Search Results: "Ben Hutchings"

17 August 2016

Raphaël Hertzog: Freexian s report about Debian Long Term Support, July 2016

A Debian LTS logoLike each month, here comes a report about the work of paid contributors to Debian LTS. Individual reports In July, 136.6 work hours have been dispatched among 11 paid contributors. Their reports are available: Evolution of the situation The number of sponsored hours jumped to 159 hours per month thanks to GitHub joining as our second platinum sponsor (funding 3 days of work per month)! Our funding goal is getting closer but it s not there yet. The security tracker currently lists 22 packages with a known CVE and the dla-needed.txt file likewise. That s a sharp decline compared to last month. Thanks to our sponsors New sponsors are in bold.

2 comments Liked this article? Click here. My blog is Flattr-enabled.

Ben Hutchings: Debian LTS work, July 2016

I was assigned another 14.7 hours of work by Freexian's Debian LTS initiative and carried over 1 from last month. I worked a total of 15 hours, carrying over a fraction of an hour. I spent another week in the Front Desk role and triaged various new CVEs for wheezy. I spent the remainder of the time working on the next Linux stable updates (3.2.82 and Debian 3.2.81-2), but didn't release them - that will be done in the next few days.

16 July 2016

Raphaël Hertzog: Freexian s report about Debian Long Term Support, June 2016

A Debian LTS logoLike each month, here comes a report about the work of paid contributors to Debian LTS. Individual reports In June, 158.25 work hours have been dispatched among 11 paid contributors. Their reports are available: DebConf 16 Presentation If you want to know more about how the LTS project is organized, you can watch the presentation I gave during DebConf 16 in Cape Town. Evolution of the situation The number of sponsored hours increased a little bit at 135 hours per month thanks to 3 new sponsors (Laboratoire LEGI UMR 5519 / CNRS, Quarantainenet BV, GNI MEDIA). Our funding goal is getting closer but it s not there yet. The security tracker currently lists 40 packages with a known CVE and the dla-needed.txt file lists 38 packages awaiting an update. Thanks to our sponsors New sponsors are in bold.

7 July 2016

Ben Hutchings: Debian LTS work, June 2016

I was assigned another 15 hours of work by Freexian's Debian LTS initiative and carried over 5 from last month. I worked a total of 19 hours, carrying over 1. I spent a week in the Front Desk role and triaged many new security issues for wheezy. I prepared the Linux 3.2.81 stable update, sent it out for review and finally released it. I then rebased the wheezy-security branch on top of that and added some later security fixes that were not yet suitable for a kernel.org update. I uploaded to wheezy-security and issued DLA-516-1. I started working on the next Linux stable updates (3.2.82 and the next wheezy LTS update) and on an update for imagemagick, but haven't uploaded anything for them yet.

13 June 2016

Raphaël Hertzog: Freexian s report about Debian Long Term Support, May 2016

A Debian LTS logoLike each month, here comes a report about the work of paid contributors to Debian LTS. Individual reports In May, 166 work hours have been dispatched among 9 paid contributors. Their reports are available: Evolution of the situation The number of sponsored hours stayed the same over May but will likely increase a little bit the next month as we have two new Bronze sponsors being processed. The security tracker currently lists 36 packages with a known CVE and the dla-needed.txt file lists 36 packages awaiting an update. Despite the higher than usual number of work hours dispatched in May, we still have more open CVE than we used to have at the end of the squeeze LTS period. So more support is always needed Thanks to our sponsors New sponsors are in bold.

No comment Liked this article? Click here. My blog is Flattr-enabled.

10 June 2016

Ben Hutchings: Debian LTS work, May 2016

I was assigned another 15 hours of work by Freexian's Debian LTS initiative, but only worked a total of 10 hours. I intend to make up for this in June. I began preparing the next stable update for Linux 3.2 on kernel.org, but haven't yet sent it out for review. I rebased the wheezy-security branch onto Linux 3.2.80, and added fixes for one more security issue and one data corruption issue affecting aufs. I started a week in the front desk, triaging new issues for wheezy.

