Spice for Mac redux

Returning to the Spice for Mac problem. Also working on a memory allocation patch. Updates on the Linux hosts and VMs backups.

Backups

This morning, my Synology was completely unresponsive. Investigating a bit, I noticed two things:

  1. The Snapshot Replication tasks were piling up. I think a VM file is changing too quickly for snapshotting to work OK.
  2. On both Big and Muse, there were dozens of rsync jobs piling up… Ooops 😦

So I decided to change my backup strategy:

  1. I modified my backup scripts to use flock, so that only one rsync per machine is active at a time. Otherwise, since I’m using rsync --delete to make sure that my backup does not keep files I removed locally (keeping them in the history is why I have snapshots), two simultaneous rsync collide into one another, one deleting the temporary files that the other creates. Ouch. Using flock allows me to keep a high backup frequency (every 5 minutes), while ensuring that if a large file is modified, enough time is spent copying it.
  2. I moved the backups of VM image files to a separate shared folder, with a much lower snapshot replication schedule (once a day instead of every 5 minutes).

WordPress overwrite

Later notes were lost because I saved from a window that had an older version of the post 😦 From memory, there was:

Investigation of a problem regarding tearing with video rendering, which Marc-André says is a problem on the Mesa side.

Investigation of networking issues with my guests. Apparently, when “something” happens outside, e.g. DNS / DHCP server not responding or something like that, then I lose user bridged networking, and have to reboot. Investigation later showed that the tap0 and tap1 interfaces are gone. Not sure why. Rebooting fixes it, but I wish there was a better way.

 

Author: Christophe de Dinechin

To the dismay of my beloved wife and kids, I still try to change the world. It's been hopelessly a work in progress for a few decades now… I'm passionate about programming techniques and programming languages, interactive 3D, real-time computing, OS design, free software, physics research, religion, the meaning of life, and so much more (see http://c3d.github.io for a few links)…

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