Multiple stage servers in open build service

 The open build service publisher has a configuration variable in BSConfig.pm, where you can define a rsync server to publish the built repos to.

Unfortunately, the documentation apart from the actual code (in src/backend/bs_publish function sync_to_stage) seems scarce, so let's document one non-standard usage here.

"Standard" (IMO) usage, one rsync staging server:

our $stageserver = 'rsync://my-rsync/obs-repos-module';

 But now, for a transition phase, I need multiple rsync servers that are all synced to. The format for this is a perl array variable reference that contains pairs of "project name regex, array of sync servers". This also allows to sync different repositories to different rsync servers for example.

The simplest use of this is "sync all repos to multiple rsync servers" and is configured like this:

our $stageserver = ['.*', ['rsync://rsync1/module1', 'rsync://rsync2/module2', 'rsync://rsync3/module3']];

 With this configuration, bs_publish will send all repos to the three mentioned rsync URLs in turn.

Make Hibernation Great Again!

 I have now put the fixes from the last two blogposts into a github repository: https://github.com/seife/make-hibernate-great-again so that you can just clone it, examine what it does and then run

sudo make install

followed by

sudo dracut -f

This should do the following:

• let resume actually work (by enabling the dracut resume module)
• make hibernate more verbose (switch to an empty text console and increase the kernel's log level before hibernation, restore after resume)
• make resume more verbose

Have fun!

I have also packaged it in obs://home:seife:testing, but I do not really advise to use this repo on anything but my own machines ;-) 

 

 

"hibernation fix" part 2: verbose resume

Now that I fixed hibernation to resume at all, I found another thing I had added to my old install long ago.

The "problem" is, that resume from hibernation is very quiet. So all you see is the GRUB messages "loading kernel", "loading initrd", then nothing, just the disk light may be blinking for quite some time, and if resume is successful, you'll see the unlock prompt of your screenlock.

That's a bit too little "user interface" for my taste.

The reason it is like this is, that the kernel's progress messages (in 10% steps) are printed with level "pr_info":

    if (!(nr_pages % m))

        pr_info("Image loading progress: %3d%%\n",

                                     nr_pages / m * 10);

But the default "quiet" boot suppresses KERN_INFO messages, which is good because without that, you cannot find the prompt for unlocking your crypted filesystems amongst all those KERN_INFO messages during boot... so how to fix it?

We can just adapt the systemd-hibernate-resume.service to increase the kernel log level just before starting to resume, via a dropin file in /etc/systemd/system/systemd-hibernate-resume.service.d/10-resume-verbose.conf:

[Service]

ExecStartPre=/bin/sh -c "echo 7 > /proc/sys/kernel/printk"

ExecStartPost=/bin/sh -c "echo 1 > /proc/sys/kernel/printk"

Also, add the file to your dracut config, so that it is actually included in the initrd:

install_items+=" /etc/systemd/system/systemd-hibernate-resume@.service.d/10-resume-verbose.conf "

now rebuild your initrd with "dracut -f" and enjoy :-)

Oh, and of course this only helps if you do not use things like plymouth which actually hide everything interesting during boot. Update 2022-02-12: it also works with plymouth, because image loading kicks in before plymouth can hide the interesting bits.

dracut: fix hibernate after fresh install

Just for fun, I finally installed a fresh Tumbleweed on one of my machines to actually find out if I'm missing out on new features that are masked by just always updating the old installation.

One feature that I had missed was, that hibernation was no longer working. Or, to be more exact, hibernation was working, but resume was not. Investigating the issue, I found that dracut's "resume" module was not included in the initramfs, which in turn lead to initramfs not even trying to resume.

The dracut mechanism has some logic to actually find out if suspend and resume is configured, and when it decides it is not, it will just skip adding the "useless" resume module.

Unfortunately, the check is faulty IMHO. It checks, if the resume device is configured in the kernel, and if it is, it adds the module to dracut. The problem is, that this kernel config is written by the resume code in the initrd... so during installation this is not the case, and as a result the module is not added to initrd, which leads to the config not being set on next reboot... 

The trivial fix is to call dracut once with the option to include the resume module:

dracut -a resume -f

After a reboot, the kernel config will be set and in the future the resume module will always be included in the initrd.

For an even saver setup, adding

add_dracutmodules+=" resume "

to /etc/dracut.conf.d/99-local.conf might be even better.

Of course I wanted to report a bug about the issue, then found out that there are plenty already:

• openSUSE: https://bugzilla.opensuse.org/1192506
• upstream dracut: https://github.com/dracutdevs/dracut/issues/924
• Fedora: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1795422
• RedHat actually fixed it for RHEL9 by just removing the crazy "only include it if it has been included before"-logic: https://github.com/redhat-plumbers/dracut-rhel9/pull/12