2 June 2016

Raphaël Hertzog: My Free Software Activities in May 2016

My monthly report covers a large part of what I have been doing in the free software world. I write it for my donators (thanks to them!) but also for the wider Debian community because it can give ideas to newcomers and it s one of the best ways to find volunteers to work with me on projects that matter to me. Debian LTS Due to some departure and increased workload, I wanted to find out a few new paid contributors for Debian LTS. So I sent a mail to debian-jobs@lists.debian.org and contrary to last time (where I posted the announce only here on my blog), I had plenty of replies I ended up enrolling 6 new contributors and refusing 3 persons that did not have the required profile. All new contributors are supposed to handle at least one LTS update on their free time to get up to speed. But from the 6 new contributors only 3 managed to handle their training update in May. During the month I spent quite some time providing guidance to the new contributors both in private mails and on the debian-lts mailing list. I also reviewed a xen update where I had (rightfully) some doubts about the work done. Packaging work fonts-cantarell. After having diagnosed the problem last month, I got annoyed enough by the lack of a fixed package that I found a way to package a newer upstream release of fonts-cantarell without requiring a fontforge update that was likely to take some time still so I prepared and uploaded 0.0.24-1. cpputest. Bug #823711 reported some license issues with some of the files. I immediately forwarded this upstream (issue 961) and fixed it in Debian by repacking the upstream tarball. Fortunately upstream has been quick to handle his and there s a new upstream release (3.8) where the problematic files have been dropped. live-boot. Kali s live images were no longer booting (stuck in the initrd) and with the help of Ben Hutchings we diagnosed this back to #823069 which I fixed in live-boot 20160511. udev. I filed #824025 to request that the rule defining the MAC-based name of USB network interfaces be isolated in its own file so that it can be easily disabled (we do that in Kali). Misc stuff. I packaged Django 1.8.13 in jessie-backports. I filed
#824165 against sbuild being broken with $apt_allow_unauthenticated = 1; in .sbuildrc. I filed a wishlist bug #824168 against apt-listchanges to suggest that it ignores news from auto-installed packages. I filed #825923 to report a regression in python-nltk (discovered in Kali first). Infrastructure work packages.debian.org. A few months ago, I wrote a patch for packages.debian.org so that it forwards emails to tracker.debian.org instead of packages.qa.debian.org. At that time, I was in touch with Rhonda and was hoping that she would apply it rather quickly (the patch is rather short). After a few more pings, she made it clear that she was not alone and that I should rather file a proper request so that someone else can also process it. So I filed #824085 and tried to find someone else to apply my patch. Most of the members of pkg_maint said that they were part of the group only due to generic webmaster involvement but that they did not want to touch that part. Fortunately, Martin Zobel Helas was more receptive to my request and helped me to deploy my changes. I committed my change and Martin pulled it in the live checkout on picconi.debian.org. This update is also a first step towards the possibility to use foo@packages.debian.org and/or teams+foo@tracker.debian.org in the Maintainer field of a package. With this we can get rid of dedicated mailing lists that just duplicate the work of the package tracker. And we no longer need to care about the fact that the Maintainer is handled differently than Uploaders since all (human) co-maintainers would then be listed in Uploaders only (and the package tracker would deal appropriately with mails sent to the Maintainer). Distro Tracker. I improved the import process to be able to force a new processing of source packages that were already imported. This was useful to let it recognize architectures which were newly added in its database (and that were ignored and thus not displayed up to now). I also made a first review of the AppStream patch submitted by Matthias Klump in #806740. Thanks See you next month for a new summary of my activities.

No comment Liked this article? Click here. My blog is Flattr-enabled.

