Search Results: "will"

13 March 2023

Antoine Beaupr : Framework 12th gen laptop review

The Framework is a 13.5" laptop body with swappable parts, which makes it somewhat future-proof and certainly easily repairable, scoring an "exceedingly rare" 10/10 score from ifixit.com. There are two generations of the laptop's main board (both compatible with the same body): the Intel 11th and 12th gen chipsets. I have received my Framework, 12th generation "DIY", device in late September 2022 and will update this page as I go along in the process of ordering, burning-in, setting up and using the device over the years. Overall, the Framework is a good laptop. I like the keyboard, the touch pad, the expansion cards. Clearly there's been some good work done on industrial design, and it's the most repairable laptop I've had in years. Time will tell, but it looks sturdy enough to survive me many years as well. This is also one of the most powerful devices I ever lay my hands on. I have managed, remotely, more powerful servers, but this is the fastest computer I have ever owned, and it fits in this tiny case. It is an amazing machine. On the downside, there's a bit of proprietary firmware required (WiFi, Bluetooth, some graphics) and the Framework ships with a proprietary BIOS, with currently no Coreboot support. Expect to need the latest kernel, firmware, and hacking around a bunch of things to get resolution and keybindings working right. Like others, I have first found significant power management issues, but many issues can actually be solved with some configuration. Some of the expansion ports (HDMI, DP, MicroSD, and SSD) use power when idle, so don't expect week-long suspend, or "full day" battery while those are plugged in. Finally, the expansion ports are nice, but there's only four of them. If you plan to have a two-monitor setup, you're likely going to need a dock. Read on for the detailed review. For context, I'm moving from the Purism Librem 13v4 because it basically exploded on me. I had, in the meantime, reverted back to an old ThinkPad X220, so I sometimes compare the Framework with that venerable laptop as well. This blog post has been maturing for months now. It started in September 2022 and I declared it completed in March 2023. It's the longest single article on this entire website, currently clocking at about 13,000 words. It will take an average reader a full hour to go through this thing, so I don't expect anyone to actually do that. This introduction should be good enough for most people, read the first section if you intend to actually buy a Framework. Jump around the table of contents as you see fit for after you did buy the laptop, as it might include some crucial hints on how to make it work best for you, especially on (Debian) Linux.

Advice for buyers Those are things I wish I would have known before buying:
  1. consider buying 4 USB-C expansion cards, or at least a mix of 4 USB-A or USB-C cards, as they use less power than other cards and you do want to fill those expansion slots otherwise they snag around and feel insecure
  2. you will likely need a dock or at least a USB hub if you want a two-monitor setup, otherwise you'll run out of ports
  3. you have to do some serious tuning to get proper (10h+ idle, 10 days suspend) power savings
  4. in particular, beware that the HDMI, DisplayPort and particularly the SSD and MicroSD cards take a significant amount power, even when sleeping, up to 2-6W for the latter two
  5. beware that the MicroSD card is what it says: Micro, normal SD cards won't fit, and while there might be full sized one eventually, it's currently only at the prototyping stage
  6. the Framework monitor has an unusual aspect ratio (3:2): I like it (and it matches classic and digital photography aspect ratio), but it might surprise you

Current status I have the framework! It's setup with a fresh new Debian bookworm installation. I've ran through a large number of tests and burn in. I have decided to use the Framework as my daily driver, and had to buy a USB-C dock to get my two monitors connected, which was own adventure. Update: Framework just (2023-03-23) just announced a whole bunch of new stuff: The recording is available in this video and it's not your typical keynote. It starts ~25 minutes late, audio is crap, lightning and camera are crap, clapping seems to be from whatever staff they managed to get together in a room, decor is bizarre, colors are shit. It's amazing.

Specifications Those are the specifications of the 12th gen, in general terms. Your build will of course vary according to your needs.
  • CPU: i5-1240P, i7-1260P, or i7-1280P (Up to 4.4-4.8 GHz, 4+8 cores), Iris Xe graphics
  • Storage: 250-4000GB NVMe (or bring your own)
  • Memory: 8-64GB DDR4-3200 (or bring your own)
  • WiFi 6e (AX210, vPro optional, or bring your own)
  • 296.63mm X 228.98mm X 15.85mm, 1.3Kg
  • 13.5" display, 3:2 ratio, 2256px X 1504px, 100% sRGB, >400 nit
  • 4 x USB-C user-selectable expansion ports, including
    • USB-C
    • USB-A
    • HDMI
    • DP
    • Ethernet
    • MicroSD
    • 250-1000GB SSD
  • 3.5mm combo headphone jack
  • Kill switches for microphone and camera
  • Battery: 55Wh
  • Camera: 1080p 60fps
  • Biometrics: Fingerprint Reader
  • Backlit keyboard
  • Power Adapter: 60W USB-C (or bring your own)
  • ships with a screwdriver/spludger
  • 1 year warranty
  • base price: 1000$CAD, but doesn't give you much, typical builds around 1500-2000$CAD

Actual build This is the actual build I ordered. Amounts in CAD. (1CAD = ~0.75EUR/USD.)

Base configuration
  • CPU: Intel Core i5-1240P (AKA Alder Lake P 8 4.4GHz P-threads, 8 3.2GHz E-threads, 16 total, 28-64W), 1079$
  • Memory: 16GB (1 x 16GB) DDR4-3200, 104$

Customization
  • Keyboard: US English, included

Expansion Cards
  • 2 USB-C $24
  • 3 USB-A $36
  • 2 HDMI $50
  • 1 DP $50
  • 1 MicroSD $25
  • 1 Storage 1TB $199
  • Sub-total: 384$

Accessories
  • Power Adapter - US/Canada $64.00

Total
  • Before tax: 1606$
  • After tax and duties: 1847$
  • Free shipping

Quick evaluation This is basically the TL;DR: here, just focusing on broad pros/cons of the laptop.

Pros

Cons
  • the 11th gen is out of stock, except for the higher-end CPUs, which are much less affordable (700$+)
  • the 12th gen has compatibility issues with Debian, followup in the DebianOn page, but basically: brightness hotkeys, power management, wifi, the webcam is okay even though the chipset is the infamous alder lake because it does not have the fancy camera; most issues currently seem solvable, and upstream is working with mainline to get their shit working
  • 12th gen might have issues with thunderbolt docks
  • they used to have some difficulty keeping up with the orders: first two batches shipped, third batch sold out, fourth batch should have shipped (?) in October 2021. they generally seem to keep up with shipping. update (august 2022): they rolled out a second line of laptops (12th gen), first batch shipped, second batch shipped late, September 2022 batch was generally on time, see this spreadsheet for a crowdsourced effort to track those supply chain issues seem to be under control as of early 2023. I got the Ethernet expansion card shipped within a week.
  • compared to my previous laptop (Purism Librem 13v4), it feels strangely bulkier and heavier; it's actually lighter than the purism (1.3kg vs 1.4kg) and thinner (15.85mm vs 18mm) but the design of the Purism laptop (tapered edges) makes it feel thinner
  • no space for a 2.5" drive
  • rather bright LED around power button, but can be dimmed in the BIOS (not low enough to my taste) I got used to it
  • fan quiet when idle, but can be noisy when running, for example if you max a CPU for a while
  • battery described as "mediocre" by Ars Technica (above), confirmed poor in my tests (see below)
  • no RJ-45 port, and attempts at designing ones are failing because the modular plugs are too thin to fit (according to Linux After Dark), so unlikely to have one in the future Update: they cracked that nut and ship an 2.5 gbps Ethernet expansion card with a realtek chipset, without any firmware blob (!)
  • a bit pricey for the performance, especially when compared to the competition (e.g. Dell XPS, Apple M1)
  • 12th gen Intel has glitchy graphics, seems like Intel hasn't fully landed proper Linux support for that chipset yet

Initial hardware setup A breeze.

Accessing the board The internals are accessed through five TorX screws, but there's a nice screwdriver/spudger that works well enough. The screws actually hold in place so you can't even lose them. The first setup is a bit counter-intuitive coming from the Librem laptop, as I expected the back cover to lift and give me access to the internals. But instead the screws is release the keyboard and touch pad assembly, so you actually need to flip the laptop back upright and lift the assembly off (!) to get access to the internals. Kind of scary. I also actually unplugged a connector in lifting the assembly because I lifted it towards the monitor, while you actually need to lift it to the right. Thankfully, the connector didn't break, it just snapped off and I could plug it back in, no harm done. Once there, everything is well indicated, with QR codes all over the place supposedly leading to online instructions.

Bad QR codes Unfortunately, the QR codes I tested (in the expansion card slot, the memory slot and CPU slots) did not actually work so I wonder how useful those actually are. After all, they need to point to something and that means a URL, a running website that will answer those requests forever. I bet those will break sooner than later and in fact, as far as I can tell, they just don't work at all. I prefer the approach taken by the MNT reform here which designed (with the 100 rabbits folks) an actual paper handbook (PDF). The first QR code that's immediately visible from the back of the laptop, in an expansion cord slot, is a 404. It seems to be some serial number URL, but I can't actually tell because, well, the page is a 404. I was expecting that bar code to lead me to an introduction page, something like "how to setup your Framework laptop". Support actually confirmed that it should point a quickstart guide. But in a bizarre twist, they somehow sent me the URL with the plus (+) signs escaped, like this: 
https://guides.frame.work/Guide/Framework\+Laptop\+DIY\+Edition\+Quick\+Start\+Guide/57
... which Firefox immediately transforms in: 
https://guides.frame.work/Guide/Framework/+Laptop/+DIY/+Edition/+Quick/+Start/+Guide/57
I'm puzzled as to why they would send the URL that way, the proper URL is of course: 
https://guides.frame.work/Guide/Framework+Laptop+DIY+Edition+Quick+Start+Guide/57
(They have also "let the team know about this for feedback and help resolve the problem with the link" which is a support code word for "ha-ha! nope! not my problem right now!" Trust me, I know, my own code word is "can you please make a ticket?")

Seating disks and memory The "DIY" kit doesn't actually have that much of a setup. If you bought RAM, it's shipped outside the laptop in a little plastic case, so you just seat it in as usual. Then you insert your NVMe drive, and, if that's your fancy, you also install your own mPCI WiFi card. If you ordered one (which was my case), it's pre-installed. Closing the laptop is also kind of amazing, because the keyboard assembly snaps into place with magnets. I have actually used the laptop with the keyboard unscrewed as I was putting the drives in and out, and it actually works fine (and will probably void your warranty, so don't do that). (But you can.) (But don't, really.)

Hardware review

Keyboard and touch pad The keyboard feels nice, for a laptop. I'm used to mechanical keyboard and I'm rather violent with those poor things. Yet the key travel is nice and it's clickety enough that I don't feel too disoriented. At first, I felt the keyboard as being more laggy than my normal workstation setup, but it turned out this was a graphics driver issues. After enabling a composition manager, everything feels snappy. The touch pad feels good. The double-finger scroll works well enough, and I don't have to wonder too much where the middle button is, it just works. Taps don't work, out of the box: that needs to be enabled in Xorg, with something like this: 
cat > /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/40-libinput.conf <<EOF
Section "InputClass"
      Identifier "libinput touch pad catchall"
      MatchIsTouchpad "on"
      MatchDevicePath "/dev/input/event*"
      Driver "libinput"
      Option "Tapping" "on"
      Option "TappingButtonMap" "lmr"
EndSection
EOF
But be aware that once you enable that tapping, you'll need to deal with palm detection... So I have not actually enabled this in the end.

Power button The power button is a little dangerous. It's quite easy to hit, as it's right next to one expansion card where you are likely to plug in a cable power. And because the expansion cards are kind of hard to remove, you might squeeze the laptop (and the power key) when trying to remove the expansion card next to the power button. So obviously, don't do that. But that's not very helpful. An alternative is to make the power button do something else. With systemd-managed systems, it's actually quite easy. Add a HandlePowerKey stanza to (say) /etc/systemd/logind.conf.d/power-suspends.conf: 
[Login]
HandlePowerKey=suspend
HandlePowerKeyLongPress=poweroff
You might have to create the directory first: 
mkdir /etc/systemd/logind.conf.d/
Then restart logind: 
systemctl restart systemd-logind
And the power button will suspend! Long-press to power off doesn't actually work as the laptop immediately suspends... Note that there's probably half a dozen other ways of doing this, see this, this, or that.

Special keybindings There is a series of "hidden" (as in: not labeled on the key) keybindings related to the fn keybinding that I actually find quite useful.
Key Equivalent Effect Command
p Pause lock screen xset s activate
b Break ? ?
k ScrLk switch keyboard layout N/A
It looks like those are defined in the microcontroller so it would be possible to add some. For example, the SysRq key is almost bound to fn s in there. Note that most other shortcuts like this are clearly documented (volume, brightness, etc). One key that's less obvious is F12 that only has the Framework logo on it. That actually calls the keysym XF86AudioMedia which, interestingly, does absolutely nothing here. By default, on Windows, it opens your browser to the Framework website and, on Linux, your "default media player". The keyboard backlight can be cycled with fn-space. The dimmer version is dim enough, and the keybinding is easy to find in the dark. A skinny elephant would be performed with alt PrtScr (above F11) KEY, so for example alt fn F11 b should do a hard reset. This comment suggests you need to hold the fn only if "function lock" is on, but that's actually the opposite of my experience. Out of the box, some of the fn keys don't work. Mute, volume up/down, brightness, monitor changes, and the airplane mode key all do basically nothing. They don't send proper keysyms to Xorg at all. This is a known problem and it's related to the fact that the laptop has light sensors to adjust the brightness automatically. Somehow some of those keys (e.g. the brightness controls) are supposed to show up as a different input device, but don't seem to work correctly. It seems like the solution is for the Framework team to write a driver specifically for this, but so far no progress since July 2022. In the meantime, the fancy functionality can be supposedly disabled with: 
echo 'blacklist hid_sensor_hub'   sudo tee /etc/modprobe.d/framework-als-blacklist.conf
... and a reboot. This solution is also documented in the upstream guide. Note that there's another solution flying around that fixes this by changing permissions on the input device but I haven't tested that or seen confirmation it works.

Kill switches The Framework has two "kill switches": one for the camera and the other for the microphone. The camera one actually disconnects the USB device when turned off, and the mic one seems to cut the circuit. It doesn't show up as muted, it just stops feeding the sound. Both kill switches are around the main camera, on top of the monitor, and quite discreet. Then turn "red" when enabled (i.e. "red" means "turned off").

Monitor The monitor looks pretty good to my untrained eyes. I have yet to do photography work on it, but some photos I looked at look sharp and the colors are bright and lively. The blacks are dark and the screen is bright. I have yet to use it in full sunlight. The dimmed light is very dim, which I like.

Screen backlight I bind brightness keys to xbacklight in i3, but out of the box I get this error: 
sep 29 22:09:14 angela i3[5661]: No outputs have backlight property
It just requires this blob in /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/backlight.conf: 
Section "Device"
    Identifier  "Card0"
    Driver      "intel"
    Option      "Backlight"  "intel_backlight"
EndSection
This way I can control the actual backlight power with the brightness keys, and they do significantly reduce power usage.

