Hi. My name is Ian Jackson. I write as a Rust contributor and as a Debian Developer with first-hand experience of Debian s approach to trademarks. (But I am not a member of the Debian Rust Packaging Team.) Your form invites me to state any blocking concerns. I m afraid I have one: PROBLEM The policy on distributing modified versions of Rust (page 4, 8th bullet) is far too restrictive. PROBLEM - ASPECT 1 On its face the policy forbids making a clone of the Rust repositories on a git forge, and pushing a modified branch there. That is publicly distributing a modified version of Rust. I.e., the current policy forbids the Rust s community s own development workflow! PROBLEM - ASPECT 2 The policy also does not meet the needs of Software-Freedom-respecting downstreams, including community Linux distributions such as Debian. There are two scenarios (fuzzy, and overlapping) which provide a convenient framing to discuss this: Firstly, in practical terms, Debian may need to backport bugfixes, or sometimes other changes. Sometimes Debian will want to pre-apply bugfixes or changes that have been contributed by users, and are intended eventually to go upstream, but are not included upstream in official Rust yet. This is a routine activity for a distribution. The policy, however, forbids it. Secondly, Debian, as a point of principle, requires the ability to diverge from upstream if and when Debian decides that this is the right choice for Debian s users. The freedom to modify is a key principle of Free Software. This includes making changes that the upstream project disapproves of. Some examples of this, where Debian has made changes, that upstream do not approve of, have included things like: removing user-tracking code, or disabling obsolescence timebombs that stop a particular version working after a certain date. Overall, while alignment in values between Debian and Rust seems to be very good right now, modifiability it is a matter of non-negotiable principle for Debian. The 8th bullet point on page 4 of the PDF does not give Debian (and Debian s users) these freedoms. POSSIBLE SOLUTIONS Other formulations, or an additional permission, seem like they would be able to meet the needs of both Debian and Rust. The first thing to recognise is that forbidding modified versions is probably not necessary to prevent language ecosystem fragmentation. Many other programming languages are distributed under fully Free Software licences without such restrictive trademark policies. (For example, Python; I m sure a thorough survey would find many others.) The scenario that would be most worrying for Rust would be embrace - extend - extinguish . In projects with a copyleft licence, this is not a concern, but Rust is permissively licenced. However, one way to address this would be to add an additional permission for modification that permits distribution of modified versions without permission, but if the modified source code is also provided, under the original Rust licence. I suggest therefore adding the following 2nd sub-bullet point to the 8th bullet on page 4:

• changes which are shared, in source code form, with all recipients of the modified software, and publicly licenced under the same licence as the official materials.

This means that downstreams who fear copyleft have the option of taking Rust s permissive copyright licence at face value, but are limited in the modifications they may make, unless they rename. Conversely downstreams such as Debian who wish to operate as part of the Free Software ecosystem can freely make modifications. It also, obviously, covers the Rust Community s own development work. NON-SOLUTIONS Some upstreams, faced with this problem, have offered Debian a special permission: ie, said that it would be OK for Debian to make modifications that Debian wants to. But Debian will not accept any Debian-specific permissions. Debian could of course rename their Rust compiler. Debian has chosen to rename in the past: infamously, a similar policy by Mozilla resulted in Debian distributing Firefox under the name Iceweasel for many years. This is a PR problem for everyone involved, and results in a good deal of technical inconvenience and makework. Debian could seek approval for changes, and the Rust Foundation would grant that approval quickly . This is unworkable on a practical level - requests for permission do not fit into Debian s workflow, and the resulting delays would be unacceptable. But, more fundamentally, Debian rightly insists that it must have the freedom to make changes that the Foundation do not approve of. (For example, if a future Rust shipped with telemetry features Debian objected to.) Debian and Rust could compromise . However, Debian is an ideological as well as technological project. The principles I have set out are part of Debian s Foundation Documents - they are core values for Debian. When Debian makes compromises, it does so very slowly and with great deliberation, using its slowest and most heavyweight constitutional governance processes. Debian is not likely to want to engage in such a process for the benefit of one programming language. Users will get Rust from upstream . This is currently often the case. Right now, Rust is moving very quickly, and by Debian standards is very new. As Rust becomes more widely used, more stable, and more part of the infrastructure of the software world, it will need to become part of standard, stable, reliable, software distributions. That means Debian.

1. Catch the lightning talk summarizing the meeting here (you can even speed up 2x):

1. For a quick written summary, scroll down to the TL;DR section.

TL;DR This meeting took 3 hours and tackled a variety of topics related to DRM/KMS (Linux/DRM Kernel Modesetting):

• Sharing Drivers Between V4L2 and KMS: Brainstorming solutions for using a single driver for devices used in both camera capture and display pipelines.
• Real-Time Scheduling: Addressing issues with non-blocking page flips encountering sigkills under real-time scheduling.
• HDR/Color Management: Agreement on merging the current proposal, with NVIDIA implementing its special cases on VKMS and adding missing parts on top of Harry Wentland s (AMD) changes.
• Display Mux: Collaborative design discussions focusing on compositor control and cross-sync considerations.
• Better Commit Failure Feedback: Exploring ways to equip compositors with more detailed information for failure analysis.

---

Bringing together Linux display developers in the XDC 2024 While I didn t present a talk this year, I co-organized a Display/KMS meeting (with Rodrigo Siqueira of AMD) to build upon the momentum from the 2024 Linux Display Next hackfest. The meeting was attended by around 30 people in person and 4 remote participants. Speakers: Melissa Wen (Igalia) and Rodrigo Siqueira (AMD) Link: https://indico.freedesktop.org/event/6/contributions/383/ Topics: Similar to the hackfest, the meeting agenda was built over the first two days of the conference and mixed talks follow-up with new ideas and ongoing community efforts. The final agenda covered five topics in the scheduled order:

1. How to share drivers between V4L2 and DRM for bridge-like components (new topic);
2. Real-time Scheduling (problems encountered after the Display Next hackfest);
3. HDR/Color Management (ofc);
4. Display Mux (from Display hackfest and XDC 2024 talk, bringing AMD and NVIDIA together);
5. (Better) Commit Failure Feedback (continuing the last minute topic of the Display Next hackfest).

Unpacking the Topics Similar to the hackfest, the meeting agenda evolved over the conference. During the 3 hours of meeting, I coordinated the room and discussion rounds, and Rodrigo Siqueira took notes and also contacted key developers to provide a detailed report of the many topics discussed. From his notes, let s dive into the key discussions!

How to share drivers between V4L2 and KMS for bridge-like components. Led by Laurent Pinchart, we delved into the challenge of creating a unified driver for hardware devices (like scalers) that are used in both camera capture pipelines and display pipelines.

• Problem Statement: How can we design a single kernel driver to handle devices that serve dual purposes in both V4L2 and DRM subsystems?
• Potential Solutions:
  1. Multiple Compatible Strings: We could assign different compatible strings to the device tree node based on its usage in either the camera or display pipeline. However, this approach might raise concerns from device tree maintainers as it could be seen as a layer violation.
  2. Separate Abstractions: A single driver could expose the device to both DRM and V4L2 through separate abstractions: drm-bridge for DRM and V4L2 subdev for video. While simple, this approach requires maintaining two different abstractions for the same underlying device.
  3. Unified Kernel Abstraction: We could create a new, unified kernel abstraction that combines the best aspects of drm-bridge and V4L2 subdev. This approach offers a more elegant solution but requires significant design effort and potential migration challenges for existing hardware.

Real-Time Scheduling Challenges We have discussed real-time scheduling during this year Linux Display Next hackfest and, during the XDC 2024, Jonas Adahl brought up issues uncovered while progressing on this front.

• Context: Non-blocking page-flips can, on rare occasions, take a long time and, for that reason, get a sigkill if the thread doing the atomic commit is a real-time schedule.
• Action items:
  • Explore alternative backtraces during the busy wait (e.g., ftrace).
  • Investigate the maximum thread time in busy wait to reproduce issues faced by compositors. Tools like RTKit (mutter) can be used for better control (Michel D nzer can help with this setup).

