Wayland First up, I read Antoine Beaupr s Wayland to Sway migration with interest. While he said it s done and dusted or something similar, the post shows there s still quite a ways to go. I wouldn t say it s done or whatever till it s integrated so well that a person installs it and doesn t really need to fiddle with config files as an average user. For specific use-cases you may need to, but that should be outside of a normal user (layperson) experience. I have been using mate for a long long time and truth be told been very happy with it. The only thing I found about Wayland on mate is this discussion or rather this entry. The roadmap on Ubuntu Mate is also quite iffy. The Mate Wayland entry on Debian wiki also perhaps need an updation but dunno much as the latest update it shares is 2019 and it s 2022. One thing to note, at least according to Antoine, things should be better as and when it gets integrated even on legacy hardware. I would be interested to know how it would work on old desktops and laptops rather than new or is there some barrier? I, for one would have liked to see or know about why lightdm didn t work on Wayland and if there s support. From what little I know lightdm is much lighter than gdm3 and doesn t require much memory and from what little I have experienced works very well with mate. I have been using it since 2015/16 although the Debian changelog tells me that it has been present since 2011. I was hoping to see if there was a Wayland specific mailing list, something like debian-wayland but apparently there s not :(. Using mate desktop wayland (tried few other variations on the keywords) but search fails to find any meaningful answer :(. FWIW and I don t know the reason why but Archwiki never fails to amaze me. Interestingly, it just says No for mate. I probably would contact upstream in the coming days to know what their plans are and hopefully they will document what their plans are on integrating Wayland in both short-term and long-term with an update, or if there is something more recent they have documented elsewhere, get that update on the Debian wiki so people know. The other interesting thread I read was Russel Coker s Thinkpad X1 Carbon Gen5 entry. I would be in the market in a few months to find/buy a Thinkpad but probably of AMD rather than Intel because part of recent past history with Intel as well as AMD having a bit of an edge over Intel as far as graphics is concerned. I wonder why Russel was looking into Intel and not AMD. Would be interested to know why Intel and not AMD? Any specific reason ???

Hearing Aids I finally bought hearing aids about a couple of weeks back and have been practicing using them. I was able to have quite a few conversations although music is still I m not able to listen clearly but it is still a far cry from before and for the better. I am able to have conversations with people and also reply and they do not have to make that extra effort that they needed to. Make things easier for everybody. The one I bought is at the starting range although the hearing aids go all the way to 8 lakhs for a pair (INR 800,000), the more expensive ones having WiFi, Bluetooth and more channels, it all depends on how much can one afford. And AFAIK there is not a single Indian manufacturer who is known in this business.

One thing I did notice is while the hearing aids are remarkably sturdy if they fall down as they are small, yet you have to be careful of both dust and water . That does makes life a bit difficult as my house and city both gets sand quite a bit everyday. I don t think they made any India-specific changes, if they had, would probably make things better. I haven t yet looked at it, but it may be possible to hack it remotely. There may or may not be security issues involved, probably would try once I ve bit more time am bit more comfortable to try and see what I can find out. If I had bought it before, maybe I would have applied for the Debian event happening in Kerala, if nothing else, would have been to document what happened there in detail. I probably would have to get a new motherboard for my desktop probably in a year or two as quite a few motherboards also have WiFi (WiFi 6 ?) think on the southbridge. I at least would have a look in new year and know more as to what s been happening. For last at least 2-3 years there has been a rumor which has been confirmed time and again that the Tata Group has been in talks with multiple vendors to set chip fabrication and testing business but to date they haven t been able to find one. They do keep on giving press conferences about the same but that s all they do :(. Just shared the latest one above.

The Long War Terry Pratchett, Stephen Braxter Long Earth Terry Pratchett, Stephen Braxter ISBN13: 9780062067777 Last month there was also a seconds books sale where I was lucky enough to get my hands on the Long War. But before I share about the book itself, I had a discussion with another of my friends and had to re-share part of that conversation. While the gentleman was adamant that non-fiction books are great, my point as always is both are equal. As I shared perhaps on this blog itself, perhaps multiple times, that I had seen a YT video in which a professor shared multiple textbooks of physics and shared how they are wrong and have been wrong and kept them in a specific corner. He took the latest book which he honestly said doesn t have any mistakes as far as he know and yet still kept in that same corner denoting that it is highly possible that future understanding will make the knowledge or understanding we know different. An example of physics in the nano world and how that is different and basically turns our understanding than what we know. Now as far as the book is concerned, remember Michael Crichton s Timeline. Now that book was originally written in the 1960 s while this one was written by both the honorable gentleman in 2013. So almost 50+ years difference between the two books, and that even shows how they think about things. In this book, you no longer need a big machine, but have something called a stepper machine which is say similar to a cellphone, that size and that frame, thickness etc. In this one, the idea of multiverse is also there but done a tad differently. In this, we do not have other humans or copy humans but have multiple earths that may have same or different geography as how evolution happened. None of the multiverse earths have humans but have different species depending on the evolution that happened there. There are something called as trolls but they have a much different meaning and way about them about how most fantasy authors portray trolls. While they are big in this as well, they are as gentle as bears or rabbits. So the whole thing is about real estate and how humans have spread out on multiple earths and the politics therein. Interestingly, the story was trashed or given negative reviews on Goodreads. The sad part is/was that it was written and published in 2013 when perhaps the possibility of war or anything like that was very remote especially in the States, but now we are now in 2022 and just had an insurrection happen and whole lot of Americans are radicalized, whether you see the left or the right depending on your ideology. An American did share few weeks ago how some shares are looking at Proportional Representation and that should make both parties come more towards the center and be a bit more transparent. What was interesting to me is the fact that states have much more rights to do elections and electioneering the way they want rather than a set model which everyone has common which is what happens in India. This also does poke holes into the whole Donald Trump stolen democracy drama but that s a different story altogether. One of the more interesting things I came to know about is that there are 4 books in the long series and this was the second book in itself. I do not want to dwell on the characters themselves as frankly speaking I haven t read all the four books and it would be gross injustice on my part to talk about the characters themselves. Did I enjoy reading the book, for sure. What was interesting and very true of human nature is that even if we have the ability or had the ability to have whole worlds to ourselves, we are bound to mess it up. And in that aspect, I don t think he is too far off the mark. If I had a whole world, wouldn t I try to exploit it to the best or worse of my ability. One of the more interesting topics in the book is the barter system they have thought of that is called as favors. If you are in multiple worlds, then having a currency, even fiat money is of no use and they have to find ways and means to trade with one another. The book also touches a bit on slavery but only just and doesn t really explore it as much as it could have.

Identity Now this has many meanings to it. Couple of weeks ago, saw a transgender meet. For the uninitiated or rather people like me, basically it is about people who are born in one gender but do not identify with it but the other and they express it first through their clothes and expression and the end of the journey perhaps is with having the organs but this may or may not be feasible, as such surgery is expensive and also not available everywhere. After section 377 was repealed few years ago, we do have a third gender on forms as well as have something called a Transgender Act but how much the needle has moved in society is still a question. They were doing a roadshow near my house hence I was able to talk with them with my new hearing aids and while there was lot of traffic was able to understand some of their issues. For e.g. they find it difficult to get houses on rent, but then it is similar for bachelor guys or girls also. One could argue to what degree it is, and that perhaps maybe. Also, there is a myth that they are somehow promiscuous but that I believe is neither here or there. Osho said an average person thinks about the opposite sex every few seconds or a minute. I am sure even Freud would have similar ideas. So, if you look in that way everybody is promiscuous as far as thought is concerned. The other part being opportunity but that again is function of so many other things. Some people are able to attract a lot of people, others might not. And then whether they chose to act on that opportunity or not is another thing altogether. Another word that is or was used is called gender fluid, but that too is iffy as gender fluid may or may not mean transgender. Also, while watching some nature documentary few days/weeks back had come to know that trees have something like 18 odd genders. That just blows me out of the mind and does re-question this whole idea of sexuality and identity to only two which seems somewhat regressive at least to me. If we think humans are part of nature, then we need to be open up perhaps a bit more. But identity as I shared above has more than one meaning. For e.g. citizenship, that one is born in India is even messier to know, understand and define. I had come across this article about couple of months back. Now think about this. Now, there have been studies and surveys about citizenship and it says something like 60% birth registrations are done in metro cities. Now Metro cities are 10 as defined by Indian state. But there are roughly an odd 4k cities in India and probably twice the number of villages and those are conservative numbers as we still don t record things meticulously, maybe due to the Indian oral tradition or just being lazy or both, one part is also that if you document people and villages and towns, then you are also obligated to give them some things as a state and that perhaps is not what the Indian state wants. A small village in India could be anywhere from few hundreds of people to a few thousand. And all the new interventions whether it is PAN, Aadhar has just made holes rather than making things better. They are not inclusive but exclusive. And none of this takes into account Indian character and the way things are done in India. In most households, excluding the celebs (they are in a world of pain altogether when it comes to baby names but then it s big business but that s an entire different saga altogether, so not going to touch that.) I would use or say my individual case as that is and seems to be something which is regular even today. I was given a nickname when I was 3 years old and given a name when I was 5-6 when I was put in school. I also came to know in school few kids who didn t like their names and couple of them cajoled and actually changed their names while they were kids, most of us just stayed with what we got. I do remember sharing about nakushi or something similar a name given to few girls in Maharashtra by their parents and the state intervened and changed their names. But that too is another story in itself. What I find most problematic is that the state seems to be blind, and this seems to be by design rather than a mistake. Couple of years back, Assam did something called NRC (National Register of Citizens) and by the Govt s own account it was a failure of massive proportions. And they still want to bring in CAA, screwing up Assam more. And this is the same Govt. went shown how incorrect it was, blamed it all on the High Court and it s the same Govt. that shopped around for judges to put somebody called Mr. Saibaba (an invalid 90 year adivasi) against whom the Govt. hasn t even a single proof as of date. Apparently, they went to 6 judges who couldn t give what the decision the Govt. wanted. All this info. is in public domain. So the current party ruling, i.e. BJP just wants to make more divisions rather than taking people along as they don t have answers either on economy, inflation or issues that people are facing. One bright light has been Rahul Gandhi who has been doing a padhyatra (walking) from Kanyakumari to Kashmir and has had tremendous success although mainstream media has showed almost nothing what he is doing or why he is doing that. Not only he had people following him, there are and were many who took his example and using the same values of inclusiveness are walking where they can. And this is not to do with just a political party but more with a political thought of inclusiveness, that we are one irrespective of what I believe, eat, wear etc. And that gentleman has been giving press conferences while our dear P.M. even after 8 years doesn t have the guts to do a single press conference. Before closing, I do want to take another aspect, Rahul Gandhi s mother is an Italian or was from Italy before she married. But for BJP she is still Italian. Rishi Sunak, who has become the UK Prime Minister they think of him as Indian and yet he has sworn using the Queen s name. And the same goes for Canada Kumar (Akshay Kumar) and many others. How the right is able to blind and deaf to what it thinks is beyond me. All these people have taken an oath in the name of the Queen and they have to be loyal to her or rather now King Charles III. The disconnect continues.

Powell's frontage

I'm over on the west coast of the States attending 15th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Utility and Cloud Computing (UCC2022) in Vancouver, WA. Vancouver is a city on the southern extent of Washington, on the north side of the Columbia River from the (better known) Portland, Oregon. (Perhaps more about Vancouver in another post.) In between conference sessions I've made a couple of trips out to Portland to see bits and pieces. My friends with experience here all raved about Powell's City of Books, and with good reason. I managed to escape without a mortal wound to my finances, but only just.

Music Millennium. Keep Portland Weird!

Likewise Music Millennium, emblazoned with the unofficial city slogan "Keep Portland Weird!" was a worthwhile pilgrimage. I was saved only by knowing that I had to carry home whatever I bought on the plane. Visiting MM made me realise something about my favourite record store at home, Beatdown Records: It is a truly world-class record store. I have bought from (and sold at) many times over the years, but the last time I had a realisation that it was somewhere a bit special was in between two of the UK's Covid lockdowns. My father and I both qualified for early access to the first two rounds of COVID-19 vaccinations on offer in the UK the Astra Zeneca and The Centre for Life (across the road from Beatdown Records) was the nearest place to go and get them. By the time of our second shot, shops had started to open up again and things had loosened up a bit. We had time to kill around the appointment so I took my Dad to Beatdown. The shop has a reasonably-sized front room with a selection of CDs and records, but the real gold is in the back. Dad hadn't realised there was a back. He's a pretty quiet person so when I took him to the back and he loudly exclaimed " Wow", it was quite satisfying.

As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, I've been trying to hack an Orbic Speed RC400L mobile hotspot so it'll automatically boot when power is attached. When plugged in it would flash a "Welcome" screen and then switch to a display showing the battery charging - it wouldn't show up on USB, and didn't turn on any networking. So, my initial assumption was that the bootloader was making a policy decision not to boot Linux. After getting root (as described in the previous post), I was able to cat /proc/mtd and see that partition 7 was titled "aboot". Aboot is a commonly used Android bootloader, based on Little Kernel - LK provides the hardware interface, aboot is simply an app that runs on top of it. I was able to find the source code for Quectel's aboot, which is intended to run on the same SoC that's in this hotspot, so it was relatively easy to line up a bunch of the Ghidra decompilation with actual source (top tip: find interesting strings in your decompilation and paste them into github search, and see whether you get a repo back).

Unfortunately looking through this showed various cases where bootloader policy decisions were made, but all of them seemed to result in Linux booting. Patching them and flashing the patched loader back to the hotspot didn't change the behaviour. So now I was confused: it seemed like Linux was loading, but there wasn't an obvious point in the boot scripts where it then decided not to do stuff. No boot logs were retained between boots, which made things even more annoying. But then I realised that, well, I have root - I can just do my own logging. I hacked in an additional init script to dump dmesg to /var, powered it down, and then plugged in a USB cable. It booted to the charging screen. I hit the power button and it booted fully, appearing on USB. I adb shelled in, checked the logs, and saw that it had booted twice. So, we were definitely entering Linux before showing the charging screen. But what was the difference?

Diffing the dmesg showed that there was a major distinction on the kernel command line. The kernel command line is data populated by the bootloader and then passed to the kernel - it's how you provide arguments that alter kernel behaviour without having to recompile it, but it's also exposed to userland by the running kernel so it also serves as a way for the bootloader to pass information to the running userland. The boot that resulted in the charging screen had a androidboot.poweronreason=USB argument, the one that booted fully had androidboot.poweronreason=PWRKEY. Searching the filesystem for androidboot.poweronreason showed that the script that configures USB did not enable USB if poweronreason was USB, and the same string also showed up in a bunch of other applications. The bootloader was always booting Linux, but it was telling Linux why it had booted, and if that reason was "USB" then Linux was choosing not to enable USB and not starting the networking stack.

One approach would be to modify every application that parsed this data and make it work even if the power on reason was "USB". That would have been tedious. It seemed easier to modify the bootloader. Looking for that string in Ghidra showed that it was reading a register from the power management controller and then interpreting that to determine the reason it had booted. In effect, it was doing something like:

boot_reason = read_pmic_boot_reason();
switch(boot_reason)  
case 0x10:
  bootparam = strdup("androidboot.poweronreason=PWRKEY");
  break;
case 0x20:
  bootparam = strdup("androidboot.poweronreason=USB");
  break;
default:
  bootparam = strdup("androidboot.poweronreason=Hard_Reset");

Changing the 0x20 to 0xff meant that the USB case would never be detected, and it would fall through to the default. All the userland code was happy to accept "Hard_Reset" as a legitimate reason to boot, and now plugging in USB results in the modem booting to a functional state. Woo.

If you want to do this yourself, dump the aboot partition from your device, and search for the hex sequence "03 02 00 0a 20"". Change the final 0x20 to 0xff, copy it back to the device, and write it to mtdblock7. If it doesn't work, feel free to curse me, but I'm almost certainly going to be no use to you whatsoever. Also, please, do not just attempt to mechanically apply this to other hotspots. It's not going to end well.

comments

Focus This month I didn't have any particular focus. I just worked on issues in my info bubble.

Changes

vcs-home: add links (1 2)

purple-discord: link repology

duck: add indicator

how-can-i-help: cleanups

libusbgx: fix C++ build

devscripts: add error info

debbugs: allow mbox export of responses, toggle response display using CSS

Debian website: drop spam domain

Debian package uploads: libemail-outlook-message-perl (backports 1 2), purple-discord, sptag, celery (1 2)

Debian wiki pages: accessibility, ArchitectureSpecificsMemo, BackupAndRecovery, DebianKernel (GitBisect, UserspaceTools), DebianUpgrade, DebianWiki/Contact, Debootstrap, DeveloperNews (1 2), Glossary, loongarch64, LoongArch, LTS/Development, PorterBoxHowToUse, PortsDocs/New, Ports (loong64, riscv64), ppc64el, QuickInstall, RISC-V, SponsorChecklist, SystemBuildTools, Teams (Dpkg/MergedUsr, Security), TracingExecution, VLC

Issues

Crash in rtorrent

Regression in pastebinit

Generated files in Sequoia linter

Build failure in subversion

Tests disabled in libx86emu

Review

Debian wiki: RecentChanges for the month

Debian BTS usertags: changes for the month

Debian screenshots:

approved apt ares avahi-discover build-essential calibre cantor chkboot coreutils dmitry drumstick-tools file fritzing fwupd gddccontrol inkscape instlled jigdo-file kalzium ktrip kylin-display-switch nm-tray procps reprooduce sddm-theme-debian-maui stress-ng termtris urlview xfce4-notifyd xfce4-statusnotifier-plugin

rejected gcc (help output), synaptic (random desktop crop), simplescreenrecorder (too small), fritzing (website), elinks (prominent advertising), dosbox (proprietary game)

Administration

Debian IRC: setup topic/entrymsg to redirect OFTC #debian-jp to the Debian Japan IRC server, cleaned up #debianppc ChanServ metadata

Debian wiki: unblock IP addresses, approve domains, approve accounts

Communication

Initiate discussions about lintian classification tags for porters, incorrect Homepage in r-cran-* packages

Edited and sent Debian Misc Developer News #58

Respond to queries from Debian users and contributors on the mailing lists and IRC

Sponsors The libemail-outlook-message-perl, purple-discord, sptag, celery work was sponsored. All other work was done on a volunteer basis.

A first update to the recently-released package spdl is now om CRAN. The key focus of spdl is a offering the same interface from both R and C++ for logging by relying on spdlog via my RcppSpdlog package. This release exposes simple helpers fmt() (to format text according to the included fmt library) and cat() which formats and prints. The very short NEWS entry for this release follows.

Changes in spld version 0.0.2 (2022-12-01)

Helper functions fmt() and cat() have been added

Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is also a diffstat report. More detailed information is on the spdl page. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can sponsor me at GitHub.

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

Review: The Fed Unbound, by Lev Menand

Publisher:	Columbia Global Reports
Copyright:	2022
ISBN:	1-7359137-1-5
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	156

The Fed Unbound is a short non-fiction exploration of US Federal Reserve actions to reducing systemic risk caused by shadow banking. Its particular focus is the role of the Fed from the 2008 financial crisis to the present, including the COVID shock, but it includes a history of what Menand calls the "American Monetary Settlement," the political compromise that gave rise to the Federal Reserve. In Menand's view, a central cause of instability in the US financial system (and, given the influence of the dollar system, the world financial system as well) is shadow banking: institutions that act as banks without being insured like banks or subject to bank regulations. A bank, in this definition, is an organization that takes deposits. I'm simplifying somewhat, but what distinguishes a deposit from a security or an investment is that deposits can be withdrawn at any time, or at least on very short notice. When you want to spend the money in your checking account, you don't have to wait for a three-month maturity period or pay an early withdrawal penalty. You simply withdraw the money, with immediate effect. This property is what makes deposits "money," rather than something that you can (but possibly cannot) sell for money, such as stocks or bonds. Most people are familiar with the basic story of how banks work. Essentially no bank simply takes people's money and puts it in a vault until the person wants it again. If that were the case, you would need to pay the bank to store your money. Instead, a bank takes in deposits and then lends some portion of that money out to others. Those loans, for things like cars or houses or credit card spending, come due over time, with interest. The interest rate the bank charges on the loans is much higher than the rate it has to pay on its deposits, and it pockets the difference. The problem with this model, of course, is that the bank doesn't have your money, so if all the depositors go to the bank at the same time and ask for their money, the bank won't be able to repay them and will collapse. (See, for example, the movie It's a Wonderful Life, or Mary Poppins, or any number of other movies or books.) Retail banks are therefore subject to stringent regulations designed to promote public trust and to ensure that traditional banking is a boring (if still lucrative) business. Banks are also normally insured, which in the US means that if they do experience a run, federal regulators will step in, shut down the bank in an orderly fashion, and ensure every depositor gets their money back (at least up to the insurance limit). Alas, if you thought people would settle for boring work that makes a comfortable profit, you don't know the financial industry. Highly-regulated insured deposits are less lucrative than acting like a bank without all of those restrictions and rules and deposit insurance payments. As Menand relates in his brief history of US banking, financial institutions constantly invent new forms of deposits with similar properties but without all the pesky rules: eurodollars (which have nothing to do with the European currency), commercial paper, repo, and many others. These forms of deposits are primarily used by large institutions like corporations. The details vary, but they tend to be prone to the same fundamental instability as bank deposits: if there's a run on the market, there may not be enough liquidity for everyone to withdraw their money at once. Unlike bank deposits, though, there is no insurance, no federal regulator to step in and make depositors whole, and much less regulation to ensure that runs are unlikely. Instead, there's the Federal Reserve, which has increasingly become the bulwark against liquidity crises among shadow banks. This happened in 2008 during the financial crisis (which Menand argues can be seen as a shadow bank run sparked by losses on mortgage securities), and again at a larger scale in 2020 during the initial COVID crisis. Menand is clear that these interventions from the Federal Reserve were necessary. The alternative would have been an uncontrolled collapse of large sections of the financial system, with unknown consequences. But the Fed was not intended to perform those types of interventions. It has no regulatory authority to reform the underlying financial systems to make them safer, remove executives who failed to maintain sufficient liquidity for a crisis, or (as is standard for all traditional US banks) prohibit combining banking and more speculative investment on the same balance sheet. What the Federal Reserve can do, and did, is function as a buyer of last resort, bailing out shadow banks by purchasing assets with newly-created money. This works, in the sense that it averts the immediate crisis, but it creates other distortions. Most importantly, constant Fed intervention doesn't create an incentive to avoid situations that require that intervention; if anything, it encourages more dangerous risk-taking. The above, plus an all-too-brief history of the politics of US banking, is the meat of this book. It's a useful summary, as far as it goes, and I learned a few new things. But I think The Fed Unbound is confused about its audience. This type of high-level summary and capsule history seems most useful for people without an economics background and who haven't been following macroeconomics closely. But Menand doesn't write for that audience. He assumes definitions of words like "deposits" and "money" that are going to be confusing or even incomprehensible to the lay reader. For example, Menand describes ordinary retail banks as creating money, even saying that a bank loans money by simply incrementing the numbers in a customer's deposit account. This is correct in the technical economic definition of money (fractional reserve banking effectively creates new money), but it's going to sound to someone not well-versed in the terminology as if retail banks can create new dollars out of the ether. That power is, of course, reserved for the Federal Reserve, and indeed is largely the point of its existence. Much of this book relies on a very specific definition of money and money supply that will only be familiar to those with economics training. Similarly, the history of the Federal Reserve is interesting but slight, and at no point does Menand explain clearly how the record-keeping between it and retail banks works, or what the Fed's "balance sheet" means in practice. I realize this book isn't trying to give a detailed description or history of the Federal Reserve system, but the most obvious audience is likely to flounder at the level of detail Menand provides. Perhaps, therefore, this book is aimed at an audience already familiar with macroeconomics? But, if so, I'm not sure it says anything new. I follow macroeconomic policy moderately closely and found most of Menand's observations obvious and not very novel. There were tidbits here and there that I hadn't understood, but my time would probably have been better invested in another book. Menand proposes some reforms, but they mostly consist of "Congress should do its job and not create situations where the Federal Reserve has to act without the right infrastructure and political oversight," and, well, yes. It's hard to disagree with that, and it's also hard to see how it will ever happen. It's far too convenient to outsource such problems to central banking, where they are hidden behind financial mechanics that are incomprehensible to the average voter. This is an important topic, but I don't think this is the book to read about it. If you want a clearer and easier-to-understand role of the Federal Reserve in shadow banking crises, read Crashed instead. If you want to learn more about how retail bank regulation works, and hear a strong case for why the same principles should be applied to shadow banks, see Sheila Bair's Bull by the Horns. I'm still looking for a great history and explainer of the Federal Reserve system as a whole, but that is not this book. Rating: 5 out of 10

I've been playing with an Orbic Speed, a relatively outdated device that only speaks LTE Cat 4, but the towers I can see from here are, uh, not well provisioned so throughput really isn't a concern (and refurbs are $18, so). As usual I'm pretty terrible at just buying devices and using them for their intended purpose, and in this case it has the irritating behaviour that if there's a power cut and the battery runs out it doesn't boot again when power returns, so here's what I've learned so far.

