Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:
In 2018, Google moved its in-house Linux desktop from the Goobuntu to a new Linux distro, the Debian-based gLinux. Why? Because, as Google explained, Ubuntu's Long Term Support (LTS) two-year release "meant that we had to upgrade every machine in our fleet of over 100,000 devices before the end-of-life date of the OS."
That was a pain. Add in the time-consuming need to fully customize engineers' PCs, and Google decided that it cost too much. Besides, the "effort to upgrade our Goobuntu fleet usually took the better part of a year. With a two-year support window, there was only one year left until we had to go through the same process all over again for the next LTS. This entire process was a huge stress factor for our team, as we got hundreds of bugs with requests for help for corner cases."
So, when Google had enough of that, it moved to Debian Linux (though not just vanilla Debian). The company created a rolling Debian distribution: GLinux Rolling Debian Testing (Rodete). The idea is that users and developers are best served by giving them the latest updates and patches as they're created and deemed ready for production. Such distros include Arch Linux, Debian Testing, and openSUSE Tumbleweed.
For Google, the immediate goal was to get off the two-year upgrade cycle. As the move to Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) has shown, these incremental changes work well. They're also easier to control and rollback if something goes wrong.
To make all this work without a lot of blood, sweat, and tears, Google created a new workflow system, Sieve. Whenever Sieve spots a new version of a Debian package, it starts a new build. These packages are built in package groups since separate packages often must be upgraded together. Once the whole group has been built, Google runs a virtualized test suite to ensure no core components and developer workflows are broken. Next, each group is tested separately with a full system installation, boot, and local test suite run. The package builds complete within minutes, but testing can take up to an hour.
[...] release Sieve's code so we can all start producing rolling Linux desktop releases. How about it, Google? What do you say?
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Friday July 29 2022, @04:24PM (5 children)
I'm happy with Manjaro, except for maybe the whole systemd thing, but i don't currently have the time to worry about it... maybe when i retire.
I plan on getting a new pc this fall and plan on doing some distro-hopping trialing. Maybe get 2 hd's to make it easier....
I though google was making their own OS?
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Freeman on Friday July 29 2022, @04:39PM (1 child)
My most recent Linux trial on my gaming machine was with an External SSD via 3.0. It booted fast and ran well. I highly recommend doing that kind of thing for a trial. That way you can keep your main setup untouched. In the event you want to give it a good go, without screwing with your current system, you can just unplug all of the internal storage. That way, you have no chance of screwing up your current install. Sure, there are fancy ways of dealing with things, but I do like the KISS (Keep it Simple, Stupid) philosophy.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Runaway1956 on Friday July 29 2022, @04:56PM
I'll second the external drive idea. I'm still fooling with Linux distros (when I have the time) on a MacBook pro. Easy to install, it touches nothing on the Mac SSD, I don't even have to fool with boot sequence settings. When the SSD is plugged in, it offers to boot, or I can select Mac's own SSD. And, the PCIe SSD hooked up via Thunderbolt is indistinguishable from the native SSD for performance. Added benefit is, I can move that SSD from laptop to desktop to phone back to laptop, as needed. Linux will pull necessary drivers as needed when you move!
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 29 2022, @05:53PM
That's just for their Data Gathering Eyeballs
(Score: 2) by lentilla on Sunday July 31 2022, @08:26AM (1 child)
Forget the second hard drive - virtualise.
Get your installation image, and five minutes later you have a brand-new operating system running. (You can surf the web for those five minutes using your normal desktop, with the install running in a window.)
If you don't like the new software, delete the image and move on. (After all, it only cost you five minutes.) Want to try something funky? Take a snapshot, do your worst, and roll back the change in an instant.
Making a mistake during installation and over-writing your original operating system is a thing of the past. You don't have to muck about with special drivers because the virtualisation platform abstracts really common devices. (And it Just Works.)
If you will be in the market for a new PC just make sure it has plenty of RAM - forget that second hard disk and roll it into your RAM budget. You won't notice any difference in speed.
The only downside is a bit of mental gymnastics involving a "Host Key" when you switch between a window on the virtualised installation and the bare metal installation. (You have to press a special key to release the keyboard to let it escape from the virtualised system. This usually goes away after you install some integration software on the virtualised system.)
Virtualise. You will not regret it. I use Oracle's VirtualBox [virtualbox.org], licensed under GPLv2.
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Sunday July 31 2022, @02:17PM
I might try this:
my problem is I'd get it just the way i want it, then would have to do it all over again on hardware.
I know... first world problem :)
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Freeman on Friday July 29 2022, @04:46PM (4 children)
Needing to update everyone, every two years, sounds like an absolute nightmare. Especially, considering it took them nearly an entire year to upgrade everyone. Rolling updates sounds okay, but could cause a lot of trouble as well. Debian puts a lot less fluff into their base system, though. That move alone, could save them untold headaches.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 29 2022, @06:21PM (3 children)
Um, LTS is 5 years.
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Friday July 29 2022, @06:32PM (2 children)
From the article, I just figured that LTS had gone stupid. Though, maybe it's just some weird thing they were doing?