HDR/Color Management This is a well-known topic with ongoing effort on all layers of the Linux Display stack and has been discussed online and in-person in conferences and meetings over the last years. Here s a breakdown of the key points raised at this meeting:

• Talk: Color operations for Linux color pipeline on AMD devices: In the previous day, Alex Hung (AMD) presented the implementation of this API on AMD display driver.
• NVIDIA Integration: While they agree with the overall proposal, NVIDIA needs to add some missing parts. Importantly, they will implement these on top of Harry Wentland s (AMD) proposal. Their specific requirements will be implemented on VKMS (Virtual Kernel Mode Setting driver) for further discussion. This VKMS implementation can benefit compositor developers by providing insights into NVIDIA s specific needs.
• Other vendors: There is a version of the KMS API applied on Intel color pipeline. Apart from that, other vendors appear to be comfortable with the current proposal but lacks the bandwidth to implement it right now.
• Upstream Patches: The relevant upstream patches were can be found here. [As humorously notes, this series is eagerly awaiting your Acked-by (approval)]
• Compositor Side: The compositor developers have also made significant progress.
  • KDE has already implemented and validated the API through an experimental implementation in Kwin.
  • Gamescope currently uses a driver-specific implementation but has a draft that utilizes the generic version. However, some work is still required to fully transition away from the driver-specific approach. AP: work on porting gamescope to KMS generic API
  • Weston has also begun exploring implementation, and we might see something from them by the end of the year.
• Kernel and Testing: The kernel API proposal is well-refined and meets the DRM subsystem requirements. Thanks to Harry Wentland effort, we already have the API attached to two hardware vendors and IGT tests, and, thanks to Xaver Hugl, a compositor implementation in place.

Finally, there was a strong sense of agreement that the current proposal for HDR/Color Management is ready to be merged. In simpler terms, everything seems to be working well on the technical side - all signs point to merging and shipping the DRM/KMS plane color management API!

Display Mux During the meeting, Daniel Dadap led a brainstorming session on the design of the display mux switching sequence, in which the compositor would arm the switch via sysfs, then send a modeset to the outgoing driver, followed by a modeset to the incoming driver.

• Context:
  • During this year Linux Display Next hackfest, Mario Limonciello (AMD) introduced the topic and led a discussion on Display Mux.
  • Daniel Dadap (NVIDIA) retook this discussion with the XDC 2024 talk: Dynamic Switching of Display Muxes on Hybrid GPU Systems.
• Key Considerations:
  • HPD Handling: There was a general consensus that disabling HPD can be part of the sequence for internal panels and we don t need to focus on it here.
  • Cross-Sync: Ensuring synchronization between the compositor and the drivers is crucial. The compositor should act as the drm-master to coordinate the entire sequence, but how can this be ensured?
  • Future-Proofing: The design should not assume the presence of a mux. In future scenarios, direct sharing over DP might be possible.
• Action points:
  • Sharing DP AUX: Explore the idea of sharing DP AUX and its implications.
  • Backlight: The backlight definition represents a problem in the mux switch context, so we should explore some of the current specs available for that.

Towards Better Commit Failure Feedback In the last part of the meeting, Xaver Hugl asked for better commit failure feedback.

• Problem description: Compositors currently face challenges in collecting detailed information from the kernel about commit failures. This lack of granular data hinders their ability to understand and address the root causes of these failures.

To address this issue, we discussed several potential improvements:

• Direct Kernel Log Access: One idea is to directly load relevant kernel logs into the compositor. This would provide more detailed information about the failure and potentially aid in debugging.
• Finer-Grained Failure Reporting: We also explored the possibility of separating atomic failures into more specific categories. Not all failures are critical, and understanding the nature of the failure can help compositors take appropriate action.
• Enhanced Logging: Currently, the dmesg log doesn t provide enough information for user-space validation. Raising the log level to capture more detailed information during failures could be a viable solution.

By implementing these improvements, we aim to equip compositors with the necessary tools to better understand and resolve commit failures, leading to a more robust and stable display system.

A Big Thank You! Huge thanks to Rodrigo Siqueira for these detailed meeting notes. Also, Laurent Pinchart, Jonas Adahl, Daniel Dadap, Xaver Hugl, and Harry Wentland for bringing up interesting topics and leading discussions. Finally, thanks to all the participants who enriched the discussions with their experience, ideas, and inputs, especially Alex Goins, Antonino Maniscalco, Austin Shafer, Daniel Stone, Demi Obenour, Jessica Zhang, Joan Torres, Leo Li, Liviu Dudau, Mario Limonciello, Michel D nzer, Rob Clark, Simon Ser and Teddy Li. This collaborative effort will undoubtedly contribute to the continued development of the Linux display stack. Stay tuned for future updates!

Changes in RcppArmadillo version 14.2.0-1 (2024-11-16)

• Upgraded to Armadillo release 14.2.0 (Smooth Caffeine)
  • Faster handling of symmetric matrices by inv() and rcond()
  • Faster handling of hermitian matrices by inv(), rcond(), cond(), pinv(), rank()
  • Added solve_opts::force_sym option to solve() to force the use of the symmetric solver
  • More efficient handling of compound expressions by solve()
• Added exporter specialisation for icube for the ARMA_64BIT_WORD case

