Search Results: "pm"

12 August 2020

Michael Stapelberg: Linux distributions: Can we do without hooks and triggers?

Hooks are an extension feature provided by all package managers that are used in larger Linux distributions. For example, Debian uses apt, which has various maintainer scripts. Fedora uses rpm, which has scriptlets. Different package managers use different names for the concept, but all of them offer package maintainers the ability to run arbitrary code during package installation and upgrades. Example hook use cases include adding daemon user accounts to your system (e.g. postgres), or generating/updating cache files. Triggers are a kind of hook which run when other packages are installed. For example, on Debian, the man(1) package comes with a trigger which regenerates the search database index whenever any package installs a manpage. When, for example, the nginx(8) package is installed, a trigger provided by the man(1) package runs. Over the past few decades, Open Source software has become more and more uniform: instead of each piece of software defining its own rules, a small number of build systems are now widely adopted. Hence, I think it makes sense to revisit whether offering extension via hooks and triggers is a net win or net loss.

Hooks preclude concurrent package installation Package managers commonly can make very little assumptions about what hooks do, what preconditions they require, and which conflicts might be caused by running multiple package s hooks concurrently. Hence, package managers cannot concurrently install packages. At least the hook/trigger part of the installation needs to happen in sequence. While it seems technically feasible to retrofit package manager hooks with concurrency primitives such as locks for mutual exclusion between different hook processes, the required overhaul of all hooks seems like such a daunting task that it might be better to just get rid of the hooks instead. Only deleting code frees you from the burden of maintenance, automated testing and debugging. In Debian, there are 8620 non-generated maintainer scripts, as reported by find shard*/src/*/debian -regex ".*\(pre\ post\)\(inst\ rm\)$" on a Debian Code Search instance.

Triggers slow down installing/updating other packages Personally, I never use the apropos(1) command, so I don t appreciate the man(1) package s trigger which updates the database used by apropos(1). The process takes a long time and, because hooks and triggers must be executed serially (see previous section), blocks my installation or update. When I tell people this, they are often surprised to learn about the existance of the apropos(1) command. I suggest adopting an opt-in model.

Unnecessary work if programs are not used between updates Hooks run when packages are installed. If a package s contents are not used between two updates, running the hook in the first update could have been skipped. Running the hook lazily when the package contents are used reduces unnecessary work. As a welcome side-effect, lazy hook evaluation automatically makes the hook work in operating system images, such as live USB thumb drives or SD card images for the Raspberry Pi. Such images must not ship the same crypto keys (e.g. OpenSSH host keys) to all machines, but instead generate a different key on each machine. Why do users keep packages installed they don t use? It s extra work to remember and clean up those packages after use. Plus, users might not realize or value that having fewer packages installed has benefits such as faster updates. I can also imagine that there are people for whom the cost of re-installing packages incentivizes them to just keep packages installed you never know when you might need the program again

Implemented in an interpreted language While working on hermetic packages (more on that in another blog post), where the contained programs are started with modified environment variables (e.g. PATH) via a wrapper bash script, I noticed that the overhead of those wrapper bash scripts quickly becomes significant. For example, when using the excellent magit interface for Git in Emacs, I encountered second-long delays when using hermetic packages compared to standard packages. Re-implementing wrappers in a compiled language provided a significant speed-up. Similarly, getting rid of an extension point which mandates using shell scripts allows us to build an efficient and fast implementation of a predefined set of primitives, where you can reason about their effects and interactions. magit needs to run git a few times for displaying the full status, so small overhead quickly adds up.

Incentivizing more upstream standardization Hooks are an escape hatch for distribution maintainers to express anything which their packaging system cannot express. Distributions should only rely on well-established interfaces such as autoconf s classic ./configure && make && make install (including commonly used flags) to build a distribution package. Integrating upstream software into a distribution should not require custom hooks. For example, instead of requiring a hook which updates a cache of schema files, the library used to interact with those files should transparently (re-)generate the cache or fall back to a slower code path. Distribution maintainers are hard to come by, so we should value their time. In particular, there is a 1:n relationship of packages to distribution package maintainers (software is typically available in multiple Linux distributions), so it makes sense to spend the work in the 1 and have the n benefit.

Can we do without them? If we want to get rid of hooks, we need another mechanism to achieve what we currently achieve with hooks. If the hook is not specific to the package, it can be moved to the package manager. The desired system state should either be derived from the package contents (e.g. required system users can be discovered from systemd service files) or declaratively specified in the package build instructions more on that in another blog post. This turns hooks (arbitrary code) into configuration, which allows the package manager to collapse and sequence the required state changes. E.g., when 5 packages are installed which each need a new system user, the package manager could update /etc/passwd just once. If the hook is specific to the package, it should be moved into the package contents. This typically means moving the functionality into the program start (or the systemd service file if we are talking about a daemon). If (while?) upstream is not convinced, you can either wrap the program or patch it. Note that this case is relatively rare: I have worked with hundreds of packages and the only package-specific functionality I came across was automatically generating host keys before starting OpenSSH s sshd(8) . There is one exception where moving the hook doesn t work: packages which modify state outside of the system, such as bootloaders or kernel images. Even that can be moved out of a package-specific hook, as Fedora demonstrates.

Conclusion Global state modifications performed as part of package installation today use hooks, an overly expressive extension mechanism. Instead, all modifications should be driven by configuration. This is feasible because there are only a few different kinds of desired state modifications. This makes it possible for package managers to optimize package installation.

Michael Stapelberg: distri: 20x faster initramfs (initrd) from scratch

In case you are not yet familiar with why an initramfs (or initrd, or initial ramdisk) is typically used when starting Linux, let me quote the wikipedia definition: [ ] initrd is a scheme for loading a temporary root file system into memory, which may be used as part of the Linux startup process [ ] to make preparations before the real root file system can be mounted. Many Linux distributions do not compile all file system drivers into the kernel, but instead load them on-demand from an initramfs, which saves memory. Another common scenario, in which an initramfs is required, is full-disk encryption: the disk must be unlocked from userspace, but since userspace is encrypted, an initramfs is used.

Motivation Thus far, building a distri disk image was quite slow: This is on an AMD Ryzen 3900X 12-core processor (2019):
distri % time make cryptimage serial=1
80.29s user 13.56s system 186% cpu 50.419 total # 19s image, 31s initrd
Of these 50 seconds, dracut s initramfs generation accounts for 31 seconds (62%)! Initramfs generation time drops to 8.7 seconds once dracut no longer needs to use the single-threaded gzip(1) , but the multi-threaded replacement pigz(1) : This brings the total time to build a distri disk image down to:
distri % time make cryptimage serial=1
76.85s user 13.23s system 327% cpu 27.509 total # 19s image, 8.7s initrd
Clearly, when you use dracut on any modern computer, you should make pigz available. dracut should fail to compile unless one explicitly opts into the known-slower gzip. For more thoughts on optional dependencies, see Optional dependencies don t work . But why does it take 8.7 seconds still? Can we go faster? The answer is Yes! I recently built a distri-specific initramfs I m calling minitrd. I wrote both big parts from scratch:
  1. the initramfs generator program (distri initrd)
  2. a custom Go userland (cmd/minitrd), running as /init in the initramfs.
minitrd generates the initramfs image in 400ms, bringing the total time down to:
distri % time make cryptimage serial=1
50.09s user 8.80s system 314% cpu 18.739 total # 18s image, 400ms initrd
(The remaining time is spent in preparing the file system, then installing and configuring the distri system, i.e. preparing a disk image you can run on real hardware.) How can minitrd be 20 times faster than dracut? dracut is mainly written in shell, with a C helper program. It drives the generation process by spawning lots of external dependencies (e.g. ldd or the dracut-install helper program). I assume that the combination of using an interpreted language (shell) that spawns lots of processes and precludes a concurrent architecture is to blame for the poor performance. minitrd is written in Go, with speed as a goal. It leverages concurrency and uses no external dependencies; everything happens within a single process (but with enough threads to saturate modern hardware). Measuring early boot time using qemu, I measured the dracut-generated initramfs taking 588ms to display the full disk encryption passphrase prompt, whereas minitrd took only 195ms. The rest of this article dives deeper into how minitrd works.

What does an initramfs do? Ultimately, the job of an initramfs is to make the root file system available and continue booting the system from there. Depending on the system setup, this involves the following 5 steps:

1. Load kernel modules to access the block devices with the root file system Depending on the system, the block devices with the root file system might already be present when the initramfs runs, or some kernel modules might need to be loaded first. On my Dell XPS 9360 laptop, the NVMe system disk is already present when the initramfs starts, whereas in qemu, we need to load the virtio_pci module, followed by the virtio_scsi module. How will our userland program know which kernel modules to load? Linux kernel modules declare patterns for their supported hardware as an alias, e.g.:
initrd# grep virtio_pci lib/modules/5.4.6/modules.alias
alias pci:v00001AF4d*sv*sd*bc*sc*i* virtio_pci
Devices in sysfs have a modalias file whose content can be matched against these declarations to identify the module to load:
initrd# cat /sys/devices/pci0000:00/*/modalias
pci:v00001AF4d00001005sv00001AF4sd00000004bc00scFFi00
pci:v00001AF4d00001004sv00001AF4sd00000008bc01sc00i00
[ ]
Hence, for the initial round of module loading, it is sufficient to locate all modalias files within sysfs and load the responsible modules. Loading a kernel module can result in new devices appearing. When that happens, the kernel sends a uevent, which the uevent consumer in userspace receives via a netlink socket. Typically, this consumer is udev(7) , but in our case, it s minitrd. For each uevent messages that comes with a MODALIAS variable, minitrd will load the relevant kernel module(s). When loading a kernel module, its dependencies need to be loaded first. Dependency information is stored in the modules.dep file in a Makefile-like syntax:
initrd# grep virtio_pci lib/modules/5.4.6/modules.dep
kernel/drivers/virtio/virtio_pci.ko: kernel/drivers/virtio/virtio_ring.ko kernel/drivers/virtio/virtio.ko
To load a module, we can open its file and then call the Linux-specific finit_module(2) system call. Some modules are expected to return an error code, e.g. ENODEV or ENOENT when some hardware device is not actually present. Side note: next to the textual versions, there are also binary versions of the modules.alias and modules.dep files. Presumably, those can be queried more quickly, but for simplicitly, I have not (yet?) implemented support in minitrd.

2. Console settings: font, keyboard layout Setting a legible font is necessary for hi-dpi displays. On my Dell XPS 9360 (3200 x 1800 QHD+ display), the following works well:
initrd# setfont latarcyrheb-sun32
Setting the user s keyboard layout is necessary for entering the LUKS full-disk encryption passphrase in their preferred keyboard layout. I use the NEO layout:
initrd# loadkeys neo

3. Block device identification In the Linux kernel, block device enumeration order is not necessarily the same on each boot. Even if it was deterministic, device order could still be changed when users modify their computer s device topology (e.g. connect a new disk to a formerly unused port). Hence, it is good style to refer to disks and their partitions with stable identifiers. This also applies to boot loader configuration, and so most distributions will set a kernel parameter such as root=UUID=1fa04de7-30a9-4183-93e9-1b0061567121. Identifying the block device or partition with the specified UUID is the initramfs s job. Depending on what the device contains, the UUID comes from a different place. For example, ext4 file systems have a UUID field in their file system superblock, whereas LUKS volumes have a UUID in their LUKS header. Canonically, probing a device to extract the UUID is done by libblkid from the util-linux package, but the logic can easily be re-implemented in other languages and changes rarely. minitrd comes with its own implementation to avoid cgo or running the blkid(8) program.

4. LUKS full-disk encryption unlocking (only on encrypted systems) Unlocking a LUKS-encrypted volume is done in userspace. The kernel handles the crypto, but reading the metadata, obtaining the passphrase (or e.g. key material from a file) and setting up the device mapper table entries are done in user space.
initrd# modprobe algif_skcipher
initrd# cryptsetup luksOpen /dev/sda4 cryptroot1
After the user entered their passphrase, the root file system can be mounted:
initrd# mount /dev/dm-0 /mnt

5. Continuing the boot process (switch_root) Now that everything is set up, we need to pass execution to the init program on the root file system with a careful sequence of chdir(2) , mount(2) , chroot(2) , chdir(2) and execve(2) system calls that is explained in this busybox switch_root comment.
initrd# mount -t devtmpfs dev /mnt/dev
initrd# exec switch_root -c /dev/console /mnt /init
To conserve RAM, the files in the temporary file system to which the initramfs archive is extracted are typically deleted.

How is an initramfs generated? An initramfs image (more accurately: archive) is a compressed cpio archive. Typically, gzip compression is used, but the kernel supports a bunch of different algorithms and distributions such as Ubuntu are switching to lz4. Generators typically prepare a temporary directory and feed it to the cpio(1) program. In minitrd, we read the files into memory and generate the cpio archive using the go-cpio package. We use the pgzip package for parallel gzip compression. The following files need to go into the cpio archive:

minitrd Go userland The minitrd binary is copied into the cpio archive as /init and will be run by the kernel after extracting the archive. Like the rest of distri, minitrd is built statically without cgo, which means it can be copied as-is into the cpio archive.

Linux kernel modules Aside from the modules.alias and modules.dep metadata files, the kernel modules themselves reside in e.g. /lib/modules/5.4.6/kernel and need to be copied into the cpio archive. Copying all modules results in a 80 MiB archive, so it is common to only copy modules that are relevant to the initramfs s features. This reduces archive size to 24 MiB. The filtering relies on hard-coded patterns and module names. For example, disk encryption related modules are all kernel modules underneath kernel/crypto, plus kernel/drivers/md/dm-crypt.ko. When generating a host-only initramfs (works on precisely the computer that generated it), some initramfs generators look at the currently loaded modules and just copy those.

Console Fonts and Keymaps The kbd package s setfont(8) and loadkeys(1) programs load console fonts and keymaps from /usr/share/consolefonts and /usr/share/keymaps, respectively. Hence, these directories need to be copied into the cpio archive. Depending on whether the initramfs should be generic (work on many computers) or host-only (works on precisely the computer/settings that generated it), the entire directories are copied, or only the required font/keymap.

cryptsetup, setfont, loadkeys These programs are (currently) required because minitrd does not implement their functionality. As they are dynamically linked, not only the programs themselves need to be copied, but also the ELF dynamic linking loader (path stored in the .interp ELF section) and any ELF library dependencies. For example, cryptsetup in distri declares the ELF interpreter /ro/glibc-amd64-2.27-3/out/lib/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2 and declares dependencies on shared libraries libcryptsetup.so.12, libblkid.so.1 and others. Luckily, in distri, packages contain a lib subdirectory containing symbolic links to the resolved shared library paths (hermetic packaging), so it is sufficient to mirror the lib directory into the cpio archive, recursing into shared library dependencies of shared libraries. cryptsetup also requires the GCC runtime library libgcc_s.so.1 to be present at runtime, and will abort with an error message about not being able to call pthread_cancel(3) if it is unavailable.

time zone data To print log messages in the correct time zone, we copy /etc/localtime from the host into the cpio archive.

minitrd outside of distri? I currently have no desire to make minitrd available outside of distri. While the technical challenges (such as extending the generator to not rely on distri s hermetic packages) are surmountable, I don t want to support people s initramfs remotely. Also, I think that people s efforts should in general be spent on rallying behind dracut and making it work faster, thereby benefiting all Linux distributions that use dracut (increasingly more). With minitrd, I have demonstrated that significant speed-ups are achievable.

Conclusion It was interesting to dive into how an initramfs really works. I had been working with the concept for many years, from small tasks such as debug why the encrypted root file system is not unlocked to more complicated tasks such as set up a root file system on DRBD for a high-availability setup . But even with that sort of experience, I didn t know all the details, until I was forced to implement every little thing. As I suspected going into this exercise, dracut is much slower than it needs to be. Re-implementing its generation stage in a modern language instead of shell helps a lot. Of course, my minitrd does a bit less than dracut, but not drastically so. The overall architecture is the same. I hope my effort helps with two things:
  1. As a teaching implementation: instead of wading through the various components that make up a modern initramfs (udev, systemd, various shell scripts, ), people can learn about how an initramfs works in a single place.
  2. I hope the significant time difference motivates people to improve dracut.

Appendix: qemu development environment Before writing any Go code, I did some manual prototyping. Learning how other people prototype is often immensely useful to me, so I m sharing my notes here. First, I copied all kernel modules and a statically built busybox binary:
% mkdir -p lib/modules/5.4.6
% cp -Lr /ro/lib/modules/5.4.6/* lib/modules/5.4.6/
% cp ~/busybox-1.22.0-amd64/busybox sh
To generate an initramfs from the current directory, I used:
% find .   cpio -o -H newc   pigz > /tmp/initrd
In distri s Makefile, I append these flags to the QEMU invocation:
-kernel /tmp/kernel \
-initrd /tmp/initrd \
-append "root=/dev/mapper/cryptroot1 rdinit=/sh ro console=ttyS0,115200 rd.luks=1 rd.luks.uuid=63051f8a-54b9-4996-b94f-3cf105af2900 rd.luks.name=63051f8a-54b9-4996-b94f-3cf105af2900=cryptroot1 rd.vconsole.keymap=neo rd.vconsole.font=latarcyrheb-sun32 init=/init systemd.setenv=PATH=/bin rw vga=836"
The vga= mode parameter is required for loading font latarcyrheb-sun32. Once in the busybox shell, I manually prepared the required mount points and kernel modules:
ln -s sh mount
ln -s sh lsmod
mkdir /proc /sys /run /mnt
mount -t proc proc /proc
mount -t sysfs sys /sys
mount -t devtmpfs dev /dev
modprobe virtio_pci
modprobe virtio_scsi
As a next step, I copied cryptsetup and dependencies into the initramfs directory:
% for f in /ro/cryptsetup-amd64-2.0.4-6/lib/*; do full=$(readlink -f $f); rel=$(echo $full   sed 's,^/,,g'); mkdir -p $(dirname $rel); install $full $rel; done
% ln -s ld-2.27.so ro/glibc-amd64-2.27-3/out/lib/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2
% cp /ro/glibc-amd64-2.27-3/out/lib/ld-2.27.so ro/glibc-amd64-2.27-3/out/lib/ld-2.27.so
% cp -r /ro/cryptsetup-amd64-2.0.4-6/lib ro/cryptsetup-amd64-2.0.4-6/
% mkdir -p ro/gcc-libs-amd64-8.2.0-3/out/lib64/
% cp /ro/gcc-libs-amd64-8.2.0-3/out/lib64/libgcc_s.so.1 ro/gcc-libs-amd64-8.2.0-3/out/lib64/libgcc_s.so.1
% ln -s /ro/gcc-libs-amd64-8.2.0-3/out/lib64/libgcc_s.so.1 ro/cryptsetup-amd64-2.0.4-6/lib
% cp -r /ro/lvm2-amd64-2.03.00-6/lib ro/lvm2-amd64-2.03.00-6/
In busybox, I used the following commands to unlock the root file system:
modprobe algif_skcipher
./cryptsetup luksOpen /dev/sda4 cryptroot1
mount /dev/dm-0 /mnt

8 August 2020

Reproducible Builds: Reproducible Builds in July 2020

Welcome to the July 2020 report from the Reproducible Builds project. In these monthly reports, we round-up the things that we have been up to over the past month. As a brief refresher, the motivation behind the Reproducible Builds effort is to ensure no flaws have been introduced from the original free software source code to the pre-compiled binaries we install on our systems. (If you re interested in contributing to the project, please visit our main website.)

