Debian on iMil.net

Build a Single in Tree Linux Kernel Module (Debian & Clones)

Sun, 21 Aug 2022 20:43:27 +0200

How misleading and complicated this task should be that I’m writing such an article in 2022?
Anyway, if you struggle compiling a simple, standalone Linux kernel module on Debian, Ubuntu, Mint and the like, here’s the recipe:

Fetch linux-source-<version> and linux-headers-<version>

$ sudo apt install linux-source-5.4.0 linux-headers-$(uname -r)

Do not use apt-get source linux-source-<version>, only pain will you find.

Untar the fetched archive where you’d like

$ tar jxvf /usr/src/linux-source-5.4.0.tar.bz2

Copy your current kernel configuration

$ cd linux-source-5.4.0
$ cp /boot/config-$(uname -r) .config

Prepare the build environment

$ make oldconfig scripts prepare modules_prepare

Copy current kernel exported symbols file

$ cp /usr/src/linux-headers-$(uname -r)/Module.symvers .

Build the module you need

$ make -C . M=arch/x86/kvm

Test it

$ sudo insmod arch/x86/kvm/kvm-intel.ko

Eventually backup the current loaded module (modinfo <module>), replace it with your freshly built one and don’t forget to depmod -a.

Kubernetes under my desk

Tue, 16 Oct 2018 14:52:05 +0000

I’m diving into Kubernetes for a couple of months now. Discovering the possibilities and philosophy behind the hype definitely changed my mind. Yes, it is huge (in every sense ;) ) and it does change the way we, ex-sysops / ops / syasdmins do our work. Not tomorrow, not soon, now.

I’ve had my hands on various managed kubernetes clusters like GKE (Google Container Engine), EKS (AWS Elastic Container Service) or the more humble minikube but I’m not happy when I don’t understand what a technology is made of. So I googled and googled (yeah sorry Qwant and duckduckgo I needed actual answers), until I found >many >incredibly >useful resources.

Running Debian from an USB stick on a MacBook Pro

Fri, 04 Aug 2017 12:53:12 +0000

Yeah well, it happened. In my last post I was excited to get back to a BSD UNIX (FreeBSD) for my laptop, I thought I had fought the worse when rebuilding kernel and world in order to have a working DRM module for the Intel Iris 6100 that is bundled with this MacBook Pro generation. But I was wrong. None of the BSDs around had support for the BCM43602 chip that provides WiFi to the laptop. What’s the point of a laptop without WiFi…

Start pkgsrc's nginx with systemd

Sun, 28 Feb 2016 08:17:20 +0000

Not so long ago, I wrote about using pkgsrc on Debian GNU/Linux, and assumed you’d start an installed service using rc.d. When I setup the new iMil.net server, I decided to give a try to kvm as it is easier to maintain, has good performances (sometimes better than Xen), nice administration tools, plus NetBSD now has a good VirtIO driver but no PVHVM support yet.

The first thing I do when setting up a Debian Jessie server is getting rid of systemd, whose philosophy and quality don’t match my personnal taste; but in that case, I wanted to use libvirtd so I could manage my virtual machines with virt-manager, and as a matter of fact, libvirtd has a hard dependency on systemd. There was no escape this time, I had to learn and use it.

NetBSD/amd64 7.0 on kvm

Fri, 29 Jan 2016 11:04:30 +0000

If you recently tried to install NetBSD 7.0 using Linux KVM you might have encountered the following failure:

This bug have been recently fixed on the 7-branch but the official ISO images are not yet updated, so you’ll have to use NetBSD daily builds mini-ISO which includes Christos fix to bus_dma.c

For the record, here’s the virt-install command I use:

sudo virt-install
    --virt-type kvm
    --name korriban
    --ram 4096 --disk path=/dev/vms/korriban,bus=virtio
    --vcpus 2
    --network bridge:br0,model=virtio
    --graphics vnc
    --accelerate
    --noautoconsole
    --cdrom /home/imil/iso/boot.iso
    --cpu host

Performances are really good, the host is a Debian GNU/Linux 8.0 amd64 running on Online’s Dedibox Classic 2015.

Using pkgsrc on debian GNU/Linux

Sun, 05 Jul 2015 16:42:43 +0000

While I tend to appreciate debian GNU/Linux, its tendency to be quite late on software versionning is sometimes annoying. Also, as a pkgsrc developer, I am used to have greater control over the packages I install, for example regarding the options I’d like to include.

For these reasons and a couple more, I sometimes choose to use pkgsrc along with apt to deal with particular packages. In this article, I’ll show how to achieve that task.