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

$ KR='/usr/share/keyrings/hpe.gpg'
$ for fingerprint in \
  882F7199B20F94BD7E3E690EFADD8D64B1275EA3 \
  57446EFDE098E5C934B69C7DC208ADDE26C2B797 \
  476DADAC9E647EE27453F2A3B070680A5CE2D476 ; do \
    curl "https://keyserver.ubuntu.com/pks/lookup?op=get&search=0x$ fingerprint " \
        gpg --no-default-keyring --keyring "$ KR " --import ; \
  done
$ gpg --list-keys --no-default-keyring --keyring "$ KR " 
/usr/share/keyrings/hpe.gpg
---------------------------
pub   rsa2048 2012-12-04 [SC] [expired: 2022-12-02]
      476DADAC9E647EE27453F2A3B070680A5CE2D476
uid           [ expired] Hewlett-Packard Company RSA (HP Codesigning Service)
pub   rsa2048 2014-11-19 [SC] [expired: 2024-11-16]
      882F7199B20F94BD7E3E690EFADD8D64B1275EA3
uid           [ expired] Hewlett-Packard Company RSA (HP Codesigning Service) - 1
pub   rsa2048 2015-12-10 [SCEA] [expires: 2025-12-07]
      57446EFDE098E5C934B69C7DC208ADDE26C2B797
uid           [ unknown] Hewlett Packard Enterprise Company RSA-2048-25 
$ echo "deb [signed-by=$ KR ] http://downloads.linux.hpe.com/SDR/repo/mcp bookworm/current non-free" \
    sudo dd of=/etc/apt/sources.list.d status=none
$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install -y -qq ssacli > /dev/null 2>&1
$ sudo ssacli ctrl all show status
HPE Smart Array P408i-p SR Gen10 in Slot 3
   Controller Status: OK
   Cache Status: OK
   Battery/Capacitor Status: OK
$ sudo ssacli ctrl all show detail
HPE Smart Array P408i-p SR Gen10 in Slot 3
   Bus Interface: PCI
   Slot: 3
   Serial Number: PFJHD0ARCCR1QM
   RAID 6 Status: Enabled
   Controller Status: OK
   Hardware Revision: B
   Firmware Version: 2.65
   Firmware Supports Online Firmware Activation: True
   Driver Supports Online Firmware Activation: True
   Rebuild Priority: High
   Expand Priority: Medium
   Surface Scan Delay: 3 secs
   Surface Scan Mode: Idle
   Parallel Surface Scan Supported: Yes
   Current Parallel Surface Scan Count: 1
   Max Parallel Surface Scan Count: 16
   Queue Depth: Automatic
   Monitor and Performance Delay: 60  min
   Elevator Sort: Enabled
   Degraded Performance Optimization: Disabled
   Inconsistency Repair Policy: Disabled
   Write Cache Bypass Threshold Size: 1040 KiB
   Wait for Cache Room: Disabled
   Surface Analysis Inconsistency Notification: Disabled
   Post Prompt Timeout: 15 secs
   Cache Board Present: True
   Cache Status: OK
   Cache Ratio: 10% Read / 90% Write
   Configured Drive Write Cache Policy: Disable
   Unconfigured Drive Write Cache Policy: Default
   Total Cache Size: 2.0
   Total Cache Memory Available: 1.8
   Battery Backed Cache Size: 1.8
   No-Battery Write Cache: Disabled
   SSD Caching RAID5 WriteBack Enabled: True
   SSD Caching Version: 2
   Cache Backup Power Source: Batteries
   Battery/Capacitor Count: 1
   Battery/Capacitor Status: OK
   SATA NCQ Supported: True
   Spare Activation Mode: Activate on physical drive failure (default)
   Controller Temperature (C): 53
   Cache Module Temperature (C): 43
   Capacitor Temperature  (C): 40
   Number of Ports: 2 Internal only
   Encryption: Not Set
   Express Local Encryption: False
   Driver Name: smartpqi
   Driver Version: Linux 2.1.18-045
   PCI Address (Domain:Bus:Device.Function): 0000:11:00.0
   Negotiated PCIe Data Rate: PCIe 3.0 x8 (7880 MB/s)
   Controller Mode: Mixed
   Port Max Phy Rate Limiting Supported: False
   Latency Scheduler Setting: Disabled
   Current Power Mode: MaxPerformance
   Survival Mode: Enabled
   Host Serial Number: 2M20040D1Q
   Sanitize Erase Supported: True
   Sanitize Lock: None
   Sensor ID: 0
      Location: Capacitor
      Current Value (C): 40
      Max Value Since Power On: 42
   Sensor ID: 1
      Location: ASIC
      Current Value (C): 53
      Max Value Since Power On: 55
   Sensor ID: 2
      Location: Unknown
      Current Value (C): 43
      Max Value Since Power On: 45
   Sensor ID: 3
      Location: Cache
      Current Value (C): 43
      Max Value Since Power On: 44
   Primary Boot Volume: None
   Secondary Boot Volume: None
$ sudo ssacli ctrl all show config
HPE Smart Array P408i-p SR Gen10 in Slot 3  (sn: PFJHD0ARCCR1QM)
   Internal Drive Cage at Port 1I, Box 2, OK
   Internal Drive Cage at Port 2I, Box 2, OK
   Port Name: 1I (Mixed)
   Port Name: 2I (Mixed)
   Array A (SAS, Unused Space: 0  MB)
      logicaldrive 1 (1.64 TB, RAID 6, OK)
      physicaldrive 1I:2:1 (port 1I:box 2:bay 1, SAS HDD, 300 GB, OK)
      physicaldrive 1I:2:2 (port 1I:box 2:bay 2, SAS HDD, 1.2 TB, OK)
      physicaldrive 1I:2:3 (port 1I:box 2:bay 3, SAS HDD, 300 GB, OK)
      physicaldrive 1I:2:4 (port 1I:box 2:bay 4, SAS HDD, 1.2 TB, OK)
      physicaldrive 2I:2:5 (port 2I:box 2:bay 5, SAS HDD, 300 GB, OK)
      physicaldrive 2I:2:6 (port 2I:box 2:bay 6, SAS HDD, 300 GB, OK)
      physicaldrive 2I:2:7 (port 2I:box 2:bay 7, SAS HDD, 1.2 TB, OK)
      physicaldrive 2I:2:8 (port 2I:box 2:bay 8, SAS HDD, 1.2 TB, OK)
   SEP (Vendor ID HPE, Model Smart Adapter) 379  (WWID: 51402EC013705E88, Port: Unknown)
$ sudo ssacli ctrl slot=3 pd 2I:2:7 show detail
HPE Smart Array P408i-p SR Gen10 in Slot 3
   Array A
      physicaldrive 2I:2:7
         Port: 2I
         Box: 2
         Bay: 7
         Status: OK
         Drive Type: Data Drive
         Interface Type: SAS
         Size: 1.2 TB
         Drive exposed to OS: False
         Logical/Physical Block Size: 512/512
         Rotational Speed: 10000
         Firmware Revision: U850
         Serial Number: KZGN1BDE
         WWID: 5000CCA01D247239
         Model: HGST    HUC101212CSS600
         Current Temperature (C): 46
         Maximum Temperature (C): 51
         PHY Count: 2
         PHY Transfer Rate: 6.0Gbps, Unknown
         PHY Physical Link Rate: 6.0Gbps, Unknown
         PHY Maximum Link Rate: 6.0Gbps, 6.0Gbps
         Drive Authentication Status: OK
         Carrier Application Version: 11
         Carrier Bootloader Version: 6
         Sanitize Erase Supported: False
         Shingled Magnetic Recording Support: None
         Drive Unique ID: 5000CCA01D247238

cjac@server0:~$ sudo ssacli ctrl all show config
HPE Smart Array P408i-p SR Gen10 in Slot 3  (sn: PFJHD0ARCCR1QM)
   Internal Drive Cage at Port 1I, Box 2, OK
   Internal Drive Cage at Port 2I, Box 2, OK
   Port Name: 1I (Mixed)
   Port Name: 2I (Mixed)
   Array A (SAS, Unused Space: 0  MB)
      logicaldrive 1 (1.64 TB, RAID 6, OK)
      physicaldrive 1I:2:1 (port 1I:box 2:bay 1, SAS HDD, 300 GB, OK)
      physicaldrive 1I:2:2 (port 1I:box 2:bay 2, SAS HDD, 1.2 TB, Predictive Failure)
      physicaldrive 1I:2:3 (port 1I:box 2:bay 3, SAS HDD, 300 GB, OK)
      physicaldrive 1I:2:4 (port 1I:box 2:bay 4, SAS HDD, 1.2 TB, OK)
      physicaldrive 2I:2:5 (port 2I:box 2:bay 5, SAS HDD, 300 GB, OK)
      physicaldrive 2I:2:6 (port 2I:box 2:bay 6, SAS HDD, 300 GB, OK)
      physicaldrive 2I:2:7 (port 2I:box 2:bay 7, SAS HDD, 1.2 TB, OK)
      physicaldrive 2I:2:8 (port 2I:box 2:bay 8, SAS HDD, 300 GB, OK)
   SEP (Vendor ID HPE, Model Smart Adapter) 379  (WWID: 51402EC013705E88, Port: Unknown)

cjac@server0:~$ sudo ssacli ctrl all show config
[sudo] password for cjac: 
HPE Smart Array P408i-p SR Gen10 in Slot 3  (sn: PFJHD0ARCCR1QM)
   Internal Drive Cage at Port 1I, Box 2, OK
   Internal Drive Cage at Port 2I, Box 2, OK
   Port Name: 1I (Mixed)
   Port Name: 2I (Mixed)
   Array A (SAS, Unused Space: 0  MB)
      logicaldrive 1 (1.64 TB, RAID 6, Recovering, 56.43% complete)
      physicaldrive 1I:2:1 (port 1I:box 2:bay 1, SAS HDD, 300 GB, OK)
      physicaldrive 1I:2:2 (port 1I:box 2:bay 2, SAS HDD, 300 GB, Rebuilding)
      physicaldrive 1I:2:3 (port 1I:box 2:bay 3, SAS HDD, 300 GB, OK)
      physicaldrive 1I:2:4 (port 1I:box 2:bay 4, SAS HDD, 1.2 TB, OK)
      physicaldrive 2I:2:5 (port 2I:box 2:bay 5, SAS HDD, 300 GB, OK)
      physicaldrive 2I:2:6 (port 2I:box 2:bay 6, SAS HDD, 300 GB, OK)
      physicaldrive 2I:2:7 (port 2I:box 2:bay 7, SAS HDD, 1.2 TB, OK)
      physicaldrive 2I:2:8 (port 2I:box 2:bay 8, SAS HDD, 300 GB, OK)
   SEP (Vendor ID HPE, Model Smart Adapter) 379  (WWID: 51402EC013705E88, Port: Unknown)

cjac@server0:~$ date ; sudo ssacli ctrl all show config
Mon Dec  9 07:36:44 PM PST 2024 ... logicaldrive 1 (1.64 TB, RAID 6, Recovering, 66.85% complete)...
Mon Dec  9 07:39:25 PM PST 2024 ... logicaldrive 1 (1.64 TB, RAID 6, Recovering, 68.97% complete) ...
cjac@server0:~$ date ; sudo ssacli ctrl all show config   grep Recovering
Mon Dec  9 07:43:05 PM PST 2024 ... logicaldrive 1 (1.64 TB, RAID 6, Recovering, 71.85% complete)
Mon Dec  9 07:43:57 PM PST 2024 ... logicaldrive 1 (1.64 TB, RAID 6, Recovering, 72.55% complete)
cjac@server0:~$ sleep 5m ; date ; sudo ssacli ctrl all show config   grep Recovering
Mon Dec  9 07:49:43 PM PST 2024 ... logicaldrive 1 (1.64 TB, RAID 6, Recovering, 77.00% complete)
cjac@server0:~$ date ; sudo ssacli ctrl all show config   grep -e 1I:2:2 -e logicaldrive
Mon Dec  9 11:36:14 PM PST 2024 ... logicaldrive 1 (1.64 TB, RAID 6, OK)
physicaldrive 1I:2:2 (port 1I:box 2:bay 2, SAS HDD, 300 GB, OK)