First, it's clearly running Linux (nmap indicates that, as do the headers from the built-in webserver). The login page for the web interface has some text reading "Open Source Notice" that highlights when you move the mouse over it, but that's it - there's code to make the text light up, but it's not actually a link. There's no exposed license notices at all, although there is a copy on the filesystem that doesn't seem to be reachable from anywhere. The notice tells you to email them to receive source code, but doesn't actually provide an email address.

Still! Let's see what else we can figure out. There's no open ports other than the web server, but there is an update utility that includes some interesting components. First, there's a copy of adb, the Android Debug Bridge. That doesn't mean the device is running Android, it's common for embedded devices from various vendors to use a bunch of Android infrastructure (including the bootloader) while having a non-Android userland on top. But this is still slightly surprising, because the device isn't exposing an adb interface over USB. There's also drivers for various Qualcomm endpoints that are, again, not exposed. Running the utility under Windows while the modem is connected results in the modem rebooting and Windows talking about new hardware being detected, and watching the device manager shows a bunch of COM ports being detected and bound by Qualcomm drivers. So, what's it doing?

Sticking the utility into Ghidra and looking for strings that correspond to the output that the tool conveniently leaves in the logs subdirectory shows that after finding a device it calls vendor_device_send_cmd(). This is implemented in a copy of libusb-win32 that, again, has no offer for source code. But it's also easy to drop that into Ghidra and discover thatn vendor_device_send_cmd() is just a wrapper for usb_control_msg(dev,0xc0,0xa0,0,0,NULL,0,1000);. Sending that from Linux results in the device rebooting and suddenly exposing some more USB endpoints, including a functional adb interface. Although, annoyingly, the rndis interface that enables USB tethering via the modem is now missing.

Unfortunately the adb user is unprivileged, but most files on the system are world-readable. data/logs/atfwd.log is especially interesting. This modem has an application processor built into the modem chipset itself, and while the modem implements the Hayes Command Set there's also a mechanism for userland to register that certain AT commands should be pushed up to userland. These are handled by the atfwd_daemon that runs as root, and conveniently logs everything it's up to. This includes having logged all the communications executed when the update tool was run earlier, so let's dig into that.

The system sends a bunch of AT+SYSCMD= commands, each of which is in the form of echo (stuff) >>/usrdata/sec/chipid. Once that's all done, it sends AT+CHIPID, receives a response of CHIPID:PASS, and then AT+SER=3,1, at which point the modem reboots back into the normal mode - adb is gone, but rndis is back. But the logs also reveal that between the CHIPID request and the response is a security check that involves RSA. The logs on the client side show that the text being written to the chipid file is a single block of base64 encoded data. Decoding it just gives apparently random binary. Heading back to Ghidra shows that atfwd_daemon is reading the chipid file and then decrypting it with an RSA key. The key is obtained by calling a series of functions, each of which returns a long base64-encoded string. Decoding each of these gives 1028 bytes of high entropy data, which is then passed to another function that decrypts it using AES CBC using a key of 000102030405060708090a0b0c0d0e0f and an initialization vector of all 0s. This is somewhat weird, since there's 1028 bytes of data and 128 bit AES works on blocks of 16 bytes. The behaviour of OpenSSL is apparently to just pad the data out to a multiple of 16 bytes, but that implies that we're going to end up with a block of garbage at the end. It turns out not to matter - despite the fact that we decrypt 1028 bytes of input only the first 200 bytes mean anything, with the rest just being garbage. Concatenating all of that together gives us a PKCS#8 private key blob in PEM format. Which means we have not only the private key, but also the public key.

So, what's in the encrypted data, and where did it come from in the first place? It turns out to be a JSON blob that contains the IMEI and the serial number of the modem. This is information that can be read from the modem in the first place, so it's not secret. The modem decrypts it, compares the values in the blob to its own values, and if they match sets a flag indicating that validation has succeeeded. But what encrypted it in the first place? It turns out that the json blob is just POSTed to http://pro.w.ifelman.com/api/encrypt and an encrypted blob returned. Of course, the fact that it's being encrypted on the server with the public key and sent to the modem that decrypted with the private key means that having access to the modem gives us the public key as well, which means we can just encrypt our own blobs.

What does that buy us? Digging through the code shows the only case that it seems to matter is when parsing the AT+SER command. The first argument to this is the serial mode to transition to, and the second is whether this should be a temporary transition or a permanent one. Once parsed, these arguments are passed to /sbin/usb/compositions/switch_usb which just writes the mode out to /usrdata/mode.cfg (if permanent) or /usrdata/mode_tmp.cfg (if temporary). On boot, /data/usb/boot_hsusb_composition reads the number from this file and chooses which USB profile to apply. This requires no special permissions, except if the number is 3 - if so, the RSA verification has to be performed first. This is somewhat strange, since mode 9 gives the same rndis functionality as mode 3, but also still leaves the debug and diagnostic interfaces enabled.

So what's the point of all of this? I'm honestly not sure! It doesn't seem like any sort of effective enforcement mechanism (even ignoring the fact that you can just create your own blobs, if you change the IMEI on the device somehow, you can just POST the new values to the server and get back a new blob), so the best I've been able to come up with is to ensure that there's some mapping between IMEI and serial number before the device can be transitioned into production mode during manufacturing.

But, uh, we can just ignore all of this anyway. Remember that AT+SYSCMD= stuff that was writing the data to /usrdata/sec/chipid in the first place? Anything that's passed to AT+SYSCMD is just executed as root. Which means we can just write a new value (including 3) to /usrdata/mode.cfg in the first place, without needing to jump through any of these hoops. Which also means we can just adb push a shell onto there and then use the AT interface to make it suid root, which avoids needing to figure out how to exploit any of the bugs that are just sitting there given it's running a 3.18.48 kernel.

Anyway, I've now got a modem that's got working USB tethering and also exposes a working adb interface, and I've got root on it. Which let me dump the bootloader and discover that it implements fastboot and has an oem off-mode-charge command which solves the problem I wanted to solve of having the device boot when it gets power again. Unfortunately I still need to get into fastboot mode. I haven't found a way to do it through software (adb reboot bootloader doesn't do anything), but this post suggests it's just a matter of grounding a test pad, at which point I should just be able to run fastboot oem off-mode-charge and it'll be all set. But that's a job for tomorrow.

Edit: Got into fastboot mode and ran fastboot oem off-mode-charge 0 but sadly it doesn't actually do anything, so I guess next is going to involve patching the bootloader binary. Since it's signed with a cert titled "General Use Test Key (for testing only)" it apparently doesn't have secure boot enabled, so this should be easy enough.

comments

Review: Servant Mage, by Kate Elliott

Publisher:	Tordotcom
Copyright:	2022
ISBN:	1-250-76904-3
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	165

Servant Mage is a (so far at least) standalone fantasy novella. Fellian is a servant mage, which means that she makes Lamps for the customers of the inn, cleans the privies, and watches her effective owners find ways to put her deeper into indentured servitude. That's the only life permitted by the August Protector to those found to carry the taint of magical talent, caused by (it is said) demons who have bound themselves to their souls. Fellian's effective resistance is limited to giving covert reading lessons. Or was, before she is hired by a handsome man who needs a Lamplighter. A man who has been looking for her specifically, is a magical Adept, and looks suspiciously like a soldier for the despised and overthrown monarchists. A difficulty with writing a story that reverses cliches is that you have to establish the cliches in order to reverse them, which runs the risk that a lot of the story may feel cliched. I fear some of that happened here. Magic, in this world, is divided into elemental spheres, each of which has been restricted to limited and practical tasks by the Liberationists. The new regime searches the population for the mage-gifted and forces them into public service for the good of all (or at least that's how they describe it), with as little education as possible. Fellian was taught to light Lamps, but what she has is fire magic, and she's worked out some additional techniques on her own. The Adept is air, and one of the soldiers with him is earth. If you're guessing that two more elements turn up shortly and something important happens if you get all five of them together, you're perhaps sensing a bit of unoriginality in the magic system. That's not the cliche that's the primary target of this story, though. The current rulers of this country, led by the austere August Protector, are dictatorial anti-monarchists who are happy to force mages into indenture and deny people schooling. Fellian has indeed fallen in with the monarchists, who unsurprisingly are attempting to reverse the revolution. They, unlike the Liberationists, respect mages and are willing to train them, and they would like to recruit Fellian. I won't spoil the details of where Elliott is going with the plot, but it does eventually go somewhere refreshingly different. The path to get there, though, is familiar from any number of fantasy epics that start with a slave with special powers. Servant Mage is more aware of this than most, and Fellian is sharp-tongued and suspicious rather than innocent and trainable, but there are a lot of familiar character tropes and generic fantasy politics. This is the second story (along with the Spiritwalker trilogy) of Elliott's I've read that uses the French Revolution as a political model but fails to provide satisfying political depth. This one is a novella and can therefore be forgiven for not having the time to dive into revolutionary politics, but I wish Elliott would do more with this idea. Here, the anti-monarchists are straight-up villains, and while that's partly setup for more nuance than you might be expecting, it still felt like a waste of the setting. I want the book that tackles the hard social problem of reconciling the chaos and hopefulness of political revolution with magical powers that can be dangerous and oppressive without the structure of tradition. It feels like Elliott keeps edging towards that book but hasn't found the right hook to write it. Instead, we get a solid main character in Fellian, a bunch of supporting characters who mostly register as "okay," some magical set pieces that have all the right elements and yet didn't grab my sense of wonder, and a story that seemed heavily signposted. The conclusion was the best part of the story, but by the time we got there it wasn't as much of a surprise as I wanted it to be. I had this feeling with the Spiritwalker series as well: the pieces making up the story are of good quality, and Elliott's writing is solid, but the narrative magic never quite coheres for me. It's the sort of novella where I finished reading, went "huh," and then was excited to start a new book. I have no idea if there are plans for more stories in this universe, but Servant Mage felt like a prelude to a longer series. If that series does materialize, there are some signs that it could be more satisfying. At the end of the story, Fellian is finally in a place to do something original and different, and I am mildly curious what she might do. Maybe enough to read the next book, if one turns up. Mostly, though, I'm waiting for the sequel to Unconquerable Sun. Next April! Rating: 6 out of 10

A new package made it to CRAN today: spdl. It provides a very simple interface to spdlog with the key focus being that provides the same interface from both R and C++. I had brought spdlog to R a little while ago via RcppSpdlog, but its use was generally limited to C++ code where we would write something like (taken from one of the examples included in the package)

spdlog::info("Welcome to spdlog!");

I then provided C-level exports from the package accessible in other package but with that the signature only became longer as it also included the package name, here RcppSpdlog. So I experimented a little with that and added another more compactly named namespace spdl around it. So then it becomes

spdl::info("Info message with values   and  ", 42, 1.23);  // C++ code

which now also shows the power of the included fmt library. And I got quite used to that and now wanted to same from R! But to create a new namespace, we need a new package. So we made one. Now from R too:

spdl::info("Info message with values   and  ", 42L, 1.23)  # R code

We layered a very simple wrapper for fmt over this. All R argument are passed to format() and we simply send a vector of strings over the C interface to the RcppSpdlog package where the templated formatter of fmt is invoked but for character values. You can equally well format the string locally first. Everything works: from paste() to sprintf() to any of the existing string interpolators all of which are nice. But none works just like fmt and I wanted to have the same formatter in both languages, and like how fmt works. By tradition, the NEWS entry for this release follows.

Changes in spld version 0.0.1 (2022-11-21)

Initial release of R and C++ loggers using spdl::* namespace

More detailed information is on the spdl page. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can sponsor me at GitHub.

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

A maintenance release 0.9.14 of the RcppClassic package arrived earlier today on CRAN. This package provides a maintained version of the otherwise deprecated initial Rcpp API which no new projects should use as the normal Rcpp API is so much better. The changes is. CRAN was reporting (for all four macOS builds, and only there) that an absolute path was embedded, so we updated the (old ) call to install_name_tool use on that (and only that) OS. No other changes were made. CRANberries also reports the changes relative to the previous release from nearly three years ago. Questions, comments etc should go to the rcpp-devel mailing list off the R-Forge page. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can now sponsor me at GitHub.

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

History, Setup So for quite some time I have a QNAP TS-873x here, equipped with 8 Western Digital Red 10 TB disks, plus 2 WD Blue 500G M2 SSDs. The QNAP itself has an AMD Embedded R-Series RX-421MD with 4 cores and was equipped with 48G RAM. Initially I had been quite happy, the system is nice. It was fast, it was easy to get to run and the setup of things I wanted was simple enough. All in a web interface that tries to imitate a kind of workstation feeling and also tries to hide that it is actually a webinterface. Natually with that amount of disks I had a RAID6 for the disks, plus RAID1 for the SSDs. And then configured as a big storage pool with the RAID1 as cache. Below the hood QNAP uses MDADM Raid and LVM (if you want, with thin provisioning), in some form of emdedded linux. The interface allows for regular snapshots of your storage with flexible enough schedules to create them, so it all appears pretty good.

QNAP slow Fast forward some time and it gets annoying. First off you really should have regular raid resyncs scheduled, and while you can set priorities on them and have them low priority, they make the whole system feel very sluggish, quite annoying. And sure, power failure (rare, but can happen) means another full resync run. Also, it appears all of the snapshots are always mounted to some /mnt/snapshot/something place (df on the system gets quite unusable). Second, the reboot times. QNAP seems to be affected by the more features, fuck performance virus, and bloat their OS with more and more features while completly ignoring the performance. Everytime they do an upgrade it feels worse. Lately reboot times went up to 10 to 15 minutes - and then it still hadn t started the virtual machines / docker containers one might run on. Another 5 to 10 minutes for those. Opening the file explorer - ages on calculating what to show. Trying to get the storage setup shown? Go get a coffee, but please fetch the beans directly from the plantation, or you are too fast. Annoying it was. And no, no broken disks or fan or anything, it all checks out fine.

Replace QNAPs QTS system So I started looking around what to do. More RAM may help a little bit, but I already had 48G, the system itself appears to only do 64G maximum, so not much chance of it helping enough. Hardware is all fine and working, so software needs to be changed. Sounds hard, but turns out, it is not.

TrueNAS And I found that multiple people replaced the QNAPs own system with a TrueNAS installation and generally had been happy. Looking further I found that TrueNAS has a variant called `Scale` - which is based on Debian. Doubly good, that, so I went off checking what I may need for it.

Requirements Heck, that was a step back. To install TrueNAS you need an HDMI out and a disk to put it on. The one that QTS uses is too small, so no option.
QNAPs original internal USB drive, DOM
So either use one of the SSDs that played cache (and should do so again in TrueNAS, or get the QNAP original replaced. HDMI out is simple, get a cheap card and put it into one of the two PCIe-4x slots, done. The disk thing looked more complicated, as QNAP uses some internal usb stick thing . Turns out it is just a USB stick that has an 8+1pin connector. Couldn t find anything nice as replacement, but hey, there are 9-pin to USB-A adapters.
a 9pin to USB A adapter
With that adapter, one can take some random M2 SSD and an M2-to-USB case, plus some cabling, and voila, we have a nice system disk.
9pin adapter to USB-A connected with some more cable
Obviously there isn t a good place to put this SSD case and cable, but the QNAP case is large enough to find space and use some cable ties to store it safely. Space enough to get the cable from the side, where the mainboard is to the place I mounted it, so all fine.
Mounted SSD in its external case
The next best M2 SSD was a Western Digital Red with 500G - and while this is WAY too much for TrueNAS, it works. And hey, only using a tiny fraction? Oh so much more cells available internally to use when others break. Or something Together with the Asus card mounted I was able to install TrueNAS. Which is simple, their installer is easy enough to follow, just make sure to select the right disk to put it on.

Preserving data during the move Switching from QNAP QTS to TrueNAS Scale means changing from MDADM Raid with LVM and ext4 on top to ZFS and as such all data on it gets erased. So a backup first is helpful, and I got myself two external Seagate USB Disks of 6TB each - enough for the data I wanted to keep. Copying things all over took ages, especially as the QNAP backup thingie sucks, it was breaking quite often. Also, for some reason I did not investigate, the performance of it was real bad. It started at a maximum of 50MB/s, but the last terabyte of data was copied at MUCH less than that, and so it took much longer than I anticipated. Copying back was slow too, but much less so. Of course reading things usually is faster than writing, with it going around 100MB/s most of the time, which is quite a bit more - still not what USB3 can actually do, but I guess the AMD chip doesn t want to go that fast.

TrueNAS experience The installation went mostly smooth, the only real trouble had been on my side. Turns out that a bad network cable does NOT help the network setup, who would have thought. Other than that it is the usual set of questions you would expect, a reboot, and then some webinterface. And here the differences start. The whole system boots up much faster. Not even a third of the time compared to QTS. One important thing: As TrueNAS scale is Debian based, and hence a linux kernel, it automatically detects and assembles the old RAID arrays that QTS put on. Which TrueNAS can do nothing with, so it helps to manually stop them and wipe the disks. Afterwards I put ZFS on the disks, with a similar setup to what I had before. The spinning rust are the data disks in a RAIDZ2 setup, the two SSDs are added as cache devices. Unlike MDADM, ZFS does not have a long sync process. Also unlike the MDADM/LVM/EXT4 setup from before, ZFS works different. It manages the raid thing but it also does the volume and filesystem parts. Quite different handling, and I m still getting used to it, so no, I won t write some ZFS introduction now.

Features The two systems can not be compared completly, they are having a pretty different target audience. QNAP is more for the user that wants some network storage that offers a ton of extra features easily available via a clickable interface. While TrueNAS appears more oriented to people that want a fast but reliable storage system. TrueNAS does not offer all the extra bloat the QNAP delivers. Still, you have the ability to run virtual machines and it seems it comes with Rancher, so some kubernetes/container ability is there. It lacks essential features like assigning PCI devices to virtual machines, so is not useful right now, but I assume that will come in a future version. I am still exploring it all, but I like what I have right now. Still rebuilding my setup to have all shares exported and used again, but the most important are working already.

A version 0.0.10 of RcppSpdlog is now on CRAN and in Debian. RcppSpdlog bundles spdlog, a wonderful header-only C++ logging library with all the bells and whistles you would want that was written by Gabi Melman, and also includes fmt by Victor Zverovich. This release continues on the path started less than two weeks ago with the RcppSpdlog 0.0.9 release. We continue to support both R and C++ access by adding a (simple) variadic template formatter exposing fmt::format() (by focusing on just string arguments). This can be accessed from R via the exact same formatting strings that fmt uses, and which we have come to like for its simplicity. Of course if one prefers a different string interpolation method, or plain sprintf(), or even paste: they all work as all that matters is that a character variable gets passed on. We also added a little bit of new documentation in the vignette. The NEWS entry for this release follows.

Changes in RcppSpdlog version 0.0.10 (2022-11-17)

Support variadic templates with fmt::format

Add R formatting helper which converts arguments to character taking advantage of variadic template logger: fmt logging from R

Expand vignette

Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is also a diffstat report. More detailed information is on the RcppSpdlog page, or the package documention site. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can sponsor me at GitHub.

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

I started migrating my graphical workstations to Wayland, specifically migrating from i3 to Sway. This is mostly to address serious graphics bugs in the latest Framwork laptop, but also something I felt was inevitable. The current status is that I've been able to convert my i3 configuration to Sway, and adapt my systemd startup sequence to the new environment. Screen sharing only works with Pipewire, so I also did that migration, which basically requires an upgrade to Debian bookworm to get a nice enough Pipewire release. I'm testing Wayland on my laptop, but I'm not using it as a daily driver because I first need to upgrade to Debian bookworm on my main workstation. Most irritants have been solved one way or the other. My main problem with Wayland right now is that I spent a frigging week doing the conversion: it's exciting and new, but it basically sucked the life out of all my other projects and it's distracting, and I want it to stop. The rest of this page documents why I made the switch, how it happened, and what's left to do. Hopefully it will keep you from spending as much time as I did in fixing this. TL;DR: Wayland is mostly ready. Main blockers you might find are that you need to do manual configurations, DisplayLink (multiple monitors on a single cable) doesn't work in Sway, HDR and color management are still in development. I had to install the following packages:

apt install \
    brightnessctl \
    foot \
    gammastep \
    gdm3 \
    grim slurp \
    pipewire-pulse \
    sway \
    swayidle \
    swaylock \
    wdisplays \
    wev \
    wireplumber \
    wlr-randr \
    xdg-desktop-portal-wlr

And did some of tweaks in my $HOME, mostly dealing with my esoteric systemd startup sequence, which you won't have to deal with if you are not a fan.

