Category Archives: Opensuse

Flatpak and Blender after system updates – update the flatpak Nvidia packet to match your drivers

Posted on by

Some days ago I wanted to perform some Blender experiments on my laptop. Before I had upgraded most of the installed Leap 15.3 packages installed. Afterwards I thought this was a good opportunity to bring my flatpak based installation of Blender up to date, too.

A flatpak installation of Blender had been necessary since I had changed the laptop’s OS to Opensuse Leap 15.3. Reason: Opensuse did and does not offer any current version of Blender in its official repositories for Leap 15.3 (which in itself is a shame). (I have not yet checked whether the situation has changed with Leap 15.4.)

Blender’s present version available for flatpak is 3.3.1. I had Blender version 3.1 installed. So, I upgraded to version 3.3.1. However, this upgrade step for Blender alone did not work. (In contrast to a snap upgrade).

The problem

The sequence of commands I used to perform the update was:

flatpak remote-add --if-not-exists flathub https://flathub.org/repo/flathub.flatpakrepo
flatpak update org.blender.Blender  
flatpak list

The second command brought Blender V3.3.1 to my disk. However, when I tried to start my new Blender with 

flatpak run org.blender.Blender &

the system complained about a not working GLX and GL installation.

But, actually my KDE desktop was running on the laptop’s Nvidia card. The laptop has an Optimus configuration. I use Opensuse Prime to switch between the Intel i915 driver for the graphics card integrated in the processor and the Nvidia driver for the dedicated graphics card. And Nvidia was running definitively.

The cause of the failure and its solution

Flatpak requires the right interface for the Nvidia card AND the presently active GLX-environment to start OpenGL applications.

A “flatpak list” showed me that I had an “app” “nvidia-470-141-01” running. 

Name                    Application ID                                   Version    Branch   Installation
Blender                 org.blender.Blender                              3.3.1      stable   system
Codecs                  org.blender.Blender.Codecs                                  stable   system
Freedesktop Platform    org.freedesktop.Platform                         21.08.16   21.08    system
Mesa                    org.freedesktop.Platform.GL.default              21.3.9     21.08    system
nvidia-470-141-01       org.freedesktop.Platform.GL.nvidia-470-141-01               1.4      system
Intel                   org.freedesktop.Platform.VAAPI.Intel                        21.08    system
ffmpeg-full             org.freedesktop.Platform.ffmpeg-full                        21.08    system
openh264                org.freedesktop.Platform.openh264                2.1.0      2.0      system

A quick view to the nvidia-settings and YaST showed me, however, that the drivers and other components installed on Leap 15.3 were of version “nvidia-470-141-03”.

Then I tried 

mytux:~ # flatpak install flathub org.freedesktop.Platform.GL.nvidia-470-141
Looking for matches…
Similar refs found for ‘org.freedesktop.Platform.GL.nvidia-470-141’ in remote ‘flathub’ (system):

   1) runtime/org.freedesktop.Platform.GL.nvidia-470-94/x86_64/1.4
   2) runtime/org.freedesktop.Platform.GL.nvidia-470-141-03/x86_64/1.4
   3) runtime/org.freedesktop.Platform.GL.nvidia-470-141-10/x86_64/1.4
   4) runtime/org.freedesktop.Platform.GL.nvidia-470-74/x86_64/1.4
   5) runtime/org.freedesktop.Platform.GL.nvidia-430-14/x86_64/1.4
   6) runtime/org.freedesktop.Platform.GL.nvidia-390-141/x86_64/1.4

Which do you want to use (0 to abort)? [0-6]: 2

This command offered me a list to select the required subversion from. In my case option 2 was the appropriate one.

And indeed after the installation I could start my new Blender version again.

By the way: Flatpak allows for multiple versions to be installed at the same time. Like:

Name                 Application ID                                Version  Branch Installation
Blender              org.blender.Blender                           3.3.1    stable system
Codecs               org.blender.Blender.Codecs                             stable system
Freedesktop Platform org.freedesktop.Platform                      21.08.16 21.08  system
Mesa                 org.freedesktop.Platform.GL.default           21.3.9   21.08  system
nvidia-470-141-03    org.freedesktop.Platform.GL.nvidia-470-141-03          1.4    system
nvidia-470-141-10    org.freedesktop.Platform.GL.nvidia-470-141-10          1.4    system
Intel                org.freedesktop.Platform.VAAPI.Intel                   21.08  system
ffmpeg-full          org.freedesktop.Platform.ffmpeg-full                   21.08  system
openh264             org.freedesktop.Platform.openh264             2.1.0    2.0    system

Conclusion

Your flatpak installation must provide a version of the ‘org.freedesktop.Platform.GL.nvidia-xxx-nnn-mm’ packet which matches the present Nvidia driver installation on your Linux operative system.
Do not forget to upgrade flatpak packets for NVidia after having upgraded Nvidia drivers on your Linux OS!

Links

https://github.com/flathub/ org.blender.Blender/ issues/97
Replacing unstable Blender 2.82 on Leap 15.3 with flatpak or snap based Blender 3.1

Opensuse Leap, dolphin and abysmal slow data transfer between two external USB 3 disks

Posted on by

Today I had to copy a set of multiple directories, each with around 600 sub-directories and a total of 420,000 singular files, between two external USB-3 hard disks. Both the USB controllers of the mainboard and the controllers of the external disks were USB-3 capable. My PC has 64 GB RAM. Which in this case was of no help. I got the problem on an Opensuse Leap 15.3-system, but you may find it on other Linux-OS, too.

