why
not write my own?
I considered writing a simple hack around pacmd/pacli, but they aren't much
machine-oriented and regex-parsing is not fun, so I found that newer (git or
v1.0-dev) pulse versions have a
nice dbus interface to everything.
Only problem there is that it doesn't really work, crashing pulse on any
attempt to get some list from properties. Had to track down
the issue, good thing it's fairly trivial to fix
(just a simple revert), and then just hacked-up simple non-interactive tool to
adjust sink volume by some percentage, specified on command line.
It was good enough for hotkeys, but I still wanted some nice
alsamixer-like bars and thought it might be a good place to implement
control per-stream sound levels as well, which is really another nice
feature, but only as long as there's a way to actually adjust these
levels, which there wasn't.
A few hours of python and learning curses and there we go:
ALSA plug-in [aplay] (fraggod@sacrilege:1424) [ #############---------- ]
MPlayer (fraggod@sacrilege:1298) [ ####################### ]
Simple client (TCP/IP client from 192.168.0.5:49162) [ #########-------------- ]
Result was quite responsive and solid, which I kinda didn't expect from any sort
of interactive interface.
Guess I may be not the only person in the world looking for a cli mixer, so
I'd probably put the project up somewhere, meanwhile the script is available
here.
The only deps are python-2.7 with curses support and dbus-python, which should
come out of the box on any decent desktop system these days, anyway. List of
command-line parameters to control sink level is available via traditional
"-h" or "--help" option, although interactive stream levels tuning doesn't
need any of them.