Meeting Minutes

IRC Log of the meeting.

Agenda

2010-23-03 Meeting Agenda

Outstanding actions from last meeting

• JFo to send out regression bug day announcements on monday
  e-mail went out last week for the schedule to all bug lists that normal bug days go to

• JFo to do a wiki page on regression bug days
  In progress, carried forward to next week.
  Wiki page for the Bug Day is located here: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/KernelTeam/KernelBugDay.

Lucid Release Status: Bugs

	Beta 2 Milestoned Bugs	Release Targeted Bugs
linux	13	32
linux-fsl-imx51	0	0
linux-ec2	1	1
linux-mvl-dove	1	2

Blueprints: kernel-lucid-bug-handling

Only outstanding item for beta 2 still open: [leannogasawara] apport — sub-system directed reporting [amber]:INPROGRESS all other beta 2 tasks are complete

Blueprints: kerne-lucid-kernel-config-review

PATA and SATA pull out is done and some debian installer fallout sorted out (thanks smb), and the review of the builtin sub-systems complete.

Blueprints: kernel-lucid-kms

I’ve just released a test kernel which addresses the flickering problem with some Intel graphics devices. There are five bugs open against this: http://bit.ly/aiKuuL. Otherwise we are continuing to debug issues as they appear.

Blueprints: kernel-lucid-suspend-resume

Nothing new to report.

Blueprints: kernel-lucid-apparmor-development

Looking at Bug #458299, Bug #529288, Bug #544764, Bug #549428, which all seem to be inter-related or even possibly symptoms of the same bug

• Launchpad bug 458299 in linux “apparmor_parser: page allocation failure. order:5″ [High,Confirmed] https://launchpad.net/bugs/458299
• Launchpad bug 549428 in apparmor “Triggers permanent high i/o load after upgrade” [Undecided,New] https://launchpad.net/bugs/549428
• apparmor “unkillable apparmor_parser” [Undecided,New] https://launchpad.net/bugs/544764
• linux “”Kernel Oops” – unable to handle kernel paging request at ffff880323279bf2 RIP is at aa_dfa_match_len+0xd9/0xf0″ [Low,Incomplete] https://launchpad.net/bugs/529288

Blueprints: kernel-lucid-boot-performance

Looks like the remaining ureadahead work will get postponed to Lucid+1 as the userspace bits are not likely to make Lucid. That likely will close off the blueprint.

Other Release Tasks: Lucid Audio Support

Did a bunch of arsenal work, blasted several hundred alsa-driver bugs with automated comments.

Other Release Tasks: Lucid Better Power Mgt

Pushed a new set of packages out and a CFT (call for testing). No news since.

Other Release Tasks: EC2 Lucid Kernel Status

Did lots of testing for Bug #540378, Bug #527208, haven’t been able to trip either so we are looking good for EC2.

• Launchpad bug 540378 in linux-ec2 “BUG: soft lockup – CPU#1 stuck for 66s! [swapper:0]” [Medium,New] https://launchpad.net/bugs/540378
• Launchpad bug 527208 in linux-ec2 “ec2 instance fails boot, no console output on c1.xlarge” [High,Confirmed] https://launchpad.net/bugs/527208

Status: Lucid

Lucid is at stable 2.6.32.10+drm33.1. We are prepping to the Beta-2 freeze on Thursday, and expect to upload kernels for that early Wednesday. Anything we need in should be up for review _today_.

Security & Bugfix Kernels

Hardy	2.6.24-27.68	(security) *
	2.6.24-27.69	(proposed) [ 6]	1/ 3 verifications done (+1)
Intrepid	2.6.27-17.46	(security)
Jaunty	2.6.28-18.60	(security)
Karmic	2.6.31-19.58	(security) *
	&lbsp; 2.6.31-19.59 (proposed) [ 6] 2/19 verifications done (+2) LBM 2.6.31-20.22 (updates) * &lbsp; 2.6.31-20.23 (proposed) [ 6] 0/ 2 verifications done mvl-dove 2.6.31-211.26 (security) * &lbsp; 2.6.31-213.27 (proposed) [ 6] fsl-imx51 2.6.31-108.25 (security) * &lbsp; 2.6.31-110.26 (proposed) [ 6] 0/ 1 verifications done 1/ 1 failed! #507416 ec2 2.6.31-304.13 (security) * &lbsp; 2.6.31-110.26 (proposed) [ 6]

Karmic ec2 and mvl-dove have no open bug reports but were rebased to the version of master in proposed. Asked for quick re-test.
Karmic fsl-imx51 needs to set the status right. An update for it has been uploaded today (consisting of previous and new changelog).