Migrating Debian Wheezy to LMDE

Wed, 12 Nov 2014 12:07:18 +0000

My “mediacenter”, a small x86 machine plugged to the living-room TV was a diskless (PXE/NFS root) Debian Wheezy until the past week end. After having tried Linux Mint on a laptop of mine and being impressed by its integration quality, I decided to migrate my mediacenter to LMDE.

I did not reinstalled the system, mainly because Mint does not support debootstrap, instead I followed a couple of HOWTOs I found on their forums: this one and this one.

Install NetBSD (or any PV-capable system) on IBM's SoftLayer

Mon, 03 Nov 2014 20:28:30 +0000

At ${DAYWORK}, I happen to use IBM’s cloud: SoftLayer. It has all the features you’d expect from such a platform, and can instantiate pretty much any major GNU/Linux distribution you’d think of; but here’s the thing, we also use NetBSD for some infrastructure services, and as you’d guess, there’s no NetBSD support at all on SoftLayer.

I had to reverse some bits of their provisioning system to understand how to achieve NetBSD installation, but most of all, automatic provisioning.

Mounting UFS2 read/write on Linux

Fri, 31 Oct 2014 12:49:00 +0000

I recently had the need to mount an UFS2 (NetBSD) partition under GNU/Linux, and while this is surprising, a standard Linux distro, Debian in my case, is not able to mount it in read/write mode.

I came across this project https://github.com/DanielO/fuse-ufs2 which has basic UFS2 read/write support. It is not very stable, I made it crash a couple of times while using vim on the mounted partition, but it does support simple operations like cp, rm and such.

Debian backport of OpenSSH 6.2

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 12:48:00 +0000

Update

As written on the comments: _ Colin Watson Says: May 17th, 2013 at 7:12 pm

I uploaded 6.2 packages to Debian a week or so after you posted this, so you can/should now just use those instead. I expect they should build fine on wheezy. _

As a matter of fact, the following is now deprecated

At ${DAYWORK}, we used to have our own OpenSSH debian package which included the famous OpenSSH LPK patch, which permits the use of an OpenLDAP server as an SSH public key provider.

Les économies de Noël

Wed, 26 Dec 2012 12:05:09 +0000

Upgrade de ma bonne vieille tatooine de squeeze en wheezy terminé. Modulo quelques soucis de polices, ça s’est plutôt bien passé. Il y a bien ce vieux message de grub:

Mais les réponses sur les MLs sont laconiques et surtout, cela n’empêche nullement grub de fonctionner puisque mon /boot est un soft RAID sur des partitions physiques, sans LVM. Merci past-iMil. Comme cette machine était la dernière affublée d’un bureau gnome 2 et qu’il était simplement inenvisageable de basculer au monstre gnome 3, elle aussi a migré vers XFCE (4.8 pour wheezy). Hormis le fait que le look par défaut est à gerber, je retrouve mon bon vieux bureau XFCE muni de ses icônes Faenza, le thème GTK2 BSM Simple Dark Menu et les décorations de fenêtres Elegant Brit. J’aime ce setup. Je n’ai encore trouvé aucun thème GTK3 qui se mariait bien avec BSM Simple, pour le moment ce sera Hope. Dans la foulée, j’ai tout de même gagné un bon Go de RAM, et je ne veux même pas savoir ce que cela aurait donné avec le bureau JavaScript de gnome 3. Bref, plutôt satisfait, encore quelques glitches, mais l’experience est globalement positive. Mais ouiii, il arrive le screenshot :)

Les migrations de la rentrée

Mon, 05 Oct 2009 14:34:04 +0000

On peut lire sur GCU que nous avons passé une partie du week end, après un bafr bien arrosé, à mettre à jour Zone0.GCU-Squad.org, machine qui héberge le site, et moult services du groupe.

Il faut l’avouer, cette mise à jour fut une promenade de santé en comparaison de sa cauchemardesque installation voila deux ans. Je me propose tout de même de vous raconter les quelques manipulations qui furent nécessaires à sa migration vers 2009.

Dégageuntu 9.01

Sun, 25 Jan 2009 17:39:30 +0000

De frustrations en déconvenues, j’ai profité d’un upgrade de machine pour virer ubuntu et repasser à debian.

Oui, ubuntu est un bon produit dans sa globalité, j’en ai fait des éloges à ses débuts, j’ai pris sa défense lorsque les premières bourdes sont apparues, j’ai même encore recemment chanté les louanges de héron boiteux, mais voila, me concernant, la qualité du travail effectué par les mainteneurs d’ubuntu depuis quelques mois n’a fait qu’empirer.