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Friday July 29 2022, @06:36PM (1 child)
Wow, looking at the release cycle for LTS, they were hopping on the new LTS every 2 years. That's just stupid. The entire idea of LTS is that you don't need to upgrade to the latest and greatest "feature set/design whim" while also maintaining security. https://ubuntu.com/blog/what-is-an-ubuntu-lts-release [ubuntu.com]
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 29 2022, @07:36PM
I'm still installing Ubuntu 18.04LTS on 5 year old Xeons. For my purposes, they'll be good until 2028 (or longer if I can accept some fussing with PPAs).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubuntu#Releases [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 2, Interesting) by shrewdsheep on Friday July 29 2022, @05:29PM (1 child)
I administer ~ 10 linux machines (home/work/family/friends, server/desktop) and I exactly understand what they mean by pain of upgrading. First being reluctant, I have now switched (almost) all machines to openSUSE Tumbleweed. So far I am happy (~ 6 mo). BTW, what is described sounds very much like openQA. AFAIK SuSE was the first to introduce automatic testing into distro-building.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Friday July 29 2022, @05:46PM
My Raspbian machines almost never update, once they have a distro that works they just use it until the flash memory burns out.
I mostly leap-frogged from 14.04 to 18.04 to 22.04 for my Ubuntu desktops/systems. AFAIK 18.04 is still supported through April 2023, not that I care so much about that for my personal machines, but for corporate policy things it's nice to say "our OS is still supported..."
The only way gbian or GLinux or whatever you want to call it would make sense for _you_ is if you can create the test suites that ensure the new builds don't break what matters to _you_. If you don't need anything that Google doesn't use on their desktops, then you're golden, but, those little corner cases that you use that they don't....
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 29 2022, @06:48PM (4 children)
I can't tell if the reporter is lazy, or google went insane. Debian testing is certainly not intended for production use.
From the linked debian wiki, 'Compared to stable and unstable, next-stable testing has the worst security update speed. Don't prefer testing if security is a concern.'
- and from the main testing download page, 'Hence, "testing" does not get security updates in a timely manner.'
They say they've got someone trying to integrate security patches into things, but again, untimely. The laughable claim, "Google can patch security holes on the entire fleet quickly without compromising stability" at best presumes there's some stability in the first place. What would be easier (and proper civil of them) would be if they just gave money to the debian project and used stable. It doesn't present like they're contributing codefixes back.
Debian Testing is not for production anything. It's not that the developers don't know if it works or not, they literally know it doesn't.
I guess Cali's got better dope than the rest of the US.
(Score: 3, Informative) by HiThere on Friday July 29 2022, @07:54PM (2 children)
Actually Debian testing works fine most of the time, so the claim that they know it doesn't is wrong. But it does occasionally break harshly. They're TESTING it. Unstable, even, mainly works. It gets the security patches faster, but that's partially because they're barely checked that they're working.
Things pretty much move: somebody develops something, and get it into shape where they think it's pretty good, so they submit it. The developers at Debian look over the submission, and decide whether they think it's good enough. If so, it goes into unstable. There lots of people whack it around, and check it out. If it does well enough, and no real problems are detected, it moves into testing. It sits there being used by lots of people and collecting error reports and fixed. Eventually enough new testing packages are collected that are deemed good enough, and a new stable is put together. Stable is only altered to fix things that are broken...but those can have a high priority.
So testing gets the security patches most slowly. But it's not stuff that's known to be broken. (Even unstable isn't that flaky.)
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 29 2022, @09:02PM
Sounds like when you order fries there's Large, Extra Large and Bring the Truck Around. Ain't nobody wants small.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 31 2022, @04:02AM
Testing breaks, by your own admission, and theirs. Going like "they think it works" is bogus. you can't have it both ways.
"Most of the time." Having your staff's workstations & laptops rendered non-reliable some of the time sounds like a time-sucking (thus expensive) policy.
I've used Debian since potato, all three branches. Filed bugs, submitted patches. The distinctions between unstable, testing, and stable (i've used them all) are not subtle arcana.
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Saturday July 30 2022, @12:13AM
I hope you aren't running production services off of developer desktop workstations. I can't think otherwise why you assume Google is using this for production.
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 2) by Snotnose on Friday July 29 2022, @09:55PM (1 child)
Back when I was a sysadmin (91-92) I did whatever Sun told me to, software wise (*). When I had my own network of Linux boxes (tbh, have, although now they're called pi and NAS) I upgrade whenever I'm bored and want to Do Something and I'm bored and feel Something Needs Doing (tm).
I'm envisioning a couple thousand folks like me that run Linux outside of official channels, and Someone in the High Tower has had a "um, this might fuck my career trajectory" moment.
Which, TBH, I can't blame him/her for.
* hardware wise? I bought a bunch of cheap PC RAM and upgraded all our machines to max out RAM for 25% the official cost. I convinced my boss to let me physically cut a wire on every Sun desktop after recording a conversation between him and his secretary, which I setup in advance.
Too bad cameras weren't a thing back then, as I had my suspicions on my boss and his secretary, and, well, lets just say I like to think I wouldn't sink to that level. But goddam was she hot. Then again, he was not.
I just passed a drug test. My dealer has some explaining to do.
(Score: 1) by Runaway1956 on Saturday July 30 2022, @01:44AM
I guess that can be good, or bad. A lot of families start that way. Dynasties, even. But, I've sure screwed up a lot of stuff when I was bored!
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by darkfeline on Saturday July 30 2022, @12:23AM
> release Sieve's code so we can all start producing rolling Linux desktop releases. How about it, Google? What do you say?
The author seems to think there's a neat little software package that Google could just release and let everyone magically have custom stable rolling release Linux desktop distros with little effort.
I have a bridge to sell him, comes with a 3 step assembly guide.
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!