Incoming Bugs: Regressions

Current regression stats (broken down by release):

regression-potential (up 130)

• 166 lucid bugs

regression-update (up 1)

• 12 karmic bugs
• 5 jaunty bugs
• 2 intrepid bugs
• 1 hardy bug

regression-release (down 1)

• 53 karmic bugs
• 21 jaunty bugs
• 11 intrepid bugs
• 4 hardy bugs

regression-proposed (no change)

• 1 karmic bug

Incoming Bugs: Bug day report

Today is another Kernel Team ‘regression-’ bug day. Thanks for working on these last week. The next Kernel Regression Bug Day will be on Thursday of this week.

Open Discussion or Questions

1. Nothing new this week.

Read more

Meeting Minutes

IRC Log of the meeting.

Agenda

2010-23-03 Meeting Agenda

Outstanding actions from last meeting

1. JFo to send out regression bug day announcements on monday
   Carried forward to next week.
2. JFo to do a wiki page on regression bug days
   In progress, carried forward to next week.

Lucid Release Status: Bugs

	Beta 1 Milestoned Bugs	Release Targeted Bugs
linux	13	30
linux-fsl-imx51	0	0
linux-ec2	1	1
linux-mvl-dove	1	2

Blueprints: kernel-lucid-bug-handling

Nothing new to report.

Blueprints: kerne-lucid-kernel-config-review

Nothing new to report.

Blueprints: kernel-lucid-kms

Testing of the beta has been mostly good so far, there are a couple of “blank screen on install” bugs to look at.

Blueprints: kernel-lucid-suspend-resume

Nothing new to report.

Blueprints: kernel-lucid-apparmor-development

Another lkml push going out today, will also issue pull requests for the bug fixes it includes.
Since beta 1 release have picked up another couple bugs to look at with security team
Bug #544819, Bug #544789, Bug #544764 as well as #529288 which I haven’t been able to
reproduce and currently looks as if it is caused by memory corruption.

• apparmor “apparmor does not work with midori” [Undecided,New] https://launchpad.net/bugs/544819
• apparmor “apparmor-logprof not working” [Undecided,New] https://launchpad.net/bugs/544789
• apparmor “unkillable apparmor_parser” [Undecided,New] https://launchpad.net/bugs/544764
• linux “”Kernel Oops” – unable to handle kernel paging request at ffff880323279bf2 RIP is at aa_dfa_match_len+0xd9/0xf0″ [Low,Incomplete] https://launchpad.net/bugs/529288

Blueprints: kernel-lucid-boot-performance

Nothing new to report.

Other Release Tasks: Lucid Audio Support

Still working on the bug survey. I’ve moved to working on modifications to arsenal
scripts to do more of the work. I’ve done a bit of refactoring of Bryce’s process-new-bugs.py
script and sent it to him. I’ll take his feedback and appy the changes to our scripts
as well. I’m trying to make it so we don’t fork the scripts quite so much.

Other Release Tasks: Lucid Better Power Mgt

Sent some patches upstream to pm-utils and am waiting on feedback. Will push out a new set of packages when I hear back.

Other Release Tasks: EC2 Lucid Kernel Status

Testing fix for Bug #527208, which also seems to fix Bug #540378

• linux-ec2 “ec2 instance fails boot, no console output on c1.xlarge” [High,Confirmed] https://launchpad.net/bugs/527208
• linux-ec2 “BUG: soft lockup – CPU#1 stuck for 66s! [swapper:0]” [Medium,New] https://launchpad.net/bugs/540378

Other than those its looking good.

Status: Lucid

Ok, apw uploaded a kernel including 2.6.32.10 and a newer igb driver. Uploaded meta today so it will probably get offered soonish.
Will gather updates till Friday and then do another upload.

Security & Bugfix Kernels

Dapper	2.6.15-55.83	(security)
Hardy	2.6.24-27.68	(security) *
Intrepid	2.6.27-17.46	(security)
Jaunty	2.6.28-18.60	(security)
Karmic	2.6.31-19.58	(security) *
	LBM 2.6.31-20.22 (updates) * mvl-dove 2.6.31-211.26 (security) * fsl-imx51 2.6.31-108.25 (security) * ec2 2.6.31-304.13 (security) *

Packages marked with ‘*’ have been uploaded to proposed. Planned acceptance into proposed is tomorrow.