Why switch? I originally held back from migrating to Wayland: it seemed like a complicated endeavor hardly worth the cost. It also didn't seem actually ready. But after reading this blurb on LWN, I decided to at least document the situation here. The actual quote that convinced me it might be worth it was:
It s amazing. I have never experienced gaming on Linux that looked this smooth in my life.
... I'm not a gamer, but I do care about latency. The longer version is worth a read as well. The point here is not to bash one side or the other, or even do a thorough comparison. I start with the premise that Xorg is likely going away in the future and that I will need to adapt some day. In fact, the last major Xorg release (21.1, October 2021) is rumored to be the last ("just like the previous release...", that said, minor releases are still coming out, e.g. 21.1.4). Indeed, it seems even core Xorg people have moved on to developing Wayland, or at least Xwayland, which was spun off it its own source tree. X, or at least Xorg, in in maintenance mode and has been for years. Granted, the X Window System is getting close to forty years old at this point: it got us amazingly far for something that was designed around the time the first graphical interface. Since Mac and (especially?) Windows released theirs, they have rebuilt their graphical backends numerous times, but UNIX derivatives have stuck on Xorg this entire time, which is a testament to the design and reliability of X. (Or our incapacity at developing meaningful architectural change across the entire ecosystem, take your pick I guess.) What pushed me over the edge is that I had some pretty bad driver crashes with Xorg while screen sharing under Firefox, in Debian bookworm (around November 2022). The symptom would be that the UI would completely crash, reverting to a text-only console, while Firefox would keep running, audio and everything still working. People could still see my screen, but I couldn't, of course, let alone interact with it. All processes still running, including Xorg. (And no, sorry, I haven't reported that bug, maybe I should have, and it's actually possible it comes up again in Wayland, of course. But at first, screen sharing didn't work of course, so it's coming a much further way. After making screen sharing work, though, the bug didn't occur again, so I consider this a Xorg-specific problem until further notice.) There were also frustrating glitches in the UI, in general. I actually had to setup a compositor alongside i3 to make things bearable at all. Video playback in a window was laggy, sluggish, and out of sync. Wayland fixed all of this.

Wayland equivalents This section documents each tool I have picked as an alternative to the current Xorg tool I am using for the task at hand. It also touches on other alternatives and how the tool was configured. Note that this list is based on the series of tools I use in desktop. TODO: update desktop with the following when done, possibly moving old configs to a ?xorg archive.

Window manager: i3 sway This seems like kind of a no-brainer. Sway is around, it's feature-complete, and it's in Debian. I'm a bit worried about the "Drew DeVault community", to be honest. There's a certain aggressiveness in the community I don't like so much; at least an open hostility towards more modern UNIX tools like containers and systemd that make it hard to do my work while interacting with that community. I'm also concern about the lack of unit tests and user manual for Sway. The i3 window manager has been designed by a fellow (ex-)Debian developer I have a lot of respect for (Michael Stapelberg), partly because of i3 itself, but also working with him on other projects. Beyond the characters, i3 has a user guide, a code of conduct, and lots more documentation. It has a test suite. Sway has... manual pages, with the homepage just telling users to use `man -k sway` to find what they need. I don't think we need that kind of elitism in our communities, to put this bluntly. But let's put that aside: Sway is still a no-brainer. It's the easiest thing to migrate to, because it's mostly compatible with i3. I had to immediately fix those resources to get a minimal session going:

i3 Sway note

`set_from_resources` `set` no support for X resources, naturally

`new_window pixel 1` `default_border pixel 1` actually supported in i3 as well

That's it. All of the other changes I had to do (and there were actually a lot) were all Wayland-specific changes, not Sway-specific changes. For example, use `brightnessctl` instead of `xbacklight` to change the backlight levels. See a copy of my full sway/config for details. Other options include:

dwl: tiling, minimalist, dwm for Wayland, not in Debian

Hyprland: tiling, fancy animations, not in Debian

Qtile: tiling, extensible, in Python, not in Debian (1015267)

river: Zig, stackable, tagging, not in Debian (1006593)

velox: inspired by xmonad and dwm, not in Debian

vivarium: inspired by xmonad, not in Debian

i3	Sway	note
`set_from_resources`	`set`	no support for X resources, naturally
`new_window pixel 1`	`default_border pixel 1`	actually supported in i3 as well

Status bar: py3status waybar I have invested quite a bit of effort in setting up my status bar with py3status. It supports Sway directly, and did not actually require any change when migrating to Wayland. Unfortunately, I had trouble making nm-applet work. Based on this nm-applet.service, I found that you need to pass --indicator for it to show up at all. In theory, tray icon support was merged in 1.5, but in practice there are still several limitations, like icons not clickable. Also, on startup, nm-applet --indicator triggers this error in the Sway logs:

nov 11 22:34:12 angela sway[298938]: 00:49:42.325 [INFO] [swaybar/tray/host.c:24] Registering Status Notifier Item ':1.47/org/ayatana/NotificationItem/nm_applet'
nov 11 22:34:12 angela sway[298938]: 00:49:42.327 [ERROR] [swaybar/tray/item.c:127] :1.47/org/ayatana/NotificationItem/nm_applet IconPixmap: No such property  IconPixmap 
nov 11 22:34:12 angela sway[298938]: 00:49:42.327 [ERROR] [swaybar/tray/item.c:127] :1.47/org/ayatana/NotificationItem/nm_applet AttentionIconPixmap: No such property  AttentionIconPixmap 
nov 11 22:34:12 angela sway[298938]: 00:49:42.327 [ERROR] [swaybar/tray/item.c:127] :1.47/org/ayatana/NotificationItem/nm_applet ItemIsMenu: No such property  ItemIsMenu 
nov 11 22:36:10 angela sway[313419]: info: fcft.c:838: /usr/share/fonts/truetype/dejavu/DejaVuSans.ttf: size=24.00pt/32px, dpi=96.00

... but that seems innocuous. The tray icon displays but is not clickable. Note that there is currently (November 2022) a pull request to hook up a "Tray D-Bus Menu" which, according to Reddit might fix this, or at least be somewhat relevant. If you don't see the icon, check the bar.tray_output property in the Sway config, try: tray_output *. The non-working tray was the biggest irritant in my migration. I have used nmtui to connect to new Wifi hotspots or change connection settings, but that doesn't support actions like "turn off WiFi". I eventually fixed this by switching from py3status to waybar, which was another yak horde shaving session, but ultimately, it worked.

Web browser: Firefox Firefox has had support for Wayland for a while now, with the team enabling it by default in nightlies around January 2022. It's actually not easy to figure out the state of the port, the meta bug report is still open and it's huge: it currently (Sept 2022) depends on 76 open bugs, it was opened twelve (2010) years ago, and it's still getting daily updates (mostly linking to other tickets). Firefox 106 presumably shipped with "Better screen sharing for Windows and Linux Wayland users", but I couldn't quite figure out what those were. TL;DR: `echo MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1 >> ~/.config/environment.d/firefox.conf && apt install xdg-desktop-portal-wlr`

How to enable it Firefox depends on this silly variable to start correctly under Wayland (otherwise it starts inside Xwayland and looks fuzzy and fails to screen share):

MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1 firefox

To make the change permanent, many recipes recommend adding this to an environment startup script:

if [ "$XDG_SESSION_TYPE" == "wayland" ]; then
    export MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1
fi

At least that's the theory. In practice, Sway doesn't actually run any startup shell script, so that can't possibly work. Furthermore, XDG_SESSION_TYPE is not actually set when starting Sway from gdm3 which I find really confusing, and I'm not the only one. So the above trick doesn't actually work, even if the environment (XDG_SESSION_TYPE) is set correctly, because we don't have conditionals in environment.d(5). (Note that systemd.environment-generator(7) do support running arbitrary commands to generate environment, but for some some do not support user-specific configuration files... Even then it may be a solution to have a conditional MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND environment, but I'm not sure it would work because ordering between those two isn't clear: maybe the XDG_SESSION_TYPE wouldn't be set just yet...) At first, I made this ridiculous script to workaround those issues. Really, it seems to me Firefox should just parse the XDG_SESSION_TYPE variable here... but then I realized that Firefox works fine in Xorg when the MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND is set. So now I just set that variable in environment.d and It Just Works :

MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1

Side note: Chrome fails to share a full screen I was still using Google Chrome (or, more accurately, Debian's Chromium package) for some videoconferencing. It's mainly because Chromium was the only browser which will allow me to share only one of my two monitors, which is extremely useful. To start chrome with the Wayland backend, you need to use:

chromium  -enable-features=UseOzonePlatform -ozone-platform=wayland

If it shows an ugly gray border, check the

Use system title bar and
borders

setting. It can do some screensharing. Sharing a window and a tab seems to work, but sharing a full screen doesn't: it's all black. Maybe not ready for prime time. And since Firefox can do what I need under Wayland now, I will not need to fight with Chromium to work under Wayland:

apt purge chromium

Note that a similar fix was necessary for Signal Desktop, see this commit. Basically you need to figure out a way to pass those same flags to signal:

--enable-features=WaylandWindowDecorations --ozone-platform-hint=auto

Email: notmuch See Emacs, below.

File manager: thunar Unchanged.

News: feed2exec, gnus See Email, above, or Emacs in Editor, below.

Editor: Emacs okay-ish Emacs is being actively ported to Wayland. According to this LWN article, the first (partial, to Cairo) port was done in 2014 and a working port (to GTK3) was completed in 2021, but wasn't merged until late 2021. That is: after Emacs 28 was released (April 2022). So we'll probably need to wait for Emacs 29 to have native Wayland support in Emacs, which, in turn, is unlikely to arrive in time for the Debian bookworm freeze. There are, however, unofficial builds for both Emacs 28 and 29 provided by spwhitton which may provide native Wayland support. I tested the snapshot packages and they do not quite work well enough. First off, they completely take over the builtin Emacs they hijack the $PATH in /etc! and certain things are simply not working in my setup. For example, this hook never gets ran on startup:

(add-hook 'after-init-hook 'server-start t)

Still, like many X11 applications, Emacs mostly works fine under Xwayland. The clipboard works as expected, for example. Scaling is a bit of an issue: fonts look fuzzy. I have heard anecdotal evidence of hard lockups with Emacs running under Xwayland as well, but haven't experienced any problem so far. I did experience a Wayland crash with the snapshot version however. TODO: look again at Wayland in Emacs 29.

Backups: borg Mostly irrelevant, as I do not use a GUI.

Color theme: srcery, redshift gammastep I am keeping Srcery as a color theme, in general. Redshift is another story: it has no support for Wayland out of the box, but it's apparently possible to apply a hack on the TTY before starting Wayland, with:

redshift -m drm -PO 3000

This tip is from the arch wiki which also has other suggestions for Wayland-based alternatives. Both KDE and GNOME have their own "red shifters", and for wlroots-based compositors, they (currently, Sept. 2022) list the following alternatives:

gammastep: in Debian, panel indicator, seems good
clight: uses the webcam to probe for light
wl-gammaray: fork of gammastep, runs as a DBUS service
wlsunset: WNPP

I configured gammastep with a simple gammastep.service file associated with the sway-session.target.

Display manager: lightdm gdm3 Switched because lightdm failed to start sway:

nov 16 16:41:43 angela sway[843121]: 00:00:00.002 [ERROR] [wlr] [libseat] [common/terminal.c:162] Could not open target tty: Permission denied

Possible alternatives:

lightdm elephant greeter (I tried slick-greeter and ukui-greeter, neither could start the Sway session)
greetd and QtGreet (former in Debian, not latter, which means we're stuck with the weird agreety which doesn't work at all)
sddm: KDE's default, in Debian, probably heavier or as heavy as gdm3

Terminal: xterm foot One of the biggest question mark in this transition was what to do about Xterm. After writing two articles about terminal emulators as a professional journalist, decades of working on the terminal, and probably using dozens of different terminal emulators, I'm still not happy with any of them. This is such a big topic that I actually have an entire blog post specifically about this. For starters, using xterm under Xwayland works well enough, although the font scaling makes things look a bit too fuzzy. I have also tried foot: it ... just works! Fonts are much crisper than Xterm and Emacs. URLs are not clickable but the URL selector (`control-shift-u`) is just plain awesome (think "vimperator" for the terminal). There's cool hack to jump between prompts. Copy-paste works. True colors work. The word-wrapping is excellent: it doesn't lose one byte. Emojis are nicely sized and colored. Font resize works. There's even scroll back search (`control-shift-r`). Foot went from a question mark to being a reason to switch to Wayland, just for this little goodie, which says a lot about the quality of that software. The selection clicks are a not quite what I would expect though. In rxvt and others, you have the following patterns:

single click: reset selection, or drag to select

double: select word

triple: select quotes or line

quadruple: select line

I particularly find the "select quotes" bit useful. It seems like foot just supports double and triple clicks, with word and line selected. You can select a rectangle with `control`,. It correctly extends the selection word-wise with right click if double-click was first used. One major problem with Foot is that it's a new terminal, with its own termcap entry. Support for foot was added to ncurses in the 20210731 release, which was shipped after the current Debian stable release (Debian bullseye, which ships 6.2+20201114-2). A workaround for this problem is to install the `foot-terminfo` package on the remote host, which is available in Debian stable. This should eventually resolve itself, as Debian bookworm has a newer version. Note that some corrections were also shipped in the 20211113 release, but that is also shipped in Debian bookworm. That said, I am almost certain I will have to revert back to xterm under Xwayland at some point in the future. Back when I was using GNOME Terminal, it would mostly work for everything until I had to use the serial console on a (HP ProCurve) network switch, which have a fancy TUI that was basically unusable there. I fully expect such problems with foot, or any other terminal than xterm, for that matter. The foot wiki has good troubleshooting instructions as well. Update: I did find one tiny thing to improve with foot, and it's the default logging level which I found pretty verbose. After discussing it with the maintainer on IRC, I submitted this patch to tweak it, which I described like this on Mastodon:
today's reason why i will go to hell when i die (TRWIWGTHWID?): a 600-word, 63 lines commit log for a one line change: https://codeberg.org/dnkl/foot/pulls/1215
It's Friday.

Launcher: rofi rofi?? rofi does not support Wayland. There was a rather disgraceful battle in the pull request that led to the creation of a fork (lbonn/rofi), so it's unclear how that will turn out. Given how relatively trivial problem space is, there is of course a profusion of options:

Tool In Debian Notes

alfred yes general launcher/assistant tool

bemenu yes, bookworm+ inspired by dmenu

cerebro no Javascript ... uh... thing

dmenu-wl no fork of dmenu, straight port to Wayland

Fuzzel ITP 982140 dmenu/drun replacement, app icon overlay

gmenu no drun replacement, with app icons

kickoff no dmenu/run replacement, fuzzy search, "snappy", history, copy-paste, Rust

krunner yes KDE's runner

mauncher no dmenu/drun replacement, math

nwg-launchers no dmenu/drun replacement, JSON config, app icons, nwg-shell project

Onagre no rofi/alfred inspired, multiple plugins, Rust

menu no dmenu/drun rewrite

Rofi (lbonn's fork) no see above

sirula no `.desktop` based app launcher

Ulauncher ITP 949358 generic launcher like Onagre/rofi/alfred, might be overkill

tofi yes, bookworm+ dmenu/drun replacement, C

wmenu no fork of dmenu-wl, but mostly a rewrite

Wofi yes dmenu/drun replacement, not actively maintained

yofi no dmenu/drun replacement, Rust

The above list comes partly from https://arewewaylandyet.com/ and awesome-wayland. It is likely incomplete. I have read some good things about bemenu, fuzzel, and wofi. A particularly tricky option is that my rofi password management depends on xdotool for some operations. At first, I thought this was just going to be (thankfully?) impossible, because we actually like the idea that one app cannot send keystrokes to another. But it seems there are actually alternatives to this, like wtype or ydotool, the latter which requires root access. wl-ime-type does that through the `input-method-unstable-v2` protocol (sample emoji picker, but is not packaged in Debian. As it turns out, wtype just works as expected, and fixing this was basically a two-line patch. Another alternative, not in Debian, is wofi-pass. The other problem is that I actually heavily modified rofi. I use "modis" which are not actually implemented in wofi or tofi, so I'm left with reinventing those wheels from scratch or using the rofi + wayland fork... It's really too bad that fork isn't being reintegrated... For now, I'm actually still using rofi under Xwayland. The main downside is that fonts are fuzzy, but it otherwise just works. Note that wlogout could be a partial replacement (just for the "power menu").

Tool	In Debian	Notes
alfred	yes	general launcher/assistant tool
bemenu	yes, bookworm+	inspired by dmenu
cerebro	no	Javascript ... uh... thing
dmenu-wl	no	fork of dmenu, straight port to Wayland
Fuzzel	ITP 982140	dmenu/drun replacement, app icon overlay
gmenu	no	drun replacement, with app icons
kickoff	no	dmenu/run replacement, fuzzy search, "snappy", history, copy-paste, Rust
krunner	yes	KDE's runner
mauncher	no	dmenu/drun replacement, math
nwg-launchers	no	dmenu/drun replacement, JSON config, app icons, nwg-shell project
Onagre	no	rofi/alfred inspired, multiple plugins, Rust
menu	no	dmenu/drun rewrite
Rofi (lbonn's fork)	no	see above
sirula	no	`.desktop` based app launcher
Ulauncher	ITP 949358	generic launcher like Onagre/rofi/alfred, might be overkill
tofi	yes, bookworm+	dmenu/drun replacement, C
wmenu	no	fork of dmenu-wl, but mostly a rewrite
Wofi	yes	dmenu/drun replacement, not actively maintained
yofi	no	dmenu/drun replacement, Rust

Image viewers: geeqie ? I'm not very happy with geeqie in the first place, and I suspect the Wayland switch will just make add impossible things on top of the things I already find irritating (Geeqie doesn't support copy-pasting images). In practice, Geeqie doesn't seem to work so well under Wayland. The fonts are fuzzy and the thumbnail preview just doesn't work anymore (filed as Debian bug 1024092). It seems it also has problems with scaling. Alternatives:

gwenview: KDE viewer, in Debian

koko: KDE viewer, not in Debian?

imv: x11/wayland viewer, scriptable, possible security issues and limited format support, in Debian

mvi: mpv-based image viewer

pix: KDE/mobile viewer, not in Debian

swayimg: overlay, in Debian

vimiv: vim-like keybindings, not in Debian

See also this list and that list for other list of image viewers, not necessarily ported to Wayland. TODO: pick an alternative to geeqie, nomacs would be gorgeous if it wouldn't be basically abandoned upstream (no release since 2020), has an unpatched CVE-2020-23884 since July 2020, does bad vendoring, and is in bad shape in Debian (4 minor releases behind). So for now I'm still grumpily using Geeqie.

Media player: mpv, gmpc / sublime This is basically unchanged. `mpv` seems to work fine under Wayland, better than Xorg on my new laptop (as mentioned in the introduction), and that before the version which improves Wayland support significantly, by bringing native Pipewire support and DMA-BUF support. gmpc is more of a problem, mainly because it is abandoned. See 2022-08-22-gmpc-alternatives for the full discussion, one of the alternatives there will likely support Wayland. Finally, I might just switch to sublime-music instead... In any case, not many changes here, thankfully.

Screensaver: xsecurelock swaylock I was previously using xss-lock and xsecurelock as a screensaver, with xscreensaver "hacks" as a backend for xsecurelock. The basic screensaver in Sway seems to be built with swayidle and swaylock. It's interesting because it's the same "split" design as xss-lock and xsecurelock. That, unfortunately, does not include the fancy "hacks" provided by xscreensaver, and that is unlikely to be implemented upstream. Other alternatives include gtklock and waylock (zig), which do not solve that problem either. It looks like swaylock-plugin, a swaylock fork, which at least attempts to solve this problem, although not directly using the real xscreensaver hacks. swaylock-effects is another attempt at this, but it only adds more effects, it doesn't delegate the image display. Other than that, maybe it's time to just let go of those funky animations and just let swaylock do it's thing, which is display a static image or just a black screen, which is fine by me. In the end, I am just using `swayidle` with a configuration based on the systemd integration wiki page but with additional tweaks from this service, see the resulting swayidle.service file. Interestingly, damjan also has a service for swaylock itself, although it's not clear to me what its purpose is...

Screenshot: maim grim, pubpaste I'm a heavy user of maim (and a package uploader in Debian). It looks like the direct replacement to maim (and slop) is grim (and slurp). There's also swappy which goes on top of grim and allows preview/edit of the resulting image, nice touch (not in Debian though). See also awesome-wayland screenshots for other alternatives: there are many, including X11 tools like Flameshot that also support Wayland. One key problem here was that I have my own screenshot / pastebin software which will needed an update for Wayland as well. That, thankfully, meant actually cleaning up a lot of horrible code that involved calling xterm and xmessage for user interaction. Now, pubpaste uses GTK for prompts and looks much better. (And before anyone freaks out, I already had to use GTK for proper clipboard support, so this isn't much of a stretch...)

Screen recorder: simplescreenrecorder wf-recorder In Xorg, I have used both peek or simplescreenrecorder for screen recordings. The former will work in Wayland, but has no sound support. The latter has a fork with Wayland support but it is limited and buggy ("doesn't support recording area selection and has issues with multiple screens"). It looks like wf-recorder will just do everything correctly out of the box, including audio support (with `--audio`, duh). It's also packaged in Debian. One has to wonder how this works while keeping the "between app security" that Wayland promises, however... Would installing such a program make my system less secure? Many other options are available, see the awesome Wayland screencasting list.

RSI: workrave nothing? Workrave has no support for Wayland. activity watch is a time tracker alternative, but is not a RSI watcher. KDE has rsiwatcher, but that's a bit too much on the heavy side for my taste. SafeEyes looks like an alternative at first, but it has many issues under Wayland (escape doesn't work, idle doesn't work, it just doesn't work really). timekpr-next could be an alternative as well, and has support for Wayland. I am also considering just abandoning workrave, even if I stick with Xorg, because it apparently introduces significant latency in the input pipeline. And besides, I've developed a pretty unhealthy alert fatigue with Workrave. I have used the program for so long that my fingers know exactly where to click to dismiss those warnings very effectively. It makes my work just more irritating, and doesn't fix the fundamental problem I have with computers.

Other apps This is a constantly changing list, of course. There's a bit of a "death by a thousand cuts" in migrating to Wayland because you realize how many things you were using are tightly bound to X.

