Building and Booting Upstream Linux and U-Boot for Raspberry Pi 2/3 ARM Boards

Published on 27 October, 2016 in Fedora. 35 Comments Tags: , , , , , .

My home automation setup will make use of Arduinos and also embedded Linux devices. I’m currently looking into a few boards to see if any meet my criteria. Previously I looked at the Orange Pi One, now I’m looking at the Raspberry Pi 2 (which is compatible with the 3).

The most important factor for me is that the device must be supported in upstream Linux (preferably stable, but mainline will do) and U-Boot. I do not wish to use any old, crappy, vulnerable vendor trees!

The Raspberry Pi needs little introduction. It’s a small ARM device, created for education, that’s taken the world by storm and is used in lots of projects.

Raspberry Pi 2, powered by USB with 3v UART connected

Raspberry Pi 2, powered by USB with 3v UART connected

The Raspberry Pi actually has native support for booting a kernel, you don’t have to use U-Boot. However, one of the neat things about U-Boot is that it can provide netboot capabilities, so that you can boot your device from images across the network (we’re just going to use it to boot a kernel and initramfs, however).

One of the other interesting things about the Raspberry Pi is that there are lots of ways to tweak the device using a config.txt file.

The Raspberry Pi 3 has a 64bit CPU, however it is probably best run in 32bit mode (as a Raspberry Pi 2) as 64bit userland is not particularly advanced in ARM world, yet.

Fedora 25 will finally support Raspberry Pi 2 and 3 (although not all peripherals will be supported right away).

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Building and Booting Upstream Linux and U-Boot for Orange Pi One ARM Board (with Ethernet)

Published on 23 October, 2016 in Fedora. 10 Comments Tags: , , , , .

My home automation setup will make use of Arduinos and also embedded Linux devices. I’m currently looking into a few boards to see if any meet my criteria.

The most important factor for me is that the device must be supported in upstream Linux (preferably stable, but mainline will do) and U-Boot. I do not wish to use any old, crappy, vulnerable vendor trees!

The Orange Pi One is a small, cheap ARM board based on the AllWinner H3 (sun8iw7p1) SOC with a quad-Core Cortex-A7 ARM CPU and 512MB RAM. It has no wifi, but does have an onboard 10/100 Ethernet provided by the SOC (Linux patches incoming). It has no NAND flash (not supported upstream yet anyway), but does support SD. There is lots of information available at http://linux-sunxi.org.

Orange Pi One

Orange Pi One

Note that while Fedora 25 does not yet support this board specifically it does support both the Orange Pi PC (which is effectively a more full-featured version of this device) and the Orange Pi Lite (which is the same but swaps Ethernet for WiFi). Using either of those configurations should at least boot on the Orange Pi One.

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My Custom Open Source Home Automation Project – Part 3, Roll Out

Published on 22 October, 2016 in Fedora and FOSS. 1 Comment Tags: , , , .

In Part 1 I discussed motivation and research where I decided to build a custom, open source wired solution. Part 2 discussed the prototype and other experiments.

Because we were having to fit in with the builder, I didn’t have enough time to finalise the smart system, so I needed a dumb mode. This Part 3 is about rolling out dumb mode in Smart house!

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My Custom Open Source Home Automation Project – Part 2, Design and Prototype

Published on 22 October, 2016 in Fedora and FOSS. 2 Comments Tags: , , , .

In Part 1 I discussed motivation and research where I decided to build a custom, open source wired solution. In this Part 2 I discuss the design and the prototype that proved the design.

Wired Design

Although there are options like 1-Wire, I decided that I wanted more flexibility at the light switches.

  • Inspired by Jon Oxer’s awesome SuperHouse.tv
  • Individual circuits for lights and some General Purpose Outlets (GPO)
  • Bank of relays control the circuits
  • Arduinos and/or embedded Linux devices control the relays

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My Custom Open Source Home Automation Project – Part 1, Motivation and Research

Published on 22 October, 2016 in Fedora and FOSS. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

In January 2016 I gave a presentation at the Canberra Linux Users Group about my journey developing my own Open Source home automation system. This is an adaptation of that presentation for my blog. Big thanks to my brother, Tim, for all his help with this project!

