Search Results: "cas"

3 September 2025

Joachim Breitner: F91 in Lean

Back in March, with version 4.17.0, Lean introduced partial_fixpoint, a new way to define recursive functions. I had drafted a blog post for the official Lean FRO blog back then, but forgot about it, and with the Lean FRO blog discontinued, I ll just publish it here, better late than never. With the partial_fixpoint mechanism we can model possibly partial functions (so those returning an Option) without an explicit termination proof, and still prove facts about them. See the corresponding section in the reference manual for more details. On the Lean Zulip, I was asked if we can use this feature to define the McCarthy 91 function and prove it to be total. This function is a well-known tricky case for termination proofs. First let us have a brief look at why this function is tricky to define in a system like Lean. A naive definition like
def f91 (n : Nat) : Nat :=
  if n > 100
  then n - 10
  else f91 (f91 (n + 11))
does not work; Lean is not able to prove termination of this functions by itself. Even using well-founded recursion with an explicit measure (e.g. termination_by 101 - n) is doomed, because we would have to prove facts about the function s behaviour (namely that f91n = f91101 = 91 for 90 n 100) and at the same time use that fact in the termination proof that we have to provide while defining the function. (The Wikipedia page spells out the proof.) We can make well-founded recursion work if we change the signature and use a subtype on the result to prove the necessary properties while we are defining the function. Lean by Example shows how to do it, but for larger examples this approach can be hard or tedious. With partial_fixpoint, we can define the function as a partial function without worrying about termination. This requires a change to the function s signature, returning an Option Nat:
def f91 (n : Nat) : Option Nat :=
  if n > 100
    then pure (n - 10)
    else f91 (n + 11) >>= f91
partial_fixpoint
From the point of view of the logic, Option.none is then used for those inputs for which the function does not terminate. This function definition is accepted and the function runs fine as compiled code:
#eval f91 42
prints some 91. The crucial question is now: Can we prove anything about f91 In particular, can we prove that this function is actually total? Since we now have the f91 function defined, we can start proving auxillary theorems, using whatever induction schemes we need. In particular we can prove that f91 is total and always returns 91 for n 100:
theorem f91_spec_high (n : Nat) (h : 100 < n) : f91 n = some (n - 10) := by
  unfold f91; simp [*]
theorem f91_spec_low (n : Nat) (h  : n   100) : f91 n = some 91 := by
  unfold f91
  rw [if_neg (by omega)]
  by_cases n < 90
    rw [f91_spec_low (n + 11) (by omega)]
    simp only [Option.bind_eq_bind, Option.some_bind]
    rw [f91_spec_low 91 (by omega)]
    rw [f91_spec_high (n + 11) (by omega)]
    simp only [Nat.reduceSubDiff, Option.some_bind]
    by_cases h : n = 100
      simp [f91, *]
      exact f91_spec_low (n + 1) (by omega)
theorem f91_spec (n : Nat) : f91 n = some (if n   100 then 91 else n - 10) := by
  by_cases h100 : n   100
    simp [f91_spec_low, *]
    simp [f91_spec_high, Nat.lt_of_not_le  _ , *]
-- Generic totality theorem
theorem f91_total (n : Nat) : (f91 n).isSome := by simp [f91_spec]
(Note that theorem f91_spec_low is itself recursive in a somewhat non-trivial way, but Lean can figure that out all by itself. Use termination_by? if you are curious.) This is already a solid start! But what if we want a function of type f91! (n : Nat) : Nat, without the Option? Then can derive that from the partial variant, as we have just proved that to be actually total:
def f91! (n : Nat) : Nat  := (f91 n).get (f91_total n)
theorem f91!_spec (n : Nat) : f91! n = if n   100 then 91 else n - 10 := by
  simp [f91!, f91_spec]
Using partial_fixpoint one can decouple the definition of a function from a termination proof, or even model functions that are not terminating on all inputs. This can be very useful in particular when using Lean for program verification, such as with the aeneas package, where such partial definitions are used to model Rust programs.

Enrico Zini: CAdES signatures on Debian

CAdES is a digital signature standard that is used and sometimes mandated, by the Italian Public Administration. To be able to do my job, I own a Carta Nazionale dei Servizi (CNS) with which I can generate legally binding signatures. Now comes the problem of finding a software to do it. Infocamere Firma4NG InfoCamere are distributing a software called Firma4NG, with a Linux option, which, I'm pleased to say, seems to work just fine. Autofirma AutoFirma is a Java software for digital signatures distributed by the Spanish government, which has a Linux version. It is licensed as GPL-2+ EUPL-1.1, and the source seems to be here. While my Spanish is decent I lack jargon for this specific field, and I didn't manage to make it work with my CNS. Autogram Andrej Shadura pointed me to Autogram, a Slovakian software for digital signatures, licensed under the EUPL-1.2. The interface is still only in Slovakian, so tried it but I didn't go very far in trying to make it work. OpenSSL In trixie, openssl is almost, but not quite, able to do it. Here's as far as I've got. Install opensc
apt install opensc
Test if you can access the smart card with:
pkcs11-tool --list-objects [-l]
You can find other pkcs11-tool examples here Set up a pkcs11 provider for openssl
apt install pkcs11-provider
Edit /etc/ssl/openssl.cnf:
[pkcs11_sect]
module = /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/ossl-modules/pkcs11.so
pkcs11-module-path = /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/pkcs11/opensc-pkcs11.so
default_algorithms = ALL
activate = 1
Test with openssl list -providers You can check if openssl can see keys on the card:
openssl pkey -in 'pkcs11:id=%01' -pubin -pubout -text
See PKCS11 URI documentation here. Install the PKCS11 engine for openssl
apt install libengine-pkcs11-openssl
It looks like providers replaced engines, and this would not be needed, but I couldn't find a way to convince openssl to work without this. Sign a document
openssl cms -nodetach -binary -cades -outform DER -in filename -out filename.p7m -sign -signer 'pkcs11:id=%01' -keyform engine -engine pkcs11
It verifies correctly using the Austrian verification system. All the Italian verification systems I tried, however, complain that, although the signature is valid, the certificate is emitted by an unqualified CA and the certificate revocation information cannot be found. PAdES When signing PDF files, the PAdES standard is sometimes accepted. LibreOffice is able to generate PAdES signatures using the "File / Digital signatures " menu, and provided the smart card is in the reader it is able to use it. Both LibreOffice and Okular can verify that the signature is indeed there. However, when trying to validate the signature using Italian validators, I get the same complaints about unqualified CAs and missing revocation information. Wall of shame Dike GoSign Infocert (now Tinexta) used to distribute a software called "Dike GoSign" that worked on Ubuntu, which I used on a completely isolated VM, and it was awful but it worked. I had to regenerate the VM for it, and discovered that the version they distribute now will refuse to work unless one signs in online with a Tinexta account. From the same company that asks you to install their own root certifiactes to use their digital signature system. Gross. Dropped. Aruba Sign Aruba used to distribute a software called Aruba Sign, which also worked on Ubuntu. Ubuntu support has been discontinued, and they now only offer support for Windows or Mac. Yuck. Dropped.

Ben Hutchings: FOSS activity in August 2025

2 September 2025

Debian Outreach Team: Spaarsh Gsoc Report

layout: post title: GSoC 2025 Report: Enhancing Debian packages with ROCm GPU acceleration date: 2025-09-01 categories: gsoc debian ROCm debian-packaging author: Spaarsh Thakkar

GitLab Salsa: @Spaarsh

GitHub: Spaarsh

Introduction I am Spaarsh Thakkar, a final-year Computer Science Engineering undergrad from India. My interests lie in research and systems. My recent work has been in and around Graphics Processing Units and I also hold a keen interest in Computer Networks. At the time of writing, I have been an open-source contributor for almost a year.

Proposal Description (as shown on GSoC Project Profile1) Due to Debian s open-source nature, no Debian package in main can have a proprietary GPU package listed as a dependency. While AI and HPC workloads increasingly rely on GPU acceleration, many Debian packages still focus solely on CUDA, which is proprietary. With the advent of ROCm, an open-source GPU computing platform, we can now integrate full-fledged AMD GPU support into Debian packages. This will improve the experience of developers working in AI/ML and HPC while positioning Debian as a strong OS choice for GPU-driven workloads. The proposal aims to aid in solving the aforementioned program by packaging several ROCm packages for debian and add ROCm support to some existing debian packages. The deliverables are as follows:
  1. New Debian packages with GPU support
  2. Enhanced GPU support within existing Debian packages
  3. More autopackagetests running on the Debian ROCm CI

Key Objectives Enable ROCm in:
  1. dbcsr
  2. gloo
  3. cp2k
Publish the following packages to debian apt archive:
  1. hipblas-common
  2. hipBLASlt

Work Report

1. Publishing hipblas-common to apt This objective was successfully completed, resulting in hipblas-common being published in the apt repository2. The process involved the following steps:
  1. Filing a Intent-To-Package (ITP)3
  2. Pulling the upstream source code repository from GitHub
  3. Adding the debian/ packaging files
  4. Testing the package locally
  5. Creating the corresponding project under rocm-team4
  6. Applying the necessary changes
  7. Building the package
  8. Testing it using sbuild
  9. Signing the package files
  10. Uploading the package to the mentors.debian.net archive(now in official archive)5
  11. Addressing review feedback and making changes
  12. Requesting sponsorship6
  13. Securing sponsorship, which led to the package being accepted into the experimental branch of apt
Since the beginning of GSoC, the package has also been promoted to the unstable branch2.

2. DBCSR ROCm and Multi-Arch Support During my GSoC project, I worked on extending the DBCSR (Distributed Block Compressed Sparse Row)7 package to improve its ROCm/HIP support, and handling multi-architecture GPU kernels in a way that is both practical for upstream maintainers and debian package developers. The code changes can be found at my dbcsr fork here8.

ROCm/HIP Enablement
  • Enabled ROCm backend support to DBCSR, allowing GPU acceleration beyond CUDA by enabling HIP-based builds.
  • Investigated and resolved build issues specific to HIP kernels within DBCSR.

Multi-Architecture GPU Kernel Handling (The following content was presented in greater detail at DebConf 25 as well. The presentation video can be found here9 and the presentation slide can be found here10).
  • DBCSR contains GPU kernels that are heavily optimized for specific architectures. By default, these are built for a single target architecture, which poses challenges for packaging where binaries need to support multiple possible GPU targets.
  • Explored different strategies for solving the multi-arch GPU kernel distribution problem, including:
    • Option 1: Fat binaries (embedding multiple GPU architectures into a single binary, with runtime dispatch). This is ideal for end-users but requires deeper changes upstream and is not straightforward with HIP/ROCm.
    • Option 2: Arch-specific libraries (e.g., libdbcsr.gfxXXX.a), where the alternatives system or explicit user selection would determine which one is used. This solves the problem but pushes complexity downstream into packaging and user configuration.
    • Option 3: Prefixed functions inside a single file, where kernels are compiled separately per architecture, functions are renamed with an arch prefix, and runtime logic in DBCSR decides which kernel to invoke. This shifts complexity upstream but could give a clean downstream experience.
  • I critically analyzed these options in the context of Debian packaging and upstream maintainability. Arch-specific .a files introduce exponential dependency complexity. The prefixed-function approach seemed like a plausible way forward, though it requires upstream buy-in.
  • After consulting with my mentor, these concerns were raised in the dbcsr repository as a discussion here11

Summary My work involved:
  • Enabling HIP/ROCm support in DBCSR.
  • Prototyping strategies for handling GPU multi-arch builds.
  • Evaluating the trade-offs between upstream maintainability and downstream packaging complexity.

3. gloo, hipification and source code issues One of the other packages that were targeted was gloo12. It is a collective communications library and has the implementations of different Machine Learning communication algorithms. The code changes can be found at my gloo fork here13 (some changes have not be committed at the time of writing).

HIP/ROCm Enablement
  1. Fixing old ROCm CMake functions The upstream Gloo codebase still used old ROCm CMake functions that began with the hip_ prefix (for example, hip_add_executable). These functions have since been deprecated/removed. I updated the build system to use the modern ROCm CMake equivalents so that the package can build properly in a current ROCm environment.
  2. Debian packaging changes I modified debian/control to add a new package, libgloo-rocm, in addition to the existing packages. This allows proper separation and handling of ROCm-enabled builds in Debian.
  3. First successful library build After these changes, I was able to successfully build the library. However, I ran into issues when trying to produce the shared library: there were undefined symbol errors at link time.

Source Code Issue On investigating the undefined symbol errors, I identified that these came from a lack of explicit template instantiation for some Gloo classes. Since C++ templates only get compiled when explicitly used or instantiated, this resulted in missing symbols in the shared library. To solve this, I explored the source code and noticed that the HIP backend code was not natively written it was generated from the CUDA backend using a custom hipification script maintained by the repo.
  • I experimented with modifying the HIPification process itself, trying out hipify-perl14 instead of the repository s custom Python script.
  • I also tried tweaking the source code in places where template instantiations were missing, so that the ROCm build would correctly export the needed symbols.