.Xresources - just say goodbye to that old resource system, it was used, in my case, only for rofi, xterm, and ... Xboard!?
keyboard layout switcher: built-in to Sway since 2017 (PR 1505, 1.5rc2+), requires a small configuration change, see this answer as well, looks something like this command:
```
 swaymsg input 0:0:X11_keyboard xkb_layout de
```
or using this config:
```
 input *  
     xkb_layout "ca,us"
     xkb_options "grp:sclk_toggle"
  
```
That works refreshingly well, even better than in Xorg, I must say. swaykbdd is an alternative that supports per-window layouts (in Debian).
wallpaper: currently using feh, will need a replacement, TODO: figure out something that does, like feh, a random shuffle. swaybg just loads a single image, duh. oguri might be a solution, but unmaintained, used here, not in Debian. wallutils is another option, also not in Debian. For now I just don't have a wallpaper, the background is a solid gray, which is better than Xorg's default (which is whatever crap was left around a buffer by the previous collection of programs, basically)
notifications: currently using dunst in some places, which works well in both Xorg and Wayland, not a blocker, salut a possible alternative (not in Debian), damjan uses mako. TODO: install dunst everywhere
notification area: I had trouble making nm-applet work. based on this nm-applet.service, I found that you need to pass --indicator. In theory, tray icon support was merged in 1.5, but in practice there are still several limitations, like icons not clickable. On startup, nm-applet --indicator triggers this error in the Sway logs:
```
 nov 11 22:34:12 angela sway[298938]: 00:49:42.325 [INFO] [swaybar/tray/host.c:24] Registering Status Notifier Item ':1.47/org/ayatana/NotificationItem/nm_applet'
 nov 11 22:34:12 angela sway[298938]: 00:49:42.327 [ERROR] [swaybar/tray/item.c:127] :1.47/org/ayatana/NotificationItem/nm_applet IconPixmap: No such property  IconPixmap 
 nov 11 22:34:12 angela sway[298938]: 00:49:42.327 [ERROR] [swaybar/tray/item.c:127] :1.47/org/ayatana/NotificationItem/nm_applet AttentionIconPixmap: No such property  AttentionIconPixmap 
 nov 11 22:34:12 angela sway[298938]: 00:49:42.327 [ERROR] [swaybar/tray/item.c:127] :1.47/org/ayatana/NotificationItem/nm_applet ItemIsMenu: No such property  ItemIsMenu 
 nov 11 22:36:10 angela sway[313419]: info: fcft.c:838: /usr/share/fonts/truetype/dejavu/DejaVuSans.ttf: size=24.00pt/32px, dpi=96.00
```
... but it seems innocuous. The tray icon displays but, as stated above, is not clickable. If you don't see the icon, check the bar.tray_output property in the Sway config, try: tray_output *. Note that there is currently (November 2022) a pull request to hook up a "Tray D-Bus Menu" which, according to Reddit might fix this, or at least be somewhat relevant. This was the biggest irritant in my migration. I have used nmtui to connect to new Wifi hotspots or change connection settings, but that doesn't support actions like "turn off WiFi". I eventually fixed this by switching from py3status to waybar.
window switcher: in i3 I was using this bespoke i3-focus script, which doesn't work under Sway, swayr an option, not in Debian. So I put together this other bespoke hack from multiple sources, which works.
PDF viewer: currently using atril (which supports Wayland), could also just switch to zatura/mupdf permanently, see also calibre for a discussion on document viewers

See also this list of useful addons and this other list for other app alternatives.

More X11 / Wayland equivalents For all the tools above, it's not exactly clear what options exist in Wayland, or when they do, which one should be used. But for some basic tools, it seems the options are actually quite clear. If that's the case, they should be listed here:

X11 Wayland In Debian

`arandr` wdisplays yes

`autorandr` kanshi yes

`xdotool` wtype yes

`xev` wev yes

`xlsclients` `swaymsg -t get_tree` yes

`xrandr` wlr-randr yes

lswt is a more direct replacement for `xlsclients` but is not packaged in Debian. See also:

https://github.com/swaywm/sway/wiki/Useful-add-ons-for-sway

https://github.com/swaywm/sway/wiki/i3-Migration-Guide

Note that arandr and autorandr are not directly part of X. arewewaylandyet.com refers to a few alternatives. We suggest wdisplays and kanshi above (see also this service file) but wallutils can also do the autorandr stuff, apparently, and nwg-displays can do the arandr part. Neither are packaged in Debian yet. So I have tried wdisplays and it Just Works, and well. The UI even looks better and more usable than arandr, so another clean win from Wayland here. TODO: test kanshi as a autorandr replacement

X11	Wayland	In Debian
`arandr`	wdisplays	yes
`autorandr`	kanshi	yes
`xdotool`	wtype	yes
`xev`	wev	yes
`xlsclients`	`swaymsg -t get_tree`	yes
`xrandr`	wlr-randr	yes

Other issues

systemd integration I've had trouble getting session startup to work. This is partly because I had a kind of funky system to start my session in the first place. I used to have my whole session started from .xsession like this:

#!/bin/sh
. ~/.shenv
systemctl --user import-environment
exec systemctl --user start --wait xsession.target

But obviously, the xsession.target is not started by the Sway session. It seems to just start a default.target, which is really not what we want because we want to associate the services directly with the graphical-session.target, so that they don't start when logging in over (say) SSH. damjan on #debian-systemd showed me his sway-setup which features systemd integration. It involves starting a different session in a completely new .desktop file. That work was submitted upstream but refused on the grounds that "I'd rather not give a preference to any particular init system." Another PR was abandoned because "restarting sway does not makes sense: that kills everything". The work was therefore moved to the wiki. So. Not a great situation. The upstream wiki systemd integration suggests starting the systemd target from within Sway, which has all sorts of problems:

you don't get Sway logs anywhere
control groups are all messed up

I have done a lot of work trying to figure this out, but I remember that starting systemd from Sway didn't actually work for me: my previously configured systemd units didn't correctly start, and especially not with the right $PATH and environment. So I went down that rabbit hole and managed to correctly configure Sway to be started from the systemd --user session. I have partly followed the wiki but also picked ideas from damjan's sway-setup and xdbob's sway-services. Another option is uwsm (not in Debian). This is the config I have in .config/systemd/user/:

I have also configured those services, but that's somewhat optional:

You will also need at least part of my sway/config, which sends the systemd notification (because, no, Sway doesn't support any sort of readiness notification, that would be too easy). And you might like to see my swayidle-config while you're there. Finally, you need to hook this up somehow to the login manager. This is typically done with a desktop file, so drop sway-session.desktop in /usr/share/wayland-sessions and sway-user-service somewhere in your $PATH (typically /usr/bin/sway-user-service). The session then looks something like this:

$ systemd-cgls   head -101
Control group /:
-.slice
 user.slice (#472)
    user.invocation_id: bc405c6341de4e93a545bde6d7abbeec
    trusted.invocation_id: bc405c6341de4e93a545bde6d7abbeec
   user-1000.slice (#10072)
      user.invocation_id: 08f40f5c4bcd4fd6adfd27bec24e4827
      trusted.invocation_id: 08f40f5c4bcd4fd6adfd27bec24e4827
     user@1000.service   (#10156)
        user.delegate: 1
        trusted.delegate: 1
        user.invocation_id: 76bed72a1ffb41dca9bfda7bb174ef6b
        trusted.invocation_id: 76bed72a1ffb41dca9bfda7bb174ef6b
       session.slice (#10282)
         xdg-document-portal.service (#12248)
           9533 /usr/libexec/xdg-document-portal
           9542 fusermount3 -o rw,nosuid,nodev,fsname=portal,auto_unmount,subt 
         xdg-desktop-portal.service (#12211)
           9529 /usr/libexec/xdg-desktop-portal
         pipewire-pulse.service (#10778)
           6002 /usr/bin/pipewire-pulse
         wireplumber.service (#10519)
           5944 /usr/bin/wireplumber
         gvfs-daemon.service (#10667)
           5960 /usr/libexec/gvfsd
         gvfs-udisks2-volume-monitor.service (#10852)
           6021 /usr/libexec/gvfs-udisks2-volume-monitor
         at-spi-dbus-bus.service (#11481)
           6210 /usr/libexec/at-spi-bus-launcher
           6216 /usr/bin/dbus-daemon --config-file=/usr/share/defaults/at-spi2 
           6450 /usr/libexec/at-spi2-registryd --use-gnome-session
         pipewire.service (#10403)
           5940 /usr/bin/pipewire
         dbus.service (#10593)
           5946 /usr/bin/dbus-daemon --session --address=systemd: --nofork --n 
       background.slice (#10324)
         tracker-miner-fs-3.service (#10741)
           6001 /usr/libexec/tracker-miner-fs-3
       app.slice (#10240)
         xdg-permission-store.service (#12285)
           9536 /usr/libexec/xdg-permission-store
         gammastep.service (#11370)
           6197 gammastep
         dunst.service (#11958)
           7460 /usr/bin/dunst
         wterminal.service (#13980)
           69100 foot --title pop-up
           69101 /bin/bash
           77660 sudo systemd-cgls
           77661 head -101
           77662 wl-copy
           77663 sudo systemd-cgls
           77664 systemd-cgls
         syncthing.service (#11995)
           7529 /usr/bin/syncthing -no-browser -no-restart -logflags=0 --verbo 
           7537 /usr/bin/syncthing -no-browser -no-restart -logflags=0 --verbo 
         dconf.service (#10704)
           5967 /usr/libexec/dconf-service
         gnome-keyring-daemon.service (#10630)
           5951 /usr/bin/gnome-keyring-daemon --foreground --components=pkcs11 
         gcr-ssh-agent.service (#10963)
           6035 /usr/libexec/gcr-ssh-agent /run/user/1000/gcr
         swayidle.service (#11444)
           6199 /usr/bin/swayidle -w
         nm-applet.service (#11407)
           6198 /usr/bin/nm-applet --indicator
         wcolortaillog.service (#11518)
           6226 foot colortaillog
           6228 /bin/sh /home/anarcat/bin/colortaillog
           6230 sudo journalctl -f
           6233 ccze -m ansi
           6235 sudo journalctl -f
           6236 journalctl -f
         afuse.service (#10889)
           6051 /usr/bin/afuse -o mount_template=sshfs -o transform_symlinks - 
         gpg-agent.service (#13547)
           51662 /usr/bin/gpg-agent --supervised
           51719 scdaemon --multi-server
         emacs.service (#10926)
            6034 /usr/bin/emacs --fg-daemon
           33203 /usr/bin/aspell -a -m -d en --encoding=utf-8
         xdg-desktop-portal-gtk.service (#12322)
           9546 /usr/libexec/xdg-desktop-portal-gtk
         xdg-desktop-portal-wlr.service (#12359)
           9555 /usr/libexec/xdg-desktop-portal-wlr
         sway.service (#11037)
           6037 /usr/bin/sway
           6181 swaybar -b bar-0
           6209 py3status
           6309 /usr/bin/i3status -c /tmp/py3status_oy4ntfnq
           6969 Xwayland :0 -rootless -terminate -core -listen 29 -listen 30 - 
       init.scope (#10198)
         5909 /lib/systemd/systemd --user
         5911 (sd-pam)
     session-7.scope (#10440)
       5895 gdm-session-worker [pam/gdm-password]
       6028 /usr/libexec/gdm-wayland-session --register-session sway-user-serv 
[...]

I think that's pretty neat.

TODO: consider this improved script: https://github.com/xdbob/sway-services/blob/master/bin/sway-user-service
TODO: move config into Puppet so it's in sync
TODO: maybe submit as a PR on the Debian package?

Environment propagation At first, my terminals and rofi didn't have the right `$PATH`, which broke a lot of my workflow. It's hard to tell exactly how Wayland gets started or where to inject environment. This discussion suggests a few alternatives and this Debian bug report discusses this issue as well. I eventually picked environment.d(5) since I already manage my user session with systemd, and it fixes a bunch of other problems. I used to have a `.shenv` that I had to manually source everywhere. The only problem with that approach is that it doesn't support conditionals, but that's something that's rarely needed.

Pipewire This is a whole topic onto itself, but migrating to Wayland also involves using Pipewire if you want screen sharing to work. You can actually keep using Pulseaudio for audio, that said, but that migration is actually something I've wanted to do anyways: Pipewire's design seems much better than Pulseaudio, as it folds in JACK features which allows for pretty neat tricks. (Which I should probably show in a separate post, because this one is getting rather long.) I first tried this migration in Debian bullseye, and it didn't work very well. Ardour would fail to export tracks and I would get into weird situations where streams would just drop mid-way. A particularly funny incident is when I was in a meeting and I couldn't hear my colleagues speak anymore (but they could) and I went on blabbering on my own for a solid 5 minutes until I realized what was going on. By then, people had tried numerous ways of letting me know that something was off, including (apparently) coughing, saying "hello?", chat messages, IRC, and so on, until they just gave up and left. I suspect that was also a Pipewire bug, but it could also have been that I muted the tab by error, as I recently learned that clicking on the little tiny speaker icon on a tab mutes that tab. Since the tab itself can get pretty small when you have lots of them, it's actually quite frequently that I mistakenly mute tabs. Anyways. Point is: I already knew how to make the migration, and I had already documented how to make the change in Puppet. It's basically:

apt install pipewire pipewire-audio-client-libraries pipewire-pulse wireplumber

Then, as a regular user:

systemctl --user daemon-reload
systemctl --user --now disable pulseaudio.service pulseaudio.socket
systemctl --user --now enable pipewire pipewire-pulse
systemctl --user mask pulseaudio

An optional (but key, IMHO) configuration you should also make is to "switch on connect", which will make your Bluetooth or USB headset automatically be the default route for audio, when connected. In ~/.config/pipewire/pipewire-pulse.conf.d/autoconnect.conf:

context.exec = [
      path = "pactl"        args = "load-module module-always-sink"  
      path = "pactl"        args = "load-module module-switch-on-connect"  
    #  path = "/usr/bin/sh"  args = "~/.config/pipewire/default.pw"  
]

See the excellent as usual Arch wiki page about Pipewire for that trick and more information about Pipewire. Note that you must not put the file in ~/.config/pipewire/pipewire.conf (or pipewire-pulse.conf, maybe) directly, as that will break your setup. If you want to add to that file, first copy the template from /usr/share/pipewire/pipewire-pulse.conf first. So far I'm happy with Pipewire in bookworm, but I've heard mixed reports from it. I have high hopes it will become the standard media server for Linux in the coming months or years, which is great because I've been (rather boldly, I admit) on the record saying I don't like PulseAudio. Rereading this now, I feel it might have been a little unfair, as "over-engineered and tries to do too many things at once" applies probably even more to Pipewire than PulseAudio (since it also handles video dispatching). That said, I think Pipewire took the right approach by implementing existing interfaces like Pulseaudio and JACK. That way we're not adding a third (or fourth?) way of doing audio in Linux; we're just making the server better.

Keypress drops Sometimes I lose keyboard presses. This correlates with the following warning from Sway:

d c 06 10:36:31 curie sway[343384]: 23:32:14.034 [ERROR] [wlr] [libinput] event5  - SONiX USB Keyboard: client bug: event processing lagging behind by 37ms, your system is too slow

... and corresponds to an open bug report in Sway. It seems the "system is too slow" should really be "your compositor is too slow" which seems to be the case here on this older system (curie). It doesn't happen often, but it does happen, particularly when a bunch of busy processes start in parallel (in my case: a linter running inside a container and notmuch new). The proposed fix for this in Sway is to gain real time privileges and add the CAP_SYS_NICE capability to the binary. We'll see how that goes in Debian once 1.8 gets released and shipped.

Improvements over i3

Tiling improvements There's a lot of improvements Sway could bring over using plain i3. There are pretty neat auto-tilers that could replicate the configurations I used to have in Xmonad or Awesome, see:

autotiling

swaymonad

Display latency tweaks TODO: You can tweak the display latency in wlroots compositors with the max_render_time parameter, possibly getting lower latency than X11 in the end.

Sound/brightness changes notifications TODO: Avizo can display a pop-up to give feedback on volume and brightness changes. Not in Debian. Other alternatives include SwayOSD and sway-nc, also not in Debian.

Debugging tricks The xeyes (in the x11-apps package) will run in Wayland, and can actually be used to easily see if a given window is also in Wayland. If the "eyes" follow the cursor, the app is actually running in xwayland, so not natively in Wayland. Another way to see what is using Wayland in Sway is with the command:

swaymsg -t get_tree

Conclusion In general, this took me a long time, but it mostly works. The tray icon situation is pretty frustrating, but there's a workaround and I have high hopes it will eventually fix itself. I'm also actually worried about the DisplayLink support because I eventually want to be using this, but hopefully that's another thing that will hopefully fix itself before I need it.

A word on the security model I'm kind of worried about all the hacks that have been added to Wayland just to make things work. Pretty much everywhere we need to, we punched a hole in the security model:

windows can spy on each other (although xdg-desktop-portal-wlr does confirm if you have some `chooser` installed, see xdg-desktop-portal-wrl(5))

windows can type over each other (through e.g. wtype through the virtual-keyboard protocol)

windows can overlay on top of each other (so one app could, for example, spoof a password dialog, through the layer-shell protocol)

Wikipedia describes the security properties of Wayland as it "isolates the input and output of every window, achieving confidentiality, integrity and availability for both." I'm not sure those are actually realized in the actual implementation, because of all those holes punched in the design, at least in Sway. For example, apparently the GNOME compositor doesn't have the virtual-keyboard protocol, but they do have (another?!) text input protocol. Wayland does offer a better basis to implement such a system, however. It feels like the Linux applications security model lacks critical decision points in the UI, like the user approving "yes, this application can share my screen now". Applications themselves might have some of those prompts, but it's not mandatory, and that is worrisome.

In my tubman setup, I started using ZFS on an old server I had lying around. The machine is really old though (2011!) and it "feels" pretty slow. I want to see how much of that is ZFS and how much is the machine. Synthetic benchmarks show that ZFS may be slower than mdadm in RAID-10 or RAID-6 configuration, so I want to confirm that on a live workload: my workstation. Plus, I want easy, regular, high performance backups (with send/receive snapshots) and there's no way I'm going to use BTRFS because I find it too confusing and unreliable. So off we go.

Installation Since this is a conversion (and not a new install), our procedure is slightly different than the official documentation but otherwise it's pretty much in the same spirit: we're going to use ZFS for everything, including the root filesystem. So, install the required packages, on the current system:

apt install --yes gdisk zfs-dkms zfs zfs-initramfs zfsutils-linux

We also tell DKMS that we need to rebuild the initrd when upgrading:

echo REMAKE_INITRD=yes > /etc/dkms/zfs.conf

Partitioning This is going to partition /dev/sdc with:

1MB MBR / BIOS legacy boot
512MB EFI boot
1GB bpool, unencrypted pool for /boot

rest of the disk for zpool, the rest of the data

 sgdisk --zap-all /dev/sdc
 sgdisk -a1 -n1:24K:+1000K -t1:EF02 /dev/sdc
 sgdisk     -n2:1M:+512M   -t2:EF00 /dev/sdc
 sgdisk     -n3:0:+1G      -t3:BF01 /dev/sdc
 sgdisk     -n4:0:0        -t4:BF00 /dev/sdc

That will look something like this:

    root@curie:/home/anarcat# sgdisk -p /dev/sdc
    Disk /dev/sdc: 1953525168 sectors, 931.5 GiB
    Model: ESD-S1C         
    Sector size (logical/physical): 512/512 bytes
    Disk identifier (GUID): [REDACTED]
    Partition table holds up to 128 entries
    Main partition table begins at sector 2 and ends at sector 33
    First usable sector is 34, last usable sector is 1953525134
    Partitions will be aligned on 16-sector boundaries
    Total free space is 14 sectors (7.0 KiB)
    Number  Start (sector)    End (sector)  Size       Code  Name
       1              48            2047   1000.0 KiB  EF02  
       2            2048         1050623   512.0 MiB   EF00  
       3         1050624         3147775   1024.0 MiB  BF01  
       4         3147776      1953525134   930.0 GiB   BF00

Unfortunately, we can't be sure of the sector size here, because the USB controller is probably lying to us about it. Normally, this smartctl command should tell us the sector size as well:

root@curie:~# smartctl -i /dev/sdb -qnoserial
smartctl 7.2 2020-12-30 r5155 [x86_64-linux-5.10.0-14-amd64] (local build)
Copyright (C) 2002-20, Bruce Allen, Christian Franke, www.smartmontools.org
=== START OF INFORMATION SECTION ===
Model Family:     Western Digital Black Mobile
Device Model:     WDC WD10JPLX-00MBPT0
Firmware Version: 01.01H01
User Capacity:    1 000 204 886 016 bytes [1,00 TB]
Sector Sizes:     512 bytes logical, 4096 bytes physical
Rotation Rate:    7200 rpm
Form Factor:      2.5 inches
Device is:        In smartctl database [for details use: -P show]
ATA Version is:   ATA8-ACS T13/1699-D revision 6
SATA Version is:  SATA 3.0, 6.0 Gb/s (current: 6.0 Gb/s)
Local Time is:    Tue May 17 13:33:04 2022 EDT
SMART support is: Available - device has SMART capability.
SMART support is: Enabled

Above is the example of the builtin HDD drive. But the SSD device enclosed in that USB controller doesn't support SMART commands, so we can't trust that it really has 512 bytes sectors. This matters because we need to tweak the ashift value correctly. We're going to go ahead the SSD drive has the common 4KB settings, which means ashift=12. Note here that we are not creating a separate partition for swap. Swap on ZFS volumes (AKA "swap on ZVOL") can trigger lockups and that issue is still not fixed upstream. Ubuntu recommends using a separate partition for swap instead. But since this is "just" a workstation, we're betting that we will not suffer from this problem, after hearing a report from another Debian developer running this setup on their workstation successfully. We do not recommend this setup though. In fact, if I were to redo this partition scheme, I would probably use LUKS encryption and setup a dedicated swap partition, as I had problems with ZFS encryption as well.

Creating pools ZFS pools are somewhat like "volume groups" if you are familiar with LVM, except they obviously also do things like RAID-10. (Even though LVM can technically also do RAID, people typically use mdadm instead.) In any case, the guide suggests creating two different pools here: one, in cleartext, for boot, and a separate, encrypted one, for the rest. Technically, the boot partition is required because the Grub bootloader only supports readonly ZFS pools, from what I understand. But I'm a little out of my depth here and just following the guide.

Boot pool creation This creates the boot pool in readonly mode with features that grub supports:

    zpool create \
        -o cachefile=/etc/zfs/zpool.cache \
        -o ashift=12 -d \
        -o feature@async_destroy=enabled \
        -o feature@bookmarks=enabled \
        -o feature@embedded_data=enabled \
        -o feature@empty_bpobj=enabled \
        -o feature@enabled_txg=enabled \
        -o feature@extensible_dataset=enabled \
        -o feature@filesystem_limits=enabled \
        -o feature@hole_birth=enabled \
        -o feature@large_blocks=enabled \
        -o feature@lz4_compress=enabled \
        -o feature@spacemap_histogram=enabled \
        -o feature@zpool_checkpoint=enabled \
        -O acltype=posixacl -O canmount=off \
        -O compression=lz4 \
        -O devices=off -O normalization=formD -O relatime=on -O xattr=sa \
        -O mountpoint=/boot -R /mnt \
        bpool /dev/sdc3

I haven't investigated all those settings and just trust the upstream guide on the above.

Main pool creation This is a more typical pool creation.

    zpool create \
        -o ashift=12 \
        -O encryption=on -O keylocation=prompt -O keyformat=passphrase \
        -O acltype=posixacl -O xattr=sa -O dnodesize=auto \
        -O compression=zstd \
        -O relatime=on \
        -O canmount=off \
        -O mountpoint=/ -R /mnt \
        rpool /dev/sdc4

Breaking this down:

-o ashift=12: mentioned above, 4k sector size
-O encryption=on -O keylocation=prompt -O keyformat=passphrase: encryption, prompt for a password, default algorithm is aes-256-gcm, explicit in the guide, made implicit here
-O acltype=posixacl -O xattr=sa: enable ACLs, with better performance (not enabled by default)
-O dnodesize=auto: related to extended attributes, less compatibility with other implementations
-O compression=zstd: enable zstd compression, can be disabled/enabled by dataset to with zfs set compression=off rpool/example
-O relatime=on: classic atime optimisation, another that could be used on a busy server is atime=off
-O canmount=off: do not make the pool mount automatically with mount -a?
-O mountpoint=/ -R /mnt: mount pool on / in the future, but /mnt for now

Those settings are all available in zfsprops(8). Other flags are defined in zpool-create(8). The reasoning behind them is also explained in the upstream guide and some also in [the Debian wiki][]. Those flags were actually not used:

-O normalization=formD: normalize file names on comparisons (not storage), implies utf8only=on, which is a bad idea (and effectively meant my first sync failed to copy some files, including this folder from a supysonic checkout). and this cannot be changed after the filesystem is created. bad, bad, bad.

