Sunday, April 28, 2013

Woot - Mozilla's Firefox Mobile Nigtly has WebRTC support


Once and again I try the Nightly version of Mozilla Firefox.



Today I noticed that the Mobile version of Firefox has WebRTC support. Woot!?

That means you can go into about:config and set
media.peerconnection.enabled

to true.
If you've got a second mobile device or download the nightly desktop version (and enable peerconnection there too).
Then you can visit the webrtc reference application with the first device, and enter the given URL (at the bottom) on the second device to join the session.
E voilĂ  you've got a working WebRTC (with video and audio) connection between your two devices.



Or even conversat.io ! Yes - use conversat.io - looks promissing. Maybe even for team (ovirt) meetings?

Enjoy and feed-back.

Thursday, April 25, 2013

Testing oVirt Node in 4min (video)


My focus over the last year or so lay on bringing test automation to oVirt Node.
It was challenging because oVirt Node is based on a LiveCD - at boot and post-installtion. (The whole LiveCD is used as a r/o rootfs.)

To allow an automated testing of oVirt Node, I've been working on igor. It allows us to test oVirt Node on real hardware an in VMs.

When you throw all the new features (see below - libvirt-only, new igorc, new igor events service, junit-reports for jobs) together you can do a complete testsuite run on an oVirt Node ISO with one command.

And this is how it looks (view it in fullscreen to see all the nifty details, but this will leave you without the subtitles explaining what's happening):


0 00:00:00,000 --> 00:00:00,100 1 00:00:00,100 --> 00:00:03,000 Launching igorc 2 00:00:03,000 --> 00:00:12,000 igorc (left) extracts LiveCD, creates a profile and submits a new job 3 00:00:27,000 --> 00:00:32,000 igord created a VM (right) and boots it up (from a CD derived from the igord profile) 4 00:00:40,000 --> 00:01:00,000 VM (right) boots and the autoinstall is performed 5 00:01:36,000 --> 00:01:45,000 Installation finished (Ctrl-Alt-Del is sent to the VM to reboot [that's a known bug]) 6 00:01:58,000 --> 00:02:05,000 The VM now boots from HD 7 00:02:20,000 --> 00:02:27,000 An igor-service is now started in the background (within the VM) to communicate with igord 8 00:02:34,000 --> 00:02:39,000 The igor-service tells igord about the ocmpletion of the first testcase, which is then picked up by igorc (left). 9 00:02:39,000 --> 00:02:45,000 A couple of more testcases were completed (left) and a reboot is initiated (by the igor-service within the VM) 10 00:02:48,000 --> 00:03:10,000 The VM (right) reboots 11 00:03:46,000 --> 00:03:59,000 All testcases passed and the VM is torn down by igord

This is a big step forward - even if there are still some issues outstanding to achieve the goal to make testcase development fun.

Now that we've seen the fancy part some background and open issues.
One pitfall - up to this week - was the hurdle to get igor up an running. Igor used to require Cobbler - and cobbler is not easy to setup on Fedora 18 (which I use to build an test oVirt Node - which itself is based on Fedora 18 packages).

Anyhow - long story short - Igor has a "feature complete" "backend" for libvirt now, that means, igor doesn't need cobbler anymore. Furthermore I've added a brand new igor client (called igorc) which communicates with igord (the daemon doing all the coordination work).
This client has some "advanced" features  like pretty printing of junit results (Igor offers the result of the testruns in junit's XML format).

Some open issues:
  • ovirt-node needs a target to build a testable ISO
  • igor needs a feature to upload testsuites from the client side
All of this is up in the igor repository. ovirt-node related patches (e.g. merging of the igor plugin are pending). Just follow the node-devel ml to see when is is ready for daily usage.
That's it for now - thanks for watching.

Friday, April 19, 2013

Rust 0.6 for Fedora



The previous draft spec wasn't able to build rust with the official 0.6 sources. The spec file is now updated and you can build your own rust package using:
$ curl -O https://raw.github.com/fabiand/rust-spec/master/rust.spec
$ nice ionice rpmbuild --noclean -ba -v rust.spec

It is assumed that you've got a working fedora-package setup and an internet connection.

Changes are mainly that chrpath is used to remove rpaths from files. Rust is still using it's own libuv and llvm.

Thursday, April 4, 2013

Getting EFI (OVMF) into libvirt

OMG!

Finally it's working like a charm - booting a VM with EFI (instead of a BIOS).

lersek pointed me to a page describing how to test SecureBoot with Fedora this implies the usage of EFI. And that page contains a link to an rpm carrying the EFI payload. Awesome.

After installing the RPM you only need to tell libvirt to use that bootloader instead of the default one.

All you need to do:
# Install a prerequirement
$ sudo dnf install seavgabios-bin ipxe-roms ipxe-roms-qemu

# Install OVMF
$ sudo rpm -ivh http://fedorapeople.org/~crobinso/\
    secureboot/edk2.manual-0-0.20130221.944c84a6.x86_64.rpm

# Create a VM pointing to OVMF
$ sudo virt-install --name f18-uefi \
                    --ram 2048 \
                    --boot loader=/usr/share/edk2.manual/\
                                  ovmf-x64/OVMF-pure-efi.fd \
                    --disk f18-uefi.qcow,format=qcow2,size=10 \
                    --os-variant fedora18 \
                    --cdrom /path/to/Fedora-18-x86_64-DVD.iso

That's it! I'm truly amazed.

Btw.: oVirt Node can also be tested this way. Sadly it currently crashes under EFI.