Geek Blight

A web search only provided some unconvincing results with old tools that (for the most part) didn’t work, or were not as straightforward, or involved media servers and more complex setups. Long story short, if you want something that works well and is relatively easy to set up and understand in concept for us Linux nerds, the most practical solution I’ve found is to install the VLC app on the AppleTV, which has a convenient feature to play content from a remote URL. This way, you only need to serve the video file from your Linux box using HTTP. Yes, technically this is not really “casting”.

Typing URLs on the VLC app is a pain in the neck unless you pair a Bluetooth mouse and keyboard to your AppleTV, but VLC remembers a history of recently played URLs, so my final setup involves serving the content I want to play from a fixed URL. This way, I can open the VLC app, scroll down to the last played URL and hit the remote button to start playing whatever I’ve chosen to watch at that moment in a matter of seconds.

My URL looks like http://192.168.68.202:64004/watch.mkv. Let’s take that bit by bit.

You probably want something simple for the HTTP server, and there are several options.

Most Linux distributions have Python installed, and the http.server module includes a simple built-in HTTP server that can be used from the command line. python3 -m http.server -d DIRECTORY PORT will serve the contents of the DIRECTORY directory using the given PORT (e.g. 8080 as we mentioned earlier). I’m also partial to Busybox’s httpd server because it has a few extra capabilities and it allows you to customize directory indexing with a CGI script. To use it, call busybox httpd -f -vv -p PORT -h DIRECTORY. For most people, the Python server is a more direct and convenient option.

A simple setup is serving the contents of a fixed directory in the file system where you place a symlink named watch.mkv that points to the real file you want to serve, and you change the target of the symlink each time. The directory could be a subdirectory of /tmp, or perhaps $HOME/public_html. In my case I serve $HOME/Public because I use that location for serving files to the local network with multiple tools.

Then, there’s the matter of making sure the AppleTV can connect to your Linux box on the chosen port. If your distribution uses some kind of firewall, you may have to explicitly open the port. For example, in Fedora Workstation you could use sudo firewall-cmd --permanent --add-port=PORT/tcp as a one-time setup command with PORT being the chosen port.

If the file you serve contains subtitle streams, VLC lets you choose the subtitle track when playing content, so that’s good enough. The app also has an option to look for subtitles following the same name pattern as the file being played. For example, placing a watch.srt file next to the video file in the same directory should work. I sometimes download SRT files from the web when the included DVD subtitles are subpar. I’m looking at you, Paw Patrol 2-Movie Collection, and your subtitles that display too early, too late or too briefly! Almost as disappointing as the quality of the toys.

In any case, I found it very convenient to create a proper MKV file on the fly whenever I want to watch something, embedding the subtitle stream in it if needed, and making it active by default for the most friction-less experience possible. Note this is different from “burning” the subtitles into the video stream, which requires re-encoding. When embedding subtitles this way, I don’t even have to bother activating them from VLC. Creating a proper MKV file on /tmp is easy and pretty fast (seconds) if you don’t re-encode the video or audio streams. For that, I wrote the following script and named it ffmpeg-prepare-watch.sh.

Note you can change WEBSERVER_PORT, WEBSERVER_ROOT and the way the HTTP server is launched as mentioned above.

The user experience is now precisely as I like it: simple and understandable, despite using the command line. When I want to “cast” something from my Linux PC, I call ffmpeg-prepare-watch.sh VIDEO_FILE SUBTITLES_FILE. This will create /tmp/watch.mkv very quickly, and $HOME/Public/watch.mkv is a symlink to it. Once ffmpeg finishes, I answer "y" to the prompt to start the web server, which will serve the contents of $HOME/Public over HTTP. Finally, I start playing the last URL from the VLC AppleTV app. The whole process takes a few seconds and is as convenient as using catt was before.

Hello, I’m Ricardo from Igalia and I’m going to talk about Device-Generated Commands in Vulkan. This is a new extension that was released a couple of weeks ago. I wrote CTS tests for it, I helped with the spec and I worked with some actual heros, some of them present in this room, that managed to get this implemented in a driver.