[the Debian wiki]: https://wiki.debian.org/ZFS#Advanced_Topics

Side note about single-disk pools Also note that we're living dangerously here: single-disk ZFS pools are rumoured to be more dangerous than not running ZFS at all. The choice quote from this article is:
[...] any error can be detected, but cannot be corrected. This sounds like an acceptable compromise, but its actually not. The reason its not is that ZFS' metadata cannot be allowed to be corrupted. If it is it is likely the zpool will be impossible to mount (and will probably crash the system once the corruption is found). So a couple of bad sectors in the right place will mean that all data on the zpool will be lost. Not some, all. Also there's no ZFS recovery tools, so you cannot recover any data on the drives.
Compared with (say) ext4, where a single disk error can recovered, this is pretty bad. But we are ready to live with this with the idea that we'll have hourly offline snapshots that we can easily recover from. It's trade-off. Also, we're running this on a NVMe/M.2 drive which typically just blinks out of existence completely, and doesn't "bit rot" the way a HDD would. Also, the FreeBSD handbook quick start doesn't have any warnings about their first example, which is with a single disk. So I am reassured at least.

Creating mount points Next we create the actual filesystems, known as "datasets" which are the things that get mounted on mountpoint and hold the actual files.

this creates two containers, for ROOT and BOOT
```
 zfs create -o canmount=off -o mountpoint=none rpool/ROOT &&
 zfs create -o canmount=off -o mountpoint=none bpool/BOOT
```
Note that it's unclear to me why those datasets are necessary, but they seem common practice, also used in this FreeBSD example. The OpenZFS guide mentions the Solaris upgrades and Ubuntu's zsys that use that container for upgrades and rollbacks. This blog post seems to explain a bit the layout behind the installer.
this creates the actual boot and root filesystems:
```
 zfs create -o canmount=noauto -o mountpoint=/ rpool/ROOT/debian &&
 zfs mount rpool/ROOT/debian &&
 zfs create -o mountpoint=/boot bpool/BOOT/debian
```
I guess the debian name here is because we could technically have multiple operating systems with the same underlying datasets.

then the main datasets:

 zfs create                                 rpool/home &&
 zfs create -o mountpoint=/root             rpool/home/root &&
 chmod 700 /mnt/root &&
 zfs create                                 rpool/var

exclude temporary files from snapshots:

 zfs create -o com.sun:auto-snapshot=false  rpool/var/cache &&
 zfs create -o com.sun:auto-snapshot=false  rpool/var/tmp &&
 chmod 1777 /mnt/var/tmp

and skip automatic snapshots in Docker:
```
 zfs create -o canmount=off                 rpool/var/lib &&
 zfs create -o com.sun:auto-snapshot=false  rpool/var/lib/docker
```
Notice here a peculiarity: we must create rpool/var/lib to create rpool/var/lib/docker otherwise we get this error:
```
 cannot create 'rpool/var/lib/docker': parent does not exist
```
... and no, just creating /mnt/var/lib doesn't fix that problem. In fact, it makes things even more confusing because an existing directory shadows a mountpoint, which is the opposite of how things normally work. Also note that you will probably need to change storage driver in Docker, see the zfs-driver documentation for details but, basically, I did:
```
echo '  "storage-driver": "zfs"  ' > /etc/docker/daemon.json
```
Note that podman has the same problem (and similar solution):
```
printf '[storage]\ndriver = "zfs"\n' > /etc/containers/storage.conf
```

make a tmpfs for /run:

 mkdir /mnt/run &&
 mount -t tmpfs tmpfs /mnt/run &&
 mkdir /mnt/run/lock

We don't create a /srv, as that's the HDD stuff. Also mount the EFI partition:

mkfs.fat -F 32 /dev/sdc2 &&
mount /dev/sdc2 /mnt/boot/efi/

At this point, everything should be mounted in /mnt. It should look like this:

root@curie:~# LANG=C df -h -t zfs -t vfat
Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
rpool/ROOT/debian     899G  384K  899G   1% /mnt
bpool/BOOT/debian     832M  123M  709M  15% /mnt/boot
rpool/home            899G  256K  899G   1% /mnt/home
rpool/home/root       899G  256K  899G   1% /mnt/root
rpool/var             899G  384K  899G   1% /mnt/var
rpool/var/cache       899G  256K  899G   1% /mnt/var/cache
rpool/var/tmp         899G  256K  899G   1% /mnt/var/tmp
rpool/var/lib/docker  899G  256K  899G   1% /mnt/var/lib/docker
/dev/sdc2             511M  4.0K  511M   1% /mnt/boot/efi

Now that we have everything setup and mounted, let's copy all files over.

Copying files This is a list of all the mounted filesystems

for fs in /boot/ /boot/efi/ / /home/; do
    echo "syncing $fs to /mnt$fs..." && 
    rsync -aSHAXx --info=progress2 --delete $fs /mnt$fs
done

You can check that the list is correct with:

mount -l -t ext4,btrfs,vfat   awk ' print $3 '

Note that we skip /srv as it's on a different disk. On the first run, we had:

root@curie:~# for fs in /boot/ /boot/efi/ / /home/; do
        echo "syncing $fs to /mnt$fs..." && 
        rsync -aSHAXx --info=progress2 $fs /mnt$fs
    done
syncing /boot/ to /mnt/boot/...
              0   0%    0.00kB/s    0:00:00 (xfr#0, to-chk=0/299)  
syncing /boot/efi/ to /mnt/boot/efi/...
     16,831,437 100%  184.14MB/s    0:00:00 (xfr#101, to-chk=0/110)
syncing / to /mnt/...
 28,019,293,280  94%   47.63MB/s    0:09:21 (xfr#703710, ir-chk=6748/839220)rsync: [generator] delete_file: rmdir(var/lib/docker) failed: Device or resource busy (16)
could not make way for new symlink: var/lib/docker
 34,081,267,990  98%   50.71MB/s    0:10:40 (xfr#736577, to-chk=0/867732)    
rsync error: some files/attrs were not transferred (see previous errors) (code 23) at main.c(1333) [sender=3.2.3]
syncing /home/ to /mnt/home/...
rsync: [sender] readlink_stat("/home/anarcat/.fuse") failed: Permission denied (13)
 24,456,268,098  98%   68.03MB/s    0:05:42 (xfr#159867, ir-chk=6875/172377) 
file has vanished: "/home/anarcat/.cache/mozilla/firefox/s2hwvqbu.quantum/cache2/entries/B3AB0CDA9C4454B3C1197E5A22669DF8EE849D90"
199,762,528,125  93%   74.82MB/s    0:42:26 (xfr#1437846, ir-chk=1018/1983979)rsync: [generator] recv_generator: mkdir "/mnt/home/anarcat/dist/supysonic/tests/assets/\#346" failed: Invalid or incomplete multibyte or wide character (84)
*** Skipping any contents from this failed directory ***
315,384,723,978  96%   76.82MB/s    1:05:15 (xfr#2256473, to-chk=0/2993950)    
rsync error: some files/attrs were not transferred (see previous errors) (code 23) at main.c(1333) [sender=3.2.3]

Note the failure to transfer that supysonic file? It turns out they had a weird filename in their source tree, since then removed, but still it showed how the utf8only feature might not be such a bad idea. At this point, the procedure was restarted all the way back to "Creating pools", after unmounting all ZFS filesystems (

umount
/mnt/run /mnt/boot/efi && umount -t zfs -a

) and destroying the pool, which, surprisingly, doesn't require any confirmation (

zpool destroy
rpool

). The second run was cleaner:

root@curie:~# for fs in /boot/ /boot/efi/ / /home/; do
        echo "syncing $fs to /mnt$fs..." && 
        rsync -aSHAXx --info=progress2 --delete $fs /mnt$fs
    done
syncing /boot/ to /mnt/boot/...
              0   0%    0.00kB/s    0:00:00 (xfr#0, to-chk=0/299)  
syncing /boot/efi/ to /mnt/boot/efi/...
              0   0%    0.00kB/s    0:00:00 (xfr#0, to-chk=0/110)  
syncing / to /mnt/...
 28,019,033,070  97%   42.03MB/s    0:10:35 (xfr#703671, ir-chk=1093/833515)rsync: [generator] delete_file: rmdir(var/lib/docker) failed: Device or resource busy (16)
could not make way for new symlink: var/lib/docker
 34,081,807,102  98%   44.84MB/s    0:12:04 (xfr#736580, to-chk=0/867723)    
rsync error: some files/attrs were not transferred (see previous errors) (code 23) at main.c(1333) [sender=3.2.3]
syncing /home/ to /mnt/home/...
rsync: [sender] readlink_stat("/home/anarcat/.fuse") failed: Permission denied (13)
IO error encountered -- skipping file deletion
 24,043,086,450  96%   62.03MB/s    0:06:09 (xfr#151819, ir-chk=15117/172571)
file has vanished: "/home/anarcat/.cache/mozilla/firefox/s2hwvqbu.quantum/cache2/entries/4C1FDBFEA976FF924D062FB990B24B897A77B84B"
315,423,626,507  96%   67.09MB/s    1:14:43 (xfr#2256845, to-chk=0/2994364)    
rsync error: some files/attrs were not transferred (see previous errors) (code 23) at main.c(1333) [sender=3.2.3]

Also note the transfer speed: we seem capped at 76MB/s, or 608Mbit/s. This is not as fast as I was expecting: the USB connection seems to be at around 5Gbps:

anarcat@curie:~$ lsusb -tv   head -4
/:  Bus 02.Port 1: Dev 1, Class=root_hub, Driver=xhci_hcd/6p, 5000M
    ID 1d6b:0003 Linux Foundation 3.0 root hub
     __ Port 1: Dev 4, If 0, Class=Mass Storage, Driver=uas, 5000M
        ID 0b05:1932 ASUSTek Computer, Inc.

So it shouldn't cap at that speed. It's possible the USB adapter is failing to give me the full speed though. It's not the M.2 SSD drive either, as that has a ~500MB/s bandwidth, acccording to its spec. At this point, we're about ready to do the final configuration. We drop to single user mode and do the rest of the procedure. That used to be shutdown now, but it seems like the systemd switch broke that, so now you can reboot into grub and pick the "recovery" option. Alternatively, you might try systemctl rescue, as I found out. I also wanted to copy the drive over to another new NVMe drive, but that failed: it looks like the USB controller I have doesn't work with older, non-NVME drives.

Boot configuration Now we need to enter the new system to rebuild the boot loader and initrd and so on. First, we bind mounts and chroot into the ZFS disk:

mount --rbind /dev  /mnt/dev &&
mount --rbind /proc /mnt/proc &&
mount --rbind /sys  /mnt/sys &&
chroot /mnt /bin/bash

Next we add an extra service that imports the bpool on boot, to make sure it survives a zpool.cache destruction:

cat > /etc/systemd/system/zfs-import-bpool.service <<EOF
[Unit]
DefaultDependencies=no
Before=zfs-import-scan.service
Before=zfs-import-cache.service
[Service]
Type=oneshot
RemainAfterExit=yes
ExecStart=/sbin/zpool import -N -o cachefile=none bpool
# Work-around to preserve zpool cache:
ExecStartPre=-/bin/mv /etc/zfs/zpool.cache /etc/zfs/preboot_zpool.cache
ExecStartPost=-/bin/mv /etc/zfs/preboot_zpool.cache /etc/zfs/zpool.cache
[Install]
WantedBy=zfs-import.target
EOF

Enable the service:

systemctl enable zfs-import-bpool.service

I had to trim down /etc/fstab and /etc/crypttab to only contain references to the legacy filesystems (/srv is still BTRFS!). If we don't already have a tmpfs defined in /etc/fstab:

ln -s /usr/share/systemd/tmp.mount /etc/systemd/system/ &&
systemctl enable tmp.mount

Rebuild boot loader with support for ZFS, but also to workaround GRUB's missing zpool-features support:

grub-probe /boot   grep -q zfs &&
update-initramfs -c -k all &&
sed -i 's,GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX.*,GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="root=ZFS=rpool/ROOT/debian",' /etc/default/grub &&
update-grub

For good measure, make sure the right disk is configured here, for example you might want to tag both drives in a RAID array:

dpkg-reconfigure grub-pc

Install grub to EFI while you're there:

grub-install --target=x86_64-efi --efi-directory=/boot/efi --bootloader-id=debian --recheck --no-floppy

Filesystem mount ordering. The rationale here in the OpenZFS guide is a little strange, but I don't dare ignore that.

mkdir /etc/zfs/zfs-list.cache
touch /etc/zfs/zfs-list.cache/bpool
touch /etc/zfs/zfs-list.cache/rpool
zed -F &

Verify that zed updated the cache by making sure these are not empty:

cat /etc/zfs/zfs-list.cache/bpool
cat /etc/zfs/zfs-list.cache/rpool

Once the files have data, stop zed:

fg
Press Ctrl-C.

Fix the paths to eliminate /mnt:

sed -Ei "s /mnt/? / " /etc/zfs/zfs-list.cache/*

Snapshot initial install:

zfs snapshot bpool/BOOT/debian@install
zfs snapshot rpool/ROOT/debian@install

Exit chroot:

exit

Finalizing One last sync was done in rescue mode:

for fs in /boot/ /boot/efi/ / /home/; do
    echo "syncing $fs to /mnt$fs..." && 
    rsync -aSHAXx --info=progress2 --delete $fs /mnt$fs
done

Then we unmount all filesystems:

mount   grep -v zfs   tac   awk '/\/mnt/  print $3 '   xargs -i  umount -lf  
zpool export -a

Reboot, swap the drives, and boot in ZFS. Hurray!

Benchmarks This is a test that was ran in single-user mode using fio and the Ars Technica recommended tests, which are:

Single 4KiB random write process:

 fio --name=randwrite4k1x --ioengine=posixaio --rw=randwrite --bs=4k --size=4g --numjobs=1 --iodepth=1 --runtime=60 --time_based --end_fsync=1

16 parallel 64KiB random write processes:

 fio --name=randwrite64k16x --ioengine=posixaio --rw=randwrite --bs=64k --size=256m --numjobs=16 --iodepth=16 --runtime=60 --time_based --end_fsync=1

Single 1MiB random write process:

 fio --name=randwrite1m1x --ioengine=posixaio --rw=randwrite --bs=1m --size=16g --numjobs=1 --iodepth=1 --runtime=60 --time_based --end_fsync=1

Strangely, that's not exactly what the author, Jim Salter, did in his actual test bench used in the ZFS benchmarking article. The first thing is there's no read test at all, which is already pretty strange. But also it doesn't include stuff like dropping caches or repeating results. So here's my variation, which i called fio-ars-bench.sh for now. It just batches a bunch of fio tests, one by one, 60 seconds each. It should take about 12 minutes to run, as there are 3 pair of tests, read/write, with and without async. My bias, before building, running and analysing those results is that ZFS should outperform the traditional stack on writes, but possibly not on reads. It's also possible it outperforms it on both, because it's a newer drive. A new test might be possible with a new external USB drive as well, although I doubt I will find the time to do this.

Results All tests were done on WD blue SN550 drives, which claims to be able to push 2400MB/s read and 1750MB/s write. An extra drive was bought to move the LVM setup from a WDC WDS500G1B0B-00AS40 SSD, a WD blue M.2 2280 SSD that was at least 5 years old, spec'd at 560MB/s read, 530MB/s write. Benchmarks were done on the M.2 SSD drive but discarded so that the drive difference is not a factor in the test. In practice, I'm going to assume we'll never reach those numbers because we're not actually NVMe (this is an old workstation!) so the bottleneck isn't the disk itself. For our purposes, it might still give us useful results.

Rescue test, LUKS/LVM/ext4 Those tests were performed with everything shutdown, after either entering the system in rescue mode, or by reaching that target with:

systemctl rescue

The network might have been started before or after the test as well:

systemctl start systemd-networkd

So it should be fairly reliable as basically nothing else is running. Raw numbers, from the ?job-curie-lvm.log, converted to MiB/s and manually merged:

test	read I/O	read IOPS	write I/O	write IOPS
rand4k4g1x	39.27	10052	212.15	54310
rand4k4g1x--fsync=1	39.29	10057	2.73	699
rand64k256m16x	1297.00	20751	1068.57	17097
rand64k256m16x--fsync=1	1290.90	20654	353.82	5661
rand1m16g1x	315.15	315	563.77	563
rand1m16g1x--fsync=1	345.88	345	157.01	157

Peaks are at about 20k IOPS and ~1.3GiB/s read, 1GiB/s write in the 64KB blocks with 16 jobs. Slowest is the random 4k block sync write at an abysmal 3MB/s and 700 IOPS The 1MB read/write tests have lower IOPS, but that is expected.

Rescue test, ZFS This test was also performed in rescue mode. Raw numbers, from the ?job-curie-zfs.log, converted to MiB/s and manually merged:

test read I/O read IOPS write I/O write IOPS

rand4k4g1x 77.20 19763 27.13 6944

rand4k4g1x--fsync=1 76.16 19495 6.53 1673

rand64k256m16x 1882.40 30118 70.58 1129

rand64k256m16x--fsync=1 1865.13 29842 71.98 1151

rand1m16g1x 921.62 921 102.21 102

rand1m16g1x--fsync=1 908.37 908 64.30 64

Peaks are at 1.8GiB/s read, also in the 64k job like above, but much faster. The write is, as expected, much slower at 70MiB/s (compared to 1GiB/s!), but it should be noted the sync write doesn't degrade performance compared to async writes (although it's still below the LVM 300MB/s).

test	read I/O	read IOPS	write I/O	write IOPS
rand4k4g1x	77.20	19763	27.13	6944
rand4k4g1x--fsync=1	76.16	19495	6.53	1673
rand64k256m16x	1882.40	30118	70.58	1129
rand64k256m16x--fsync=1	1865.13	29842	71.98	1151
rand1m16g1x	921.62	921	102.21	102
rand1m16g1x--fsync=1	908.37	908	64.30	64

Conclusions Really, ZFS has trouble performing in all write conditions. The random 4k sync write test is the only place where ZFS outperforms LVM in writes, and barely (7MiB/s vs 3MiB/s). Everywhere else, writes are much slower, sometimes by an order of magnitude. And before some ZFS zealot jumps in talking about the SLOG or some other cache that could be added to improved performance, I'll remind you that those numbers are on a bare bones NVMe drive, pretty much as fast storage as you can find on this machine. Adding another NVMe drive as a cache probably will not improve write performance here. Still, those are very different results than the tests performed by Salter which shows ZFS beating traditional configurations in all categories but uncached 4k reads (not writes!). That said, those tests are very different from the tests I performed here, where I test writes on a single disk, not a RAID array, which might explain the discrepancy. Also, note that neither LVM or ZFS manage to reach the 2400MB/s read and 1750MB/s write performance specification. ZFS does manage to reach 82% of the read performance (1973MB/s) and LVM 64% of the write performance (1120MB/s). LVM hits 57% of the read performance and ZFS hits barely 6% of the write performance. Overall, I'm a bit disappointed in the ZFS write performance here, I must say. Maybe I need to tweak the record size or some other ZFS voodoo, but I'll note that I didn't have to do any such configuration on the other side to kick ZFS in the pants...

Real world experience This section document not synthetic backups, but actual real world workloads, comparing before and after I switched my workstation to ZFS.

Docker performance I had the feeling that running some git hook (which was firing a Docker container) was "slower" somehow. It seems that, at runtime, ZFS backends are significant slower than their overlayfs/ext4 equivalent:

May 16 14:42:52 curie systemd[1]: home-docker-overlay2-17e4d24228decc2d2d493efc401dbfb7ac29739da0e46775e122078d9daf3e87\x2dinit-merged.mount: Succeeded.
May 16 14:42:52 curie systemd[5161]: home-docker-overlay2-17e4d24228decc2d2d493efc401dbfb7ac29739da0e46775e122078d9daf3e87\x2dinit-merged.mount: Succeeded.
May 16 14:42:52 curie systemd[1]: home-docker-overlay2-17e4d24228decc2d2d493efc401dbfb7ac29739da0e46775e122078d9daf3e87-merged.mount: Succeeded.
May 16 14:42:53 curie dockerd[1723]: time="2022-05-16T14:42:53.087219426-04:00" level=info msg="starting signal loop" namespace=moby path=/run/docker/containerd/daemon/io.containerd.runtime.v2.task/moby/af22586fba07014a4d10ab19da10cf280db7a43cad804d6c1e9f2682f12b5f10 pid=151170
May 16 14:42:53 curie systemd[1]: Started libcontainer container af22586fba07014a4d10ab19da10cf280db7a43cad804d6c1e9f2682f12b5f10.
May 16 14:42:54 curie systemd[1]: docker-af22586fba07014a4d10ab19da10cf280db7a43cad804d6c1e9f2682f12b5f10.scope: Succeeded.
May 16 14:42:54 curie dockerd[1723]: time="2022-05-16T14:42:54.047297800-04:00" level=info msg="shim disconnected" id=af22586fba07014a4d10ab19da10cf280db7a43cad804d6c1e9f2682f12b5f10
May 16 14:42:54 curie dockerd[998]: time="2022-05-16T14:42:54.051365015-04:00" level=info msg="ignoring event" container=af22586fba07014a4d10ab19da10cf280db7a43cad804d6c1e9f2682f12b5f10 module=libcontainerd namespace=moby topic=/tasks/delete type="*events.TaskDelete"
May 16 14:42:54 curie systemd[2444]: run-docker-netns-f5453c87c879.mount: Succeeded.
May 16 14:42:54 curie systemd[5161]: run-docker-netns-f5453c87c879.mount: Succeeded.
May 16 14:42:54 curie systemd[2444]: home-docker-overlay2-17e4d24228decc2d2d493efc401dbfb7ac29739da0e46775e122078d9daf3e87-merged.mount: Succeeded.
May 16 14:42:54 curie systemd[5161]: home-docker-overlay2-17e4d24228decc2d2d493efc401dbfb7ac29739da0e46775e122078d9daf3e87-merged.mount: Succeeded.
May 16 14:42:54 curie systemd[1]: run-docker-netns-f5453c87c879.mount: Succeeded.
May 16 14:42:54 curie systemd[1]: home-docker-overlay2-17e4d24228decc2d2d493efc401dbfb7ac29739da0e46775e122078d9daf3e87-merged.mount: Succeeded.

