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Weird VirtIO errors on a jessie KVM host: Fixed!

Fri, 08 Jan 2016 10:57:00 +0000

Yesterday I posted a desperate plea for help as I had no idea where else to look for clues on what was causing random I/O errors on the guests of our jessie KVM host.

Thanks to Michael Herold, who was kind enough to mail me after identifying our problem, now we know os-prober is to blame, triggering the problem on every kernel update on the host, and we have quickly uninstalled it from all our systems.

Weird VirtIO errors on a jessie KVM host running Debian guests

Thu, 07 Jan 2016 16:20:00 +0000

Hi Interwebs! I’m facing a weird issue with one of our server’s at work, involving Debian jessie, libvirt and Debian guests using VirtIO drivers. This is a plea for help. :)

Basically, we are getting random VirtIO errors inside our guests, resulting in stuff like this:

[4735406.568235] blk_update_request: I/O error, dev vda, sector 142339584
[4735406.572008] EXT4-fs warning (device dm-0): ext4_end_bio:317: I/O error -5 writing to inode 1184437 (offset 0 size 208896 starting block 17729472)
[4735406.572008] Buffer I/O error on device dm-0, logical block 17729472
[ ... ]
[4735406.572008] Buffer I/O error on device dm-0, logical block 17729481
[4735406.643486] blk_update_request: I/O error, dev vda, sector 142356480
[ ... ]
[4735406.748456] blk_update_request: I/O error, dev vda, sector 38587480
[4735411.020309] Buffer I/O error on dev dm-0, logical block 12640808, lost sync page write
[4735411.055184] Aborting journal on device dm-0-8.
[4735411.056148] Buffer I/O error on dev dm-0, logical block 12615680, lost sync page write
[4735411.057626] JBD2: Error -5 detected when updating journal superblock for dm-0-8.
[4735411.057936] Buffer I/O error on dev dm-0, logical block 0, lost sync page write
[4735411.057946] EXT4-fs error (device dm-0): ext4_journal_check_start:56: Detected aborted journal
[4735411.057948] EXT4-fs (dm-0): Remounting filesystem read-only
[4735411.057949] EXT4-fs (dm-0): previous I/O error to superblock detected

(From an Ubuntu 15.04 guest, EXT4 on LVM2)

A pile of reasons why GNOME should be Debian jessie’s default desktop environment

Thu, 07 Aug 2014 23:58:00 +0000

GNOME has, for some reason or another, always been the default desktop environment in Debian since the installer is able to install a full desktop environment by default. Release after release, Debian has been shipping different versions of GNOME, first based on the venerable 1.2/1.4 series, then moving to the time-based GNOME 2.x series, and finally to the newly designed 3.4 series for the last stable release, Debian 7 ‘wheezy’.

GUADEC 2012

Sun, 29 Jul 2012 16:31:00 +0000

I’ve been in A Coruña for this year’s GUADEC since Tuesday night, and it rocked. I did a late registration after my first week at Collabora, which is sponsoring my stay here.

I came one day early to participate, as Debian’s representative, at the yearly GNOME Advisory Board meeting, for the first time. It was a positive experience, which helped me get a grasp of the “big picture” of what the GNOME Foundation does. I also had the pleasure of visiting Igalia’s awesome offices in the city, and puting faces to many names during the meeting.

Season of change

Sun, 15 Jul 2012 22:45:00 +0000

It feels like I’m sitting in a roller-coaster wagon. There’s probably too much change going on for me to assimilate naturally. In particular:

I just wrapped up (well, mostly) one of the toughest Uni semestres. I had to deal with lots of very time consuming assignments, and then the usual round of final exams. Even if this semester I got the best marks in my journey (or shall we say Via Crucis) through University, I still managed to fail one exam, for the Advanced Networks subject, which is quite annoying, given I got high marks (even the highest in one case) in other subjects I really don’t master at all. In any case, this is the end of the pain. The only thing that’s left is just one exam and a project based on GNU/Linux technologies which will basically mean formatting for prettyness the sysadmin docs we’ve been collecting at the office during the last few years. This effort will be nothing to what I’ve been doing during the past 18 months, so I’m really relieved to have it past me already.

GNOME 3.4 in wheezy

Sun, 03 Jun 2012 09:47:00 +0000

Users of Debian sid will have noticed: the final (and interesting) bits of GNOME 3.4 have landed and if all looks as good as it does now, they should migrate to wheezy in about a week.

