[virt-tools-list] Status W9 - Feb 27…Mar 3, 2017

[Christophe de Dinechin]

Week plan:
- Explore Mesa configuration to get virgl working in guest when building from sources
- Investigate if the bug is fixed, if not, bisect and attempt a fix
- Resume my efforts on Spice for Mac, VNC is just a bit painful

Results:
- Built Mesa from source in virgl configuration
- Bisected and identified a commit fixing it by Marc-André. Marked bug as duplicate
- Restarted hacking Spice for Mac, battling old autotools bugs, use of outdated macros, API differences between Linux and macOS

Unplanned:
- Lost Muse, my primary VM host, to either a BTRFS bug or a badly placed bad sector
- Spent some time trying to repair the disk and salvage some data, notably the VMs I was working on
- Reinstalled the host, restored the VMs, decided to stick with BTRFS for now, assuming it checksummed the disk and told me about a bad sector
- Setup a per-VM backup plan at home (instead of per-host) so that I would lose 5 minutes of data and not one day next time
- Discovered we pre-allocate 10000 surfaces in Spice when we usually use a handful. Began working on a patch to make this dynamic
- Began investigating a case where some tearing occurs in Spice - There’s a fix client-side, Marc-André suggested a fix in Mesa
- Ran into issues with qemu://session networking going away - Have not found yet how to restore it “the right way"

Stuff I learned this week:
- Doing a git bisect does not work if you look for “first good” commit, it gets confused at merge points. You have to lie and reverse good and bad.
- Tools such as btrfsck and btrfs rescue, which are not very efficient based on my experience
- I need to understand virsh net-define, because I keep loosing virbr0 on my hosts
- For locking processes in scripts, the flock utility is now “standard enough” to be a better solution than ad-hoc locking
- Don’t rely on default configure options. The configure options in .spec files (e.g. mesa.spec) may be essential for some key features. Found it here: https://src.fedoraproject.org/cgit/rpms/mesa.git/tree/mesa.spec.
- Learned about the Mock tool https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Using_Mock_to_test_package_builds, will need to use it

Next week plan:
- Monday, my wife Christine undergoes some surgery
- Investigation of the rendering tearing in Spice and taking over Marc-André’s effort (dating back over one year, apparently)
- Keep pushing on Spice for Mac
- Learn more about package creation (use of Mock, Homebrew Spice package)