Multiple monitor support I have been able to hook up my two old monitors to the HDMI and DisplayPort expansion cards on the laptop. The lid closes without suspending the machine, and everything works great. I actually run out of ports, even with a 4-port USB-A hub, which gives me a total of 7 ports:
  1. power (USB-C)
  2. monitor 1 (DisplayPort)
  3. monitor 2 (HDMI)
  4. USB-A hub, which adds:
  5. keyboard (USB-A)
  6. mouse (USB-A)
  7. Yubikey
  8. external sound card
Now the latter, I might be able to get rid of if I switch to a combo-jack headset, which I do have (and still need to test). But still, this is a problem. I'll probably need a powered USB-C dock and better monitors, possibly with some Thunderbolt chaining, to save yet more ports. But that means more money into this setup, argh. And figuring out my monitor situation is the kind of thing I'm not that big of a fan of. And neither is shopping for USB-C (or is it Thunderbolt?) hubs. My normal autorandr setup doesn't work: I have tried saving a profile and it doesn't get autodetected, so I also first need to do: 
autorandr -l framework-external-dual-lg-acer
The magic: 
autorandr -l horizontal
... also works well. The worst problem with those monitors right now is that they have a radically smaller resolution than the main screen on the laptop, which means I need to reset the font scaling to normal every time I switch back and forth between those monitors and the laptop, which means I actually need to do this: 
autorandr -l horizontal &&
eho Xft.dpi: 96   xrdb -merge &&
systemctl restart terminal xcolortaillog background-image emacs &&
i3-msg restart
Kind of disruptive.

Expansion ports I ordered a total of 10 expansion ports. I did manage to initialize the 1TB drive as an encrypted storage, mostly to keep photos as this is something that takes a massive amount of space (500GB and counting) and that I (unfortunately) don't work on very often (but still carry around). The expansion ports are fancy and nice, but not actually that convenient. They're a bit hard to take out: you really need to crimp your fingernails on there and pull hard to take them out. There's a little button next to them to release, I think, but at first it feels a little scary to pull those pucks out of there. You get used to it though, and it's one of those things you can do without looking eventually. There's only four expansion ports. Once you have two monitors, the drive, and power plugged in, bam, you're out of ports; there's nowhere to plug my Yubikey. So if this is going to be my daily driver, with a dual monitor setup, I will need a dock, which means more crap firmware and uncertainty, which isn't great. There are actually plans to make a dual-USB card, but that is blocked on designing an actual board for this. I can't wait to see more expansion ports produced. There's a ethernet expansion card which quickly went out of stock basically the day it was announced, but was eventually restocked. I would like to see a proper SD-card reader. There's a MicroSD card reader, but that obviously doesn't work for normal SD cards, which would be more broadly compatible anyways (because you can have a MicroSD to SD card adapter, but I have never heard of the reverse). Someone actually found a SD card reader that fits and then someone else managed to cram it in a 3D printed case, which is kind of amazing. Still, I really like that idea that I can carry all those little adapters in a pouch when I travel and can basically do anything I want. It does mean I need to shuffle through them to find the right one which is a little annoying. I have an elastic band to keep them lined up so that all the ports show the same side, to make it easier to find the right one. But that quickly gets undone and instead I have a pouch full of expansion cards. Another awesome thing with the expansion cards is that they don't just work on the laptop: anything that takes USB-C can take those cards, which means you can use it to connect an SD card to your phone, for backups, for example. Heck, you could even connect an external display to your phone that way, assuming that's supported by your phone of course (and it probably isn't). The expansion ports do take up some power, even when idle. See the power management section below, and particularly the power usage tests for details.

USB-C charging One thing that is really a game changer for me is USB-C charging. It's hard to overstate how convenient this is. I often have a USB-C cable lying around to charge my phone, and I can just grab that thing and pop it in my laptop. And while it will obviously not charge as fast as the provided charger, it will stop draining the battery at least. (As I wrote this, I had the laptop plugged in the Samsung charger that came with a phone, and it was telling me it would take 6 hours to charge the remaining 15%. With the provided charger, that flew down to 15 minutes. Similarly, I can power the laptop from the power grommet on my desk, reducing clutter as I have that single wire out there instead of the bulky power adapter.) I also really like the idea that I can charge my laptop with a power bank or, heck, with my phone, if push comes to shove. (And vice-versa!) This is awesome. And it works from any of the expansion ports, of course. There's a little led next to the expansion ports as well, which indicate the charge status:
  • red/amber: charging
  • white: charged
  • off: unplugged
I couldn't find documentation about this, but the forum answered. This is something of a recurring theme with the Framework. While it has a good knowledge base and repair/setup guides (and the forum is awesome) but it doesn't have a good "owner manual" that shows you the different parts of the laptop and what they do. Again, something the MNT reform did well. Another thing that people are asking about is an external sleep indicator: because the power LED is on the main keyboard assembly, you don't actually see whether the device is active or not when the lid is closed. Finally, I wondered what happens when you plug in multiple power sources and it turns out the charge controller is actually pretty smart: it will pick the best power source and use it. The only downside is it can't use multiple power sources, but that seems like a bit much to ask.

Multimedia and other devices Those things also work:
  • webcam: splendid, best webcam I've ever had (but my standards are really low)
  • onboard mic: works well, good gain (maybe a bit much)
  • onboard speakers: sound okay, a little metal-ish, loud enough to be annoying, see this thread for benchmarks, apparently pretty good speakers
  • combo jack: works, with slight hiss, see below
There's also a light sensor, but it conflicts with the keyboard brightness controls (see above). There's also an accelerometer, but it's off by default and will be removed from future builds.

Combo jack mic tests The Framework laptop ships with a combo jack on the left side, which allows you to plug in a CTIA (source) headset. In human terms, it's a device that has both a stereo output and a mono input, typically a headset or ear buds with a microphone somewhere. It works, which is better than the Purism (which only had audio out), but is on par for the course for that kind of onboard hardware. Because of electrical interference, such sound cards very often get lots of noise from the board. With a Jabra Evolve 40, the built-in USB sound card generates basically zero noise on silence (invisible down to -60dB in Audacity) while plugging it in directly generates a solid -30dB hiss. There is a noise-reduction system in that sound card, but the difference is still quite striking. On a comparable setup (curie, a 2017 Intel NUC), there is also a his with the Jabra headset, but it's quieter, more in the order of -40/-50 dB, a noticeable difference. Interestingly, testing with my Mee Audio Pro M6 earbuds leads to a little more hiss on curie, more on the -35/-40 dB range, close to the Framework. Also note that another sound card, the Antlion USB adapter that comes with the ModMic 4, also gives me pretty close to silence on a quiet recording, picking up less than -50dB of background noise. It's actually probably picking up the fans in the office, which do make audible noises. In other words, the hiss of the sound card built in the Framework laptop is so loud that it makes more noise than the quiet fans in the office. Or, another way to put it is that two USB sound cards (the Jabra and the Antlion) are able to pick up ambient noise in my office but not the Framework laptop. See also my audio page.

Performance tests

Compiling Linux 5.19.11 On a single core, compiling the Debian version of the Linux kernel takes around 100 minutes: 
5411.85user 673.33system 1:37:46elapsed 103%CPU (0avgtext+0avgdata 831700maxresident)k
10594704inputs+87448000outputs (9131major+410636783minor)pagefaults 0swaps
This was using 16 watts of power, with full screen brightness. With all 16 cores (make -j16), it takes less than 25 minutes: 
19251.06user 2467.47system 24:13.07elapsed 1494%CPU (0avgtext+0avgdata 831676maxresident)k
8321856inputs+87427848outputs (30792major+409145263minor)pagefaults 0swaps
I had to plug the normal power supply after a few minutes because battery would actually run out using my desk's power grommet (34 watts). During compilation, fans were spinning really hard, quite noisy, but not painfully so. The laptop was sucking 55 watts of power, steadily: 
  Time    User  Nice   Sys  Idle    IO  Run Ctxt/s  IRQ/s Fork Exec Exit  Watts
-------- ----- ----- ----- ----- ----- ---- ------ ------ ---- ---- ---- ------
 Average  87.9   0.0  10.7   1.4   0.1 17.8 6583.6 5054.3 233.0 223.9 233.1  55.96
 GeoMean  87.9   0.0  10.6   1.2   0.0 17.6 6427.8 5048.1 227.6 218.7 227.7  55.96
  StdDev   1.4   0.0   1.2   0.6   0.2  3.0 1436.8  255.5 50.0 47.5 49.7   0.20
-------- ----- ----- ----- ----- ----- ---- ------ ------ ---- ---- ---- ------
 Minimum  85.0   0.0   7.8   0.5   0.0 13.0 3594.0 4638.0 117.0 111.0 120.0  55.52
 Maximum  90.8   0.0  12.9   3.5   0.8 38.0 10174.0 5901.0 374.0 362.0 375.0  56.41
-------- ----- ----- ----- ----- ----- ---- ------ ------ ---- ---- ---- ------
Summary:
CPU:  55.96 Watts on average with standard deviation 0.20
Note: power read from RAPL domains: package-0, uncore, package-0, core, psys.
These readings do not cover all the hardware in this device.

memtest86+ I ran Memtest86+ v6.00b3. It shows something like this: 
Memtest86+ v6.00b3        12th Gen Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-1240P
CLK/Temp: 2112MHz    78/78 C   Pass  2% #
L1 Cache:   48KB    414 GB/s   Test 46% ##################
L2 Cache: 1.25MB    118 GB/s   Test #3 [Moving inversions, 1s & 0s] 
L3 Cache:   12MB     43 GB/s   Testing: 16GB - 18GB [1GB of 15.7GB]
Memory  :  15.7GB  14.9 GB/s   Pattern: 
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
CPU: 4P+8E-Cores (16T)    SMP: 8T (PAR))    Time:  0:27:23  Status: Pass     \
RAM: 1600MHz (DDR4-3200) CAS 22-22-22-51    Pass:  1        Errors: 0
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Memory SPD Information
----------------------
 - Slot 2: 16GB DDR-4-3200 - Crucial CT16G4SFRA32A.C16FP (2022-W23)
                          Framework FRANMACP04
 <ESC> Exit  <F1> Configuration  <Space> Scroll Lock            6.00.unknown.x64
So about 30 minutes for a full 16GB memory test.

Software setup Once I had everything in the hardware setup, I figured, voil , I'm done, I'm just going to boot this beautiful machine and I can get back to work. I don't understand why I am so na ve some times. It's mind boggling. Obviously, it didn't happen that way at all, and I spent the best of the three following days tinkering with the laptop.

Secure boot and EFI First, I couldn't boot off of the NVMe drive I transferred from the previous laptop (the Purism) and the BIOS was not very helpful: it was just complaining about not finding any boot device, without dropping me in the real BIOS. At first, I thought it was a problem with my NVMe drive, because it's not listed in the compatible SSD drives from upstream. But I figured out how to enter BIOS (press F2 manically, of course), which showed the NVMe drive was actually detected. It just didn't boot, because it was an old (2010!!) Debian install without EFI. So from there, I disabled secure boot, and booted a grml image to try to recover. And by "boot" I mean, I managed to get to the grml boot loader which promptly failed to load its own root file system somehow. I still have to investigate exactly what happened there, but it failed some time after the initrd load with: 
Unable to find medium containing a live file system
This, it turns out, was fixed in Debian lately, so a daily GRML build will not have this problems. The upcoming 2022 release (likely 2022.10 or 2022.11) will also get the fix. I did manage to boot the development version of the Debian installer which was a surprisingly good experience: it mounted the encrypted drives and did everything pretty smoothly. It even offered me to reinstall the boot loader, but that ultimately (and correctly, as it turns out) failed because I didn't have a /boot/efi partition. At this point, I realized there was no easy way out of this, and I just proceeded to completely reinstall Debian. I had a spare NVMe drive lying around (backups FTW!) so I just swapped that in, rebooted in the Debian installer, and did a clean install. I wanted to switch to bookworm anyways, so I guess that's done too.

Storage limitations Another thing that happened during setup is that I tried to copy over the internal 2.5" SSD drive from the Purism to the Framework 1TB expansion card. There's no 2.5" slot in the new laptop, so that's pretty much the only option for storage expansion. I was tired and did something wrong. I ended up wiping the partition table on the original 2.5" drive. Oops. It might be recoverable, but just restoring the partition table didn't work either, so I'm not sure how I recover the data there. Normally, everything on my laptops and workstations is designed to be disposable, so that wasn't that big of a problem. I did manage to recover most of the data thanks to git-annex reinit, but that was a little hairy.

Bootstrapping Puppet Once I had some networking, I had to install all the packages I needed. The time I spent setting up my workstations with Puppet has finally paid off. What I actually did was to restore two critical directories: 
/etc/ssh
/var/lib/puppet
So that I would keep the previous machine's identity. That way I could contact the Puppet server and install whatever was missing. I used my Puppet optimization trick to do a batch install and then I had a good base setup, although not exactly as it was before. 1700 packages were installed manually on angela before the reinstall, and not in Puppet. I did not inspect each one individually, but I did go through /etc and copied over more SSH keys, for backups and SMTP over SSH.

LVFS support It looks like there's support for the (de-facto) standard LVFS firmware update system. At least I was able to update the UEFI firmware with a simple: 
apt install fwupd-amd64-signed
fwupdmgr refresh
fwupdmgr get-updates
fwupdmgr update
Nice. The 12th gen BIOS updates, currently (January 2023) beta, can be deployed through LVFS with: 
fwupdmgr enable-remote lvfs-testing
echo 'DisableCapsuleUpdateOnDisk=true' >> /etc/fwupd/uefi_capsule.conf 
fwupdmgr update
Those instructions come from the beta forum post. I performed the BIOS update on 2023-01-16T16:00-0500.

Resolution tweaks The Framework laptop resolution (2256px X 1504px) is big enough to give you a pretty small font size, so welcome to the marvelous world of "scaling". The Debian wiki page has a few tricks for this.

Console This will make the console and grub fonts more readable: 
cat >> /etc/default/console-setup <<EOF
FONTFACE="Terminus"
FONTSIZE=32x16
EOF
echo GRUB_GFXMODE=1024x768 >> /etc/default/grub
update-grub

Xorg Adding this to your .Xresources will make everything look much bigger: 
! 1.5*96
Xft.dpi: 144
Apparently, some of this can also help: 
! These might also be useful depending on your monitor and personal preference:
Xft.autohint: 0
Xft.lcdfilter:  lcddefault
Xft.hintstyle:  hintfull
Xft.hinting: 1
Xft.antialias: 1
Xft.rgba: rgb
It my experience it also makes things look a little fuzzier, which is frustrating because you have this awesome monitor but everything looks out of focus. Just bumping Xft.dpi by a 1.5 factor looks good to me. The Debian Wiki has a page on HiDPI, but it's not as good as the Arch Wiki, where the above blurb comes from. I am not using the latter because I suspect it's causing some of the "fuzziness". TODO: find the equivalent of this GNOME hack in i3? (gsettings set org.gnome.mutter experimental-features "['scale-monitor-framebuffer']"), taken from this Framework guide

Issues

BIOS configuration The Framework BIOS has some minor issues. One issue I personally encountered is that I had disabled Quick boot and Quiet boot in the BIOS to diagnose the above boot issues. This, in turn, triggers a bug where the BIOS boot manager (F12) would just hang completely. It would also fail to boot from an external USB drive. The current fix (as of BIOS 3.03) is to re-enable both Quick boot and Quiet boot. Presumably this is something that will get fixed in a future BIOS update. Note that the following keybindings are active in the BIOS POST check:
Key Meaning
F2 Enter BIOS setup menu
F12 Enter BIOS boot manager
Delete Enter BIOS setup menu

WiFi compatibility issues I couldn't make WiFi work at first. Obviously, the default Debian installer doesn't ship with proprietary firmware (although that might change soon) so the WiFi card didn't work out of the box. But even after copying the firmware through a USB stick, I couldn't quite manage to find the right combination of ip/iw/wpa-supplicant (yes, after repeatedly copying a bunch more packages over to get those bootstrapped). (Next time I should probably try something like this post.) Thankfully, I had a little USB-C dongle with a RJ-45 jack lying around. That also required a firmware blob, but it was a single package to copy over, and with that loaded, I had network. Eventually, I did managed to make WiFi work; the problem was more on the side of "I forgot how to configure a WPA network by hand from the commandline" than anything else. NetworkManager worked fine and got WiFi working correctly. Note that this is with Debian bookworm, which has the 5.19 Linux kernel, and with the firmware-nonfree (firmware-iwlwifi, specifically) package.