Translating this:

container setup: ~1 second
container runtime: ~1 second
container teardown: ~1 second
total runtime: 2-3 seconds

Obviously, those timestamps are not quite accurate enough to make precise measurements... After I switched to ZFS:

mai 30 15:31:39 curie systemd[1]: var-lib-docker-zfs-graph-41ce08fb7a1d3a9c101694b82722f5621c0b4819bd1d9f070933fd1e00543cdf\x2dinit.mount: Succeeded. 
mai 30 15:31:39 curie systemd[5287]: var-lib-docker-zfs-graph-41ce08fb7a1d3a9c101694b82722f5621c0b4819bd1d9f070933fd1e00543cdf\x2dinit.mount: Succeeded. 
mai 30 15:31:40 curie systemd[1]: var-lib-docker-zfs-graph-41ce08fb7a1d3a9c101694b82722f5621c0b4819bd1d9f070933fd1e00543cdf.mount: Succeeded. 
mai 30 15:31:40 curie systemd[5287]: var-lib-docker-zfs-graph-41ce08fb7a1d3a9c101694b82722f5621c0b4819bd1d9f070933fd1e00543cdf.mount: Succeeded. 
mai 30 15:31:41 curie dockerd[3199]: time="2022-05-30T15:31:41.551403693-04:00" level=info msg="starting signal loop" namespace=moby path=/run/docker/containerd/daemon/io.containerd.runtime.v2.task/moby/42a1a1ed5912a7227148e997f442e7ab2e5cc3558aa3471548223c5888c9b142 pid=141080 
mai 30 15:31:41 curie systemd[1]: run-docker-runtime\x2drunc-moby-42a1a1ed5912a7227148e997f442e7ab2e5cc3558aa3471548223c5888c9b142-runc.ZVcjvl.mount: Succeeded. 
mai 30 15:31:41 curie systemd[5287]: run-docker-runtime\x2drunc-moby-42a1a1ed5912a7227148e997f442e7ab2e5cc3558aa3471548223c5888c9b142-runc.ZVcjvl.mount: Succeeded. 
mai 30 15:31:41 curie systemd[1]: Started libcontainer container 42a1a1ed5912a7227148e997f442e7ab2e5cc3558aa3471548223c5888c9b142. 
mai 30 15:31:45 curie systemd[1]: docker-42a1a1ed5912a7227148e997f442e7ab2e5cc3558aa3471548223c5888c9b142.scope: Succeeded. 
mai 30 15:31:45 curie dockerd[3199]: time="2022-05-30T15:31:45.883019128-04:00" level=info msg="shim disconnected" id=42a1a1ed5912a7227148e997f442e7ab2e5cc3558aa3471548223c5888c9b142 
mai 30 15:31:45 curie dockerd[1726]: time="2022-05-30T15:31:45.883064491-04:00" level=info msg="ignoring event" container=42a1a1ed5912a7227148e997f442e7ab2e5cc3558aa3471548223c5888c9b142 module=libcontainerd namespace=moby topic=/tasks/delete type="*events.TaskDelete" 
mai 30 15:31:45 curie systemd[1]: run-docker-netns-e45f5cf5f465.mount: Succeeded. 
mai 30 15:31:45 curie systemd[5287]: run-docker-netns-e45f5cf5f465.mount: Succeeded. 
mai 30 15:31:45 curie systemd[1]: var-lib-docker-zfs-graph-41ce08fb7a1d3a9c101694b82722f5621c0b4819bd1d9f070933fd1e00543cdf.mount: Succeeded. 
mai 30 15:31:45 curie systemd[5287]: var-lib-docker-zfs-graph-41ce08fb7a1d3a9c101694b82722f5621c0b4819bd1d9f070933fd1e00543cdf.mount: Succeeded.

That's double or triple the run time, from 2 seconds to 6 seconds. Most of the time is spent in run time, inside the container. Here's the breakdown:

container setup: ~2 seconds
container run: ~4 seconds
container teardown: ~1 second
total run time: about ~6-7 seconds

That's a two- to three-fold increase! Clearly something is going on here that I should tweak. It's possible that code path is less optimized in Docker. I also worry about podman, but apparently it also supports ZFS backends. Possibly it would perform better, but at this stage I wouldn't have a good comparison: maybe it would have performed better on non-ZFS as well...

Interactivity While doing the offsite backups (below), the system became somewhat "sluggish". I felt everything was slow, and I estimate it introduced ~50ms latency in any input device. Arguably, those are all USB and the external drive was connected through USB, but I suspect the ZFS drivers are not as well tuned with the scheduler as the regular filesystem drivers...

Recovery procedures For test purposes, I unmounted all systems during the procedure:

umount /mnt/boot/efi /mnt/boot/run
umount -a -t zfs
zpool export -a

And disconnected the drive, to see how I would recover this system from another Linux system in case of a total motherboard failure. To import an existing pool, plug the device, then import the pool with an alternate root, so it doesn't mount over your existing filesystems, then you mount the root filesystem and all the others:

zpool import -l -a -R /mnt &&
zfs mount rpool/ROOT/debian &&
zfs mount -a &&
mount /dev/sdc2 /mnt/boot/efi &&
mount -t tmpfs tmpfs /mnt/run &&
mkdir /mnt/run/lock

Offsite backup Part of the goal of using ZFS is to simplify and harden backups. I wanted to experiment with shorter recovery times specifically both point in time recovery objective and recovery time objective and faster incremental backups. This is, therefore, part of my backup services. This section documents how an external NVMe enclosure was setup in a pool to mirror the datasets from my workstation. The final setup should include syncoid copying datasets to the backup server regularly, but I haven't finished that configuration yet.

Partitioning The above partitioning procedure used sgdisk, but I couldn't figure out how to do this with sgdisk, so this uses sfdisk to dump the partition from the first disk to an external, identical drive:

sfdisk -d /dev/nvme0n1   sfdisk --no-reread /dev/sda --force

Pool creation This is similar to the main pool creation, except we tweaked a few bits after changing the upstream procedure:

zpool create \
        -o cachefile=/etc/zfs/zpool.cache \
        -o ashift=12 -d \
        -o feature@async_destroy=enabled \
        -o feature@bookmarks=enabled \
        -o feature@embedded_data=enabled \
        -o feature@empty_bpobj=enabled \
        -o feature@enabled_txg=enabled \
        -o feature@extensible_dataset=enabled \
        -o feature@filesystem_limits=enabled \
        -o feature@hole_birth=enabled \
        -o feature@large_blocks=enabled \
        -o feature@lz4_compress=enabled \
        -o feature@spacemap_histogram=enabled \
        -o feature@zpool_checkpoint=enabled \
        -O acltype=posixacl -O xattr=sa \
        -O compression=lz4 \
        -O devices=off \
        -O relatime=on \
        -O canmount=off \
        -O mountpoint=/boot -R /mnt \
        bpool-tubman /dev/sdb3

The change from the main boot pool are:

no unicode normalization
different device path (sdb used to be the M.2 device, it's now nvme0n1)
reordered parameters

Main pool creation is:

zpool create \
        -o ashift=12 \
        -O encryption=on -O keylocation=prompt -O keyformat=passphrase \
        -O acltype=posixacl -O xattr=sa -O dnodesize=auto \
        -O compression=zstd \
        -O relatime=on \
        -O canmount=off \
        -O mountpoint=/ -R /mnt \
        rpool-tubman /dev/sdb4

First sync I used syncoid to copy all pools over to the external device. syncoid is a thing that's part of the sanoid project which is specifically designed to sync snapshots between pool, typically over SSH links but it can also operate locally. The sanoid command had a --readonly argument to simulate changes, but syncoid didn't so I tried to fix that with an upstream PR. It seems it would be better to do this by hand, but this was much easier. The full first sync was:

root@curie:/home/anarcat# ./bin/syncoid -r  bpool bpool-tubman
CRITICAL ERROR: Target bpool-tubman exists but has no snapshots matching with bpool!
                Replication to target would require destroying existing
                target. Cowardly refusing to destroy your existing target.
          NOTE: Target bpool-tubman dataset is < 64MB used - did you mistakenly run
                 zfs create bpool-tubman  on the target? ZFS initial
                replication must be to a NON EXISTENT DATASET, which will
                then be CREATED BY the initial replication process.
INFO: Sending oldest full snapshot bpool/BOOT@test (~ 42 KB) to new target filesystem:
44.2KiB 0:00:00 [4.19MiB/s] [========================================================================================================================] 103%            
INFO: Updating new target filesystem with incremental bpool/BOOT@test ... syncoid_curie_2022-05-30:12:50:39 (~ 4 KB):
2.13KiB 0:00:00 [ 114KiB/s] [===============================================================>                                                         ] 53%            
INFO: Sending oldest full snapshot bpool/BOOT/debian@install (~ 126.0 MB) to new target filesystem:
 126MiB 0:00:00 [ 308MiB/s] [=======================================================================================================================>] 100%            
INFO: Updating new target filesystem with incremental bpool/BOOT/debian@install ... syncoid_curie_2022-05-30:12:50:39 (~ 113.4 MB):
 113MiB 0:00:00 [ 315MiB/s] [=======================================================================================================================>] 100%
root@curie:/home/anarcat# ./bin/syncoid -r  rpool rpool-tubman
CRITICAL ERROR: Target rpool-tubman exists but has no snapshots matching with rpool!
                Replication to target would require destroying existing
                target. Cowardly refusing to destroy your existing target.
          NOTE: Target rpool-tubman dataset is < 64MB used - did you mistakenly run
                 zfs create rpool-tubman  on the target? ZFS initial
                replication must be to a NON EXISTENT DATASET, which will
                then be CREATED BY the initial replication process.
INFO: Sending oldest full snapshot rpool/ROOT@syncoid_curie_2022-05-30:12:50:51 (~ 69 KB) to new target filesystem:
44.2KiB 0:00:00 [2.44MiB/s] [===========================================================================>                                             ] 63%            
INFO: Sending oldest full snapshot rpool/ROOT/debian@install (~ 25.9 GB) to new target filesystem:
25.9GiB 0:03:33 [ 124MiB/s] [=======================================================================================================================>] 100%            
INFO: Updating new target filesystem with incremental rpool/ROOT/debian@install ... syncoid_curie_2022-05-30:12:50:52 (~ 3.9 GB):
3.92GiB 0:00:33 [ 119MiB/s] [======================================================================================================================>  ] 99%            
INFO: Sending oldest full snapshot rpool/home@syncoid_curie_2022-05-30:12:55:04 (~ 276.8 GB) to new target filesystem:
 277GiB 0:27:13 [ 174MiB/s] [=======================================================================================================================>] 100%            
INFO: Sending oldest full snapshot rpool/home/root@syncoid_curie_2022-05-30:13:22:19 (~ 2.2 GB) to new target filesystem:
2.22GiB 0:00:25 [90.2MiB/s] [=======================================================================================================================>] 100%            
INFO: Sending oldest full snapshot rpool/var@syncoid_curie_2022-05-30:13:22:47 (~ 5.6 GB) to new target filesystem:
5.56GiB 0:00:32 [ 176MiB/s] [=======================================================================================================================>] 100%            
INFO: Sending oldest full snapshot rpool/var/cache@syncoid_curie_2022-05-30:13:23:22 (~ 627.3 MB) to new target filesystem:
 627MiB 0:00:03 [ 169MiB/s] [=======================================================================================================================>] 100%            
INFO: Sending oldest full snapshot rpool/var/lib@syncoid_curie_2022-05-30:13:23:28 (~ 69 KB) to new target filesystem:
44.2KiB 0:00:00 [1.40MiB/s] [===========================================================================>                                             ] 63%            
INFO: Sending oldest full snapshot rpool/var/lib/docker@syncoid_curie_2022-05-30:13:23:28 (~ 442.6 MB) to new target filesystem:
 443MiB 0:00:04 [ 103MiB/s] [=======================================================================================================================>] 100%            
INFO: Sending oldest full snapshot rpool/var/lib/docker/05c0de7fabbea60500eaa495d0d82038249f6faa63b12914737c4d71520e62c5@266253254 (~ 6.3 MB) to new target filesystem:
6.49MiB 0:00:00 [12.9MiB/s] [========================================================================================================================] 102%            
INFO: Updating new target filesystem with incremental rpool/var/lib/docker/05c0de7fabbea60500eaa495d0d82038249f6faa63b12914737c4d71520e62c5@266253254 ... syncoid_curie_2022-05-30:13:23:34 (~ 4 KB):
1.52KiB 0:00:00 [27.6KiB/s] [============================================>                                                                            ] 38%            
INFO: Sending oldest full snapshot rpool/var/lib/flatpak@syncoid_curie_2022-05-30:13:23:36 (~ 2.0 GB) to new target filesystem:
2.00GiB 0:00:17 [ 115MiB/s] [=======================================================================================================================>] 100%            
INFO: Sending oldest full snapshot rpool/var/tmp@syncoid_curie_2022-05-30:13:23:55 (~ 57.0 MB) to new target filesystem:
61.8MiB 0:00:01 [45.0MiB/s] [========================================================================================================================] 108%            
INFO: Clone is recreated on target rpool-tubman/var/lib/docker/ed71ddd563a779ba6fb37b3b1d0cc2c11eca9b594e77b4b234867ebcb162b205 based on rpool/var/lib/docker/05c0de7fabbea60500eaa495d0d82038249f6faa63b12914737c4d71520e62c5@266253254
INFO: Sending oldest full snapshot rpool/var/lib/docker/ed71ddd563a779ba6fb37b3b1d0cc2c11eca9b594e77b4b234867ebcb162b205@syncoid_curie_2022-05-30:13:23:58 (~ 218.6 MB) to new target filesystem:
 219MiB 0:00:01 [ 151MiB/s] [=======================================================================================================================>] 100%

Funny how the CRITICAL ERROR doesn't actually stop syncoid and it just carries on merrily doing when it's telling you it's "cowardly refusing to destroy your existing target"... Maybe that's because my pull request broke something though... During the transfer, the computer was very sluggish: everything feels like it has ~30-50ms latency extra:

anarcat@curie:sanoid$ LANG=C top -b  -n 1   head -20
top - 13:07:05 up 6 days,  4:01,  1 user,  load average: 16.13, 16.55, 11.83
Tasks: 606 total,   6 running, 598 sleeping,   0 stopped,   2 zombie
%Cpu(s): 18.8 us, 72.5 sy,  1.2 ni,  5.0 id,  1.2 wa,  0.0 hi,  1.2 si,  0.0 st
MiB Mem :  15898.4 total,   1387.6 free,  13170.0 used,   1340.8 buff/cache
MiB Swap:      0.0 total,      0.0 free,      0.0 used.   1319.8 avail Mem 
    PID USER      PR  NI    VIRT    RES    SHR S  %CPU  %MEM     TIME+ COMMAND
     70 root      20   0       0      0      0 S  83.3   0.0   6:12.67 kswapd0
4024878 root      20   0  282644  96432  10288 S  44.4   0.6   0:11.43 puppet
3896136 root      20   0   35328  16528     48 S  22.2   0.1   2:08.04 mbuffer
3896135 root      20   0   10328    776    168 R  16.7   0.0   1:22.93 zfs
3896138 root      20   0   10588    788    156 R  16.7   0.0   1:49.30 zfs
    350 root       0 -20       0      0      0 R  11.1   0.0   1:03.53 z_rd_int
    351 root       0 -20       0      0      0 S  11.1   0.0   1:04.15 z_rd_int
3896137 root      20   0    4384    352    244 R  11.1   0.0   0:44.73 pv
4034094 anarcat   30  10   20028  13960   2428 S  11.1   0.1   0:00.70 mbsync
4036539 anarcat   20   0    9604   3464   2408 R  11.1   0.0   0:00.04 top
    352 root       0 -20       0      0      0 S   5.6   0.0   1:03.64 z_rd_int
    353 root       0 -20       0      0      0 S   5.6   0.0   1:03.64 z_rd_int
    354 root       0 -20       0      0      0 S   5.6   0.0   1:04.01 z_rd_int

I wonder how much of that is due to syncoid, particularly because I often saw mbuffer and pv in there which are not strictly necessary to do those kind of operations, as far as I understand. Once that's done, export the pools to disconnect the drive:

zpool export bpool-tubman
zpool export rpool-tubman

Raw disk benchmark Copied the 512GB SSD/M.2 device to another 1024GB NVMe/M.2 device:

anarcat@curie:~$ sudo dd if=/dev/sdb of=/dev/sdc bs=4M status=progress conv=fdatasync
499944259584 octets (500 GB, 466 GiB) copi s, 1713 s, 292 MB/s
119235+1 enregistrements lus
119235+1 enregistrements  crits
500107862016 octets (500 GB, 466 GiB) copi s, 1719,93 s, 291 MB/s

... while both over USB, whoohoo 300MB/s!

Monitoring ZFS should be monitoring your pools regularly. Normally, the [[!debman zed]] daemon monitors all ZFS events. It is the thing that will report when a scrub failed, for example. See this configuration guide. Scrubs should be regularly scheduled to ensure consistency of the pool. This can be done in newer zfsutils-linux versions (bullseye-backports or bookworm) with one of those, depending on the desired frequency:

systemctl enable zfs-scrub-weekly@rpool.timer --now
systemctl enable zfs-scrub-monthly@rpool.timer --now

When the scrub runs, if it finds anything it will send an event which will get picked up by the zed daemon which will then send a notification, see below for an example. TODO: deploy on curie, if possible (probably not because no RAID) TODO: this should be in Puppet

Scrub warning example So what happens when problems are found? Here's an example of how I dealt with an error I received. After setting up another server (tubman) with ZFS, I eventually ended up getting a warning from the ZFS toolchain.

Date: Sun, 09 Oct 2022 00:58:08 -0400
From: root <root@anarc.at>
To: root@anarc.at
Subject: ZFS scrub_finish event for rpool on tubman
ZFS has finished a scrub:
   eid: 39536
 class: scrub_finish
  host: tubman
  time: 2022-10-09 00:58:07-0400
  pool: rpool
 state: ONLINE
status: One or more devices has experienced an unrecoverable error.  An
        attempt was made to correct the error.  Applications are unaffected.
action: Determine if the device needs to be replaced, and clear the errors
        using 'zpool clear' or replace the device with 'zpool replace'.
   see: https://openzfs.github.io/openzfs-docs/msg/ZFS-8000-9P
  scan: scrub repaired 0B in 00:33:57 with 0 errors on Sun Oct  9 00:58:07 2022
config:
        NAME        STATE     READ WRITE CKSUM
        rpool       ONLINE       0     0     0
          mirror-0  ONLINE       0     0     0
            sdb4    ONLINE       0     1     0
            sdc4    ONLINE       0     0     0
        cache
          sda3      ONLINE       0     0     0
errors: No known data errors

This, in itself, is a little worrisome. But it helpfully links to this more detailed documentation (and props up there: the link still works) which explains this is a "minor" problem (something that could be included in the report). In this case, this happened on a server setup on 2021-04-28, but the disks and server hardware are much older. The server itself (marcos v1) was built around 2011, over 10 years ago now. The hard drive in question is:

root@tubman:~# smartctl -i -qnoserial /dev/sdb
smartctl 7.2 2020-12-30 r5155 [x86_64-linux-5.10.0-15-amd64] (local build)
Copyright (C) 2002-20, Bruce Allen, Christian Franke, www.smartmontools.org
=== START OF INFORMATION SECTION ===
Model Family:     Seagate BarraCuda 3.5
Device Model:     ST4000DM004-2CV104
Firmware Version: 0001
User Capacity:    4,000,787,030,016 bytes [4.00 TB]
Sector Sizes:     512 bytes logical, 4096 bytes physical
Rotation Rate:    5425 rpm
Form Factor:      3.5 inches
Device is:        In smartctl database [for details use: -P show]
ATA Version is:   ACS-3 T13/2161-D revision 5
SATA Version is:  SATA 3.1, 6.0 Gb/s (current: 3.0 Gb/s)
Local Time is:    Tue Oct 11 11:02:32 2022 EDT
SMART support is: Available - device has SMART capability.
SMART support is: Enabled

Some more SMART stats:

root@tubman:~# smartctl -a -qnoserial /dev/sdb   grep -e  Head_Flying_Hours -e Power_On_Hours -e Total_LBA -e 'Sector Sizes'
Sector Sizes:     512 bytes logical, 4096 bytes physical
  9 Power_On_Hours          0x0032   086   086   000    Old_age   Always       -       12464 (206 202 0)
240 Head_Flying_Hours       0x0000   100   253   000    Old_age   Offline      -       10966h+55m+23.757s
241 Total_LBAs_Written      0x0000   100   253   000    Old_age   Offline      -       21107792664
242 Total_LBAs_Read         0x0000   100   253   000    Old_age   Offline      -       3201579750

That's over a year of power on, which shouldn't be so bad. It has written about 10TB of data (21107792664 LBAs * 512 byte/LBA), which is about two full writes. According to its specification, this device is supposed to support 55 TB/year of writes, so we're far below spec. Note that are still far from the "non-recoverable read error per bits" spec (1 per 10E15), as we've basically read 13E12 bits (3201579750 LBAs * 512 byte/LBA = 13E12 bits). It's likely this disk was made in 2018, so it is in its fourth year. Interestingly, /dev/sdc is also a Seagate drive, but of a different series:

root@tubman:~# smartctl -qnoserial  -i /dev/sdb
smartctl 7.2 2020-12-30 r5155 [x86_64-linux-5.10.0-15-amd64] (local build)
Copyright (C) 2002-20, Bruce Allen, Christian Franke, www.smartmontools.org
=== START OF INFORMATION SECTION ===
Model Family:     Seagate BarraCuda 3.5
Device Model:     ST4000DM004-2CV104
Firmware Version: 0001
User Capacity:    4,000,787,030,016 bytes [4.00 TB]
Sector Sizes:     512 bytes logical, 4096 bytes physical
Rotation Rate:    5425 rpm
Form Factor:      3.5 inches
Device is:        In smartctl database [for details use: -P show]
ATA Version is:   ACS-3 T13/2161-D revision 5
SATA Version is:  SATA 3.1, 6.0 Gb/s (current: 3.0 Gb/s)
Local Time is:    Tue Oct 11 11:21:35 2022 EDT
SMART support is: Available - device has SMART capability.
SMART support is: Enabled

It has seen much more reads than the other disk which is also interesting:

root@tubman:~# smartctl -a -qnoserial /dev/sdc   grep -e  Head_Flying_Hours -e Power_On_Hours -e Total_LBA -e 'Sector Sizes'
Sector Sizes:     512 bytes logical, 4096 bytes physical
  9 Power_On_Hours          0x0032   059   059   000    Old_age   Always       -       36240
240 Head_Flying_Hours       0x0000   100   253   000    Old_age   Offline      -       33994h+10m+52.118s
241 Total_LBAs_Written      0x0000   100   253   000    Old_age   Offline      -       30730174438
242 Total_LBAs_Read         0x0000   100   253   000    Old_age   Offline      -       51894566538

That's 4 years of Head_Flying_Hours, and over 4 years (4 years and 48 days) of Power_On_Hours. The copyright date on that drive's specs goes back to 2016, so it's a much older drive. SMART self-test succeeded.

Remaining issues

TODO: move send/receive backups to offsite host, see also zfs for alternatives to syncoid/sanoid there

TODO: setup backup cron job (or timer?)