General news At the upcoming DebConf20 conference (now being held online), Holger Levsen will present a talk on Thursday 27th August about Reproducing Bullseye in practice , focusing on independently verifying that the binaries distributed from ftp.debian.org were made from their claimed sources. Tavis Ormandy published a blog post making the provocative claim that You don t need reproducible builds , asserting elsewhere that the many attacks that have been extensively reported in our previous reports are fantasy threat models . A number of rebuttals have been made, including one from long-time contributor Reproducible Builds contributor Bernhard Wiedemann. On our mailing list this month, Debian Developer Graham Inggs posted to our list asking for ideas why the openorienteering-mapper Debian package was failing to build on the Reproducible Builds testing framework. Chris Lamb remarked from the build logs that the package may be missing a build dependency, although Graham then used our own diffoscope tool to show that the resulting package remains unchanged with or without it. Later, Nico Tyni noticed that the build failure may be due to the relationship between the FILE C preprocessor macro and the -ffile-prefix-map GCC flag. An issue in Zephyr, a small-footprint kernel designed for use on resource-constrained systems, around .a library files not being reproducible was closed after it was noticed that a key part of their toolchain was updated that now calls --enable-deterministic-archives by default. Reproducible Builds developer kpcyrd commented on a pull request against the libsodium cryptographic library wrapper for Rust, arguing against the testing of CPU features at compile-time. He noted that:
I ve accidentally shipped broken updates to users in the past because the build system was feature-tested and the final binary assumed the instructions would be present without further runtime checks
David Kleuker also asked a question on our mailing list about using SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH with the install(1) tool from GNU coreutils. When comparing two installed packages he noticed that the filesystem birth times differed between them. Chris Lamb replied, realising that this was actually a consequence of using an outdated version of diffoscope and that a fix was in diffoscope version 146 released in May 2020. Later in July, John Scott posted asking for clarification regarding on the Javascript files on our website to add metadata for LibreJS, the browser extension that blocks non-free Javascript scripts from executing. Chris Lamb investigated the issue and realised that we could drop a number of unused Javascript files [ ][ ][ ] and added unminified versions of Bootstrap and jQuery [ ].

Development work

Website On our website this month, Chris Lamb updated the main Reproducible Builds website and documentation to drop a number of unused Javascript files [ ][ ][ ] and added unminified versions of Bootstrap and jQuery [ ]. He also fixed a number of broken URLs [ ][ ]. Gonzalo Bulnes Guilpain made a large number of grammatical improvements [ ][ ][ ][ ][ ] as well as some misspellings, case and whitespace changes too [ ][ ][ ]. Lastly, Holger Levsen updated the README file [ ], marked the Alpine Linux continuous integration tests as currently disabled [ ] and linked the Arch Linux Reproducible Status page from our projects page [ ].

diffoscope diffoscope is our in-depth and content-aware diff utility that can not only locate and diagnose reproducibility issues, it provides human-readable diffs of all kinds. In July, Chris Lamb made the following changes to diffoscope, including releasing versions 150, 151, 152, 153 & 154:
  • New features:
    • Add support for flash-optimised F2FS filesystems. (#207)
    • Don t require zipnote(1) to determine differences in a .zip file as we can use libarchive. [ ]
    • Allow --profile as a synonym for --profile=-, ie. write profiling data to standard output. [ ]
    • Increase the minimum length of the output of strings(1) to eight characters to avoid unnecessary diff noise. [ ]
    • Drop some legacy argument styles: --exclude-directory-metadata and --no-exclude-directory-metadata have been replaced with --exclude-directory-metadata= yes,no . [ ]
  • Bug fixes:
    • Pass the absolute path when extracting members from SquashFS images as we run the command with working directory in a temporary directory. (#189)
    • Correct adding a comment when we cannot extract a filesystem due to missing libguestfs module. [ ]
    • Don t crash when listing entries in archives if they don t have a listed size such as hardlinks in ISO images. (#188)
  • Output improvements:
    • Strip off the file offset prefix from xxd(1) and show bytes in groups of 4. [ ]
    • Don t emit javap not found in path if it is available in the path but it did not result in an actual difference. [ ]
    • Fix ... not available in path messages when looking for Java decompilers that used the Python class name instead of the command. [ ]
  • Logging improvements:
    • Add a bit more debugging info when launching libguestfs. [ ]
    • Reduce the --debug log noise by truncating the has_some_content messages. [ ]
    • Fix the compare_files log message when the file does not have a literal name. [ ]
  • Codebase improvements:
    • Rewrite and rename exit_if_paths_do_not_exist to not check files multiple times. [ ][ ]
    • Add an add_comment helper method; don t mess with our internal list directly. [ ]
    • Replace some simple usages of str.format with Python f-strings [ ] and make it easier to navigate to the main.py entry point [ ].
    • In the RData comparator, always explicitly return None in the failure case as we return a non-None value in the success one. [ ]
    • Tidy some imports [ ][ ][ ] and don t alias a variable when we do not use it. [ ]
    • Clarify the use of a separate NullChanges quasi-file to represent missing data in the Debian package comparator [ ] and clarify use of a null diff in order to remember an exit code. [ ]
  • Other changes:
    • Profile the launch of libguestfs filesystems. [ ]
    • Clarify and correct our contributing info. [ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ]
Jean-Romain Garnier also made the following changes:
  • Allow passing a file with a list of arguments via diffoscope @args.txt. (!62)
  • Improve the output of side-by-side diffs by detecting added lines better. (!64)
  • Remove offsets before instructions in objdump [ ][ ] and remove raw instructions from ELF tests [ ].

Other tools strip-nondeterminism is our tool to remove specific non-deterministic results from a completed build. It is used automatically in most Debian package builds. In July, Chris Lamb ensured that we did not install the internal handler documentation generated from Perl POD documents [ ] and fixed a trivial typo [ ]. Marc Herbert added a --verbose-level warning when the Archive::Cpio Perl module is missing. (!6) reprotest is our end-user tool to build same source code twice in widely differing environments and then checks the binaries produced by each build for any differences. This month, Vagrant Cascadian made a number of changes to support diffoscope version 153 which had removed the (deprecated) --exclude-directory-metadata and --no-exclude-directory-metadata command-line arguments, and updated the testing configuration to also test under Python version 3.8 [ ].

Distributions

Debian In June 2020, Timo R hling filed a wishlist bug against the debhelper build tool impacting the reproducibility status of hundreds of packages that use the CMake build system. This month however, Niels Thykier uploaded debhelper version 13.2 that passes the -DCMAKE_SKIP_RPATH=ON and -DBUILD_RPATH_USE_ORIGIN=ON arguments to CMake when using the (currently-experimental) Debhelper compatibility level 14. According to Niels, this change:
should fix some reproducibility issues, but may cause breakage if packages run binaries directly from the build directory.
34 reviews of Debian packages were added, 14 were updated and 20 were removed this month adding to our knowledge about identified issues. Chris Lamb added and categorised the nondeterministic_order_of_debhelper_snippets_added_by_dh_fortran_mod [ ] and gem2deb_install_mkmf_log [ ] toolchain issues. Lastly, Holger Levsen filed two more wishlist bugs against the debrebuild Debian package rebuilder tool [ ][ ].

openSUSE In openSUSE, Bernhard M. Wiedemann published his monthly Reproducible Builds status update. Bernhard also published the results of performing 12,235 verification builds of packages from openSUSE Leap version 15.2 and, as a result, created three pull requests against the openSUSE Build Result Compare Script [ ][ ][ ].

Other distributions In Arch Linux, there was a mass rebuild of old packages in an attempt to make them reproducible. This was performed because building with a previous release of the pacman package manager caused file ordering and size calculation issues when using the btrfs filesystem. A system was also implemented for Arch Linux packagers to receive notifications if/when their package becomes unreproducible, and packagers now have access to a dashboard where they can all see all their unreproducible packages (more info). Paul Spooren sent two versions of a patch for the OpenWrt embedded distribution for adding a build system revision to the packages manifest so that all external feeds can be rebuilt and verified. [ ][ ]

Upstream patches The Reproducible Builds project detects, dissects and attempts to fix as many currently-unreproducible packages as possible. We endeavour to send all of our patches upstream where appropriate. This month, we wrote a large number of these patches, including: Vagrant Cascadian also reported two issues, the first regarding a regression in u-boot boot loader reproducibility for a particular target [ ] and a non-deterministic segmentation fault in the guile-ssh test suite [ ]. Lastly, Jelle van der Waa filed a bug against the MeiliSearch search API to report that it embeds the current build date.

Testing framework We operate a large and many-featured Jenkins-based testing framework that powers tests.reproducible-builds.org. This month, Holger Levsen made the following changes:
  • Debian-related changes:
    • Tweak the rescheduling of various architecture and suite combinations. [ ][ ]
    • Fix links for 404 and not for us icons. (#959363)
    • Further work on a rebuilder prototype, for example correctly processing the sbuild exit code. [ ][ ]
    • Update the sudo configuration file to allow the node health job to work correctly. [ ]
    • Add php-horde packages back to the pkg-php-pear package set for the bullseye distribution. [ ]
    • Update the version of debrebuild. [ ]
  • System health check development:
    • Add checks for broken SSH [ ], logrotate [ ], pbuilder [ ], NetBSD [ ], unkillable processes [ ], unresponsive nodes [ ][ ][ ][ ], proxy connection failures [ ], too many installed kernels [ ], etc.
    • Automatically fix some failed systemd units. [ ]
    • Add notes explaining all the issues that hosts are experiencing [ ] and handle zipped job log files correctly [ ].
    • Separate nodes which have been automatically marked as down [ ] and show status icons for jobs with issues [ ].
  • Misc:
    • Disable all Alpine Linux jobs until they are or Alpine is fixed. [ ]
    • Perform some general upkeep of build nodes hosted by OSUOSL. [ ][ ][ ][ ]
In addition, Mattia Rizzolo updated the init_node script to suggest using sudo instead of explicit logout and logins [ ][ ] and the usual build node maintenance was performed by Holger Levsen [ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ], Mattia Rizzolo [ ][ ] and Vagrant Cascadian [ ][ ][ ][ ].

If you are interested in contributing to the Reproducible Builds project, please visit our Contribute page on our website. However, you can get in touch with us via:

3 August 2020

Sylvain Beucler: Debian LTS and ELTS - July 2020

Debian LTS Logo Here is my transparent report for my work on the Debian Long Term Support (LTS) and Debian Extended Long Term Support (ELTS), which extend the security support for past Debian releases, as a paid contributor. In July, the monthly sponsored hours were split evenly among contributors depending on their max availability - I was assigned 25.25h for LTS (out of 30 max; all done) and 13.25h for ELTS (out of 20 max; all done). We shifted suites: welcome Stretch LTS and Jessie ELTS. The LTS->ELTS switch happened at the start of the month, but the oldstable->LTS switch happened later (after finalizing and flushing proposed-updates to a last point release), causing some confusion but nothing major. ELTS - Jessie LTS - Stretch Documentation/Scripts

31 July 2020

Chris Lamb: Free software activities in July 2020

Here is my monthly update covering what I have been doing in the free and open source software world during July 2020 (previous month): For Lintian, the static analysis tool for Debian packages:

Reproducible Builds One of the original promises of open source software is that distributed peer review and transparency of process results in enhanced end-user security. However, whilst anyone may inspect the source code of free and open source software for malicious flaws, almost all software today is distributed as pre-compiled binaries. This allows nefarious third-parties to compromise systems by injecting malicious code into ostensibly secure software during the various compilation and distribution processes. The motivation behind the Reproducible Builds effort is to ensure no flaws have been introduced during this compilation process by promising identical results are always generated from a given source, thus allowing multiple third-parties to come to a consensus on whether a build was compromised. The project is proud to be a member project of the Software Freedom Conservancy. Conservancy acts as a corporate umbrella allowing projects to operate as non-profit initiatives without managing their own corporate structure. If you like the work of the Conservancy or the Reproducible Builds project, please consider becoming an official supporter. This month, I:

diffoscope Elsewhere in our tooling, I made the following changes to diffoscope, including preparing and uploading versions 150, 151, 152, 153 & 154 to Debian:

Debian In Debian, I made the following uploads this month:

Debian LTS This month I have worked 18 hours on Debian Long Term Support (LTS) and 12 for the Extended LTS project. This included: You can find out more about the project via the following video:

29 July 2020

Enrico Zini: Building and packaging a sysroot

This is part of a series of posts on compiling a custom version of Qt5 in order to develop for both amd64 and a Raspberry Pi. After having had some success with a sysroot in having a Qt5 cross-build environment that includes QtWebEngine, the next step is packaging the sysroot so it can be available both to build the cross-build environment, and to do cross-development with it. The result is this Debian source package which takes a Raspberry Pi OS disk image, provisions it in-place, extracts its contents, and packages them. Yes. You may want to reread the last paragraph. It works directly in the disk image to avoid a nasty filesystem issue on emulated 32bit Linux over a 64bit mounted filesystem. This feels like the most surreal Debian package I've ever created, and this saga looks like one of the hairiest yaks I've ever shaved. Integrating this monster codebase, full of bundled code and hacks, into a streamlined production and deployment system has been for me a full stack nightmare, and I have a renewed and growing respect for the people in the Qt/KDE team in Debian, who manage to stay on top of this mess, so that it all just works when we need it.

27 July 2020

Russ Allbery: Review: Rise of the Warrior Cop

Review: Rise of the Warrior Cop, by Radley Balko
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Copyright: 2013
ISBN: 1-61039-212-4
Format: Kindle
Pages: 336
As the United States tries, in fits and starts, to have a meaningful discussion about long-standing police racism, brutality, overreach, corruption, and murder, I've realized that my theoretical understanding of the history of and alternative frameworks for law enforcement is woefully lacking. Starting with a book by a conservative white guy is not the most ideal of approaches, but it's what I already had on hand, and it won't be the last book I read and review on this topic. (Most of my research so far has been in podcast form. I don't review those here, but I can recommend Ezra Klein's interviews with Ta-Nehisi Coates, Paul Butler, and, most strongly, sujatha baliga.) Rise of the Warrior Cop is from 2013 and has had several moments of fame, no doubt helped by Balko's connections to the conservative and libertarian right. One of the frustrating facts of US politics is that critiques of the justice system from the right (and from white men) get more media attention than critiques from the left. That said, it's a generally well-respected book on the factual history of the topic, and police brutality and civil rights are among the points on which I have stopped-clock agreements with US libertarians. This book is very, very libertarian. In my callow youth, I was an ardent libertarian, so I've read a lot of US libertarian literature. It's a genre with its own conventions that become obvious when you read enough of it, and Rise of the Warrior Cop goes through them like a checklist. Use the Roman Republic (never the Roman Empire) as the starting point for any political discussion, check. Analyze the topic in the context of pre-revolutionary America, check. Spend considerable effort on discerning the opinions of the US founders on the topic since their opinions are always relevant to the modern world, check. Locate some point in the past (preferably before 1960) where the political issue was as good as it has ever been, check. Frame all changes since then as an erosion of rights through government overreach, check. Present your solution as a return to a previous era of respect for civil rights, check. Once you start recognizing the genre conventions, their prevalence in libertarian writing is almost comical. The framing chapters therefore leave a bit to be desired, but the meat of the book is a useful resource. Starting with the 1970s and its use as a campaigning tool by Nixon, Balko traces a useful history of the war on drugs. And starting with the 1980s, the number of cites to primary sources and the evidence of Balko's own research increases considerably. If you want to know how US police turned into military cosplayers with body armor, heavy weapons, and armored vehicles, this book provides a lot of context and history. One of the reasons why I view libertarians as allies of convenience on this specific issue is that drug legalization and disgust with the war on drugs have been libertarian issues for decades. Ideologically honest libertarians (and Balko appears to be one) are inherently skeptical of the police, so when the police overreach in an area of libertarian interest, they notice. Balko makes a solid argument, backed up with statistics, specific programs, legislation, and court cases, that the drug war and its accompanying lies about heavily-armed drug dealers and their supposed threat to police officers was the fuel for the growth of SWAT teams, no-knock search warrants, erosion of legal protections for criminal defendants, and de facto license for the police to ignore the scope and sometimes even the existence of warrants. This book is useful support for the argument that fears for the safety of officers underlying the militarization of police forces are imaginary. One telling point that Balko makes repeatedly and backs with statistical and anecdotal evidence is that the police generally do not use raid tactics on dangerous criminals. On the contrary, aggressive raids are more likely to be used on the least dangerous criminals because they're faster, they're fun for the police (they provide an adrenaline high and let them play with toys), and they're essentially risk-free. If the police believe someone is truly dangerous, they're more likely to use careful surveillance and to conduct a quiet arrest at an unexpected moment. The middle-of-the-night armed break-ins with battering rams, tear gas, and flash-bangs are, tellingly, used against the less dangerous suspects. This is part of Balko's overall argument that police equipment and tactics have become untethered from any realistic threat and have become cultural. He traces an acceleration of that trend to 9/11 and the resulting obsession with terrorism, which further opened the spigot of military hardware and "special forces" training. This became a point of competition between police departments, with small town forces that had never seen a terrorist and had almost no chance of a terrorist incident demanding their own armored vehicles. I've encountered this bizarre terrorism justification personally; one of the reasons my local police department gave in a public hearing for not having a policy against shooting at moving vehicles was "but what if terrorism?" I don't believe there has ever been a local terrorist attack. SWAT in such places didn't involve the special training or dedicated personnel of large city forces; instead, it was a part-time duty for normal police officers, and frequently they were encouraged to practice SWAT tactics by using them at random for some otherwise normal arrest or search. Balko argues that those raids were more exciting than normal police work, leading to a flood of volunteers for that duty and a tendency to use them as much as possible. That in turn normalizes disconnecting police tactics from the underlying crime or situational risk. So far, so good. But despite the information I was able to extract from it, I have mixed feelings about Rise of the Warrior Cop as a whole. At the least, it has substantial limitations. First, I don't trust the historical survey of policing in this book. Libertarian writing makes for bad history. The constraints of the genre require overusing only a few points of reference, treating every opinion of the US founders as holy writ, and tying forward progress to a return to a previous era, all of which interfere with good analysis. Balko also didn't do the research for the historical survey, as is clear from the footnotes. The citations are all to other people's histories, not to primary sources. He's summarizing other people's histories, and you'll almost certainly get better history by finding well-respected historians who cover the same ground. (That said, if you're not familiar with Peel's policing principles, this is a good introduction.) Second, and this too is unfortunately predictable in a libertarian treatment, race rarely appears in this book. If Balko published the same book today, I'm sure he would say more about race, but even in 2013 its absence is strange. I was struck while reading by how many examples of excessive police force were raids on west coast pot farms; yes, I'm sure that was traumatic, but it's not the demographic I would name as the most vulnerable to or affected by police brutality. West coast pot growers are, however, mostly white. I have no idea why Balko made that choice. Perhaps he thought his target audience would be more persuaded by his argument if he focused on white victims. Perhaps he thought it was an easier and less complicated story to tell. Perhaps, like a lot of libertarians, he doesn't believe racism has a significant impact on society because it would be a market failure. Perhaps those were the people who more readily came to mind. But to talk about police militarization, denial of civil rights, and police brutality in the United States without putting race at the center of both the history and the societal effects leaves a gaping hole in the analysis. Given that lack of engagement, I also am dubious of Balko's policy prescriptions. His reform suggestions aren't unreasonable, but they stay firmly in the centrist and incrementalist camp and would benefit white people more than black people. Transparency, accountability, and cultural changes are all fine and good, but the cultural change Balko is focused on is less aggressive arrest tactics, more use of mediation, and better physical fitness. I would not object to those things (well, maybe the last, which seemed odd), but we need to have a discussion about police white supremacist organizations, the prevalence of spousal abuse, and the police tendency to see themselves not as public servants but as embattled warriors who are misunderstood by the naive sheep they are defending. And, of course, you won't find in Rise of the Warrior Cop any thoughtful wrestling with whether there are alternative approaches to community safety, whether punitive rather than restorative justice is effective, or whether crime is a symptom of deeper societal problems we could address but refuse to. The most radical suggestion Balko has is to legalize drugs, which is both the predictable libertarian position and, as we have seen from recent events in the United States, far from the only problem of overcriminalization. I understand why this book is so frequently mentioned on-line, and its author's political views may make it more palatable to some people than a more race-centered or radical perspective. But I don't think this is the best or most useful book on police violence that one could read today. I hope to find a better one in upcoming reviews. Rating: 6 out of 10

