January2008

January 2008 Team Reports

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Community Council

IRC Team

  • After confusion around the creation of #kubuntu-kde4, a new document was discussed as a good reference when creating new channels to help avoid some of the problems experienced.

  • jussi01 and pleia2 were approved to the ubuntu-irc team.

Kubuntu

  • KDE 4.0 was released! Install it now http://kubuntu.org/announcements/kde-4.0.php

  • Jonathan attended the 4.0 release event at the Googleplex, read reports on the http://dot.kde.org/ (if you're brave, try searching YouTube for "KDE Karaoke")

  • A #kubuntu-kde4 channel was created to address KDE4 specific questions
  • A patch was added to the KDE4 menu to add Kubuntu branding artwork (similar to the Suse menu art)
  • Two new approved members: Stephen Stalcup (vorian) and Yuriy Kozlov (yuriy)

Mobile Team

Status report for week 51

Moblin Kernel and Driver Status

  • 2.6.24 Kernel Support Alek continues to port the patches from 2.6.22 to 2.6.24. He is using/referencing the work previously done by Amit.
    • PSB / SLT HW Support
    Jacob still owes me a patch to work around the MWAIT/local APIC timer issue. We decided to go with the plan to mark the MWAIT instruction broken in the kernel taking out the CPU_FEATURE_MWAIT after cpuid is read for the effected processor. SDIO

    Feng has released a kernel patch on moblin.org containing Marvell's GPL release of the 8688 WLAN + BT drivers. In the process we've removed the older & outdated MSS SDIO kernel patch from moblin.org. Pierre Ossman's SDIO stack is the only choice for SDIO support on moblin. Dabney Thermal patches No changes this week. USB Client Drivers Alek continues to add support for the USB Client solution that was described previously. I don't have an update on his status this week.

    PSB Gfx & Video Drivers Inuka has been investigating a bug with the PSB Gfx Beta3 RC driver where powertop is reporting that X is generating 120+ interrupts/second when the system is idle. This prevents the CPU from going into a

    lower power C state and blows battery life. The issue is believed to be in the implementation/design on the interface between closed & open pieces of the driver. After the holidays we'll be talking directly with the 3rd party developer to get this corrected. Power and Performance Testing/Optimization Jay has numbers that compares performance between the mobile browser compiled with gcc and browser compiled with Intel C/C++ compiler. As expected there are some significant improvement, for example browser startup appears to be about 25% faster with the version compiled with the Intel compiler. Before we get too excited, we need spend some time scrubbing the data and make sure the numbers we've collected are accurate.

Status report for week 02

Moblin Kernel and Driver Status

  • 2.6.24 & 2.6.22 Kernel Support Alek set up a 2.6.24-rc5 kernel tree with Moblin patches on Moblin.org. In order to support both of 2.6.22 and 2.6.24 kernels we made relevant changes to have more consistent kernel package numbering:

    1. Original kernel-mid package was renamed to kernel-mid-2.6.22 and the binary packages it produced got renamed to linux-menlow-default-2.6.22 and linux-menlow-developer-2.6.22
    2. A new kernel-mid-2.6.24 package (now based on rc5) was added to Moblin already, and the binary package names were changed to linux-menlow-default-2.6.24 and linux-menlow-developer-2.6.24.
    3. psb-kmd package was updated to build Gfx modules for both of these two kernels. The binary packages are psb-kmd-default-2.6.22, psb-kmd-developer-2.6.22 psb-kmd-default-2.6.24 and
      • psb-kmd-developer-2.6.24.
    4. The fset files for Moblin Image Creator got updated too.
    PSB / SLT HW Support The broken MWAIT/local APIC timer issue is assumed to be fixed in a new BIOS release through microcode patch to SLT. Once the fix is in a released BIOS and before we can enable-HT, we still need to take out the kernel boot option nolapic_timer in Moblin image-creator and then verify there is no boot hang and the extra interrupts issue goes away. This is the work our team needs to do. SDIO Feng is submitting a SDIO multi-function fix patch to Pierre Ossman's SDIO stack. The patch is still under review. Dabney Thermal patches No changes this week. USB Client Drivers No changes this week. The USBC solution as described before has been done and checked in Moblin.org already.