Incoming Bugs: Regressions

Current regression stats (broken down by release):

regression-potential (up 40)

• 128 lucid bugs

regression-update (up 1)

• 12 karmic bugs
• 5 jaunty bugs
• 2 intrepid bugs
• 1 hardy bug

regression-release (down 1)

• 53 karmic bugs
• 22 jaunty bugs
• 11 intrepid bugs
• 4 hardy bugs

regression-proposed (no change)

• 1 karmic bug

Incoming Bugs: Bug day report

Open Discussion or Questions

1. A warm welcome from all to Kamal Mostafa, the latest kernel team member.

Read more

Meeting Minutes

IRC Log of the meeting.

Agenda

2010-09-03 Meeting Agenda

Outstanding actions from last meeting

1. None

Lucid Release Status: Bugs

	Beta 1 Milestoned Bugs	Release Targeted Bugs
linux	1	28
linux-fsl-imx51	2	2
linux-ec2	0	1
linux-mvl-dove	1	2

Blueprints: kernel-lucid-bug-handling

Almost done with the analysis of the X debugging pages. JFo will update the team on the current state of the Kernel Team pages and an initial draft of recommended changes to the structure and layout via the e-mail list. Will have the arsenal scripts running (not in dry run mode) by the end of this week.

• I’m almost ready to present my findings on the X wiki debug pages and how I’d like to restructure the Kernel Team pages. I hope to send something on this to the list this week

• I am reworking the way the arsenal scripts gather and process bugs so that I can extend the ‘reach’ of the script deeper into the backlog. I’ll probably do a rather intense round of bug processing during the lull after release freeze.

• I sent out an e-mail to the c-k-t list (meant to send to the k-t list) regarding a wiki page describing the rationale for automated bug processing. Please provide some feedback. I’d like to get this URL integrated into the arsenal scripts soon.

Blueprints: kerne-lucid-kernel-config-review

Discussion thread started on the remaining sub-systems and PATA/SATA driver status. Should have patches for immediatly after Beta-1.

Blueprints: kernel-lucid-kms

We are seeing a lot of issues with i945 and older graphics cards, which includes all the atom netbooks. This is looking to be new occurance of the i915.powersave problems, we will disable powersaving for these ‘older’ cards by default.

Blueprints: kernel-lucid-suspend-resume

Looks like we are getting some useful information as a result of the patch to measure suspend resume times. I am currently looking at the suspend/resume bugs filed recently and trying to get a sense of any common elements we can find.

Blueprints: kernel-lucid-apparmor-development

The latest upstream push is ready go out.

Blueprints: kernel-lucid-boot-performance

The ureadahead patches are with Foundations for testing. Again we should have results in time for the first upload after Beta-1.

Other Release Tasks: Lucid Audio Support

Nothing significantly new this week.

I’m several days into my als-driver bug survey and have looked at almost 200 bugs. I’m basicly going through them one by one and adding tags onto them. If they have not had any action for more than a couple months I’m requesting a test of a dev image and the mainline kernel. I’m pretty amazed at the number of bugs that have not seen any attention since their initial submission.

The biggest buckets are “no sound at all” and “internal mic not working”. There are a few that look like upgrade isses, people running out and buying the latest HW expecting it to “just work”, etc.

I also see that there are a bunch of bugs that are “past expiration”. I asked around about this and was told that the bot that ran around marking these “invalid” had to be turned off because it wasn’t smart enought and was invalidating bugs it shouldn’t. I was told that a new status is being created “Expired” specifically for these bugs and that the bot would be smartened up. This work is supposed to happen this month.

Other Release Tasks: Lucid Better Power Mgt

The release team has pretty much veto’d putting the pmutils functionality in as it didn’t hit b-1. The rest has been postponed due to workload.

Other Release Tasks: EC2 Lucid Kernel Status

Working on Launchpad bug 527208 in linux-ec2 “ec2 instance fails boot, no console output on c1.xlarge” [High,Confirmed] https://launchpad.net/bugs/527208

Have confirmed that it isn’t exhibiting under similar circumstances in rackspace cloud. I haven’t made anymore progress on testing pv-ops.