Battery life I was having between about 7 hours of battery on the Purism Librem 13v4, and that's after a year or two of battery life. Now, I still have about 7 hours of battery life, which is nicer than my old ThinkPad X220 (20 minutes!) but really, it's not that good for a new generation laptop. The 12th generation Intel chipset probably improved things compared to the previous one Framework laptop, but I don't have a 11th gen Framework to compare with). (Note that those are estimates from my status bar, not wall clock measurements. They should still be comparable between the Purism and Framework, that said.) The battery life doesn't seem up to, say, Dell XPS 13, ThinkPad X1, and of course not the Apple M1, where I would expect 10+ hours of battery life out of the box. That said, I do get those kind estimates when the machine is fully charged and idle. In fact, when everything is quiet and nothing is plugged in, I get dozens of hours of battery life estimated (I've seen 25h!). So power usage fluctuates quite a bit depending on usage, which I guess is expected. Concretely, so far, light web browsing, reading emails and writing notes in Emacs (e.g. this file) takes about 8W of power: 
Time    User  Nice   Sys  Idle    IO  Run Ctxt/s  IRQ/s Fork Exec Exit  Watts
-------- ----- ----- ----- ----- ----- ---- ------ ------ ---- ---- ---- ------
 Average   1.7   0.0   0.5  97.6   0.2  1.2 4684.9 1985.2 126.6 39.1 128.0   7.57
 GeoMean   1.4   0.0   0.4  97.6   0.1  1.2 4416.6 1734.5 111.6 27.9 113.3   7.54
  StdDev   1.0   0.2   0.2   1.2   0.0  0.5 1584.7 1058.3 82.1 44.0 80.2   0.71
-------- ----- ----- ----- ----- ----- ---- ------ ------ ---- ---- ---- ------
 Minimum   0.2   0.0   0.2  94.9   0.1  1.0 2242.0  698.2 82.0 17.0 82.0   6.36
 Maximum   4.1   1.1   1.0  99.4   0.2  3.0 8687.4 4445.1 463.0 249.0 449.0   9.10
-------- ----- ----- ----- ----- ----- ---- ------ ------ ---- ---- ---- ------
Summary:
System:   7.57 Watts on average with standard deviation 0.71
Expansion cards matter a lot in the battery life (see below for a thorough discussion), my normal setup is 2xUSB-C and 1xUSB-A (yes, with an empty slot, and yes, to save power). Interestingly, playing a video in a (720p) window in a window takes up more power (10.5W) than in full screen (9.5W) but I blame that on my desktop setup (i3 + compton)... Not sure if mpv hits the VA-API, maybe not in windowed mode. Similar results with 1080p, interestingly, except the window struggles to keep up altogether. Full screen playback takes a relatively comfortable 9.5W, which means a solid 5h+ of playback, which is fine by me. Fooling around the web, small edits, youtube-dl, and I'm at around 80% battery after about an hour, with an estimated 5h left, which is a little disappointing. I had a 7h remaining estimate before I started goofing around Discourse, so I suspect the website is a pretty big battery drain, actually. I see about 10-12 W, while I was probably at half that (6-8W) just playing music with mpv in the background... In other words, it looks like editing posts in Discourse with Firefox takes a solid 4-6W of power. Amazing and gross. (When writing about abusive power usage generates more power usage, is that an heisenbug? Or schr dinbug?)

Power management Compared to the Purism Librem 13v4, the ongoing power usage seems to be slightly better. An anecdotal metric is that the Purism would take 800mA idle, while the more powerful Framework manages a little over 500mA as I'm typing this, fluctuating between 450 and 600mA. That is without any active expansion card, except the storage. Those numbers come from the output of tlp-stat -b and, unfortunately, the "ampere" unit makes it quite hard to compare those, because voltage is not necessarily the same between the two platforms.
  • TODO: review Arch Linux's tips on power saving
  • TODO: i915 driver has a lot of parameters, including some about power saving, see, again, the arch wiki, and particularly enable_fbc=1
TL:DR; power management on the laptop is an issue, but there's various tweaks you can make to improve it. Try:
  • powertop --auto-tune
  • apt install tlp && systemctl enable tlp
  • nvme.noacpi=1 mem_sleep_default=deep on the kernel command line may help with standby power usage
  • keep only USB-C expansion cards plugged in, all others suck power even when idle
  • consider upgrading the BIOS to latest beta (3.06 at the time of writing), unverified power savings
  • latest Linux kernels (6.2) promise power savings as well (unverified)
Update: also try to follow the official optimization guide. It was made for Ubuntu but will probably also work for your distribution of choice with a few tweaks. They recommend using tlpui but it's not packaged in Debian. There is, however, a Flatpak release. In my case, it resulted in the following diff to tlp.conf: tlp.patch.

Background on CPU architecture There were power problems in the 11th gen Framework laptop, according to this report from Linux After Dark, so the issues with power management on the Framework are not new. The 12th generation Intel CPU (AKA "Alder Lake") is a big-little architecture with "power-saving" and "performance" cores. There used to be performance problems introduced by the scheduler in Linux 5.16 but those were eventually fixed in 5.18, which uses Intel's hardware as an "intelligent, low-latency hardware-assisted scheduler". According to Phoronix, the 5.19 release improved the power saving, at the cost of some penalty cost. There were also patch series to make the scheduler configurable, but it doesn't look those have been merged as of 5.19. There was also a session about this at the 2022 Linux Plumbers, but they stopped short of talking more about the specific problems Linux is facing in Alder lake:
Specifically, the kernel's energy-aware scheduling heuristics don't work well on those CPUs. A number of features present there complicate the energy picture; these include SMT, Intel's "turbo boost" mode, and the CPU's internal power-management mechanisms. For many workloads, running on an ostensibly more power-hungry Pcore can be more efficient than using an Ecore. Time for discussion of the problem was lacking, though, and the session came to a close.
All this to say that the 12gen Intel line shipped with this Framework series should have better power management thanks to its power-saving cores. And Linux has had the scheduler changes to make use of this (but maybe is still having trouble). In any case, this might not be the source of power management problems on my laptop, quite the opposite. Also note that the firmware updates for various chipsets are supposed to improve things eventually. On the other hand, The Verge simply declared the whole P-series a mistake...

Attempts at improving power usage I did try to follow some of the tips in this forum post. The tricks powertop --auto-tune and tlp's PCIE_ASPM_ON_BAT=powersupersave basically did nothing: I was stuck at 10W power usage in powertop (600+mA in tlp-stat). Apparently, I should be able to reach the C8 CPU power state (or even C9, C10) in powertop, but I seem to be stock at C7. (Although I'm not sure how to read that tab in powertop: in the Core(HW) column there's only C3/C6/C7 states, and most cores are 85% in C7 or maybe C6. But the next column over does show many CPUs in C10 states... As it turns out, the graphics card actually takes up a good chunk of power unless proper power management is enabled (see below). After tweaking this, I did manage to get down to around 7W power usage in powertop. Expansion cards actually do take up power, and so does the screen, obviously. The fully-lit screen takes a solid 2-3W of power compared to the fully dimmed screen. When removing all expansion cards and making the laptop idle, I can spin it down to 4 watts power usage at the moment, and an amazing 2 watts when the screen turned off.

Caveats Abusive (10W+) power usage that I initially found could be a problem with my desktop configuration: I have this silly status bar that updates every second and probably causes redraws... The CPU certainly doesn't seem to spin down below 1GHz. Also note that this is with an actual desktop running with everything: it could very well be that some things (I'm looking at you Signal Desktop) take up unreasonable amount of power on their own (hello, 1W/electron, sheesh). Syncthing and containerd (Docker!) also seem to take a good 500mW just sitting there. Beyond my desktop configuration, this could, of course, be a Debian-specific problem; your favorite distribution might be better at power management.

Idle power usage tests Some expansion cards waste energy, even when unused. Here is a summary of the findings from the powerstat page. I also include other devices tested in this page for completeness:
Device Minimum Average Max Stdev Note
Screen, 100% 2.4W 2.6W 2.8W N/A
Screen, 1% 30mW 140mW 250mW N/A
Backlight 1 290mW ? ? ? fairly small, all things considered
Backlight 2 890mW 1.2W 3W? 460mW? geometric progression
Backlight 3 1.69W 1.5W 1.8W? 390mW? significant power use
Radios 100mW 250mW N/A N/A
USB-C N/A N/A N/A N/A negligible power drain
USB-A 10mW 10mW ? 10mW almost negligible
DisplayPort 300mW 390mW 600mW N/A not passive
HDMI 380mW 440mW 1W? 20mW not passive
1TB SSD 1.65W 1.79W 2W 12mW significant, probably higher when busy
MicroSD 1.6W 3W 6W 1.93W highest power usage, possibly even higher when busy
Ethernet 1.69W 1.64W 1.76W N/A comparable to the SSD card
So it looks like all expansion cards but the USB-C ones are active, i.e. they draw power with idle. The USB-A cards are the least concern, sucking out 10mW, pretty much within the margin of error. But both the DisplayPort and HDMI do take a few hundred miliwatts. It looks like USB-A connectors have this fundamental flaw that they necessarily draw some powers because they lack the power negotiation features of USB-C. At least according to this post:
It seems the USB A must have power going to it all the time, that the old USB 2 and 3 protocols, the USB C only provides power when there is a connection. Old versus new.
Apparently, this is a problem specific to the USB-C to USB-A adapter that ships with the Framework. Some people have actually changed their orders to all USB-C because of this problem, but I'm not sure the problem is as serious as claimed in the forums. I couldn't reproduce the "one watt" power drains suggested elsewhere, at least not repeatedly. (A previous version of this post did show such a power drain, but it was in a less controlled test environment than the series of more rigorous tests above.) The worst offenders are the storage cards: the SSD drive takes at least one watt of power and the MicroSD card seems to want to take all the way up to 6 watts of power, both just sitting there doing nothing. This confirms claims of 1.4W for the SSD (but not 5W) power usage found elsewhere. The former post has instructions on how to disable the card in software. The MicroSD card has been reported as using 2 watts, but I've seen it as high as 6 watts, which is pretty damning. The Framework team has a beta update for the DisplayPort adapter but currently only for Windows (LVFS technically possible, "under investigation"). A USB-A firmware update is also under investigation. It is therefore likely at least some of those power management issues will eventually be fixed. Note that the upcoming Ethernet card has a reported 2-8W power usage, depending on traffic. I did my own power usage tests in powerstat-wayland and they seem lower than 2W. The upcoming 6.2 Linux kernel might also improve battery usage when idle, see this Phoronix article for details, likely in early 2023.

Idle power usage tests under Wayland Update: I redid those tests under Wayland, see powerstat-wayland for details. The TL;DR: is that power consumption is either smaller or similar.

Idle power usage tests, 3.06 beta BIOS I redid the idle tests after the 3.06 beta BIOS update and ended up with this results:
Device Minimum Average Max Stdev Note
Baseline 1.96W 2.01W 2.11W 30mW 1 USB-C, screen off, backlight off, no radios
2 USB-C 1.95W 2.16W 3.69W 430mW USB-C confirmed as mostly passive...
3 USB-C 1.95W 2.16W 3.69W 430mW ... although with extra stdev
1TB SSD 3.72W 3.85W 4.62W 200mW unchanged from before upgrade
1 USB-A 1.97W 2.18W 4.02W 530mW unchanged
2 USB-A 1.97W 2.00W 2.08W 30mW unchanged
3 USB-A 1.94W 1.99W 2.03W 20mW unchanged
MicroSD w/o card 3.54W 3.58W 3.71W 40mW significant improvement! 2-3W power saving!
MicroSD w/ card 3.53W 3.72W 5.23W 370mW new measurement! increased deviation
DisplayPort 2.28W 2.31W 2.37W 20mW unchanged
1 HDMI 2.43W 2.69W 4.53W 460mW unchanged
2 HDMI 2.53W 2.59W 2.67W 30mW unchanged
External USB 3.85W 3.89W 3.94W 30mW new result
Ethernet 3.60W 3.70W 4.91W 230mW unchanged
Note that the table summary is different than the previous table: here we show the absolute numbers while the previous table was doing a confusing attempt at showing relative (to the baseline) numbers. Conclusion: the 3.06 BIOS update did not significantly change idle power usage stats except for the MicroSD card which has significantly improved. The new "external USB" test is also interesting: it shows how the provided 1TB SSD card performs (admirably) compared to existing devices. The other new result is the MicroSD card with a card which, interestingly, uses less power than the 1TB SSD drive.