The problem

First I started to copy with the help of KDE’s Dolphin. The transfer rates were really bad – something about 5 MB/s. Would have had to wait for hours.

Then I tried with just a standard cp-command. The rates rose to something like 20 MB/s to 25 MB/s. But this was not a reasonable transfer rate either.

A workaround

A search on the Internet then gave me the following two commands

mytux:~ # echo $((48*1024*1024)) > /proc/sys/vm/dirty_bytes
mytux:~ # echo $((16*1024*1024)) > /proc/sys/vm/dirty_background_bytes

Note that setting values on these system parameters automatically sets the standard values of 

mytux:~ # cat /proc/sys/vm/dirty_ratio
20
mytux:~ # cat /proc/sys/vm/dirty_background_ratio
10

to zero! And vice versa. You either have to use dirty_bytes and dirty_background_bytes OR the related ratio-parameters!

The effect of the above settings was remarkable: The total transfer rate (i.e. reading from one disk and writing to another; both on the same controller) rose to 130 MB/s. Still far away from theoretical rates. But something I could live with.
It would be worth to experiment more with the size of the parameters, but I was satisfied regarding my specific problem.

Conclusion

An efficient data transfer on Linux systems between two external USB-3 disks may require system parameter settings by the user.
I admit: The whole thing left me baffled. For discussions and hints please refer to the Internet. It seems that the whole performance reduction is worst for users who have a lot of RAM. And the problem exists since 2014. Unbelievable!

Links

https://gist.github.com/ 2E0PGS/ f63544f8abe69acc5caaa54f56efe52f
https://www.suse.com/ support/kb/doc/? id=000017857
https://archived.forum.manjaro.org/ t/decrease-dirty-bytes-for-more-reliable-usb-transfer/62513
https://unix.stackexchange.com/ questions/ 567698/slow-transfer-write-speed-to-usb-3-flash-what-are-all-possible-solutions
https://unix.stackexchange.com/ questions/ 23003/ slow-performance-when-copying-files-to-and-from-usb-devices
https://lonesysadmin.net/ 2013/12/22/ better-linux-disk-caching-performance-vm-dirty_ratio/
https://forum.manjaro.org/t/the-pernicious-usb-stick-stall-problem/52297
https://stackoverflow.com/ questions/ 6834929/linux-virtual-memory-parameters

 

Problems with upgrading Cyrus based IMAP servers to Opensuse Leap 15.3

Posted on by

I use 2 Mail servers whose IMAP components are based on Cyrus. The mail servers are major parts of KVM/Qemu based VMs. The OS of these VMs over more than a decade was some edition of Opensuse Linux (after SLES got too expensive for a Freelancer). Authorization to access the IMAP-servers is granted by a separate LDAP server via an SASL interface. All clients access the mail servers via a TLS connection. The communication to the LDAP system uses TLS, too. TLS connections are handled by SSSD which in turn uses PAM.

The configuration of all involved clients and servers is a bit tricky – and all components have special settings to interact smoothly. So I was always happy when upgrade processes of the servers respected my settings and things went smoothly. This was not always the case, but at least the main components survived the upgrade processes. But NOT this time.

The Leap 15.3 repositories do not contain Cyrus packages any longer! And I became aware of this when it was too late. Also the SLES update repositories available after the upgrade did not contain any Cyrus packages. After the upgrade the IMAP components of my mail servers were annihilated. Not funny at all!

Fortunately, I had backuped my VMs – and could restore them to bridge the time when I had to solve the problem. Afterward I spent some hours to try to reconstruct a running Cyrus configuration on the upgraded Leap 15.3 version of the mail server VM.

I got a suitable version of a Cyrus package which works with Leap 15.3 versions from the following repository :
download.opensuse.org / repositories / server: / mail / 15.3/.

However, while the installation after some changes of the configuration file worked well locally, I could not get access to it from external clients. In Kmail I got the message that the server did not support any security mechanisms. But STARTTLS should have worked! I checked the SSSD configuration, checked the imapd.config, nsswitch, ldap.config and certificate references. All OK.

I found the solution after having read some of my own old blog posts. The Leap upgrade had brutally deleted my carefully crafted PAM files “imap” and “smtp” in “/etc/pam.d/”. This has happened before. See:

Mail-server-upgrade to Opensuse Leap 15 – and some hours with authentication trouble …

So: Keep backpus of your PAM configuration if you have some complicated TLS-interactions between your Opensuse machines!

And start acquiring knowledge on Dovecot and the migration from Cyrus to Dovecot. Who knows when Cyrus disappears from all SuSE Repositories. And be prepared for problems with Cyrus and Leap 15.4, too.

I find it also frustrating that “https://doc.opensuse.org/release-notes/x86_64/openSUSE/Leap/15.3/” does not explicitly state that the package “cyrus_imapd” was removed. The information refers to changes in “cyrus-sasl” – but this is a different package. Which ironically still exists (though modified) …

But I am too old to explode just because of the lack of important information …