Summary The issue is still unresolved. The core problem lies in how the source code is structured: the HIP backend is almost entirely auto-generated from CUDA code, and the process does not handle template instantiations correctly. Because of this, the Debian package for Gloo with ROCm support is not yet ready for release, and further source-level fixes are required to make the ROCm build reliable.

4. cp2k CP2K15 is a quantum chemistry and solid state physics software package that can perform atomistic simulations of solid state, liquid, molecular, periodic, material, crystal, and biological systems.

HIP/ROCm Enablement cp2k depends on dbcsr and hence, HIP/ROCm enablement in this package required the dbcsr16 package to get through. Even though dbcsr isn t ready yet, it was worthwhile to plan how it shall be built with HIP/ROCm once we have dbcsr in place. Upon doing this, it was realized that the architecture-wise libraries provided by the dbcsr package will result in a complicated building process for cp2k. No changes have been made to this package yet and more concrete steps shall be taken once the dbcsr package work is completed.

Summary The multi-arch build process for cp2k maybe complicated by the one static-library-per-architecture method used in the dependent package, dbcsr.

Auxiliary Work & Activities While working on the aformentioned GSoC Goals, there were a few other things that were also done.
  1. libamdhip64-dev bug file17 While trying to enable HIP/ROCm in dbcsr, CMakeDetermineHIPCompiler.cmake was unable to find HIP runtime CMake package. After going through some similar issues faced by other developers earlier, it was decided to file a bug report under the libamdhip64-dev package. After discussions with and trying the changes suggested by Cory (my mentor) under the bug, the issue was resolved. Turns out, the wrong compiler was being used by me! The gcc compiler was supposed to be used and I was using hipcc. The bug was closed since it was not due an issue with the package. Cory suggested that I add this info under the ROCm wiki page. It is yet to be done and hopefully I get it done soon.
  2. DebConf25 Talk After facing the multi-arch build dilemma with dbcsr (and also getting to know about the issues faced by other fellow package developers), I came to realise that this was more than a packaging, build or programming issue. GPU-packaging was facing a policy issue. Hence, I decided to cover this problem in greater detail at my DebConf25 Virtual Presentation under the Outreach Session. Shoutout to Cory for his support and Lucas Kanashiro for encouraging me to present my work!
  3. Bi-Weekly AMD ROCm Meetings Shortly after the Coding period started, Cory began the initiative of Bi-Weekly AMD ROCm Meetings18. Being a part of the meetings (participated in all but one!), seeing the work the other folks are doing and being able to discuss my own problems was a delight.
  4. (Upcoming) IndiaFOSS 2025 Talk After understanding the nuances and beauty of the debian packaging ecosystem in these months, I decided to spread the work about debian packaging and packaging software in general. My talk19 for the same got accepted in the upcoming IndiaFOSS 202520 conference! I hope this beings more people towards the packaging ecosystem and to the debian developer ecosystem.

Conclusion My GSoC time was fantastic! I plan to complete the work that I have started during my GSoC and beyond. Working with Cory21 and Utkarsh22 (a fellow GSoC 25 contributor under Cory) has been a very positive experience. HIP/ROCm GPU-packaging is in a nascent stage. It is an exciting time to be in this space right now. The problems are new and never encountered before (CPU packaging isn t architecture specific!). The problems were shall face in the coming time, and our solutions to them will set a precendent for the future.

References 1 : https://summerofcode.withgoogle.com/programs/2025/projects/9s4jUjV0 2 : https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/hipblas-common 3 : https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1105114 4 : https://salsa.debian.org/rocm-team 5 : https://packages.debian.org/source/sid/hipblas-common 6 : https://lists.debian.org/debian-ai/2025/05/msg00088.html 7 : https://www.cp2k.org/dbcsr 8 : https://salsa.debian.org/Spaarsh/dbcsr/ 9 : https://drive.google.com/file/d/14WQuTMcI-L0lbi3zkUc9pT6RGwwVY0j1/view?usp=sharing 10 : https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1p-nkHPgg5C5jKGy7ySZ8rts5G2vNFQpQJQ8UySOWgVE 11 : https://github.com/cp2k/dbcsr/discussions/933 12 : https://github.com/pytorch/gloo 13 : https://salsa.debian.org/Spaarsh/gloo 14 : https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/hipify 15 : https://www.cp2k.org/ 16 : https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/dbcsr 17 : https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?https://fossunited.org/indiafoss/2025bug=1108159 18 : https://lists.debian.org/debian-ai/2025/05/msg00113.html 19 : https://fossunited.org/c/indiafoss/2025/cfp/dpq0b26ece 20 : https://fossunited.org/indiafoss/2025 21 : https://salsa.debian.org/cgmb 22 : https://salsa.debian.org/utk4r-sh

1 September 2025

Guido G nther: Free Software Activities August 2025

Another short status update of what happened on my side last month. Released Phosh 0.49.0 and added some more QoL improvements to Phosh Mobile stack (e.g. around Cell broadcasts). Also pulled my SHIFT6mq out of the drawer (where it was sitting in a drawwer far too long) and got it to show a picture after a small driver fix. Thanks to the work the sdm845-mainlining folks are doing that was all that was needed. If I can get touch to work better that would be another nice device for demoing Phosh. See below for details on the above and more: phosh phoc phosh-mobile-settings stevia (formerly phosh-osk-stub) xdg-desktop-portal-phosh pfs feedbackd feedbackd-device-themes libcmatrix Chatty Debian Cellbroadcastd ModemManager gnome-clocks git-buildpackage mobian-recipies Linux Reviews This is not code by me but reviews on other peoples code. The list is (as usual) slightly incomplete. Thanks for the contributions! Help Development If you want to support my work see donations. Comments? Join the Fediverse thread

Birger Schacht: Status update, August 2025

Due to the freeze I did not do that many uploads in the last few months, so there were various new releases I packaged once Trixie was released. Regarding the release of Debian 13, Trixie, I wrote a small summary of the changes in my packages. I uploaded an unreleased version of cage to experimental, to prepare for the transition to wlroots-0.19. Both sway and labwc already had packages in experimental that depended on the new wlroots version. When the transition happened, I uploaded the cage version to unstable, as well as labwc 0.9.1 and sway 1.11. I updated Most of the packages I uploaded using git-debpush, some of them could not be uploaded this way due to upstream using git submodules (this is 1107219). I also created 1112040 - git-debpush: should also say which tag it created and 1111504 - git-debpush: pristine-tar check warns about pristine-tar data thats not present (which is already fixed). I uploaded wayback 0.2 to NEW, where it is waiting for review, (ITP). In my dayjob I added extended the place lookup form of apis-core-rdf to allow searching places and selecting them on a map using leaflet and the nominatim API. Another issue I worked on was about highlighting those inputs of our generic list filter that are used to filter the results. I released a couple of bugfix releases for the v0.50 release, then v0.51 and two bugfix releases and then v0.52 and another couple of bugfix releases. v0.53 will land in a couple of days. I also released v0.6.2 of apis-highlighter-ng, which is sort of a plugin for apis-core-rdf, that allows to highlight parts of a text and link them to whatever Django object (in our case relations).

29 August 2025

Ravi Dwivedi: Installing Debian With Btrfs and Encryption

Motivation On the 8th of August 2025 (a day before the Debian Trixie release), I was upgrading my personal laptop from Debian Bookworm to Trixie. It was a major update. However, the update didn t go smoothly, and I ran into some errors. From the Debian support IRC channel, I got to know that it would be best if I removed the texlive packages. However, it was not so easy to just remove texlive with a simple apt remove command. I had to remove the texlive packages from /usr/bin. Then I ran into other errors. Hours after I started the upgrade, I realized I preferred having my system as it was before, as I had to travel to Noida the next day. Needless to say, I wanted to go to sleep rather than fix my broken system. Only if I had a way to go back to my system before I started upgrading, it would have saved a lot of trouble for me. I ended up installing Trixie from scratch. It turns out that there was a way to recover to the state before the upgrade - using Timeshift to roll back the system to a state (in our example, it is the state before the upgrade process started) in the past. However, it needs the Btrfs filesystem with appropriate subvolumes, not provided by Debian installer in their guided partitioning menu. I have set it up after a few weeks of the above-mentioned incident. Let me demonstrate how it works.
Check the screenshot above. It shows a list of snapshots made by Timeshift. Some of them were made by me manually. Others were made by Timeshift automatically as per the routine - I have set up hourly backups and weekly backups etc. In the above-mentioned major update, I could have just taken a snapshot using Timeshift before performing the upgrade and could have rolled back to that snapshot when I found that I cannot spend more time on fixing my installation errors. Then I could just perform the upgrade later.

Installation In this tutorial, I will cover how I installed Debian with Btrfs and disk encryption, along with creating subvolumes @ for root and @home for /home so that I can use Timeshift to create snapshots. These snapshots are kept on the same disk where Debian is installed, and the use-case is to roll back to a working system in case I mess up something or to recover an accidentally deleted file. I went through countless tutorials on the Internet, but I didn t find a single tutorial covering both the disk encryption and the above-mentioned subvolumes (on Debian). Debian doesn t create the desired subvolumes by default, therefore the process requires some manual steps, which beginners may not be comfortable performing. Beginners can try distros such as Fedora and Linux Mint, as their installation includes Btrfs with the required subvolumes. Furthermore, it is pertinent to note that I used Debian Trixie s DVD iso on a real laptop (not a virtual machine) for my installation. Debian Trixie is the codename for the current stable version of Debian. Then I took screenshots in a virtual machine by repeating the process. Moreover, a couple of screenshots are from the installation I did on the real laptop. Let s start the tutorial by booting up the Debian installer.
The above screenshot shows the first screen we see on the installer. Since we want to choose Expert Install, we select Advanced Options in the screenshot above.
Let s select the Expert Install option in the above screenshot. It is because we want to create subvolumes after the installer is done with the partition, and only then proceed to installing the base system. Non-expert install modes proceed directly to installing the system right after creating partitions without pausing for us to create the subvolumes.
After selecting the Expert Install option, you will get the screen above. I will skip to partitioning from here and leave the intermediate steps such as choosing language, region, connecting to Wi-Fi, etc. For your reference, I did create the root user.
Let s jump right to the partitioning step. Select the Partition disks option from the menu as shown above.
Choose Manual.
Select your disk where you would like to install Debian.
Select Yes when asked for creating a new partition.
I chose the msdos option as I am not using UEFI. If you are using UEFI, then you need to choose the gpt option. Also, your steps will (slightly) differ from mine if you are using UEFI. In that case, you can watch this video by the YouTube channel EF Linux in which he creates an EFI partition. As he doesn t cover disk encryption, you can continue reading this post after following the steps corresponding to EFI.
Select the free space option as shown above.
Choose Create a new partition.
I chose the partition size to be 1 GB.
Choose Primary.
Choose Beginning.
Now, I got to this screen.
I changed mount point to /boot and turned on the bootable flag and then selected Done setting up the partition.
Now select free space.
Choose the Create a new partition option.
I made the partition size equal to the remaining space on my disk. I do not intend to create a swap partition, so I do not need more space.
Select Primary.
Select the Use as option to change its value.
Select physical volume for encryption.
Select Done setting up the partition.
Now select Configure encrypted volumes.
Select Yes.
Select Finish.
Selecting Yes will take a lot of time to erase the data. Therefore, I would say if you have hours for this step (in case your SSD is like 1 TB), then I would recommend selecting Yes. Otherwise, you could select No and compromise on the quality of encryption. After this, you will be asked to enter a passphrase for disk encryption and confirm it. Please do so. I forgot to take the screenshot for that step.
Now select that encrypted volume as shown in the screenshot above.
Here we will change a couple of options which will be shown in the next screenshot.
In the Use as menu, select btrfs journaling file system.
Now, click on the mount point option.
Change it to / - the root file system.
Select Done setting up the partition.
This is a preview of the paritioning after performing the above-mentioned steps.
If everything is okay, proceed with the Finish partitioning and write changes to disk option.
The installer is reminding us to create a swap partition. I proceeded without it as I planned to add swap after the installation.
If everything looks fine, choose yes for writing the changes to disks.
Now we are done with partitioning and we are shown the screen in the screenshot above. If we had not selected the Expert Install option, the installer would have proceeded to install the base system without asking us. However, we want to create subvolumes before proceeding to install the base system. This is the reason we chose Expert Install. Now press Ctrl + F2.
You will see the screen as in the above screenshot. It says Please press Enter to activate this console. So, let s press Enter.
After pressing Enter, we see the above screen.
The screenshot above shows the steps I performed in the console. I followed the already mentioned video by EF Linux for this part and adapted it to my situation (he doesn t encrypt the disk in his tutorial). First we run df -h to have a look at how our disk is partitioned. In my case, the output was:
# df -h
Filesystem              Size  Used  Avail   Use% Mounted on
tmpfs                   1.6G  344.0K  1.6G    0% /run
devtmpfs                7.7G       0  7.7G   0% /dev
/dev/sdb1               3.7G    3.7G    0   100% /cdrom
/dev/mapper/sda2_crypt  952.9G  5.8G  950.9G  0% /target
/dev/sda1               919.7M  260.0K  855.8M  0% /target/boot
df -h shows us that /dev/mapper/sda2_crypt and /dev/sda1 are mounted on /target and /target/boot respectively. Let s unmount them. For that, we run:
# umount /target
# umount /target/boot
Next, let s mount our root filesystem to /mnt.
# mount /dev/mapper/sda2_crypt /mnt
Let s go into the /mnt directory.
# cd /mnt
Upon listing the contents of this directory, we get:
/mnt # ls
@rootfs
Debian installer has created a subvolume @rootfs automatically. However, we need the subvolumes to be @ and @home. Therefore, let s rename the @rootfs subvolume to @.
/mnt # mv @rootfs @
Listing the contents of the directory again, we get:
/mnt # ls
@
We only one subvolume right now. Therefore, let us go ahead and create another subvolume @home.
/mnt # btrfs subvolume create @home
Create subvolume './@home'
If we perform ls now, we will see there are two subvolumes:
/mnt # ls
@ @home
Let us mount /dev/mapper/sda2_crypt to /target
/mnt # mount -o noatime,space_cache=v2,compress=zstd,ssd,discard=async,subvol=@ /dev/mapper/sda2_crypt /target/
Now we need to create a directory for /home.
/mnt # mkdir /target/home/
Now we mount the /home directory with subvol=@home option.
/mnt # mount -o noatime,space_cache=v2,compress=zstd,ssd,discard=async,subvol=@home /dev/mapper/sda2_crypt /target/home/
Now mount /dev/sda1 to /target/boot.
/mnt # mount /dev/sda1 /target/boot/
Now we need to add these options to the fstab file, which is located at /target/etc/fstab. Unfortunately, vim is not installed in this console. The only way to edit is Nano.
nano /target/etc/fstab
Edit your fstab file to look similar to the one in the screenshot above. I am pasting the fstab file contents below for easy reference.
# /etc/fstab: static file system information.
#
# Use 'blkid' to print the universally unique identifier for a
# device; this may be used with UUID= as a more robust way to name devices
# that works even if disks are added and removed. See fstab(5).
#
# systemd generates mount units based on this file, see systemd.mount(5).
# Please run 'systemctl daemon-reload' after making changes here.
#
# <file system> <mount point>   <type>  <options>       <dump>  <pass>
/dev/mapper/sda2_crypt /        btrfs   noatime,compress=zstd,ssd,discard=async,space_cache=v2,subvol=@ 0       0
/dev/mapper/sda2_crypt /home    btrfs   noatime,compress=zstd,ssd,discard=async,space_cache=v2,subvol=@home 0       0
# /boot was on /dev/sda1 during installation
UUID=12842b16-d3b3-44b4-878a-beb1e6362fbc /boot           ext4    defaults        0       2
/dev/sr0        /media/cdrom0   udf,iso9660 user,noauto     0       0
Please double check the fstab file before saving it. In Nano, you can press Ctrl+O followed by pressing Enter to save the file. Then press Ctrl+X to quit Nano. Now, preview the fstab file by running
cat /target/etc/fstab
and verify that the entries are correct, otherwise you will booted to an unusable and broken system after the installation is complete. Next, press Ctrl + Alt + F1 to go back to the installer.
Proceed to Install the base system.
Screenshot of Debian installer installing the base system. Screenshot of Debian installer installing the base system.
I chose the default option here - linux-image-amd64. After this, the installer will ask you a few more questions. For desktop environment, I chose KDE Plasma. You can choose the desktop environment as per your liking. I will not cover the rest of the installation process and assume that you were able to install from here.

