So, what's your Linux week been like?

A busy day Friday, I have run the updates for 2/3 of my Virtual Machines (VM). It takes 5 to 6 hours. My Ryzen3 22200G is really busy, when I update 2 Windows VMs at the same time, For an hour the system runs a ~100% CPU load. I have recently overclocked the CPU to 3.7GHz, that helps somewhat.

The photo shows the update of Windows 10 and you can see in Conky on the right that almost all 16GB of memory is used and CPU loads are close to 100%. The CPU temperature is in the 70°C below the 80°C, at which the CPU starts throttling. To proof that I run two Windows Update see the photo with Windows 8.1 below. Win 8.1 is ready with the limited updates and it now is cleaning the disk and especially deleting the system files and restore points. Note that both Windows VMs take approx 50% of the CPU time, see in the right upper corner of the Windows window.

After a while the updates get boring, so I decided to play some music. The Host OS is a minimal Install of Ubuntu 21.04, so I need another VM to play music. So I started Windows XP Home.

See it playing my music. The music is playing without any stutters. I’m impressed by the Linux scheduler I run the VMs with 4 cores each, except Win XP Home, that only supports one CPU. Note that the 16GB is now completely used for VRAM 1GB; ZFS Cache 4GB; Windows 10 3GB; Windows 8.1 3GB and Windows XP 1GB. The remainder is used by the Host OS; Virtualbox and ZFS.

All 3 VMs are run from the dpool datapool, which consists of 2 striped 500GB HDD partitions (Raid-0) supported by a 95GB SSD cache (L2ARC and ZIL). The Windows 11 VM and the other Windows 10 VM from my previous entry here run from my nvme-SSD.

The VMs react slow from time to time running 2 or more updates at the same time, so I consider a Ryzen 5 4600G or 5600G, next year when the prices are right for me, due to the introduction of ZEN 4.

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I installed Michael AI and immediately got this popup on one of my drives:

Michael AI - Screenshot_2021-09-18_19-01-39

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I know it’s a joke but I had a similar problem recently. Days later I remembered iostat and found the culprit process baloo churning up 100s of GB of my disk space.

I’m back to school again and discovered one my classes use the Respondus Lockdown Browser to conduct tests with. It can detect when it’s running in a VM and can’t be used, but luckily with some tweaking I can get it running in my Windows VM and it is non-the-wiser. The only issue now being the webcam, which is my phone, uses a desktop app and the Lockdown Browser won’t let it run. So my next trick is figuring out how to pass a V4L2Loopback source as a hardware device to the VM. Fun times!

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Fun with updates! My entire self hosted stack is running in assorted docker containers because it’s easy and I’m lazy.

I tried to update Nextcloud, but because I am a supre l33t h@x04 I did not rtfm, or anything. Which surprisingly didn’t work out “great”. So I was able to practice my backup restoration process, which identified some flaws, namely that backing up all of the apps at one time is great until I want to restore, because then I have to restore all of my app data, not just the pieces I need.

The upside is that I’ve got everything upgraded, and working, and I’ve got all my apps being individually backed up.

Yesterday was exciting.

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Like I promised, I activated Windows 11 Pro VM on my Dec 2011 HP 8460p based on its Windows 7 sticker. It has an i5-2520M and 8GB DDR3 and a 2TB HDD. The boot time was good for booting a Windows VM from a HDD 1:06 minutes. OpenZFS of the Host did a good job due to the reduction of the number of IO operations caused by the lz4 compression. To avoid using swap, I reserved only 3GB for Windows 11 Pro and it did run fine! Up to now the only updates I see are Security Intelligence Update for Microsoft Defender Antivirus.

I proved that Windows 11 runs fine on my 10 year old Sandy Bridge laptop and on my 2 year old Ryzen 3 2200G.

Microsoft should stop its BS about Windows 11. It might be somewhat defensible in the USA and Europe, but for users in Africa; Asia and South America it is crazy. People will be running Windows 10, but how many can afford to buy a new PC? In my home town Santiago de los Caballeros the biggest computer shop sells off-lease PCs from the USA. Note that they are 5,6 or sometimes 7 year old. Those users are allowed to use WIn 10 till 2025 with MBR and without UEFI; TPM and GPT, why not allow the same for Win 11.

If it is supported by the hardware, oblige new Win 11 installs to use the available security feature, but don’t punish the poor people in the world by not allowing Win 11 on their >>5-year old off-lease PCs.

I moved my work to VMs and the Banking & PayPal VM is encrypted by Virtualbox. I don’t need TPM and currently I don’t use UEFI nor GPT, basically because I upgraded from Windows 10 VM based on MBR. To get official Win 11 compatibility I have to reinstall my Win 11 VM (or use Gparted for conversion?), Virtualbox should provide me with VBox-fTPM 2.0 and I need a newer CPU e.g a Ryzen 3 3200G :slight_smile: :frowning:

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Here is one of the reasons that I support Linux and its open source approach. I can afford the latest hardware, but I know that a few BILLION people around the world can not. Supporting Linux and its development truly addresses the digital divide.