TODO: swap still not setup on curie, see zfs

TODO: document this somewhere: bpool and rpool are both pools and datasets. that's pretty confusing, but also very useful because it allows for pool-wide recursive snapshots, which are used for the backup system

fio improvements I really want to improve my experience with fio. Right now, I'm just cargo-culting stuff from other folks and I don't really like it. stressant is a good example of my struggles, in the sense that it doesn't really work that well for disk tests. I would love to have just a single .fio job file that lists multiple jobs to run serially. For example, this file describes the above workload pretty well:

[global]
# cargo-culting Salter
fallocate=none
ioengine=posixaio
runtime=60
time_based=1
end_fsync=1
stonewall=1
group_reporting=1
# no need to drop caches, done by default
# invalidate=1
# Single 4KiB random read/write process
[randread-4k-4g-1x]
rw=randread
bs=4k
size=4g
numjobs=1
iodepth=1
[randwrite-4k-4g-1x]
rw=randwrite
bs=4k
size=4g
numjobs=1
iodepth=1
# 16 parallel 64KiB random read/write processes:
[randread-64k-256m-16x]
rw=randread
bs=64k
size=256m
numjobs=16
iodepth=16
[randwrite-64k-256m-16x]
rw=randwrite
bs=64k
size=256m
numjobs=16
iodepth=16
# Single 1MiB random read/write process
[randread-1m-16g-1x]
rw=randread
bs=1m
size=16g
numjobs=1
iodepth=1
[randwrite-1m-16g-1x]
rw=randwrite
bs=1m
size=16g
numjobs=1
iodepth=1

... except the jobs are actually started in parallel, even though they are stonewall'd, as far as I can tell by the reports. I sent a mail to the fio mailing list for clarification. It looks like the jobs are started in parallel, but actual (correctly) run serially. It seems like this might just be a matter of reporting the right timestamps in the end, although it does feel like starting all the processes (even if not doing any work yet) could skew the results.

Hangs during procedure During the procedure, it happened a few times where any ZFS command would completely hang. It seems that using an external USB drive to sync stuff didn't work so well: sometimes it would reconnect under a different device (from sdc to sdd, for example), and this would greatly confuse ZFS. Here, for example, is sdd reappearing out of the blue:

May 19 11:22:53 curie kernel: [  699.820301] scsi host4: uas
May 19 11:22:53 curie kernel: [  699.820544] usb 2-1: authorized to connect
May 19 11:22:53 curie kernel: [  699.922433] scsi 4:0:0:0: Direct-Access     ROG      ESD-S1C          0    PQ: 0 ANSI: 6
May 19 11:22:53 curie kernel: [  699.923235] sd 4:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg2 type 0
May 19 11:22:53 curie kernel: [  699.923676] sd 4:0:0:0: [sdd] 1953525168 512-byte logical blocks: (1.00 TB/932 GiB)
May 19 11:22:53 curie kernel: [  699.923788] sd 4:0:0:0: [sdd] Write Protect is off
May 19 11:22:53 curie kernel: [  699.923949] sd 4:0:0:0: [sdd] Write cache: enabled, read cache: enabled, doesn't support DPO or FUA
May 19 11:22:53 curie kernel: [  699.924149] sd 4:0:0:0: [sdd] Optimal transfer size 33553920 bytes
May 19 11:22:53 curie kernel: [  699.961602]  sdd: sdd1 sdd2 sdd3 sdd4
May 19 11:22:53 curie kernel: [  699.996083] sd 4:0:0:0: [sdd] Attached SCSI disk

Next time I run a ZFS command (say zpool list), the command completely hangs (D state) and this comes up in the logs:

May 19 11:34:21 curie kernel: [ 1387.914843] zio pool=bpool vdev=/dev/sdc3 error=5 type=2 offset=71344128 size=4096 flags=184880
May 19 11:34:21 curie kernel: [ 1387.914859] zio pool=bpool vdev=/dev/sdc3 error=5 type=2 offset=205565952 size=4096 flags=184880
May 19 11:34:21 curie kernel: [ 1387.914874] zio pool=bpool vdev=/dev/sdc3 error=5 type=2 offset=272789504 size=4096 flags=184880
May 19 11:34:21 curie kernel: [ 1387.914906] zio pool=bpool vdev=/dev/sdc3 error=5 type=1 offset=270336 size=8192 flags=b08c1
May 19 11:34:21 curie kernel: [ 1387.914932] zio pool=bpool vdev=/dev/sdc3 error=5 type=1 offset=1073225728 size=8192 flags=b08c1
May 19 11:34:21 curie kernel: [ 1387.914948] zio pool=bpool vdev=/dev/sdc3 error=5 type=1 offset=1073487872 size=8192 flags=b08c1
May 19 11:34:21 curie kernel: [ 1387.915165] zio pool=bpool vdev=/dev/sdc3 error=5 type=2 offset=272793600 size=4096 flags=184880
May 19 11:34:21 curie kernel: [ 1387.915183] zio pool=bpool vdev=/dev/sdc3 error=5 type=2 offset=339853312 size=4096 flags=184880
May 19 11:34:21 curie kernel: [ 1387.915648] WARNING: Pool 'bpool' has encountered an uncorrectable I/O failure and has been suspended.
May 19 11:34:21 curie kernel: [ 1387.915648] 
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.558614] task:txg_sync        state:D stack:    0 pid:  997 ppid:     2 flags:0x00004000
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.558623] Call Trace:
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.558640]  __schedule+0x282/0x870
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.558650]  schedule+0x46/0xb0
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.558670]  schedule_timeout+0x8b/0x140
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.558675]  ? __next_timer_interrupt+0x110/0x110
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.558678]  io_schedule_timeout+0x4c/0x80
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.558689]  __cv_timedwait_common+0x12b/0x160 [spl]
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.558694]  ? add_wait_queue_exclusive+0x70/0x70
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.558702]  __cv_timedwait_io+0x15/0x20 [spl]
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.558816]  zio_wait+0x129/0x2b0 [zfs]
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.558929]  dsl_pool_sync+0x461/0x4f0 [zfs]
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.559032]  spa_sync+0x575/0xfa0 [zfs]
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.559138]  ? spa_txg_history_init_io+0x101/0x110 [zfs]
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.559245]  txg_sync_thread+0x2e0/0x4a0 [zfs]
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.559354]  ? txg_fini+0x240/0x240 [zfs]
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.559366]  thread_generic_wrapper+0x6f/0x80 [spl]
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.559376]  ? __thread_exit+0x20/0x20 [spl]
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.559379]  kthread+0x11b/0x140
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.559382]  ? __kthread_bind_mask+0x60/0x60
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.559386]  ret_from_fork+0x22/0x30
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.559401] task:zed             state:D stack:    0 pid: 1564 ppid:     1 flags:0x00000000
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.559404] Call Trace:
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.559409]  __schedule+0x282/0x870
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.559412]  ? __kmalloc_node+0x141/0x2b0
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.559417]  schedule+0x46/0xb0
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.559420]  schedule_preempt_disabled+0xa/0x10
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.559424]  __mutex_lock.constprop.0+0x133/0x460
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.559435]  ? nvlist_xalloc.part.0+0x68/0xc0 [znvpair]
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.559537]  spa_all_configs+0x41/0x120 [zfs]
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.559644]  zfs_ioc_pool_configs+0x17/0x70 [zfs]
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.559752]  zfsdev_ioctl_common+0x697/0x870 [zfs]
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.559758]  ? _copy_from_user+0x28/0x60
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.559860]  zfsdev_ioctl+0x53/0xe0 [zfs]
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.559866]  __x64_sys_ioctl+0x83/0xb0
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.559869]  do_syscall_64+0x33/0x80
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.559873]  entry_SYSCALL_64_after_hwframe+0x44/0xa9
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.559876] RIP: 0033:0x7fcf0ef32cc7
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.559878] RSP: 002b:00007fcf0e181618 EFLAGS: 00000246 ORIG_RAX: 0000000000000010
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.559881] RAX: ffffffffffffffda RBX: 000055b212f972a0 RCX: 00007fcf0ef32cc7
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.559883] RDX: 00007fcf0e181640 RSI: 0000000000005a04 RDI: 000000000000000b
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.559885] RBP: 00007fcf0e184c30 R08: 00007fcf08016810 R09: 00007fcf08000080
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.559886] R10: 0000000000080000 R11: 0000000000000246 R12: 000055b212f972a0
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.559888] R13: 0000000000000000 R14: 00007fcf0e181640 R15: 0000000000000000
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.559980] task:zpool           state:D stack:    0 pid:11815 ppid:  3816 flags:0x00004000
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.559983] Call Trace:
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.559988]  __schedule+0x282/0x870
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.559992]  schedule+0x46/0xb0
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.559995]  io_schedule+0x42/0x70
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.560004]  cv_wait_common+0xac/0x130 [spl]
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.560008]  ? add_wait_queue_exclusive+0x70/0x70
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.560118]  txg_wait_synced_impl+0xc9/0x110 [zfs]
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.560223]  txg_wait_synced+0xc/0x40 [zfs]
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.560325]  spa_export_common+0x4cd/0x590 [zfs]
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.560430]  ? zfs_log_history+0x9c/0xf0 [zfs]
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.560537]  zfsdev_ioctl_common+0x697/0x870 [zfs]
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.560543]  ? _copy_from_user+0x28/0x60
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.560644]  zfsdev_ioctl+0x53/0xe0 [zfs]
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.560649]  __x64_sys_ioctl+0x83/0xb0
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.560653]  do_syscall_64+0x33/0x80
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.560656]  entry_SYSCALL_64_after_hwframe+0x44/0xa9
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.560659] RIP: 0033:0x7fdc23be2cc7
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.560661] RSP: 002b:00007ffc8c792478 EFLAGS: 00000246 ORIG_RAX: 0000000000000010
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.560664] RAX: ffffffffffffffda RBX: 000055942ca49e20 RCX: 00007fdc23be2cc7
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.560666] RDX: 00007ffc8c792490 RSI: 0000000000005a03 RDI: 0000000000000003
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.560667] RBP: 00007ffc8c795e80 R08: 00000000ffffffff R09: 00007ffc8c792310
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.560669] R10: 000055942ca49e30 R11: 0000000000000246 R12: 00007ffc8c792490
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.560671] R13: 000055942ca49e30 R14: 000055942aed2c20 R15: 00007ffc8c795a40

Here's another example, where you see the USB controller bleeping out and back into existence:

mai 19 11:38:39 curie kernel: usb 2-1: USB disconnect, device number 2
mai 19 11:38:39 curie kernel: sd 4:0:0:0: [sdd] Synchronizing SCSI cache
mai 19 11:38:39 curie kernel: sd 4:0:0:0: [sdd] Synchronize Cache(10) failed: Result: hostbyte=DID_ERROR driverbyte=DRIVER_OK
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel: INFO: task zed:1564 blocked for more than 241 seconds.
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel:       Tainted: P          IOE     5.10.0-14-amd64 #1 Debian 5.10.113-1
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel: "echo 0 > /proc/sys/kernel/hung_task_timeout_secs" disables this message.
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel: task:zed             state:D stack:    0 pid: 1564 ppid:     1 flags:0x00000000
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel: Call Trace:
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel:  __schedule+0x282/0x870
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel:  ? __kmalloc_node+0x141/0x2b0
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel:  schedule+0x46/0xb0
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel:  schedule_preempt_disabled+0xa/0x10
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel:  __mutex_lock.constprop.0+0x133/0x460
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel:  ? nvlist_xalloc.part.0+0x68/0xc0 [znvpair]
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel:  spa_all_configs+0x41/0x120 [zfs]
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel:  zfs_ioc_pool_configs+0x17/0x70 [zfs]
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel:  zfsdev_ioctl_common+0x697/0x870 [zfs]
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel:  ? _copy_from_user+0x28/0x60
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel:  zfsdev_ioctl+0x53/0xe0 [zfs]
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel:  __x64_sys_ioctl+0x83/0xb0
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel:  do_syscall_64+0x33/0x80
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel:  entry_SYSCALL_64_after_hwframe+0x44/0xa9
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel: RIP: 0033:0x7fcf0ef32cc7
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel: RSP: 002b:00007fcf0e181618 EFLAGS: 00000246 ORIG_RAX: 0000000000000010
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel: RAX: ffffffffffffffda RBX: 000055b212f972a0 RCX: 00007fcf0ef32cc7
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel: RDX: 00007fcf0e181640 RSI: 0000000000005a04 RDI: 000000000000000b
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel: RBP: 00007fcf0e184c30 R08: 00007fcf08016810 R09: 00007fcf08000080
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel: R10: 0000000000080000 R11: 0000000000000246 R12: 000055b212f972a0
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel: R13: 0000000000000000 R14: 00007fcf0e181640 R15: 0000000000000000
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel: INFO: task zpool:11815 blocked for more than 241 seconds.
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel:       Tainted: P          IOE     5.10.0-14-amd64 #1 Debian 5.10.113-1
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel: "echo 0 > /proc/sys/kernel/hung_task_timeout_secs" disables this message.
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel: task:zpool           state:D stack:    0 pid:11815 ppid:  2621 flags:0x00004004
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel: Call Trace:
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel:  __schedule+0x282/0x870
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel:  schedule+0x46/0xb0
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel:  io_schedule+0x42/0x70
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel:  cv_wait_common+0xac/0x130 [spl]
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel:  ? add_wait_queue_exclusive+0x70/0x70
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel:  txg_wait_synced_impl+0xc9/0x110 [zfs]
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel:  txg_wait_synced+0xc/0x40 [zfs]
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel:  spa_export_common+0x4cd/0x590 [zfs]
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel:  ? zfs_log_history+0x9c/0xf0 [zfs]
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel:  zfsdev_ioctl_common+0x697/0x870 [zfs]
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel:  ? _copy_from_user+0x28/0x60
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel:  zfsdev_ioctl+0x53/0xe0 [zfs]
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel:  __x64_sys_ioctl+0x83/0xb0
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel:  do_syscall_64+0x33/0x80
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel:  entry_SYSCALL_64_after_hwframe+0x44/0xa9
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel: RIP: 0033:0x7fdc23be2cc7
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel: RSP: 002b:00007ffc8c792478 EFLAGS: 00000246 ORIG_RAX: 0000000000000010
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel: RAX: ffffffffffffffda RBX: 000055942ca49e20 RCX: 00007fdc23be2cc7
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel: RDX: 00007ffc8c792490 RSI: 0000000000005a03 RDI: 0000000000000003
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel: RBP: 00007ffc8c795e80 R08: 00000000ffffffff R09: 00007ffc8c792310
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel: R10: 000055942ca49e30 R11: 0000000000000246 R12: 00007ffc8c792490
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel: R13: 000055942ca49e30 R14: 000055942aed2c20 R15: 00007ffc8c795a40

I understand those are rather extreme conditions: I would fully expect the pool to stop working if the underlying drives disappear. What doesn't seem acceptable is that a command would completely hang like this.

References See the zfs documentation for more information about ZFS, and tubman for another installation and migration procedure.

The Debian Videoteam has been sprinting in Cape Town, South Africa -- mostly because with Stefano here for a few months, four of us (Jonathan, Kyle, Stefano, and myself) actually are in the country on a regular basis. In addition to that, two more members of the team (Nicolas and Louis-Philippe) are joining the sprint remotely (from Paris and Montreal).

(Kyle and Stefano working on things, with me behind the camera and Jonathan busy elsewhere.) We've made loads of progress! Some highlights:

We did a lot of triaging of outstanding bugs and merge requests against our ansible repository. Stale issues were closed, merge requests have been merged (or closed when they weren't relevant anymore), and new issues that we found while working on them were fixed. We also improved our test coverage for some of our ansible roles, and modernized as well as improved the way our documentation is built. (Louis-Philippe, Stefano, Kyle, Wouter, Nicolas)
Some work was done on SReview, our video review and transcode tool: I fixed up the metadata export code and did some other backend work, while Stefano worked a bit on the frontend, bringing it up to date to use bootstrap 4, and adding client-side filtering using vue. Future work on this will allow editing various things from the webinterface -- currently that requires issuing SQL commands directly. (Wouter and Stefano)
Jonathan explored new features in OBS. We've been using OBS for our "loopy" setup since DebConf20, which is used for the slightly more interactive sponsor loop that is shown in between talks. The result is that we'll be able to simplify and improve that setup in future (mini)DebConf instances. (Jonathan)
Kyle had a look at options for capturing hardware. We currently use Opsis boards, but they are not an ideal solution, and we are exploring alternatives. (Kyle)
Some package uploads happened! libmedia-convert-perl will now (hopefully) migrate to testing; and if all goes well, a new version of SReview will be available in unstable soon.

The sprint isn't over yet (we're continuing until Sunday), but loads of things have already happened. Stay tuned!

Welcome to the Reproducible Builds report for October 2022! In these reports we attempt to outline the most important things that we have been up to over the past month. As ever, if you are interested in contributing to the project, please visit our Contribute page on our website.

Our in-person summit this year was held in the past few days in Venice, Italy. Activity and news from the summit will therefore be covered in next month s report!

A new article related to reproducible builds was recently published in the 2023 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy. Titled Taxonomy of Attacks on Open-Source Software Supply Chains and authored by Piergiorgio Ladisa, Henrik Plate, Matias Martinez and Olivier Barais, their paper:

[ ] proposes a general taxonomy for attacks on opensource supply chains, independent of specific programming languages or ecosystems, and covering all supply chain stages from code contributions to package distribution.

Taking the form of an attack tree, the paper covers 107 unique vectors linked to 94 real world supply-chain incidents which is then mapped to 33 mitigating safeguards including, of course, reproducible builds:

Reproducible Builds received a very high utility rating (5) from 10 participants (58.8%), but also a high-cost rating (4 or 5) from 12 (70.6%). One expert commented that a reproducible build like used by Solarwinds now, is a good measure against tampering with a single build system and another claimed this is going to be the single, biggest barrier .

It was noticed this month that Solarwinds published a whitepaper back in December 2021 in order to:

[ ] illustrate a concerning new reality for the software industry and illuminates the increasingly sophisticated threats made by outside nation-states to the supply chains and infrastructure on which we all rely.

The 12-month anniversary of the 2020 Solarwinds attack (which SolarWinds Worldwide LLC itself calls the SUNBURST attack) was, of course, the likely impetus for publication.

Whilst collaborating on making the Cyrus IMAP server reproducible, Ellie Timoney asked why the Reproducible Builds testing framework uses two remarkably distinctive build paths when attempting to flush out builds that vary on the absolute system path in which they were built. In the case of the Cyrus IMAP server, these happened to be:

/build/1st/cyrus-imapd-3.6.0~beta3/
/build/2/cyrus-imapd-3.6.0~beta3/2nd/

Asked why they vary in three different ways, Chris Lamb listed in detail the motivation behind to each difference.

On our mailing list this month:

Daniel Garcia from WalletScrutiny.com started a thread asking for input on buttons with the Reproducible Builds logo, requesting design suggestions or other feedback. [ ]
Arch Linux contributor kpcyrd wrote to our list this month with the news that multiple people in Arch Linux noticed the output of our git archive command doesn t match the tarball served by GitHub anymore. In his post, kpcyrd narrows the change to a specific commit in Git. [ ]
Akihiro Suda wrote to a share a new tool called repro-get. According to Akihiro s post, repro-get is a tool to install a specific snapshot of apt/dnf/apk/pacman packages using SHA256SUMS files . This is needed in order to install specific (or pinned ) dependencies needed to validate a build.
Finally, Janneke Nieuwenhuizen announced the release of GNU Mes 0.24.1, which represents 23 commits over five months by four people. GNU Mes is a Scheme interpreter and C compiler for bootstrapping the GNU System. [ ]

The Reproducible Builds project is delighted to welcome openEuler to the Involved projects page [ ]. openEuler is Linux distribution developed by Huawei, a counterpart to it s more commercially-oriented EulerOS.

Debian Colin Watson wrote about his experience towards making the databases generated by the `man-db` UNIX manual page indexing tool:
One of the people working on [reproducible builds] noticed that man-db s database files were an obstacle to [reproducibility]: in particular, the exact contents of the database seemed to depend on the order in which files were scanned when building it. The reporter proposed solving this by processing files in sorted order, but I wasn t keen on that approach: firstly because it would mean we could no longer process files in an order that makes it more efficient to read them all from disk (still valuable on rotational disks), but mostly because the differences seemed to point to other bugs.
Colin goes on to describe his approach to solving the problem, including fixing various fits of internal caching, and he ends his post with None of this is particularly glamorous work, but it paid off .
Vagrant Cascadian announced on our mailing list another online sprint to help clear the huge backlog of reproducible builds patches submitted by performing NMUs (Non-Maintainer Uploads). The first such sprint took place on September 22nd, but another was held on October 6th, and another small one on October 20th. This resulted in the following progress:

Chris Lamb:

`ascii2binary` (Fixed #1020812, #998758 & #1007421)

`bibclean` (Fixed #829754 & #929036)

`dradio` (Fixed #1020814)

`leave` (Fixed #777403, #967002 & #999259)

`libimage-imlib2-perl` (Fixed #1020665)

`mailto` (Fixed #998978 & #777413)

`remote-tty` (Fixed #829721 & #977280)

`xcolmix` (Fixed #1020748, #999219 & #988018)

`z80asm` (Fixed #939775 & #1020875)

Holger Levsen:

`libtheora` (Fixed #990843 & #990844)

`sgml-base` (Fixed #1006646 & #929706)

Vagrant Cascadian:

`ario` (Investigated #828876)

`cloop` (Fixed #787996)

`elvis-tiny` (Fixed #829755 & #901345)

`hannah` (Fixed #845782 & #901260)

`mc` (Investigated #828683)

`mod-dnssd` (Submitted alternate fix for #828752)

`snake4` (Fixed #829715 & #913734)

`the` (Fixed #842550)

`zephyr` (Investigated #828867 & #1021374)

`msp430mcu` (Fixed #860275)

`checkpw` (Fixed #777299 & #1020887)

`madlib` (Fixed #778946)

41 reviews of Debian packages were added, 62 were updated and 12 were removed this month adding to our knowledge about identified issues. A number of issue types were updated too. [1][ ]
Lastly, Luca Boccassi submitted a patch to `debhelper`, a set of tools used in the packaging of the majority of Debian packages. The patch addressed an issue in the `dh_installsysusers` utility so that the `postinst` post-installation script that `debhelper` generates the same data regardless of the underlying filesystem ordering.

Other distributions F-Droid is a community-run app store that provides free software applications for Android phones. This month, F-Droid changed their documentation and guidance to now explicitly encourage RB for new apps [ ][ ], and FC Stegerman created an extremely in-depth issue on GitLab concerning the APK signing block. You can read more about F-Droid s approach to reproducibility in our July 2022 interview with Hans-Christoph Steiner of the F-Droid Project. In openSUSE, Bernhard M. Wiedemann published his usual openSUSE monthly report.

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 such patches, including:

Bernhard M. Wiedemann:

`asymptote` (date-related issue)

`fastjet-contrib` (sort nondeterminstic filesystem ordering)

`forge` (Sphinx doctree issue)

`gau2grid` (output varies with `march=native`)

`gosec` (date-related issue)

`helmfile` (date-related issue)

`libnvme` (date-related issue)

`moab` (CPU)

`tcl` (fails to build in 2038)

`vectorscan` (output varies with `march=native`)

`xz2/lzma` (Rust-related filesystem ordering)

Chris Lamb:

#891263 filed against `puppet` back in early 2018 was finally merged into Puppet and was released in Puppet 7.20.0.

#1021198 filed against `puppet-agent`.

#1022777 filed against `tpm2-pytss` (forwarded upstream).

Vagrant Cascadian:

#1021331 filed against `cclive`.

#1021373 filed against `librep`.

#1021374 filed against `zephyr`.

#1021452 filed against `libdv`.

#1021454 filed against `dbview`.