Standby battery usage I wrote some quick hack to evaluate how much power is used during sleep. Apparently, this is one of the areas that should have improved since the first Framework model, let's find out. My baseline for comparison is the Purism laptop, which, in 10 minutes, went from this: 
sep 28 11:19:45 angela systemd-sleep[209379]: /sys/class/power_supply/BAT/charge_now                      =   6045 [mAh]
... to this: 
sep 28 11:29:47 angela systemd-sleep[209725]: /sys/class/power_supply/BAT/charge_now                      =   6037 [mAh]
That's 8mAh per 10 minutes (and 2 seconds), or 48mA, or, with this battery, about 127 hours or roughly 5 days of standby. Not bad! In comparison, here is my really old x220, before: 
sep 29 22:13:54 emma systemd-sleep[176315]: /sys/class/power_supply/BAT0/energy_now                     =   5070 [mWh]
... after: 
sep 29 22:23:54 emma systemd-sleep[176486]: /sys/class/power_supply/BAT0/energy_now                     =   4980 [mWh]
... which is 90 mwH in 10 minutes, or a whopping 540mA, which was possibly okay when this battery was new (62000 mAh, so about 100 hours, or about 5 days), but this battery is almost dead and has only 5210 mAh when full, so only 10 hours standby. And here is the Framework performing a similar test, before: 
sep 29 22:27:04 angela systemd-sleep[4515]: /sys/class/power_supply/BAT1/charge_full                    =   3518 [mAh]
sep 29 22:27:04 angela systemd-sleep[4515]: /sys/class/power_supply/BAT1/charge_now                     =   2861 [mAh]
... after: 
sep 29 22:37:08 angela systemd-sleep[4743]: /sys/class/power_supply/BAT1/charge_now                     =   2812 [mAh]
... which is 49mAh in a little over 10 minutes (and 4 seconds), or 292mA, much more than the Purism, but half of the X220. At this rate, the battery would last on standby only 12 hours!! That is pretty bad. Note that this was done with the following expansion cards:
  • 2 USB-C
  • 1 1TB SSD drive
  • 1 USB-A with a hub connected to it, with keyboard and LAN
Preliminary tests without the hub (over one minute) show that it doesn't significantly affect this power consumption (300mA). This guide also suggests booting with nvme.noacpi=1 but this still gives me about 5mAh/min (or 300mA). Adding mem_sleep_default=deep to the kernel command line does make a difference. Before: 
sep 29 23:03:11 angela systemd-sleep[3699]: /sys/class/power_supply/BAT1/charge_now                     =   2544 [mAh]
... after: 
sep 29 23:04:25 angela systemd-sleep[4039]: /sys/class/power_supply/BAT1/charge_now                     =   2542 [mAh]
... which is 2mAh in 74 seconds, which is 97mA, brings us to a more reasonable 36 hours, or a day and a half. It's still above the x220 power usage, and more than an order of magnitude more than the Purism laptop. It's also far from the 0.4% promised by upstream, which would be 14mA for the 3500mAh battery. It should also be noted that this "deep" sleep mode is a little more disruptive than regular sleep. As you can see by the timing, it took more than 10 seconds for the laptop to resume, which feels a little alarming as your banging the keyboard to bring it back to life. You can confirm the current sleep mode with: 
# cat /sys/power/mem_sleep
s2idle [deep]
In the above, deep is selected. You can change it on the fly with: 
printf s2idle > /sys/power/mem_sleep
Here's another test: 
sep 30 22:25:50 angela systemd-sleep[32207]: /sys/class/power_supply/BAT1/charge_now                     =   1619 [mAh]
sep 30 22:31:30 angela systemd-sleep[32516]: /sys/class/power_supply/BAT1/charge_now                     =   1613 [mAh]
... better! 6 mAh in about 6 minutes, works out to 63.5mA, so more than two days standby. A longer test: 
oct 01 09:22:56 angela systemd-sleep[62978]: /sys/class/power_supply/BAT1/charge_now                     =   3327 [mAh]
oct 01 12:47:35 angela systemd-sleep[63219]: /sys/class/power_supply/BAT1/charge_now                     =   3147 [mAh]
That's 180mAh in about 3.5h, 52mA! Now at 66h, or almost 3 days. I wasn't sure why I was seeing such fluctuations in those tests, but as it turns out, expansion card power tests show that they do significantly affect power usage, especially the SSD drive, which can take up to two full watts of power even when idle. I didn't control for expansion cards in the above tests running them with whatever card I had plugged in without paying attention so it's likely the cause of the high power usage and fluctuations. It might be possible to work around this problem by disabling USB devices before suspend. TODO. See also this post. In the meantime, I have been able to get much better suspend performance by unplugging all modules. Then I get this result: 
oct 04 11:15:38 angela systemd-sleep[257571]: /sys/class/power_supply/BAT1/charge_now                     =   3203 [mAh]
oct 04 15:09:32 angela systemd-sleep[257866]: /sys/class/power_supply/BAT1/charge_now                     =   3145 [mAh]
Which is 14.8mA! Almost exactly the number promised by Framework! With a full battery, that means a 10 days suspend time. This is actually pretty good, and far beyond what I was expecting when starting down this journey. So, once the expansion cards are unplugged, suspend power usage is actually quite reasonable. More detailed standby tests are available in the standby-tests page, with a summary below. There is also some hope that the Chromebook edition specifically designed with a specification of 14 days standby time could bring some firmware improvements back down to the normal line. Some of those issues were reported upstream in April 2022, but there doesn't seem to have been any progress there since. TODO: one final solution here is suspend-then-hibernate, which Windows uses for this TODO: consider implementing the S0ix sleep states , see also troubleshooting TODO: consider https://github.com/intel/pm-graph

Standby expansion cards test results This table is a summary of the more extensive standby-tests I have performed:
Device Wattage Amperage Days Note
baseline 0.25W 16mA 9 sleep=deep nvme.noacpi=1
s2idle 0.29W 18.9mA ~7 sleep=s2idle nvme.noacpi=1
normal nvme 0.31W 20mA ~7 sleep=s2idle without nvme.noacpi=1
1 USB-C 0.23W 15mA ~10
2 USB-C 0.23W 14.9mA same as above
1 USB-A 0.75W 48.7mA 3 +500mW (!!) for the first USB-A card!
2 USB-A 1.11W 72mA 2 +360mW
3 USB-A 1.48W 96mA <2 +370mW
1TB SSD 0.49W 32mA <5 +260mW
MicroSD 0.52W 34mA ~4 +290mW
DisplayPort 0.85W 55mA <3 +620mW (!!)
1 HDMI 0.58W 38mA ~4 +250mW
2 HDMI 0.65W 42mA <4 +70mW (?)
Conclusions:
  • USB-C cards take no extra power on suspend, possibly less than empty slots, more testing required
  • USB-A cards take a lot more power on suspend (300-500mW) than on regular idle (~10mW, almost negligible)
  • 1TB SSD and MicroSD cards seem to take a reasonable amount of power (260-290mW), compared to their runtime equivalents (1-6W!)
  • DisplayPort takes a surprising lot of power (620mW), almost double its average runtime usage (390mW)
  • HDMI cards take, surprisingly, less power (250mW) in standby than the DP card (620mW)
  • and oddly, a second card adds less power usage (70mW?!) than the first, maybe a circuit is used by both?
A discussion of those results is in this forum post.

Standby expansion cards test results, 3.06 beta BIOS Framework recently (2022-11-07) announced that they will publish a firmware upgrade to address some of the USB-C issues, including power management. This could positively affect the above result, improving both standby and runtime power usage. The update came out in December 2022 and I redid my analysis with the following results:
Device Wattage Amperage Days Note
baseline 0.25W 16mA 9 no cards, same as before upgrade
1 USB-C 0.25W 16mA 9 same as before
2 USB-C 0.25W 16mA 9 same
1 USB-A 0.80W 62mA 3 +550mW!! worse than before
2 USB-A 1.12W 73mA <2 +320mW, on top of the above, bad!
Ethernet 0.62W 40mA 3-4 new result, decent
1TB SSD 0.52W 34mA 4 a bit worse than before (+2mA)
MicroSD 0.51W 22mA 4 same
DisplayPort 0.52W 34mA 4+ upgrade improved by 300mW
1 HDMI ? 38mA ? same
2 HDMI ? 45mA ? a bit worse than before (+3mA)
Normal 1.08W 70mA ~2 Ethernet, 2 USB-C, USB-A
Full results in standby-tests-306. The big takeaway for me is that the update did not improve power usage on the USB-A ports which is a big problem for my use case. There is a notable improvement on the DisplayPort power consumption which brings it more in line with the HDMI connector, but it still doesn't properly turn off on suspend either. Even worse, the USB-A ports now sometimes fails to resume after suspend, which is pretty annoying. This is a known problem that will hopefully get fixed in the final release.

Battery wear protection The BIOS has an option to limit charge to 80% to mitigate battery wear. There's a way to control the embedded controller from runtime with fw-ectool, partly documented here. The command would be: 
sudo ectool fwchargelimit 80
I looked at building this myself but failed to run it. I opened a RFP in Debian so that we can ship this in Debian, and also documented my work there. Note that there is now a counter that tracks charge/discharge cycles. It's visible in tlp-stat -b, which is a nice improvement: 
root@angela:/home/anarcat# tlp-stat -b
--- TLP 1.5.0 --------------------------------------------
+++ Battery Care
Plugin: generic
Supported features: none available
+++ Battery Status: BAT1
/sys/class/power_supply/BAT1/manufacturer                   = NVT
/sys/class/power_supply/BAT1/model_name                     = Framewo
/sys/class/power_supply/BAT1/cycle_count                    =      3
/sys/class/power_supply/BAT1/charge_full_design             =   3572 [mAh]
/sys/class/power_supply/BAT1/charge_full                    =   3541 [mAh]
/sys/class/power_supply/BAT1/charge_now                     =   1625 [mAh]
/sys/class/power_supply/BAT1/current_now                    =    178 [mA]
/sys/class/power_supply/BAT1/status                         = Discharging
/sys/class/power_supply/BAT1/charge_control_start_threshold = (not available)
/sys/class/power_supply/BAT1/charge_control_end_threshold   = (not available)
Charge                                                      =   45.9 [%]
Capacity                                                    =   99.1 [%]
One thing that is still missing is the charge threshold data (the (not available) above). There's been some work to make that accessible in August, stay tuned? This would also make it possible implement hysteresis support.

Ethernet expansion card The Framework ethernet expansion card is a fancy little doodle: "2.5Gbit/s and 10/100/1000Mbit/s Ethernet", the "clear housing lets you peek at the RTL8156 controller that powers it". Which is another way to say "we didn't completely finish prod on this one, so it kind of looks like we 3D-printed this in the shop".... The card is a little bulky, but I guess that's inevitable considering the RJ-45 form factor when compared to the thin Framework laptop. I have had a serious issue when trying it at first: the link LEDs just wouldn't come up. I made a full bug report in the forum and with upstream support, but eventually figured it out on my own. It's (of course) a power saving issue: if you reboot the machine, the links come up when the laptop is running the BIOS POST check and even when the Linux kernel boots. I first thought that the problem is likely related to the powertop service which I run at boot time to tweak some power saving settings. It seems like this: 
echo 'on' > '/sys/bus/usb/devices/4-2/power/control'
... is a good workaround to bring the card back online. You can even return to power saving mode and the card will still work: 
echo 'auto' > '/sys/bus/usb/devices/4-2/power/control'
Further research by Matt_Hartley from the Framework Team found this issue in the tlp tracker that shows how the USB_AUTOSUSPEND setting enables the power saving even if the driver doesn't support it, which, in retrospect, just sounds like a bad idea. To quote that issue:
By default, USB power saving is active in the kernel, but not force-enabled for incompatible drivers. That is, devices that support suspension will suspend, drivers that do not, will not.
So the fix is actually to uninstall tlp or disable that setting by adding this to /etc/tlp.conf: 
USB_AUTOSUSPEND=0
... but that disables auto-suspend on all USB devices, which may hurt other power usage performance. I have found that a a combination of: 
USB_AUTOSUSPEND=1
USB_DENYLIST="0bda:8156"
and this on the kernel commandline: 
usbcore.quirks=0bda:8156:k
... actually does work correctly. I now have this in my /etc/default/grub.d/framework-tweaks.cfg file: 
# net.ifnames=0: normal interface names ffs (e.g. eth0, wlan0, not wlp166
s0)
# nvme.noacpi=1: reduce SSD disk power usage (not working)
# mem_sleep_default=deep: reduce power usage during sleep (not working)
# usbcore.quirk is a workaround for the ethernet card suspend bug: https:
//guides.frame.work/Guide/Fedora+37+Installation+on+the+Framework+Laptop/
108?lang=en
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="net.ifnames=0 nvme.noacpi=1 mem_sleep_default=deep usbcore.quirks=0bda:8156:k"
# fix the resolution in grub for fonts to not be tiny
GRUB_GFXMODE=1024x768
Other than that, I haven't been able to max out the card because I don't have other 2.5Gbit/s equipment at home, which is strangely satisfying. But running against my Turris Omnia router, I could pretty much max a gigabit fairly easily: 
[ ID] Interval           Transfer     Bitrate         Retr
[  5]   0.00-10.00  sec  1.09 GBytes   937 Mbits/sec  238             sender
[  5]   0.00-10.00  sec  1.09 GBytes   934 Mbits/sec                  receiver
The card doesn't require any proprietary firmware blobs which is surprising. Other than the power saving issues, it just works. In my power tests (see powerstat-wayland), the Ethernet card seems to use about 1.6W of power idle, without link, in the above "quirky" configuration where the card is functional but without autosuspend.