Status: Lucid

Lucid remains at stable v2.6.32.9, though v2.6.32.10 is now available and will be applied once Beta-1 is over. We have commited patches to expose the DRM backports version such that when v2.6.33.1 DRM patches we can tell that that has occured in bug reports. We have also changed the default settings for the CDROM trays to allow direct removal of disks, userspace will handle this shortly.

All of the main kernels (linux, linux-fsl-imx51, linux-mvl-dove, linux-qcm-msm, and linux-ec2) remain unchanged from last week. linux-ti-omap was just accepted into the archive. Anything which requires a kernel change will have to wait until after beta-1 and will have to pass the abbreviated SRU process (2 acks required).

Security & Bugfix Kernels

Dapper	2.6.15-55.82	(security)
Hardy	2.6.24-27.65	(security)
	2.6.24-27.67 (updates)
Intrepid	2.6.27-17.45	(security)
Jaunty	2.6.28-18.59	(security)
Karmic	2.6.31-19.57	(security)
	LBM 2.6.31-20.22 (updates) mvl-dove 2.6.31-211.22 (security) fsl-imx51 2.6.31-108.21 (security)   2.6.31-108.23 (proposed)[12] 0/ 1 verifications done (+0) ec2 2.6.31-304.11 (updates)

Security update is expected somewhen today (after some final tests)

Incoming Bugs: Regressions

Current regression stats (broken down by release):

regression-potential (up 30)

• 88 lucid bugs

regression-update (no change)

• 11 karmic bugs
• 5 jaunty bugs
• 2 intrepid bugs
• 1 hardy bug

regression-release (no change)

• 54 karmic bugs
• 22 jaunty bugs
• 11 intrepid bugs
• 4 hardy bugs

regression-proposed (no change)

• 1 karmic bug

Incoming Bugs: Bug day report

Today is another Kernel Team ‘regression-’ bug day. Thanks for working on these last week. I’ll be looking at the schedule for the rest of this release and proposing more bug days to work out regressions to Pete for inclusion in the schedule. I anticipate that, as we move closer to the release freeze, we will probably do more than one bug day a week, but I want to see what the timeframe looks like before I propose that.

I didn’t get to schedule a community bug day today as I had planned. I will get things ready to hold another bug day against bugs with patches attached for next week.

Open Discussion or Questions

1. Nothing new this week.

Read more

Meeting Minutes

IRC Log of the meeting.

Agenda

2010-09-03 Meeting Agenda

Outstanding actions from last meeting

1. None

Lucid Release Status: Bugs

	Beta 1 Milestoned Bugs	Release Targeted Bugs
linux	9	24
linux-fsl-imx51	1	1
linux-ec2	1	1
linux-mvl-dove	1	2

Blueprints: kernel-lucid-bug-handling

Almost done with the analysis of the X debugging pages. JFo will update the team on the current state of the Kernel Team pages and an initial draft of recommended changes to the structure and layout via the e-mail list. Will have the arsenal scripts running (not in dry run mode) by the end of this week.

Blueprints: kerne-lucid-kernel-config-review

We have pulled out the HID devices to modular. Discussions on other drivers still pending, any changes will have to occur post beta-1 now.

Blueprints: kernel-lucid-kms

We have committed to the v2.6.33 drm backport which is now uploaded to the archive. Re-testing of graphics issues now to be requested. JFo will put out a call for testing for the drm backport asap.

Blueprints: kernel-lucid-suspend-resume

The suspend resume patch is in and already seeing some benefits. One bug where the battery is fingered as taking 10s to respond.

Blueprints: kernel-lucid-apparmor-development

Editing text for another push to LKML There are still a few LSM audit issues to attend to and we will see how the __d_path discussions play out. Currently trying to keep the 2 pushes separate

Blueprints: kernel-lucid-boot-performance

Nothing new to report.

Other Release Tasks: Lucid Audio Support

Nothing new to report.

Other Release Tasks: Lucid Better Power Mgt

Pushed some power policy scripts to https://code.edge.launchpad.net/~amitk/ubuntu/lucid/pm-utils-powersave-policy/amit. Will prepare a package in PPA and issue call for testing tomorrow. pitti is going to review them in the mean while, but other comments welcome

Other Release Tasks: EC2 Lucid Kernel Status

Bug #527208 is still outstanding

• Launchpad bug 527208 in linux-ec2 “ec2 instance fails boot, no console output on c1.xlarge” [High,Confirmed] https://launchpad.net/bugs/527208

Other than that no known issues. However it may be affecting more than just c1.xlarge kernels.