20 July 2020

Evgeni Golov: Building and publishing documentation for Ansible Collections

I had a draft of this article for about two months, but never really managed to polish and finalize it, partially due to some nasty hacks needed down the road. Thankfully, one of my wishes was heard and I had now the chance to revisit the post and try a few things out. Sadly, my wish was granted only partially and the result is still not beautiful, but read yourself ;-) UPDATE: I've published a follow up post on building documentation for Ansible Collections using antsibull, as my wish was now fully granted. As part of my day job, I am maintaining the Foreman Ansible Modules - a collection of modules to interact with Foreman and its plugins (most notably Katello). We've been maintaining this collection (as in set of modules) since 2017, so much longer than collections (as in Ansible Collections) existed, but the introduction of Ansible Collections allowed us to provide a much easier and supported way to distribute the modules to our users. Now users usually want two things: features and documentation. Features are easy, we already have plenty of them. But documentation was a bit cumbersome: we had documentation inside the modules, so you could read it via ansible-doc on the command line if you had the collection installed, but we wanted to provide online readable and versioned documentation too - something the users are used to from the official Ansible documentation. Building HTML from Ansible modules Ansible modules contain documentation in form of YAML blocks documenting the parameters, examples and return values of the module. The Ansible documentation site is built using Sphinx from reStructuredText. As the modules don't contain reStructuredText, Ansible hashad a tool to generate it from the documentation YAML: build-ansible.py document-plugins. The tool and the accompanying libraries are not part of the Ansible distribution - they just live in the hacking directory. To run them we need a git checkout of Ansible and source hacking/env-setup to set PYTHONPATH and a few other variables correctly for Ansible to run directly from that checkout. It would be nice if that'd be a feature of ansible-doc, but while it isn't, we need to have a full Ansible git checkout to be able to continue.The tool has been recently split out into an own repository/distribution: antsibull. However it was also a bit redesigned to be easier to use (good!), and my hack to abuse it to build documentation for out-of-tree modules doesn't work anymore (bad!). There is an issue open for collections support, so I hope to be able to switch to antsibull soon. Anyways, back to the original hack. As we're using documentation fragments, we need to tell the tool to look for these, because otherwise we'd get errors about not found fragments. We're passing ANSIBLE_COLLECTIONS_PATHS so that the tool can find the correct, namespaced documentation fragments there. We also need to provide --module-dir pointing at the actual modules we want to build documentation for.
ANSIBLEGIT=/path/to/ansible.git
source $ ANSIBLEGIT /hacking/env-setup
ANSIBLE_COLLECTIONS_PATHS=../build/collections python3 $ ANSIBLEGIT /hacking/build-ansible.py document-plugins --module-dir ../plugins/modules --template-dir ./_templates --template-dir $ ANSIBLEGIT /docs/templates --type rst --output-dir ./modules/
Ideally, when antsibull supports collections, this will become antsibull-docs collection without any need to have an Ansible checkout, sourcing env-setup or pass tons of paths. Until then we have a Makefile that clones Ansible, runs the above command and then calls Sphinx (which provides a nice Makefile for building) to generate HTML from the reStructuredText. You can find our slightly modified templates and themes in our git repository in the docs directory. Publishing HTML documentation for Ansible Modules Now that we have a way to build the documentation, let's also automate publishing, because nothing is worse than out-of-date documentation! We're using GitHub and GitHub Actions for that, but you can achieve the same with GitLab, TravisCI or Jenkins. First, we need a trigger. As we want always up-to-date documentation for the main branch where all the development happens and also documentation for all stable releases that are tagged (we use vX.Y.Z for the tags), we can do something like this:
on:
  push:
    tags:
      - v[0-9]+.[0-9]+.[0-9]+
    branches:
      - master
Now that we have a trigger, we define the job steps that get executed:
    steps:
      - name: Check out the code
        uses: actions/checkout@v2
      - name: Set up Python
        uses: actions/setup-python@v2
        with:
          python-version: "3.7"
      - name: Install dependencies
        run: make doc-setup
      - name: Build docs
        run: make doc
At this point we will have the docs built by make doc in the docs/_build/html directory, but not published anywhere yet. As we're using GitHub anyways, we can also use GitHub Pages to host the result.
      - uses: actions/checkout@v2
      - name: configure git
        run:  
          git config user.name "$ GITHUB_ACTOR "
          git config user.email "$ GITHUB_ACTOR @bots.github.com"
          git fetch --no-tags --prune --depth=1 origin +refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/origin/*
      - name: Set up Python
        uses: actions/setup-python@v2
        with:
          python-version: "3.7"
      - name: Install dependencies
        run: make doc-setup
      - name: Build docs
        run: make doc
      - name: commit docs
        run:  
          git checkout gh-pages
          rm -rf $(basename $ GITHUB_REF )
          mv docs/_build/html $(basename $ GITHUB_REF )
          dirname */index.html   sort --version-sort   xargs -I@@ -n1 echo '<div><a href="@@/"><p>@@</p></a></div>' >> index.html
          git add $(basename $ GITHUB_REF ) index.html
          git commit -m "update docs for $(basename $ GITHUB_REF )"   true
      - name: push docs
        run: git push origin gh-pages
As this is not exactly self explanatory:
  1. Configure git to have a proper author name and email, as otherwise you get ugly history and maybe even failing commits
  2. Fetch all branch names, as the checkout action by default doesn't do this.
  3. Setup Python, Sphinx, Ansible etc.
  4. Build the documentation as described above.
  5. Switch to the gh-pages branch from the commit that triggered the workflow.
  6. Remove any existing documentation for this tag/branch ($GITHUB_REF contains the name which triggered the workflow) if it exists already.
  7. Move the previously built documentation from the Sphinx output directory to a directory named after the current target.
  8. Generate a simple index of all available documentation versions.
  9. Commit all changes, but don't fail if there is nothing to commit.
  10. Push to the gh-pages branch which will trigger a GitHub Pages deployment.
Pretty sure this won't win any beauty contest for scripting and automation, but it gets the job done and nobody on the team has to remember to update the documentation anymore. You can see the results on theforeman.org or directly on GitHub.

Shirish Agarwal: Hearing loss, pandemic, lockdown

Sorry for not being on blog for sometime, the last few months have been brutal. While I am externally ok, because of the lockdown I sensed major hearing loss. First, I thought it may be a hallucination or something but as it persisted for days, I got myself checked and found out that I got 80% hearing loss in my right ear. How and why I don t know. Is this NIHL or some other kind of hearing loss is yet to be ascertained. I do live what is and used to be one of the busiest roads in the city, now for last few months not so much. On top of it, you have various other noises.

Tinnitus I also experienced Tinnitus which again I perceived to be a hallucination but found it s not. I have no clue if my eiplepsy has anything to do with hearing loss or both are different. I did discover that while today we know that something like Tinnitus exists, just 10-15 years back, people might mistake it for madness. In a way it is madness because you are constantly hearing sound, music etc. 24 7 , that is enough to drive anybody mad. During this brief period, did learn what an Otoscope is . I did get audiometry tests done but need to get at least a second or if possible also a third opinion but those will have to wait as the audio clinics are about 8-10 kms. away. In the open-close-open-close environment just makes it impossible to figure out the time, date and get it done. After that is done then probably get a hearing device, probably a Siemens Signia hearing aid. The hearing aids are damn expensive, almost 50k per piece and they probably have a lifetime of about 5-6 years, so it s a bit of a expensive proposition. I also need a second or/and third opinion on the audiometry profile so I know things are correct. All of these things are gonna take time.

Pandemic Situation in India and Testing Coincidentally, was talking to couple of people about this. It is sad to see that we have the third highest number of covid cases at 1/10th the tests we are doing vis-a-vis U.S.A. According to statistical site ourworldindata , we seem to be testing 0.22 per thousand people compared to 2.28 people per thousand done by United States. Sadly it doesn t give the breakup of the tests, from what I read the PCR tests are better than the antibody tests, a primer shares the difference between the two tests. IIRC, the antibody tests are far cheaper than the swab tests but swab tests are far more accurate as it looks for the virus s genetic material (RNA) . Anyways coming to the numbers, U.S. has a population of roughly 35 crores taking a little bit liberty from numbers given at popclock . India meanwhile has 135 crore or almost four times the population of U.S. and the amount of testing done is 1/10th as shared above. Just goes to share where the GOI priorities lie . We are running out of beds, ventilators and whatever else there is. Whatever resources are there are being used for covid patients and they are being charged a bomb. I have couple of hospitals near my place and the cost of a bed in an isolation ward is upward of INR 100k and if you need a ventilator then add another 50k . And in moment of rarity, the differences between charges of private and public are zero. Meaning there is immense profiteering happening it seems in the medical world. Heck, even the Govt. is on the act where they are charging 18% GST on sanitizers. If this is not looting then I dunno what is.
Example of Medical Bills people have to pay.

China, Nepal & Diplomacy While everybody today knows how China has intruded and captured quite a part of Ladakh, this wasn t the case when they started in April. That time Ajai Shukla had shared this with the top defence personnel but nothing came of it. Then on May 30th he broke/shared the news with the rest of the world and was immediately branded anti-national, person on Chinese payroll and what not. This is when he and Pravin Sawnhey of Force Magazine had both been warning of the same from last year itself. Pravin, has a youtube channel and had been warning India against Chinese intentions from 2015 and even before that. He had warned repeatedly that our obsession with the Pakistan border meant that we were taking eyes of the border with China which spans almost 2300 odd kms. going all the way to Arunachal Pradesh. A good map which shows the conflict can be found at dw.com which I am sharing/reproducing below
India-China Border Areas Copyright DW.com 2020
Note:- I am sharing a neutral party s rendering of the border disputes or somebody who doesn t have much at stake as the two countries have so that things could be looked at little objectively. The Prime Minister on the other hand, made the comment which made galvanising a made-up word into verb . It means to go without coming in. In fact, several news sites shared the statement told by the Prime Minister and the majority of people were shocked. In fact, there had been reports that he gave the current CDS, General Rawat, a person of his own choosing, a peace of his mind. But what lead to this confrontation in the first place ? I think many pieces are part of that puzzle, one of the pieces are surely the cutting of defense budget for the last 6 years, Even this year, if you look at the budget slashes done in the earlier part of the year when he shared how HAL had to raise loans from the market to pay salaries of its own people. Later he shared how the Govt. was planning to slash the defence budget. Interestingly, he had also shared some of the reasons which reaffirm that it is the only the Govt. which can solve some of the issues/conundrum

First, it must recognize that our firms competing for global orders are up against rivals that are being supported by their home governments with tax and export incentives and infrastructure that almost invariably surpasses India s. Our government must provide its aerospace firms with a level playing field, if not a competitive advantage. The greatest deterrent to growth our companies face is the high cost of capital and lack of access to funds. In several cases, Indian MSMEs have had to turn down offers to build components and assemblies for global OEM supply chains simply because the cost of capital to create the shop floor and train the personnel was too high. This resulted in a loss of business and a missed opportunity for creating jobs and skills. To overcome this, the government could create a sector specific A&D Fund to provide low cost capital quickly to enable our MSMEs to grab fleeting business opportunities. Ajai Shukla, blogpost 13th March 2020 . And then reporting on 11th May 2020 itself, CDS Gen. Rawat himself commented on saving the budget, they were in poor taste but still he shared what he thought about it. So, at the end of it one part of the story. The other part of the story probably lies in India s relations with its neighbors and lack of numbers in diplomats and diplomacy. So let me cover both the things one by one .

Diplomats, lack of numbers and hence the hands we are dealth with When Mr. Modi started his first term, he used the term Maximum Governance, Minimum Government but sadly cut those places where it indeed needs more people, one of which is diplomacy. A slightly dated 2012 article/opinion shared writes that India needs to engage with the rest of the world and do with higher number. Cut to 2020 and the numbers more or less remain the same . What Mr. Modi tried to do is instead of using diplomats, he tried to use his charm and hugopolicy for lack of a better term. 6 years later, here we are. After 200 trips abroad, not a single trade agreement to show what he done. I could go on but both time and energy are not on my side hence now switching to Nepal

Nepal, once friend, now enemy ? Nepal had been a friend of India for 70 odd years, what changed in the last few years that it changed from friend to enemy ? There had been two incidents in recent memory that changed the status quo. The first is the 2015 Nepal blockade . Now one could argue it either way but the truth is that Nepal understood that it is heavily dependent on India hence as any sovereign country would do in its interest it also started courting China for imports so there is some balance. The second one though is one of our own making. On December 16, 2014 RBI allowed Nepali citizens to have cash upto INR 25,000/- . Then in 2016 when demonetization was announced, they said that people could exchange only upto INR 4,500/- which was far below the limit shared above. And btw, before people start blaming just RBI for the decision, FEMA decisions are taken jointly by the finance ministry (FE) as well as ministry of external affairs (MEA) . So without them knowing the decision could not have been taken when announcing it. The result of lowering of demonetization is what made Nepal move more into Chinese hands and this has been shared by number of people in numerous articles in different websites. The wire interview with the vice-chairman of Niti Ayog is pretty interesting. The argument that Nepal show give an estimate of how much old money is there falls flat when in demonetization itself, it was thought of that around 30-40% was black money and would not be returned but by RBI s own admissions all 99.3% of the money was returned. Perhaps they should have consulted Prof. Arun Kumar of JNU who has extensively written and studied the topic before doing that fool-hardy step. It is the reason that since then, an economy which was searing at 9% has been contracting ever since, I could give a dozen articles stating that, but for the moment, just one will suffice. The slowing economy and the sharp divisions between people based on either outlook, religion or whatever also encouraged China to attack us. This year is not good for India. The only thing I hope Indians and people all over do is just maintain physical distances, masks and somehow survive till middle of next year without getting infected when probably most of the vaccine candidates have been trialed, results are in and we have a ready vaccine. I do hope that at least for once, ICMR shares data even after the vaccine is approved, whichever vaccine. Till later.