Comments and feedback welcome.

Why home automation?

  • It’s cool
  • Good way to learn something new
  • Leverage modern technology to make things easier in the home

At the same time, it’s kinda scary. There is a lack of standards and lack of decent security applied to most Internet of Things (IoT) solutions.

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Configuring QEMU bridge helper after “access denied by acl file” error

Published on 31 August, 2016 in Fedora. 2 Comments Tags: , , .

QEMU has a neat bridge-helper utility which allows a non-root user to easily connect a virtual machine to a bridged interface. In Fedora at least, qemu-bridge-helper runs as setuid (any user can run as root) and privileges are immediately dropped to cap_net_admin. It also has a simple white/blacklist ACL mechanism in place which limits connections to virbr0, libvirt’s local area network.

That’s all great, but often you actually want a guest to be a part of your real network. This means it must connect to a bridged interface (often br0) on a physical network device.

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Live migrating Btrfs from RAID 5/6 to RAID 10

Published on 26 August, 2016 in Fedora. 4 Comments Tags: , , .

Recently it was discovered that the RAID 5/6 implementation in Btrfs is broken, due to the fact that can miscalculate parity (which is rather important in RAID 5 and RAID 6).

So what to do with an existing setup that’s running native Btfs RAID 5/6?

Well, fortunately, this issue doesn’t affect non-parity based RAID levels such as 1 and 0 (and combinations thereof) and it also doesn’t affect a Btrfs filesystem that’s sitting on top of a standard Linux Software RAID (md) device.

So if down-time isn’t a problem, we could re-create the RAID 5/6 array using md and put Btrfs back on top and restore our data… or, thanks to Btrfs itself, we can live migrate it to RAID 10!

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Command line password management with pass

Published on 10 August, 2016 in Fedora and FOSS. 6 Comments Tags: , , , , , , .

Why use a password manager in the first place? Well, they make it easy to have strong, unique passwords for each of your accounts on every system you use (and that’s a good thing).

For years I’ve stored my passwords in Firefox, because it’s convenient, and I never bothered with all those other fancy password managers. The problem is, that it locked me into Firefox and I found myself still needing to remember passwords for servers and things.

So a few months ago I decided to give command line tool Pass a try. It’s essentially a shell script wrapper for GnuPG and stores your passwords (with any notes) in individually encrypted files.

I love it.

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Setting up OpenStack Ansible All-in-one behind a proxy

Published on 9 August, 2016 in FOSS and OpenStack. 7 Comments Tags: , , .

Setting up OpenStack Ansible (OSA) All-in-one (AIO) behind a proxy requires a couple of settings, but it should work fine (we’ll also configure the wider system). There are two types of git repos that we should configure for (unless you’re an OpenStack developer), those that use http (or https) and those that use the git protocol.

Firstly, this assumes an Ubuntu 14.04 server install (with at least 60GB of free space on / partition).

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Booting Fedora 24 cloud image with KVM

Published on 17 June, 2016 in Fedora and FOSS. 2 Comments Tags: , , .

Fedora 24 is on the way, here’s how you can play with the cloud image on your local machine.

Download the image:
wget https://alt.fedoraproject.org/pub/alt/stage/24_RC-1.2/CloudImages/x86_64/images/Fedora-Cloud-Base-24-1.2.x86_64.qcow2

Make a new local backing image (so that we don’t write to our downloaded image) called my-disk.qcow2:
qemu-img create -f qcow2 -b Fedora-Cloud-Base-24-1.2.x86_64.qcow2 my-disk.qcow2

The cloud image uses cloud-init to configure itself on boot which sets things like hostname, usernames, passwords and ssh keys, etc. You can also run specific commands at two stages of the boot process (see bootcmd and runcmd below) and output messages (see final_message below) which is useful for scripted testing.

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