Proprietary firmware blobs The framework does need proprietary firmware to operate. Specifically:
  • the WiFi network card shipped with the DIY kit is a AX210 card that requires a 5.19 kernel or later, and the firmware-iwlwifi non-free firmware package
  • the Bluetooth adapter also loads the firmware-iwlwifi package (untested)
  • the graphics work out of the box without firmware, but certain power management features come only with special proprietary firmware, normally shipped in the firmware-misc-nonfree but currently missing from the package
Note that, at the time of writing, the latest i915 firmware from linux-firmware has a serious bug where loading all the accessible firmware results in noticeable I estimate 200-500ms lag between the keyboard (not the mouse!) and the display. Symptoms also include tearing and shearing of windows, it's pretty nasty. One workaround is to delete the two affected firmware files: 
cd /lib/firmware && rm adlp_guc_70.1.1.bin adlp_guc_69.0.3.bin
update-initramfs -u
You will get the following warning during build, which is good as it means the problematic firmware is disabled: 
W: Possible missing firmware /lib/firmware/i915/adlp_guc_69.0.3.bin for module i915
W: Possible missing firmware /lib/firmware/i915/adlp_guc_70.1.1.bin for module i915
But then it also means that critical firmware isn't loaded, which means, among other things, a higher battery drain. I was able to move from 8.5-10W down to the 7W range after making the firmware work properly. This is also after turning the backlight all the way down, as that takes a solid 2-3W in full blast. The proper fix is to use some compositing manager. I ended up using compton with the following systemd unit: 
[Unit]
Description=start compositing manager
PartOf=graphical-session.target
ConditionHost=angela
[Service]
Type=exec
ExecStart=compton --show-all-xerrors --backend glx --vsync opengl-swc
Restart=on-failure
[Install]
RequiredBy=graphical-session.target
compton is orphaned however, so you might be tempted to use picom instead, but in my experience the latter uses much more power (1-2W extra, similar experience). I also tried compiz but it would just crash with: 
anarcat@angela:~$ compiz --replace
compiz (core) - Warn: No XI2 extension
compiz (core) - Error: Another composite manager is already running on screen: 0
compiz (core) - Fatal: No manageable screens found on display :0
When running from the base session, I would get this instead: 
compiz (core) - Warn: No XI2 extension
compiz (core) - Error: Couldn't load plugin 'ccp'
compiz (core) - Error: Couldn't load plugin 'ccp'
Thanks to EmanueleRocca for figuring all that out. See also this discussion about power management on the Framework forum. Note that Wayland environments do not require any special configuration here and actually work better, see my Wayland migration notes for details.
Also note that the iwlwifi firmware also looks incomplete. Even with the package installed, I get those errors in dmesg: 
[   19.534429] Intel(R) Wireless WiFi driver for Linux
[   19.534691] iwlwifi 0000:a6:00.0: enabling device (0000 -> 0002)
[   19.541867] iwlwifi 0000:a6:00.0: firmware: failed to load iwlwifi-ty-a0-gf-a0-72.ucode (-2)
[   19.541881] iwlwifi 0000:a6:00.0: firmware: failed to load iwlwifi-ty-a0-gf-a0-72.ucode (-2)
[   19.541882] iwlwifi 0000:a6:00.0: Direct firmware load for iwlwifi-ty-a0-gf-a0-72.ucode failed with error -2
[   19.541890] iwlwifi 0000:a6:00.0: firmware: failed to load iwlwifi-ty-a0-gf-a0-71.ucode (-2)
[   19.541895] iwlwifi 0000:a6:00.0: firmware: failed to load iwlwifi-ty-a0-gf-a0-71.ucode (-2)
[   19.541896] iwlwifi 0000:a6:00.0: Direct firmware load for iwlwifi-ty-a0-gf-a0-71.ucode failed with error -2
[   19.541903] iwlwifi 0000:a6:00.0: firmware: failed to load iwlwifi-ty-a0-gf-a0-70.ucode (-2)
[   19.541907] iwlwifi 0000:a6:00.0: firmware: failed to load iwlwifi-ty-a0-gf-a0-70.ucode (-2)
[   19.541908] iwlwifi 0000:a6:00.0: Direct firmware load for iwlwifi-ty-a0-gf-a0-70.ucode failed with error -2
[   19.541913] iwlwifi 0000:a6:00.0: firmware: failed to load iwlwifi-ty-a0-gf-a0-69.ucode (-2)
[   19.541916] iwlwifi 0000:a6:00.0: firmware: failed to load iwlwifi-ty-a0-gf-a0-69.ucode (-2)
[   19.541917] iwlwifi 0000:a6:00.0: Direct firmware load for iwlwifi-ty-a0-gf-a0-69.ucode failed with error -2
[   19.541922] iwlwifi 0000:a6:00.0: firmware: failed to load iwlwifi-ty-a0-gf-a0-68.ucode (-2)
[   19.541926] iwlwifi 0000:a6:00.0: firmware: failed to load iwlwifi-ty-a0-gf-a0-68.ucode (-2)
[   19.541927] iwlwifi 0000:a6:00.0: Direct firmware load for iwlwifi-ty-a0-gf-a0-68.ucode failed with error -2
[   19.541933] iwlwifi 0000:a6:00.0: firmware: failed to load iwlwifi-ty-a0-gf-a0-67.ucode (-2)
[   19.541937] iwlwifi 0000:a6:00.0: firmware: failed to load iwlwifi-ty-a0-gf-a0-67.ucode (-2)
[   19.541937] iwlwifi 0000:a6:00.0: Direct firmware load for iwlwifi-ty-a0-gf-a0-67.ucode failed with error -2
[   19.544244] iwlwifi 0000:a6:00.0: firmware: direct-loading firmware iwlwifi-ty-a0-gf-a0-66.ucode
[   19.544257] iwlwifi 0000:a6:00.0: api flags index 2 larger than supported by driver
[   19.544270] iwlwifi 0000:a6:00.0: TLV_FW_FSEQ_VERSION: FSEQ Version: 0.63.2.1
[   19.544523] iwlwifi 0000:a6:00.0: firmware: failed to load iwl-debug-yoyo.bin (-2)
[   19.544528] iwlwifi 0000:a6:00.0: firmware: failed to load iwl-debug-yoyo.bin (-2)
[   19.544530] iwlwifi 0000:a6:00.0: loaded firmware version 66.55c64978.0 ty-a0-gf-a0-66.ucode op_mode iwlmvm
Some of those are available in the latest upstream firmware package (iwlwifi-ty-a0-gf-a0-71.ucode, -68, and -67), but not all (e.g. iwlwifi-ty-a0-gf-a0-72.ucode is missing) . It's unclear what those do or don't, as the WiFi seems to work well without them. I still copied them in from the latest linux-firmware package in the hope they would help with power management, but I did not notice a change after loading them. There are also multiple knobs on the iwlwifi and iwlmvm drivers. The latter has a power_schmeme setting which defaults to 2 (balanced), setting it to 3 (low power) could improve battery usage as well, in theory. The iwlwifi driver also has power_save (defaults to disabled) and power_level (1-5, defaults to 1) settings. See also the output of modinfo iwlwifi and modinfo iwlmvm for other driver options.

Graphics acceleration After loading the latest upstream firmware and setting up a compositing manager (compton, above), I tested the classic glxgears. Running in a window gives me odd results, as the gears basically grind to a halt: 
Running synchronized to the vertical refresh.  The framerate should be
approximately the same as the monitor refresh rate.
137 frames in 5.1 seconds = 26.984 FPS
27 frames in 5.4 seconds =  5.022 FPS
Ouch. 5FPS! But interestingly, once the window is in full screen, it does hit the monitor refresh rate: 
300 frames in 5.0 seconds = 60.000 FPS
I'm not really a gamer and I'm not normally using any of that fancy graphics acceleration stuff (except maybe my browser does?). I installed intel-gpu-tools for the intel_gpu_top command to confirm the GPU was engaged when doing those simulations. A nice find. Other useful diagnostic tools include glxgears and glxinfo (in mesa-utils) and (vainfo in vainfo). Following to this post, I also made sure to have those settings in my about:config in Firefox, or, in user.js: 
user_pref("media.ffmpeg.vaapi.enabled", true);
Note that the guide suggests many other settings to tweak, but those might actually be overkill, see this comment and its parents. I did try forcing hardware acceleration by setting gfx.webrender.all to true, but everything became choppy and weird. The guide also mentions installing the intel-media-driver package, but I could not find that in Debian. The Arch wiki has, as usual, an excellent reference on hardware acceleration in Firefox.

Chromium / Signal desktop bugs It looks like both Chromium and Signal Desktop misbehave with my compositor setup (compton + i3). The fix is to add a persistent flag to Chromium. In Arch, it's conveniently in ~/.config/chromium-flags.conf but that doesn't actually work in Debian. I had to put the flag in /etc/chromium.d/disable-compositing, like this: 
export CHROMIUM_FLAGS="$CHROMIUM_FLAGS --disable-gpu-compositing"
It's possible another one of the hundreds of flags might fix this issue better, but I don't really have time to go through this entire, incomplete, and unofficial list (!?!). Signal Desktop is a similar problem, and doesn't reuse those flags (because of course it doesn't). Instead I had to rewrite the wrapper script in /usr/local/bin/signal-desktop to use this instead: 
exec /usr/bin/flatpak run --branch=stable --arch=x86_64 org.signal.Signal --disable-gpu-compositing "$@"
This was mostly done in this Puppet commit. I haven't figured out the root of this problem. I did try using picom and xcompmgr; they both suffer from the same issue. Another Debian testing user on Wayland told me they haven't seen this problem, so hopefully this can be fixed by switching to wayland.

Graphics card hangs I believe I might have this bug which results in a total graphical hang for 15-30 seconds. It's fairly rare so it's not too disruptive, but when it does happen, it's pretty alarming. The comments on that bug report are encouraging though: it seems this is a bug in either mesa or the Intel graphics driver, which means many people have this problem so it's likely to be fixed. There's actually a merge request on mesa already (2022-12-29). It could also be that bug because the error message I get is actually: 
Jan 20 12:49:10 angela kernel: Asynchronous wait on fence 0000:00:02.0:sway[104431]:cb0ae timed out (hint:intel_atomic_commit_ready [i915]) 
Jan 20 12:49:15 angela kernel: i915 0000:00:02.0: [drm] GPU HANG: ecode 12:0:00000000 
Jan 20 12:49:15 angela kernel: i915 0000:00:02.0: [drm] Resetting chip for stopped heartbeat on rcs0 
Jan 20 12:49:15 angela kernel: i915 0000:00:02.0: [drm] GuC firmware i915/adlp_guc_70.1.1.bin version 70.1 
Jan 20 12:49:15 angela kernel: i915 0000:00:02.0: [drm] HuC firmware i915/tgl_huc_7.9.3.bin version 7.9 
Jan 20 12:49:15 angela kernel: i915 0000:00:02.0: [drm] HuC authenticated 
Jan 20 12:49:15 angela kernel: i915 0000:00:02.0: [drm] GuC submission enabled 
Jan 20 12:49:15 angela kernel: i915 0000:00:02.0: [drm] GuC SLPC enabled
It's a solid 30 seconds graphical hang. Maybe the keyboard and everything else keeps working. The latter bug report is quite long, with many comments, but this one from January 2023 seems to say that Sway 1.8 fixed the problem. There's also an earlier patch to add an extra kernel parameter that supposedly fixes that too. There's all sorts of other workarounds in there, for example this: 
echo "options i915 enable_dc=1 enable_guc_loading=1 enable_guc_submission=1 edp_vswing=0 enable_guc=2 enable_fbc=1 enable_psr=1 disable_power_well=0"   sudo tee /etc/modprobe.d/i915.conf
from this comment... So that one is unsolved, as far as the upstream drivers are concerned, but maybe could be fixed through Sway.

Weird USB hangs / graphical glitches I have had weird connectivity glitches better described in this post, but basically: my USB keyboard and mice (connected over a USB hub) drop keys, lag a lot or hang, and I get visual glitches. The fix was to tighten the screws around the CPU on the motherboard (!), which is, thankfully, a rather simple repair.

USB docks are hell Note that the monitors are hooked up to angela through a USB-C / Thunderbolt dock from Cable Matters, with the lovely name of 201053-SIL. It has issues, see this blog post for an in-depth discussion.

Shipping details I ordered the Framework in August 2022 and received it about a month later, which is sooner than expected because the August batch was late. People (including me) expected this to have an impact on the September batch, but it seems Framework have been able to fix the delivery problems and keep up with the demand. As of early 2023, their website announces that laptops ship "within 5 days". I have myself ordered a few expansion cards in November 2022, and they shipped on the same day, arriving 3-4 days later.

The supply pipeline There are basically 6 steps in the Framework shipping pipeline, each (except the last) accompanied with an email notification:
  1. pre-order
  2. preparing batch
  3. preparing order
  4. payment complete
  5. shipping
  6. (received)
This comes from the crowdsourced spreadsheet, which should be updated when the status changes here. I was part of the "third batch" of the 12th generation laptop, which was supposed to ship in September. It ended up arriving on my door step on September 27th, about 33 days after ordering. It seems current orders are not processed in "batches", but in real time, see this blog post for details on shipping.

Shipping trivia I don't know about the others, but my laptop shipped through no less than four different airplane flights. Here are the hops it took: I can't quite figure out how to calculate exactly how much mileage that is, but it's huge. The ride through Alaska is surprising enough but the bounce back through Winnipeg is especially weird. I guess the route happens that way because of Fedex shipping hubs. There was a related oddity when I had my Purism laptop shipped: it left from the west coast and seemed to enter on an endless, two week long road trip across the continental US.

Other resources

11 March 2023

Dirk Eddelbuettel: pkgKitten 0.2.3 on CRAN: Minor Update

kitten A new release 0.2.3 of pkgKitten arrived on CRAN earlier, and will be uploaded to Debian. pkgKitten makes it simple to create new R packages via a simple function invocation. A wrapper kitten.r exists in the littler package to make it even easier. This release improves the created Description: , and updated some of the continuous integration.

Changes in version 0.2.3 (2023-03-11)
  • Small improvement to generated Description: field and Title:
  • Maintenance for continuous integration setup

More details about the package are at the pkgKitten webpage, the pkgKitten docs site, and the pkgKitten GitHub repo. Courtesy of my CRANberries site, there is also a diffstat report for this release. 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.

10 March 2023

Antoine Beaupr : how to audit for open services with iproute2

The computer world has a tendency of reinventing the wheel once in a while. I am not a fan of that process, but sometimes I just have to bite the bullet and adapt to change. This post explains how I adapted to one particular change: the netstat to sockstat transition. I used to do this to show which processes where listening on which port on a server: 
netstat -anpe
It was a handy mnemonic as, in France, ANPE was the agency responsible for the unemployed (basically). That would list all sockets (-a), not resolve hostnames (-n, because it's slow), show processes attached to the socket (-p) with extra info like the user (-e). This still works, but sometimes fail to find the actual process hooked to the port. Plus, it lists a whole bunch of UNIX sockets and non-listening sockets, which are generally irrelevant for such an audit. What I really wanted to use was really something like: 
netstat -pleunt   sort
... which has the "pleut" mnemonic ("rains", but plural, which makes no sense and would be badly spelled anyway). That also only lists listening (-l) and network sockets, specifically UDP (-u) and TCP (-t). But enough with the legacy, let's try the brave new world of sockstat which has the unfortunate acronym ss. The equivalent sockstat command to the above is: 
ss -pleuntO
It's similar to the above, except we need the -O flag otherwise ss does that confusing thing where it splits the output on multiple lines. But I actually use: 
ss -plunt0
... i.e. without the -e as the information it gives (cgroup, fd number, etc) is not much more useful than what's already provided with -p (service and UID). All of the above also show sockets that are not actually a concern because they only listen on localhost. Those one should be filtered out. So now we embark into that wild filtering ride. This is going to list all open sockets and show the port number and service: 
ss -pluntO --no-header   sed 's/^\([a-z]*\) *[A-Z]* *[0-9]* [0-9]* *[0-9]* */\1/'   sed 's/^[^:]*:\(:\]:\)\?//;s/\([0-9]*\) *[^ ]*/\1\t/;s/,fd=[0-9]*//'   sort -gu
For example on my desktop, it looks like: 
anarcat@angela:~$ sudo ss -pluntO --no-header   sed 's/^\([a-z]*\) *[A-Z]* *[0-9]* [0-9]* *[0-9]* */\1/'   sed 's/^[^:]*:\(:\]:\)\?//;s/\([0-9]*\) *[^ ]*/\1\t/;s/,fd=[0-9]*//'   sort -gu
          [::]:* users:(("unbound",pid=1864))        
22  users:(("sshd",pid=1830))           
25  users:(("master",pid=3150))        
53  users:(("unbound",pid=1864))        
323 users:(("chronyd",pid=1876))        
500 users:(("charon",pid=2817))        
631 users:(("cups-browsed",pid=2744))   
2628    users:(("dictd",pid=2825))          
4001    users:(("emacs",pid=3578))          
4500    users:(("charon",pid=2817))        
5353    users:(("avahi-daemon",pid=1423))  
6600    users:(("systemd",pid=3461))       
8384    users:(("syncthing",pid=232169))   
9050    users:(("tor",pid=2857))            
21027   users:(("syncthing",pid=232169))   
22000   users:(("syncthing",pid=232169))   
33231   users:(("syncthing",pid=232169))   
34953   users:(("syncthing",pid=232169))   
35770   users:(("syncthing",pid=232169))   
44944   users:(("syncthing",pid=232169))   
47337   users:(("syncthing",pid=232169))   
48903   users:(("mosh-client",pid=234126))  
52774   users:(("syncthing",pid=232169))   
52938   users:(("avahi-daemon",pid=1423))  
54029   users:(("avahi-daemon",pid=1423))  
anarcat@angela:~$
But that doesn't filter out the localhost stuff, lots of false positive (like emacs, above). And this is where it gets... not fun, as you need to match "localhost" but we don't resolve names, so you need to do some fancy pattern matching: 
ss -pluntO --no-header   \
    sed 's/^\([a-z]*\) *[A-Z]* *[0-9]* [0-9]* *[0-9]* */\1/;s/^tcp//;s/^udp//'   \
    grep -v -e '^\[fe80::' -e '^127.0.0.1' -e '^\[::1\]' -e '^192\.' -e '^172\.'   \
    sed 's/^[^:]*:\(:\]:\)\?//;s/\([0-9]*\) *[^ ]*/\1\t/;s/,fd=[0-9]*//'  \
    sort -gu
This is kind of horrible, but it works, those are the actually open ports on my machine: 
anarcat@angela:~$ sudo ss -pluntO --no-header           sed 's/^\([a-
z]*\) *[A-Z]* *[0-9]* [0-9]* *[0-9]* */\1/;s/^tcp//;s/^udp//'        
   grep -v -e '^\[fe80::' -e '^127.0.0.1' -e '^\[::1\]' -e '^192\.' -
e '^172\.'           sed 's/^[^:]*:\(:\]:\)\?//;s/\([0-9]*\) *[^ ]*/\
1\t/;s/,fd=[0-9]*//'          sort -gu
22  users:(("sshd",pid=1830))           
500 users:(("charon",pid=2817))        
631 users:(("cups-browsed",pid=2744))   
4500    users:(("charon",pid=2817))        
5353    users:(("avahi-daemon",pid=1423))  
6600    users:(("systemd",pid=3461))       
21027   users:(("syncthing",pid=232169))   
22000   users:(("syncthing",pid=232169))   
34953   users:(("syncthing",pid=232169))   
35770   users:(("syncthing",pid=232169))   
48903   users:(("mosh-client",pid=234126))  
52938   users:(("avahi-daemon",pid=1423))  
54029   users:(("avahi-daemon",pid=1423))
Surely there must be a better way. It turns out that lsof can do some of this, and it's relatively straightforward. This lists all listening TCP sockets: 
lsof -iTCP -sTCP:LISTEN +c 15   grep -v localhost   sort
A shorter version from Adam Shand is: 
lsof -i @localhost
... which basically replaces the grep -v localhost line. In theory, this would do the equivalent on UDP 
lsof -iUDP -sUDP:^Idle
... but in reality, it looks like lsof on Linux can't figure out the state of a UDP socket: 
lsof: no UDP state names available: UDP:^Idle
... which, honestly, I'm baffled by. It's strange because ss can figure out the state of those sockets, heck it's how -l vs -a works after all. So we need something else to show listening UDP sockets. The following actually looks pretty good after all: 
ss -pluO
That will list localhost sockets of course, so we can explicitly ask ss to resolve those and filter them out with something like: 
ss -plurO   grep -v localhost
oh, and look here! ss supports pattern matching, so we can actually tell it to ignore localhost directly, which removes that horrible sed line we used earlier: 
ss -pluntO '! ( src = localhost )'
That actually gives a pretty readable output. One annoyance is we can't really modify the columns here, so we still need some god-awful sed hacking on top of that to get a cleaner output: 
ss -nplutO '! ( src = localhost )'    \
    sed 's/\(udp\ tcp\).*:\([0-9][0-9]*\)/\2\t\1\t/;s/\([0-9][0-9]*\t[udtcp]*\t\)[^u]*users:(("/\1/;s/".*//;s/.*Address:Port.*/Netid\tPort\tProcess/'   \
    sort -nu
That looks horrible and is basically impossible to memorize. But it sure looks nice: 
anarcat@angela:~$ sudo ss -nplutO '! ( src = localhost )'    sed 's/\(udp\ tcp\).*:\([0-9][0-9]*\)/\2\t\1\t/;s/\([0-9][0-9]*\t[udtcp]*\t\)[^u]*users:(("/\1/;s/".*//;s/.*Address:Port.*/Port\tNetid\tProcess/'   sort -nu
Port    Netid   Process
22  tcp sshd
500 udp charon
546 udp NetworkManager
631 udp cups-browsed
4500    udp charon
5353    udp avahi-daemon
6600    tcp systemd
21027   udp syncthing
22000   udp syncthing
34953   udp syncthing
35770   udp syncthing
48903   udp mosh-client
52938   udp avahi-daemon
54029   udp avahi-daemon
Better ideas welcome.