17 May 2016

Reproducible builds folks: Reproducible builds: week 55 in Stretch cycle

What happened in the Reproducible Builds effort between May 8th and May 14th 2016: Documentation updates Toolchain fixes Packages fixed The following 28 packages have become newly reproducible due to changes in their build dependencies: actor-framework ask asterisk-prompt-fr-armelle asterisk-prompt-fr-proformatique coccinelle cwebx d-itg device-tree-compiler flann fortunes-es idlastro jabref konclude latexdiff libint minlog modplugtools mummer mwrap mxallowd mysql-mmm ocaml-atd ocamlviz postbooks pycorrfit pyscanfcs python-pcs weka The following 9 packages had older versions which were reproducible, and their latest versions are now reproducible again due to changes in their build dependencies: csync2 dune-common dune-localfunctions libcommons-jxpath-java libcommons-logging-java libstax-java libyanfs-java python-daemon yacas The following packages have become newly reproducible after being fixed: The following packages had older versions which were reproducible, and their latest versions are now reproducible again after being fixed: Some uploads have fixed some reproducibility issues, but not all of them: Patches submitted that have not made their way to the archive yet: Package reviews 344 reviews have been added, 125 have been updated and 20 have been removed in this week. 14 FTBFS bugs have been reported by Chris Lamb. tests.reproducible-builds.org Misc. Dan Kegel sent a mail to report about his experiments with a reproducible dpkg PPA for Ubuntu. According to him sudo add-apt-repository ppa:dank/dpkg && sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install dpkg should be enough to get reproducible builds on Ubuntu 16.04. This week's edition was written by Ximin Luo and Holger Levsen and reviewed by a bunch of Reproducible builds folks on IRC.

Raphaël Hertzog: Freexian s report about Debian Long Term Support, April 2016

A Debian LTS logoLike each month, here comes a report about the work of paid contributors to Debian LTS. Individual reports In April, 116.75 work hours have been dispatched among 9 paid contributors. Their reports are available: Many contributors did not use all their allocated hours. This is partly explained by the fact that in April Wheezy was still under the responsibility of the security team and they were not able to drive updates from start to finish. In any case, this means that they have more hours available over May and since the LTS period started, they should hopefully be able to make a good dent in the backlog of security updates. Evolution of the situation The number of sponsored hours reached a new record with 132 hours per month, thanks to two new gold sponsors (Babiel GmbH and Plat Home). Plat Home s sponsorship was aimed to help us maintain Debian 7 Wheezy on armel and armhf (on top of already supported amd64 and i386). Hopefully the trend will continue so that we can reach our objective of funding the equivalent of a full-time position. The security tracker currently lists 45 packages with a known CVE and the dla-needed.txt file lists 44 packages awaiting an update. This is a bit more than the 15-20 open entries that we used to have at the end of the Debian 6 LTS period. Thanks to our sponsors New sponsors are in bold.

No comment Liked this article? Click here. My blog is Flattr-enabled.

2 May 2016

Reproducible builds folks: Reproducible builds: week 53 in Stretch cycle

What happened in the Reproducible Builds effort between April 24th and 30th 2016. Media coverage Reproducible builds were mentioned explicitly in two talks at the Mini-DebConf in Vienna: Aspiration together with the OTF CommunityLab released their report about the Reproducible Builds summit in December 2015 in Athens. Toolchain fixes Now that the GCC development window has been opened again, the SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH patch by Dhole and Matthias Klose to address the issue timestamps_from_cpp_macros (__DATE__ / __TIME__) has been applied upstream and will be released with GCC 7. Following that Matthias Klose also has uploaded gcc-5/5.3.1-17 and gcc-6/6.1.1-1 to unstable with a backport of that SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH patch. Emmanuel Bourg uploaded maven/3.3.9-4, which uses SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH for the maven.build.timestamp. (SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH specification) Other upstream changes Alexis Bienven e submitted a patch to Sphinx which extends SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH support for copyright years in generated documentation. Packages fixed The following 12 packages have become reproducible due to changes in their build dependencies: hhvm jcsp libfann libflexdock-java libjcommon-java libswingx1-java mobile-atlas-creator not-yet-commons-ssl plexus-utils squareness svnclientadapter The following packages have became reproducible after being fixed: Some uploads have fixed some reproducibility issues, but not all of them: Patches submitted that have not made their way to the archive yet: Package reviews 95 reviews have been added, 15 have been updated and 129 have been removed in this week. 22 FTBFS bugs have been reported by Chris Lamb and Martin Michlmayr. diffoscope development strip-nondeterminism development tests.reproducible-builds.org Misc. Amongst the 29 interns who will work on Debian through GSoC and Outreachy there are four who will be contributing to Reproducible Builds for Debian and Free Software. We are very glad to welcome ceridwen, Satyam Zode, Scarlett Clark and Valerie Young and look forward to working together with them the coming months (and maybe beyond)! This week's edition was written by Reiner Herrmann and Holger Levsen and reviewed by a bunch of Reproducible builds folks on IRC.