18 July 2020

Ritesh Raj Sarraf: Laptop Mode Tools 1.74

Laptop Mode Tools 1.74 Laptop Mode Tools version 1.74 has been released. This release includes important bug fixes, some defaults settings updated to current driver support in Linux and support for devices with nouveau based nVIDIA cards. A filtered list of changes is mentioned below. For the full log, please refer to the git repository

1.74 - Sat Jul 18 19:10:40 IST 2020
* With 4.15+ kernels, Linux Intel SATA has a better link power
  saving policy, med_power_with_dipm, which should be the recommended
  one to use
* Disable defaults for syslog logging
* Initialize LM_VERBOSE with default to disabled
* Merge pull request #157 from rickysarraf/nouveau
* Add power saving module for nouveau cards
* Disable ethernet module by default
* Add board-specific folder and documentation
* Add execute bit on module radeon-dpm
* Drop unlock because there is no lock acquired

Resources

What is Laptop Mode Tools
Description: Tools for Power Savings based on battery/AC status
 Laptop mode is a Linux kernel feature that allows your laptop to save
 considerable power, by allowing the hard drive to spin down for longer
 periods of time. This package contains the userland scripts that are
 needed to enable laptop mode.
 .
 It includes support for automatically enabling laptop mode when the
 computer is working on batteries. It also supports various other power
 management features, such as starting and stopping daemons depending on
 power mode, automatically hibernating if battery levels are too low, and
 adjusting terminal blanking and X11 screen blanking
 .
 laptop-mode-tools uses the Linux kernel's Laptop Mode feature and thus
 is also used on Desktops and Servers to conserve power

16 July 2020

Louis-Philippe V ronneau: DebConf Videoteam Sprint Report -- DebConf20@Home

DebConf20 starts in about 5 weeks, and as always, the DebConf Videoteam is working hard to make sure it'll be a success. As such, we held a sprint from July 9th to 13th to work on our new infrastructure. A remote sprint certainly ain't as fun as an in-person one, but we nonetheless managed to enjoy ourselves. Many thanks to those who participated, namely: We also wish to extend our thanks to Thomas Goirand and Infomaniak for providing us with virtual machines to experiment on and host the video infrastructure for DebConf20. Advice for presenters For DebConf20, we strongly encourage presenters to record their talks in advance and send us the resulting video. We understand this is more work, but we think it'll make for a more agreeable conference for everyone. Video conferencing is still pretty wonky and there is nothing worse than a talk ruined by a flaky internet connection or hardware failures. As such, if you are giving a talk at DebConf this year, we are asking you to read and follow our guide on how to record your presentation. Fear not: we are not getting rid of the Q&A period at the end of talks. Attendees will ask their questions either on IRC or on a collaborative pad and the Talkmeister will relay them to the speaker once the pre-recorded video has finished playing. New infrastructure, who dis? Organising a virtual DebConf implies migrating from our battle-tested on-premise workflow to a completely new remote one. One of the major changes this means for us is the addition of Jitsi Meet to our infrastructure. We normally have 3 different video sources in a room: two cameras and a slides grabber. With the new online workflow, directors will be able to play pre-recorded videos as a source, will get a feed from a Jitsi room and will see the audience questions as a third source. This might seem simple at first, but is in fact a very major change to our workflow and required a lot of work to implement.
               == On-premise ==                                          == Online ==
                                                      
              Camera 1                                                 Jitsi
                                                                          
                 v                 ---> Frontend                         v                 ---> Frontend
                                                                                            
    Slides -> Voctomix -> Backend -+--> Frontend         Questions -> Voctomix -> Backend -+--> Frontend
                                                                                            
                 ^                 ---> Frontend                         ^                 ---> Frontend
                                                                          
              Camera 2                                           Pre-recorded video
In our tests, playing back pre-recorded videos to voctomix worked well, but was sometimes unreliable due to inconsistent encoding settings. Presenters will thus upload their pre-recorded talks to SReview so we can make sure there aren't any obvious errors. Videos will then be re-encoded to ensure a consistent encoding and to normalise audio levels. This process will also let us stitch the Q&As at the end of the pre-recorded videos more easily prior to publication. Reducing the stream latency One of the pitfalls of the streaming infrastructure we have been using since 2016 is high video latency. In a worst case scenario, remote attendees could get up to 45 seconds of latency, making participation in events like BoFs arduous. In preparation for DebConf20, we added a new way to stream our talks: RTMP. Attendees will thus have the option of using either an HLS stream with higher latency or an RTMP stream with lower latency. Here is a comparative table that can help you decide between the two protocols:
HLS RTMP
Pros
  • Can be watched from a browser
  • Auto-selects a stream encoding
  • Single URL to remember
  • Lower latency (~5s)
Cons
  • Higher latency (up to 45s)
  • Requires a dedicated video player (VLC, mpv)
  • Specific URLs for each encoding setting
Live mixing from home with VoctoWeb Since DebConf16, we have been using voctomix, a live video mixer developed by the CCC VOC. voctomix is conveniently divided in two: voctocore is the backend server while voctogui is a GTK+ UI frontend directors can use to live-mix. Although voctogui can connect to a remote server, it was primarily designed to run either on the same machine as voctocore or on the same LAN. Trying to use voctogui from a machine at home to connect to a voctocore running in a datacenter proved unreliable, especially for high-latency and low bandwidth connections. Inspired by the setup FOSDEM uses, we instead decided to go with a web frontend for voctocore. We initially used FOSDEM's code as a proof of concept, but quickly reimplemented it in Python, a language we are more familiar with as a team. Compared to the FOSDEM PHP implementation, voctoweb implements A / B source selection (akin to voctogui) as well as audio control, two very useful features. In the following screen captures, you can see the old PHP UI on the left and the new shiny Python one on the right. The old PHP voctowebThe new Python3 voctoweb Voctoweb is still under development and is likely to change quite a bit until DebConf20. Still, the current version seems to works well enough to be used in production if you ever need to. Python GeoIP redirector We run multiple geographically-distributed streaming frontend servers to minimize the load on our streaming backend and to reduce overall latency. Although users can connect to the frontends directly, we typically point them to live.debconf.org and redirect connections to the nearest server. Sadly, 6 months ago MaxMind decided to change the licence on their GeoLite2 database and left us scrambling. To fix this annoying issue, Stefano Rivera wrote a Python program that uses the new database and reworked our ansible frontend server role. Since the new database cannot be redistributed freely, you'll have to get a (free) license key from MaxMind if you to use this role. Ansible & CI improvements Infrastructure as code is a living process and needs constant care to fix bugs, follow changes in DSL and to implement new features. All that to say a large part of the sprint was spent making our ansible roles and continuous integration setup more reliable, less buggy and more featureful. All in all, we merged 26 separate ansible-related merge request during the sprint! As always, if you are good with ansible and wish to help, we accept merge requests on our ansible repository :)

Enrico Zini: Build Qt5 cross-builder with raspbian sysroot: compiling with the sysroot