Thorsten Alteholz: My Debian Activities in February 2023

FTP master This month I accepted 284 and rejected 49 packages. The overall number of packages that got accepted was 286. I love this calm and peaceful time now within the Debian project, when everybody only cares for RC bugs and NEW does not grow. Debian LTS This was my hundred-fourth month that I did some work for the Debian LTS initiative, started by Raphael Hertzog at Freexian. This month my all in all workload has been 8h. During that time I uploaded: As I added all missing ELA uploads to the git repository I also had a look at package-operations and added stuff to make my life a bit easier. Debian ELTS This month was the fifty fifth ELTS month. I also made myself familiar with the mandatory git workflow and committed all my packages of this years ELA to the corresponding repository. Debian Astro This month I uploaded improved packages or new versions of: Debian Printing This month I uploaded new versions or improved packages of: As ippsample does not build on i386, I filed a RM bug for this architecture. Maybe in a later upstream release it will be available again on all architectures. I could also close lots of bugs that happen to be fixed upstream, but have not been closed with the upload of the new version. Parts of this work is generously funded by Freexian! Other stuff This month I uploaded improved packages of: The upload of feynmf could only happen due to the help of several people (please see #1029439). Thanks a lot!

9 March 2023

Charles Plessy: If you work at Dreamhost, can you help us?

Update: thanks to the very kind involvment of the widow of our wemaster, we could provide enough private information to Dreamhost, who finally accepted to reset the password and the MFA. We have recovered evrything! Many thanks to everybody who helped us! Due to tragic circumstances, one association that I am part of, Sciencescope got locked out of its account at Dreamhost. Locked out, we can not pay the annual bill. Dreamhost contacted us about the payment, but will not let us recover the access to our account in order to pay. So they will soon close the account. Our website, mailing lists and archives, will be erased. We provided plenty of evidence that we are not scammers and that we are the legitimate owners of the account, but reviewing it is above the pay grade of the custommer support (I don't blame them) and I could not convince them to let somebody higher have a look at our case. If you work at Dreamhost and want to keep us as custommers instead of kicking us like that, please ask the support service in charge of ticket 225948648 to send the recovery URL to the secondary email adddresses (the ones you used to contact us about the bill!) in addition to the primary one (which nobody will read anymore). You can encrypt it for my Debian Developer key 73471499CC60ED9EEE805946C5BD6C8F2295D502 if you worry it gets in wrong hands. If you still have doubts I am available for calls any time. If you know somebody working at Dreamhost can you pass them the message? This would be a big, big, relief for our non-profit association.

Dirk Eddelbuettel: RcppRedis 0.2.3 on CRAN: Maintenance

A new minor release 0.2.3 of our RcppRedis package arrived on CRAN today. RcppRedis is one of several packages connecting R to the fabulous Redis in-memory datastructure store (and much more). RcppRedis does not pretend to be feature complete, but it may do some things faster than the other interfaces, and also offers an optional coupling with MessagePack binary (de)serialization via RcppMsgPack. The package has carried production loads on a trading floor for several years. This update is fairly mechanical. CRAN wants everybody off the C++11 train which is fair game given that it 2023 and most sane and lucky people are facing sane and modern compilers so this makes sense. (And I raise a toast to all those poor souls facing RHEL 7 / CentOS 7 with a compiler from many moons ago: I hear it is a vibrant job market out there so maybe time to make a switch ). As with a few of my other packages, this release simply does away with the imposition of C++11 as the package will compile just fine under C++14 or C++17 (as governed by your version of R). The detailed changes list follows.

Changes in version 0.2.3 (2023-03-08)
  • No longer set a C++ compilation standard as the default choices by R are sufficient for the package
  • Switch include to Rcpp/Rcpp which signals use of all Rcpp features including Modules

Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is also a diffstat report for this release. More information is on the RcppRedis 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.

8 March 2023

Joey Hess: the slink and a half boxed set

Today I stumbled upon this youtube video which takes a retrocomputing look at a product I was involved in creating in 1999. It was fascinating looking back at it, and I realized I've never written down how this boxed set of Debian "slink and a half", an unofficial Debian release, came to be. As best I can remember, the CD in that box was Debian 2.1 ("slink") with the linux kernel updated from 2.0 to 2.2. Specifically, it used VA Linux Systems's patched version of the kernel, which supported their hardware better, but also 2.2 generally supported a lot of hardware much better than 2.0. There were some other small modifications that got rolled back into Debian 2.2. I mostly remember updating the installer to support that kernel, and building CD images. Probably over the course of a few weeks. This was the first time I worked on the (old) Debian installer, and the first time I built a Debian CD. I also edited the O'Rielly book that was included in the boxed set. It was wild when pallet loads of these boxed sets showed up. I think they sold for $19.95 at Fry's, although VA Linux Systems also gave lots of them away at conferences.
Watching the video of the installation, I was struck again and again by pain points, which the video does a good job of highlighting. It was a guided tour of everything about Debian that I wanted to fix in 1999. At each pain point I remembered how we fixed it, often years later, after considerable effort. I remembered how the old installer (the boot-floppies) was mostly moribund with only a couple people able and willing to work on it at all. (The video is right to compare its partitioning with old Linux installers from the early 90's because it was a relic from that era!) I remembered designing a new Debian installer that was more modular so more people could get invested in maintaining smaller pieces of it. It was yes, a second system, and developed too slowly, but was intended to withstand the test of time. It mostly has, since it's used to this day. I remembered how partitioning got automated in new Debian installer, by a new "partman" program being contributed by someone I'd never heard of before, obsoleting some previous attempts we'd made (yay modularity). I remembered how I started the os-prober project, which lets the Debian installer add other OS's that are co-installed on the machine to the boot menu. And how that got picked up even outside of Debian, by eg Red Hat. I remembered working on tasksel soon after that project was started, and all the difficult decisions about what tasks to offer and what software it should install. I remembered how the horrible stream of questions from package after package was to deal with, and how I implemented debconf, which tidied that up, integrated it into the installer's UI, made it automatable, and let novices avoid seeing configuration that was intended for experts. And I remembered writing dpkg-reconfigure, so that those configuration choices could be revisited later. It's quite possible I would not have done most of that if VA Linux Systems had not tasked me with making this CD. The thing about releasing something imperfect into the world is you start to feel a responsibility to improve it...
The main critique in the video specific to this boxed set and not to any other Debian release of this era is that this was a single CD, while 2 CDs were needed for all of Debian at the time. And many people had only dialup internet, so would be stuck very slowly downloading any other software they needed. And likewise those free forever upgrades the box promised. Oh the irony: After starting many of those projects, I left VA Linux Systems and the lands of fast internet, and spent 4 years on dialup. Most of that stuff was developed on dialup, though I did have about a year with better internet at the end to put the finishing touches in the new installer that shipped in Debian 3.1. Yes, the dialup apt-gets were excruciatingly slow. But the upgrades were in fact, free forever.
PS: The video's description includes "it would take many years of effort (primarily from Ubuntu) that would help smooth out many of the rough end of this product". All these years later, I do continue to enjoy people involved in Ubuntu downplaying the extent that it was a reskin of my Debian installer shipped on a CD a few months before Debian could get around to shipping it. Like they say, history doesn't repeat, but it does rhyme. PPS: While researching this blog post, I found an even more obscure, and broken, Debian CD was produced by VA Linux in November 1999. Distributed for free at Comdex by the thousands, this CD lacked the Packages file that is necessary for apt-get to use it. I don't know if any versions of that CD still exist. If you find one, email me and I'll send some instructions I wrote up in 1999 to work around the problem.

Anton Gladky: Boost C++: default for Debian Bookworm will remain 1.74.0

Boost C++ is a popular set of free, open-source C++ libraries that provide developers with powerful tools and functionality to enhance their software development projects. The newest version, 1.81.0, has been available in Debian Bookworm for about a month now, but the default version for boost-dependent packages is still the older 1.74.0. The transition to the newer library has been postponed due to possible regressions that could take more time to resolve. This means that the default version for boost-dependent packages in Debian Bookworm will remain 1.74.0 until after the release. If you re working on your own project, you can use the newest version of Boost C++ (1.81.0) to take advantage of its new features and improvements. Debian Bullseye users can also access Boost C++ 1.81.0 from the bullseye-backports repository. Thanks Freexian for supporting this effort.

Thomas Lange: Launch of new FAI project website

After more than 13 years, I've launched a new design for the FAI project web site https://fai-project.org It now uses Materialize CSS and will work much better on mobile devices. Thanks to Thorsten B lo who did the first part of converting the web pages to the new design. I hope you all enjoy the new layout. FAI