    PSB Gfx & Video Drivers Inuka is checking if the interrupts PSB Gfx Beta3 RC driver generating issue (120+ interrupts/second) is gone with the latest driver release. Inuka is also investigating a screen resolution issue which only happens on 2.6.24 kernel. With 2.6.24-rc5 and psb-kmd 2.6.24 module, the default X screen resolution is set to 1280x1024 instead of 1024x768. Power and Performance Testing/Optimization No changes this week. Grub fast boot/resume Martin enabled boot splash and resuming progress bar feature to grub package. Martin fixed the grub fast resume bug for 2.6.24 kernel and would check into the Moblin.org soon. Martin also discussed with EFI team to find how to take advantage of fast EFI bios booting. The fast EFI bios would only cost 2~3 second to hand over control right to boot loader after power up. In this case, Martin need port the fast boot patch from grub to elilo or grub2 which support EFI boot.

Midbrowser status

  • Right before the Holiday break, Asac helped Jimmy resolved some of the FF3.0 and Midbrowser integration issues. Asac also created a debian package for Pat McGowan so that Pat can demo it at CES. A gold star for Asac. We are planning to move Midbdrowser development to FF3.0. FF3.0 beta2 based MIdbrowser will be used for Moblin Beta3 release. QA from PRC has experienced browser performance issues on Crownbeach. Someone has been assigned to look into these performance bugs. Continued to work on bug fixes.

Status report for week 03

Moblin Kernel and Driver Status

  • Kernel Support

    We are talking with Ubuntu kernel team about how to better sync up kernel patches between us. The initial plan is: we will have a dedicated engineer -- Chetty, Jay<jay.chetty@intel.com> in our team to take all of our Moblin patches and port, support and push them into Ubuntu's new branch of the Ubuntu kernel. Other Moblin kernel members will continue to commit changes to Moblin kernel with notification to Jay. And Jay may need assistance from the whole team when porting the changes to Ubuntu's kernel branch. Hope to finalize the plan during Intel/Ubuntu sprint.

    File-system corruption on hard shutdown (https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/176178) issue got fixed after fixing the /dev/sda1 ext2 partition mounted as read-write bug. Thanks Michael Frey for his patch. PSB / SLT HW Support The broken MWAIT/local APIC timer issue got fixed after applied BIOS 66 to Crown-beach boards. Thus the kernel cmdline option nolapic_timer is not necessary any more. And when removed nolapic_timer options, the HT got enabled without 200+ interrupts per second issue.

    Jacob investigated many "APIC error on xx(xx)" kernel messages during booting issue (see Unclear APIC error msg reported when enable HT in CRB BIOS https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/180252) and found:

    1. BIOS does not set DTS (Digital thermal sensor) thresholds correctly.
    2. BIOS configures LAPIC thermal interrupts to be delivered via SMI.
    SDIO Feng committed a Marvell 8688 combo-card workaround (a force 100ms delay after power-on) to Moblin kernel. Dabney Thermal patches No changes this week. USB Client Drivers No changes this week..

    PSB Gfx & Video Drivers Inuka found an issue where PSB Gfx will set default resolution to 1280x1024 when drivers/acpi/video module was not inserted. But still need to rootcause this issue. Inuka has been working with Bryce to try to integrate PSB Gfx Beta3 driver to Hardy. Inuka has fixed the patch applying issue, but the built binary package does not function correctly. Inuka will continue to support on this issue. Power and Performance Testing/Optimization Jay completed a complete ACPI verification for Crown-beach board and fixed the issue where procfs did not get correct temperature. Jay also fired a bug “Closing the virtual lid does not turn the display off”

    (https://bugs.launchpad.net/moblin-kernel/+bug/183013) and need to rootcause it. Jay also successfully built the midbrowser with Intel compiler (ICC) and did a performance comparison between the GCC built midbrowser and found a very good increase in performance (25%+ for browser launching, and 20%+ page loading from QA team) Grub fast boot/resume Martin is working on fixing the issue where fast resume gets hung when HT is enabled.

Midbrowser status

  • Team is busy working on moving from FF 3.0 beta 1 to beta 2 code base.
  • Looking into why bookmark not working in FF3.0 based Midbrowser.
  • Got some good performance numbers from QA on FF3.0 base Midbrowser. The average page rendering is close to 50% faster with the FF3.0 beta1 based code. However the startup time appears to be
    • slower.
  • We have got permission from the owner of the grabanddrag addon to use in Midbrowser to provide finger scrolling.