1 May 2016

Ben Hutchings: 10 years as a Debian Developer

On 1st May 2006 my Debian account was created and I gained the status of Debian Developer. At that time I had already been to several BSPs and one DebConf, and maintained a few applications and Perl library packages. We were working toward the etch release and would soon hold DebConf 6 in Mexico. Ten years later, I still maintain one of those packages (sgt-puzzles) but the rest were either handed over to the Perl team or entirely removed. I wrote, maintained, and then gave away dvswitch all within this period. I have packaged some other applications that I needed to use - kup, ministat, odhcp6c - and I continue to maintain them. I have also made many NMUs, including security uploads, for all kinds of packages including bind9, e2fsprogs, (e)glibc, lvm2, sudo, sysvinit and udev. However, for about the past 7 years most of my work in Debian has been done within the kernel team, working on the Linux kernel and closely related packages - such as crda, ethtool, firmware-nonfree and initramfs-tools. I have also become an upstream developer for several of these projects. I'm proud to have played a part in the etch, lenny, squeeze, wheezy and jessie releases, and I have enjoyed attending 7 more DebConfs and many mini-DebConfs. I'm now looking forward to another great release (stretch) and to attending DebConf 16 in Cape Town this summer winter. I hope to still be active in Debian in 2026, looking back on another 10 years in this amazing project.

Ben Hutchings: Debian LTS work, April 2016

This month was still quiet for me in terms of uploads, as "wheezy" was only handed over to the LTS team near the end of the month. I carried over 5.5 hours from March and was assigned another 15 hours of work by Freexian's Debian LTS initiative, but only worked a total of 12.25 hours. I have returned the spare hours to the pool. As last month, I prepared a stable update for Linux 3.2 on kernel.org, which will be released soon as 3.2.80. I also triaged the open security issues and backported a few individual patches to our wheezy-security branch. However I expect to rebase the wheezy-security branch onto Linux 3.2.80 before making the next upload. I also participated in discussion of supporting armel/armhf in wheezy LTS. I don't expect many LTS users to be using the Debian kernel packages, as we only supported a small range of ARM hardware before the introduction of the multiplatform flavours in jessie. However, those architectures rarely require any extra effort to support in linux stable updates so I had no objection to including them.