Post installation Let s jump to our freshly installed Debian system. Since I created a root user, I added the user ravi to the suoders file (/etc/sudoers) so that ravi can run commands with sudo. Follow this if you would like to do the same. Now we set up zram as swap. First, install zram-tools.
sudo apt install zram-tools
Now edit the file /etc/default/zramswap and make sure to have the following lines are uncommented:
ALGO=lz4
PERCENT=50
Now, run
sudo systemctl restart zramswap
If you run lsblk now, you should see the below-mentioned entry in the output:
zram0          253:0    0   7.8G  0 disk  [SWAP]
This shows us that zram has been activated as swap. Now we install timeshift, which can be done by running
sudo apt install timeshift
After the installation is complete, run Timeshift and schedule snapshots as you please. We are done now. Hope the tutorial was helpful. See you in the next post and let me know if you have any suggestions and questions on this tutorial.

Raju Devidas: Fixing Auto-Rotate screen orientation on PostmarketOS devices running MATE DE

Fixing Auto-Rotate screen orientation on PostmarketOS devices running MATE DEI have been using my Samsung Galaxy Tab A (2015) with PostmarketOS on and off since last year. It serves as a really good e-book reader with KOReader installed on it. Have tried phosh and plasma-mobile on it, works nicely but slows the device down heavily (2 GB RAM and old processor) so I use MATE Desktop environment on it.Lately I have started using this tablet along with my laptop as a second screen for work. And it has been working super nicely for that. The only issue being that I have to manually rotate the screen to landscape every time I reboot the device. It resets the screen orientation to portrait after a reboot. So I went through the pmOS wiki and a neat nice hack documented there worked very well for me. First we will test if the auto-rotate sensor works and if we can read values from it. So we install some basic necessary packages
$ sudo apk add xrandr xinput inotify-tools iio-sensor-proxy
Enable the service for iio-sensor-proxy
sudo rc-update add iio-sensor-proxy
Reboot the device. Now in the device terminal start the sensor monitor-sensor
user@samsung-gt58 ~> monitor-sensor
    Waiting for iio-sensor-proxy to appear
+++ iio-sensor-proxy appeared
=== Has accelerometer (orientation: normal, tilt: vertical)
=== Has ambient light sensor (value: 5.000000, unit: lux)
=== No proximity sensor
=== No compass
    Light changed: 14.000000 (lux)
    Accelerometer orientation changed: left-up
    Tilt changed: tilted-down
    Light changed: 12.000000 (lux)
    Tilt changed: vertical
    Light changed: 13.000000 (lux)
    Light changed: 11.000000 (lux)
    Light changed: 13.000000 (lux)
    Accelerometer orientation changed: normal
    Light changed: 5.000000 (lux)
    Light changed: 6.000000 (lux)
    Light changed: 5.000000 (lux)
    Accelerometer orientation changed: right-up
    Light changed: 3.000000 (lux)
    Light changed: 4.000000 (lux)
    Light changed: 5.000000 (lux)
    Light changed: 12.000000 (lux)
    Tilt changed: tilted-down
    Light changed: 19.000000 (lux)
    Accelerometer orientation changed: bottom-up
    Tilt changed: vertical
    Light changed: 1.000000 (lux)
    Light changed: 2.000000 (lux)
    Light changed: 4.000000 (lux)
    Accelerometer orientation changed: right-up
    Tilt changed: tilted-down
    Light changed: 11.000000 (lux)
    Accelerometer orientation changed: normal
    Tilt changed: vertical
    Tilt changed: tilted-down
    Light changed: 18.000000 (lux)
    Light changed: 21.000000 (lux)
    Light changed: 22.000000 (lux)
    Light changed: 19.000000 (lux)
    Accelerometer orientation changed: left-up
    Light changed: 17.000000 (lux)
    Tilt changed: vertical
    Light changed: 14.000000 (lux)
    Tilt changed: tilted-down
    Light changed: 16.000000 (lux)
    Light changed: 18.000000 (lux)
    Light changed: 17.000000 (lux)
    Light changed: 18.000000 (lux)
    Light changed: 17.000000 (lux)
    Light changed: 18.000000 (lux)
    Light changed: 17.000000 (lux)
    Light changed: 18.000000 (lux)
    Light changed: 17.000000 (lux)
As you can see we can read the rotation values from the sensor as I am rotating the tablet in different orientations. Now we just need to use a script which changes the screen orientation using xrandr according to the sensor value.
#!/bin/sh
killall monitor-sensor
monitor-sensor > /dev/shm/sensor.log 2>&1 &
while inotifywait -e modify /dev/shm/sensor.log; do
  ORIENTATION=$(tail /dev/shm/sensor.log   grep &aposorientation&apos   tail -1   grep -oE &apos[^ ]+$&apos)
  case "$ORIENTATION" in
    normal)
      xrandr -o normal
      xinput set-prop "Goodix Capacitive TouchScreen" "Coordinate Transformation Matrix" 1 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 1
      ;;
    left-up)
      xrandr -o left
      xinput set-prop "Goodix Capacitive TouchScreen" "Coordinate Transformation Matrix" 0 -1 1 1 0 0 0 0 1
      ;;
    bottom-up)
      xrandr -o inverted
      xinput set-prop "Goodix Capacitive TouchScreen" "Coordinate Transformation Matrix" -1 0 1 0 -1 1 0 0 1
      ;;
    right-up)
      xrandr -o right
      xinput set-prop "Goodix Capacitive TouchScreen" "Coordinate Transformation Matrix" 0 1 0 -1 0 1 0 0 1
      ;;
  esac
done

auto-rotate-screen.sh

You need to replace the name of your touch input device in the script, you can get the name by using xinput --list , make sure to type this on the device terminal.
user@samsung-gt58 ~> xinput --list
* Virtual core pointer                    	id=2	[master pointer  (3)]
*   * Virtual core XTEST pointer              	id=4	[slave  pointer  (2)]
*   * Zinitix Capacitive TouchScreen          	id=10	[slave  pointer  (2)]
*   * Toad One Plus                           	id=12	[slave  pointer  (2)]
* Virtual core keyboard                   	id=3	[master keyboard (2)]
    * Virtual core XTEST keyboard             	id=5	[slave  keyboard (3)]
    * GPIO Buttons                            	id=6	[slave  keyboard (3)]
    * pm8941_pwrkey                           	id=7	[slave  keyboard (3)]
    * pm8941_resin                            	id=8	[slave  keyboard (3)]
    * Zinitix Capacitive TouchScreen          	id=11	[slave  keyboard (3)]
    * samsung-a2015 Headset Jack              	id=9	[slave  keyboard (3)]
In our script here we are using a Zinitix capacitive screen, it will be different for yours.Once your script is ready with the correct touchscreen name. Save and make the script executable. chmod +x auto-rotate-screen.sh Then test your script in your terminal ./auto-rotate.sh , stop the script using Ctrl + CNow we need add this script to auto-start. On MATE DE you can go to System > Control Center > Startup Applications, then click on Custom Add button, browse the script location, give it a name and then click on Add button. Now reboot the tablet/device, login and see the auto rotation working.
0:00
/0:09

  1. Auto-Rotation wiki article on PostmarketOS Wiki https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Auto-rotation

Noah Meyerhans: Determining Network Online Status of Dualstack Cloud VMs

When a Debian cloud VM boots, it typically runs cloud-init at various points in the boot process. Each invocation can perform certain operations based on the host s static configuration passed by the user, typically either through a well known link-local network service or an attached iso9660 drive image. Some of the cloud-init steps execute before the network comes up, and others at a couple of different points after the network is up. I recently encountered an unexpected issue when configuring a dualstack (uses both IPv6 and legacy IPv4 networking) VM to use a custom apt server accessible only via IPv6. VM provisioning failed because it was unable to access the server in question, yet when I logged in to investigate, it was able to access the server without any problem. The boot had apparently gone smoothly right up until cloud-init s Package Update Upgrade Install module called apt-get update, which failed and broke subsequent provisioning steps. The errors reported by apt-get indicated that there was no route to the service in question, which more accurately probably meant that there was not yet a route to the service. But there was shortly after, when I investigated. This was surprising because the apt-get invocations occur in a cloud-init sequence that s explicitly ordered after the network is configured according to systemd-networkd-wait-online. Investigation eventually led to similar issues encountered in other environments reported in Debian bug #1111791, systemd: network-online.target reached before IPv6 address is ready . The issue described in that bug is identical to mine, but the bug is tagged wontfix. The behavior is considered correct.

Why the default behavior is the correct one While it s a bit counterintuitive, the systemd-networkd behavior is correct, and it s also not something we d want to override in the cloud images. Without explicit configuration, systemd can t accurately infer the intended network configuration of a given system. If a system is IPv6-only, systemd-networkd-wait-online will introduce unexpected delays in the boot process if it waits for IPv4, and vice-versa. If it assumes dualstack, things are even worse because it would block for a long time (approximately two minutes) in any single stack network before failing, leaving the host in degraded state. So the most reasonable default behavior is to block until any protocol is configured. For these same reasons, we can t change the systemd-networkd-wait-online configuration in our cloud images. All of the cloud environments we support offer both single stack and dual stack networking, so we preserve systemd s default behavior. What s causing problems here is that IPv6 takes significantly longer to configure due to its more complex router solicitation + router advertisement + DHCPv6 setup process. So in this particular case, where I ve got a dualstack VM that needs to access a v6-only apt server during the provisioning process, I need to find some mechanism to override systemd s default behavior and wait for IPv6 connectivity specifically.

