Month: June 2011

uam can now mount CDs and DVDs!

Today I have released uam-0.2. The new release adds a long-awaited feature — capability of mounting and unmounting ejectable media like CD and DVD disks. And it does so in a way much simpler than I expected.

But first, what is uam?

uam is my old project, dating back to the times of HAL. Although HAL is long gone, uam is still there shining. It is a simple, lightweight media automounter using udev rules only.

Unlike HAL (or udisks) it doesn’t introduce any additional daemons. It just installs a few udev rules and helper scripts. When a media device is added or removed, udev calls the scripts and they perform all the mount/umount operations as necessary. HAL/udisks not required anymore, neither do mounter daemons.

Isn’t that a very limited solution?

Of course uam can’t be as flexible as the HAL/udisks attempt. You can’t get it (easily) to do things like asking user for permission or password; well, it doesn’t even create mounted media icons on your desktop. But is that what you really want it to do?

You can tell uam is one of the plug & play apps. emerge uam, CR and newly-inserted media shall start appearing in /media. There’s a config file too. If you want to fine-tune it a little, there are a few more switches and options in /etc/udev/uam.conf. You can set mount options, mountpoint naming, device filtering…

But how does it handle CDs and DVDs without a daemon?

Before, it wasn’t possible to mount CDs without some kind of a polling daemon. HAL/udisks provided such a daemon; I was even considering adding such a daemon to uam. The other solution was to use sys-apps/pmount which allows unprivileged users to mount removable media.

None of these is any longer necessary. Nowadays, kernel can poll ejectable drives itself and report media change (and eject) events through udev. As of 0.2, uam handles those events and is able to mount CDs as well.

In order to do that, the kernel polling has to be enabled. This can be done either per-device:

echo 5000 > /sys/block/sr0/events_poll_msecs

or by setting a common polling interval as events_dfl_poll_msecs parameter to the block module:

echo 5000 > /sys/module/block/parameters/events_dfl_poll_msecs

The interval is specified in milliseconds, i.e. the above examples set it to 5 seconds. Smaller intervals result in a quicker mounting of CDs, larger result in less polling overhead.

PMS Test Suite: getting the test results

One of key problems in PMS Test Suite is getting actual test results. With the whole complexity of build process, including privilege dropping, sandbox, collision protection, auto-pretending it is not that easy to check whether a particular test succeeded without risking a lot of false positives.

The simple attempt: succeed or die!

The simplest method of all would be to assume the test is supposed to either complete and merge successfully or die. Although that will work in many cases, it has many limitations.

First of all, to make it work as expected, the actual test code has to be executed. If for some reason the test code is not executed, we end up with a false positive. Consider the test checking phase function execution order. If for some reason pkg_postinst() isn’t called at all, there is no way we could die about it.

Moreover, if a test is supposed to fail, we can’t be sure if it failed for our reason or with some random PM bug. We could try to implement some method of grabbing the failure message and parsing it but that would imply relying on a particular output format. That’s not really what I’m interested in.

On the other hand, that is most straightforward method of checking test results. It doesn’t introduce additional dependencies, is PM-safe and that’s why the most basic EbuildTestCase class of PMS Test Suite uses that. Well, to be more exact, it checks vardb before and after running the tests to see which ones were merged and which ones failed to.

Passing more complex test results

Due to the problems pointed out above, I’ve decided to introduce a more complex test result checking method. Originally, it was supposed to use files to store ebuild output but during early testing showed that that concept has a few weaknesses.

Most importantly, FEATURES=userpriv resulted in some phase functions being run as root and some other as portage user. I’ve decided that hacking permissions, sandbox and other potential obstacles to get that concept working was not worth the effort.

That’s why the current implementation uses D-Bus for communication between the actual tests and the test runner. I was a little surprised by the fact that neither Portage nor pkgcore had any trouble with letting the test code reach the system bus.

Right now, the DbusEbuildTestCase handles all necessary D-Bus integration. It creates an D-Bus object for each running test, integrates the pms-test-dbus eclass with tests and provides methods to submit and check the test results.

Not all D-Bus test cases have to actually submit any output. Simpler ones just ping the D-Bus object in pkg_setup() to let it know that the test was actually started. This avoids a case when a test is expected to die and is considered so because PM didn’t start it at all (e.g. due to insufficient permissions when emerge assumes --pretend).