• [1] https://blog.jeujeus.de/blog/hardware/laptops-will-not-sleep-anymore/
• [2] https://tinyurl.com/2b7mxaj7
• [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OHKKcd3sx2c

Complexity Culture In a large enough organization, where the team is high functioning enough to have and maintain trust amongst peers, members of the team will specialize. People will begin to engage with subsets of the work to be done, and begin to have their efficacy measured against that part of the organization s problems. Incentives shift, and over time it becomes increasingly likely that two engineers may have two very different priorities when working on the same system together. Someone accountable for uptime and tasked with responding to outages will begin to resist changes. Someone accountable for rapidly delivering features will resist gates between them and their users. Companies (either wittingly or unwittingly) will deal with this by tasking engineers with both production (feature development) and operational tasks (maintenance), so the difference in incentives isn t usually as bad as it could be. When we get a bunch of folks from far-flung corners of an organization in a room, fire up a slide deck and throw up some aspirational to-be architecture diagram in order to get a sign-off to solve some problem (be it someone needs a credible promotion packet, new feature needs to get delivered, or the system has begun to fail and needs fixing), the initial reaction will, more often than I d like, start to devolve into a discussion of how this is going to introduce a bunch of complexity, going to be hard to maintain, why can t you make it less complex? Right around here is when I start to try and contextualize the conversation happening around me understand what complexity is that being discussed, and understand who is taking on that burden. Think about who should be owning that problem, and work through the tradeoffs involved. Is it best solved here, or left to consumers (be them other systems, developers, or users). Should something become an API call s optional param, taking on all the edge-cases and on, or should users have to implement the logic using the data you return (leaving everyone else to take on all the edge-cases and maintenance)? Should you process the data, or require the user to preprocess it for you? Frequently it s right to make an active and explicit decision to simplify and leave problems to be solved downstream, since they may not actually need to be solved or perhaps you expect consumers will want to own the specifics of how the problem is solved, in which case you leave lots of documentation and examples. Many other times, especially when it s something downstream consumers are likely to hit, it s best solved internal to the system, since the only thing that can come of leaving it unsolved are bugs, frustration and half-correct solutions. This is a grey-space of tradeoffs, not a clear decision tree. No one wants the software manifestation of a katamari ball or a junk drawer, nor does anyone want a half-baked service unable to handle the simplest use-case.

Head-in-sand as a Service Popoffs about how complex something is, are, to a first approximation, best understood as meaning complicated for the person making comments . A lot of the #thoughtleadership believe that an AWS hosted EKS k8s cluster running images built by CI talking to an AWS hosted PostgreSQL RDS is not complex. They re right. Mostly right. This is less complex less complex for them. It s not, however, without complexity and its own tradeoffs it s just complexity that they do not have to deal with. Now they don t have to maintain machines that have pesky operating systems or hard drive failures. They don t have to deal with updating the version of k8s, nor ensuring the backups work. No one has to push some artifact to prod manually. Deployments happen unattended. You click a button and get a cluster. On the other hand, developers outside the ops function need to deal with troubleshooting CI, debugging access control rules encoded in turing complete YAML, permissions issues inside the cluster due to whatever the fuck a service mesh is, everyone needs to learn how to use some k8s tools they only actually use during a bad day, likely while doing some x.509 troubleshooting to connect to the cluster (an internal only endpoint; just port forward it) not to mention all sorts of rules to route packets to their project (a single repo s binary being run in 3 containers on a single vm host). Beyond that, there s the invisible complexity complexity on the interior of a service you depend on. I think about the dozens of teams maintaining the EKS service (which is either run on EC2 instances, or alternately, EC2 instances in a trench coat, moustache and even more shell scripts), the RDS service (also EC2 and shell scripts, but this time accounting for redundancy, backups, availability zones), scores of hypervisors pulled off the shelf (xen, kvm) smashed together with the ones built in-house (firecracker, nitro, etc) running on hardware that has to be refreshed and maintained continuously. Every request processed by network ACL rules, AWS IAM rules, security group rules, using IP space announced to the internet wired through IXPs directly into ISPs. I don t even want to begin to think about the complexity inherent in how those switches are designed. Shitloads of complexity to solve problems you may or may not have, or even know you had. What s more complex? An app running in an in-house 4u server racked in the office s telco closet in the back running off the office Verizon line, or an app running four hypervisors deep in an AWS datacenter? Which is more complex to you? What about to your organization? In total? Which is more prone to failure? Which is more secure? Is the complexity good or bad? What type of Complexity can you manage effectively? Which threaten the system? Which threaten your users?

COMPLEXIVIBES This extends beyond Engineering. Decisions regarding what tools are we able to use be them existing contracts with cloud providers, CIO mandated SaaS products, a list of the only permissible open source projects will incur costs in terms of expressed complexity . Pinning open source projects to a fixed set makes SBOM production less complex . Using only one SaaS provider s product suite (even if its terrible, because it has all the types of tools you need) makes accreditation less complex . If all you have is a contract with Pauly T s lowest price technically acceptable artisinal cloudary and haberdashery, the way you pay for your compute is less complex for the CIO shop, though you will find yourself building your own hosted database template, mechanism to spin up a k8s cluster, and all the operational and technical burden that comes with it. Or you won t and make it everyone else s problem in the organization. Nothing you can do will solve for the fact that you must now deal with this problem somewhere because it was less complicated for the business to put the workloads on the existing contract with a cut-rate vendor. Suddenly, the decision to reduce complexity because of an existing contract vehicle has resulted in a huge amount of technical risk and maintenance burden being onboarded. Complexity you would otherwise externalize has now been taken on internally. With a large enough organizations (specifically, in this case, i m talking about you, bureaucracies), this is largely ignored or accepted as normal since the personnel cost is understood to be free to everyone involved. Doing it this way is more expensive, more work, less reliable and less maintainable, and yet, somehow, is, in a lot of ways, less complex to the organization. It s particularly bad with bureaucracies, since screwing up a contract will get you into much more trouble than delivering a broken product, leaving basically no reason for anyone to care to fix this. I can t shake the feeling that for every story of technical mandates gone awry, somewhere just out of sight there s a decisionmaker optimizing for what they believe to be the least amount of complexity least hassle, fewest unique cases, most consistency as they can. They freely offload complexity from their accreditation and risk acceptance functions through mandates. They will never have to deal with it. That does not change the fact that someone does.

TC;DR (TOO COMPLEX; DIDN T REVIEW) We wish to rid ourselves of systemic Complexity after all, complexity is bad, simplicity is good. Removing upper-bound own-goal complexity ( accidental complexity in Brooks s terms) is important, but once you hit the lower bound complexity, the tradeoffs become zero-sum. Removing complexity from one part of the system means that somewhere else maybe outside your organization or in a non-engineering function must grow it back. Sometimes, the opposite is the case, such as when a previously manual business processes is automated. Maybe that s a good idea. Maybe it s not. All I know is that what doesn t help the situation is conflating complexity with everything we don t like legacy code, maintenance burden or toil, cost, delivery velocity.