What won t work Cloud-init offers the ability to write out arbitrary files during provisioning. So writing a drop-in for systemd-networkd-wait-online.service is trivial. Unfortunately, this doesn t give us everything we actually need. We still need to invoke systemctl daemon-reload to get systemd to actually apply the changes after we ve written them, and of course we need to do that before the service actually runs. Cloud-init provides a bootcmd module that lets us run shell commands very early in the boot process , but it runs too early: it runs before we ve written out our configuration files. Similarly, it provides a runcmd module, but scripts there are towards the end of the boot process, far too late to be useful. Instead of using the bootcmd facility, to simply reload systemd s config, it seemed possible that we could both write the config and trigger the reload, similar to the following:
 bootcmd:
- mkdir -p /etc/systemd/system/systemd-networkd-wait-online.service.d
- echo "[Service]" > /etc/systemd/system/systemd-networkd-wait-online.service.d/10-netplan.conf
- echo "ExecStart=" >> /etc/systemd/system/systemd-networkd-wait-online.service.d/10-netplan.conf
- echo "ExecStart=/usr/lib/systemd/systemd-networkd-wait-online --operational-state=routable --any --ipv6" >> /etc/systemd/system/systemd-networkd-wait-online.service.d/10-netplan.conf
- systemctl daemon-reload
But even that runs too late, as we can see in the logs that systemd-networkd-wait-online.service has completed before bootcmd is executed:
root@sid-tmp2:~# journalctl --no-pager -l -u systemd-networkd-wait-online.service
Aug 29 17:02:12 sid-tmp2 systemd[1]: Starting systemd-networkd-wait-online.service - Wait for Network to be Configured...
Aug 29 17:02:13 sid-tmp2 systemd[1]: Finished systemd-networkd-wait-online.service - Wait for Network to be Configured
.
root@sid-tmp2:~# grep -F 'config-bootcmd ran' /var/log/cloud-init.log
2025-08-29 17:02:14,766 - handlers.py[DEBUG]: finish: init-network/config-bootcmd: SUCCESS: config-bootcmd ran successfully and took 0.467 seconds
At this point, it s looking like there are few options left!

What eventually worked I ended up identifying two solutions to the issue, both of which involve getting some other component of the provisioning process to run systemd-networkd-wait-online.

Solution 1 The first involves getting apt-get itself to wait for IPv6 configuration. The apt.conf configuration interface allows the definition of an APT::Update::Pre-Invoke hook that s executed just before apt s update operation. By writing the following to a file in /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/, we re able to ensure that we have IPv6 connectivity before apt-get tries accessing the network. This cloud-config snippet accomplishes that:
 - path: /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/99-wait-for-ipv6
content:  
APT::Update::Pre-Invoke   "/usr/lib/systemd/systemd-networkd-wait-online --operational-state=routable --any --ipv6";  
This is safe to leave in place after provisioning, because the delay will be negligible once IPv6 connectivity is established. It s only during address configuration that it ll block for a noticeable amount of time, but that s what we want. This solution isn t entirely correct, though, because it s only apt-get that s actually affected by it. Other service that start after the system is ostensibly online might only see IPv4 connectivity when they start. This seems acceptable at the moment, though.

Solution 2 The second solution is to simply invoke systemd-networkd-wait-online directly from a cloud-init bootcmd. Similar to the first solution, it s not exactly correct because the host has already reached network-online.target, but it does block enough of cloud-init that package installation happens only after it completes. The cloud-config snippet for this is
bootcmd:
- [/usr/lib/systemd/systemd-networkd-wait-online, --operational-state=routable, --any, --ipv6]
In either case, we still want to write out a snippet to configure systemd-networkd-wait-online to wait for IPv6 connectivity for future reboots. Even though cloud-init won t necessarily run in those cases, and many cloud VMs never reboot at all, it does complete the solution. Additionally, it solves the problem for any derivative images that may be created based on the running VM s state. (At least if we can be certain that instances of those derivative images will never run in an IPv4-only network!)
write_files:
- path: /run/systemd/system/systemd-networkd-wait-online.service.d/99-ipv6-wait.conf
content:  
[Service]
ExecStart=
ExecStart=/lib/systemd/systemd-networkd-wait-online --any --operational-state=routable --ipv6

How to properly solve it One possible improvement would be for cloud-init to support a configuration key allowing the admin to specify the required protocols. Based on the presence of this key, cloud-init could reconfigure systemd-networkd-wait-online.service accordingly. Alternatively it could set the appropriate RequiredFamilyForOnline= value in the generated .network file. cloud-init supports multiple network configuration backends, so each of those would need to be updated. If using the systemd-networkd configuration renderer, this should be straightforward, but Debian uses the netplan renderer, so that tool might also need to be taught to pass such a configuration along to systemd-networkd.

28 August 2025

Valhalla's Things: 1840s Underwear

Posted on August 28, 2025
Tags: madeof:atoms, craft:sewing, FreeSoftWear
A woman wearing a knee-length shift with very short pleated sleeves and drawers that are a bit longer than needed to be ankle-length. The shift is too wide at the top, had to have a pleat taken in the center front, but the sleeves are still falling down. She is also wearing a black long sleeved t-shirt and leggings under said underwear, for decency. A bit more than a year ago, I had been thinking about making myself a cartridge pleated skirt. For a number of reasons, one of which is the historybounding potential, I ve been thinking pre-crinoline, so somewhere around the 1840s, and that s a completely new era for me, which means: new underwear. Also, the 1840s are pre-sewing machine, and I was already in a position where I had more chances to handsew than to machine sew, so I decided to embrace the slowness and sew 100% by hand, not even using the machine for straight seams. A woman turning fast enough that her petticoat extends a considerable distance from the body. The petticoat is white with a pattern of cording from the hem to just below hip level, with a decreasing number of rows of cording going up. If I remember correctly, I started with the corded petticoat, looking around the internet for instructions, and then designing my own based on the practicality of using modern wide fabric from my stash (and specifically some DITTE from costumers favourite source of dirty cheap cotton IKEA). Around the same time I had also acquired a sashiko kit, and I used the Japanese technique for sewing running stitches pushing the needle with a thimble that covers the base of the middle finger, and I can confirm that for this kind of things it s great! I ve since worn the petticoat a few times for casual / historyBounding / folkwearBounding reasons, during the summer, and I can confirm it s comfortable to use; I guess that during the winter it could be nice to add a flannel layer below it. The technical drawing and pattern for drawers from the book: each leg is cut out of a rectangle of fabric folded along the length, the leg is tapered equally, while the front is tapered more than the back, and comes to a point below the top of the original rectangle. Then I proceeded with the base layers: I had been browsing through The workwoman's guide and that provided plenty of examples, and I selected the basic ankle-length drawers from page 53 and the alternative shift on page 47. As for fabric, I had (and still have) a significant lack of underwear linen in my stash, but I had plenty of cotton voile that I had not used in a while: not very historically accurate for plain underwear, but quite suitable for a wearable mockup. Working with a 1830s source had an interesting aspect: other of the usual, mildly annoying, imperial units, it also used a lot a few obsolete units, especially nails, that my qalc, my usual calculator and converter, doesn t support. Not a big deal, because GNU units came to the rescue, and that one knows a lot of obscure and niche units, and it s quite easy to add those that are missing1 Working on this project also made me freshly aware of something I had already noticed: converting instructions for machine sewing garments into instructions for hand sewing them is usually straightforward, but the reverse is not always true. Starting from machine stitching, you can usually convert straight stitches into backstitches (or running backstitches), zigzag and overlocking into overcasting and get good results. In some cases you may want to use specialist hand stitches that don t really have a machine equivalent, such as buttonhole stitches instead of simply overcasting the buttonhole, but that s it. Starting from hand stitching, instead, there are a number of techniques that could be converted to machine stitching, but involve a lot of visible topstitching that wasn t there in the original instructions, or at times are almost impossible to do by machine, if they involve whipstitching together finished panels on seams that are subject to strong tension. Anyway, halfway through working with the petticoat I cut both the petticoat and the drawers at the same time, for efficiency in fabric use, and then started sewing the drawers. the top third or so of the drawers, showing a deep waistband that is closed with just one button at the top, and the front opening with finished edges that continue through the whole crotch, with just the overlap of fabric to provide coverage. The book only provided measurements for one size (moderate), and my fabric was a bit too narrow to make them that size (not that I have any idea what hip circumference a person of moderate size was supposed to have), so the result is just wide enough to be comfortably worn, but I think that when I ll make another pair I ll try to make them a bit wider. On the other hand they are a bit too long, but I think that I ll fix it by adding a tuck or two. Not a big deal, anyway. The same woman as in the opening image from the back, the shift droops significantly in the center back, and the shoulder straps have fallen down on the top of the arms. The shift gave me a bit more issues: I used the recommended gusset size, and ended up with a shift that was way too wide at the top, so I had to take a box pleat in the center front and back, which changed the look and wear of the garment. I have adjusted the instructions to make gussets wider, and in the future I ll make another shift following those. Even with the pleat, the narrow shoulder straps are set quite far to the sides, and they tend to droop, and I suspect that this is to be expected from the way this garment is made. The fact that there are buttonholes on the shoulder straps to attach to the corset straps and prevent the issue is probably a hint that this behaviour was to be expected. The technical drawing of the shift from the book, showing a the top of the body, two trapezoidal shoulder straps, the pleated sleeves and a ruffle on the front edge. I ve also updated the instructions so that they shoulder straps are a bit wider, to look more like the ones in the drawing from the book. Making a corset suitable for the time period is something that I will probably do, but not in the immediate future, but even just wearing the shift under a later midbust corset with no shoulder strap helps. I m also not sure what the point of the bosom gores is, as they don t really give more room to the bust where it s needed, but to the high bust where it s counterproductive. I also couldn t find images of original examples made from this pattern to see if they were actually used, so in my next make I may just skip them. Sleeve detail, showing box pleats that are about 2 cm wide and a few mm distance from each other all along the circumference, neatly sewn into the shoulder strap on one side and the band at the other side. On the other hand, I m really happy with how cute the short sleeves look, and if2 I ll ever make the other cut of shift from the same book, with the front flaps, I ll definitely use these pleated sleeves rather than the straight ones that were also used at the time. As usual, all of the patterns have been published on my website under a Free license:

  1. My ~/.units file currently contains definitions for beardseconds, bananas and the more conventional Nm and NeL (linear mass density of fibres).
  2. yeah, right. when.

27 August 2025

Russell Coker: ZRAM and VMs

I ve just started using zram for swap on VMs. The use of compression for swap in Linux apparently isn t new, it s been in the Linux kernel since version 3.2 (since 2012). But until recent years I hadn t used it. When I started using Mobian (the Debian distribution for phones) zram was in the default setup, it basically works and I never needed to bother with it which is exactly what you want from such a technology. After seeing it s benefits in Mobian I started using it on my laptops where it worked well. Benefits of ZRAM ZRAM means that instead of paging data to storage it is compressed to another part of RAM. That means no access to storage which is a significant benefit if storage is slow (typical for phones) or if storage wearing out is a problem. For servers you typically have SSDs that are fast and last for significant write volumes, for example the 120G SSDs referenced in my blog post about swap (not) breaking SSD [1] are running well in my parents PC because they outlasted all the other hardware connected to them and 120G isn t usable for anything more demanding than my parents use nowadays. Those are Intel 120G 2.5 DC grade SATA SSDs. For most servers ZRAM isn t a good choice as you can just keep doing IO on the SSDs for years. A server that runs multiple VMs is a special case because you want to isolate the VMs from each other. Support for quotas for storage IO in Linux isn t easy to configure while limiting the number of CPU cores is very easy. If a system or VM using ZRAM for swap starts paging excessively the bottleneck will be CPU, this probably isn t going to be great on a phone with a slow CPU but on a server class CPU it will be less of a limit. Whether compression is slower or faster than SSD is a complex issue but it will definitely be just a limit for that VM. When I setup a VM server I want to have some confidence that a DoS attack or configuration error on one VM isn t going to destroy the performance of other VMs. If the VM server has 4 cores (the smallest VM server I run) and no VM has more than 2 cores then I know that the system can still run adequately if half the CPU performance is being wasted. Some servers I run have storage limits that make saving the disk space for swap useful. For servers I run in Hetzner (currently only one server but I have run up to 6 at various times in the past) the storage is often limited, Hetzner seems to typically have storage that is 8* the size of RAM so if you have many VMs configured with the swap that they might need in the expectation that usually at most one of them will be actually swapping then it can make a real difference to usable storage. 5% of storage used for swap files isn t uncommon or unreasonable. Big Servers I am still considering the implications of zram on larger systems. If I have a ML server with 512G of RAM would it make sense to use it? It seems plausible that a system might need 550G of RAM and zram could make the difference between jobs being killed with OOM and the jobs just completing. The CPU overhead of compression shouldn t be an issue as when you have dozens of cores in the system having one or two used for compression is no big deal. If a system is doing strictly ML work there will be a lot of data that can t be compressed, so the question is how much of the memory is raw input data and the weights used for calculations and how much is arrays with zeros and other things that are easy to compress. With a big server nothing less than 32G of swap will make much difference to the way things work and if you have 32G of data being actively paged then the fastest NVMe devices probably won t be enough to give usable performance. As zram uses one stream per CPU code if you have 44 cores that means 44 compression streams which should handle greater throughput. I ll write another blog post if I get a chance to test this.