20 April 2016

Ben Hutchings: Experiments with signed kernels and modules in Debian

I've lately been working on support for Secure Boot in Debian, mostly in the packages maintained by the kernel team. My instructions for setting up UEFI Secure Boot are based on OVMF running on KVM/QEMU. All 'Designed for Windows' PCs should allow reconfiguration of SB, but it may not be easy to do so. They also assume that the firmware includes an EFI shell. Updated: Robert Edmonds pointed out that the 'Designed for Windows' requirements changed with Windows 10: The ability to reconfigure SB is indeed now optional for devices which are designed to always boot with a specific Secure Boot configuration. I also noticed that the requirements say that OEMs should not sign an EFI shell binary. Therefore I've revised the instructions to use efibootmgr instead. Background UEFI Secure Boot, when configured and enabled (which it is on most new PCs) requires that whatever it loads is signed with a trusted key. The one common trusted key for PCs is held by Microsoft, and while they will sign other people's code for a nominal fee, they require that it also validates the code it loads, i.e. the kernel or next stage boot loader. The kernel in turn is responsible for validating any code that could compromise its integrity (kernel modules, kexec images). Currently there are no such signed boot loaders in Debian, though the shim and grub-signed packages included in many other distributions should be usable. However it's possible to load an appropriately configured Linux kernel directly from the UEFI firmware (typically through the shell) which is what I'm doing at the moment. Packaging signed kernels Signing keys obviously need to be protected against disclosure; the private keys can't be included in a source package. We also won't install them on buildds separately, and generating signatures at build time would of course be unreproducible. So I've created a new source package, linux-signed, which contains detached signatures prepared offline. Currently the binary packages built from linux-signed also contain only detached signatures, which are applied as necessary at installation time. The signed kernel image (only on x86 for now) is named /boot/vmlinuz-kversion.efi.signed. However, since packages must not modify files owned by another package and I didn't want to dpkg-divert thousands of modules, the module signatures remain detached. Detached module signatures are a new invention of mine, and require changes in kmod and various other packages to support them. (An alternate might be to put signed modules under a different directory and drop a configuration file in /lib/depmod.d to make them higher priority. But then we end up with two copies of every module installed, which can be a substantial waste of space.) Preparation The packages you need to repeat the experiment: For Secure Boot, you'll then need to copy the signed kernel and the initrd onto the EFI system partition, normally mounted at /boot/efi. SB requires a Platform Key (PK) which will already be installed on a real PC. You can replace it but you don't need to. If you're using OVMF, there are no persistent keys so you do need to generate your own: 
openssl req -new -x509 -newkey rsa:2048 -keyout pk.key -out pk.crt \
    -outform der -nodes
You'll also need to install the certificate for my kernel image signing key, which is under debian/certs in the linux-signed package. OVMF requires this in DER format: 
openssl x509 -in linux-signed-1~exp3/debian/certs/linux-image-benh@debian.org.cert.pem \
    -out linux.crt -outform der
You'll need to copy the certificate(s) to a FAT-formatted partition such as the EFI system partition, so that the firmware can read it. Use efibootmgr to add a boot entry for the kernel, for example: 
efibootmgr -c -d /dev/sda -L linux-signed -l '\vmlinuz.efi' -u 'initrd=initrd.img root=/dev/sda2 ro quiet'
You should use the same kernel parameters as usual, except that you also need to specify the initrd filename using the initrd= parameter. The EFI stub code at the beginning of the kernel will load the initrd using EFI boot services. Enabling Secure Boot
  1. Reboot the system and enter UEFI setup
  2. Find the menu entry for Secure Boot customisation (in OVMF, it's under 'Device Manager' for some reason)
  3. In OVMF, enrol the PK from pk.crt
  4. Add linux.crt to the DB (whitelist database)
  5. Ensure that Secure Boot is enabled and in 'User Mode'
Booting the kernel in Secure Boot If all went well, Linux will boot as normal. You can confirm that Secure Boot was enabled by reading /sys/kernel/security/securelevel, which will contain 1 if it was. Module signature validation Module signatures are now always checked and unsigned modules will be given the 'E' taint flag. If Secure Boot is used or you add the kernel parameter module.sig_enforce=1, unsigned modules will be rejected. You can also turn on signature enforcement and turn off various other methods of modifying kernel code (such as kexec) by writing 1 to /sys/kernel/security/securelevel.

15 April 2016

Raphaël Hertzog: Freexian s report about Debian Long Term Support, March 2016

A Debian LTS logoLike each month, here comes a report about the work of paid contributors to Debian LTS. Individual reports In February, 111.75 work hours have been dispatched among 10 paid contributors. Their reports are available: Evolution of the situation The number of sponsored hours started to increase for April (116.75 hours, thanks to Sonus Networks) and should increase even further for May (with a new Gold sponsor currently joining us, Babiel GmbH). Hopefully the trend will continue so that we can reach our objective of funding the equivalent of a full-time position. At the end of the month the LTS team will be fully responsible of all Debian 7 Wheezy updates. For now paid contributors are still helping the security team by fixing packages that were fixed in squeeze already but that are still outstanding in wheezy. They are also looking for ways to ensure that some of the most complicated packages can be supported over the wheezy LTS timeframe. It is likely that we will seek external help (possibly from credativ which is already handling support of PostgreSQL) for the maintenance of Xen and that some other packages (like libav, vlc, maybe qemu?) will be upgraded to newer versions which are still maintained (either upstream or in Debian Jessie by the Debian maintainers). Thanks to our sponsors New sponsors are in bold.

No comment Liked this article? Click here. My blog is Flattr-enabled.