Status: Lucid

Lucid remains at stable v2.6.32.9. As mentioned above we have taken the v2.6.33 DRM backport as this greatly improves stability and removes the need for the Nouveau LBM module, cleaning up installs. We have also incorporated building the kernel perf tool. All of the main kernel (linux, linux-fsl-imx51, linux-mvl-dove, and linux-qcm-msm) are now closed for the Beta-1, uploaded and building, linux-ec2 has been tested and pending a build-test is ready to upload. Anything which requires a kernel change will have to wait until after beta-1 and will have to pass the abbreviated SRU process (2 acks required).

Security & Bugfix Kernels

Dapper	2.6.15-55.82	(security)
Hardy	2.6.24-27.65	(security)
	2.6.24-27.67 (proposed)[15] 1/3 verifications done (+0)
Intrepid	2.6.27-17.45	(security)
Jaunty	2.6.28-18.59	(security)
Karmic	2.6.31-19.56	(security)
	LBM 2.6.31-20.22 (updates) mvl-dove 2.6.31-211.22 (security)   2.6.31-211.23 (waiting for acceptance) fsl-imx51 2.6.31-108.21 (security)   2.6.31-108.23 (proposed)[5] 0/ 1 verifications done (+0) ec2 2.6.31-304.11 (updates)

Hardy is just about to move to updates.

Coming up another security update, then final big upload for Karmic.

Incoming Bugs: Regressions

Current regression stats (broken down by release):

regression-potential (up 30)

• 86 lucid bugs

regression-update (no change)

• 11 karmic bugs
• 5 jaunty bugs
• 2 intrepid bugs
• 1 hardy bug

regression-release (no change)

• 56 karmic bugs
• 22 jaunty bugs
• 11 intrepid bugs
• 4 hardy bugs

regression-proposed (no change)

• 1 karmic bug

Incoming Bugs: Bug day report

There was no bug day last week. This is a gentle reminder that we have decided to hold a weekly Kernel Bug Day to deal with regression bugs. What this means is that for one day a week we would like for the kernel team to focus on addressing ‘regression-’ tagged bugs. We’d like to see a significant reduction in the numbers reported above.

https://bugs.edge.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bugs?field.tag=regression-potential+regression-release+regression-proposed+regression-updates&field.tags_combinator=ANY

The plan, as I see it, is to implement this up to release and then discuss the continued utility of having a Kernel Team Bug Day much like the Bug Days we have now with the community.

The next Bug Day will be next Tuesday. The focus will be on Bugs with patches attached. As usual, all are welcome to help, and all help is greatly appreciated.

The Kernel Bug Day will be on Tuesday of every week until release.

Open Discussion or Questions

1. We are now basically frozen for Beta-1 (barring kitten killers), I will be pushing out any tasks which required kernel changes to Beta-2 shortly, there is almost nothing in this category. The remainder of our non-release tasks for Beta-1 need focus, and if they aren’t going to make it I want to know.
2. Two links that you may find useful:
   • A breakdown of bugs by package.
   • A view created by the Launchpad team of bugs with patches by age. (this is not completely accurate yet).

Read more

Meeting Minutes

IRC Log of the meeting.

Agenda

2010-16-02 Meeting Agenda

Outstanding actions from last meeting

1. None

Lucid Release Status: Bugs

	Beta 1 Milestoned Bugs	Release Targeted Bugs
linux	8	18
linux-fsl-imx51	1	1
linux-ec2	1	1
linux-mvl-dove	0	0

Blueprints: kernel-lucid-bug-handling

No update, all items are still in progress.

Blueprints: kernel-lucid-review-of-ubuntu-delta

Lenovo driver confirmed no longer required and dropped. This blueprint is essentially complete and this item wll be removed from the meeting agenda.

Blueprints: kerne-lucid-kernel-config-review

It seems we require SECCOMP enabled for Lucid, preliminary patches for ARM are under testing.

Blueprints: kernel-lucid-kms

The v2.6.33 DRM backport is looking very much the better starting point in most testing. There are still issues to resolve but they are much much less severe. The final go/no-go decision is expected in the next couple of days with the change occuring this week. We have been attempting to test the main Lucid kernel and also the Lucid kernel with the .33 drm backport, but have encountered problems with suspend/resume that appear to be related to the Iron Lake processor but not the drm drivers. We are continuing to try to sort out these problems.

Blueprints: kernel-lucid-suspend-resume

Nothing new to report.