22 August 2025

Russell Coker: Dell T320 H310 RAID and IT Mode

The Problem Just over 2 years ago my Dell T320 server had a motherboard failure [1]. I recently bought another T320 that had been gutted (no drives, PSUs, or RAM) and put the bits from my one in it. I installed Debian and the resulting installation wouldn t boot, I tried installing with both UEFI and BIOS modes with the same result. Then I realised that the disks I had installed were available even though I hadn t gone through the RAID configuration (I usually make a separate RAID-0 for each disk to work best with BTRFS or ZFS). I tried changing the BIOS setting for SATA disks between RAID and AHCI modes which didn t change things and realised that the BIOS setting in question probably applies to the SATA connector on the motherboard and that the RAID card was in IT mode which means that each disk is seen separately. If you are using ZFS or BTRFS you don t want to use a RAID-1, RAID-5, or RAID-6 on the hardware RAID controller, if there are different versions of the data on disks in the stripe then you want the filesystem to be able to work out which one is correct. To use IT mode you have to flash a different unsupported firmware on the RAID controller and then you either have to go to some extra effort to make it bootable or have a different device to boot from. The Root Causes Dell has no reason to support unusual firmware on their RAID controllers. Installing different firmware on a device that is designed for high availability is going to have some probability of data loss and perhaps more importantly for Dell some probability of customers returning hardware during the support period and acting innocent about why it doesn t work. Dell has a great financial incentive to make it difficult to install Dell firmware on LSI cards from other vendors which have equivalent hardware as they don t want customers to get all the benefits of iDRAC integration etc without paying the Dell price premium. All the other vendors have similar financial incentives so there is no official documentation or support on converting between different firmware images. Dell s support for upgrading the Dell version is pretty good, but it aborts if it sees something different. The Attempts I tried following the instructions in this document to flash back to Dell firmware [2]. This document is about the H310 RAID card in my Dell T320 AKA a LSI SAS 9211-8i . The sas2flash.efi program didn t seem to do anything, it returned immediately and didn t give an error message. This page gives a start of how to get inside the Dell firmware package but doesn t work [3]. It didn t cover the case where sasdupie aborts with an error because it detects the current version as 00.00.00.00 not something that the upgrade program is prepared to upgrade from. But it s a place to start looking for someone who wants to try harder at this. This forum post has some interesting information, I gave up before trying it, but it may be useful for someone else [4]. The Solution Dell tower servers have as a standard feature an internal USB port for a boot device. So I created a boot image on a spare USB stick and installed it there and it then loads the kernel and mounts the filesystem from a SATA hard drive. Once I got that working everything was fine. The Debian/Trixie installer would probably have allowed me to install an EFI device on the internal USB stick as part of the install if I had known what was going to happen. The system is now fully working and ready to sell. Now I just need to find someone who wants IT mode on the RAID controller and hopefully is willing to pay extra for it. Whatever I sell the system for it seems unlikely to cover the hours I spent working on this. But I learned some interesting things about RAID firmware and hopefully this blog post will be useful to other people, even if only to discourage them from trying to change firmware.

20 August 2025

Antoine Beaupr : Encrypting a Debian install with UKI

I originally setup a machine without any full disk encryption, then somehow regretted it quickly after. My original reasoning was that this was a "play" machine so I wanted as few restrictions on accessing the machine as possible, which meant removing passwords, mostly. I actually ended up having a user password, but disabled the lock screen. Then I started using the device to manage my photo collection, and suddenly there was a lot of "confidential" information on the device that I didn't want to store in clear text anymore.

Pre-requisites So, how does one convert an existing install from plain text to full disk encryption? One way is to backup to an external drive, re-partition everything and copy things back, but that's slow and boring. Besides, cryptsetup has a cryptsetup-reencrypt command, surely we can do this in place? Having not set aside enough room for /boot, I briefly considered a "encrypted /boot" configuration and conversion (e.g. with this guide) but remembered grub's support for this is flaky, at best, so I figured I would try something else. Here, I'm going to guide you through how I first converted from grub to systemd-boot then to UKI kernel, then re-encrypt my main partition. Note that secureboot is disabled here, see further discussion below.

systemd-boot and Unified Kernel Image conversion systemd folks have been developing UKI ("unified kernel image") to ship kernels. The way this works is the kernel and initrd (and UEFI boot stub) in a single portable executable that lives in the EFI partition, as opposed to /boot. This neatly solves my problem, because I already have such a clear-text partition and won't need to re-partition my disk to convert. Debian has started some preliminary support for this. It's not default, but I found this guide from Vasudeva Kamath which was pretty complete. Since the guide assumes some previous configuration, I had to adapt it to my case. Here's how I did the conversion to both systemd-boot and UKI, all at once. I could have perhaps done it one at a time, but doing both at once works fine. Before your start, make sure secureboot is disabled, see the discussion below.
  1. install systemd tools:
    apt install systemd-ukify systemd-boot
    
  2. Configure systemd-ukify, in /etc/kernel/install.conf:
    layout=uki
    initrd_generator=dracut
    uki_generator=ukify
    
    TODO: it doesn't look like this generates a initrd with dracut, do we care?
  3. Configure the kernel boot arguments with the following in /etc/kernel/uki.conf:
    [UKI]
    Cmdline=@/etc/kernel/cmdline
    
    The /etc/kernel/cmdline file doesn't actually exist here, and that's fine. Defaults are okay, as the image gets generated from your current /proc/cmdline. Check your /etc/default/grub and /proc/cmdline if you are unsure. You'll see the generated arguments in bootctl list below.
  4. Build the image:
    dpkg-reconfigure linux-image-$(uname -r)
    
  5. Check the boot options:
    bootctl list
    
    Look for a Type #2 (.efi) entry for the kernel.
  6. Reboot:
    reboot
    
You can tell you have booted with systemd-boot because (a) you won't see grub and (b) the /proc/cmdline will reflect the configuration listed in bootctl list. In my case, a systemd.machine_id variable is set there, and not in grub (compare with /boot/grub/grub.cfg). By default, the systemd-boot loader just boots, without a menu. You can force the menu to show up by un-commenting the timeout line in /boot/efit/loader/loader.conf, by hitting keys during boot (e.g. hitting "space" repeatedly), or by calling:
systemctl reboot --boot-loader-menu=0
See the systemd-boot(7) manual for details on that. I did not go through the secureboot process, presumably I had already disabled secureboot. This is trickier: because one needs a "special key" to sign the UKI image, one would need the collaboration of debian.org to get this working out of the box with the keys shipped onboard most computers. In other words, if you want to make this work with secureboot enabled on your computer, you'll need to figure out how to sign the generated images before rebooting here, because otherwise you will break your computer. Otherwise, follow the following guides:

Re-encrypting root filesystem Now that we have a way to boot an encrypted filesystem, we can switch to LUKS for our filesystem. Note that you can probably follow this guide if, somehow, you managed to make grub work with your LUKS setup, although as this guide shows, you'd need to downgrade the cryptographic algorithms, which seems like a bad tradeoff. We're using cryptsetup-reencrypt for this which, amazingly, supports re-encrypting devices on the fly. The trick is it needs free space at the end of the partition for the LUKS header (which, I guess, makes it a footer), so we need to resize the filesystem to leave room for that, which is the trickiest bit. This is a possibly destructive behavior. Be sure your backups are up to date, or be ready to lose all data on the device. We assume 512 byte sectors here. Check your sector size with fdisk -l and adjust accordingly.
  1. Before you perform the procedure, make sure requirements are installed:
    apt install cryptsetup systemd-cryptsetup cryptsetup-initramfs
    
    Note that this requires network access, of course.
  2. Reboot in a live image, I like GRML but any Debian live image will work, possibly including the installer
  3. First, calculate how many sectors to free up for the LUKS header
    qalc> 32Mibyte / ( 512 byte )
      (32 mebibytes) / (512 bytes) = 65536
    
  4. Find the sector sizes of the Linux partitions:
    fdisk  -l /dev/nvme0n1   awk '/filesystem/   print $1 " " $4  '  
    
    For example, here's an example with a /boot and / filesystem:
    $ sudo fdisk -l /dev/nvme0n1   awk '/filesystem/   print $1 " " $4  '
    /dev/nvme0n1p2 999424
    /dev/nvme0n1p3 3904979087
    
  5. Substract 1 from 2:
    qalc> set precision 100
    qalc> 3904979087 - 65536
    
    Or, last step and this one, in one line:
    fdisk -l /dev/nvme0n1   awk '/filesystem/   print $1 " " $4 - 65536  '
    
  6. Recheck filesystem:
    e2fsck -f /dev/nvme0n1p2
    
  7. Resize filesystem:
    resize2fs /dev/nvme0n1p2 $(fdisk -l /dev/nvme0n1   awk '/nvme0n1p2/   print $4 - 65536  ')s
    
    Notice the trailing s here: it makes resize2fs interpret the number as a 512 byte sector size, as opposed to the default (4k blocks).
  8. Re-encrypt filesystem:
    cryptsetup reencrypt --encrypt /dev/nvme0n1p2 --resize-device-size=32M
    
    This is it! This is the most important step! Make sure your laptop is plugged in and try not to interrupt it. This can, apparently, be resumed without problem, but I'd hate to show you how. This will show progress information like:
    Progress:   2.4% ETA 23m45s,      53GiB written, speed   1.3 GiB/s
    
    Wait until the ETA has passed.
  9. Open and mount the encrypted filesystem and mount the EFI system partition (ESP):
    cryptsetup open /dev/nvme0n1p2 crypt
    mount /dev/mapper/crypt /mnt
    mount /dev/nvme0n1p1 /mnt/boot/efi
    
    If this fails, now is the time to consider restoring from backups.
  10. Enter the chroot
    for fs in proc sys dev ; do
      mount --bind /$fs /mnt/$fs
    done
    chroot /mnt
    
    Pro tip: this can be done in one step in GRML with:
    grml-chroot /mnt bash
    
  11. Generate a crypttab:
    echo crypt_dev_nvme0n1p2 UUID=$(blkid -o value -s UUID /dev/nvme0n1p2) none luks,discard >> /etc/crypttab
    
  12. Adjust root filesystem in /etc/fstab, make sure you have a line like this:
    /dev/mapper/crypt_dev-nvme0n1p2 /               ext4    errors=remount-ro 0       1
    
    If you were already using a UUID entry for this, there's nothing to change!
  13. Configure the root filesystem in the initrd:
    echo root=/dev/mapper/crypt_dev_nvme0n1p2 > /etc/kernel/cmdline
    
  14. Regenerate UKI:
    dpkg-reconfigure linux-image-$(uname -r)
    
    Be careful here! systemd-boot inherits the command line from the system where it is generated, so this will possibly feature some unsupported commands from your boot environment. In my case GRML had a couple of those, which broke the boot. It's still possible to workaround this issue by tweaking the arguments at boot time, that said.
  15. Exit chroot and reboot
    exit
    reboot
    
Some of the ideas in this section were taken from this guide but was mostly rewritten to simplify the work. My guide also avoids the grub hacks or a specific initrd system (as the guide uses initramfs-tools and grub, while I, above, switched to dracut and systemd-boot). RHEL also has a similar guide, perhaps even better. Somehow I have made this system without LVM at all, which simplifies things a bit (as I don't need to also resize the physical volume/volume groups), but if you have LVM, you need to tweak this to also resize the LVM bits. The RHEL guide has some information about this.

