Category: Linux

Minimizing I/O when migrating from Virtualbox on Veracrypt to Proxmox on ZFS

I’m moving large-ish (half-TB or larger) files between hosts. It’s important to avoid extra copies in this workflow, since each pass over one of the larger files to read the whole thing (and there are several of them) takes hours. I managed to decrypt VM disk images, transform them from one disk image format to another, copy them from one host to another, calculate SHA-256 hashes on both sides to verify data integrity, compress and encrypt them on the destination, and to display a progress bar, all without any additional copies. One big block-device read on the source end and one big block-device write on the destination end is all of the disk I/O that’s happening.

See below for how I did this.

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Solved: Ubuntu 20.04 update makes boot time increase by 4 minutes

I’m doing software development on an Ubuntu 20.04 VM running on my MacBook Pro via Parallels Desktop 17. I recently noticed that the “Software Update” app in the Ubuntu desktop machine was saying there were a lot of things to update, which makes sense since I just created this VM a couple of months ago via a fancy Ansible playbook, and I haven’t gotten around to updating it until yesterday.

Well, after the update, it started taking a really long time to boot. There were two places where it hangs for 2 minutes for no apparent reason, meaning that the boot process is about 4-1/2 minutes long.

I’ve figured out what happened and found a workaround, but I’ll mention a few of the things I looked at along the way since they’re sort of interesting and may be relevant if your issue is similar but not caused by the same thing.

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Take back your control-space keybinding in Ubuntu w/ Cinnamon

I use Emacs and just switched to Cinnamon when upgrading to Trusty Tahr. It somehow stole the control-space keybinding, which I use in Emacs a lot; it is used for setting the current mark, so I can cut or delete a region of a buffer. This is also used for the autocomplete feature in Eclipse, which is one of the main reasons I use Eclipse.

Solution found: some built-in thing called IBus binds that for setting the input method. I like the input method I already have set up & I don’t need to change it, so here’s how to disable that: answer on askubuntu.com.