Blueprints: kernel-lucid-apparmor-development

Another submission going out today, wanted to sleep on d_path and d_namespace changes. Also pam_apparmor will be finished up today. Upstream is generally receptive to the new patches, the d_path stuff is getting the most conversation.

Blueprints: kernel-lucid-boot-performance

We remain around the 1.6s to rootfs mark. There is some instability in the figure which looks to be a race during boot, needs further investigation. Patches for incremental readahead detection are now in testing.

Other Release Tasks: Lucid Audio Support

Nothing new to report.

Other Release Tasks: Lucid Better Power Mgt

Nothing new to report.

Other Release Tasks: EC2 Lucid Kernel Status

Nothing new to report.

Status: Lucid

Lucid is at stable v2.6.32.9. We have taken a few small update icluding a wacom driver update. As mentioned above we are still looking to update graphics with that likely to be the outcome. Progress has been pretty solid the last week, but new tasks and bugs pulling us back from the trend-line. There is a fair bit to do before kernel freeze but the new bits should be in in time. We will have to do some fixing after that. We have closed off one of the slipped items, the rest remain and need pushing. If you have an at-risk item, i would like to know when its likely to be done.

Security & Bugfix Kernels

Dapper	2.6.15-55.82	(security)
Hardy	2.6.24-27.65	(security)
	2.6.24-27.67 (proposed)[8] 1/3 verifications done (+1)
Intrepid	2.6.27-17.45	(security)
Jaunty	2.6.28-18.59	(security)
Karmic	2.6.31-19.56	(security)
	2.6.31-20.57 (proposed)[22] 8/19 verifications done (+3) LBM 2.6.31-20.22 (proposed)[22] 0/ 2 verifications done (+0) mvl-dove 2.6.31-211.22 (security)   2.6.31-211.23 (waiting for acceptance) fsl-imx51 2.6.31-108.21 (security)   2.6.31-108.22 (proposed)[13] 0/ 1 verifications done (+0) ec2 2.6.31-304.10 (security)   2.6.31-304.11 (proposed)[13] 0/ 1 verifications done (+0)

• For Karmic: the following bugs are unverified:
  • bug 504273, bug 494045, bug 494461 and bug 510722 (intel graphics)
  • bug 458503 and bug 458503 (hotkeys)
  • bug 506180 (ath5k regression by stable)
• For now there were some doubts on bug 452558 as of whether 96MB of memory stolen is a high ratio of overall memory on ARM. Probably someone with knowledge has to say there is still enough left.

Incoming Bugs: Regressions

Current regression stats (broken down by release):

regression-potential (up 30)

• 57 lucid bugs

regression-update (no change)

• 10 karmic bugs
• 5 jaunty bugs
• 2 intrepid bugs
• 1 hardy bug

regression-release (no change)

• 57 karmic bugs
• 23 jaunty bugs
• 11 intrepid bugs
• 4 hardy bugs

regression-proposed (no change)

• 1 karmic bug

Incoming Bugs: Bug day report

No bug day last week. This week’s bug day has been postponed to next week. The focus will be on bugs with patches.

Open Discussion or Questions

Just a reminder we’re heading into the last week for lucid before freeze. Anything you think you want in needs to be on my (apw’s) radar before Friday.

Read more

Sunday was the final day at SCALE8x, We had good traffic at our booth,the loco team was bring us people with interesting problems and perspectives.  I had this one person come up to me and express his dis-satisfaction about Ubuntu.

“I have a  desktop that has an ATI Radeon card, and I can’t get the display to work. There are a lot of reports on the user forums about this card and canonical is not doing anything about it. I have emailed canonical  about it but I see  no action. Should I tell people  to switch to fedora ?”

This person is a journalist, and I did not want him to give Ubuntu bad press because he did not know the correct process to get this problems resolved. Forums are for users to communicate with users, and when a solution is posted to the forum the thread is almost never closed, and users keep adding comments to it making it hard to find any useful information there. If you think you have a problem the correct process is to report a bug in launchpad. As an example, if sound does not work, and you have done some basic troubleshooting and found it to be a bug, reporting this bug is very easy. Open a terminal and run the following command.

$ ubuntu-bug audio

More serious kernel problems are automatically reported by apport.  In the end, this journalist seemed less unhappy, but still insisted that the user experience is not what it is supposed  to be, and that user experience is the reason that keep Apple Macs and Microsoft Windows in business. Point taken, you should not have to know about a process to report a problem, operating system should treat the user as dumb and do it under the covers, and apport does not to an extend.