Whack-A-Mole machines from <https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Whac-A-Mole_Cedar_Point.jpg> This is part of a series of posts on compiling a custom version of Qt5 in order to develop for both amd64 and a Raspberry Pi. Now that I have a sysroot, I try to use it to build Qt5 with QtWebEngine. Nothing seems to work straightforwardly with Qt5's build system, and hit an endless series of significant blockers to try and work around.
Problem in wayland code QtWayland's source currently does not compile:
../../../hardwareintegration/client/brcm-egl/qwaylandbrcmeglwindow.cpp: In constructor  QtWaylandClient::QWaylandBrcmEglWindow::QWaylandBrcmEglWindow(QWindow*) :
../../../hardwareintegration/client/brcm-egl/qwaylandbrcmeglwindow.cpp:131:67: error: no matching function for call to  QtWaylandClient::QWaylandWindow::QWaylandWindow(QWindow*&) 
     , m_eventQueue(wl_display_create_queue(mDisplay->wl_display()))
                                                                   ^
In file included from ../../../../include/QtWaylandClient/5.15.0/QtWaylandClient/private/qwaylandwindow_p.h:1,
                 from ../../../hardwareintegration/client/brcm-egl/qwaylandbrcmeglwindow.h:43,
                 from ../../../hardwareintegration/client/brcm-egl/qwaylandbrcmeglwindow.cpp:40:
../../../../include/QtWaylandClient/5.15.0/QtWaylandClient/private/../../../../../src/client/qwaylandwindow_p.h:97:5: note: candidate:  QtWaylandClient::QWaylandWindow::QWaylandWindow(QWindow*, QtWayland
Client::QWaylandDisplay*) 
     QWaylandWindow(QWindow *window, QWaylandDisplay *display);
     ^~~~~~~~~~~~~~
../../../../include/QtWaylandClient/5.15.0/QtWaylandClient/private/../../../../../src/client/qwaylandwindow_p.h:97:5: note:   candidate expects 2 arguments, 1 provided
make[5]: Leaving directory '/home/build/armhf/qt-everywhere-src-5.15.0/qttools/src/qdoc'
I am not trying to debug here. I understand that Wayland support is not a requirement, and I'm adding -skip wayland to Qt5's configure options. Next round. nss not found Qt5 embeds Chrome's sources. Chrome's sources require libnss3-dev to be available for both host and target architectures. Although I now have it installed both on the build system and in the sysroot, the pkg-config wrapper that Qt5 hooks into its Chrome's sources, failes to find it:
Command: /usr/bin/python2 /home/build/armhf/qt-everywhere-src-5.15.0/qtwebengine/src/3rdparty/chromium/build/config/linux/pkg-config.py -s /home/build/sysroot/ -a arm -p /usr/bin/arm-linux-gnueabihf-pkg-config --system_libdir lib nss -v -lssl3
Returned 1.
stderr:
Package nss was not found in the pkg-config search path.
Perhaps you should add the directory containing  nss.pc'
to the PKG_CONFIG_PATH environment variable
No package 'nss' found
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/home/build/armhf/qt-everywhere-src-5.15.0/qtwebengine/src/3rdparty/chromium/build/config/linux/pkg-config.py", line 248, in <module>
    sys.exit(main())
  File "/home/build/armhf/qt-everywhere-src-5.15.0/qtwebengine/src/3rdparty/chromium/build/config/linux/pkg-config.py", line 143, in main
    prefix = GetPkgConfigPrefixToStrip(options, args)
  File "/home/build/armhf/qt-everywhere-src-5.15.0/qtwebengine/src/3rdparty/chromium/build/config/linux/pkg-config.py", line 82, in GetPkgConfigPrefixToStrip
    "--variable=prefix"] + args, env=os.environ).decode('utf-8')
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/subprocess.py", line 223, in check_output
    raise CalledProcessError(retcode, cmd, output=output)
subprocess.CalledProcessError: Command '['/usr/bin/arm-linux-gnueabihf-pkg-config', '--variable=prefix', 'nss']' returned non-zero exit status 1
See //build/config/linux/nss/BUILD.gn:15:3: whence it was called.
  pkg_config("system_nss_no_ssl_config")  
  ^---------------------------------------
See //crypto/BUILD.gn:218:25: which caused the file to be included.
    public_configs += [ "//build/config/linux/nss:system_nss_no_ssl_config" ]
                        ^--------------------------------------------------
Project ERROR: GN run error!
It's trying to look into $SYSROOT/usr/lib/pkgconfig, while it should be $SYSROOT//usr/lib/arm-linux-gnueabihf/pkgconfig. I worked around this this patch to qtwebengine/src/3rdparty/chromium/build/config/linux/pkg-config.py:
--- pkg-config.py.orig  2020-07-16 11:46:21.005373002 +0200
+++ pkg-config.py   2020-07-16 11:46:02.605296967 +0200
@@ -61,6 +61,7 @@
   libdir = sysroot + '/usr/' + options.system_libdir + '/pkgconfig'
   libdir += ':' + sysroot + '/usr/share/pkgconfig'
+  libdir += ':' + sysroot + '/usr/lib/arm-linux-gnueabihf/pkgconfig'
   os.environ['PKG_CONFIG_LIBDIR'] = libdir
   return libdir
Next round. g++ 8.3.0 Internal Compiler Error Qt5's sources embed Chrome's sources that embed the skia library sources. One of the skia library sources, when cross-compiled to ARM with -O1 or -O2 with g++ 8.3.0, produces an Internal Compiler Error:
/usr/bin/arm-linux-gnueabihf-g++ -MMD -MF obj/skia/skcms/skcms.o.d -DUSE_UDEV -DUSE_AURA=1 -DUSE_NSS_CERTS=1 -DUSE_OZONE=1 -DOFFICIAL_BUILD -DTOOLKIT_QT -D_FILE_OFFSET_BITS=64 -D_LARGEFILE_SOURCE -D_LARGEFILE64_SOURCE -DNO_UNWIND_TABLES -D__STDC_CONSTANT_MACROS -D__STDC_FORMAT_MACROS -DCR_SYSROOT_HASH=76e6068f9f6954e2ab1ff98ce5fa236d3d85bcbd -DNDEBUG -DNVALGRIND -DDYNAMIC_ANNOTATIONS_ENABLED=0 -I../../3rdparty/chromium/third_party/skia/include/third_party/skcms -Igen -I../../3rdparty/chromium -w -std=c11 -mfp16-format=ieee -fno-strict-aliasing --param=ssp-buffer-size=4 -fstack-protector -fno-unwind-tables -fno-asynchronous-unwind-tables -fPIC -pipe -pthread -march=armv7-a -mfloat-abi=hard -mtune=generic-armv7-a -mfpu=vfpv3-d16 -mthumb -Wall -U_FORTIFY_SOURCE -D_FORTIFY_SOURCE=2 -Wno-psabi -Wno-unused-local-typedefs -Wno-maybe-uninitialized -Wno-deprecated-declarations -fno-delete-null-pointer-checks -Wno-comments -Wno-packed-not-aligned -Wno-dangling-else -Wno-missing-field-initializers -Wno-unused-parameter -O2 -fno-ident -fdata-sections -ffunction-sections -fno-omit-frame-pointer -g0 -fvisibility=hidden -std=gnu++14 -Wno-narrowing -Wno-class-memaccess -Wno-attributes -Wno-class-memaccess -Wno-subobject-linkage -Wno-invalid-offsetof -Wno-return-type -Wno-deprecated-copy -fno-exceptions -fno-rtti --sysroot=../../../../../../sysroot/ -fvisibility-inlines-hidden -c ../../3rdparty/chromium/third_party/skia/third_party/skcms/skcms.cc -o obj/skia/skcms/skcms.o
during RTL pass: expand
In file included from ../../3rdparty/chromium/third_party/skia/third_party/skcms/skcms.cc:2053:
../../3rdparty/chromium/third_party/skia/third_party/skcms/src/Transform_inl.h: In function  void baseline::exec_ops(const Op*, const void**, const char*, char*, int) :
../../3rdparty/chromium/third_party/skia/third_party/skcms/src/Transform_inl.h:766:13: internal compiler error: in convert_move, at expr.c:218
 static void exec_ops(const Op* ops, const void** args,
             ^~~~~~~~
Please submit a full bug report,
with preprocessed source if appropriate.
See <file:///usr/share/doc/gcc-8/README.Bugs> for instructions.
I reported the bug at https://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=96206 Since this source compiles with -O0, I attempted to fix this by editing qtwebkit/src/3rdparty/chromium/build/config/compiler/BUILD.gn and replacing instances of -O1 and -O2 with -O0. Spoiler: wrong attempt. We'll see it in the next round. Impossible constraint in asm Qt5's sources embed Chrome's sources that embed the ffmpeg library sources. Even if ffmpeg's development libraries are present both in the host and in the target system, the build system insists in compiling and using the bundled version. Unfortunately, using -O0 breaks the build of ffmpeg:
/usr/bin/arm-linux-gnueabihf-gcc -MMD -MF obj/third_party/ffmpeg/ffmpeg_internal/opus.o.d -DHAVE_AV_CONFIG_H -D_POSIX_C_SOURCE=200112 -D_XOPEN_SOURCE=600 -DPIC -DFFMPEG_CONFIGURATION=NULL -DCHROMIUM_NO_LOGGING -D_ISOC99_SOURCE -D_LARGEFILE_SOURCE -DUSE_UDEV -DUSE_AURA=1 -DUSE_NSS_CERTS=1 -DUSE_OZONE=1 -DOFFICIAL_BUILD -DTOOLKIT_QT -D_FILE_OFFSET_BITS=64 -D_LARGEFILE_SOURCE -D_LARGEFILE64_SOURCE -DNO_UNWIND_TABLES -DCR_SYSROOT_HASH=76e6068f9f6954e2ab1ff98ce5fa236d3d85bcbd -DNDEBUG -DNVALGRIND -DDYNAMIC_ANNOTATIONS_ENABLED=0 -DOPUS_FIXED_POINT -I../../3rdparty/chromium/third_party/ffmpeg/chromium/config/Chromium/linux/arm -I../../3rdparty/chromium/third_party/ffmpeg -I../../3rdparty/chromium/third_party/ffmpeg/compat/atomics/gcc -Igen -I../../3rdparty/chromium -I../../3rdparty/chromium/third_party/opus/src/include -fPIC -Wno-deprecated-declarations -fomit-frame-pointer -w -std=c99 -pthread -fno-math-errno -fno-signed-zeros -fno-tree-vectorize -fno-strict-aliasing --param=ssp-buffer-size=4 -fstack-protector -fno-unwind-tables -fno-asynchronous-unwind-tables -fPIC -pipe -pthread -march=armv7-a -mfloat-abi=hard -mtune=generic-armv7-a -mfpu=vfpv3-d16 -mthumb -g0 -fvisibility=hidden -Wno-psabi -Wno-unused-local-typedefs -Wno-maybe-uninitialized -Wno-deprecated-declarations -fno-delete-null-pointer-checks -Wno-comments -Wno-packed-not-aligned -Wno-dangling-else -Wno-missing-field-initializers -Wno-unused-parameter -O0 -fno-ident -fdata-sections -ffunction-sections -std=gnu11 --sysroot=../../../../../../sysroot/ -c ../../3rdparty/chromium/third_party/ffmpeg/libavcodec/opus.c -o obj/third_party/ffmpeg/ffmpeg_internal/opus.o
In file included from ../../3rdparty/chromium/third_party/ffmpeg/libavutil/intmath.h:30,
                 from ../../3rdparty/chromium/third_party/ffmpeg/libavutil/common.h:106,
                 from ../../3rdparty/chromium/third_party/ffmpeg/libavutil/avutil.h:296,
                 from ../../3rdparty/chromium/third_party/ffmpeg/libavutil/audio_fifo.h:30,
                 from ../../3rdparty/chromium/third_party/ffmpeg/libavcodec/opus.h:28,
                 from ../../3rdparty/chromium/third_party/ffmpeg/libavcodec/opus_celt.h:29,
                 from ../../3rdparty/chromium/third_party/ffmpeg/libavcodec/opus.c:32:
../../3rdparty/chromium/third_party/ffmpeg/libavcodec/opus.c: In function  ff_celt_quant_bands :
../../3rdparty/chromium/third_party/ffmpeg/libavutil/arm/intmath.h:77:5: error: impossible constraint in  asm 
     __asm__ ("usat %0, %2, %1" : "=r"(x) : "r"(a), "i"(p));
     ^~~~~~~
The same source compiles with using -O2 instead of -O0. I worked around this by undoing the previous change, and limiting -O0 to just the source that causes the Internal Compiler Error. I edited qtwebengine/src/3rdparty/chromium/third_party/skia/third_party/skcms/skcms.cc to prepend:
#pragma GCC push_options
#pragma GCC optimize ("O0")
and append:
#pragma GCC pop_options
Next round. Missing build-deps for i386 code Qt5's sources embed Chrome's sources that embed the V8 library sources. For some reason, torque, that is part of V8, wants to build some of its sources into 32 bit code with -m32, and I did not have i386 cross-compilation libraries installed:
/usr/bin/g++ -MMD -MF v8_snapshot/obj/v8/torque_base/csa-generator.o.d -DUSE_UDEV -DUSE_AURA=1 -DUSE_NSS_CERTS=1 -DUSE_OZONE=1 -DOFFICIAL_BUILD -DTOOLKIT_QT -D_FILE_OFFSET_BITS=64 -D_LARGEFILE_SOURCE -D_LARGEFILE64_SOURCE -DNO_UNWIND_TABLES -D__STDC_CONSTANT_MACROS -D__STDC_FORMAT_MACROS -DNDEBUG -DNVALGRIND -DDYNAMIC_ANNOTATIONS_ENABLED=0 -DV8_TYPED_ARRAY_MAX_SIZE_IN_HEAP=64 -DENABLE_MINOR_MC -DV8_INTL_SUPPORT -DV8_CONCURRENT_MARKING -DV8_ENABLE_LAZY_SOURCE_POSITIONS -DV8_EMBEDDED_BUILTINS -DV8_SHARED_RO_HEAP -DV8_WIN64_UNWINDING_INFO -DV8_ENABLE_REGEXP_INTERPRETER_THREADED_DISPATCH -DV8_31BIT_SMIS_ON_64BIT_ARCH -DV8_DEPRECATION_WARNINGS -DV8_TARGET_ARCH_ARM -DCAN_USE_ARMV7_INSTRUCTIONS -DCAN_USE_VFP3_INSTRUCTIONS -DUSE_EABI_HARDFLOAT=1 -DV8_HAVE_TARGET_OS -DV8_TARGET_OS_LINUX -DDISABLE_UNTRUSTED_CODE_MITIGATIONS -DV8_31BIT_SMIS_ON_64BIT_ARCH -DV8_DEPRECATION_WARNINGS -Iv8_snapshot/gen -I../../3rdparty/chromium -I../../3rdparty/chromium/v8 -Iv8_snapshot/gen/v8 -fno-strict-aliasing --param=ssp-buffer-size=4 -fstack-protector -fno-unwind-tables -fno-asynchronous-unwind-tables -fPIC -pipe -pthread -m32 -msse2 -mfpmath=sse -mmmx -Wall -U_FORTIFY_SOURCE -D_FORTIFY_SOURCE=2 -Wno-unused-local-typedefs -Wno-maybe-uninitialized -Wno-deprecated-declarations -fno-delete-null-pointer-checks -Wno-comments -Wno-packed-not-aligned -Wno-dangling-else -Wno-missing-field-initializers -Wno-unused-parameter -fno-omit-frame-pointer -g0 -fvisibility=hidden -Wno-strict-overflow -Wno-return-type -O3 -fno-ident -fdata-sections -ffunction-sections -std=gnu++14 -Wno-narrowing -Wno-class-memaccess -Wno-attributes -Wno-class-memaccess -Wno-subobject-linkage -Wno-invalid-offsetof -Wno-return-type -Wno-deprecated-copy -fvisibility-inlines-hidden -fexceptions -frtti -c ../../3rdparty/chromium/v8/src/torque/csa-generator.cc -o v8_snapshot/obj/v8/torque_base/csa-generator.o
In file included from ../../3rdparty/chromium/v8/src/torque/csa-generator.h:8,
                 from ../../3rdparty/chromium/v8/src/torque/csa-generator.cc:5:
/usr/include/c++/8/iostream:38:10: fatal error: bits/c++config.h: No such file or directory
 #include <bits/c++config.h>
          ^~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
compilation terminated.
New build dependencies needed:
apt install lib32stdc++-8-dev
apt install libc6-dev-i386
dpkg --add-architecture i386
apt install linux-libc-dev:i386
Next round. OpenGL build issues Next bump are OpenGL related compiler issues:
/usr/bin/arm-linux-gnueabihf-g++ -MMD -MF obj/QtWebEngineCore/gl_ozone_glx_qt.o.d -DCHROMIUM_VERSION=\"80.0.3987.163\" -DUSE_UDEV -DUSE_AURA=1 -DUSE_NSS_CERTS=1 -DUSE_OZONE=1 -DOFFICIAL_BUILD -DTOOLKIT_QT -D_FILE_OFFSET_BITS=64 -D_LARGEFILE_SOURCE -D_LARGEFILE64_SOURCE -DNO_UNWIND_TABLES -D__STDC_CONSTANT_MACROS -D__STDC_FORMAT_MACROS -DCR_SYSROOT_HASH=76e6068f9f6954e2ab1ff98ce5fa236d3d85bcbd -DNDEBUG -DNVALGRIND -DDYNAMIC_ANNOTATIONS_ENABLED=0 -DQT_NO_LINKED_LIST -DQT_NO_KEYWORDS -DQT_USE_QSTRINGBUILDER -DQ_FORWARD_DECLARE_OBJC_CLASS=QT_FORWARD_DECLARE_CLASS -DQTWEBENGINECORE_VERSION_STR=\"5.15.0\" -DQTWEBENGINEPROCESS_NAME=\"QtWebEngineProcess\" -DBUILDING_CHROMIUM -DQTWEBENGINE_EMBEDDED_SWITCHES -DQT_NO_EXCEPTIONS -D_LARGEFILE64_SOURCE -D_LARGEFILE_SOURCE -DQT_NO_DEBUG -DQT_QUICK_LIB -DQT_GUI_LIB -DQT_QMLMODELS_LIB -DQT_WEBCHANNEL_LIB -DQT_QML_LIB -DQT_NETWORK_LIB -DQT_POSITIONING_LIB -DQT_CORE_LIB -DQT_WEBENGINECOREHEADERS_LIB -DVK_NO_PROTOTYPES -DGL_GLEXT_PROTOTYPES -DUSE_GLX -DUSE_EGL -DGOOGLE_PROTOBUF_NO_RTTI -DGOOGLE_PROTOBUF_NO_STATIC_INITIALIZER -DHAVE_PTHREAD -DU_USING_ICU_NAMESPACE=0 -DU_ENABLE_DYLOAD=0 -DUSE_CHROMIUM_ICU=1 -DU_STATIC_IMPLEMENTATION -DICU_UTIL_DATA_IMPL=ICU_UTIL_DATA_FILE -DUCHAR_TYPE=uint16_t -DWEBRTC_NON_STATIC_TRACE_EVENT_HANDLERS=0 -DWEBRTC_CHROMIUM_BUILD -DWEBRTC_POSIX -DWEBRTC_LINUX -DABSL_ALLOCATOR_NOTHROW=1 -DWEBRTC_USE_BUILTIN_ISAC_FIX=1 -DWEBRTC_USE_BUILTIN_ISAC_FLOAT=0 -DHAVE_SCTP -DNO_MAIN_THREAD_WRAPPING -DSK_HAS_PNG_LIBRARY -DSK_HAS_WEBP_LIBRARY -DSK_USER_CONFIG_HEADER=\"../../skia/config/SkUserConfig.h\" -DSK_GL -DSK_HAS_JPEG_LIBRARY -DSK_USE_LIBGIFCODEC -DSK_VULKAN_HEADER=\"../../skia/config/SkVulkanConfig.h\" -DSK_VULKAN=1 -DSK_SUPPORT_GPU=1 -DSK_GPU_WORKAROUNDS_HEADER=\"gpu/config/gpu_driver_bug_workaround_autogen.h\" -DVK_NO_PROTOTYPES -DLEVELDB_PLATFORM_CHROMIUM=1 -DLEVELDB_PLATFORM_CHROMIUM=1 -DV8_31BIT_SMIS_ON_64BIT_ARCH -DV8_DEPRECATION_WARNINGS -I../../3rdparty/chromium/skia/config -I../../3rdparty/chromium/third_party -I../../3rdparty/chromium/third_party/boringssl/src/include -I../../3rdparty/chromium/third_party/skia/include/core -Igen -I../../3rdparty/chromium -I/home/build/armhf/qt-everywhere-src-5.15.0/qtwebengine/src/core -I/home/build/armhf/qt-everywhere-src-5.15.0/qtwebengine/src/core/api -I/home/build/armhf/qt-everywhere-src-5.15.0/qtdeclarative/include/QtQuick/5.15.0 -I/home/build/armhf/qt-everywhere-src-5.15.0/qtdeclarative/include/QtQuick/5.15.0/QtQuick -I/home/build/armhf/qt-everywhere-src-5.15.0/qtbase/include/QtGui/5.15.0 -I/home/build/armhf/qt-everywhere-src-5.15.0/qtbase/include/QtGui/5.15.0/QtGui -I/home/build/armhf/qt-everywhere-src-5.15.0/qtdeclarative/include -I/home/build/armhf/qt-everywhere-src-5.15.0/qtdeclarative/include/QtQuick -I/home/build/armhf/qt-everywhere-src-5.15.0/qtbase/include -I/home/build/armhf/qt-everywhere-src-5.15.0/qtbase/include/QtGui -I/home/build/armhf/qt-everywhere-src-5.15.0/qtdeclarative/include/QtQmlModels/5.15.0 -I/home/build/armhf/qt-everywhere-src-5.15.0/qtdeclarative/include/QtQmlModels/5.15.0/QtQmlModels -I/home/build/armhf/qt-everywhere-src-5.15.0/qtdeclarative/include/QtQml/5.15.0 -I/home/build/armhf/qt-everywhere-src-5.15.0/qtdeclarative/include/QtQml/5.15.0/QtQml -I/home/build/armhf/qt-everywhere-src-5.15.0/qtbase/include/QtCore/5.15.0 -I/home/build/armhf/qt-everywhere-src-5.15.0/qtbase/include/QtCore/5.15.0/QtCore -I/home/build/armhf/qt-everywhere-src-5.15.0/qtdeclarative/include/QtQmlModels -I/home/build/armhf/qt-everywhere-src-5.15.0/qtwebchannel/include -I/home/build/armhf/qt-everywhere-src-5.15.0/qtwebchannel/include/QtWebChannel -I/home/build/armhf/qt-everywhere-src-5.15.0/qtdeclarative/include/QtQml -I/home/build/armhf/qt-everywhere-src-5.15.0/qtbase/include/QtNetwork -I/home/build/armhf/qt-everywhere-src-5.15.0/qtlocation/include -I/home/build/armhf/qt-everywhere-src-5.15.0/qtlocation/include/QtPositioning -I/home/build/armhf/qt-everywhere-src-5.15.0/qtbase/include/QtCore -I/home/build/armhf/qt-everywhere-src-5.15.0/qtwebengine/include -I/home/build/armhf/qt-everywhere-src-5.15.0/qtwebengine/include/QtWebEngineCore -I/home/build/armhf/qt-everywhere-src-5.15.0/qtwebengine/include/QtWebEngineCore/5.15.0 -I/home/build/armhf/qt-everywhere-src-5.15.0/qtwebengine/include/QtWebEngineCore/5.15.0/QtWebEngineCore -I.moc -I/home/build/sysroot/opt/vc/include -I/home/build/sysroot/opt/vc/include/interface/vcos/pthreads -I/home/build/sysroot/opt/vc/include/interface/vmcs_host/linux -Igen/.moc -I/home/build/armhf/qt-everywhere-src-5.15.0/qtbase/mkspecs/devices/linux-rasp-pi2-g++ -Igen -Igen -I../../3rdparty/chromium/third_party/libyuv/include -Igen -I../../3rdparty/chromium/third_party/jsoncpp/source/include -I../../3rdparty/chromium/third_party/jsoncpp/generated -Igen -Igen -I../../3rdparty/chromium/third_party/khronos -I../../3rdparty/chromium/gpu -I../../3rdparty/chromium/third_party/vulkan/include -I../../3rdparty/chromium/third_party/perfetto/include -Igen/third_party/perfetto/build_config -Igen -Igen -Igen/third_party/dawn/src/include -I../../3rdparty/chromium/third_party/dawn/src/include -Igen -I../../3rdparty/chromium/third_party/boringssl/src/include -I../../3rdparty/chromium/third_party/protobuf/src -Igen/protoc_out -I../../3rdparty/chromium/third_party/protobuf/src -I../../3rdparty/chromium/third_party/ced/src -I../../3rdparty/chromium/third_party/icu/source/common -I../../3rdparty/chromium/third_party/icu/source/i18n -I../../3rdparty/chromium/third_party/webrtc_overrides -I../../3rdparty/chromium/third_party/webrtc -Igen/third_party/webrtc -I../../3rdparty/chromium/third_party/abseil-cpp -I../../3rdparty/chromium/third_party/skia -I../../3rdparty/chromium/third_party/libgifcodec -I../../3rdparty/chromium/third_party/vulkan/include -I../../3rdparty/chromium/third_party/skia/third_party/vulkanmemoryallocator -I../../3rdparty/chromium/third_party/vulkan/include -Igen/third_party/perfetto -Igen/third_party/perfetto -Igen/third_party/perfetto -Igen/third_party/perfetto -Igen/third_party/perfetto -Igen/third_party/perfetto -Igen/third_party/perfetto -Igen/third_party/perfetto -Igen/third_party/perfetto -Igen/third_party/perfetto -I../../3rdparty/chromium/third_party/crashpad/crashpad -I../../3rdparty/chromium/third_party/crashpad/crashpad/compat/non_mac -I../../3rdparty/chromium/third_party/crashpad/crashpad/compat/linux -I../../3rdparty/chromium/third_party/crashpad/crashpad/compat/non_win -I../../3rdparty/chromium/third_party/libwebm/source -I../../3rdparty/chromium/third_party/leveldatabase -I../../3rdparty/chromium/third_party/leveldatabase/src -I../../3rdparty/chromium/third_party/leveldatabase/src/include -I../../3rdparty/chromium/v8/include -Igen/v8/include -I../../3rdparty/chromium/third_party/mesa_headers -fno-strict-aliasing --param=ssp-buffer-size=4 -fstack-protector -fno-unwind-tables -fno-asynchronous-unwind-tables -fPIC -pipe -pthread -march=armv7-a -mfloat-abi=hard -mtune=generic-armv7-a -mfpu=vfpv3-d16 -mthumb -Wall -U_FORTIFY_SOURCE -D_FORTIFY_SOURCE=2 -Wno-psabi -Wno-unused-local-typedefs -Wno-maybe-uninitialized -Wno-deprecated-declarations -fno-delete-null-pointer-checks -Wno-comments -Wno-packed-not-aligned -Wno-dangling-else -Wno-missing-field-initializers -Wno-unused-parameter -O2 -fno-ident -fdata-sections -ffunction-sections -fno-omit-frame-pointer -g0 -fvisibility=hidden -g -O2 -fdebug-prefix-map=/home/build/armhf/qt-everywhere-src-5.15.0=. -fstack-protector-strong -Wformat -Werror=format-security -Wdate-time -D_FORTIFY_SOURCE=2 -O2 -fno-exceptions -Wall -Wextra -D_REENTRANT -I/home/build/sysroot/usr/include/nss -I/home/build/sysroot/usr/include/nspr -std=gnu++14 -Wno-narrowing -Wno-class-memaccess -Wno-attributes -Wno-class-memaccess -Wno-subobject-linkage -Wno-invalid-offsetof -Wno-return-type -Wno-deprecated-copy -fno-exceptions -fno-rtti --sysroot=../../../../../../sysroot/ -fvisibility-inlines-hidden -g -O2 -fdebug-prefix-map=/home/build/armhf/qt-everywhere-src-5.15.0=. -fstack-protector-strong -Wformat -Werror=format-security -Wdate-time -D_FORTIFY_SOURCE=2 -O2 -std=gnu++1y -fno-exceptions -Wall -Wextra -D_REENTRANT -Wno-unused-parameter -Wno-unused-variable -Wno-deprecated-declarations -c /home/build/armhf/qt-everywhere-src-5.15.0/qtwebengine/src/core/ozone/gl_ozone_glx_qt.cpp -o obj/QtWebEngineCore/gl_ozone_glx_qt.o
In file included from ../../3rdparty/chromium/ui/gl/gl_bindings.h:497,
                 from ../../3rdparty/chromium/ui/gl/gl_gl_api_implementation.h:12,
                 from /home/build/armhf/qt-everywhere-src-5.15.0/qtwebengine/src/core/ozone/gl_ozone_glx_qt.cpp:49:
../../3rdparty/chromium/ui/gl/gl_bindings_autogen_egl.h:227:5: error:  EGLSetBlobFuncANDROID  has not been declared
     EGLSetBlobFuncANDROID set,
     ^~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
../../3rdparty/chromium/ui/gl/gl_bindings_autogen_egl.h:228:5: error:  EGLGetBlobFuncANDROID  has not been declared
     EGLGetBlobFuncANDROID get);
     ^~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
../../3rdparty/chromium/ui/gl/gl_bindings_autogen_egl.h:571:46: error:  EGLSetBlobFuncANDROID  has not been declared
                                              EGLSetBlobFuncANDROID set,
                                              ^~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
../../3rdparty/chromium/ui/gl/gl_bindings_autogen_egl.h:572:46: error:  EGLGetBlobFuncANDROID  has not been declared
                                              EGLGetBlobFuncANDROID get) = 0;
                                              ^~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
cc1plus: warning: unrecognized command line option  -Wno-deprecated-copy 
/usr/bin/arm-linux-gnueabihf-g++ -MMD -MF obj/QtWebEngineCore/display_gl_output_surface.o.d -DCHROMIUM_VERSION=\"80.0.3987.163\" -DUSE_UDEV -DUSE_AURA=1 -DUSE_NSS_CERTS=1 -DUSE_OZONE=1 -DOFFICIAL_BUILD -DTOOLKIT_QT -D_FILE_OFFSET_BITS=64 -D_LARGEFILE_SOURCE -D_LARGEFILE64_SOURCE -DNO_UNWIND_TABLES -D__STDC_CONSTANT_MACROS -D__STDC_FORMAT_MACROS -DCR_SYSROOT_HASH=76e6068f9f6954e2ab1ff98ce5fa236d3d85bcbd -DNDEBUG -DNVALGRIND -DDYNAMIC_ANNOTATIONS_ENABLED=0 -DQT_NO_LINKED_LIST -DQT_NO_KEYWORDS -DQT_USE_QSTRINGBUILDER -DQ_FORWARD_DECLARE_OBJC_CLASS=QT_FORWARD_DECLARE_CLASS -DQTWEBENGINECORE_VERSION_STR=\"5.15.0\" -DQTWEBENGINEPROCESS_NAME=\"QtWebEngineProcess\" -DBUILDING_CHROMIUM -DQTWEBENGINE_EMBEDDED_SWITCHES -DQT_NO_EXCEPTIONS -D_LARGEFILE64_SOURCE -D_LARGEFILE_SOURCE -DQT_NO_DEBUG -DQT_QUICK_LIB -DQT_GUI_LIB -DQT_QMLMODELS_LIB -DQT_WEBCHANNEL_LIB -DQT_QML_LIB -DQT_NETWORK_LIB -DQT_POSITIONING_LIB -DQT_CORE_LIB -DQT_WEBENGINECOREHEADERS_LIB -DVK_NO_PROTOTYPES -DGL_GLEXT_PROTOTYPES -DUSE_GLX -DUSE_EGL -DGOOGLE_PROTOBUF_NO_RTTI -DGOOGLE_PROTOBUF_NO_STATIC_INITIALIZER -DHAVE_PTHREAD -DU_USING_ICU_NAMESPACE=0 -DU_ENABLE_DYLOAD=0 -DUSE_CHROMIUM_ICU=1 -DU_STATIC_IMPLEMENTATION -DICU_UTIL_DATA_IMPL=ICU_UTIL_DATA_FILE -DUCHAR_TYPE=uint16_t -DWEBRTC_NON_STATIC_TRACE_EVENT_HANDLERS=0 -DWEBRTC_CHROMIUM_BUILD -DWEBRTC_POSIX -DWEBRTC_LINUX -DABSL_ALLOCATOR_NOTHROW=1 -DWEBRTC_USE_BUILTIN_ISAC_FIX=1 -DWEBRTC_USE_BUILTIN_ISAC_FLOAT=0 -DHAVE_SCTP -DNO_MAIN_THREAD_WRAPPING -DSK_HAS_PNG_LIBRARY -DSK_HAS_WEBP_LIBRARY -DSK_USER_CONFIG_HEADER=\"../../skia/config/SkUserConfig.h\" -DSK_GL -DSK_HAS_JPEG_LIBRARY -DSK_USE_LIBGIFCODEC -DSK_VULKAN_HEADER=\"../../skia/config/SkVulkanConfig.h\" -DSK_VULKAN=1 -DSK_SUPPORT_GPU=1 -DSK_GPU_WORKAROUNDS_HEADER=\"gpu/config/gpu_driver_bug_workaround_autogen.h\" -DVK_NO_PROTOTYPES -DLEVELDB_PLATFORM_CHROMIUM=1 -DLEVELDB_PLATFORM_CHROMIUM=1 -DV8_31BIT_SMIS_ON_64BIT_ARCH -DV8_DEPRECATION_WARNINGS -I../../3rdparty/chromium/skia/config -I../../3rdparty/chromium/third_party -I../../3rdparty/chromium/third_party/boringssl/src/include -I../../3rdparty/chromium/third_party/skia/include/core -Igen -I../../3rdparty/chromium -I/home/build/armhf/qt-everywhere-src-5.15.0/qtwebengine/src/core -I/home/build/armhf/qt-everywhere-src-5.15.0/qtwebengine/src/core/api -I/home/build/armhf/qt-everywhere-src-5.15.0/qtdeclarative/include/QtQuick/5.15.0 -I/home/build/armhf/qt-everywhere-src-5.15.0/qtdeclarative/include/QtQuick/5.15.0/QtQuick -I/home/build/armhf/qt-everywhere-src-5.15.0/qtbase/include/QtGui/5.15.0 -I/home/build/armhf/qt-everywhere-src-5.15.0/qtbase/include/QtGui/5.15.0/QtGui -I/home/build/armhf/qt-everywhere-src-5.15.0/qtdeclarative/include -I/home/build/armhf/qt-everywhere-src-5.15.0/qtdeclarative/include/QtQuick -I/home/build/armhf/qt-everywhere-src-5.15.0/qtbase/include -I/home/build/armhf/qt-everywhere-src-5.15.0/qtbase/include/QtGui -I/home/build/armhf/qt-everywhere-src-5.15.0/qtdeclarative/include/QtQmlModels/5.15.0 -I/home/build/armhf/qt-everywhere-src-5.15.0/qtdeclarative/include/QtQmlModels/5.15.0/QtQmlModels -I/home/build/armhf/qt-everywhere-src-5.15.0/qtdeclarative/include/QtQml/5.15.0 -I/home/build/armhf/qt-everywhere-src-5.15.0/qtdeclarative/include/QtQml/5.15.0/QtQml -I/home/build/armhf/qt-everywhere-src-5.15.0/qtbase/include/QtCore/5.15.0 -I/home/build/armhf/qt-everywhere-src-5.15.0/qtbase/include/QtCore/5.15.0/QtCore -I/home/build/armhf/qt-everywhere-src-5.15.0/qtdeclarative/include/QtQmlModels -I/home/build/armhf/qt-everywhere-src-5.15.0/qtwebchannel/include -I/home/build/armhf/qt-everywhere-src-5.15.0/qtwebchannel/include/QtWebChannel -I/home/build/armhf/qt-everywhere-src-5.15.0/qtdeclarative/include/QtQml -I/home/build/armhf/qt-everywhere-src-5.15.0/qtbase/include/QtNetwork -I/home/build/armhf/qt-everywhere-src-5.15.0/qtlocation/include -I/home/build/armhf/qt-everywhere-src-5.15.0/qtlocation/include/QtPositioning -I/home/build/armhf/qt-everywhere-src-5.15.0/qtbase/include/QtCore -I/home/build/armhf/qt-everywhere-src-5.15.0/qtwebengine/include -I/home/build/armhf/qt-everywhere-src-5.15.0/qtwebengine/include/QtWebEngineCore -I/home/build/armhf/qt-everywhere-src-5.15.0/qtwebengine/include/QtWebEngineCore/5.15.0 -I/home/build/armhf/qt-everywhere-src-5.15.0/qtwebengine/include/QtWebEngineCore/5.15.0/QtWebEngineCore -I.moc -I/home/build/sysroot/opt/vc/include -I/home/build/sysroot/opt/vc/include/interface/vcos/pthreads -I/home/build/sysroot/opt/vc/include/interface/vmcs_host/linux -Igen/.moc -I/home/build/armhf/qt-everywhere-src-5.15.0/qtbase/mkspecs/devices/linux-rasp-pi2-g++ -Igen -Igen -I../../3rdparty/chromium/third_party/libyuv/include -Igen -I../../3rdparty/chromium/third_party/jsoncpp/source/include -I../../3rdparty/chromium/third_party/jsoncpp/generated -Igen -Igen -I../../3rdparty/chromium/third_party/khronos -I../../3rdparty/chromium/gpu -I../../3rdparty/chromium/third_party/vulkan/include -I../../3rdparty/chromium/third_party/perfetto/include -Igen/third_party/perfetto/build_config -Igen -Igen -Igen/third_party/dawn/src/include -I../../3rdparty/chromium/third_party/dawn/src/include -Igen -I../../3rdparty/chromium/third_party/boringssl/src/include -I../../3rdparty/chromium/third_party/protobuf/src -Igen/protoc_out -I../../3rdparty/chromium/third_party/protobuf/src -I../../3rdparty/chromium/third_party/ced/src -I../../3rdparty/chromium/third_party/icu/source/common -I../../3rdparty/chromium/third_party/icu/source/i18n -I../../3rdparty/chromium/third_party/webrtc_overrides -I../../3rdparty/chromium/third_party/webrtc -Igen/third_party/webrtc -I../../3rdparty/chromium/third_party/abseil-cpp -I../../3rdparty/chromium/third_party/skia -I../../3rdparty/chromium/third_party/libgifcodec -I../../3rdparty/chromium/third_party/vulkan/include -I../../3rdparty/chromium/third_party/skia/third_party/vulkanmemoryallocator -I../../3rdparty/chromium/third_party/vulkan/include -Igen/third_party/perfetto -Igen/third_party/perfetto -Igen/third_party/perfetto -Igen/third_party/perfetto -Igen/third_party/perfetto -Igen/third_party/perfetto -Igen/third_party/perfetto -Igen/third_party/perfetto -Igen/third_party/perfetto -Igen/third_party/perfetto -I../../3rdparty/chromium/third_party/crashpad/crashpad -I../../3rdparty/chromium/third_party/crashpad/crashpad/compat/non_mac -I../../3rdparty/chromium/third_party/crashpad/crashpad/compat/linux -I../../3rdparty/chromium/third_party/crashpad/crashpad/compat/non_win -I../../3rdparty/chromium/third_party/libwebm/source -I../../3rdparty/chromium/third_party/leveldatabase -I../../3rdparty/chromium/third_party/leveldatabase/src -I../../3rdparty/chromium/third_party/leveldatabase/src/include -I../../3rdparty/chromium/v8/include -Igen/v8/include -I../../3rdparty/chromium/third_party/mesa_headers -fno-strict-aliasing --param=ssp-buffer-size=4 -fstack-protector -fno-unwind-tables -fno-asynchronous-unwind-tables -fPIC -pipe -pthread -march=armv7-a -mfloat-abi=hard -mtune=generic-armv7-a -mfpu=vfpv3-d16 -mthumb -Wall -U_FORTIFY_SOURCE -D_FORTIFY_SOURCE=2 -Wno-psabi -Wno-unused-local-typedefs -Wno-maybe-uninitialized -Wno-deprecated-declarations -fno-delete-null-pointer-checks -Wno-comments -Wno-packed-not-aligned -Wno-dangling-else -Wno-missing-field-initializers -Wno-unused-parameter -O2 -fno-ident -fdata-sections -ffunction-sections -fno-omit-frame-pointer -g0 -fvisibility=hidden -g -O2 -fdebug-prefix-map=/home/build/armhf/qt-everywhere-src-5.15.0=. -fstack-protector-strong -Wformat -Werror=format-security -Wdate-time -D_FORTIFY_SOURCE=2 -O2 -fno-exceptions -Wall -Wextra -D_REENTRANT -I/home/build/sysroot/usr/include/nss -I/home/build/sysroot/usr/include/nspr -std=gnu++14 -Wno-narrowing -Wno-class-memaccess -Wno-attributes -Wno-class-memaccess -Wno-subobject-linkage -Wno-invalid-offsetof -Wno-return-type -Wno-deprecated-copy -fno-exceptions -fno-rtti --sysroot=../../../../../../sysroot/ -fvisibility-inlines-hidden -g -O2 -fdebug-prefix-map=/home/build/armhf/qt-everywhere-src-5.15.0=. -fstack-protector-strong -Wformat -Werror=format-security -Wdate-time -D_FORTIFY_SOURCE=2 -O2 -std=gnu++1y -fno-exceptions -Wall -Wextra -D_REENTRANT -Wno-unused-parameter -Wno-unused-variable -Wno-deprecated-declarations -c /home/build/armhf/qt-everywhere-src-5.15.0/qtwebengine/src/core/compositor/display_gl_output_surface.cpp -o obj/QtWebEngineCore/display_gl_output_surface.o
In file included from ../../3rdparty/chromium/gpu/command_buffer/client/gles2_interface.h:8,
                 from ../../3rdparty/chromium/gpu/command_buffer/client/client_transfer_cache.h:15,
                 from ../../3rdparty/chromium/gpu/command_buffer/client/gles2_implementation.h:28,
                 from /home/build/armhf/qt-everywhere-src-5.15.0/qtwebengine/src/core/compositor/display_gl_output_surface.cpp:47:
/home/build/sysroot/opt/vc/include/GLES2/gl2.h:78: warning: "GL_FALSE" redefined
 #define GL_FALSE                          (GLboolean)0
In file included from ../../3rdparty/chromium/gpu/command_buffer/client/client_context_state.h:10,
                 from ../../3rdparty/chromium/gpu/command_buffer/client/gles2_implementation.h:27,
                 from /home/build/armhf/qt-everywhere-src-5.15.0/qtwebengine/src/core/compositor/display_gl_output_surface.cpp:47:
../../3rdparty/chromium/third_party/khronos/GLES3/gl3.h:85: note: this is the location of the previous definition
 #define GL_FALSE                          0
In file included from ../../3rdparty/chromium/gpu/command_buffer/client/gles2_interface.h:8,
                 from ../../3rdparty/chromium/gpu/command_buffer/client/client_transfer_cache.h:15,
                 from ../../3rdparty/chromium/gpu/command_buffer/client/gles2_implementation.h:28,
                 from /home/build/armhf/qt-everywhere-src-5.15.0/qtwebengine/src/core/compositor/display_gl_output_surface.cpp:47:
/home/build/sysroot/opt/vc/include/GLES2/gl2.h:79: warning: "GL_TRUE" redefined
 #define GL_TRUE                           (GLboolean)1
In file included from ../../3rdparty/chromium/gpu/command_buffer/client/client_context_state.h:10,
                 from ../../3rdparty/chromium/gpu/command_buffer/client/gles2_implementation.h:27,
                 from /home/build/armhf/qt-everywhere-src-5.15.0/qtwebengine/src/core/compositor/display_gl_output_surface.cpp:47:
../../3rdparty/chromium/third_party/khronos/GLES3/gl3.h:86: note: this is the location of the previous definition
 #define GL_TRUE                           1
In file included from ../../3rdparty/chromium/gpu/command_buffer/client/gles2_interface.h:8,
                 from ../../3rdparty/chromium/gpu/command_buffer/client/client_transfer_cache.h:15,
                 from ../../3rdparty/chromium/gpu/command_buffer/client/gles2_implementation.h:28,
                 from /home/build/armhf/qt-everywhere-src-5.15.0/qtwebengine/src/core/compositor/display_gl_output_surface.cpp:47:
/home/build/sysroot/opt/vc/include/GLES2/gl2.h:600:37: error: conflicting declaration of C function  void glShaderSource(GLuint, GLsizei, const GLchar**, const GLint*) 
 GL_APICALL void         GL_APIENTRY glShaderSource (GLuint shader, GLsizei count, const GLchar** string, const GLint* length);
                                     ^~~~~~~~~~~~~~
In file included from ../../3rdparty/chromium/gpu/command_buffer/client/client_context_state.h:10,
                 from ../../3rdparty/chromium/gpu/command_buffer/client/gles2_implementation.h:27,
                 from /home/build/armhf/qt-everywhere-src-5.15.0/qtwebengine/src/core/compositor/display_gl_output_surface.cpp:47:
../../3rdparty/chromium/third_party/khronos/GLES3/gl3.h:624:29: note: previous declaration  void glShaderSource(GLuint, GLsizei, const GLchar* const*, const GLint*) 
 GL_APICALL void GL_APIENTRY glShaderSource (GLuint shader, GLsizei count, const GLchar *const*string, const GLint *length);
                             ^~~~~~~~~~~~~~
cc1plus: warning: unrecognized command line option  -Wno-deprecated-copy 
I'm out of the allocated hour budget, and I'll stop here for now. Building Qt5 has been providing some of the most nightmarish work time in my entire professional life. If my daily job became being required to deal with this kind of insanity, I would strongly invest in a change of career. Update Andreas Gruber wrote:
Long story short, a fast solution for the issue with EGLSetBlobFuncANDROID is to remove libraspberrypi-dev from your sysroot and do a full rebuild. There will be some changes to the configure results, so please review them - if they are relevant for you - before proceeding with your work.
And thanks to Andreas, the story can continue...