Device-Generated Commands is an extension that allows apps to go one step further in GPU-driven rendering because it makes it possible to write commands to a storage buffer from the GPU and later execute the contents of the buffer without needing to go through the CPU to record those commands, like you typically do by calling vkCmd functions working with regular command buffers.

It’s one step ahead of indirect draws and dispatches, and one step behind work graphs.

Getting away from Vulkan momentarily, if you want to store commands in a storage buffer there are many possible ways to do it. A naïve approach we can think of is creating the buffer as you see in the slide. We assign a number to each Vulkan command and store it in the buffer. Then, depending on the command, more or less data follows. For example, lets take the sequence of commands in the slide: (1) push constants followed by (2) dispatch. We can store a token number or command id or however you want to call it to indicate push constants, then we follow with meta-data about the command (which is the section in green color) containing the layout, stage flags, offset and size of the push contants. Finally, depending on the size, we store the push constant values, which is the first chunk of data in blue. For the dispatch it’s similar, only that it doesn’t need metadata because we only want the dispatch dimensions.

But this is not how GPUs work. A GPU would have a very hard time processing this. Also, Vulkan doesn’t work like this either. We want to make it possible to process things in parallel and provide as much information in advance as possible to the driver.

So in Vulkan things are different. The buffer will not contain an arbitrary sequence of commands where you don’t know which one comes next. What we do is to create an Indirect Commands Layout. This is the main concept. The layout is like a template for a short sequence of commands. We create this layout using the tokens and meta-data that we saw colored red and green in the previous slide.

We specify the layout we will use in advance and, in the buffer, we ony store the actual data for each command. The result is that the buffer containing commands (lets call it the DGC buffer) is divided into small chunks, called sequences in the spec, and the buffer can contain many such sequences, but all of them follow the layout we specified in advance.

In the example, we have push constant values of a known size followed by the dispatch dimensions. Push constant values, dispatch. Push constant values, dispatch. Etc.

The second thing Vulkan does is to severely limit the selection of available commands. You can’t just start render passes or bind descriptor sets or do anything you can do in a regular command buffer. You can only do a few things, and they’re all in this slide. There’s general stuff like push contants, stuff related to graphics like draw commands and binding vertex and index buffers, and stuff to dispatch compute or ray tracing work. That’s it.

Moreover, each layout must have one token that dispatches work (draw, compute, trace rays) but you can only have one and it must be the last one in the layout.

Something that’s optional (not every implementation is going to support this) is being able to switch pipelines or shaders on the fly for each sequence.

Summing up, in implementations that allow you to do it, you have to create something new called Indirect Execution Sets, which are groups or arrays of pipelines that are more or less identical in state and, basically, only differ in the shaders they include.

Inside each set, each pipeline gets an index and you can change the pipeline used for each sequence by (1) specifying the Execution Set in advance (2) using an execution set token in the layout, and (3) storing a pipeline index in the DGC buffer as the token data.

The summary of how to use it would be:

First, create the commands layout and, optionally, create the indirect execution set if you’ll switch pipelines and the driver supports that.

Then, get a rough idea of the maximum number of sequences that you’ll run in a single batch.

With that, create the DGC buffer, query the required preprocess buffer size, which is an auxiliar buffer used by some implementations, and allocate both.

Then, you record the regular command buffer normally and specify the state you’ll use for DGC. This also includes some commands that dispatch work that fills the DGC buffer somehow.

Finally, you dispatch indirect work by calling vkCmdExecuteGeneratedCommandsEXT. Note you need a barrier to synchronize previous writes to the DGC buffer with reads from it.

You can also do explicit preprocessing but I won’t go into detail here.

That’s it. Thank for watching, thanks Valve for funding a big chunk of the work involved in shipping this, and thanks to everyone who contributed!

This one is easy because I was already using something similar to monitor disks on a few computers using smartd. When smartd detects a disk may be about to fail, it can be told to email root, and we can use $HOME/.forward to redirect the email with a script. The script, as in this case, can use msmtp, which is a nice program that lets you send emails from the command line using an SMTP server. Thanks to Fastmail, I generated a new set of credentials for SMTP access, installed msmtp in the cloud server and created a config file for it in /etc/msmtprc. Note running msmtp --version will report the right system configuration file name. The configuration file looks like this:

In my case, SERVER is smtp.fastmail.com, PORT is 465 and USERNAME and PASSWORD are the ones I created. The TLS trust file has that path in Fedora, but it may be different on other distributions.