Sven Hoexter: Istio: Connect via a VirtualService to External IP Addresses

Rant - I've a theory about istio: It feels like a software designed by people who hate the IT industry and wanted revenge. So they wrote a software with so many odd points of traffic interception (e.g. SNI based traffic re-routing) that's completely impossible to debug. If you roll that out into an average company you completely halt the IT operations for something like a year. On topic: I've two endpoints (IP addresses serving HTTPS on a none standard port) outside of kubernetes, and I need some rudimentary balancing of traffic. Since istio is already here one can levarage that, combining the resource kinds ServiceEntry, DestinationRule and VirtualService to publish a service name within the istio mesh. Since we do not have host names and DNS for those endpoint IP addresses we need to rely on istio itself to intercept the DNS traffic and deliver a virtual IP address to access the service. The sample given here leverages the exportTo configuration to make the service name only available in the same namespace. If you need broader access remove or adjust that. As usual in kubernetes you can resolve the name also as FQDN, e.g. acme-service.mynamespace.svc.cluster.local.
---
apiVersion: networking.istio.io/v1beta1
kind: ServiceEntry
metadata:
  name: acme-service
spec:
  hosts:
    - acme-service
  ports:
    - number: 12345
      name: acmeglue
      protocol: HTTPS
  resolution: STATIC
  location: MESH_EXTERNAL
  # limit the availability to the namespace this resource is applied to
  # if you need cross namespace access remove all the  exportTo s in here
  exportTo:
    - "."
  # use  endpoints:  in this setup,  addreses:  did not work
  endpoints:
    # region1
    - address: 192.168.0.1
      ports:
        acmeglue: 12345
    # region2
     - address: 10.60.48.50
       ports:
        acmeglue: 12345
---
apiVersion: networking.istio.io/v1beta1
kind: DestinationRule
metadata:
  name: acme-service
spec:
  host: acme-service
  # limit the availability to the namespace this resource is applied to
  exportTo:
    - "."
  trafficPolicy:
    loadBalancer:
      simple: LEAST_REQUEST
    connectionPool:
      tcp:
        tcpKeepalive:
          # We have GCP service attachments involved with a 20m idle timeout
          # https://cloud.google.com/vpc/docs/about-vpc-hosted-services#nat-subnets-other
          time: 600s
---
apiVersion: networking.istio.io/v1beta1
kind: VirtualService
metadata:
  name: acme-service
spec:
  hosts:
    - acme-service
  # limit the availability to the namespace this resource is applied to
  exportTo:
    - "."
  http:
  - route:
    - destination:
        host: acme-service
    retries:
      attempts: 2
      perTryTimeout: 2s
      retryOn: connect-failure,5xx
---
# Demo Deployment, istio configuration is the important part
apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: Deployment
metadata:
  name: foobar
  labels:
    app: foobar
spec:
  replicas: 1
  selector:
    matchLabels:
      app: foobar
  template:
    metadata:
      labels:
        app: foobar
        # enable istio sidecar
        sidecar.istio.io/inject: "true"
      annotations:
        # Enable DNS capture and interception, IP resolved will be in 240.240/16
        # If you use network policies you've to allow egress to this range.
        proxy.istio.io/config:  
          proxyMetadata:
            ISTIO_META_DNS_CAPTURE: "true"
    spec:
      containers:
      - name: nginx
        image: nginx:latest
        ports:
        - containerPort: 80
Now we can exec into the deployed pod, do something like curl -vk https://acme-service:12345, and it will talk to one of the endpoints defined in the ServiceEntry via an IP address out of the 240.240/16 Class E network. Documentation
https://istio.io/latest/docs/reference/config/networking/virtual-service/
https://istio.io/latest/docs/reference/config/networking/service-entry/#ServiceEntry-Resolution
https://istio.io/latest/docs/reference/config/networking/destination-rule/#LoadBalancerSettings-SimpleLB
https://istio.io/latest/docs/ops/configuration/traffic-management/dns-proxy/#sidecar-mode

Dirk Eddelbuettel: RcppArmadillo 14.6.3-1 on CRAN: Minor Upstream Bug Fixes

armadillo image Armadillo is a powerful and expressive C++ template library for linear algebra and scientific computing. It aims towards a good balance between speed and ease of use, has a syntax deliberately close to Matlab, and is useful for algorithm development directly in C++, or quick conversion of research code into production environments. RcppArmadillo integrates this library with the R environment and language and is widely used by (currently) 1268 other packages on CRAN, downloaded 41 million times (per the partial logs from the cloud mirrors of CRAN), and the CSDA paper (preprint / vignette) by Conrad and myself has been cited 642 times according to Google Scholar. Conrad made three minor bug fix releases since the 4.6.0 release last month. We need to pace releases at CRAN so we do not immediately upload there on each upstream release and then CRAN also had the usual (and well-deserved) summer rest leading to a slight delay relative to the last upstream. The minor changes in the three releases are summarized below. All our releases are always available via the GitHub repo and hence also via r-universe, and still rigorously tested via our own reverse-dependency checks. We also note that the package once again passed with flying colours and no human intervention which remains impressive given the over 1200 reverse dependencies.

Changes in RcppArmadillo version 14.6.3-1 (2025-08-14)
  • Upgraded to Armadillo release 14.6.3 (Caffe Mocha)
    • Fix OpenMP related crashes in Cube::slice() on Arm64 CPUs

Changes in RcppArmadillo version 14.6.2-1 (2025-08-08) (GitHub Only)
  • Upgraded to Armadillo release 14.6.2 (Caffe Mocha)
    • Fix for corner-case speed regression in sum()
    • Better handling of OpenMP in omit_nan() and omit_nonfinite()

Changes in RcppArmadillo version 14.6.1-1 (2025-07-21) (GitHub Only)
  • Upgraded to Armadillo release 14.6.1 (Caffe Mocha)
    • Fix for speed regression in mean()
    • Fix for detection of compiler configuration
    • Use of pow optimization now optional

Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is a diffstat report relative to previous release. More detailed information is on the RcppArmadillo page. Questions, comments etc should go to the rcpp-devel mailing list off the Rcpp R-Forge page.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can sponsor me at GitHub.

18 August 2025

Jonathan Dowland: Amiga redux

Matthew blogged about his Amiga CDTV project, a truly unique Amiga hack which also manages to be a novel Doom project (no mean feat: it's a crowded space) This re-awakened my dormant wish to muck around with my childhood Amiga some more. When I last wrote about it (four years ago ) I'd upgraded the disk drive emulator with an OLED display and rotary encoder. I'd forgotten to mention I'd also sourced a modern trapdoor RAM expansion which adds 2MiB of RAM. The Amiga can only see 1.5MiB1 of it at the moment, I need perform a mainboard modification to access the final 512kiB2, which means some soldering.
[Amiga Test Kit](https://github.com/keirf/Amiga-Stuff) showing 2MiB RAM Amiga Test Kit showing 2MiB RAM
What I had planned to do back then: replace the switch in the left button of the original mouse, which was misbehaving; perform the aformentioned mainboard mod; upgrade the floppy emulator wiring to a ribbon cable with plug-and-socket, for easier removal; fit an RTC chip to the RAM expansion board to get clock support in the OS. However much of that might be might be moot, because of two other mods I am considering, PiStorm I've re-considered the PiStorm accelerator mentioned in Matt's blog. Four years ago, I'd passed over it, because it required you to run Linux on a Raspberry Pi, and then an m68k emulator as a user-space process under Linux. I didn't want to administer another Linux system, and I'm generally uncomfortable about using a regular Linux distribution on SD storage over the long term. However in the intervening years Emu68, a bare-metal m68k emulator has risen to prominence. You boot the Pi straight into Emu68 without Linux in the middle. For some reason that's a lot more compelling to me. The PiStorm enormously expands the RAM visible to the Amiga. There would be no point in doing the mainboard mod to add 512k (and I don't know how that would interact with the PiStorm). It also can provide virtual hard disk devices to the Amiga (backed by files on the SD card), meaning the floppy emulator would be superfluous. Denise Mainboard I've just learned about a truly incredible project: the Denise Mini-ITX Amiga mainboard. It fitss into a Mini-ITX case (I have a suitable one spare already). Some assembly required. You move the chips from the original Amiga over to the Denise mainboard. It's compatible with the PiStorm (or vice-versa). It supports PC-style PS/2 keyboards (I have a Model M in the loft, thanks again Simon) and has a bunch of other modern conveniences: onboard RTC; mini-ITX power (I'll need something like a picoPSU too) It wouldn't support my trapdoor RAM card but it takes a 72-pin DIMM which can supply 2MiB of Chip RAM, and the PiStorm can do the rest (they're compatible3). No stock at the moment but if I could get my hands on this, I could build something that could permanently live on my desk.

  1. the Boobip board's 1.5MiB is "chip" RAM: accessible to the other chips on the mainboard, with access mediated by the AGNUS chip.
  2. the final 512kiB is "Fast" RAM: only accessible to the CPU, not mediated via Agnus.
  3. confirmation

Otto Kek l inen: Best Practices for Submitting and Reviewing Merge Requests in Debian

Featured image of post Best Practices for Submitting and Reviewing Merge Requests in DebianHistorically the primary way to contribute to Debian has been to email the Debian bug tracker with a code patch. Now that 92% of all Debian source packages are hosted at salsa.debian.org the GitLab instance of Debian more and more developers are using Merge Requests, but not necessarily in the optimal way. In this post I share what I ve found the best practice to be, presented in the natural workflow from forking to merging.

Why use Merge Requests? Compared to sending patches back and forth in email, using a git forge to review code contributions brings several benefits:
  • Contributors can see the latest version of the code immediately when the maintainer pushes it to git, without having to wait for an upload to Debian archives.
  • Contributors can fork the development version and easily base their patches on the correct version and help test that the software continues to function correctly at that specific version.
  • Both maintainer and other contributors can easily see what was already submitted and avoid doing duplicate work.
  • It is easy for anyone to comment on a Merge Request and participate in the review.
  • Integrating CI testing is easy in Merge Requests by activating Salsa CI.
  • Tracking the state of a Merge Request is much easier than browsing Debian bug reports tagged patch , and the cycle of submit review re-submit re-review is much easier to manage in the dedicated Merge Request view compared to participants setting up their own email plugins for code reviews.
  • Merge Requests can have extra metadata, such as Approved , and the metadata often updates automatically, such as a Merge Request being closed automatically when the Git commit ID from it is pushed to the target branch.
Keeping these benefits in mind will help ensure that the best practices make sense and are aligned with maximizing these benefits.

Finding the Debian packaging source repository and preparing to make a contribution Before sinking any effort into a package, start by checking its overall status at the excellent Debian Package Tracker. This provides a clear overview of the package s general health in Debian, when it was last uploaded and by whom, and if there is anything special affecting the package right now. This page also has quick links to the Debian bug tracker of the package, the build status overview and more. Most importantly, in the General section, the VCS row links to the version control repository the package advertises. Before opening that page, note the version most recently uploaded to Debian. This is relevant because nothing in Debian currently enforces that the package in version control is actually the same as the latest uploaded to Debian. Packaging source code repository links at tracker.debian.org Following the Browse link opens the Debian package source repository, which is usually a project page on Salsa. To contribute, start by clicking the Fork button, select your own personal namespace and, under Branches to include, pick Only the default branch to avoid including unnecessary temporary development branches. View after pressing Fork Once forking is complete, clone it with git-buildpackage. For this example repository, the exact command would be gbp clone --verbose git@salsa.debian.org:otto/glow.git. Next, add the original repository as a new remote and pull from it to make sure you have all relevant branches. Using the same fork as an example, the commands would be:
git remote add go-team https://salsa.debian.org/go-team/packages/glow.git
gbp pull --verbose --track-missing go-team
The gbp pull command can be repeated whenever you want to make sure the main branches are in sync with the original repository. Finally, run gitk --all & to visually browse the Git history and note the various branches and their states in the two remotes. Note the style in comments and repository structure the project has and make sure your contributions follow the same conventions to maximize the chances of the maintainer accepting your contribution. It may also be good to build the source package to establish a baseline of the current state and what kind of binaries and .deb packages it produces. If using Debcraft, one can simply run debcraft build in the Git repository.

Submitting a Merge Request for a Debian packaging improvement Always start by making a development branch by running git checkout -b <branch name> to clearly separate your work from the main branch. When making changes, remember to follow the conventions you already see in the package. It is also important to be aware of general guidelines on how to make good Git commits. If you are not able to immediately finish coding, it may be useful to publish the Merge Request as a draft so that the maintainer and others can see that you started working on something and what general direction your change is heading in. If you don t finish the Merge Request in one sitting and return to it another day, you should remember to pull the Debian branch from the original Debian repository in case it has received new commits. This can be done easily with these commands (assuming the same remote and branch names as in the example above):
git fetch go-team
git rebase -i go-team/debian/latest
Frequent rebasing is a great habit to help keep the Git history linear, and restructuring and rewording your commits will make the Git history easier to follow and understand why the changes were made. When pushing improved versions of your branch, use git push --force. While GitLab does allow squashing, I recommend against it. It is better that the submitter makes sure the final version is a neat and clean set of commits that the receiver can easily merge without having to do any rebasing or squashing themselves. When ready, remove the draft status of the Merge Request and wait patiently for review. If the maintainer does not respond in several days, try sending an email to <source package name>@packages.debian.org, which is the official way to contact maintainers. You could also post a comment on the MR and tag the last few committers in the same repository so that a notification email is triggered. As a last resort, submit a bug report to the Debian bug tracker to announce that a Merge Request is pending review. This leaves a permanent record for posterity (or the Debian QA team) of your contribution. However, most of the time simply posting the Merge Request in Salsa is enough; excessive communication might be perceived as spammy, and someone needs to remember to check that the bug report is closed.