3.2 → 3.4 hasn’t been as complicated as the previous horrible transition, but still had some complications due to Cogl/Clutter incompatibilities. Other than that, our major problem has been manpower, but this isn’t new for many other Debian teams. We’ve also seen new incarnations of “Linux-only technology is now mandatory” which makes our lives a bit more miserable due to kfreebsd-* and hurd-i386, but for now we’ve still been able to dodge it. It seems wheezy+1 will be fun in that regard though, and we might need to take drastic approaches.

GNOME 3.4

Thu, 29 Mar 2012 23:50:00 +0000

The GNOME project released today GNOME 3.4, the second major update to the GNOME 3 platform. Congrats!

I know there’s lots of polish and improvements to some of the major rough edges in GNOME 3.2, but I think that of all changes in this release, Epiphany really stands out, as you can see in blog posts by Xan and Diego.

Work to bring GNOME 3.4 to Debian wheezy users has been underway for a few weeks already, and some bits and pieces have been hitting unstable since the tarballs were released a pair of days ago. We still need more base work to be done before some exciting components like GNOME Shell can hit our archive, and we want to fix as many FTBFS with GLib 2.32 bugs as possible before pushing it to unstable, but all in all, hopefully this time, shepherding a major GNOME release to Debian testing won’t be as painful as it was not so long ago. However, we have already identified some fun bits involving clutter, cogl and mutter in our initial analysis, but nothing that hopefully can’t be dealt with in a civilised way.

alsaconf

Thu, 23 Feb 2012 23:53:00 +0000

Removing alsaconf was one of the very few rewarding moments of these ten years of taking care of ALSA in Debian.

Not everyone agreed back then, and we still get some retaliation. :)

Date: Thu, 23 Feb 2012 02:59:31 +0100
From: <CENSORED>
To: jordi@debian.org
Subject: sabotage!

the removing of alsaconf without working(!) alternatives was (AND IS!) an
act of sabotage against millions of debian/alsa - users who needs stable
productive systems

you and all those proponents of removing this still needed alsaconf - program
will have to take the responsibility in front of an (us-) court for damages in
millions of dollars - amounts (lost man hours) all over the world

only a short while and we will have enough sponsors and witnesses around the
globe (and a very specialised, international labouring bureau of advocates) to
go to the court for prosecution.

we will not tolerate such an betray ("stable"? - do you believe, we're
fools??!!) against broad sections of the population and against the spirit of
free software!

it will be intresting to investigate, in whoms interests you've done so and
who the beneficiaries are ...

L.B.
conductor, publicist, whistleblower

FOSDEM 2012

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 13:05:00 +0000

In a few hours, I’ll be flying to Brussels with Ivan, for a new edition of FOSDEM, undoubtedly the best Free Software conference in Europe.

I’m looking forward to hang out with Debian, GNOME and #dudes people, as well as to explore some other quiet and cool spots in the city with our hosts Raül and Vir.

I’ll probably be around the CrossDistro and CrossDesktop rooms most of the time, but before that I’ll be at the Delirium café not long after landing in Brussels.

GNOME Shell 3.2 in wheezy: a retrospective

Tue, 31 Jan 2012 01:23:00 +0000

When you read this, GNOME Shell 3.2 will (hopefully!) have finally transitioned to Debian’s testing suite.

Planet GNOME readers might think Debian now has outdated versions of software even in their development versions, or the distribution’s development marches at glacial pace. Wheezy GNOME users will finally have a Shell that matches the rest of their GNOME components, something that works with the Shell extensions website and much less problems and limitations compared to 3.0.2.

Installing GNOME 3 in Debian

Thu, 29 Sep 2011 01:46:00 +0000

The following is a quick HOWTO for the brave Debian users who want to upgrade to GNOME 3. Assuming you have an up to date system running sid, and experimental listed in your APT sources, perform the following complicated steps to end up having a functional GNOME 3 desktop:

apt-get install -t experimental gnome

Thanks go to Joss for putting together new GNOME 3 meta-packages, and the rest of the Debian GNOME people for months of hard planning and packaging work, and painful testing transition handling.

Not going to DebConf 11

Wed, 13 Jul 2011 13:47:00 +0000

3 months ago, I was positive I would be attending DebConf 11 in Banja Luka, but as the time to buy tickets and plan the trip came closer, I began to realise I don’t have lots and lots of vacation, and I probably prefer spending them doing something that absolutely rocks my world. I’ve always enjoyed the Debian conferences when I’ve been lucky to be there, but last year’s experience in the Pyrenees was nothing a DebConf can compare to, and I’ve decided to spend time seeking similar experiences this summer.