With that configuration all set, I created the following script as /usr/local/bin/pingmonitor-mail:

It expects the subject of the email as the first argument and typically a sentence for the body as the second argument. I ran it a few times from the command line and verified it worked perfectly.

As mentioned before, nginx does not support CGI. It only supports FastCGI, so this is slightly more complicated than expected. After a few tries, I settled on using /var/run/pingmonitor as the main directory containing the FastCGI socket (more on that later) and /var/run/pingmonitor/pings for the actual pings.

I thought a bit about how to record the ping timestamps. My initial idea was to save it to a file but then I started overthinking it. If I used a file to store the timestamps (either appending to it or overwriting the file contents) I wanted to make sure the checker would always read a full timestamp and wouldn’t get partial file contents. If the CGI script wrote the timestamp to the file it would need to block it somehow in the improbable case that the checker was attempting to read the file at the same time. To avoid that complication, I decided to take advantage of the file system to handle that for me. /var/run/pingmonitor/pings would be a directory instead. When the CGI script runs, it would create a new empty file in that directory with the timestamp being the name of the file. The checker would list the files in the directory, convert their names to timestamps and check the most recent one. I think that works because either the file exists or it does not when you list the directory contents, so it’s atomic. If you know it’s not atomic, please leave a comment or email me with a reference.

For the FastCGI script itself, I installed the fastcgi Python module using pip. This allowed me to create a script that easily provides a FastCGI process that launches before nginx, runs as the nginx user and creates the timestamp files when called. Take a look below:

Apart from directory creation and user switching logic at the beginning, the interesting part is the pingmonitor function. It obtains the epoch in nanoseconds and converts it to seconds. The file name is a zero-padded version of that number, which is is then “touched”, and a reply is served to the HTTP client.

Not pictured, is that by decorating the function with @fastcgi.fastcgi(), a socket is created in the current directory (/var/run/pingmonitor) with the name fcgi.sock. That socket is the FastCGI socket that nginx will use to redirect requests to the FastCGI process. Also, if you run that file as a script, the decorator will create a main loop for you.

I saved the script to /usr/local/bin/pingmonitor.cgi and set up a systemd service file to start it. The systemd unit file is called called /etc/systemd/system/pingmonitor.service:

To hook it up with nginx, I created a block in its configuration file:

I used a StackOverflow question as a reference for this.

In the nginx configuration block you can see I’m using RANDOM_STRING as part of the CGI script URL, which is a long random string. This is because I didn’t want that URL to be easily discoverable. Its location is basically a secret between my server and my RPi.

After setting everything up I accessed the URL with my browser multiple times, confirmed the timestamp files were being created, etc.

This is the easy part that goes in the RPi. I could’ve used a systemd timer but went with a service instead (like the guy pushing all shapes through the same hole), so the main part is a script that pings the URL once a minute, saved as /usr/local/bin/pingmonitor-pinger.sh.

And the corresponding systemd service file called /etc/systemd/system/pingmonitor-pinger.service:

This part goes into the cloud server again. The script tries to send a single email when it detects pings are too old (1000 seconds, more or less reasonable limit chosen arbitrarily), and another one if the pings come back. It’s also in charge of removing old ping files. I could have removed all existing files with each check, but I decided to arbitrarily keep the last 10 in case it was useful for something. To send emails, it uses /usr/local/bin/pingmonitor-mail as described above. I saved it under /usr/local/bin/pingmonitor-checker.py.

Again, such an script could be run as a systemd timer, but I decided to write it as a loop and use a service instead, called /etc/systemd/system/pingmonitor-checker.service.

After setting that up, I checked it works by experimenting with a few timeouts and stopping and starting the pinger service on the RPi. I’m pretty happy with how things turned out, given that this sits outside my usual domain. With an unreliable Internet connection at home, what I did may not be suitable for you if all you’re interested in are the actual power outages. In my case, Internet outages are very infrequent so I’m willing to live with a few false positives if that means I won’t waste the contents of my fridge and freezer again.