Respect the review feedback, respond quickly and avoid Merge Requests getting stale Once you get feedback, try to respond as quickly as possible. When people participating have everything fresh in their minds, it is much easier for the submitter to rework it and for the reviewer to re-review. If the Merge Request becomes stale, it can be challenging to revive it. Also, if it looks like the MR is only waiting for re-review but nothing happens, re-read the previous feedback and make sure you actually address everything. After that, post a friendly comment where you explicitly say you have addressed all feedback and are only waiting for re-review.

Reviewing Merge Requests This section about reviewing is not exclusive to Debian package maintainers anyone can contribute to Debian by reviewing open Merge Requests. Typically, the larger an open source project gets, the more help is needed in reviewing and testing changes to avoid regressions, and all diligently done work is welcome. As the famous Linus quote goes, given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow . On salsa.debian.org, you can browse open Merge Requests per project or for a whole group, just like on any GitLab instance. Reviewing Merge Requests is, however, most fun when they are fresh and the submitter is active. Thus, the best strategy is to ensure you have subscribed to email notifications in the repositories you care about so you get an email for any new Merge Request (or Issue) immediately when posted. Change notification settings from Global to Watch to get an email on new Merge Requests When you see a new Merge Request, try to review it within a couple of days. If you cannot review in a reasonable time, posting a small note that you intend to review it later will feel better to the submitter compared to not getting any response. Personally, I have a habit of assigning myself as a reviewer so that I can keep track of my whole review queue at https://salsa.debian.org/dashboard/merge_requests?reviewer_username=otto, and I recommend the same to others. Seeing the review assignment happen is also a good way to signal to the submitter that their submission was noted.

Reviewing commit-by-commit in the web interface Reviewing using the web interface works well in general, but I find that the way GitLab designed it is not ideal. In my ideal review workflow, I first read the Git commit message to understand what the submitter tried to do and why; only then do I look at the code changes in the commit. In GitLab, to do this one must first open the Commits tab and then click on the last commit in the list, as it is sorted in reverse chronological order with the first commit at the bottom. Only after that do I see the commit message and contents. Getting to the next commit is easy by simply clicking Next. Example review to demonstrate location of buttons and functionality When adding the first comment, I choose Start review and for the following remarks Add to review. Finally, I click Finish review and Submit review, which will trigger one single email to the submitter with all my feedback. I try to avoid using the Add comment now option, as each such comment triggers a separate notification email to the submitter.

Reviewing and testing on your own computer locally For the most thorough review, I pull the code to my laptop for local review with git pull <remote url> <branch name>. There is no need to run git remote add as pulling using a URL directly works too and saves from needing to clean up old remotes later. Pulling the Merge Request contents locally allows me to build, run and inspect the code deeply and review the commits with full metadata in gitk or equivalent.

Investing enough time in writing feedback, but not too much See my other post for more in-depth advice on how to structure your code review feedback. In Debian, I would emphasize patience, to allow the submitter time to rework their submission. Debian packaging is notoriously complex, and even experienced developers often need more feedback and time to get everything right. Avoid the temptation to rush the fix in yourself. In open source, Git credits are often the only salary the submitter gets. If you take the idea from the submission and implement it yourself, you rob the submitter of the opportunity to get feedback, try to improve and finally feel accomplished. Sure, it takes extra effort to give feedback, but the contributor is likely to feel ownership of their work and later return to further improve it. If a submission looks hopelessly low quality and you feel that giving feedback is a waste of time, you can simply respond with something along the lines of: Thanks for your contribution and interest in helping Debian. Unfortunately, looking at the commits, I see several shortcomings, and it is unlikely a normal review process is enough to help you finalize this. Please reach out to Debian Mentors to get a mentor who can give you more personalized feedback. There might also be contributors who just dump the code , ignore your feedback and never return to finalize their submission. If a contributor does not return to finalize their submission in 3-6 months, I will in my own projects simply finalize it myself and thank the contributor in the commit message (but not mark them as the author). Despite best practices, you will occasionally still end up doing some things in vain, but that is how volunteer collaboration works. We all just need to accept that some communication will inevitably feel like wasted effort, but it should be viewed as a necessary investment in order to get the benefits from the times when the communication led to real and valuable collaboration. Please just do not treat all contributors as if they are unlikely to ever contribute again; otherwise, your behavior will cause them not to contribute again. If you want to grow a tree, you need to plant several seeds.

Approving and merging Assuming review goes well and you are ready to approve, and if you are the only maintainer, you can proceed to merge right away. If there are multiple maintainers, or if you otherwise think that someone else might want to chime in before it is merged, use the Approve button to show that you approve the change but leave it unmerged. The person who approved does not necessarily have to be the person who merges. The point of the Merge Request review is not separation of duties in committing and merging the main purpose of a code review is to have a different set of eyeballs looking at the change before it is committed into the main development branch for all eternity. In some packages, the submitter might actually merge themselves once they see another developer has approved. In some rare Debian projects, there might even be separate people taking the roles of submitting, approving and merging, but most of the time these three roles are filled by two people either as submitter and approver+merger or submitter+merger and approver. If you are not a maintainer at all and do not have permissions to click Approve, simply post a comment summarizing your review and that you approve it and support merging it. This can help the maintainers review and merge faster.

Making a Merge Request for a new upstream version import Unlike many other Linux distributions, in Debian each source package has its own version control repository. The Debian sources consist of the upstream sources with an additional debian/ subdirectory that contains the actual Debian packaging. For the same reason, a typical Debian packaging Git repository has a debian/latest branch that has changes only in the debian/ subdirectory while the surrounding upstream files are the actual upstream files and have the actual upstream Git history. For details, see my post explaining Debian source packages in Git. Because of this Git branch structure, importing a new upstream version will typically modify three branches: debian/latest, upstream/latest and pristine-tar. When doing a Merge Request for a new upstream import, only submit one Merge Request for one branch: which means merging your new changes to the debian/latest branch. There is no need to submit the upstream/latest branch or the pristine-tar branch. Their contents are fixed and mechanically imported into Debian. There are no changes that the reviewer in Debian can request the submitter to do on these branches, so asking for feedback and comments on them is useless. All review, comments and re-reviews concern the content of the debian/latest branch only. It is not even necessary to use the debian/latest branch for a new upstream version. Personally, I always execute the new version import (with gbp import-orig --verbose --uscan) and prepare and test everything on debian/latest, but when it is time to submit it for review, I run git checkout -b import/$(dpkg-parsechangelog -SVersion) to get a branch named e.g. import/1.0.1 and then push that for review.

Reviewing a Merge Request for a new upstream version import Reviewing and testing a new upstream version import is a bit tricky currently, but possible. The key is to use gbp pull to automate fetching all branches from the submitter s fork. Assume you are reviewing a submission targeting the Glow package repository and there is a Merge Request from user otto s fork. As the maintainer, you would run the commands:
git remote add otto https://salsa.debian.org/otto/glow.git
gbp pull --verbose otto
If there was feedback in the first round and you later need to pull a new version for re-review, running gbp pull --force will not suffice, and this trick of manually fetching each branch and resetting them to the submitter s version is needed:
for BRANCH in pristine-tar upstream debian/latest
do
git checkout $BRANCH
git reset --hard origin/$BRANCH
git pull --force https://salsa.debian.org/otto/glow.git $BRANCH
done
Once review is done, either click Approve and let the submitter push everything, or alternatively, push all the branches you pulled locally yourself. In GitLab and other forges, the Merge Request will automatically be marked as Merged once the commit ID that was the head of the Merge Request is pushed to the target branch.

Please allow enough time for everyone to participate When working on Debian, keep in mind that it is a community of volunteers. It is common for people to do Debian stuff only on weekends, so you should patiently wait for at least a week so that enough workdays and weekend days have passed for the people you interact with to have had time to respond on their own Debian time. Having to wait may feel annoying and disruptive, but try to look at the upside: you do not need to do extra work simply while waiting for others. In some cases, that waiting can be useful thanks to the sleep on it phenomenon: when you yourself look at your own submission some days later with fresh eyes, you might notice something you overlooked earlier and improve your code change even without other people s feedback!

Contribute reviews! The last but not least suggestion is to make a habit of contributing reviews to packages you do not maintain. As we already see in large open source projects, such as the Linux kernel, they have far more code submissions than they can handle. The bottleneck for progress and maintaining quality becomes the reviews themselves. For Debian, as an organization and as a community, to be able to renew and grow new contributors, we need more of the senior contributors to shift focus from merely maintaining their packages and writing code to also intentionally interact with new contributors and guide them through the process of creating great open source software. Reviewing code is an effective way to both get tangible progress on individual development items and to transfer culture to a new generation of developers.

Why aren t 100% of all Debian source packages hosted on Salsa? As seen at trends.debian.net, more and more packages are using Salsa. Debian does not, however, have any policy about it. In fact, the Debian Policy Manual does not even mention the word Salsa anywhere. Adoption of Salsa has so far been purely organic, as in Debian each package maintainer has full freedom to choose whatever preferences they have regarding version control. I hope the trend to use Salsa will continue and more shared workflows emerge so that collaboration gets easier. To drive the culture of using Merge Requests and more, I drafted the Debian proposal DEP-18: Encourage Continuous Integration and Merge Request based Collaboration for Debian packages. If you are active in Debian and you think DEP-18 is beneficial for Debian, please give a thumbs up at dep-team/deps!21.