1 April 2016

Ben Hutchings: Debian LTS work, March 2016

Last month was relatively quiet for me in terms of uploads, as the "squeeze" LTS period was over and "wheezy" is still in the hands of the regular Debian security team. I carried over 7.25 hours from Feburary and was assigned another 11 hours of work by Freexian's Debian LTS initiative, and worked a total of 12.75 hours. As Debian 7 "wheezy" uses Linux 3.2.y, I took on maintenance of that stable branch at kernel.org from May 2012 until wheezy's EOL. (This currently makes it both the oldest of the kernel.org supported releases and the one with the latest projected EOL!) I will now be maintaining it as part of my Debian LTS work, and then taking on Linux 3.16.y in my own time starting next month. Each update takes me around 10 hours to prepare, so Linux 3.2.79 accounted for most of my work this month. Aside from that, I backported an additional security fix for the kernel (that was not yet suitable for a kernel.org update) to the wheezy-security branch, rebased the wheezy branch on 3.2.79, and pulled upstream updates to the PREEMPT_RT patchset.

26 March 2016

Ben Hutchings: Depression vs fever

There was a connection I meant to draw, and then forgot to do before publishing my last entry. In severe cases of depression, ECT may still be used as a last resort, and is often effective. I had the idea that the lesser shock to the brain of a high fever might somehow have an effect on less serious depression. It doesn't seem terribly likely, though, and we never did find a thermometer to check just how high my temperature was.

22 March 2016

Ben Hutchings: I'm super, thanks for asking!

Some of you (but though probably not many) will know that I've suffered from depression at times. It has made it very difficult for me to do my job, to keep my home in order, even to have real conversations. Many important tasks seemed to require more energy than I had, and every setback left me feeling hopeless. I have sought treatment on several occasions, with very limited results. Certainly I would get better eventually, but it was hard to tell whether this had anything to do with the medication or therapy I received. And even while I felt better, I still didn't feel particularly happy or hopeful except when going to my favourite social events like DebConf. As I was recovering from the 'flu a weeks ago, I realised that I was feeling enthusiastic and energetic for no particular reason. Obviously I was recovering from physical illness, but that was brief. I had also just started a new project at work, but it isn't that exciting (at this stage) and I'm already aware of plenty of problems with it. So nothing external seemed to have changed to make me feel better, and yet my mood was so high that I worried that my illness could have changed to bipolar disorder and that I was entering a manic phase. Thankfully, I'm not behaving manically. I have been doing a lot more shopping than usual, but almost the first purchase was a whiteboard to maintain the to-do list that I had been keeping rather unreliably in my head, and mostly I've been buying things off that list - that I've intended to get for months or years. It's just been so long since I could feel generally positive and optimistic about my life - outside of any special event - that I didn't immediately recognise this state of mind as normality. It's now been two three weeks since my recovery, and I still feel so much better: As I feel better in myself I also find myself less self-centred and more able to focus on other people's needs, particularly my wife Nattie. Frankly I've been an asshole pretty often while I was depressed, so I apologise to those who've been the brunt of that. I hope you'll find me more pleasant to deal with from now on. There's lots more I could write, but I'll end this entry now and maybe say more at a later date.

11 March 2016

Raphaël Hertzog: Freexian s report about Debian Long Term Support, February 2016

A Debian LTS logoLike each month, here comes a report about the work of paid contributors to Debian LTS. Individual reports In February, 112.50 work hours have been dispatched among 11 paid contributors. Their reports are available: Evolution of the situation The number of sponsored hours continued to decrease a little bit. It s not worrisome yet but we should try to get back to a positive slope if we want to be able to do an outstanding job for wheezy LTS. On the positive side, TOSHIBA renewed their platinum sponsorship for another 6 months at least and we have some contacts for new sponsors, though they are far from being concluded yet. We are now in transition between squeeze LTS and wheezy LTS. The paid contributors are helping the security team by fixing packages that were fixed in squeeze already but that are still outstanding in wheezy. They are also taking generic measures to prepare wheezy LTS (for example to ensure all packages work with OpenJDK 7.x since support for 6.x will be dropped in the LTS period). Thanks to our sponsors New sponsors are in bold (none this month).

No comment Liked this article? Click here. My blog is Flattr-enabled.

