Michal Hrušecký

As you may or may not know, I'm part of the openSUSE Boosters team and I'm working on umbrella project. Part of this project is to make all openSUSE pages look similar. What I was working on during last week was to addapt Roberts Bentoo theme for Media Wiki. And as I posted to my workreport that it is available internaly (as it is curently running on my machine only) I'm posting here sample screenshot

It's been some time already since I informed you about server: database: UNSTABLE repository in openSUSE Build Service. Today I want to mention what is going on there. As the name of the repository suggests, it's probably not the best idea to use anything from here on your production servers

MySQL 5.4

I'm keeping there MySQL 5.4. Currently in version 5.4.3 beta. 5.4 branch of MySQL contains some patches to improve performance. That is the reason why it might be interesting. Downside is that it isn't released as often as 5.1 and it is not considered production ready. I already wrote something about this, so let's move to something new.

MySQL Workbench 5.2.8

What can be more interesting is that this repository also contains the newest version of MySQL Workbench. Have you ever used MySQL Administrator or MySQL Query Browser? These tools will die soon. Even versions in 11.2 are some kind of zombies on sedatives. All functionality provided before by MySQL Administrator and MySQL Query Browser should be provided by MySQL Workbench 5.2 in the future. MySQL Workbench already reached beta stage with current version. And it can be found in server: database: UNSTABLE repository. On first sight it look quite nice. I didn't played with it more deeply, just checked that it is basically working, but you can I tried few things with Administrator plugin, but I will investigate it more deeply and then write something about it.

Last note, to get some more attention screenshot of the main window

This weekend we were on LinuxAlt conference with my colleague Pavol Rusnak. It was really nice event, we met quite some people. I also learned some new things during the talks but I'm not going to write here about talks as others will surely write about them more deeply. I'm going to write something about the feedback we received and what we talked about with people.

openSUSE 11.2 DVDs

As I already mentioned before, we were giving out openSUSE 11.2 promo DVDs to the people attending conference. GoldMaster was created at Friday and we were burning DVDs during night and during conference and printing out covers to have something really fresh to give to the people. And we weren't burning new DVDs fast enough as people were really interested. We came with 30 pre-burnt DVDs and they were out in no time and the rest had to wait till we burn some more. In the end 50 people was lucky enough and received shiny new openSUSE 11.2 directly from the oven.

Liberix

Other thing I want to mention is meeting with Vlastimil Ott, representative of Liberix, which is a Czech non-profit organization promoting Linux and Open Source in general. We talked with him about what they need, how can we help them and what we can offer. And I'm really looking forward to our future cooperation in promoting Linux. One of the interesting topics we spoke about was for example giving some lectures on schools. He told us that they receive quite some offers what they can do for people to promote Linux, but sometimes they just don't have enough people.

Conclusion

We spoke also to quite a lot of other people, we received really valuable feedback from community and from the people working on other distributions as well. Some other ideas and blog post will follow. It was really great being there and I'm looking forward to the next years LinuxAlt.

This is going to be just a little note. Tomorrow starts two day conference LinuxAlt in Brno in Czech Republic. I'm planning to attend as a mere mortal (no presentation or such). So if you want to speak to me in person, you can probably catch me there somewhere. I'll be wearing some openSUSE t-shirt and I'll probably have some other openSUSE/Novell stuff with on me. I'm attaching one of my latest photos to this blog post.

And why you should be interested in meeting me? I'll be carrying around some DVDs with openSUSE 11.2 PromoDVDs for people (if they'll get ready in time). And if you'll catch me soon enough, I'll give you one. One of my colleagues, Pavol Rusnak, will be carrying some DVDs too, so you can try catching him too So tomorrow the game 'Catch your openSUSE Booster' will start and first winners will get DVD with openSUSE 11.2.

We are going to release openSUSE 11.2 soon, so I want to let you know about one problem you may expect. One of the openSUSE 11.2 features is support for ext4. Well, if you will just click on next all the time during the installation, default filesystem for your root partition will be ext4. What is the problem with that? Well, ext4 in current kernel has barriers enabled by default. It's not a problem, it's a feature, but it has some unpleasant side effects which you may encounter. Let's take a closer look.

Barriers

Barriers are used to make sure that journal is really written to your filesystem and that nothing is missing. It has one big advantage - your data are safe. On the other hand it has disadvantage as well. You have to make sure that everything is written so you can't really take full advantage of all caches and such. There is a nice article on LWN.net about barriers.

Consequences

Well and why I mention it? Barriers has some impact on performance. Sometimes this impact can be quite notable as mentioned in bug #549534. This bug was about importing some sample 1.6M SQL dump into MySQL. One friend reported this to me on IRC. On ext4 with barriers enabled this import takes 527 seconds. But after disabling barriers on the same machine same SQL dump can be imported in 21 seconds. So if you plan using MySQL for some large and heavily used database and you have UPS or something similar you may consider disabling it.

Disabling barriers

So if you want to disable barriers, you ca easily do so by using barrier=0 in mount options. You can do it by adding this option after comma to the fourth column in your /etc/fstab. Or if you want something user friendlier, run 'yast2 disk', select your partition, using right click choose to Edit it and in following dialog use Fstab Options to invoke another dialog. In Fstab Options dialog, enter barrier=0 to the Arbitrary option value field. If you can't find it, follow the screenshot or run YaST in English by using 'LANG=C yast2 disk'.