• Complexity is not the same as proclivity to failure. The most reliable systems I ve interacted with are unimaginably complex, with layers of internal protection to prevent complete failure. This has its own set of costs which other people have written about extensively.
• Complexity is not cost. Sometimes the cost of taking all the complexity in-house is less, for whatever value of cost you choose to use.
• Complexity is not absolute. Something simple from one perspective may be wildly complex from another. The impulse to burn down complex sections of code is helpful to have generally, but sometimes things are complicated for a reason, even if that reason exists outside your codebase or organization.
• Complexity is not something you can remove without introducing complexity elsewhere. Just as not making a decision is a decision itself; choosing to require someone else to deal with a problem rather than dealing with it internally is a choice that needs to be considered in its full context.

Next time you re sitting through a discussion and someone starts to talk about all the complexity about to be introduced, I want to pop up in the back of your head, politely asking what does complex mean in this context? Is it lower bound complexity? Is this complexity desirable? Is what they re saying mean something along the lines of I don t understand the problems being solved, or does it mean something along the lines of this problem should be solved elsewhere? Do they believe this will result in more work for them in a way that you don t see? Should this not solved at all by changing the bounds of what we should accept or redefine the understood limits of this system? Is the perceived complexity a result of a decision elsewhere? Who s taking this complexity on, or more to the point, is failing to address complexity required by the problem leaving it to others? Does it impact others? How specifically? What are you not seeing? What can change? What should change?

1. Beyond bitwise equality for Reproducible Builds?
2. Two Ways to Trustworthy at SeaGL 2024
3. Number of cores affected Android compiler output
4. On our mailing list
5. diffoscope
6. IzzyOnDroid passed 25% reproducible apps
7. Distribution work
8. Website updates
9. Reproducibility testing framework
10. Supply-chain security at Open Source Summit EU
11. Upstream patches

Beyond bitwise equality for Reproducible Builds? Jens Dietrich, Tim White, of Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand along with Behnaz Hassanshahi and Paddy Krishnan of Oracle Labs Australia published a paper entitled Levels of Binary Equivalence for the Comparison of Binaries from Alternative Builds :

The availability of multiple binaries built from the same sources creates new challenges and opportunities, and raises questions such as: Does build A confirm the integrity of build B? or Can build A reveal a compromised build B? . To answer such questions requires a notion of equivalence between binaries. We demonstrate that the obvious approach based on bitwise equality has significant shortcomings in practice, and that there is value in opting for alternative notions. We conceptualise this by introducing levels of equivalence, inspired by clone detection types.

A PDF of the paper is freely available.

Two Ways to Trustworthy at SeaGL 2024 On Friday 8th November, Vagrant Cascadian will present a talk entitled Two Ways to Trustworthy at SeaGL in Seattle, WA. Founded in 2013, SeaGL is a free, grassroots technical summit dedicated to spreading awareness and knowledge about free source software, hardware and culture. Vagrant s talk:

[ ] delves into how two project[s] approaches fundamental security features through Reproducible Builds, Bootstrappable Builds, code auditability, etc. to improve trustworthiness, allowing independent verification; trustworthy projects require little to no trust. Exploring the challenges that each project faces due to very different technical architectures, but also contextually relevant social structure, adoption patterns, and organizational history should provide a good backdrop to understand how different approaches to security might evolve, with real-world merits and downsides.

Number of cores affected Android compiler output Fay Stegerman wrote that the cause of the Android toolchain bug from September s report that she reported to the Android issue tracker has been found and the bug has been fixed.

the D8 Java to DEX compiler (part of the Android toolchain) eliminated a redundant field load if running the class s static initialiser was known to be free of side effects, which ended up accidentally depending on the sharding of the input, which is dependent on the number of CPU cores used during the build.

To make it easier to understand the bug and the patch, Fay also made a small example to illustrate when and why the optimisation involved is valid.

On our mailing list On our mailing list this month:

• Following-up to previous work, James Addison informed the list that the recently-released Sphinx documentation generator includes improvements to the next copyright notice substitutions.
• Pol Dellaiera wrote to the list in order to seek advice around introducing the concept of reproducibility to computer science Masters students at the University of Mons, Belgium.
• James Addison also followed-up to a previous thread on CONFIG_MODULE_SIG and the unreproducible Linux Kernel to add: I wonder whether it would be possible to use the Linux kernel s Integrity Policy Enforcement to deploy a policy that would prevent loading of anything except a set of expected kernel modules. [ ]
• There were also two informative replies from David Wheeler to a broad-based discussion on Reproducible Builds being defined in various standards. [ ][ ]

diffoscope diffoscope is our in-depth and content-aware diff utility that can locate and diagnose reproducibility issues. This month, Chris Lamb made the following changes, including preparing and uploading versions 279, 280, 281 and 282 to Debian:

• Ignore errors when listing .ar archives (#1085257). [ ]
• Don t try and test with systemd-ukify in the Debian stable distribution. [ ]
• Drop Depends on the deprecated python3-pkg-resources (#1083362). [ ]

In addition, Jelle van der Waa added support for Unified Kernel Image (UKI) files. [ ][ ][ ] Furthermore, Vagrant Cascadian updated diffoscope in GNU Guix to version 282. [ ][ ]

IzzyOnDroid passed 25% reproducible apps The IzzyOnDroid project has reached a good milestone by reaching over 25% of the ~1,200 Android apps provided by their repository (of official APKs built by the original application developers) having been confirmed to be reproducible by a rebuilder.

Distribution work In Debian this month:

• Holger Levsen uploaded devscripts version 2.24.2, including many changes to the debootsnap, debrebuild and reproducible-check scripts. This is the first time that debrebuild actually works (using sbuild s unshare backend). As part of this, Holger also fixed an issue in the reproducible-check script where a typo in the code led to incorrect results [ ]
• Recently, a news entry was added to snapshot.debian.org s homepage, describing the recent changes that made the system stable again:

  The new server has no problems keeping up with importing the full archives on every update, as each run finishes comfortably in time before it s time to run again. [While] the new server is the one doing all the importing of updated archives, the HTTP interface is being served by both the new server and one of the VM s at LeaseWeb.

  The entry list a number of specific updates surrounding the API endpoints and rate limiting.
• Lastly, 12 reviews of Debian packages were added, 3 were updated and 18 were removed this month adding to our knowledge about identified issues.

Elsewhere in distribution news, Zbigniew J drzejewski-Szmek performed another rebuild of Fedora 42 packages, with the headline result being that 91% of the packages are reproducible. Zbigniew also reported a reproducibility problem with QImage. Finally, in openSUSE, Bernhard M. Wiedemann published another report for that distribution.

Website updates There were an enormous number of improvements made to our website this month, including:

• Alba Herrerias:
  • Improve consistency across distribution-specific guides. [ ]
  • Fix a number of links on the Contribute page. [ ]
• Chris Lamb:
  • Correct the name of Civil Infrastructure Platform name and update image on the Projects page. [ ]
  • Update broken link on the Value Initialization page. [ ]
  • Try and make pipeline/branch builds of the website easier to browse. [ ][ ][ ][ ]
• hulkoba
  • Contribute to the new Success stories page. [ ]
• James Addison:
  • Huge and significant work on a (as-yet-merged) quickstart guide to be linked from the homepage [ ][ ][ ][ ][ ]
  • On the homepage, link directly to the Projects subpage. [ ]
  • Relocate dependency-drift notes to the Volatile inputs page. [ ]
• Ninette Adhikari:
  • Add a brand new Success stories page that highlights the success stories of Reproducible Builds, showcasing real-world examples of projects shipping with verifiable, reproducible builds . [ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ]
• Pol Dellaiera:
  • Update the website s README page for building the website under NixOS. [ ][ ][ ][ ][ ]
  • Add a new academic paper citation. [ ]

Lastly, Holger Levsen filed an extensive issue detailing a request to create an overview of recommendations and standards in relation to reproducible builds.

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

• Add a basic index.html for rebuilderd. [ ]
• Update the nginx.conf configuration file for rebuilderd. [ ]
• Document how to use a rescue system for Infomaniak s OpenStack cloud. [ ]
• Update usage info for two particular nodes. [ ]
• Fix up a version skew check to fix the name of the riscv64 architecture. [ ]
• Update the rebuilderd-related TODO. [ ]

In addition, Mattia Rizzolo added a new IP address for the inos5 node [ ] and Vagrant Cascadian brought 4 virt nodes back online [ ].