Moblin Applets

  • BUGS FIXED

    • BUG: "Make default for this ..." checkbox on screen resolution dialog doesn't take effect
    • BUG: "Cannot save resolution change after restart hildon-desktop or system"

      • BUGLINK: https://bugs.launchpad.net/moblin-applets/+bug/179792 FIX: The fix is in 0.25, basically I changed the gconf keys over to moblin specific settings. Then I added a reader into moblin-settings-daemon which picks up the last resolution and rotation settings and applies them during moblin-settings-daemon launch.

    • BUG: "Cannot show battery life status by clicking Battery life icon on status bar"

      • BUGLINK: https://bugs.launchpad.net/moblin-applets/+bug/176829 FIX: I added a pulldown which shows the percent charged, and if the device supports the battery.charge_level.rate ACPI event and corresponding HAL property, the remaining charge time or remaining battery time.

    • BUG: "Usability: can edit keyboard shortcut with symbol such as : ,"

      • BUGLINK: https://bugs.launchpad.net/moblin-applets/+bug/179004 FIX: I don't want to filter on what a user *can* use, since there may be unknown hardware buttons mapped into part of the ascii range of the keycode space, but I think it may be prudent to filter out the whole range of printable ascii characters. i.e. whatever passes g_ascii_isprint can't be bound.

    • BUG: "Usability: Suggest to change Background dialog "Finish" button to "Close" to be consistent with other applets dialog"

MOTU

  • After rocking work in the MOTU team, with a particular preference for GNOME- and gstreamer-related packages, Emilio Pozuelo Monfort was deemed a great addition to the MOTU team. Warm welcome to the team!

  • We have another Italian MOTU to announce. Michele Angrisano put a lot of work into merges and Universe fixes and just joined the team!

  • Stephan Hermann put a lot of work into his MOTU comeback. After lots of Security work and other Universe uploads he is back in the team.

  • NEW Packages: live-mix, mscore, mozilla-devscripts, apt-mark-sync, terminator, qtsmbstatus, libserial, hardware-connected, smplayer-themes, gnomecatalog, ffmpegthumbnailer, gimp-normalmap, gpp4, mmdb, jaaa, photoml, libksquirrel

ServerTeam

Triager

Packager

  • sommer started to work on including a default ssl configuration in apache. he has contacted the apache maintainer in Debian regarding standardizing a default ssl configuration. No answer was received so far.
  • soren is working with upstream ebox devs to get ebox into universe before the feature freeze

  • ScottK talked about the state of the MIR writing process, which state can be tracked on the ServerReviewPackage wiki page. Fabio wrote a lot of them. ScottK took care of amavisd is making good progress on the front. Most of the packages have a MIR written as of now.

Tester

  • soren will devise a plan for tracking upgrades testing. soren hasn't started to track LTS upgrade testing. He'll try to come up with a plan. He thinks tracking on per package basis is a good starting point. mathiaz added that writing a page about setting up a LTS upgrade test environment would help attract testers.

Documenter

  • sommer stated that a section about JeOS has been added to the Server Guide. The content is based on the JeOS tutorial written by nijaba. However there may be some issues with the publisher. sommer will work with nijaba to resolve the issues.
  • nealmcb stated that most of the factoids have been included in ubotu. There is a list of extra factoids in the Roadmap.
  • astabeno and sommer will take a look at ubuntu firewall while updating the firewall section of the server guide.

  • sommer is thinking about adding sections related to eBox and OpenLikewise (Active Directory integration). An AppArmor section has been added, based on the content of the wiki page on help.ubuntu.com. based on mathiaz' suggestion, sommer will add a section on virtualization based on soren's blog post.

  • sommer mentioned that the Server Guide is being reviewed for Hardy and progress is made. Documentation freeze may be moved to allow for more qa time. So if there are any more major sections that need updated/added it should be done before Feb 14th.

Developer

  • zul will an item to the Roadmap about Xen integration in Hardy. He got Xen mostly working on Hardy, based on patches from Suse. It's mostly packaged and sitting in NEW. He has to push out a kernel. mathiaz asked if his work was tracked somewhere. zul said no, but agreed to create a wiki page about it and add it the roadmap.

  • jdstrand has uploaded the first version of UbuntuFirewall to universe. He'd like to have more testing. The project has been renamed to Uncomplicated Firewall.