Enrico Zini: Build Qt5 cross-builder with raspbian sysroot: building the sysroot

This is part of a series of posts on compiling a custom version of Qt5 in order to develop for both amd64 and a Raspberry Pi. As an attempt to get webview to compile, I'm reattempting to build a Qt5 cross-compiling environment using a raspbian sysroot, instead of having dependencies for both arm and amd64 installed in the build system. Using dependencies installed in a straightforward way in the build system has failed because of issues like #963136, where some of the build dependencies are needed for both architectures, but the corresponding Debian -dev packages are not yet coinstallable. This is something that causes many people much pain.
Start from a clean sysroot Looking for a Raspbian image, I found out that it has been renamed to "Raspberry Pi OS". I realised that software names are like underwear: as soon as they become well used, they need to be changed. I downloaded RaspbianRaspberry Pi OS Lite from https://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads/raspberry-pi-os/ to start with something minimal. It came out as something like 1.5G uncompressed, which wasn't as minimal as I would have hoped, but that'll be what I'll have to work with. Adding build dependencies I have acquired significant experience manipulating RaspbianRaspberry Pi OS images from working with Himblick. This time I'm working with the disk image directly, instead of an SD card, since I will be needing it as a sysroot during the build, and I won't need to actually boot it on real hardware. The trick is to work with kpartx to make the partitions in the image available as loopback block devices. I have extracted a lot of relevant code from Himblick into a Python library I called Transilience The result is this provisioning script, which is able to take a RaspbianRaspberry Pi OS image, enlarge it, and install Debian packages into it. I find this script pretty cool, also in the way it embeds quite a bit of experience gathered on the field. I can also be integrated in a fully automated setup and provisioning system. The next step will be to use the result as a sysroot to build Qt.