Supply-chain security at Open Source Summit EU The Open Source Summit EU took place recently, and covered plenty of topics related to supply-chain security, including:

• Public Sector & OpenSSF: Principles for Package Repository Security
• The Model Openness Framework: Promoting Completeness and Openness for Reproducibility, Transparency and Usability in AI
• Structured Scorecard Results: Tailor Your Own Supply-Chain Security Policies
• Lightning Talk: Elephant in the Room: How Supply Chain Security Standards Are Not Standard and What to Do About It
• Lightning Talk: Charting the Course for Secure Software Supply Chain with Guac-AI-Mole!
• TPMs, Merkle Trees and TEEs: Enhancing SLSA with Hardware-Assisted Build Environment Verification
• Accountability Taxonomy for AI Software Bill of Materials
• Securing Your Supply Chain with an Open Source Ecosystem
• OSS Supply Chain Threats and Why You Need a Holistic Security Strategy
• A Step Closer to in-Toto lly Secure: Using in-Toto and OPA Gatekeeper to Verify Artifact Integrity
• Panel Discussion: Improving Supply Chain Integrity with OpenSSF Technologies
• Case Study: 10+ Years of Developing an SBOM System and the Dos and Don ts
• SBOM in SaaS Environments: An Update
• Securing Git Repositories with Gittuf

Upstream patches The Reproducible Builds project detects, dissects and attempts to fix as many currently-unreproducible packages as possible. We endeavour to send all of our patches upstream where appropriate. This month, we wrote a large number of such patches, including:

• Bernhard M. Wiedemann
  • apache-ivy (.zip modification time)
  • ccache (build failure)
  • colord (CPU)
  • efivar (CPU/march=native)
  • gsl (no check)
  • libcamera (date/copyright year)
  • libreoffice (possible rpm/build toolchain corruption bug)
  • moto (.gz modification time)
  • openssl-1_1 (date-related issue)
  • python-pygraphviz (benchmark)
  • sphinx/python-pygraphviz (benchmark)
  • python-panel (package.lock has random port)
  • python-propcache (random temporary path)
  • python314 (.gz-related modification time)
  • rusty_v8 (random .o files)
  • scapy (date)
  • wine (parallelism)
  • ibmtss (FTBFS-2026)
  • pymol (date)
  • pandas (ASLR)
  • linutil (drop date)
  • lsof (also filed in openSUSE: uname -r in LSOF_VSTR)
  • schily (also filed in openSUSE: uname -r)
  • superlu (nocheck)
  • util (random test failure)
  • ceph (year-2038 variation from embedded boost)
• Chris Lamb:
  • #1085097 filed against python-roborock.
  • #1085280 filed against pywayland.
  • #1085283 filed against readsb.
  • #1085381 filed against xraylarch.
• James Addison:
  • #1085112 filed against distro-info.
• Zbigniew J drzejewski-Szmek:
  • calibre (two sort issues) [ ][ ]

---

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

• IRC: #reproducible-builds on irc.oftc.net.
• Mastodon: @reproducible_builds@fosstodon.org
• Mailing list: rb-general@lists.reproducible-builds.org
• Twitter: @ReproBuilds

1. you load a given page (such as this blog post), which is a static HTML document. There's a link to add a comment to the page.
2. The link loads a new page which is generated dynamically and served back to you via CGI. This contains a HTML form for you to write your comment.
3. The form submits to the server via HTTP POST. IkiWiki validates the form content. Various static pages (in particular the one you started on, in Step 1) are regenerated.
4. the server response to the request in (3) is a HTTP 302 redirect, instructing the browser to go back to the page in Step 1.

hx-get="<CGI ENDPOINT GOES HERE>"

suppresses the normal behaviour of the tag, so clicking on it doesn't load a new page.

issues an asynchronous HTTP GET to the CGI end-point, which returns the full HTML document for the comment edit form

hx-select=".editcomment form"

extract the edit-comment form from within that document

hx-swap=beforeend and hx-target=".addcomment"

append (courtesy of beforeend) the form into the source page after the "add comment" anchor tag (.addcomment)

The old Preview Comment page

Moderation message upon submitting a comment

• Accept+Bug report

Accept + Bug Report This option would allow a package to enter Debian (in unstable or experimental) with an automatically filed RC bug report. The RC bug would prevent the package from migrating to testing until the issues are addressed. To ensure compatibility with the BTS, which only accepts bug reports for existing packages, a delayed job (24 hours post-acceptance) would file the bug.

• Binary name changes - for instance if done to experimental not via new

• Remove dependency tree

a) the DAK removal tooling to remove the entire dependency tree
   after prompting the bug report author for confirmation, or
b) the system to auto-generate corresponding bug reports for all
   packages in the dependency tree.

• Install gir (MR). Needed for e.g. Debian to properly package the Rust bindings.
• Try harder to find an app icon when showing notifications (MR)
• Add a simple Pomodoro timer plugin (MR)
• Small screenshot manager fixes (MR)
• Tweak portals configuration (MR)
• Consistent focus style on lock screen and settings (MR). Improves the visual appearance as the dotted focus frame doesn't match our otherwise colored focus frames
• Don't focus buttons in settings (MR). Improves the visual appearance as attention isn't drawn to the button focus.
• Close Phosh's settings when activating a Settings panel (MR)

• Improve cursor and cursor theme handling, hide mouse pointer by default (MR)
• Don't submit empty preedit (MR)
• Fix flickering selection bubbles in GTK4's text input fields (MR)
• Backport two more fixes and release 0.41.1 (MR)

• Allow to select default text completer (MR, MR)
• Don't crash when we fail to load a pref plugin (MR)

• Update with current gir and allow to use status pages (MR)
• Expose screenshot manager and build without warnings (MR). (Improved further by a follow up MR from Sam)
• Fix clippy warnings and add clippy to CI (MR)

• presage: Always set predictors (MR). Avoids surprises with unwanted predictors.
• Install completer information (MR)
• Handle overlapping touch events (MR). This should improve fast typing.
• Allow plain ctrl and alt in the shortcuts bar (MR
• Use Adwaita background color to make the OSK look more integrated (MR)
• Use StyleManager to support accent colors (MR)
• Fix emoji section selection in RTL locales (MR)
• Don't submit empty preedit (MR). Helps to better preserve text selections.

• Add scripts to build word corpus from Wikipedia data (MR) See here for the data.

• Release 0.42~rc1 (MR)
• Fix HighContrast (MR)

• Collect some of the QCom workarounds in a package (MR). This is not meant to go into Debian proper but it's nicer than doing all the mods by hand and forgetting which files were modified.
• q6voiced: Fix service configuration (MR)
• chatty: Enable clock test again (MR), and then unbreak translations (MR)
• phosh: Ship gir for libphosh-rs (MR)
• phoc: Backport input method related fix (MR)
• Upload initial package of phosh-osk-data: Status in NEW
• Upload initial package of xdg-desktop-portal-pohsh: Status in NEW
• Backport phosh-osk-stub abbrev fix (MR
• phoc: Update to 0.42.1 (MR
• mobile-tweaks: Enable zram on Librem 5 and PP (MR)

• Some further work on the Cell Broadcast to address comments MR)

• Further improve daemon mode (MR) (mentioned last month already but got even simpler)

• Handle Gtk H,V Separator when migrating UI files to GTK4 (MR)

• Modernize README a bit (MR)

• Use special event for SMS (MR)
• Another QoL fix when using OSK (MR)
• Fix printing time diffs on 32bit architectures (MR)

• Use endpoints for authenticated media (MR). Needed to support v1.11 servers.

