Marc's Public Blog

Vmware linux kernel support downfall

I need to start by saying that I've always considered vmware an impressive product. Some of what they're doing is incredibly hard (fast VT without CPU support) and they're doing it very well.

Yet, I've always had a gripe with Vmware which finally got me to switch to Virtualbox just now: their total lack of support for new kernels as they come out.
While it would be nice, I'm not asking for their website to have up to date patches for the latest rc kernel patch that just came out 2 hours ago, but they have always lacked support for new stable kernels, even months after they came out (sometimes up to six months almost!).

It's not like they don't have kernel engineers there, why don't they write timely patches to vmmon, vmnet and friends a few days after each new stable kernel comes out? Ok, there is the support and testing issue, but then just post them unofficially on the web site as 'unsupported', which is better than my googling for the same thing off some random guy's web page.
Now you could say "just upgrade to workstation 7.x", but shouldn't I get kernel support for the existing workstation license I already paid for, for a reasonable number of years, like 3 to 5? I'm not asking to have vmware 2 working anymore... Forcing me to buy the next vmware every time just to get kernel support is wrong. The worst part is that even workstation 7 still does not support kernel 2.6.35 or 2.6.36, so even by paying for the next version, I'm still unsupported.

For "fun", I tried to get the lastest vmware workstation from their web site, take its modules, patch them for 2.6.36 since they do not work as is, and then try to use them with vmware 6.5. Unfortunately, they're not backward compatible :(

So, I'm left with using the free limited vmware player when I had 5 paid for licenses for vmware 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6 (!). That's just wrong: I shouldn't have to use the free limited product when I have paid licenses for multiple older vmware versions with no kernel support...
And to add insult to injury when I installed the latest vmware player, it removed vmware workstation from my system without asking me, never mind if I wanted to reboot with an older kernel and use my older vmware workstation. Grr, that's not cool guys!

So, while I really liked vmware, the company and the product, this just drove me away and enticed me to try VirtualBox.
Sorry to tell you vmware: you lost a customer who could otherwise recommend your products for server room use because you couldn't be bothered to support new linux kernels timely as they came out in the 10 years or so you've been in business and I've used your products, and you clearly dropped support for your paid customers as soon as a new vmware came out, forcing people to upgrade and pay for a new version.

VirtualBox

Because USB support is a requirement for me (I mostly use windows to sync to hardware that only has windows support, like garmin GPSes), I had to use the closed source edition from Oracle.

First impressions were good: Oracle provides multiple native packages for all popular distributions (which is better than the vmware bundle that decides to uninstall old versions of vmware products without asking me), and one apt-get command later, I had virtualbox running on my laptop.

The part that really impressed me was that VirtualBox was able to re-use my vmware disk image cut in 2GB chucks as is. I just pointed it to my vmware image, and it just booted windows. Now, things were a bit ugly until I got its tools installed (a bit like vmware tools), once that was done, things worked pretty well. I read some notes about the fact that a WinXP image might not work as is in virtualbox due to ACPI and IOAPIC, but my W2K image from 10 years ago just worked as is.
A small problem was that it was incompatible with the AMD PCnet emulation than vmware used, so networking didn't quite work until I switched virtualbox to emulate an e1000 card and installed the e1000 driver in my vmware image. After that, things were good.

I was then even able to shut down the image, and re-open it in vmware player 7 (the only thing to be very careful about was that vmware player remembered that the image was a snapshot and tried to restore windows to its running state in vmware with disk blocks that has since changed due to Virtualbox having run in the meantime. Worryingly enough I did not find a way to tell vmware player to start the image from scratch as opposed to trying to restore the frozen snapshot. I had to restore my full vmware disk blocks from a backup and then delete the pointers vmware had so that it would not try to restore the image anymore and just boot it from scratch.

Anyway, I can now run my vmware image with either VirtualBox or Vmware Player, although I'm going to stick to Virtualbox from now on: I tested USB on it and it worked fine to talk to my garmin GPS, so that's all I need.

Little things I noticed:

But all in all, while I'm sad to have had to ditch Vmware after about 10 years of being a user, I'm a happy Virtualbox user now. I just hope Oracle isn't going to screw it up.

My French Roast Coffee Bag Costume

The Angry Birds from Android

Just to say that I'm not picking on plymouth, other random things broke during my recent upgrades, and I fixed it (including Xorg switching to kernel modesetting, and requiring i915.modeset=1). Usually it's just a matter of googling for error messages and applying the answers.
(plymouth is a new 'feature' that hides all the boot messages by default, replaces them with a splash screen and tries to capture text output from the boot and log it, which it still does improperly as of today, including by dropping them if there are too many).