Technical Board

  • 2007-12-18 meeting
  • 2008-01-15 meeting
    • A proposal was heard regarding the requirement for Xubuntu packages to be in main, and an extended discussion followed regarding the definition of main with respect to support and maintenance commitments made by Canonical and others on behalf of the Ubuntu project
    • The technical board, in consensus with Xubuntu community developers, resolved that:
      1. packages seeded for Xubuntu are not required to be in main
      2. Xubuntu will continue to be built as usual but including packages from universe
      3. in the Ubuntu 8.10 planning cycle (including UDS), we will discuss in depth how the repositories are organized with respect to project commitments and make plans to improve this

    • Log available at http://kryten.incognitus.net/mootbot/meetings/ubuntu-meeting.20080115_2006.html

Ubuntu Studio

  • Got -rt kernel back in repo with great help from the kernel team and Alessio.

  • ubuntustudio-controls is making its way through REVU and should hit the repo soon.

  • Fine-tuning and testing continues. Aplha4 for should be our 1st call for public testing.

US LoCo Teams Project

  • The MichiganTeam hosted a Bug Jam on January 17th to learn about bug triaging for Ubuntu. Way to go MichinganTeam Awesome B-) This is part of a larger initiative by the US Teams Project to encourage people in US LoCo Teams level to improve Ubuntu within as a large group.

  • The US Teams Project held a Meeting on January 9th to discuss JoshuaChase the new GeorgiaUSTeam leader, Mentor Update and CommunityCouncil Preview.

  • The next US Teams Project Meeting will be Wednesday 6th of February @ 8 pm PST, 9 pm MST, 10 pm CST and 11 pm EST @ 8 pm PST, 9 pm MST, 10 pm CST and 11 pm EST with posingaspopular presiding.

  • State & City LoCo Teams

    • 54

  • Approved State LoCo Teams

    • 11

  • State LoCo Teams

    • 45
  • Approved City Teams
    • 2

  • City LoCo Teams

    • 9

Ubuntu Women

  • Long and fruitful discussion on the list early in the month about how technical Ubuntu Women should be as a team. No clear resolution, but it's clear that there are many strong and useful opinions within the group about how to deal with inequality, many of which can be implemented simultaneously.

  • Emma Jane Hogbin has been encouraging women in the group to submit proposals for Ubuntu Live - several agreed and will be submitting!

  • Full Circle Magazine will feature Ubuntu Women article by Cathy Malmrose

  • Began group development of team RoadMap

  • Team meeting 17 Jan 2008

Full Circle Magazine

  • Deadline for submissions has been put back one week, this is to give us a full week (from deadline) in which to proof-read monthly writers' columns. Article deadline is now the first Sunday of each month.
  • Deadline for proof-reading is now set at the second Saturday of each month. After the proofing deadline the layout can begin. Hopefully this new system will give us less corrections to make come PDF preview time.
  • Even using Skype the sound quality of podcast #1 was felt to be unacceptable and is now scheduled for a mid-February release.
  • Article wiki was rearranged to display all (as yet) unused articles on one page and in the order in which they were received. Articles will be moved to a new page as an issue is compiled.
  • Quite a few translation teams have gone inactive, it may be time to advertise for new translation teams in some languages.

Installer

  • Several d-i components were modified to better accommodate loop installations.

  • A first cut of ubiquity-preserve-home was committed and uploaded.

  • Several bugs were fixed in Ubiquity and the Mythbuntu portions of Ubiquity.

  • Work to replace the timezone widget with a cairo-based scrolling map (hardy-ubiquity-usability) and run the UI portions of Ubiquity as a regular user is ongoing.

German Loco Team

  • ubuntu-de association has a new board, president: Matthias Urlichs, vice-president: Richard Verwayen, treasurer: Julius Bloch

  • We get the acknowledgemente that ubuntu will have a booth at Chemnitzer LinuxTag(1-2 march) and at CeBIT(4-9 march)

  • 500 ubuntu coffee mugs and 300 coffee mugs are ordered, we hope that they arrive a the end of February. Price is 6€ without shiping, if you are interested to order a mug send a mail to juliuxatubuntuminusdedotorg

  • IRC
    • #ubuntu-de-quiz is up again. Come and play the linux/foss quiz with the bot;)
    • #ubuntu-de-treffpunkt is closed. Everybody who joins that channel will be forwared to #ubuntu-de-offtopic

Tamil Team

TeamReports/January2008 (last edited 2008-11-04 12:09:56 by ABTS-TN-Static-188)