7 March 2023

Robert McQueen: Flathub in 2023

It s been quite a few months since the most recent updates about Flathub last year. We ve been busy behind the scenes, so I d like to share what we ve been up to at Flathub and why and what s coming up from us this year. I want to focus on: Today Flathub is going strong: we offer 2,000 apps from over 1,500 collaborators on GitHub. We re averaging 700,000 app downloads a day, with 898 million HTTP requests totalling 88.3 TB served by our CDN each day (thank you Fastly!). Flatpak has, in my opinion, solved the largest technical issue which has held back the mainstream growth and acceptance of Linux on the desktop (or other personal computing devices) for the past 25 years: namely, the difficulty for app developers to publish their work in a way that makes it easy for people to discover, download (or sideload, for people in challenging connectivity environments), install and use. Flathub builds on that to help users discover the work of app developers and helps that work reach users in a timely manner. Initial results of this disintermediation are promising: even with its modest size so far, Flathub has hundreds of apps that I have never, ever heard of before and that s even considering I ve been working in the Linux desktop space for nearly 20 years and spent many of those staring at the contents of dselect (showing my age a little) or GNOME Software, attending conferences, and reading blog posts, news articles, and forums. I am also heartened to see that many of our OS distributor partners have recognised that this model is hugely complementary and additive to the indispensable work they are doing to bring the Linux desktop to end users, and that having more apps available to your users is a value-add allowing you to focus on your core offering and not a zero-sum game that should motivate infighting. Ongoing Progress Getting Flathub into its current state has been a long ongoing process. Here s what we ve been up to behind the scenes: Development Last year, we concluded our first engagement with Codethink to build features into the Flathub web app to move from a build service to an app store. That includes accounts for users and developers, payment processing via Stripe, and the ability for developers to manage upload tokens for the apps they control. In parallel, James Westman has been working on app verification and the corresponding features in flat-manager to ensure app metadata accurately reflects verification and pricing, and to provide authentication for paying users for app downloads when the developer enables it. Only verified developers will be able to make direct uploads or access payment settings for their apps. Legal So far, the GNOME Foundation has acted as an incubator and legal host for Flathub even though it s not purely a GNOME product or initiative. Distributing software to end users along with processing and forwarding payments and donations also has a different legal profile in terms of risk exposure and nonprofit compliance than the current activities of the GNOME Foundation. Consequently, we plan to establish an independent legal entity to own and operate Flathub which reduces risk for the GNOME Foundation, better reflects the independent and cross-desktop interests of Flathub, and provides flexibility in the future should we need to change the structure. We re currently in the process of reviewing legal advice to ensure we have the right structure in place before moving forward. Governance As Flathub is something we want to set outside of the existing Linux desktop and distribution space and ensure we represent and serve the widest community of Linux users and developers we ve been working on a governance model that ensures that there is transparency and trust in who is making decisions, and why. We have set up a working group with myself and Mart n Abente Lahaye from GNOME, Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Neofytos Kolokotronis, and Timoth e Ravier from KDE, and Jorge Castro flying the flag for the Flathub community. Thanks also to Neil McGovern and Nick Richards who were also more involved in the process earlier on. We don t want to get held up here creating something complex with memberships and elections, so at first we re going to come up with a simple/balanced way to appoint people into a board that makes key decisions about Flathub and iterate from there. Funding We have received one grant for 2023 of $100K from Endless Network which will go towards the infrastructure, legal, and operations costs of running Flathub and setting up the structure described above. (Full disclosure: Endless Network is the umbrella organisation which also funds my employer, Endless OS Foundation.) I am hoping to grow the available funding to $250K for this year in order to cover the next round of development on the software, prepare for higher operations costs (e.g., accounting gets more complex), and bring in a second full-time staff member in addition to Bart omiej Piotrowski to handle enquiries, reviews, documentation, and partner outreach. We re currently in discussions with NLnet about funding further software development, but have been unfortunately turned down for a grant from the Plaintext Group for this year; this Schmidt Futures project around OSS sustainability is not currently issuing grants in 2023. However, we continue to work on other funding opportunities. Remaining Barriers My personal hypothesis is that our largest remaining barrier to Linux desktop scale and impact is economic. On competing platforms mobile or desktop a developer can offer their work for sale via an app store or direct download with payment or subscription within hours of making a release. While we have taken the time to first download time down from months to days with Flathub, as a community we continue to have a challenging relationship with money. Some creators are lucky enough to have a full-time job within the FLOSS space, while a few superstar developers are able to nurture some level of financial support by investing time in building a following through streaming, Patreon, Kickstarter, or similar. However, a large proportion of us have to make do with the main payback from our labours being a stream of bug reports on GitHub interspersed with occasional conciliatory beers at FOSDEM (other beverages and events are available). The first and most obvious consequence is that if there is no financial payback for participating in developing apps for the free and open source desktop, we will lose many people in the process despite the amazing achievements of those who have brought us to where we are today. As a result, we ll have far fewer developers and apps. If we can t offer access to a growing base of users or the opportunity to offer something of monetary value to them, the reward in terms of adoption and possible payment will be very small. Developers would be forgiven for taking their time and attention elsewhere. With fewer apps, our platform has less to entice and retain prospective users. The second consequence is that this also represents a significant hurdle for diverse and inclusive participation. We essentially require that somebody is in a position of privilege and comfort that they have internet, power, time, and income not to mention childcare, etc. to spare so that they can take part. If that s not the case for somebody, we are leaving them shut out from our community before they even have a chance to start. My belief is that free and open source software represents a better way for people to access computing, and there are billions of people in the world we should hope to reach with our work. But if the mechanism for participation ensures their voices and needs are never represented in our community of creators, we are significantly less likely to understand and meet those needs. While these are my thoughts, you ll notice a strong theme to this year will be leading a consultation process to ensure that we are including, understanding and reflecting the needs of our different communities app creators, OS distributors and Linux users as I don t believe that our initiative will be successful without ensuring mutual benefit and shared success. Ultimately, no matter how beautiful, performant, or featureful the latest versions of the Plasma or GNOME desktops are, or how slick the newly rewritten installer is from your favourite distribution, all of the projects making up the Linux desktop ecosystem are subdividing between ourselves an absolutely tiny market share of the global market of personal computers. To make a bigger mark on the world, as a community, we need to get out more. What s Next? After identifying our major barriers to overcome, we ve planned a number of focused initiatives and restructuring this year: Phased Deployment We re working on deploying the work we have been doing over the past year, starting first with launching the new Flathub web experience as well as the rebrand that Jakub has been talking about on his blog. This also will finally launch the verification features so we can distinguish those apps which are uploaded by their developers. In parallel, we ll also be able to turn on the Flatpak repo subsets that enable users to select only verified and/or FLOSS apps in the Flatpak CLI or their desktop s app center UI. Consultation We would like to make sure that the voices of app creators, OS distributors, and Linux users are reflected in our plans for 2023 and beyond. We will be launching this in the form of Flathub Focus Groups at the Linux App Summit in Brno in May 2023, followed up with surveys and other opportunities for online participation. We see our role as interconnecting communities and want to be sure that we remain transparent and accountable to those we are seeking to empower with our work. Whilst we are being bold and ambitious with what we are trying to create for the Linux desktop community, we also want to make sure we provide the right forums to listen to the FLOSS community and prioritise our work accordingly. Advisory Board As we build the Flathub organisation up in 2023, we re also planning to expand its governance by creating an Advisory Board. We will establish an ongoing forum with different stakeholders around Flathub: OS vendors, hardware integrators, app developers and user representatives to help us create the Flathub that supports and promotes our mutually shared interests in a strong and healthy Linux desktop community. Direct Uploads Direct app uploads are close to ready, and they enable exciting stuff like allowing Electron apps to be built outside of flatpak-builder, or driving automatic Flathub uploads from GitHub actions or GitLab CI flows; however, we need to think a little about how we encourage these to be used. Even with its frustrations, our current Buildbot ensures that the build logs and source versions of each app on Flathub are captured, and that the apps are built on all supported architectures. (Is 2023 when we add RISC-V? Reach out if you d like to help!). If we hand upload tokens out to any developer, even if the majority of apps are open source, we will go from this relatively structured situation to something a lot more unstructured and we fear many apps will be available on only 64-bit Intel/AMD machines. My sketch here is that we need to establish some best practices around how to integrate Flathub uploads into popular CI systems, encouraging best practices so that we promote the properties of transparency and reproducibility that we don t want to lose. If anyone is a CI wizard and would like to work with us as a thought partner about how we can achieve this make it more flexible where and how build tasks can be hosted, but not lose these cross-platform and inspectability properties we d love to hear from you. Donations and Payments Once the work around legal and governance reaches a decent point, we will be in the position to move ahead with our Stripe setup and switch on the third big new feature in the Flathub web app. At present, we have already implemented support for one-off payments either as donations or a required purchase. We would like to go further than that, in line with what we were describing earlier about helping developers sustainably work on apps for our ecosystem: we would also like to enable developers to offer subscriptions. This will allow us to create a relationship between users and creators that funds ongoing work rather than what we already have. Security For Flathub to succeed, we need to make sure that as we grow, we continue to be a platform that can give users confidence in the quality and security of the apps we offer. To that end, we are planning to set up infrastructure to help ensure developers are shipping the best products they possibly can to users. For example, we d like to set up automated linting and security scanning on the Flathub back-end to help developers avoid bad practices, unnecessary sandbox permissions, outdated dependencies, etc. and to keep users informed and as secure as possible. Sponsorship Fundraising is a forever task as is running such a big and growing service. We hope that one day, we can cover our costs through some modest fees built into our payments but until we reach that point, we re going to be seeking a combination of grant funding and sponsorship to keep our roadmap moving. Our hope is very much that we can encourage different organisations that buy into our vision and will benefit from Flathub to help us support it and ensure we can deliver on our goals. If you have any suggestions of who might like to support Flathub, we would be very appreciative if you could reach out and get us in touch. Finally, Thank You! Thanks to you all for reading this far and supporting the work of Flathub, and also to our major sponsors and donors without whom Flathub could not exist: GNOME Foundation, KDE e.V., Mythic Beasts, Endless Network, Fastly, and Equinix Metal via the CNCF Community Cluster. Thanks also to the tireless work of the Freedesktop SDK community to give us the runtime platform most Flatpaks depend on, particularly Seppo Yli-Olli, Codethink and others. I wanted to also give my personal thanks to a handful of dedicated people who keep Flathub working as a service and as a community: Bart omiej Piotrowski is keeping the infrastructure working essentially single-handedly (in his spare time from keeping everything running at GNOME); Kolja Lampe and Bart built the new web app and backend API for Flathub which all of the new functionality has been built on, and Filippe LeMarchand maintains the checker bot which helps keeps all of the Flatpaks up to date. And finally, all of the submissions to Flathub are reviewed to ensure quality, consistency and security by a small dedicated team of reviewers, with a huge amount of work from Hubert Figui re and Bart to keep the submissions flowing. Thanks to everyone named or unnamed for building this vision of the future of the Linux desktop together with us. (originally posted to Flathub Discourse, head there if you have any questions or comments)

6 March 2023

Valhalla's Things: Bookbinding: photo album

Posted on March 6, 2023
an open book with a watercolour of a costume pasted from two corners on one page; near the spine there is a sliver of paper as a spacer. When I paint postcards I tend to start with a draft (usually on lightweight (250 g/m ) watercolour paper, then trace1 the drawing on blank postcards and paint it again. I keep the drafts for a number of reasons; for the views / architectural ones I m using a landscape photo album that I bought many years ago, but lately I ve also sent a few cards with my historical outfits to people who like to be kept updated on that, and I wanted a different book for those, both for better organization and to be able to keep them in the portrait direction. If you know me, you can easily guess that buying one wasn t considered as an option. A closed hardcover book in uniform dark grey. Since I m not going to be writing on the pages, I decided to use a relatively cheap 200 g / m linoprint paper with a nice feel, and I ve settled on a B6 size (before trimming) to hold A6 postcard drafts. For the binding I ve decided to use a technique I ve learned from a craft book ages ago that doesn t use tapes, and added a full hard cover in dark grey linen-feel2 paper. For the end-papers I ve used some random sheets of light blue paper (probably around 100-something g / m ), and that s the thing where I could have done better, but they work. Up to now there isn t anything I hadn t done before, what was new was the fact that this book was meant to hold things between the pages, and I needed to provide space for them. a book seen from the top: near the spine all signatures are made of 4 sheets, but two of them for each signature are just stubs, and leave open spaces between the pages. After looking on the internet for solutions, I settled on adding spacers by making a signature composed of paper - spacer - paper - spacer, with the spacers being 2 cm wide, folded in half. And then, between finishing binding the book and making the cover I utterly forgot to add the head bands. Argh. It s not the first time I make this error. The same book, open on an empty page. I m happy enough with the result. There are things that are easy to improve on in the next iteration (endpapers and head bands), and something in me is not 100% happy with the fact that the spacers aren t placed between every sheet, but there are places with no spacer and places with two of them, but I can t think of (and couldn t find) a way to make them otherwise with a sewn book, unless I sew each individual sheet, which sounds way too bulky (the album I m using for the landscapes was glued, but I didn t really want to go that way). The size is smaller than the other one I was using and doesn t leave a lot of room around the paintings, but that isn t necessarily a bad thing, because it also means less wasted space. I believe that one of my next project will be another similar book in a landscape format, for those postcard drafts that aren t landscapes nor clothing related. And then maybe another? or two? or 
Traceback (most recent call last):
TooManyProjectsError: project queue is full
  1. yes, trace. I can t draw. I have too many hobbies to spend the required amount of time every day to practice it. I m going to fake it. 85% of the time I m tracing from a photo I took myself, so I m not even going to consider it cheating.
  2. the description of which, on the online shop, made it look like fabric, even if the price was suspiciously low, so I bought a sheet to see what it was. It wasn t fabric. It feels and looks nice, but I m not sure how sturdy it s going to be.

4 March 2023

Matt Brown: Retrospective: Feb 2023

February ended up being a very short work month as I made a last minute decision to travel to Adelaide for the first 2 weeks of the month to help my brother with some house renovations he was undertaking. I thought I might be able to keep up with some work and my writing goals in the evenings while I was there, but days of hard manual labour are such an unfamiliar routine for me that I didn t have any energy left to make good on that intention. The majority of my time and focus for the remaining one and half weeks of the month was catching up on the consulting work that I had pushed back while in Adelaide. So while it doesn t make for a thrilling first month to look back and report on, overall I m not unhappy with what I achieved given the time available. Next month, I hope to be able to report some more exciting progress on the product development front as well.

Monthly Scoring Rubric I m evaluating each goal using a 10 point scale based on execution velocity and risk level, rather than absolute success (which is what I will look at in the annual/mid-year review). If velocity is good and risk is low or well managed the score is high, if either the velocity is low, or risk is high then the score is low. E.g:
  • 10 - perfect execution with low-risk, on track for significantly overachieving the goal.
  • 7 - good execution with low or well managed risk, highly likely to achieve the goal.
  • 5 - execution and risk are OK, should achieve the goal if all goes well.
  • 3 - execution or risk have problems, goal is at risk.
  • 0 - stalled, with no obvious path to recovery or success.

Goals

Consulting - 6/10 Goal: Execute a series of successful consulting engagements, building a reputation for myself and leaving happy customers willing to provide testimonials that support a pipeline of future opportunities.
  • I have one active local engagement assisting a software team with migrating their application from a single to multi-region architecture.
  • Two promising international engagements which were close to starting both cancelled based on newly issued company policies freezing their staffing/outsourcing budgets due to the current economic climate.
I m happy with where this is at - I hit 90% of my target hours in February (taking into account 2 weeks off) and the feedback I m receiving is positive. The main risk is the future pipeline of engagements, particularly if the cancellations indicate a new pattern. I m not overly concerned yet, as all the opportunities to date have been from direct or referred contacts in my personal network, so there s plenty of potential to more actively solicit work to create a healthier pipeline.

Product Development - 3/10 Goal: Grow my product development skill set by taking several ideas to MVP stage with customer feedback received, and launch at least one product which generates revenue and has growth potential.
  • Accelerating electrification - I continued to keep up with industry news and added some interesting reports to my reading queue, but made no significant progress towards identifying a specific product opportunity.
  • Farm management SaaS - no activity or progress at all.
  • co2mon.nz - I put significant thought and planning into how to approach a second iteration of this product. I started writing and completed 80% of a post to communicate the revised business plan, but it s not ready for publication yet, and even if it was, the real work towards it would need to actually happen to score more points here.
I had high hopes to make at least some progress in all three areas in February, but it just didn t happen due to lack of time. The good news is that since the low score here is purely execution driven, there s no new risks or blockers that will hinder much better progress here in March.

Professional Network Development - 8/10 Goal: To build a professional relationship with at least 30 new people this year. This is off to a strong start, I made 4 brand new connections and re-established contact with 9 other existing people I d not talked to for a while. I ve found the conversations energising and challenging and I m looking forward to continuing to keep this up.

Writing - 2/10 Goal: To publish a high-quality piece of writing on this site at least once a week. Well off track as already noted. I am enjoying the writing process and I continue to find it useful in developing my thoughts and forcing me to challenge my assumptions, but coupling the writing process with the thinking/planning that is a prerequisite to get those benefits definitely makes my output a lot slower than I was expecting. The slower speed, combined with the obvious time constraints of this month are not a great doubly whammy to be starting with, but I think with some planning and preparation it should have been avoidable by having a backlog of pre-written content for use in weeks where I m on holiday or otherwise busy. It s worth noting that among all the useful feedback I received, this writing target was often called out as overly ambitious, or likely to be counterproductive to producing quality writing. The feedback makes sense - for now I m not planning to change the goal (I might at my 6-month review point), but I am going to be diligent about adhering to my quality standard, which in turn means I m choosing to accept missing a weekly post here and there and taking a lower score on the goal overall. I apologise if you ve been eagerly waiting for writing that never arrived over February!

Community - 5/10 Goal: To support the growth of my local technical community by volunteering my experience and knowledge with others through activities such as mentoring, conference talks and similar.
  • I was an invited participant of the monthly KiwiSRE meet-up which was discussing SRE team models, and in particular I was able to speak to my experiences as described in an old CRE blog post on this topic.
  • I joined the program committee for SREcon23 APAC which is scheduled for mid-June in Singapore. I also submitted two talk proposals of my own (not sharing the details for now, since the review process is intended to be blind) which I m hopeful might make the grade with my fellow PC members!