A few release backs, the switch to upstart was a bit painful. I can't say I was super thrilled with it, especially when at the time documentation and debugging info was sparse. This has however been fixed (the documentation that is), and while there are still bugglets here and there (statd won't start properly on my laptop), at least my boot doesn't randomly hang on networking dependencies anymore ( https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/network-manager/+bug/499361 ). But the main part is that I'm willing to be more patient and understanding with upstart because it is a clear win for linux: it is good progress on functionality.

And this brings up to the trainwreck otherwise known as plymouth.

So, you might ask, what is so wrong with plymouth? Well, how about this:

• If you are going to be significantly changing all our systems, you'd better post a good rationale as to why the change is good and desirable. This was done for upstart and even mostly for network-manager (nevermind the many problems that network-manager had for 18 months after being pushed to all before it was mostly useable and stable). The cynic will point out that lack of rationale for the switch to plymouth is that said rationale is very dubious.
• If you are going to be pushing a big change to all our system (hell, it's only how they boot, how they fsck drives, and how you can get to single user mode, or not), you'd better bad a page that explains how it works, how you debug it, and how you work around it if you have to. Why is it that even getting 'noplymouth' as a boot option is such a highly guarded secret apparently?
• If you really need to put a multiplexer in the boot system, which is a big change, make baby steps: add it while keeping text mode booting by default for at least existing installs. Debug the hell out of it (it looks to me that as text mode booting as you can get with plymouth is a very little tested code path, unless the entire code is as buggy still as what I experienced in text mode).
• Who thought that they were going to make friends with us by forcing that utterly useless "you don't need to see your boot, it might have useful debug info that might be useful to you, we can't have that". Why is it that is is so fscking hard to turn off plymouth boot message stealing? Even after turning off the graphical crap, you still get a useless one in text mode spinning around colored text dots. Really ?!?!
  noplymouth INIT_VERBOSE=yes at the lilo prompt seems to do it for me right now, but where on earth is that documented?

So, that's really my beef with canonical on this one: I care much much more about having a system I can upgrade mostly safely like I can in debian, than this graphical crap that is downward hurtful to my system. I really don't care about how windows-like you can make linux look like (up to an un-debuggable and opaque boot), I'm really not interested.
Ubuntu/Canonical, stop the madness, please. Do impose some standards on your eager developers who think they came up with the last 'this is so cool' thing to add to linux, especially when it affects essential parts of the system.
I think I'm also specifically bitter about plymouth in ubuntu because its presence could have been made optional in init scripts (Red Hat even had such support in their init scripts), but in ubuntu "it's obviously good enough for everybody, so eat it and shut up".

For more details on what went wrong this time with plymouth, if you are curious:

I could go on (it does go on), but that's long enough, you get the idea....

As sad as it is, and with people like Steve Langasek ( https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/plymouth/+bug/665789 ) who are now probably understandably defensive about plymouth, likely due to many complaints like mine, instead of doing the right thing and making it really optional, writing a rationale on ubuntu.com as to why it's there and why we should love it, and especially documenting the crap out of it, I'm now dubious as to whether ubuntu/canonical will get a clue about this and whether I should just switch back to Debian where I haven't seen much insanity like this...

Thankfully the flying weather was fantastic, and I got there in 45mn flat once in the air, so I wasn't at the track too late.

Increasing amounts of caffeine during the day sealed the deal: I was able to run my sessions well enough, even learn some tips from an advanced coach. I only got down to 2:09 which didn't beat my best (2:08) but I seemed to be a bit more consistent and maybe slightly smoother driving.

There were some serious miatas there, some pushing over 300HP with slicks. I couldn't compete with that :)

oh, and did I mention race cars? :)

yet, I had a good time :)

Here's a video of my 6th session where I was playing with a porsche, we were pretty evenly matched:

you can see the camera under the belly

I get 20 to 25mn flight time with one battery, which was more than enough, and captured the frames below from the HD video. I'll say that unfortunately the HD video quality from my GoPro HD is far from stellar, but it beats the original video I was getting with the non HD versions that came before it (see my first attempt at it last year with my original GoPro hung from my Minimag).
The Biggest improvement from my attempt last year was that the Cularis was much bigger and easier to see from a distance. I was easily able to fly much farther from where I was standing (about a mile) without totally losing track of which way the glider was pointing and how I could still control it to fly it back (which definitely was a problem with the much smaller minimag).

Below are frames I captured from the video:

original main campus

the 'famous' bridge to 1950 :)

1950/alza

46/47

45 and the droid/eclair/cupcake

1098 and 900 alta with 101 in the background

1965

1945 and rengstroff

After getting what felt like enough passes over the campus buildings (the so called 'GWC' was a bit out of reach for safe flying), I did a few passes over the Shoreline Amphitheatre:

Putting aside the fact that my landing wasn't that stellar, this was my only flight and the video was good the first time (thankfully I had gotten some practise shooting from a distance and 'aiming' at targets from almost a mile away). The video quality wasn't awesome but I guess that's as good as you get from a cheap-ish HD camera you can stick onto a small RC plane, so it's not too bad.