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I’m trying out Manjaro with Plasma, after hearing @TheWendyPower talking about it recently. So far it’s working nicely. Now I just need to hack in Magic Arena and I’ll be good to go.

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So as anyone who knows me will know I love pop os. I just do.

I had a spare empty partition so decided to give Endevour os a go (with gnome). I’m really liking it. I’ll try to daily driver it for a few weeks. I have a pop partition should I want to go back but I’ll give it a fair try.

One observation was that oblivion is no longer working in steam it loads but the start game button is greyed. Weird but not an issue I’m desperate to fix.

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I had forgotten how much arch stuff I’d forgotten, like Pacman commands but it’s coming back to me.

Finally did a dist-upgrade on my wife’s laptop to Debian Bullseye. This laptop had originally Jessie as its first Debian version and is now using the fourth version of Debian consecutively. No reinstalls were necessary! Thank you Debian.

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That’s really impressive.

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I wanted a simple media player on an RPi4. I tried OSMC, and the UI kept freezing, but the load average was not high. No diggity! So I gave up and just installed plain jane Raspberry Pi OS, and I’m wormhole-ing the files in across the LAN. Simple.

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I’m reusing Ubuntu 16.04 LTS in a Virtualbox Virtual Machine for my financial oriented stuff, like Newegg, Ebay etc.
I subscribed to the extended maintenance, so the Ubuntu will be maintained till April 2026.
To get up-to-date versions of Firefox and LibreOffice I installed the snaps, see the picture :slight_smile:

Those snaps load in ~1 second from my SP-nvme-SSD (3400/2300MB/s), so that almost perfect.
The Ubuntu VM is encrypted by Virtualbox and boots in ~10 seconds.
After taking the picture I took a PPA of Conky, to get the latest version of Conky and to have the error in the execgraphs of dpool & archives corrected. During that update also a new version of the kernel has been installed :slight_smile:

Why did I go back? Why not!

I always liked Ubuntu 16.04 LTS and I stopped using it begin 2021, because the 5 years maintenance period ended and I was not yet aware of the Ubuntu Extended Support Maintenance.

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This week I enjoyed the nice bluetooth support built into the Raspberry Pi desktop. Huge thanks, Simon Long!

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Today I upgraded my Host OS Ubuntu 21.04 to Ubuntu 21.10 Beta, 8 days before the release date. Everything worked fine. In Ubuntu 21.04 the deb version of Firefox had a problem. Sometimes after editing a YouTube comment, it would refuse the comment and there was no way to get it accepted again. You had to start a new one. That problem disappeared with the Firefox snap of 21.10.

The snap performance is instantaneous, except the first load that needs say 2-3 seconds. For me it is great, since I only suspend my desktop and never power it off. Even the desktop power button suspends the desktop. It only powers off abruptly during the 3 to15 power-fails/week :frowning:

The only issue I detected was, that the VM completely froze the first time, when I used the network. If I changed the network to NAT and back to Bridged again before starting the VM, there was no issue.

I had a look at Bitwarden, but I had the impression that it offers the same functionality than Firefox for web-sites so I deleted that Firefox-extension again. I also wanted to use it for the passwords of Virtualbox VMs, but that seems to be missing completely. I did google for an hour, but could not find anything relevant. So probably I remove that Bitwarden snap again and remove myself from its vault. tomorrow.

The fun issue was that Firefox offered me to choose a solid password for Bitwarden and I accepted, so my Bitwarden master password is impossible to remember :slight_smile: But is is stored in Firefox and the Bitwarden master password is protected by the Firefox master password :slight_smile: :slight_smile:

This week, I set up my Raspberry Pi in a spare bedroom with a monitor, to do some Tai Chi routines (which take up all the space in the empty room). Not being contented with wormhole, now I can FTP files/folders into it remotely (using filezilla on my laptop), since I also have pure-ftpd server installed on the Raspberry Pi. Pure-ftpd uses a self-signed SSL cert, installed to encrypt the traffic (not that encryption matters much within the LAN, but such security sloppiness deeply offends my inner “clean freak”).

