Distributions [LWN.net]

News and Editorials

What's happening at Ubuntu: from X.org updates to upstart

Last week a number of Ubuntu users saw something they never expected to see, a "Linux Blue Screen of Death". A patch to the xorg-server package inadvertently broke the windowing environment on some Ubuntu 6.06 LTS systems. The faulty patch was available for download for about 17 hours beginning Monday August 21 and ending on August 22 at 10:00 UTC. After that time the patch was removed and the mirrors temporarily disabled to prevent others from downloading the faulty package.

The problem did not corrupt or lose any data and affected users still had access to the system console. There were no security vulnerabilities associated with this problem. All in all it was not terribly serious, but for many users unused to the command line it may have seemed serious. More information can be found on this page. Instructions for fixing affected systems are also available.

Mark Shuttleworth had this to say:

An incident report is being compiled by the team and we will publish that for our broader community and users as soon as it is complete. My apologies to those who have been affected, I know that a blue screen of death is the very last thing anybody ever wants to see on Linux desktops and that any downtime caused by mistakes on our part, even measured in minutes, is unacceptable....

If there is a silver lining to the error, it is that it happened during the one week in six months when we have the core distribution development team together in one place. This gave us the opportunity not just to analyse and fix the issue, and to talk about the sequence of events that led to the problem, but also to discuss the processes we must improve to further reduce the likelihood of a repeat. The team is now more aware than ever of the responsibility we assume given extraordinary rate of adoption of Ubuntu.

Some more exciting news from Ubuntu is that of an Upstart in Universe. Upstart is an event-based init daemon, designed to replace sysvinit and other startup daemons.

Modern computers are more flexible; USB devices and network devices can be plugged in and removed at any point, some devices may need to load firmware after detection but before use by the system, mounting a partition in /etc/fstab may require tools in the network filesystem /usr requiring networking to brought up first, and so on. Upstart is designed to dynamically order the start up sequence based on the configuration and hardware found as it goes along.

The current plan is to introduce upstart in stages:

Principal development; implement a daemon that can manage jobs as described.
Replace /sbin/init while running the existing sysv-rc scripts.
Replace /etc/rcS.d scripts with upstart jobs.
Replace other daemon's scripts on a package-by-package basis.
Replace cron, atd, anacron and inetd with the end result of having a single place to configure system jobs.
Modification of other daemons and processes to send events to init instead of trying to run things themselves.

According to the current plan upstart will be at least part way into stage #3 by the time edgy is released. "From the start of development of edgy+2, no new packages will be accepted unless they provide upstart jobs instead of init scripts and init scripts will be considered deprecated."

The upstart package is available in the Ubuntu universe and experienced edgy users are invited to test it. Install the package and follow the instructions in /usr/share/doc/upstart/README.Debian to add a boot option that will use upstart instead of init. "If your system boots and shut downs normally (other than a slightly more verbose boot without usplash running) then it is working correctly." They don't mention it, but, should the system respond with a blue screen of death, it is not working correctly.

Comments (22 posted)

New Releases

Gentoo Linux 2006.1 released

Gentoo Linux 2006.1 is out. "The 2006.1 release features many highlights that improve upon 2006.0. The AMD64, HPPA, x86, 32- and 64-bit PowerPC releases are built with and include GCC 4.1, a great improvement over version 3.4 used for 2006.0. Also included are the GNU C library version 2.4 and Gentoo's baselayout 1.12.1, with improved system startup scripts." Click below for the details.

Full Story (comments: 25)

Fedora Unity Project spins and respins

The Fedora Unity project has ISO images of Fedora Core 5 available for i386 and x86_64 architectures via BitTorrent with all updates released as of August 18, 2006.

Fedora Unity has also announced Live-Spin CD and DVD ISO image of Fedora Core 5. "These Live-Spin ISOs are based on Fedora Core 5 and all updates released as of August 21st, 2006. They are available for the i386 architecture via BitTorrent." They are also making FC6T2 live CDs.