One of the more serious issues I am seeing with Lucid is that with Nvidia binary drivers. On certain laptops, on boot,  the display comes up fuzzy .

But you can easily fix this, just switch to VT1 and back to VT5, and you display will look almost normal. There are still some issues.

I noticed this problem mostly on Sony Vaio W series notebooks, Compaq Presario V6000, and Toshiba Satellite S402. The Sony Vaio W series is particularly a bad case because it is a new model. Most of these laptops that had problems with Nvidia cards also had problems with suspend/resume working properly, and a bug in plymouth causes the system to freeze if you hit the “enter/return” key.

I made contacts with several of the vendors at the show. I talked to the owner of ZaReason he had all the models of his laptops/netbooks on display. They ships all of their netbooks/laptops with Ubuntu 9.10 preinstalled. I invited him over to our testing booth to test all his netbook/laptop models. He later promised to ship us some hardware to do some enablement and fix issues. I talked to the people from softlayer they use Ubuntu Server Edition on all their offerings. I need to connect them with the Server team people. The other interesting group I talked to was Revolution Linux. They already have partnership with Canonical. From a project perspective, looks like ltsp clusters is something we could use for  our Hardware Compatibility Testing effort.

We had no banners saying “Ubuntu Hardware Compatibility Test, please bring your laptops and help us test” so some people could not find us. We should do a better job of making us visible next time. We will do this again at the Texas Linux Fest on 10th April.

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Our Ubuntu kernel sprint in London has been going very well. Our focus this week has been sharing information with each other about how we do our work, to spread around some critical knowledge. This morning we walked to work in a snowfall.

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I've been messing around with the earlyprintk kernel options to allow me to get some form of debug out before the console drivers start later on in the kernel init phase. The earlyprintk kernel option supports debug output via the VGA, serial port and USB debug port.

The USB debug port is of interest - most modern systems seem to provide a debug port capability which allows one to send debug over USB to another machine. To check if your USB controller has this capability, use:

sudo lspci -vvv | grep "Debug port"

and look for a string such as "Capabilities: [58] Debug port: BAR=1 offset=00a0". You may have more than one of these on your system, so beware you use the correct one.

One selects this mode of earlyprintk debugging using:

for the default first port, or select the Nth debug enabled port using:

One also needs to build a kernel with the following config option enabled:


On my debug set-up I used a NET20DC-USB Hi-Speed USB 2.0 Host-to-Host Debug Device connecting the target machine and a host with which I capture the USB debug using /dev/ttyUSB0 with minicom. So that I won't bore you with the details, this is all explained in the kernel documentation in Documentation/x86/earlyprintk.txt

As it was, I needed to tweak the earlyprintk driver to put in some delays in the EHCI probing and reset code to get it working on my fairly fast target laptop.
My experience with this approach wasn't great - I had to plug/unplug the debug device quite frequently for the earlyprintk EHCI reset and probe to work. Also, the EHCI USB driver initialisation later on in the kernel initialisation hung which wasn't useful.

Overall, I may have had problems with the host/target and/or the NET20DC-USB host-to-host device, but it did allow me to get some debug out, be it rather unreliably.

Probably an easier way to get debug out is just using the boot option:


however this has the problem that the messages are eventually overwritten by the real console.

Finally, for anyone with old legacy serial ports on their machine (which is quite unlikely nowadays with newer hardware), one can use:

earlyprintk=serial,ttySn,baudrate

where ttySn is the nth tty serial port.

One can also append the ",keep" option to not disable the earlyprintk once the real console is up and running.

So, with earlyprintk, there is some chance of being able to get some form of debug out to a device to allow one to debug kernel problems that occur early in the initialisation phase.

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Got a Ubuntu kernel related bug and you need help in report it? Or got an audio bug that's kernel related and you want to log the bug? Need advice or hints on how to gather kernel oops messages into a bug report? Or need to figure out how to report a bug upstream?

Well if you need this kind of help, then look no further than the Ubuntu Kernel Bug Policies wiki page. It's got a load of helpful information on kernel bug reporting and also how bug states are recorded from being initially reported, triaged, processed by a kernel developer and fixed.

We hope this will take the pain out of reporting bugs and helping you understand the bug fixing process. Kudos to Leann Ogasawara for this wiki page!

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