• Switch to GNOME 47 runtime (MR)

• Don't use deprecated pkg-resources (MR)

• Expand on DBus activation a bit (MR)

• Small build improvement and mention phosh-osk-stub (Commit)

• Fix -o option and add help output (MR)

• Don't take focus with header bar buttons (MR). Makes typing faster (as the OSK won't hide) and thus using the header bar easier

• Don't take focus when sending messages, adding emojis or attachments (MR). Makes typing faster (as the OSK won't hide) and thus using those buttons easier

• Use categories that work for both xdg-spec and the portal (MR)

• phosh-tour: add first login mode (MR)
• phosh: Animate swipe closing notifications (MR)
• iio-sensor-proxy: Report correct value on claim (MR)
• iio-sensor-proxy: face- up,down (MR)
• phosh-mobile-settings: Squeekboad scaling (MR)
• libcmatrix: Misc cleanups/fixes (MR)
• phosh: Notification separator improvements (MR
• phosh: Accent colors (MR

Changes in Rcpp release version 1.0.13-1 (2024-11-01)

• Changes in Rcpp API:
  • Use read-only VECTOR_PTR and STRING_PTR only with with R 4.5.0 or later (Kevin in #1342 fixing #1341)
• Changes in Rcpp Deployment:
  • Authors@R is now used in DESCRIPTION as mandated by CRAN

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

• [1] https://tinyurl.com/26geg4az
• [2] https://tinyurl.com/29n4hyvv
• [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VcufX8hZ5-o
• [4] https://tinyurl.com/2beb7ala
• [5] https://v8.dev/blog/control-flow-integrity
• [6] https://tinyurl.com/26p8hlcr
• [7] https://docs.kernel.org/next/x86/shstk.html
• [8] https://tinyurl.com/26ffcrho
• [9] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v-imW24OXLY
• [10] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zoX_S6d-XU4
• [11] https://tinyurl.com/ysqe79q7
• [12] https://tinyurl.com/258r74cl
• [13] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mg79n_ndR68
• [14] https://tinyurl.com/2xtu7kvv

Debian LTS contributors In September, 18 contributors have been paid to work on Debian LTS, their reports are available:

• Abhijith PA did 7.0h (out of 0.0h assigned and 14.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 7.0h to the next month.
• Adrian Bunk did 51.75h (out of 9.25h assigned and 55.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 13.0h to the next month.
• Arturo Borrero Gonzalez did 10.0h (out of 0.0h assigned and 10.0h from previous period).
• Bastien Roucari s did 20.0h (out of 20.0h assigned).
• Ben Hutchings did 20.0h (out of 12.0h assigned and 12.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 4.0h to the next month.
• Chris Lamb did 18.0h (out of 18.0h assigned).
• Daniel Leidert did 23.0h (out of 26.0h assigned), thus carrying over 3.0h to the next month.
• Emilio Pozuelo Monfort did 23.5h (out of 22.25h assigned and 37.75h from previous period), thus carrying over 36.5h to the next month.
• Guilhem Moulin did 22.25h (out of 20.0h assigned and 2.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 0.25h to the next month.
• Lucas Kanashiro did 10.0h (out of 5.0h assigned and 15.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 10.0h to the next month.
• Markus Koschany did 40.0h (out of 40.0h assigned).
• Ola Lundqvist did 6.5h (out of 14.5h assigned and 9.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 17.5h to the next month.
• Roberto C. S nchez did 24.75h (out of 21.0h assigned and 3.75h from previous period).
• Santiago Ruano Rinc n did 19.0h (out of 19.0h assigned).
• Sean Whitton did 0.75h (out of 4.0h assigned and 2.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 5.25h to the next month.
• Sylvain Beucler did 16.0h (out of 42.0h assigned and 18.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 44.0h to the next month.
• Thorsten Alteholz did 11.0h (out of 11.0h assigned).
• Tobias Frost did 17.0h (out of 7.5h assigned and 9.5h from previous period).

Evolution of the situation In September, we have released 52 DLAs. September marked the first full month of Debian 11 bullseye under the responsibility of the LTS Team and the team immediately got to work, publishing more than 4 dozen updates. Some notable updates include ruby2.7 (denial-of-service, information leak, and remote code execution), git (various arbitrary code execution vulnerabilities), firefox-esr (multiple issues), gnutls28 (information disclosure), thunderbird (multiple issues), cacti (cross site scripting and SQL injection), redis (unauthorized access, denial of service, and remote code execution), mariadb-10.5 (arbitrary code execution), cups (arbitrary code execution). Several LTS contributors have also contributed package updates which either resulted in a DSA (a Debian Security Announcement, which applies to Debian 12 bookworm) or in an upload that will be published at the next stable point release of Debian 12 bookworm. This list of packages includes cups, cups-filters, booth, nghttp2, puredata, python3.11, sqlite3, and wireshark. This sort of work, contributing fixes to newer Debian releases (and sometimes even to unstable), helps to ensure that upgrades from a release in the LTS phase of its lifecycle to a newer release do not expose users to vulnerabilities which have been closed in the older release. Looking beyond Debian, LTS contributor Bastien Roucari s has worked with the upstream developers of apache2 to address regressions introduced upstream by some recent vulnerability fixes and he has also reached out to the community regarding a newly discovered security issue in the dompurify package. LTS contributor Santiago Ruano Rinc n has undertaken the work of triaging and reproducing nearly 4 dozen CVEs potentially affecting the freeimage package. The upstream development of freeimage appears to be dormant and some of the issues have languished for more than 5 years. It is unclear how much can be done without the aid of upstream, but we will do our best to provide as much help to the community as we can feasibly manage. Finally, it is sometimes necessary to limit or discontinue support for certain packages. The transition of a release from being under the responsibility of the Debian Security Team to that of the LTS Team is an occasion where we assess any pending decisions in this area and formalize them. Please see the announcement for a complete list of packages which have been designated as unsupported.

Thanks to our sponsors Sponsors that joined recently are in bold.

• Platinum sponsors:
  • TOSHIBA (for 108 months)
  • Civil Infrastructure Platform (CIP) (for 76 months)
  • VyOS Inc (for 40 months)
• Gold sponsors:
  • Roche Diagnostics International AG (for 118 months)
  • Akamai - Linode (for 112 months)
  • Babiel GmbH (for 102 months)
  • Plat Home (for 101 months)
  • CINECA (for 76 months)
  • University of Oxford (for 58 months)
  • Deveryware (for 45 months)
  • EDF SA (for 30 months)
  • Dataport A R (for 5 months)
  • CERN (for 3 months)
• Silver sponsors:
  • Domeneshop AS (for 123 months)
  • Nantes M tropole (for 117 months)
  • Univention GmbH (for 109 months)
  • Universit Jean Monnet de St Etienne (for 109 months)
  • Ribbon Communications, Inc. (for 103 months)
  • Exonet B.V. (for 92 months)
  • Leibniz Rechenzentrum (for 87 months)
  • Minist re de l Europe et des Affaires trang res (for 70 months)
  • Cloudways by DigitalOcean (for 60 months)
  • Dinahosting SL (for 58 months)
  • Bauer Xcel Media Deutschland KG (for 52 months)
  • Platform.sh SAS (for 52 months)
  • Moxa Inc. (for 46 months)
  • sipgate GmbH (for 44 months)
  • OVH US LLC (for 42 months)
  • Tilburg University (for 42 months)
  • GSI Helmholtzzentrum f r Schwerionenforschung GmbH (for 33 months)
  • Soliton Systems K.K. (for 30 months)
  • THINline s.r.o. (for 6 months)
  • Copenhagen Airports A/S
• Bronze sponsors:
  • Evolix (for 123 months)
  • Seznam.cz, a.s. (for 123 months)
  • Intevation GmbH (for 120 months)
  • Linuxhotel GmbH (for 120 months)
  • Daevel SARL (for 119 months)
  • Bitfolk LTD (for 118 months)
  • Megaspace Internet Services GmbH (for 118 months)
  • Greenbone AG (for 117 months)
  • NUMLOG (for 117 months)
  • WinGo AG (for 116 months)
  • Entr ouvert (for 107 months)
  • Adfinis AG (for 105 months)
  • Tesorion (for 100 months)
  • GNI MEDIA (for 99 months)
  • Laboratoire LEGI - UMR 5519 / CNRS (for 99 months)
  • Bearstech (for 91 months)
  • LiHAS (for 91 months)
  • Catalyst IT Ltd (for 86 months)
  • Supagro (for 81 months)
  • Demarcq SAS (for 80 months)
  • Universit Grenoble Alpes (for 66 months)
  • TouchWeb SAS (for 58 months)
  • SPiN AG (for 55 months)
  • CoreFiling (for 51 months)
  • Institut des sciences cognitives Marc Jeannerod (for 46 months)
  • Observatoire des Sciences de l Univers de Grenoble (for 42 months)
  • Tem Innovations GmbH (for 37 months)
  • WordFinder.pro (for 36 months)
  • CNRS DT INSU R sif (for 35 months)
  • Alter Way (for 28 months)
  • Institut Camille Jordan (for 18 months)
  • SOBIS Software GmbH (for 3 months)

Debian Contributions: 2024-09 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.