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I had a useful week for Cannonical, the community and above all myself, because I reported some bugs:

  1. Because the new 21.10 had been released, I decided to test zsys once again. Zsys is the Ubuntu add on to ZFS. It allows you to boot and revert the system to a snapshot. Normally I directly delete zsys, since it creates too many automatic snapshots, but I found a way to switch off the automatic snapshots. Unfortunately Ubuntu crashed during the boot, but the Ubuntu gang did find the error and corrected it within a week. Chapeau :smile:
    I have one remaining issue with zsys, since it keeps creating automatic snapshots for my user directory. I try to live with it and I did find a way to destroy a whole list of snapshots in one command using the %snapshotname1%snapshotnameN as temp solution :slight_smile: Maybe I have to produce another bug report :frowning:
  2. Using Wayland conky did not display anything, only after a killall conky, the second time I started conky, it displayed the system internals as expected. So my conky startup script has been adapted accordingly :slight_smile: I also wrote a bug report explaining, that the first time Conky used the system window and only the second time it used a sub-window of the system window.
  3. Due to the issue with Conky I switched back temporarily to xorg and found the window, that asks for the Firefox Master Password, was completely garbled, if you ignore it and just type in your master password everything works fine :slight_smile: Wayland does not have this issue.
  4. Lastly I detected that starting video, VMs or other stuff in full screen, the top bar and Ubuntu dock do not want to disappear and they keep flickering. Only after a few mouse clicks it disappears. I stiil have to look in somewhat more detail and write another bug report, but of course I hope it will disappear magically. It does not occur in VMs nor on my i5 laptop and it happens in xorg and in Wayland. So I expect a driver issue in my Ryzen 3 2200G video driver.
  5. I also detected that deleting snapshots using “zfs destroy” did not delete that snapshot from the grub list. I do that stuff in a small script, so I added “update-grub” at the end of the script and that helped. I did not see a zsysctl command to destroy such a snapshot using the help function.
  6. The last bug-report is more a simple feature request for the installer. I like to be able to specify the size of the rpool partition during installation. At the moment I select ZFS, the installer could ask; “to specify the size” or “to use the whole disk”. The remainder of the disk could be left empty. I like that feature for the following reasons:
  • Many users like me will have a SSD and a HDD, limiting the size of the rpool partition will allow them to use part of the SSD as a L2ARC/ZIL (SSD cache) for the HDD.
  • My current laptop HDD is 2TB and a rpool partition of 2TB makes Ubuntu very slow, when after a while the HDD gets fragmented. Due to OS updates the OS gets scattered all over the HDD resulting in considerable longer HDD seek times. A smaller rpool datapool (I would choose say 10GB) would speed up the OS on the HDD.
  • It would allow us to use the gnome-disk-utility as simple backup of last resort for the EFI, rpool and bpool partitions. For my laptop and desktop I could store those two backups for example on an old 160GB USB HDD.
  • I don’t like to store my VMs in the USERDATA dataset nor in another own dataset in the rpool datapool. However on the desktop I like them on the nvme-SSD, but preferably in an own datapool with own features and properties.

I also reorganized my virtual machine storage and I have now 4 storage areas:

  • On my nvme SSD; the 5 main VMs with all my applications (Xubuntu 20.04 LTS; Ubuntu 16.04 ESM :slight_smile: Ubuntu Studio 20.04 LTS; Ubuntu 20.04 LTS and Windows 10 Pro); 5 distros in Beta or just coming out of beta (4 x Ubuntu 21.10 family; Fedora 35 and Windows 11 Pro) and 3 distros I’m interested in (Garuda Linux; Linux Mint and Manjaro).
  • On my 2 striped HDD partitions (2 x 500GB) with a 95GB SSD cache; 25 VMs I want to keep. This are all OSes still receiving updates, like e.g Zorin 15 Lite and 16; Ubuntu 18.04 or Windows 8.1.
  • On my 1TB HDDs last 500GB partition also supported by 33GB SSD cache; another 25 VMs that do not receive update anymore, like Ubuntu 4.10; Windows for Workgroups 3.11; Peppermint 3 etc.
  • On the same location in another dataset some doubles; like a 32-bits Windows Vista; frozen Windows 11 Beta. The first 3 sets of VMs have two backups, the last set has only one backup due to a 1.2TB storage limitation on my 2nd backup server a 2003 Pentium 4 HT :slight_smile:
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Hey, @BertN45, you’re a ZFS Ubuntu user. Depending on when you upgraded I just want to give you a heads up on something I came across today.

The bug was fixed after 21.10 shipped.

Edit: Actually it looks like the fix is still in impish-proposed!

I don’t worry, the bug only seem to occur, when people update ZFS directly from GitHub. I only use the ZFS/Linux combination, that have been released and thus tested by Ubuntu. The first entry of the bug report is old and valid for ZOL (ZFS On Linux) and not on OpenZFS. Newer comments to the bug are more recent, but also there the complaints seem to refer to updates directly form GitHub. The reports are talking about different versions of zfs-dkms, some working and others not.

Of course they are valid bug reports, because all those GitHub releases should work with those Linux kernels, but I don’t worry about those issues. I always stick to Ubuntu released combinations of kernel and ZOL or nowadays OpenZFS. In general Ubuntu keeps the ZFS release the same for each Ubuntu release and only updates ZFS going from Ubuntu 21.04/OpenZFS 2.0.2 to Ubuntu 21.10/OpenZFS 2.0.6 and they don’t go for the latest OpenZFS version 2.1.1 to avoid these type of issues.

Consequently I never had any issue and I use ZFS since March 2018.

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