Cinema d'Estiu de Benimaclet 2011

Thu, 30 Jun 2011 23:24:00 +0000

Yeah! It’s this time of the year: Friday evenings after work with your friends having some cool beer on the streets, Saturdays around the nearby mountains for a good hike and swimming in a lake or river, and good beach Sunday in a Valencian beach. And for a great ending of a Summer weekend, a good indie movie in your neighbourhood, reclaiming the streets and going back to our roots, when people perceived the public spaces as theirs, and would bring foldable chairs out, would gather with their neighbours and had a good after-dinner chat a la fresca.

Quinze de maig

Tue, 31 May 2011 23:11:00 +0000

Two weeks ago, I was lucky to celebrate my 33th birthday with my closest friends in l’Alqueria. When asked to wish something before blowing the candles on Victor’s delicious apple cake, I thought I have basically everything I’d want, but it’d be cool if some real changes happened in this world.

Not long after, big demonstrations asking for “Real Democracy Now” happened throughout the Spanish state, and today, that Sunday seems to be an eternity away. Huge assemblies, thousands of strangers working together, more demonstrations, an election campaign eclipsed by #15m, hundreds of well thought, plausible claims published, the movement crossing the Spanish borders and leaking into France and Greece, the feeling that this is the good one, the basis for a fresh start that can make our lives better, our society a fair one and the possibility to stand in front of the fuckers who have made our lives a lot harder, to tell them it’s not going to work like that anymore. All of this in 15 days.

GNOME 3.0

Thu, 07 Apr 2011 23:14:00 +0000

Yesterday one of my free software halves was very, very happy, because after a lot of work, GNOME 3 was released!

I’ve been following GNOME 3.0’s development since Debian got the first GNOME Shell snapshots uploaded to experimental. While my first experience, on an old, 2 or 3 generations behind Athlon 800MHz with 512MB of RAM was horrid due to the lack of features (it wasn’t even an alpha!) and the incredible slowness due to the crappy Radeon 9200, I’ve seen it evolve to the gem that was released yesterday.

A tale of Tristània and its Quadrennial Royal Ball

Thu, 31 Mar 2011 23:40:00 +0000

In one of the corners of what is now know as Europa, there was a rich, prosperous and beautiful kingdom known as Tristània. In the past, not that long ago, it had been a number of smaller kingdoms and caliphates, all with their own cultures, religions and ways of life. Wars, and series of marriages of convenience eventually configured what ended up being the united kingdom of Tristània. Throughout the years, some of the unified cultures grew and flourished, while others struggled to survive in their ever-shrinking areas of influence.

Calçotada!

Mon, 28 Feb 2011 23:22:00 +0000

This past weekend I’ve had the pleasure to join our friends from Valls, in the Camp de Tarragona, for our annual Calçotada in Picamoixon’s countryside. This was the fourth time in a row I attend, and as always, it’s been a blast, even if Enric and Clara weren’t there, and the Valencian group was reduced to just 5 of us.

Unfortunately I had my share of alcohol on Friday evening/night while partying with my workmates so when we got to Tarragona I was basically wasted. This made me not want to take a single sip of any kind of beverage not consisting of a 100% of water during the two days, but that didn’t, of course, spoil a single moment of fun.

FOSDEM 2011

Thu, 03 Feb 2011 22:45:00 +0000

When I returned from the first FOSDEM edition I attended, I wrote that I had liked and enjoyed that weekend in Brussels so much, that this conference had probably become a “must”.

It seems I was right. Five years later, I’m delighted to say

I’m happy to meet so many friends from the Debian, GNOME or GNU projects, and enjoy the kindness of our hosts in Brussels, Raül and Virginia. And I’m looking forward to the awesome beer, the excellent talks and discussions, and that unique FOSDEM atmosphere that makes this so special. This year, FOSDEM has the bonus of being able to enjoy the Debian “squeeze” 6.0 release as it happens, with many of the people who made it possible, and celebrate this on Saturday night. See you there!

New project to discuss

Fri, 14 Jan 2011 20:19:00 +0000

Reading Scott’s recent announcement on his move to Google was both surprising and a pleasure. Surprising, because it’ll take time to stop associating his name to Ubuntu, Canonical, and the nice experiences I had while I worked with them. A pleasure, because his blog post was full of reminiscences of the very early days of a project that ended up being way more successful in just a few years than probably anyone in the Oxford conference could imagine. Scott, best of luck for this new adventure!

Smoke

Fri, 31 Dec 2010 15:47:00 +0000

Last night was the last time I came back from a pub with my clothes stinking due to tobacco smoke. The Spanish congress has finally approved a real anti-smoking law which will ban smoking on public areas, with no exceptions or ways to workaround the ban. Starting on January 2nd, the Spanish state will be a smoke-free region (or mostly, it seems it’ll be permitted in open-air events like football stadiums or bullrings, and I don’t think that will be a great problem for me, specially the latter).