3 March 2016

Ben Hutchings: Last week 'flu by

Last Monday, I began a new project at Codethink - working on kernel support for the next generation of an interactive system fitted in some high-performance cars. I travelled up to Manchester the night before, and on Monday I met Codethink's team (most of whom I was familiar with). My first chore was to set up VPN access to the development resources (source control, wiki, etc.). I sandboxed the proprietary VPN client in a VM with a systemd unit to run it at boot, so I can control it by starting and stopping that VM. I then set to work on unpacking and exploring the SoC vendor's evaluation module (EVM), starting by looking at serial output - of which there was none. Nothing on the LCD panel or network port either. A frustrating day. On Tuesday, the architect from our immediate customer, already a friend of mine, joined us in Manchester. As for the EVM, without any obvious change in cabling it was now reliably spitting out the expected u-boot and kernel boot messages, unfortunately ending with errors from the touchscreen driver intermingled with messages from various graphics drivers. I looked at the u-boot environment to see how the kernel parameters were controlled and started tweaking them with the aim of working around the errors. None of this worked. I looked for more documentation on the EVM, but found none beyond the quick start guide. Had I been given the wrong kernel or device tree? They matched the available downloads though the device tree looked very different from the upstream version. I started trying to edit the vendor's device tree to remove the troublesome devices before realising that the decompiled tree was full of absolute cross-references that would be invalid after recompiling. So, a second day of frustration. In the evening I started to feel a cold coming on. I slept poorly, and just dragged myself out of bed in time for 11:00 checkout. In the office, I remembered that u-boot had commands for manipulating device trees in memory. I tried stepping through the boot script and then removing device tree nodes for the touchscreen and graphics hardware before booting the kernel. Success! I got a login prompt where of course username:root, password:[empty] worked. (It doesn't run sshd, but does run telnetd.) Then it was time for a team lunch at the excellent Samsi, though I hesitated to go as I was feeling quite poorly. Shortly after lunch I found myself falling asleep at my desk in the middle of reading documentation. I had to take a nap on the sofa. I got a little more work done that day, but I got progressively feebler. The train journey home was thankfully uneventful. I arrived home at midnight and soon went to sleep. I spent most of Thursday in a high fever, dreaming of abstract entities and their relationships that I struggled to name, but in retrospect might correspond to various kinds of software component. It was incredibly tedious. I had no appetite and little ability to process the real world. Nattie tended to me as she could. I called my mum to cancel her visit planned for the next day. On Friday my fever started to recede and I drank some soup. I was able to look after myself to some extent, though I sorely missed Nattie when she went out. I spent most of the day watching comedy and music docs on the BBC iPlayer, something far too passive for me to do normally. On Saturday morning I felt well enough to tackle the meze platter that Nattie brought back from her previous evening's outing. It tasted pretty damn good. I felt better hour by hour, and in the evening we both went out to a group dinner in a pub. Hot food smelled and tasted even more amazing! I was able to start catching up on email and some real work, preparing kernel stable updates. I even migrated DNS service for decadent.org.uk late that night, driven by anger at the incompetence of my previous provider that had prevented my mails reaching bugs.debian.org. Despite the awfulness of Thursday and the symptoms I still have (tickly throat and runny nose), this bout of the 'flu has been a positive experience for me, but I'll explain why that is in a subsequent entry.

Ben Hutchings: Debian LTS work, February 2016

February marked the end of Debian 6.0 "squeeze" LTS, though there was some initial confusion (partly my fault) over which day of month it should end. I carried over 10 hours from January and was assigned another 11.25 hours of work by Freexian's Debian LTS initiative. I worked a total of 14 hours. I started the month with "the final" update to the linux-2.6 kernel package (DLA-412-1), fixing 5 CVEs and incorporating upstream stable update 2.6.32.70. After it was agreed that support would continue to the end of the month, I made one more update on the last day (DLA-439-1), fixing 4 CVEs, a regression, and some issues I had found lacking CVEs (one is now CVE-2012-6701). I helped to edit the end-of-life announcement for Squeeze LTS. I spent a fairly quiet week in the front desk, triaging new issues for squeeze. As I've volunteered to handle embargoed issues, I prepared security updates to libssh and libssh2 and issued them minutes after the public disclosure of the similarly disastrous CVE-2016-0739 and CVE-2016-0787 issues.

Next.

Previous.