Russell Coker: Windows 10 on Debian under KVM

Here are some things that you need to do to get Windows 10 running on a Debian host under KVM. UEFI Booting UEFI is big and complex, but most of what it does isn t needed at all. If all you want to do is boot from an image of a disk with a GPT partition table then you just install the package ovmf and add something like the following to your KVM start script:
UEFI"-drive if=pflash,format=raw,readonly,file=/usr/share/OVMF/OVMF_CODE.fd -drive if=pflash,format=raw,readonly,file=/usr/share/OVMF/OVMF_VARS.fd"
Note that some of the documentation on this doesn t have the OVMF_VARS.fd file set to readonly. Allowing writes to that file means that the VM boot process (and maybe later) can change EFI variables that affect later boots and other VMs if they all share the same file. For a basic boot you don t need to change variables so you want it read-only. Also having it read-only is necessary if you want to run KVM as non-root. As an experiment I tried booting without the OVMF_VARS.fd file, it didn t boot and then even after configuring it to use the OVMF_VARS.fd file again Windows gave a boot error about the boot configuration data file that required booting from recovery media. Apparently configuration mistakes with EFI can mess up the Windows installation, so be careful and backup the Windows installation regularly! Linux can boot from EFI but you generally don t want to unless the boot device is larger than 2TB. It s relatively easy to convert a Linux installation on a GPT disk to a virtual image on a DOS partition table disk or on block devices without partition tables and that gives a faster boot. If the same person runs the host hardware and the VMs then the best choice for Linux is to have no partition tables just one filesystem per block device (which makes resizing much easier) and have the kernel passed as a parameter to kvm. So booting a VM from EFI is probably only useful for booting Windows VMs and for Linux boot loader development and testing. As an aside, the Debian Wiki page about Secure Boot on a VM [4] was useful for this. It s unfortunate that it and so much of the documentation about UEFI is about secure boot which isn t so useful if you just want to boot a system without regard to the secure boot features. Emulated IDE Disks Debian kernels (and probably kernels from many other distributions) are compiled with the paravirtualised storage device drivers. Windows by default doesn t support such devices so you need to emulate an IDE/SATA disk so you can boot Windows and install the paravirtualised storage driver. The following configuration snippet has a commented line for paravirtualised IO (which is fast) and an uncommented line for a virtual IDE/SATA disk that will allow an unmodified Windows 10 installation to boot.
#DRIVE="-drive format=raw,file=/home/kvm/windows10,if=virtio"
DRIVE="-drive id=disk,format=raw,file=/home/kvm/windows10,if=none -device ahci,id=ahci -device ide-drive,drive=disk,bus=ahci.0"
Spice Video Spice is an alternative to VNC, Here is the main web site for Spice [1]. Spice has many features that could be really useful for some people, like audio, sharing USB devices from the client, and streaming video support. I don t have a need for those features right now but it s handy to have options. My main reason for choosing Spice over VNC is that the mouse cursor in the ssvnc doesn t follow the actual mouse and can be difficult or impossible to click on items near edges of the screen. The following configuration will make the QEMU code listen with SSL on port 1234 on all IPv4 addresses. Note that this exposes the Spice password to anyone who can run ps on the KVM server, I ve filed Debian bug #965061 requesting the option of a password file to address this. Also note that the qxl virtual video hardware is VGA compatible and can be expected to work with OS images that haven t been modified for virtualisation, but that they work better with special video drivers.
KEYDIR=/etc/letsencrypt/live/kvm.example.com-0001
-spice password=xxxxxxxx,x509-cacert-file=$KEYDIR/chain.pem,x509-key-file=$KEYDIR/privkey.pem,x509-cert-file=$KEYDIR/cert.pem,tls-port=1234,tls-channel=main -vga qxl
To connect to the Spice server I installed the spice-client-gtk package in Debian and ran the following command:
spicy -h kvm.example.com -s 1234 -w xxxxxxxx
Note that this exposes the Spice password to anyone who can run ps on the system used as a client for Spice, I ve filed Debian bug #965060 requesting the option of a password file to address this. This configuration with an unmodified Windows 10 image only supported 800*600 resolution VGA display. Networking To setup bridged networking as non-root you need to do something like the following as root:
chgrp kvm /usr/lib/qemu/qemu-bridge-helper
setcap cap_net_admin+ep /usr/lib/qemu/qemu-bridge-helper
mkdir -p /etc/qemu
echo "allow all" > /etc/qemu/bridge.conf
chgrp kvm /etc/qemu/bridge.conf
chmod 640 /etc/qemu/bridge.conf
Windows 10 supports the emulated Intel E1000 network card. Configuration like the following configures networking on a bridge named br0 with an emulated E1000 card. MAC addresses that have a 1 in the second least significant bit of the first octet are locally administered (like IPv4 addresses starting with 10. ), see the Wikipedia page about MAC Address for details. The following is an example of network configuration where $ID is an ID number for the virtual machine. So far I haven t come close to 256 VMs on one network so I ve only needed one octet.
NET="-device e1000,netdev=net0,mac=02:00:00:00:01:$ID -netdev tap,id=net0,helper=/usr/lib/qemu/qemu-bridge-helper,br=br0"
Final KVM Settings
KEYDIR=/etc/letsencrypt/live/kvm.example.com-0001
SPICE="-spice password=xxxxxxxx,x509-cacert-file=$KEYDIR/chain.pem,x509-key-file=$KEYDIR/privkey.pem,x509-cert-file=$KEYDIR/cert.pem,tls-port=1234,tls-channel=main -vga qxl"
UEFI="-drive if=pflash,format=raw,readonly,file=/usr/share/OVMF/OVMF_CODE.fd -drive if=pflash,format=raw,readonly,file=/usr/share/OVMF/OVMF_VARS.fd"
DRIVE="-drive format=raw,file=/home/kvm/windows10,if=virtio"
NET="-device e1000,netdev=net0,mac=02:00:00:00:01:$ID -netdev tap,id=net0,helper=/usr/lib/qemu/qemu-bridge-helper,br=br0"
kvm -m 4000 -smp 2 $SPICE $UEFI $DRIVE $NET
Windows Settings The Spice Download page has a link for spice-guest-tools that has the QNX video driver among other things [2]. This seems to be needed for resolutions greater than 800*600. The Virt-Manager Download page has a link for virt-viewer which is the Spice client for Windows systems [3], they have MSI files for both i386 and AMD64 Windows. It s probably a good idea to set display and system to sleep after never (I haven t tested what happens if you don t do that, but there s no benefit in sleeping). Before uploading an image I disabled the pagefile and set the partition to the minimum size so I had less data to upload. Problems Here are some things I haven t solved yet. The aSpice Android client for the Spice protocol fails to connect with the QEMU code at the server giving the following message on stderr: error:14094418:SSL routines:ssl3_read_bytes:tlsv1 alert unknown ca:../ssl/record/rec_layer_s3.c:1544:SSL alert number 48 . Spice is supposed to support dynamic changes to screen resolution on the VM to match the window size at the client, this doesn t work for me, not even with the Red Hat QNX drivers installed. The Windows Spice client doesn t seem to support TLS, I guess running some sort of proxy for TLS would work but I haven t tried that yet.

14 July 2020

Ian Jackson: MessagePack vs CBOR (RFC7049)

tl;dr: Use MessagePack, rather than CBOR. Introduction I recently wanted to choose a binary encoding. This was for a project using Rust serde, so I looked at the list of formats there. I ended up reading about CBOR and MessagePack. Both of these are binary formats for a JSON-like data model. Both of them are "schemaless", meaning you can decode them without knowing the structure. (This also provides some forwards compatibility.) They are, in fact, quite similar (although they are totally incompatible). This is no accident: CBOR is, effectively, a fork of MessagePack. Both formats continue to exist and both are being used in new programs. I needed to make a choice but lacked enough information. I thought I would try to examine the reasons and nature of the split, and to make some kind of judgement about the situation. So I did a lot of reading [11]. Here are my conclusions. History and politics Between about 2010 and 2013 there was only MessagePack. Unfortunately, MessagePack had some problems. The biggest of these was that it lacked a separate string type. Strings were to be encoded simply as byte blocks. This caused serious problems for many MessagePack library implementors: for example, when decoding a MessagePack file the Python library wouldn't know whether to produce a Python bytes object, or a string. Straightforward data structures wouldn't round trip through MessagePack. [1] [2] It seems that in late 2012 this came to the attention to someone with an IETF background. According to them, after unsatisfactory conversations with MessagePack upstream, they decided they would have to fork. They submitted an Internet Draft for a partially-incompatible protocol [3] [4]. Little seemed to happen in the IETF until soon before the Orlando in-person IETF meeting in February 2013.[5] These conversations sparked some discussion in the MessagePack issue tracker. There were long threads including about process [1,2,4 ibid]. But there was also a useful technical discussion, about proposed backward compatible improves to the MessagePack spec.[5] The prominent IETF contributor provided some helpful input in these discussions in the MessagePack community - but also pushed quite hard for a "tagging" system, which suggestion was not accepted (see my technical analysis, below). An improved MessagePack spec resulted, with string support, developed largely by the MessagePack community. It seems to have been available in useable form since mid-2013 and was officially published as canonical in August 2013. Meanwhile a parallel process was pursued in the IETF, based on the IETF contributor's fork, with 11 Internet-Drafts from February[7] to September[8]. This seems to have continued even though the original technical reason for the fork - lack of string vs binary distinction - no longer applied. The IETF proponent expressed unhappiness about MessagePack's stewardship and process as much as they did about the technical details [4, ibid]. The IETF process culminated in the CBOR RFC[9]. The discussion on process questions between the IETF proponent and MessagePack upstream, in the MessagePack issue tracker [4, ibid] should make uncomfortable reading for IETF members. The IETF acceptance of CBOR despite clear and fundamental objections from MessagePack upstream[13] and indeed other respected IETF members[14], does not reflect well on the IETF. The much vaunted openness of the IETF process seems to have been rather one-sided. The IETF proponent here was an IETF Chair. Certainly the CBOR author was very well-spoken and constantly talks about politeness and cooperation and process; but what they actually did was very hostile. They accused the MessagePack community of an "us and them" attitude while simultaneously pursuing a forked specification! The CBOR RFC does mention MessagePack in Appendix E.2. But not to acknowledge that CBOR was inspired by MessagePack. Rather, it does so to make a set of tendentious criticisms of MessagePack. Perhaps these criticisms were true when they were first written in an I-D but they were certainly false by the time the RFC was actually published, which occurred after the MessagePack improvement process was completely concluded, with a formal spec issued. Since then both formats have existed in parallel. Occasionally people discuss which one is better, and sometimes it is alleged that "yes CBOR is the successor to MessagePack", which is not really fair.[9][10] Technical differences The two formats have a similar arrangement: initial byte which can encode small integers, or type and length, or type and specify a longer length encoding. But there are important differences. Overall, MessagePack is very significantly simpler. Floating point CBOR supports five floating point formats! Not only three sizes of IEEE754, but also decimal floating point, and bigfloats. This seems astonishing for a supposedly-simple format. (Some of these are supported via the semi-optional tag mechanism - see below.) Indefinite strings and arrays Like MessagePack, CBOR mostly precedes items with their length. But CBOR also supports "indefinite" strings, arrays, and so on, where the length is not specified at the beginning. The object (array, string, whatever) is terminated by a special "break" item. This seems to me to be a mistake. If you wanted the kind of application where MessagePack or CBOR would be useful, streaming sub-objects of unknown length is not that important. This possibility considerably complicates decoders. CBOR tagging system CBOR has a second layer of sort-of-type which can be attached to each data item. The set of possible tags is open-ended and extensible, but the CBOR spec itself gives tag values for: two kinds of date format; positive and negative bignums; decimal floats (see above); binary but expected to be encoded if converted to JSON (in base64url, base64, or base16); nestedly encoded CBOR; URIs; base64 data (two formats); regexps; MIME messages; and a special tag to make file(1) work. In practice it is not clear how many of these are used, but a decoder must be prepared to at least discard them. The amount of additional spec complexity here is quite astonishing. IMO binary formats like this will (just like JSON) be used by a next layer which always has an idea of what the data means, including (where the data is a binary blob) what encoding it is in etc. So these tags are not useful. These tags might look like a middle way between (i) extending the binary protocol with a whole new type such as an extension type (incompatible with old readers) and encoding your new kind data in a existing type (leaving all readers who don't know the schema to print it as just integers or bytes or string). But I think they are more trouble than they are worth. The tags are uncomfortably similar to the ASN.1 tag system, which is widely regarded as one of ASN.1's unfortunate complexities. MessagePack extension mechanism MessagePack explicitly reserves some encoding space for users and for future extensions: there is an "extension type". The payload is an extension type byte plus some more data bytes; the data bytes are in a format to be defined by the extension type byte. Half of the possible extension byte values are reserved for future specification, and half are designated for application use. This is pleasingly straightforward. (There is also one unused primary initial byte value, but that would be rejected by existing decoders and doesn't seem like a likely direction for future expansion.) Minor other differences in integer encoding The encodings of integers differ. In MessagePack, signed and unsigned integers have different typecodes. In CBOR, signed and unsigned positive integers have the same typecodes; negative integers have a different set of typecodes. This means that a CBOR reader which knows it is expecting a signed value will have to do a top-bit-set check on the actual data value! And a CBOR writer must check the value to choose a typecode. MessagePack reserves fewer shortcodes for small negative integers, than for small positive integers. Conclusions and lessons MessagePack seems to have been prompted into fixing the missing string type problem, but only by the threat of a fork. However, this fork went ahead even after MessagePack clearly accepted the need for a string type. MessagePack had a fixed protocol spec before the IETF did. The continued pursuit of the IETF fork was ostensibly been motivated by a disapproval of the development process and in particular a sense that the IETF process was superior. However, it seems to me that the IETF process was abused by CBOR's proponent, who just wanted things their own way. I have seen claims by IETF proponents that the open decisionmaking system inherently produces superior results. However, in this case the IETF process produced a bad specification. To the extent that other IETF contributors had influence over the ultimate CBOR RFC, I don't think they significantly improved it. CBOR has been described as MessagePack bikeshedded by the IETF. That would have been bad enough, but I think it's worse than that. To a large extent CBOR is one person's NIH-induced bad design rubber stamped by the IETF. CBOR's problems are not simply matters of taste: it's significantly overcomplicated. One lesson for the rest of us is that although being the upstream and nominally in charge of a project seems to give us a lot of power, it's wise to listen carefully to one's users and downstreams. Once people are annoyed enough to fork, the fork will have a life of its own. Another lesson is that many of us should be much warier of the supposed moral authority of the IETF. Many IETF standards are awful (Oauth 2 [12]; IKE; DNSSEC; the list goes on). Sometimes (especially when network adoption effects are weak, as with MessagePack vs CBOR) better results can be obtained from a smaller group, or even an individual, who simply need the thing for their own uses. Finally, governance systems of public institutions like the IETF need to be robust in defending the interests of outsiders (and hence of society at large) against eloquent insiders who know how to work the process machinery. Any institution which nominally serves the public good faces a constant risk of devolving into self-servingness. This risk gets worse the more powerful and respected the institution becomes. References
  1. #13: First-class string type in serialization specification (MessagePack issue tracker, June 2010 - August 2013)
  2. #121: Msgpack can't differentiate between raw binary data and text strings (MessagePack issue tracker, November 2012 - February 2013)
  3. draft-bormann-apparea-bpack-00: The binarypack JSON-like representation format (IETF Internet-Draft, October 2012)
  4. #129: MessagePack should be developed in an open process (MessagePack issue tracker, February 2013 - March 2013)
  5. Re: JSON mailing list and BoF (IETF apps-discuss mailing list message from Carsten Bormann, 18 February 2013)
  6. #128: Discussions on the upcoming MessagePack spec that adds the string type to the protocol (MessagePack issue tracker, February 2013 - August 2013)
  7. draft-bormann-apparea-bpack-01: The binarypack JSON-like representation format (IETF Internet-Draft, February 2013)
  8. draft-bormann-cbor: Concise Binary Object Representation (CBOR) (IETF Internet-Drafts, May 2013 - September 2013)
  9. RFC 7049: Concise Binary Object Representation (CBOR) (October 2013)
  10. "MessagePack should be replaced with [CBOR] everywhere ..." (floatboth on Hacker News, 8th April 2017)
  11. Discussion with very useful set of history links (camgunz on Hacker News, 9th April 2017)
  12. OAuth 2.0 and the Road to Hell (Eran Hammer, blog posting from 2012, via Wayback Machine)
  13. Re: [apps-discuss] [Json] msgpack/binarypack (Re: JSON mailing list and BoF) (IETF list message from Sadyuki Furuhashi, 4th March 2013)
  14. "no apologies for complaining about this farce" (IETF list message from Phillip Hallam-Baker, 15th August 2013)
    Edited 2020-07-14 18:55 to fix a minor formatting issue, and 2020-07-14 22:54 to fix two typos


comment count unavailable comments

9 July 2020

Enrico Zini: Laptop migration

This laptop used to be extra-flat My laptop battery started to explode in slow motion. HP requires 10 business days to repair my laptop under warranty, and I cannot afford that length of downtime. Alternatively, HP quoted me 375 + VAT for on-site repairs, which I tought was very funny. For 376.55 + VAT, which is pretty much exactly the same amount, I bought instead a refurbished ThinkPad X240 with a dual-core I5, 8G of RAM, 250G SSD, and a 1920x1080 IPS display, to use as a spare while my laptop is being repaired. I'd like to thank HP for giving me the opportunity to own a ThinkPad. Since I'm migrating all my system to the spare and then (hopefully) back, I'm documenting what I need to be fully productive on new hardware. Install Debian A basic Debian netinst with no tasks selected is good enough to get going. Note that if wifi worked in Debian Installer, it doesn't mean that it will work in the minimal system it installed. See here for instructions on quickly bringing up wifi on a newly installed minimal system. Copy /home A simple tar of /home is all I needed to copy my data over. A neat way to do it was connecting the two laptops with an ethernet cable, and using netcat:
# On the source
tar -C / -zcf - home   nc -l -p 12345 -N
# On the target
nc 10.0.0.1 12345   tar -C / -zxf -
Since the data travel unencrypted in this way, don't do it over wifi. Install packages I maintain a few simple local metapackages that depend on the packages I usually used. I could just install those and let apt bring in their dependencies. For the build dependencies of the programs I develop, I use mk-build-deps from the devscripts package to create metapackages that make sure they are installed. Here's an extract from debian/control of the metapackage:
Source: enrico
Section: admin
Priority: optional
Maintainer: Enrico Zini <enrico@debian.org>
Build-Depends: debhelper (>= 11)
Standards-Version: 3.7.2.1
Package: enrico
Section: admin
Architecture: all
Depends:
  mc, mmv, moreutils, powertop, syncmaildir, notmuch,
  ncdu, vcsh, ddate, jq, git-annex, eatmydata,
  vdirsyncer, khal, etckeeper, moc, pwgen
Description: Enrico's working environment
Package: enrico-devel
Section: devel
Architecture: all
Depends:
  git, python3-git, git-svn, gitk, ansible, fabric,
  valgrind, kcachegrind, zeal, meld, d-feet, flake8, mypy, ipython3,
  strace, ltrace
Description: Enrico's development environment
Package: enrico-gui
Section: x11
Architecture: all
Depends:
  xclip, gnome-terminal, qalculate-gtk, liferea, gajim,
  mumble, sm, syncthing, virt-manager
Recommends: k3b
Description: Enrico's GUI environment
Package: enrico-sanity
Section: admin
Architecture: all
Conflicts: libapache2-mod-php, libapache2-mod-php5, php5, php5-cgi, php5-fpm, libapache2-mod-php7.0, php7.0, libphp7.0-embed, libphp-embed, libphp5-embed
Description: Enrico's sanity
 Metapackage with a list of packages that I do not want anywhere near my
 system.
System-wide customizations I tend to avoid changing system-wide configuration as much as possible, so copying over /home and installing packages takes care of 99% of my needs. There are a few system-wide tweaks I cannot do without: For postfix, I have a little ansible playbook that takes care of it. Network Manager system connections need to be copied manually: a plain copy and a systemctl restart network-manager are enough. Note that Network Manager will ignore the files unless their owner and permissions are what it expects. Fine tuning Comparing the output of dpkg --get-selections between the old and the new system might highlight packages manually installed in a hurry and not added to the metapackages. Finally, what remains is fixing the sad state of mimetype associations, which seem to associate opening file depending on whatever application was installed last, phases of the moon, and what option is the most annoying. Currently on my system, PDFs are opened in inkscape by xdg-open and in calibre by run-mailcap. Let's see how long it takes to figure this one out.

6 July 2020

Reproducible Builds: Reproducible Builds in June 2020

Welcome to the June 2020 report from the Reproducible Builds project. In these reports we outline the most important things that we and the rest of the community have been up to over the past month.

What are reproducible builds? One of the original promises of open source software is that distributed peer review and transparency of process results in enhanced end-user security. But whilst anyone may inspect the source code of free and open source software for malicious flaws, almost all software today is distributed as pre-compiled binaries. This allows nefarious third-parties to compromise systems by injecting malicious code into seemingly secure software during the various compilation and distribution processes.

News The GitHub Security Lab published a long article on the discovery of a piece of malware designed to backdoor open source projects that used the build process and its resulting artifacts to spread itself. In the course of their analysis and investigation, the GitHub team uncovered 26 open source projects that were backdoored by this malware and were actively serving malicious code. (Full article) Carl Dong from Chaincode Labs uploaded a presentation on Bitcoin Build System Security and reproducible builds to YouTube: The app intended to trace infection chains of Covid-19 in Switzerland published information on how to perform a reproducible build. The Reproducible Builds project has received funding in the past from the Open Technology Fund (OTF) to reach specific technical goals, as well as to enable the project to meet in-person at our summits. The OTF has actually also assisted countless other organisations that promote transparent, civil society as well as those that provide tools to circumvent censorship and repressive surveillance. However, the OTF has now been threatened with closure. (More info) It was noticed that Reproducible Builds was mentioned in the book End-user Computer Security by Mark Fernandes (published by WikiBooks) in the section titled Detection of malware in software. Lastly, reproducible builds and other ideas around software supply chain were mentioned in a recent episode of the Ubuntu Podcast in a wider discussion about the Snap and application stores (at approx 16:00).