#1021456 filed against `bwbasic`.

#1021457 filed against `olpc-powerd`.

#1021458 filed against `o3dgc`.

#1021461 filed against `icon`.

#1021463 filed against `rdist`.

#1021464 filed against `stfl`.

#1021466 filed against `pacman`.

#1021469 filed against `lam`.

#1021470 filed against `xsok`.

#1021471 filed against `python-djvulibre`.

#1021472 filed against `xzoom`.

#1021473 filed against `nitpic`.

#1021498 filed against `tcm`.

#1021509 filed against `xxkb`.

#1021512 filed against `yersinia`.

#1021513 filed against `centrifuge`.

#1021514 and #1021516 filed against `ssocr`.

#1021518 filed against `jakarta-jmeter`.

#1021520 filed against `guymager`.

#1021521 and #1021522 filed against `crack`.

#1021751 filed against `dc3dd`.

#1021789 filed against `dlt-viewer`.

#1021792 and #1021793 filed against `vart`.

#1021799 and #1021800 filed against `pgrouting`.

#1021860 filed against `libsx`.

#1021893 filed against `device-tree-compiler`.

#1022130 filed against `tsdecrypt`.

John Neffenger:

`openjdk` (Fixed JDK-8292892)

diffoscope diffoscope is our in-depth and content-aware diff utility. Not only can it locate and diagnose reproducibility issues, it can provide human-readable diffs from many kinds of binary formats. This month, Chris Lamb prepared and uploaded versions `224` and `225` to Debian:

Add support for comparing the text content of HTML files using `html2text`. [ ]

Add support for detecting ordering-only differences in XML files. [ ]

Fix an issue with detecting ordering differences. [ ]

Use the capitalised version of Ordering consistently everywhere in output. [ ]

Add support for displaying font metadata using `ttx(1)` from the fonttools suite. [ ]

Testsuite improvements:

Temporarily allow the `stable-po` pipeline to fail in the CI. [ ]

Rename the `order1.diff` test fixture to `json_expected_ordering_diff`. [ ]

Tidy the JSON tests. [ ]

Use `assert_diff` over `get_data` and an manual assert within the XML tests. [ ]

Drop the `ALLOWED_TEST_FILES` test; it was mostly just annoying. [ ]

Tidy the `tests/test_source.py` file. [ ]

Chris Lamb also added a link to diffoscope s OpenBSD packaging on the diffoscope.org homepage [ ] and Mattia Rizzolo fix an test failure that was occurring under with LLVM 15 [ ].

Testing framework The Reproducible Builds project operates a comprehensive testing framework at tests.reproducible-builds.org in order to check packages and other artifacts for reproducibility. In October, the following changes were made by Holger Levsen:

Run the `logparse` tool to analyse results on the Debian Edu build logs. [ ]

Install `btop(1)` on all nodes running Debian. [ ]

Switch Arch Linux from using SHA1 to SHA256. [ ]

When checking Debian `debstrap` jobs, correctly log the tool usage. [ ]

Cleanup more task-related temporary directory names when testing Debian packages. [ ][ ]

Use the `cdebootstrap-static` binary for the 2nd runs of the `cdebootstrap` tests. [ ]

Drop a workaround when testing OpenWrt and coreboot as the issue in diffoscope has now been fixed. [ ]

Turn on an `rm(1)` warning into an info -level message. [ ]

Special case the `osuosl168` node for running Debian bookworm already. [ ][ ]

Use the new `non-free-firmware` suite on the `o168` node. [ ]

In addition, Mattia Rizzolo made the following changes:

Ensure that 2nd build has a merged `/usr`. [ ]

Only reconfigure the `usrmerge` package on Debian bookworm and above. [ ]

Fix `bc(1)` syntax in the computation of the percentage of unreproducible packages in the dashboard. [ ][ ][ ]

In the `index_suite_` pages, order the package status to be the same order of the menu. [ ]

Pass the `--distribution` parameter to the `pbuilder` utility. [ ]

Finally, Roland Clobus continued his work on testing Live Debian images. In particular, he extended the maintenance script to warn when workspace directories cannot be deleted. [ ]
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:

IRC: `#reproducible-builds` on `irc.oftc.net`.

Twitter: @ReproBuilds

Mailing list: `rb-general@lists.reproducible-builds.org`

The Road to Gandolfo I think I had read this book almost 10-12 years back and somehow ended up reading it up again. Apparently, he had put this fiction, story, book under some other pen name earlier. It is possible that I might have read it under that name and hence forgotten all about it. This book/story is full of innuendo, irony, sarcasm and basically the thrill of life. There are two main characters in the book, the first is General Mackenzie who has spent almost 3 to 4 decades being a spy/a counterintelligence expert in the Queen s service. And while he outclasses them all even at the ripe age of 50, he is thrown out under the pretext of conduct unbecoming of an officer. The other main character is Sam Devereaux. This gentleman is an army lawyer and is basically counting the days when he completes his tour of duty as a military lawyer and start his corporate civil law with somebody he knows. It is much to his dismay that while under a week is left for his tour of duty to be left over he is summoned to try and extradite General MacKenzie who has been put on house arrest. Apparently, in China there was a sculpture of a great Chinese gentleman in the nude. For reasons unknown or rather not being shared herein, he basically breaks part of the sculpture. This of course, enrages the Chinese and they call it a diplomatic accident and try to put the General into house arrest. Unfortunately for both the General and his captors, he decides to escape/go for it. While he does succeed entering the American embassy, he finds himself to be person non-grata and is thrown back outside where the Chinese recapture him. This is where the Embassy & the Govt. decide it would be better if somehow the General could be removed from China permanently so he doesn t cause any further diplomatic accidents. In order to do that Sam s services are bought. Now in order to understand the General, Sam learns that he has 4 ex-wives. He promptly goes and meet them to understand why the general behaved as he did. He apparently also peed on the American flag. To his surprise, all the four ex-wives are still very much in with the general. During the course of interviewing the ladies he is seduced by them and also gives names to their chests in order to differentiate between each one of them. Later he is seduced by the eldest of the four wives and they spend the evening together. Next day Sam meets and is promptly manhandled by the general and the diplomatic papers are seen by the general. After meeting the general and the Chinese counterpart, they quickly agree to extradite him as they do not know how to keep the general control. During his stay of house arrest, the General reads one of the communist rags as he puts it and gets the idea to kidnap the pope and that forms the basis of the story. Castel Gandolfo seems to be a real place which is in Italy and is apparently is the papal residence where s/he goes to reside every winter. The book is written in 1976 hence in the book, the General decides to form a corporation for which he would raise funds in order to make the kidnapping. The amount in 1976 was 40 million dollars and it was a big sum, to be with times, let s think of say 40 billion dollars so gets the scale of things. Now while a part of me wants to tell the rest of the story, the story isn t really mine to tell. Read The Road to Gandolfo for the rest. While I can t guarantee you much, I can say you might find yourself constantly amused by the antics of both the General, Sam and the General s ex-wives. There are also a few minute characters that you will meet on the way, hope you discover them and enjoy it immensely as I have. One thing I have to say, while I was reading it, I very much got vibes of Not a penny more, not a penny less by Jeffrey Archer. As shared before, lots of twists and turns, enjoy the ride

Webforms Webforms are nothing but a form you fill on the web or www. Webforms are and were a thing from early 90s to today. I was supposed to register for https://www.swavlambancard.gov.in/ almost a month back but procrastinated till few couple of days back and with good reason. I was hoping one of my good friends would help me but they had their own thing. So finally, I tried to fill the form few days back. It took me almost 30 odd attempts to finally fill the form and was given an enrollment number. Why it took me 30 odd attempts and with what should tell you the reason

I felt like I was filling the form from 1990 s rather than today because

The form doesn t know either its state or saves data during a session This lesson has been learned a long time back by almost all service providers except Govt. of India. Both the browsers on a mobile as well as desktop can save data during session. If you don t know what I mean by that go to about:preferences#privacy in Firefox and look at Manage Data. There you will find most sites do put some data along with cookies arguably to help make your web experience better. Chrome or Chromium has the same thing perhaps shared under a different name but its the same thing. But that is not all.

None of the fields have any verification. The form is of 3 pages. The verification at the end of the document doesn t tell you what is wrong and what needs to be corrected. Really think on this, I am on a 24 LED monitor and I m filling the form and I had to do it at least 20-30 times before it was accepted. And guess what, I have no clue even about why it was selected. The same data, the same everything and after the nth time it accepted. Now if I am facing such a problem when I have some idea how technology works somewhat how are people who are trying to fill this form on 6 mobiles supposed to do? And many of them not at all clued in technology as I am.

I could go on outlining many of the issues that I faced but they are all similar in many ways the problems faced while filling the NEW Income Tax forms. Of course the New Income Tax portal is a whole ball-game in itself as it gives new errors every time instead of solving them. Most C.A. s have turned to third-party xml tools that enable you to upload xml compliant data to the New Income tax portal but this is for businesses and those who can afford it. Again, even that is in a sort of messy state but that is a whole another tale altogether. One of the reasons to my mind why the forms are designed the way they are so that people go to specific cybercafes or get individual people to fill and upload it and make more money. I was told to go to a specific cybercafe and meet a certain individual and he asked for INR 500/- to do the work. While I don t have financial problems, I was more worried about my data going into the wrong hands. But I can see a very steady way to make money without doing much hard work.

Hearing Loss info. Now because I had been both to Kamla Nehru Hospital as well as Sasoon and especially the deaf department, I saw many kids with half-formed ears. I had asked the doctors and they had shared this is due to malnutrition. We do know that women during pregnancies need more calories, more everything as they are eating for two bodies, not one. And this is large-scale, apparently more than 5 percent of population have children like this. And this number was of 2014, what is it today nobody knows. I also came to know that at least for some people like me, due to Covid they became deaf. I had asked the doctors if they knew of people who had become deaf due to Covid. They basically replied in the negative as they don t have the resources to monitor the same. The Govt. has an idea of health ID but just like Aadhar has to many serious sinister implications. Somebody had shared with me a long time back that in India systems work inspite of Govt. machinery rather than because of it. Meaning that the Government itself ties itself into several knots and then people have to be creative to try and figure a way out to help people. I found another issue while dealing with them. Apparently, even though I have 60% hearing loss I would be given a certificate of 40% hearing loss and they call it Temporary Progressive Loss. I saw almost all the people who had come, many of them having far severe defencies than me getting the same/similar certificate. All of them got Temporary Progressive. Some of the cases were real puzzling. For e.g. I met another Agarwal who had a severe accident few months ago and there is some kind of paralysis & bone issue. The doctors have given up but even that gentleman was given Temporary Progressive. From what little I could understand, the idea is that over period if there is possibility of things becoming better then it should be given. Another gentleman suffered a case of dwarfism. Even he was given the same certificate. Think there have been orders from above so that people even having difficulties are not helped. Another point if you look in a macro sense, it presents a somewhat rosy picture. If someone were to debunk the Govt. data either from India or abroad then from GOI perspective they have an agenda even though the people who are suffering are our brothers and sisters And all of this is because I can read, write, articulate. Perhaps many of them may not even have a voice or a platform. Even to get this temporary progressive disability certificate there is more than 4 months of running from one place to the other, 4 months of culmination of work. This I can share and tell from my experience, who knows how much else others might have suffered for the same. In my case a review will happen after 5 years, in most other cases they have given only 1 year. Of course, this does justify people s jobs and perhaps partly it may be due to that. Such are times where I really miss that I am unable to hear otherwise could have fleshed out lot more other people s sufferings. And just so people know/understand this is happening in the heart of the city whose population easily exceeds 6 million plus and is supposed to be a progressive city. I do appreciate and understand the difficulties that the doctors are placed under.

Mum s Birthday & Social Engineering. While I don t want to get into details, in the last couple of weeks mum s birthday was there and that had totally escaped me. I have been trying to disassociate myself from her and at times it s hard and then you don t remember and somebody makes you remember. So, on one hand guilty, and the other do not know what to do. If she were alive I would have bought a piece of cake or something. Didn t feel like it, hence donated some money to the local aged home. This way at least I hope they have some semblance of peace. All of them are of her similar age group. The other thing that I began to observe in the earnest, fake identities have become the norm. Many people took elon musk s potrait using their own names in the handles, but even then Elon Free Speech Musk banned them. So much for free speech. Then I saw quite a few handles that have cute women as their profile picture but they are good at social engineering. This has started only a couple of weeks back and have seen quite a few handles leaving Twitter and joining Mastodon. Also, have been hearing that many admins of Mastodon pods are unable to get on top of this. Also, lot of people complaining as it isn t user-friendly UI as twitter is. Do they not realize that Twitter has its own IP and any competing network can t copy or infringe on their product. Otherwise, they will be sued like how Ford was & potentially win. I am not really gonna talk much about it as the blog post has become quite long and that needs its own post to do any sort of justice to it. Till later people

Government approves T&Cs for first offshore wind auction under the Renewable Electricity Support Scheme ORESS 1 expected to secure 2.5GW of electricity generating capacity #GreensInGovernment The Government has today approved the Terms and Conditions of ORESS 1, the first auction for offshore wind under the Renewable Electricity Support Scheme. This is a seminal moment in the delivery of offshore wind in Ireland. The offshore auction, the first in Ireland's history, is expected to provide a route to market for up to 2.5GW of offshore renewable energy to the Irish grid, enough to power 2.5 million Irish homes with clean electricity. Coming during the weeks of COP27, publishing details of the auction sends a strong international signal that Ireland is serious about offshore energy and our national climate targets and obligations. Recognising the critical role of local hosting communities in the development of this critical infrastructure, all offshore wind projects developed via ORESS will be required to make Community Benefit Fund contributions, from construction phase and continuing for the duration of the support period, typically for a total period of 25 years. This will result in lasting, tangible benefits for these communities. Speaking about this development, Minister Ryan said: The publication of these ORESS 1 Terms and Conditions is another massive step forward for offshore wind, for Irish climate leadership and towards Ireland s future as an international green energy hub. The first stage of this transformative auction will start before Christmas and it sets us on a path to powering many more of our homes and businesses from our own green energy resources over the coming years. It follows the enactment of the Maritime Area Planning Act last year, and the announcement regarding the awarding of Maritime Area Consents to Phase One projects last month. A final ORESS 1 auction calendar will be published by EirGrid shortly. The pre-qualification stage will launch next month (December). The qualification stage and the auction process will take place in the first half of 2023. Final auction results will be published by June 2023. Eligible projects Any project that has been awarded a Maritime Area Consent is eligible to partake in the ORESS 1 auction. Seven projects known as Relevant Projects were deemed ready to apply for Maritime Area Consents in Spring 2022. Once Maritime Area Consents are granted, these projects can not only compete for State support via the ORESS, but can also apply for planning permission from An Bord Plean la. Delivering on our broader targets ORESS 1 is expected to procure approximately 2.5GW of electricity generating capacity. Further auctions will be required to meet our renewable energy and climate ambitions. At least three offshore energy auctions are currently planned for this decade. The aim is to progress enough viable offshore projects through the consenting system to have competitive auctions. This will ultimately drive down cost for electricity consumers.

Armadillo is a powerful and expressive C++ template library for linear algebra and scientific computing. It aims towards a good balance between speed and ease of use, has a syntax deliberately close to Matlab, and is useful for algorithm development directly in C++, or quick conversion of research code into production environments. RcppArmadillo integrates this library with the R environment and language and is widely used by (currently) 1027 packages other packages on CRAN, downloaded 26.9 million times (per the partial logs from the cloud mirrors of CRAN), and the CSDA paper (preprint / vignette) by Conrad and myself has been cited 503 times according to Google Scholar. This release reflect as new upstream bugfix release 11.4.2 made recently by Conrad. To accomodate CRAN and their preference for at most a release per month, we held it back since the 11.4.0 release early October. As we usually do, we generally update once upstream Armadillo releases are made. When we do not immediately release to CRAN (in order to lower the release cadence), we make those interim releases available via GitHub source and the Rcpp drat repo. This release also brings a rearranged, and as we think, simplified layout of the header files. All existing locations are still supported but we will be starting a (very patient and slow) transition at some point. The full set of changes (since the last CRAN release 0.11.4.0.1) follows.

Changes in RcppArmadillo version 0.11.4.2.1 (2022-11-08)

Upgraded to Armadillo release 11.4.2 (Ship of Theseus)

more robust handling of corner cases in multi-threaded contexts

Internal header organisation with new sub-directories while providing full compatibility via existing paths (#395 #396)

Changes in RcppArmadillo version 0.11.4.1.0 (2022-10-10) (GitHub Only)

Upgraded to Armadillo release 11.4.1 (Ship of Theseus)

fix data race in Cube::slice()

workarounds for false warnings emitted by GCC 12 when compiling with FORTIFY_SOURCE enabled (already in RcppArmadillo 0.11.4.0.1 too)

Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is a diffstat report relative to previous release. More detailed information is on the RcppArmadillo page. Questions, comments etc should go to the rcpp-devel mailing list off the R-Forge page. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can sponsor me at GitHub.

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

Search Results: "reg"

8 December 2022

7 December 2022

2 December 2022

Focus This month I didn't have any particular focus. I just worked on issues in my info bubble.

Issues Crash in rtorrent Regression in pastebinit Generated files in Sequoia linter Build failure in subversion Tests disabled in libx86emu

Administration Debian IRC: setup topic/entrymsg to redirect OFTC #debian-jp to the Debian Japan IRC server, cleaned up #debianppc ChanServ metadata Debian wiki: unblock IP addresses, approve domains, approve accounts

Communication Initiate discussions about lintian classification tags for porters, incorrect Homepage in r-cran-* packages Edited and sent Debian Misc Developer News #58 Respond to queries from Debian users and contributors on the mailing lists and IRC

Sponsors The libemail-outlook-message-perl, purple-discord, sptag, celery work was sponsored. All other work was done on a volunteer basis.

1 December 2022

Changes in spld version 0.0.2 (2022-12-01) Helper functions fmt() and cat() have been added

30 November 2022

26 November 2022

24 November 2022

22 November 2022

Changes in spld version 0.0.1 (2022-11-21) Initial release of R and C++ loggers using spdl::* namespace

21 November 2022

19 November 2022

TrueNAS And I found that multiple people replaced the QNAPs own system with a TrueNAS installation and generally had been happy. Looking further I found that TrueNAS has a variant called Scale - which is based on Debian. Doubly good, that, so I went off checking what I may need for it.

18 November 2022

Changes in RcppSpdlog version 0.0.10 (2022-11-17) Support variadic templates with fmt::format Add R formatting helper which converts arguments to character taking advantage of variadic template logger: fmt logging from R Expand vignette

16 November 2022

Email: notmuch See Emacs, below.

File manager: thunar Unchanged.

News: feed2exec, gnus See Email, above, or Emacs in Editor, below.

Backups: borg Mostly irrelevant, as I do not use a GUI.

Other issues

Improvements over i3

Tiling improvements There's a lot of improvements Sway could bring over using plain i3. There are pretty neat auto-tilers that could replicate the configurations I used to have in Xmonad or Awesome, see: autotiling swaymonad

Display latency tweaks TODO: You can tweak the display latency in wlroots compositors with the max_render_time parameter, possibly getting lower latency than X11 in the end.

Sound/brightness changes notifications TODO: Avizo can display a pop-up to give feedback on volume and brightness changes. Not in Debian. Other alternatives include SwayOSD and sway-nc, also not in Debian.

Other documentation awesome-wayland arewewaylandyet.com hacktivist.me notes Arch Linux wiki Gentoo apps list Sway: useful addons i3 migration guide

Real world experience This section document not synthetic backups, but actual real world workloads, comparing before and after I switched my workstation to ZFS.

Partitioning The above partitioning procedure used sgdisk, but I couldn't figure out how to do this with sgdisk, so this uses sfdisk to dump the partition from the first disk to an external, identical drive: sfdisk -d /dev/nvme0n1 sfdisk --no-reread /dev/sda --force

References See the zfs documentation for more information about ZFS, and tubman for another installation and migration procedure.

12 November 2022

11 November 2022

10 November 2022

Changes in RcppArmadillo version 0.11.4.2.1 (2022-11-08) Upgraded to Armadillo release 11.4.2 (Ship of Theseus) more robust handling of corner cases in multi-threaded contexts Internal header organisation with new sub-directories while providing full compatibility via existing paths (#395 #396)

Changes in RcppArmadillo version 0.11.4.1.0 (2022-10-10) (GitHub Only) Upgraded to Armadillo release 11.4.1 (Ship of Theseus) fix data race in Cube::slice() workarounds for false warnings emitted by GCC 12 when compiling with FORTIFY_SOURCE enabled (already in RcppArmadillo 0.11.4.0.1 too)

Issues

Crash in rtorrent

Regression in pastebinit

Generated files in Sequoia linter

Build failure in subversion

Tests disabled in libx86emu

Administration

Debian IRC: setup topic/entrymsg to redirect OFTC #debian-jp to the Debian Japan IRC server, cleaned up #debianppc ChanServ metadata

Debian wiki: unblock IP addresses, approve domains, approve accounts

Communication

Initiate discussions about lintian classification tags for porters, incorrect Homepage in r-cran-* packages

Edited and sent Debian Misc Developer News #58

Respond to queries from Debian users and contributors on the mailing lists and IRC

Changes in spld version 0.0.2 (2022-12-01)

Helper functions `fmt()` and `cat()` have been added

Changes in spld version 0.0.1 (2022-11-21)

Initial release of R and C++ loggers using `spdl::*` namespace

TrueNAS And I found that multiple people replaced the QNAPs own system with a TrueNAS installation and generally had been happy. Looking further I found that TrueNAS has a variant called `Scale` - which is based on Debian. Doubly good, that, so I went off checking what I may need for it.

Changes in RcppSpdlog version 0.0.10 (2022-11-17)

Support variadic templates with fmt::format

Add R formatting helper which converts arguments to character taking advantage of variadic template logger: fmt logging from R

Expand vignette

Tiling improvements There's a lot of improvements Sway could bring over using plain i3. There are pretty neat auto-tilers that could replicate the configurations I used to have in Xmonad or Awesome, see:

autotiling

swaymonad

Other documentation

awesome-wayland

arewewaylandyet.com

hacktivist.me notes

Arch Linux wiki

Gentoo apps list

Sway: useful addons

i3 migration guide

Partitioning The above partitioning procedure used `sgdisk`, but I couldn't figure out how to do this with `sgdisk`, so this uses `sfdisk` to dump the partition from the first disk to an external, identical drive:
`sfdisk -d /dev/nvme0n1 sfdisk --no-reread /dev/sda --force`

Changes in RcppArmadillo version 0.11.4.2.1 (2022-11-08)

Upgraded to Armadillo release 11.4.2 (Ship of Theseus)

more robust handling of corner cases in multi-threaded contexts

Internal header organisation with new sub-directories while providing full compatibility via existing paths (#395 #396)

Changes in RcppArmadillo version 0.11.4.1.0 (2022-10-10) (GitHub Only)

Upgraded to Armadillo release 11.4.1 (Ship of Theseus)

fix data race in `Cube::slice()`

workarounds for false warnings emitted by GCC 12 when compiling with `FORTIFY_SOURCE` enabled (already in RcppArmadillo 0.11.4.0.1 too)