17 August 2025

C.J. Collier: The Very Model of a Patriot Online

It appears that the fragile masculinity tech evangelists have identified Debian as a community with boundaries which exclude them from abusing its members and they re so angry about it! In response to posts such as this, and inspired by Dr. Conway s piece, I ve composed a poem which, hopefully, correctly addresses the feelings of that crowd.
The Very Model of a Patriot Online
I am the very model of a modern patriot online,
My keyboard is my rifle and my noble cause is so divine.
I didn't learn my knowledge in a dusty college lecture hall,
But from the chans where bitter anonymity enthralls us all.
I spend a dozen hours every day upon my sacred quest,
To put the globo-homo narrative completely to the test.
My arguments are peer-reviewed by fellas in the comments section,
Which proves my every thesis is the model of complete perfection.
I m steeped in righteous anger that the libs call 'white fragility,'
For mocking their new pronouns and their lack of masculinity.
I m master of the epic troll, the comeback, and the searing snark,
A digital guerrilla who is fighting battles in the dark.
I know the secret symbols and the dog-whistles historical,
From Pepe the Frog to  Let s Go Brandon,  in order categorical;
In short, for fighting culture wars with rhetoric rhetorical,
I am the very model of a patriot polemical.
***
I stand for true expression, for the comics and the edgy clown,
Whose satire is too based for all the fragile folks in town.
They say my speech is 'violence' while my spirit they are trampling,
The way they try to silence me is really quite a startling sampling
Of 1984, which I've not read but thoroughly understand,
Is all about the tyranny that's gripping this once-blessed land.
My humor is a weapon, it s a razor-bladed, sharp critique,
(Though sensitive elites will call my masterpiece a form of  hate speech ).
They cannot comprehend my need for freedom from all consequence,
They call it 'hate,' I call it 'jokes,' they just don't have a lick of sense.
So when they call me  bigot  for the spicy memes I post pro bono,
I tell them their the ones who're cancelled, I'm the victim here, you know!
Then I can write a screed against the globalist cabal, you see,
And tell you every detail of their vile conspiracy.
In short, when I use logic that is flexible and personal,
I am the very model of a patriot controversial.
***
I'm very well acquainted with the scientific method, too,
It's watching lengthy YouTube vids until my face is turning blue.
I trust the heartfelt testimony of a tearful, blonde ex-nurse,
But what a paid fact-checker says has no effect and is perverse.
A PhD is proof that you've been brainwashed by the leftist mob,
While my own research on a meme is how I really do my job.
I know that masks will suffocate and vaccines are a devil's brew,
I learned it from a podcast host who used to sell brain-boosting goo.
He scorns the lamestream media, the CNNs and all the rest,
Whose biased reporting I've put fully to a rigorous test
By only reading headlines and confirming what I already knew,
Then posting my analysis for other patriots to view.
With every "study" that they cite from sources I can't stand to hear,
My own profound conclusions become ever more precisely clear.
In short, when I've debunked the experts with a confident "Says who?!",
I am the very model of a researcher who sees right through you.
***
But all these culture wars are just a sleight-of-hand, a clever feint,
To hide the stolen ballots and to cover up the moral taint
Of D.C. pizza parlors and of shipping crates from Wayfair, it s true,
It's all connected in a plot against the likes of me and you!
I've analyzed the satellite photography and watermarks,
I understand the secret drops, the cryptic Qs, the coded sparks.
The  habbening  is coming, friends, just give it two more weeks or three,
When all the traitors face the trials for their wicked treachery.
They say that nothing happened and the dates have all gone past, you see,
But that's just disinformation from the globalist enemy!
Their moving goalposts constantly, a tactic that is plain to see,
To wear us down and make us doubt the coming, final victory!
My mind can see the patterns that a simple sheep could never find,
The hidden puppet-masters who are poisoning our heart and mind.
In short, when I link drag queens to the price of gas and child-trafficking,
I am the very model of a patriot whose brain is quickening!
***
My pickup truck's a testament to everything that I hold dear,
With vinyl decals saying things the liberals all hate and fear.
The Gadsden flag is waving next to one that's blue and starkly thin,
To show my deep respect for law, except the feds who're steeped in sin.
There's Punisher and Molon Labe, so that everybody knows
I'm not someone to trifle with when push to final shoving goes.
I've got my tactical assault gear sitting ready in the den,
Awaiting for the signal to restore our land with my fellow men.
I practice clearing rooms at home when my mom goes out to the store,
A modern Minuteman who's ready for a civil war.
The neighbors give me funny looks, I see them whisper and take note,
They'll see what's what when I'm the one who's guarding checkpoints by their throat.
I am a peaceful man, of course, but I am also pre-prepared,
To neutralize the threats of which the average citizen's unscared.
In short, when my whole identity's a brand of tactical accessory,
You'll say a better warrior has never graced a Cabela's registry.
***
They say I have to tolerate a man who thinks he is a dame,
While feminists and immigrants are putting out my vital flame!
There taking all the jobs from us and giving them to folks who kneel,
And "woke HR" says my best jokes are things I'm not allowed to feel!
An Alpha Male is what I am, a lion, though I'm in this cubicle,
My life's frustrations can be traced to policies Talmudical.
They lecture me on privilege, I, who have to pay my bills and rent!
While they give handouts to the lazy, worthless, and incompetent!
My grandad fought the Nazis! Now I have to press a key for  one 
To get a call-rep I can't understand beneath the blazing sun
Of global, corporate tyranny that's crushing out the very soul
Of men like me, who've lost their rightful, natural, and just control!
So yes, I am resentful! And I'm angry! And I'm right to be!
They've stolen all my heritage and my masculinity!
In short, when my own failures are somebody else's evil plot,
I am the very model of the truest patriot we've got!
***
There putting chips inside of you! Their spraying things up in the sky!
They want to make you EAT THE BUGS and watch your very spirit die!
The towers for the 5G are a mind-control delivery tool!
To keep you docile while the children suffer in a grooming school!
The WEF, and Gates, and Soros have a plan they call the 'Great Reset,'
You'll own no property and you'll be happy, or you'll be in debt
To social credit overlords who'll track your every single deed!
There sterilizing you with plastics that they've hidden in the feed!
The world is flat! The moon is fake! The dinosaurs were just a lie!
And every major tragedy's a hoax with actors paid to cry!
I'M NOT INSANE! I SEE THE TRUTH! MY EYES ARE OPEN! CAN'T YOU SEE?!
YOU'RE ALL ASLEEP! YOU'RE COWARDS! YOU'RE AFRAID OF BEING TRULY FREE!
My heart is beating faster now, my breath is short, my vision's blurred,
From all the shocking truth that's in each single, solitary word!
I've sacrificed my life and friends to bring this message to the light, so...
You'd better listen to me now with all your concentrated might, ho!
***
For my heroic struggle, though it's cosmic and it's biblical,
Is waged inside the comments of a post that's algorithm-ical.
And still for all my knowledge that's both tactical and practical,
My mom just wants the rent I owe and says I'm being dramatical.

14 August 2025

Jonathan McDowell: Local Voice Assistant Step 4: openWakeWord

People keep asking me when I ll write the next instalment of my local voice assistant journey. I didn t mean for it to be so long since the last one, things have been busier than I d like. Anyway. Last time we d built Tensorflow, so now it s time to sort out openWakeWord. As a reminder we re trying to put a local voice satellite on my living room Debian media machine. The point of openWakeWord is to run on the machine the microphone is connected to, listening for the wake phrase ( Hey Jarvis in my case), and only then calling back to the central server to do a speech to text operation. It s wrapped up for Wyoming as wyoming-openwakeword. Of course I ve packaged it up - available at https://salsa.debian.org/noodles/wyoming-openwakeword. Trixie only released yesterday, so I m still running all of this on bookworm. That means you need python3-wyoming from Trixie - 1.6.0-1 will install fine without needing rebuilt - and the python3-tflite-runtime we built last time. Like the other pieces I m not sure about how this could land in Debian; it s unclear to me that the pre-trained models provided would be accepted in main. As usual I start it with with a systemd unit file dropped in /etc/systemd/service/wyoming-openwakeword.service:
[Unit]
Description=Wyoming OpenWakeWord server
After=network.target
[Service]
Type=simple
DynamicUser=yes
ExecStart=/usr/bin/wyoming-openwakeword --uri tcp://[::1]:10400/ --preload-model 'hey_jarvis' --threshold 0.8
MemoryDenyWriteExecute=false
ProtectControlGroups=true
PrivateDevices=false
ProtectKernelTunables=true
ProtectSystem=true
RestrictRealtime=true
RestrictNamespaces=true
[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target
I m still playing with the threshold level. It defaults to 0.5, but the device lives under the TV and seems to get a bit confused by it sometimes. There s some talk about using speex for noise suppression, but I haven t explored that yet (it s yet another Python module to bind to the C libraries I d have to look at). This is a short one; next post is actually building the local satellite on top to tie everything together.

12 August 2025

Freexian Collaborators: Debian Contributions: DebConf 25, OpenSSH upgrades, Cross compilation collaboration and more! (by Anupa Ann Joseph)

Debian Contributions: 2025-07 Contributing to Debian is part of Freexian s mission. This article covers the latest achievements of Freexian and their collaborators. All of this is made possible by organizations subscribing to our Long Term Support contracts and consulting services.

DebConf 25, by Stefano Rivera and Santiago Ruano Rinc n In July, DebConf 25 was held in Brest, France. Freexian was a gold sponsor and most of the Freexian team attended the event. Many fruitful discussions were had amongst our team and within the Debian community. DebConf itself was organized by a local team in Brest, that included Santiago (who now lives in Uruguay). Stefano was also deeply involved in the organization, as a DebConf committee member, core video team, and the lead developer for the conference website. Running the conference took an enormous amount of work, consuming all of Stefano and Santiago s time for most of July. Lucas Kanashiro was active in the DebConf content team, reviewing talks and scheduling them. There were many last-minute changes to make during the event. Anupa Ann Joseph was part of the Debian publicity team doing live coverage of DebConf 25 and was part of the DebConf 25 content team reviewing the talks. She also assisted the local team to procure the lanyards. Recorded sessions presented by Freexian collaborators, often alongside other friends in Debian, included:

OpenSSH upgrades, by Colin Watson Towards the end of a release cycle, people tend to do more upgrade testing, and this sometimes results in interesting problems. Manfred Stock reported No new SSH connections possible during large part of upgrade to Debian Trixie , which would have affected many people upgrading from Debian 12 (bookworm), with potentially severe consequences for people upgrading remote systems. In fact, there were two independent problems that each led to much the same symptom:
  • As part of hardening the OpenSSH server, OpenSSH 9.8 split the monolithic sshd listener process into two pieces: a minimal network listener (still called sshd), and an sshd-session process dealing with each individual session. Before this change, when sshd received an incoming connection, it forked and re-executed itself with some special parameters to deal with it; after this change, it forks and executes sshd-session instead, and sshd no longer accepts the parameters it used to accept for this.

    Debian package upgrades happen (roughly) in two phases: first we unpack the new files onto disk, and then we run some configuration steps which usually include things like restarting services. Normally this is fine, because the old service keeps on working until it s restarted. In this case, unpacking the new files onto disk immediately stopped new SSH connections from working: the old sshd received the connection and tried to hand it off to a freshly-executed copy of the new sshd binary on disk, which no longer supports this. This wasn t much of a problem when upgrading OpenSSH on its own or with a small number of other packages, but in release upgrades it left a large gap when you can t SSH to the system any more, and if anything fails in that interval then you could be in trouble.

    After trying a couple of other approaches, Colin landed on the idea of having the openssh-server package divert /usr/sbin/sshd to /usr/sbin/sshd.session-split before the unpack step of an upgrade from before 9.8, then removing the diversion and moving the new file into place once it s ready to restart the service. This reduces the period when new connections fail to a minimum.
  • Most OpenSSH processes, including sshd, check for a compatible version of the OpenSSL library when they start up. This check used to be very picky, among other things requiring both the major and minor part of the version number to match. OpenSSL 3 has a better versioning policy, and so OpenSSH 9.4p1 relaxed this check.

    Unfortunately, bookworm shipped with OpenSSH 9.2p1, so as soon as you unpacked the new OpenSSL library during an upgrade, sshd stopped working. This couldn t be fixed by a change in trixie; we needed to change bookworm in advance of the upgrade so that it would tolerate newer versions of OpenSSL, and time was tight if we wanted this to be available before the release of Debian 13.

    Fortunately, there s a stable-updates mechanism for exactly this sort of thing, and the stable release managers kindly accepted Colin s proposal to fix this there.
The net result is that if you apply updates to bookworm (including stable-updates / bookworm-updates, which is enabled by default) before starting the upgrade to trixie, everything should be fine.

Cross compilation collaboration, by Helmut Grohne Supporting cross building in Debian packages touches lots of areas of the archive and quite some of these matters reside in shared responsibility between different teams. Hence, DebConf was an ideal opportunity to settle long-standing issues. The cross building bof sparked lively discussions as a significant fraction of developers employ cross builds to get their work done. In the trixie release, about two thirds of the packages can satisfy their cross Build-Depends and about half of the packages actually can be cross built.

Miscellaneous contributions
  • Rapha l Hertzog updated tracker.debian.org to remove references to Debian 10 which was moved to archive.debian.org, and had many fruitful discussions related to Debusine during DebConf 25.
  • Carles Pina prepared some data, questions and information for the DebConf 25 l10n and i18n BoF.
  • Carles Pina demoed and discussed possible next steps for po-debconf-manager with different teams in DebConf 25. He also reviewed Catalan translations and sent them to the packages.
  • Carles Pina started investigating a django-compressor bug: reproduced the bug consistently and prepared a PR for django-compressor upstream (likely more details next month). Looked at packaging frictionless-py.
  • Stefano Rivera triaged Python CVEs against pypy3.
  • Stefano prepared an upload of a new upstream release of pypy3 to Debian experimental (due to the freeze).
  • Stefano uploaded python3.14 RC1 to Debian experimental.
  • Thorsten Alteholz uploaded a new upstream version of sane-airscan to experimental. He also started to work on a new upstream version of hplip.
  • Colin backported fixes for CVE-2025-50181 and CVE-2025-50182 in python-urllib3, and fixed several other release-critical or important bugs in Python team packages.
  • Lucas uploaded ruby3.4 to experimental as a starting point for the ruby-defaults transition that will happen after Trixie release.
  • Lucas coordinated with the Release team the fix of the remaining RC bugs involving ruby packages, and got them all fixed.
  • Lucas, as part of the Debian Ruby team, kicked off discussions to improve internal process/tooling.
  • Lucas, as part of the Debian Outreach team, engaged in multiple discussions around internship programs we run and also what else we could do to improve outreach in the Debian project.
  • Lucas joined the Local groups BoF during DebConf 25 and shared all the good experiences from the Brazilian community and committed to help to document everything to try to support other groups.
  • Helmut spent significant time with Samuel Thibault on improving architecture cross bootstrap for hurd-any mostly reviewing Samuel s patches. He proposed a patch for improving bash s detection of its pipesize and a change to dpkg-shlibdeps to improve behavior for building cross toolchains.
  • Helmut reiterated the multiarch policy proposal with a lot of help from Nattie Mayer-Hutchings, Rhonda D Vine and Stuart Prescott.
  • Helmut finished his work on the process based unschroot prototype that was the main feature of his talk (see above).
  • Helmut analyzed a multiarch-related glibc upgrade failure induced by a /usr-move mitigation of systemd and sent a patch and regression fix both of which reached trixie in time. Thanks to Aurelien Jarno and the release team for their timely cooperation.
  • Helmut resurrected an earlier discussion about changing the semantics of Architecture: all packages in a multiarch context in order to improve the long-standing interpreter problem. With help from Tollef Fog Heen better semantics were discovered and agreement was reached with Guillem Jover and Julian Andres Klode to consider this change. The idea is to record a concrete architecture for every Architecture: all package in the dpkg database and enable choosing it as non-native.
  • Helmut implemented type hints for piuparts.
  • Helmut reviewed and improved a patch set of Jochen Sprickerhof for debvm.
  • Anupa was involved in discussions with the Debian Women team during DebConf 25.
  • Anupa started working for the trixie release coverage and started coordinating release parties.
  • Emilio helped coordinate the release of Debian 13 trixie.

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