Feedback As always, I d love to hear from you if you have thoughts or feedback triggered by anything I ve written above. In particular, it would be useful to know whether you find this type of report interesting to read and/or what you d like to see added/removed or changed.

1 March 2023

Russ Allbery: Small book haul

I'm a bit behind on both free software maintenance and on writing reviews, what with one thing and another, but hopefully will have time to catch up next month. Meanwhile, publishing continues and books keep catching my eye. Blake Crouch (ed.) Forward (sff anthology)
Kate Elliott The Keeper's Six (sff)
Ruthanna Emrys A Half-Built Garden (sff)
R.F. Kuang Babel (sff)
Seanan McGuire The Unkindest Tide (sff)
Seanan McGuire A Killing Frost (sff)
Seanan McGuire When Sorrows Come (sff)
Seanan McGuire Be the Serpent (sff)
Terry Pratchett Thief of Time (sff)
Terry Pratchett The Last Hero (sff)
Terry Pratchett The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents (sff)
Terry Pratchett Night Watch (sff)
Terry Pratchett The Wee Free Men (sff)
Terry Pratchett Monstrous Regiment (sff) I keep hearing amazing things about Babel, so it's very high on the list.

Debian XMPP Team: XMPP What's new in Debian 12 bookworm

On Tue 13 July 2021 there was a blog post of new XMPP related software releases which have been uploaded to Debian 11 (bullseye). Today, we will inform you about updates for the upcoming Debian release bookworm. A lot of new releases have been provided by the upstream projects. There were lot of changes to the XMPP clients like Dino, Gajim, Profanity, Poezio and others. Also the XMPP servers have been enhanced. Unfortunately, we can not provide a list of all the changes which have been done, but will try to highlight some of the changes and new features. BTW, feel free to join the Debian User Support on Jabber at xmpp:debian@conference.debian.org?join. You can find a list of 58 packages of the Debian XMPP team on the XMPP QA Page. Server Libs Others Happy chatting - keep in touch with your family and friends via Jabber / XMPP - XMPP is an open standard of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) for instant messaging.

28 February 2023

Utkarsh Gupta: FOSS Activites in February 2023

Here s my (forty-first) monthly but brief update about the activities I ve done in the F/L/OSS world.

Debian
This was my 50th month of actively contributing to Debian. I became a DM in late March 2019 and a DD on Christmas 19! \o/ There s a bunch of things I do, both, technical and non-technical. Here are the things I did this month:

Uploads

Others
  • Looked up some Release team documentation.
  • Sponsored php-font-lib and php-dompdf-svg-lib for William.
  • Granted DM rights for php-dompdf.
  • Mentoring for newcomers.
  • Reviewed micro bits for Nilesh, new uploads and changes.
  • Ruby sprints.
  • Bug work (on BTS and #debian-ruby) for rails and redmine.
  • Moderation of -project mailing list.
A huge thanks to Freexian for sponsoring my Debian work and Entrouvert for sponsoring the Redmine backports. :D

Ubuntu
This was my 25th month of actively contributing to Ubuntu. Now that I joined Canonical to work on Ubuntu full-time, there s a bunch of things I do! \o/ I mostly worked on different things, I guess. I was too lazy to maintain a list of things I worked on so there s no concrete list atm. Maybe I ll get back to this section later or will start to list stuff from the fall, as I was doing before. :D

Debian (E)LTS
Debian Long Term Support (LTS) is a project to extend the lifetime of all Debian stable releases to (at least) 5 years. Debian LTS is not handled by the Debian security team, but by a separate group of volunteers and companies interested in making it a success. And Debian Extended LTS (ELTS) is its sister project, extending support to the stretch and jessie release (+2 years after LTS support). This was my forty-first month as a Debian LTS and thirty-second month as a Debian ELTS paid contributor.
I worked for 24.25 hours for LTS and 28.50 hours for ELTS.

LTS CVE Fixes and Announcements:
  • Fixed CVE-2022-47016 for tmux and uploaded to buster via 2.8-3+deb10u1.
    But decided to not roll the DLA for the package as the CVE got rejected upstream.
  • Issued DLA 3359-1, fixing CVE-2019-13038 and CVE-2021-3639, for libapache2-mod-auth-mellon.
    For Debian 10 buster, these problems have been fixed in version 0.14.2-1+deb10u1.
  • Issued DLA 3360-1, fixing CVE-2021-30151 and CVE-2022-23837, for ruby-sidekiq.
    For Debian 10 buster, these problems have been fixed in version 5.2.3+dfsg-1+deb10u1.
  • Worked on ruby-rails-html-sanitize and added notes to the security-tracker.
    TL;DR: we need newer methods in ruby-loofah to make the patches for ruby-rails-html-sanitize backportable.
  • Started to look at other set of packages meanwhile.

ELTS CVE Fixes and Announcements:
  • Issued ELA 813-1, fixing CVE-2017-12618 and CVE-2022-25147, for apr-util.
    For Debian 8 jessie, these problems have been fixed in version 1.5.4-1+deb8u1.
    For Debian 9 stretch, these problems have been fixed in version 1.5.4-3+deb9u1.
  • Issued ELA 814-1, fixing CVE-2022-39286, for jupyter-core.
    For Debian 9 stretch, these problems have been fixed in version 4.2.1-1+deb9u1.
  • Issued ELA 815-1, fixing CVE-2022-44792 and CVE-2022-44793, for net-snmp.
    For Debian 8 jessie, these problems have been fixed in version 5.7.2.1+dfsg-1+deb8u6.
    For Debian 9 stretch, these problems have been fixed in version 5.7.3+dfsg-1.7+deb9u5.
  • Helped facilitate RabbitMQ s update queries by one of our customers.
  • Started to look at other set of packages meanwhile.

Other (E)LTS Work:
Until next time.
:wq for today.

27 February 2023

Daniel Lange: Thunderbird gpg key import

Thunderbird, srsly? 5MB (or 4.8MiB) import limit. Sure. My modest pubring (111 keys) is 18MB. The Debian keyring is 28MB. May be, just may be, add another 0 to that if statement? So, until that happens, workarounds ... Option 1: Export each pubkey into a separate file. The import dialog allows to select them all in one go. But - of course - it will ask confirmation for each. So prepare some valerian tea.
gpg --with-colons --list-public-keys grep ^pub cut -d : -f 5 xargs -I -n 1 gpg -ao .pub --export ;
Option 2: Strip all the signatures, so Thunderbird gets a smaller file to chew on. This uses pgp-clean from signing-party.
gpg --with-colons --list-public-keys grep ^pub cut -d : -f 5 xargs pgp-clean -s >> there_you_go_thunderbird.pub
Option 1 will retain the signatures on individual keys, Option 2 will not.

Daniel Lange: Getting gpg to import signatures again

The GnuPG (gpg) ecosystem has been played with a bit in 2019 by adding fake signatures en masse to well known keys. The main result is that the SKS Keyserver network based on the OCaml software of the same name is basically history. A few other keyservers have come up like Hagrid (Rust) and Hockeypuck (Go) but there seems to be no clear winner yet. In case you missed it in 2019, see my take on cleaning these polluted keys. Now the changed defaults in gpg to "mitigate" this issue are trickling down to even the conservative distributions. Debian Bullseye has self-sigs-only on gpg 2.2.27 and it looks like Debian Bookworm will get gpg 2.2.40. This would add import-clean but Daniel Kahn Gillmor patched it out. He argues correctly that this new default could delete data from good locally store pubkeys. This all ends in you getting some random combination of self-sigs-only and / or import-clean depending on which Linux distribution and version you happen to use. Better be explicit. I recommend to add:
# disable new gpg defaults
keyserver-options no-self-sigs-only
keyserver-options no-import-clean
to your ~/.gnupg/gpg.conf to make sure you can manage signatures yourself and receive them from keyservers or local imports as intended. In case you care: See info gnupg --index-search=keyserver-options for the fine documentation. Of course apt install info first to be able to read info pages. 'cause who still used them in 2023? Oh, wait...

Billy Warren: My take on IRCs - let's rest from Slack and Discord for a while.

I want to interest those that haven t used IRCs for a while through this article. This article generally leans toward the Debian Community but I hope it gives you some perspectives into IRCs and also interests you in joining the Debian Community as well. Most Generation Z developers I know have at least used slack, discord, discourse and so many other communication tools but so few have used IRCs so heavily and this could be because they find it boring and limited to what kind of content they can share and what community they are participating in. I got interested in using IRCs when I joined Debian and was able to navigate my way through using some online resources. While IRC may not be as popular as other communication tools like Slack or Discord, it remains a valuable tool for communication and collaboration within the open-source community. Its open-source nature and lightweight protocol make it a flexible and customizable tool that can be used in various settings. Internet Relay Chat (IRC) is a communication protocol that has been around since the late 1980s. Despite its age, it is still a popular tool for communication and collaboration, especially within the open-source community. It is mostly known to be used by people that work on boring projects or maintain legacy code (I can t state how true this is though). Interesting facts about IRC include that it was created by a Finnish developer named Jarkko Oikarinen, who wanted to create a communication tool that would allow him to chat with his friends in real-time (the FaceBook of those days). The first IRC network was called EFnet, and it quickly grew in popularity as more and more people began to use the protocol for communication and collaboration. IRC allows users to connect to servers and join channels (chat rooms) where they can communicate in real time with other users who have also joined the same channel. Many open-source projects use IRC channels for communication and collaboration among developers. The Debian project has a number of IRC channels that are used for communication and collaboration among developers and users. I have at least interacted with three of them which include;- To start using IRC, you will need to choose an IRC client, which is software that allows you to connect to IRC networks. Some popular IRC clients for Debian users include HexChat, irssi, and WeeChat. These clients are free and open source, and can be downloaded from the Debian repositories.Once you have chosen an IRC client, you can connect to an IRC network and start joining channels. Many open-source projects have their own IRC channels, where developers can discuss the project and collaborate in real time. One of the benefits of using IRC that I found out was that it is a lightweight protocol, which means that it can be used on a wide variety of devices, including desktop computers and smartphones. This makes it an ideal communication tool for developers who may be working on different devices and need to communicate with each other quickly and easily. IRC is still a valuable tool for communication and collaboration within the open-source community even if it is not given the same popularity as other communication tools. Like some of the good old legacy designs whose function never goes old, IRC is one of them.

25 February 2023

Jelmer Vernooij: Silver Platter Batch Mode

Background Silver-Platter makes it easier to publish automated changes to repositories. However, in its default mode, the only option for reviewing changes before publishing them is to run in dry-run mode. This can be quite cumbersome if you have a lot of repositories. A new batch mode now makes it possible to generate a large number of changes against different repositories using a script, review and optionally alter the diffs, and then all publish them (and potentially refresh them later if conflicts appear).
Example running pyupgrade I m using the pyupgrade example recipe that comes with silver-platter. 
 ---
 name: pyupgrade
 command: 'pyupgrade --exit-zero-even-if-changed $(find -name "test_*.py")'
 mode: propose
 merge-request:
   commit-message: Upgrade Python code to a modern version
And a list of candidate repositories to process in candidates.yaml. 
 ---
 - url: https://github.com/jelmer/dulwich
 - url: https://github.com/jelmer/xandikos
With these in place, the updated repositories can be created: 
 $ svp batch generate --recipe=pyupgrade.yaml --candidates=candidate.syml pyupgrade
The intermediate results This will create a directory called pyupgrade, with a clone of each of the repositories. 
$ ls pyupgrade
batch.yaml  dulwich  xandikos
$ cd pyupgrade/dulwich
$ git log
commit 931f9ffb26e9143c56f20e0b85e6ddb0a8eee2eb (HEAD -> master)
Author: Jelmer Vernoo  <jelmer@jelmer.uk>
Date:   Sat Feb 25 22:28:12 2023 +0000
Run pyupgrade
diff --git a/dulwich/tests/compat/test_client.py b/dulwich/tests/compat/test_client.py
index 02ab6c0a..9b0661ed 100644
--- a/dulwich/tests/compat/test_client.py
+++ b/dulwich/tests/compat/test_client.py
@@ -628,7 +628,7 @@ class HTTPGitServer(http.server.HTTPServer):
         self.server_name = "localhost"
     def get_url(self):
-        return "http:// : /".format(self.server_name, self.server_port)
+        return f"http:// self.server_name : self.server_port /"
 class DulwichHttpClientTest(CompatTestCase, DulwichClientTestBase):
...
There is also a file called batch.yaml that describes the pending changes: 
 1
 2
 3
 4
 5
 6
 7
 8
 9
10
11
12
13
name: pyupgrade
work:
- url: https://github.com/dulwich/dulwich
  name: dulwich
  description: Upgrade to modern Python statements
  commit-message: Run pyupgrade
  mode: propose
- url: https://github.com/jelmer/xandikos
  name: xandikos
  description: Upgrade to modern Python statements
  commit-message: Run pyupgrade
  mode: propose
recipe: ../pyupgrade.yaml
At this point the changes can be reviewed, and batch.yaml edited as the user sees fit - they can remove entries that don t appear to be correct, edit the metadata for the merge requests, etc. It s also possible to make changes to the clones. Once you re happy, publish the results: 
$ svp batch publish pyupgrade
This will publish all the changes, using the mode and parameters specified in batch.yaml. batch.yaml is automatically stripped of any entries in work that have fully landed, i.e. where the pull request has been merged or where the changes were pushed to the origin. To check up on the status of your changes, run svp batch status: 
$ svp batch status pyupgrade
To refresh any merge proposals that may have become out of date, simply run publish again: 
svp batch publish pyupgrade

Petter Reinholdtsen: OpenSnitch available in Debian Sid and Bookworm

Thanks to the efforts of the OpenSnitch lead developer Gustavo I iguez Goya allowing me to sponsor the upload, the interactive application firewall OpenSnitch is now available in Debian Testing, soon to become the next stable release of Debian. This is a package which set up a network firewall on one or more machines, which is controlled by a graphical user interface that will ask the user if a program should be allowed to connect to the local network or the Internet. If some background daemon is trying to dial home, it can be blocked from doing so with a simple mouse click, or by default simply by not doing anything when the GUI question dialog pop up. A list of all programs discovered using the network is provided in the GUI, giving the user an overview of how the machine(s) programs use the network. OpenSnitch was uploaded for NEW processing about a month ago, and I had little hope of it getting accepted and shaping up in time for the package freeze, but the Debian ftpmasters proved to be amazingly quick at checking out the package and it was accepted into the archive about week after the first upload. It is now team maintained under the Go language team umbrella. A few fixes to the default setup is only in Sid, and should migrate to Testing/Bookworm in a week. During testing I ran into an issue with Minecraft server broadcasts disappearing, which was quickly resolved by the developer with a patch and a proposed configuration change. I've been told this was caused by the Debian packages default use if /proc/ information to track down kernel status, instead of the newer eBPF module that can be used. The reason is simply that upstream and I have failed to find a way to build the eBPF modules for OpenSnitch without a complete configured Linux kernel source tree, which as far as we can tell is unavailable as a build dependency in Debian. We tried unsuccessfully so far to use the kernel-headers package. It would be great if someone could provide some clues how to build eBPF modules on build daemons in Debian, possibly without the full kernel source. As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address 15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b.

Next.

Previous.