Distribution work In the ArchLinux distribution, a goal to remove .doctrees from installed files was created via Arch s TODO list mechanism. These .doctree files are caches generated by the Sphinx documentation generator when developing documentation so that Sphinx does not have to reparse all input files across runs. They should not be packaged, especially as they lead to the package being unreproducible as their pickled format contains unreproducible data. Jelle van der Waa and Eli Schwartz submitted various upstream patches to fix projects that install these by default. Dimitry Andric was able to determine why the reproducibility status of FreeBSD s base.txz depended on the number of CPU cores, attributing it to an optimisation made to the Clang C compiler [ ]. After further detailed discussion on the FreeBSD bug it was possible to get the binaries reproducible again [ ]. For the GNU Guix operating system, Vagrant Cascadian started a thread about collecting reproducibility metrics and Jan janneke Nieuwenhuizen posted that they had further reduced their bootstrap seed to 25% which is intended to reduce the amount of code to be audited to avoid potential compiler backdoors. In openSUSE, Bernhard M. Wiedemann published his monthly Reproducible Builds status update as well as made the following changes within the distribution itself:

Debian Holger Levsen filed three bugs (#961857, #961858 & #961859) against the reproducible-check tool that reports on the reproducible status of installed packages on a running Debian system. They were subsequently all fixed by Chris Lamb [ ][ ][ ]. Timo R hling filed a wishlist bug against the debhelper build tool impacting the reproducibility status of 100s of packages that use the CMake build system which led to a number of tests and next steps. [ ] Chris Lamb contributed to a conversation regarding the nondeterministic execution of order of Debian maintainer scripts that results in the arbitrary allocation of UNIX group IDs, referencing the Tails operating system s approach this [ ]. Vagrant Cascadian also added to a discussion regarding verification formats for reproducible builds. 47 reviews of Debian packages were added, 37 were updated and 69 were removed this month adding to our knowledge about identified issues. Chris Lamb identified and classified a new uids_gids_in_tarballs_generated_by_cmake_kde_package_app_templates issue [ ] and updated the paths_vary_due_to_usrmerge as deterministic issue, and Vagrant Cascadian updated the cmake_rpath_contains_build_path and gcc_captures_build_path issues. [ ][ ][ ]. Lastly, Debian Developer Bill Allombert started a mailing list thread regarding setting the -fdebug-prefix-map command-line argument via an environment variable and Holger Levsen also filed three bugs against the debrebuild Debian package rebuilder tool (#961861, #961862 & #961864).

Development On our website this month, Arnout Engelen added a link to our Mastodon account [ ] and moved the SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH git log example to another section [ ]. Chris Lamb also limited the number of news posts to avoid showing items from (for example) 2017 [ ]. strip-nondeterminism is our tool to remove specific non-deterministic results from a completed build. It is used automatically in most Debian package builds. This month, Mattia Rizzolo bumped the debhelper compatibility level to 13 [ ] and adjusted a related dependency to avoid potential circular dependency [ ].

Upstream work The Reproducible Builds project attempts to fix unreproducible packages and we try to to send all of our patches upstream. This month, we wrote a large number of such patches including: Bernhard M. Wiedemann also filed reports for frr (build fails on single-processor machines), ghc-yesod-static/git-annex (a filesystem ordering issue) and ooRexx (ASLR-related issue).

diffoscope diffoscope is our in-depth diff-on-steroids utility which helps us diagnose reproducibility issues in packages. It does not define reproducibility, but rather provides a helpful and human-readable guidance for packages that are not reproducible, rather than relying essentially-useless binary diffs. This month, Chris Lamb uploaded versions 147, 148 and 149 to Debian and made the following changes:
  • New features:
    • Add output from strings(1) to ELF binaries. (#148)
    • Dump PE32+ executables (such as EFI applications) using objdump(1). (#181)
    • Add support for Zsh shell completion. (#158)
  • Bug fixes:
    • Prevent a traceback when comparing PDF documents that did not contain metadata (ie. a PDF /Info stanza). (#150)
    • Fix compatibility with jsondiff version 1.2.0. (#159)
    • Fix an issue in GnuPG keybox file handling that left filenames in the diff. [ ]
    • Correct detection of JSON files due to missing call to File.recognizes that checks candidates against file(1). [ ]
  • Output improvements:
    • Use the CSS word-break property over manually adding U+200B zero-width spaces as these were making copy-pasting cumbersome. (!53)
    • Downgrade the tlsh warning message to an info level warning. (#29)
  • Logging improvements:
  • Testsuite improvements:
    • Update tests for file(1) version 5.39. (#179)
    • Drop accidentally-duplicated copy of the --diff-mask tests. [ ]
    • Don t mask an existing test. [ ]
  • Codebase improvements:
    • Replace obscure references to WF with Wagner-Fischer for clarity. [ ]
    • Use a semantic AbstractMissingType type instead of remembering to check for both types of missing files. [ ]
    • Add a comment regarding potential security issue in the .changes, .dsc and .buildinfo comparators. [ ]
    • Drop a large number of unused imports. [ ][ ][ ][ ][ ]
    • Make many code sections more Pythonic. [ ][ ][ ][ ]
    • Prevent some variable aliasing issues. [ ][ ][ ]
    • Use some tactical f-strings to tidy up code [ ][ ] and remove explicit u"unicode" strings [ ].
    • Refactor a large number of routines for clarity. [ ][ ][ ][ ]
trydiffoscope is the web-based version of diffoscope. This month, Chris Lamb also corrected the location for the celerybeat scheduler to ensure that the clean/tidy tasks are actually called which had caused an accidental resource exhaustion. (#12) In addition Jean-Romain Garnier made the following changes:
  • Fix the --new-file option when comparing directories by merging DirectoryContainer.compare and Container.compare. (#180)
  • Allow user to mask/filter diff output via --diff-mask=REGEX. (!51)
  • Make child pages open in new window in the --html-dir presenter format. [ ]
  • Improve the diffs in the --html-dir format. [ ][ ]
Lastly, Daniel Fullmer fixed the Coreboot filesystem comparator [ ] and Mattia Rizzolo prevented warnings from the tlsh fuzzy-matching library during tests [ ] and tweaked the build system to remove an unwanted .build directory [ ]. For the GNU Guix distribution Vagrant Cascadian updated the version of diffoscope to version 147 [ ] and later 148 [ ].

Testing framework We operate a large and many-featured Jenkins-based testing framework that powers tests.reproducible-builds.org. Amongst many other tasks, this tracks the status of our reproducibility efforts across many distributions as well as identifies any regressions that have been introduced. This month, Holger Levsen made the following changes:
  • Debian-related changes:
    • Prevent bogus failure emails from rsync2buildinfos.debian.net every night. [ ]
    • Merge a fix from David Bremner s database of .buildinfo files to include a fix regarding comparing source vs. binary package versions. [ ]
    • Only run the Debian package rebuilder job twice per day. [ ]
    • Increase bullseye scheduling. [ ]
  • System health status page:
    • Add a note displaying whether a node needs to be rebooted for a kernel upgrade. [ ]
    • Fix sorting order of failed jobs. [ ]
    • Expand footer to link to the related Jenkins job. [ ]
    • Add archlinux_html_pages, openwrt_rebuilder_today and openwrt_rebuilder_future to known broken jobs. [ ]
    • Add HTML <meta> header to refresh the page every 5 minutes. [ ]
    • Count the number of ignored jobs [ ], ignore permanently known broken jobs [ ] and jobs on known offline nodes [ ].
    • Only consider the known offline status from Git. [ ]
    • Various output improvements. [ ][ ]
  • Tools:
    • Switch URLs for the Grml Live Linux and PureOS package sets. [ ][ ]
    • Don t try to build a disorderfs Debian source package. [ ][ ][ ]
    • Stop building diffoscope as we are moving this to Salsa. [ ][ ]
    • Merge several is diffoscope up-to-date on every platform? test jobs into one [ ] and fail less noisily if the version in Debian cannot be determined [ ].
In addition: Marcus Hoffmann was added as a maintainer of the F-Droid reproducible checking components [ ], Jelle van der Waa updated the is diffoscope up-to-date in every platform check for Arch Linux and diffoscope [ ], Mattia Rizzolo backed up a copy of a remove script run on the Codethink-hosted jump server [ ] and Vagrant Cascadian temporarily disabled the fixfilepath on bullseye, to get better data about the ftbfs_due_to_f-file-prefix-map categorised issue. Lastly, the usual build node maintenance was performed by Holger Levsen [ ][ ], Mattia Rizzolo [ ] and Vagrant Cascadian [ ][ ][ ][ ][ ].

If you are interested in contributing to the Reproducible Builds project, please visit our Contribute page on our website. However, you can get in touch with us via:

This month s report was written by Bernhard M. Wiedemann, Chris Lamb, Eli Schwartz, Holger Levsen, Jelle van der Waa and Vagrant Cascadian. It was subsequently reviewed by a bunch of Reproducible Builds folks on IRC and the mailing list.

4 July 2020

Dirk Eddelbuettel: Rcpp now used by 2000 CRAN packages and one in eight!

2000 Rcpp packages As of yesterday, Rcpp stands at exactly 2000 reverse-dependencies on CRAN. The graph on the left depicts the growth of Rcpp usage (as measured by Depends, Imports and LinkingTo, but excluding Suggests) over time. Rcpp was first released in November 2008. It probably cleared 50 packages around three years later in December 2011, 100 packages in January 2013, 200 packages in April 2014, and 300 packages in November 2014. It passed 400 packages in June 2015 (when I tweeted about it), 500 packages in late October 2015, 600 packages in March 2016, 700 packages last July 2016, 800 packages last October 2016, 900 packages early January 2017, 1000 packages in April 2017, 1250 packages in November 2017, 1500 packages in November 2018 and then 1750 packages last August. The chart extends to the very beginning via manually compiled data from CRANberries and checked with crandb. The next part uses manually saved entries. The core (and by far largest) part of the data set was generated semi-automatically via a short script appending updates to a small file-based backend. A list of packages using Rcpp is available too. Also displayed in the graph is the relative proportion of CRAN packages using Rcpp. The four per-cent hurdle was cleared just before useR! 2014 where I showed a similar graph (as two distinct graphs) in my invited talk. We passed five percent in December of 2014, six percent July of 2015, seven percent just before Christmas 2015, eight percent in the summer of 2016, nine percent mid-December 2016, cracked ten percent in the summer of 2017 and eleven percent in 2018. We now passed 12.5 percent so one in every eight CRAN packages dependens on Rcpp. Stunning. There is more detail in the chart: how CRAN seems to be pushing back more and removing more aggressively (which my CRANberries tracks but not in as much detail as it could), how the growth of Rcpp seems to be slowing somewhat outright and even more so as a proportion of CRAN as one would expect a growth curve to. To mark the occassion, I sent out two tweets yesterday: first a shorter one with just the numbers , followed by a second one also containing the few calculation steps. The screenshot from the second one is below. 2000 Rcpp packages 2000 user packages is pretty mind-boggling. We can use the progression of CRAN itself compiled by Henrik in a series of posts and emails to the main development mailing list. Not that long ago CRAN itself did have only 1000 packages, then 5000, 10000, and here we are at just over 16000 with Rcpp at 12.5% and still growing (though maybe more slowly). Amazeballs. The Rcpp team continues to aim for keeping Rcpp as performant and reliable as it has been. A really big shoutout and Thank You! to all users and contributors of Rcpp for help, suggestions, bug reports, documentation or, of course, code. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can now sponsor me at GitHub. For the first year, GitHub will match your contributions.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.

3 July 2020

Dirk Eddelbuettel: #28: Welcome RSPM and test-drive with Bionic and Focal

Welcome to the 28th post in the relatively random R recommendations series, or R4 for short. Our last post was a double entry in this R4 series and the newer T4 video series and covered a topic touched upon in this R4 series multiple times: easy binary install, especially on Ubuntu. That post already previewed the newest kid on the block: RStudio s RSPM, now formally announced. In the post we were only able to show Ubuntu 18.04 aka bionic. With the formal release of RSPM support has been added for Ubuntu 20.04 aka focal and we are happy to announce that of course we added a corresponding Rocker r-rspm container. So you can now take full advantage of RSPM either via docker pull rocker/r-rspm:18.04 or via docker pull rocker/r-rspm:20.04 covering the two most recent LTS releases. RSPM is a nice accomplishment. Covering multiple Linux distributions is an excellent achievement. Allowing users to reason in terms of the CRAN packages (i.e. installing xml2, not r-cran-xml2) eases use. Doing it from via the standard R command install.packages() (or wrapper around it like our install.r from littler package) is very good too and an excellent technical achievement. There is, as best as I can tell, only one shortcoming, along with one small bit of false advertising. The shortcoming is technical. By bringing the package installation into the user application domain, it is separated from the system and lacks integration with system libraries. What do I mean here? If you were to add R to a plain Ubuntu container, say 18.04 or 20.04, then added the few lines to support RSPM and install xml2 it would install. And fail. Why? Because the system library libxml2 does not get installed with the RSPM package whereas the .deb from the distribution or PPAs does. So to help with some popular packages I added libxml2, libunits and a few more for geospatial work to the rocker/r-rspm containers. Being already present ensures packages xml2 and units can run immediately. Please file issue tickets at the Rocker repo if you come across other missing libraries we could preload. (A related minor nag is incomplete coverage. At least one of my CRAN packages does not (yet?) come as a RSPM binary. Then again, CRAN has 16k packages, and the RSPM coverage is much wider than the PPA one. But completeness would be neat. The final nag is lack of Debian support which seems, well, odd.) So what about the small bit of false advertising? Well it is claimed that RSPM makes installation so much faster on Linux . True, faster than the slowest possible installation from source. Also easier. But we had numerous posts on this blog showing other speed gains: Using ccache. And, of course, using binaries. And as the initial video mentioned above showed, installing from the PPAs is also faster than via RSPM. That is easy to replicate. Just set up the rocker/r-ubuntu:20.04 (or 18.04) container alongside the rocker/r-rspm:20.04 (or also 18.04) container. And then time install.r rstan (or install.r tinyverse) in the RSPM one against apt -y update; apt install -y r-cran-rstan (or ... r-cran-tinyverse). In every case I tried, the installation using binaries from the PPA was still faster by a few seconds. Not that it matters greatly: both are very, very quick compared to source installation (as e.g. shown here in 2017 (!!)) but the standard Ubuntu .deb installation is simply faster than using RSPM. (Likely due to better CDN usage so this may change over time. Neither method appears to do downloads in parallel so there is scope for both for doing better.) So in sum: Welcome to RSPM, and nice new tool and feel free to drive it using rocker/r-rspm:18.04 or rocker/r-rspm:20.04. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can now sponsor me at GitHub. For the first year, GitHub will match your contributions.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.

2 July 2020

Russell Coker: Isolating PHP Web Sites

If you have multiple PHP web sites on a server in a default configuration they will all be able to read each other s files in a default configuration. If you have multiple PHP web sites that have stored data or passwords for databases in configuration files then there are significant problems if they aren t all trusted. Even if the sites are all trusted (IE the same person configures them all) if there is a security problem in one site it s ideal to prevent that being used to immediately attack all sites. mpm_itk The first thing I tried was mpm_itk [1]. This is a version of the traditional prefork module for Apache that has one process for each HTTP connection. When it s installed you just put the directive AssignUserID USER GROUP in your VirtualHost section and that virtual host runs as the user:group in question. It will work with any Apache module that works with mpm_prefork. In my experiment with mpm_itk I first tried running with a different UID for each site, but that conflicted with the pagespeed module [2]. The pagespeed module optimises HTML and CSS files to improve performance and it has a directory tree where it stores cached versions of some of the files. It doesn t like working with copies of itself under different UIDs writing to that tree. This isn t a real problem, setting up the different PHP files with database passwords to be read by the desired group is easy enough. So I just ran each site with a different GID but used the same UID for all of them. The first problem with mpm_itk is that the mpm_prefork code that it s based on is the slowest mpm that is available and which is also incompatible with HTTP/2. A minor issue of mpm_itk is that it makes Apache take ages to stop or restart, I don t know why and can t be certain it s not a configuration error on my part. As an aside here is a site for testing your server s support for HTTP/2 [3]. To enable HTTP/2 you have to be running mpm_event and enable the http2 module. Then for every virtual host that is to support it (generally all https virtual hosts) put the line Protocols h2 h2c http/1.1 in the virtual host configuration. A good feature of mpm_itk is that it has everything for the site running under the same UID, all Apache modules and Apache itself. So there s no issue of one thing getting access to a file and another not getting access. After a trial I decided not to keep using mpm_itk because I want HTTP/2 support. php-fpm Pools The Apache PHP module depends on mpm_prefork so it also has the issues of not working with HTTP/2 and of causing the web server to be slow. The solution is php-fpm, a separate server for running PHP code that uses the fastcgi protocol to talk to Apache. Here s a link to the upstream documentation for php-fpm [4]. In Debian this is in the php7.3-fpm package. In Debian the directory /etc/php/7.3/fpm/pool.d has the configuration for pools . Below is an example of a configuration file for a pool:
# cat /etc/php/7.3/fpm/pool.d/example.com.conf
[example.com]
user = example.com
group = example.com
listen = /run/php/php7.3-example.com.sock
listen.owner = www-data
listen.group = www-data
pm = dynamic
pm.max_children = 5
pm.start_servers = 2
pm.min_spare_servers = 1
pm.max_spare_servers = 3
Here is the upstream documentation for fpm configuration [5]. Then for the Apache configuration for the site in question you could have something like the following:
ProxyPassMatch "^/(.*\.php(/.*)?)$" "unix:/run/php/php7.3-example.com.sock fcgi://localhost/usr/share/wordpress/"
The fcgi://localhost part is just part of the way of specifying a Unix domain socket. From the Apache Wiki it appears that the method for configuring the TCP connections is more obvious [6]. I chose Unix domain sockets because it allows putting the domain name in the socket address. Matching domains for the web server to port numbers is something that s likely to be error prone while matching based on domain names is easier to check and also easier to put in Apache configuration macros. There was some additional hassle with getting Apache to read the files created by PHP processes (the options include running PHP scripts with the www-data group, having SETGID directories for storing files, and having world-readable files). But this got things basically working. Nginx My Google searches for running multiple PHP sites under different UIDs didn t turn up any good hits. It was only after I found the DigitalOcean page on doing this with Nginx [7] that I knew what to search for to find the way of doing it in Apache.

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