pterjan's diary

  mkinitrd in Mandriva

We traditionally had a lot of patches on mkinitrd (and even had a real fork for years before rebasing on Fedora's version about two years ago).

Six or seven years ago a patch was sent by our maintainer on redhat bugzilla and it was merged about 1 year later, after 1 year without any reply. Now we tend to send them by mail with not much more success...

I had a patch merged last year and Olivier had one more recently, but we had little success overall getting our work upstream as mkinitrd is not a "real project" but more developed as internal tool by redhat, without a ML to discuss with its developers, etc.

We are now managing our patches in git so I could create easily a for-upstream branch with 18 patches that I think can be merged.

I sent last week an email about this branch to the last bunch of redhat's people who had released versions of mkinitrd as there does not seem to be an official maintainer, hopefuly they will pick some of the patches :)

The other patches are mostly splashy support (but we'll be able to drop this soon hopefuly, as plymouth seems to be working nice) or to reduce boot time.

Regarding improved boot time, we had patched mkinitrd before 2009 Spring to only wait for needed devices (the / partition, the disks under the lvm or soft raid containing /, the partition under the encrypted one containing /...) instead of waiting for all devices to be there. This saves several seconds on most machines. I did not put this part in for-upstream branch as there are two known bugs in current version adding some delay and I did not yet have time to investigate them:

• When using virtio, nash does not see that the device is already there and waits until the end of timeout (1 minute)
• When some disk which is part of a dmraid (or lvm on non partitioned disk) change name, we wait for the wrong disk.This is because UUID are only used for partitions, not for whole disks, and this happens when people had an USB key plugged during install which was sda and shifted other disks. This adds 1 minute delay per disk which does not exist, usually only one.

  For SFR, France is not in Europe

Here is an update on roaming and SMS in Europe. I wrote 2 months ago « they will decrease the price of SMS in Europe from 0.30€ to 0.13 (VAT included). » and I was wrong. The European directive was about roaming only and even if my operator (SFR) sent me a message stating that the price will be decreased for SMS sent from Europe zone, this does not include France.

After receiving my bill (containing 20 SMS from France to UK and 1 from UK), I got confirmation on the phone that SMS from France to Europe are charged 0.30 euro, and SMS from Europe to Europe are now charged 0.13 euro, because for them "Europe zone" means all European countries except France.

I still love this European directive, but I hate how mobile operators don't even try to look consistent in the prices, just to suck all the money they can.

Update: this is actually worse. On week days between 8 and 22, and on week ends, sending a SMS from France to France is 0.15 euro! So, sending a SMS to my operator's network from its own network is more expensive than sending it from abroad.

  Finding my pending patches on new GNOME Bugzilla

Here is how I did:

Chose "Search", click on "Advanced search" tab

Go down to "Advanced Searching Using Boolean Charts"

Select "Attachment is patch", "is equal to", "1"

Click on "And"

Select "Attachment creator", "contains the string", "terjan"

Then click on "Search" and if you like the results, save the search as something like "My Patches"