Delan Azabani

linux.conf.au 2014, day 3: fruit flies and firmware

 763 words 4 min  attic

I can honestly say without a doubt, that for all three days in a row of LCA 2014 so far, each was better than the last. At least one session every day set the record for what I'd consider to be the best talk. At this rate, I have no idea where the remaining two days will head.

Following a very late night figuring out the aftermath of yesterday's key signing party, my insufficient sleep made for a lethargic start, but some thought provoking lightning talks of under two minutes each quickly changed the situation.

Now familiar from past miniconfs, Elizabeth Krumbach Joseph then returned to provide an architectural overview of the OpenStack virtual server architecture, providing advice on how to share infrastructure configuration with the community, while automatically keeping sensitive credentials safe.

Dave Chinner, also previously speaking at the Linux kernel miniconf, gave a very detailed analysis of the history of filesystems since the 1970s, as well as data about when crucial features such as directories, journaling, extents, automatic block integrity, COW, wandering logs and so on were introduced in various filesystems implemented in the Linux kernel.

Interestingly, while ext2 and ext3 almost completely ceased to gain new features after a few years from their creation, ext4 has continued to do so until today. btrfs has almost exclusively grown on a LOC basis, recently surpassing the long-living XFS, which has been in active feature development since the early 1990s, while consistently decreasing in LOC. I've stuck with ext4 exclusively out of habit, but perhaps I should give XFS a fair go.

Google's Marc Merlin outlined the process of upgrading thousands of servers from Red Hat 7.1 to a decade-newer version of Debian, completely in place, without rebooting. Essentially, a sudden jump would be impossible due to things like incompatible changes to the standard C library, but with incremental updates and tricky package conversions, it's now a reality.

Thomas Petazzoni's presentation on Buildroot has truly inspired me. Take any embedded hardware system as a target, plus 20-100 lines of menu-generated configuration, and Buildroot will compile an entire kernel, rootfs and packages tailored to your needs and the target's capabilities. Both internal and external toolchains are supported, and popular platforms like the Raspberry Pi and Cubieboard have minimal profiles readily available.

Equipped with two Raspberry Pi boards and potentially a passively cooled industrial PC, there are a huge range of possibilities I could experiment with. If things pan out, it'd be really rewarding for me to have a chance to contribute to the project as well. Hey, Google uses Buildroot — I wonder if the Buildroot leaders have considered participating in Google Summer of Code... but I digress.

However, the best talk of the conference by far was Matthew Garrett's Reverse engineering vendor firmware drivers for little fun and no profit. While carefully avoiding mentioning the offending vendor, who also happens to be a major sponsor of the entire conference, Garrett fixatingly walks us through the painful saga of finding out just how this firmware configuration program works.

Somehow managing to avoid every correct way of doing things, the program uses almost no system calls that one would expect to see. It turns out that it:

To clarify, these are all really bad things to do, and the first two are especially dangerous; without using lockable kernel routines, catastrophic race conditions are possible because the "write address" and "I/O data" steps do not form a single atomic "transaction". Garrett was told not to run the program while ntpd is running, as it too interacts with the CMOS.

After four severely overworked days, many tears and even more alcohol, he successfully reimplements the software. As ridiculous as it is, this may have been a result of a direct port of a DOS utility to Linux, maintaining the same, necessary unsafe routines, but even so, that's still poor form and very lazy.

In a surprisingly positive end to the story, the vendor has since contacted Garrett and has agreed to improve future versions of the software to eliminate these serious flaws. To conclude, he was asked by a member of the audience to compare this experience to his past researching fruit flies. This led to a very astute and hilarious attempt to draw connections between them, and Garrett thus arrived at the understanding that this recent bout of software reverse engineering came out on top.