Pydantic v2, by Colin Watson Pydantic is a useful library for validating data in Python using type hints: Freexian uses it in a number of projects, including Debusine. Its Debian packaging had been stalled at 1.10.17 in testing for some time, partly due to needing to make sure everything else could cope with the breaking changes introduced in 2.x, but mostly due to needing to sort out packaging of its new Rust dependencies. Several other people (notably Alexandre Detiste, Andreas Tille, Drew Parsons, and Timo R hling) had made some good progress on this, but nobody had quite got it over the line and it seemed a bit stuck. Colin upgraded a few Rust libraries to new upstream versions, packaged rust-jiter, and chased various failures in other packages. This eventually allowed getting current versions of both pydantic-core and pydantic into testing. It should now be much easier for us to stay up to date routinely.

Reworking of glib2.0 for cross bootstrap, by Helmut Grohne Simon McVittie (not affiliated with Freexian) earlier restructured the libglib2.0-dev such that it would absorb more functionality and in particular provide tools for working with .gir files. Those tools practically require being run for their host architecture (practically this means running under qemu-user) which is at odds with the requirements of architecture cross bootstrap. The qemu requirement was expressed in package dependencies and also made people unhappy attempting to use libglib2.0-dev for i386 on amd64 without resorting to qemu. The use of qemu in architecture bootstrap is particularly problematic as it tends to not be ready at the time bootstrapping is needed. As a result, Simon proposed and implemented the introduction of a libgio-2.0-dev package providing a subset of libglib2.0-dev that does not require qemu. Packages should continue to use libglib2.0-dev in their Build-Depends unless involved in architecture bootstrap. Helmut reviewed and tested the implementation and integrated the necessary changes into rebootstrap. He also prepared a patch for libverto to use the new package and proposed adding forward compatibility to glib2.0. Helmut continued working on adding cross-exe-wrapper to architecture-properties and implemented autopkgtests later improved by Simon. The cross-exe-wrapper package now provides a generic mechanism to a program on a different architecture by using qemu when needed only. For instance, a dependency on cross-exe-wrapper:i386 provides a i686-linux-gnu-cross-exe-wrapper program that can be used to wrap an ELF executable for the i386 architecture. When installed on amd64 or i386 it will skip installing or running qemu, but for other architectures qemu will be used automatically. This facility can be used to support cross building with targeted use of qemu in cases where running host code is unavoidable as is the case for GObject introspection. This concludes the joint work with Simon and Niels Thykier on glib2.0 and architecture-properties resolving known architecture bootstrap regressions arising from the glib2.0 refactoring earlier this year.

Analyzing binary package metadata, by Helmut Grohne As Guillem Jover (not affiliated with Freexian) continues to work on adding metadata tracking to dpkg, the question arises how this affects existing packages. The dedup.debian.net infrastructure provides an easy playground to answer such questions, so Helmut gathered file metadata from all binary packages in unstable and performed an explorative analysis. Some results include:

• binutils-mipsen uses wrong file ownership
• /usr-merge is not the only cause for aliasing problems in Debian.
  • mediawiki vs vistrails
  • bmake vs ros-mk
  • golang-github-eapache-go-resiliency-dev vs golang-gopkg-eapache-go-resiliency.v1-dev
  • node-markdown-it vs libjs-markdown-it
  • dokuwiki vs php-phpseclib
  • dokuwiki vs php-random-compat

Guillem also performed a cursory analysis and reported other problem categories such as mismatching directory permissions for directories installed by multiple packages and thus gained a better understanding of what consistency checks dpkg can enforce.

Python archive rebuilds, by Stefano Rivera Last month Stefano started to write some tooling to do large-scale rebuilds in debusine, starting with finding packages that had already started to fail to build from source (FTBFS) due to the removal of setup.py test. This month, Stefano did some more rebuilds, starting with experimental versions of dh-python. During the Python 3.12 transition, we had added a dependency on python3-setuptools to dh-python, to ease the transition. Python 3.12 removed distutils from the stdlib, but many packages were expecting it to still be available. Setuptools contains a version of distutils, and dh-python was a convenient place to depend on setuptools for most package builds. This dependency was never meant to be permanent. A rebuild without it resulted in mass-filing about 340 bugs (and around 80 more by mistake). A new feature in Python 3.12, was to have unittest s test runner exit with a non-zero return code, if no tests were run. We added this feature, to be able to detect tests that are not being discovered, by mistake. We are ignoring this failure, as we wouldn t want to suddenly cause hundreds of packages to fail to build, if they have no tests. Stefano did a rebuild to see how many packages were affected, and found that around 1000 were. The Debian Python community has not come to a conclusion on how to move forward with this. As soon as Python 3.13 release candidate 2 was available, Stefano did a rebuild of the Python packages in the archive against it. This was a more complex rebuild than the others, as it had to be done in stages. Many packages need other Python packages at build time, typically to run tests. So transitions like this involve some manual bootstrapping, followed by several rounds of builds. Not all packages could be tested, as not all their dependencies support 3.13 yet. The result was around 100 bugs in packages that need work to support Python 3.13. Many other packages will need additional work to properly support Python 3.13, but being able to build (and run tests) is an important first step.

Miscellaneous contributions

• Carles prepared the update of python-pyaarlo package to a new upstream release.
• Carles worked on updating python-ring-doorbell to a new upstream release. Unfinished, pending to package a new dependency python3-firebase-messaging RFP #1082958 and its dependency python3-http-ece RFP #1083020.
• Carles improved po-debconf-manager. Main new feature is that it can open Salsa merge requests. Aiming for a lightning talk in MiniDebConf Toulouse (November) to be functional end to end and get feedback from the wider public for this proof of concept.
• Carles helped one translator to use po-debconf-manager (added compatibility for bullseye, fixed other issues) and reviewed 17 package templates.
• Colin upgraded the OpenSSH packaging to 9.9p1.
• Colin upgraded the various YubiHSM packages to new upstream versions, enabled more tests, fixed yubihsm-shell build failures on some 32-bit architectures, made yubihsm-shell build reproducibly, and fixed yubihsm-connector to apply udev rules to existing devices when the package is installed. As usual, bookworm-backports is up to date with all these changes.
• Colin fixed quite a bit of fallout from setuptools 72.0.0 removing setup.py test, backported a large upstream patch set to make buildbot work with SQLAlchemy 2.0, and upgraded 25 other Python packages to new upstream versions.
• Enrico worked with Jakob Haufe to get him up to speed for managing sso.debian.org
• Rapha l did remove spam entries in the list of teams on tracker.debian.org (see #1080446), and he applied a few external contributions, fixing a rendering issue and replacing the DDPO link with a more useful alternative. He also gave feedback on a couple of merge requests that required more work. As part of the analysis of the underlying problem, he suggested to the ftpmasters (via #1083068) to auto-reject packages having the too-many-contacts lintian error, and he raised the severity of #1076048 to serious to actually have that 4 year old bug fixed.
• Rapha l uploaded zim and hamster-time-tracker to fix issues with Python 3.12 getting rid of setuptools. He also uploaded a new gnome-shell-extension-hamster to cope with the upcoming transition to GNOME 47.
• Helmut sent seven patches and sponsored one upload for cross build failures.
• Helmut uploaded a Nagios/Icinga plugin check-smart-attributes for monitoring the health of physical disks.
• Helmut collaborated on sbuild reviewing and improving a MR for refactoring the unshare backend.
• Helmut sent a patch fixing coinstallability of gcc-defaults.
• Helmut continued to monitor the evolution of the /usr-move. With more and more key packages such as libvirt or fuse3 fixed. We re moving into the boring long-tail of the transition.
• Helmut proposed updating the meson buildsystem in debhelper to use env2mfile.
• Helmut continued to update patches maintained in rebootstrap. Due to the work on glib2.0 above, rebootstrap moves a lot further, but still fails for any architecture.
• Santiago reviewed some Merge Request in Salsa CI, such as: !478, proposed by Otto to extend the information about how to use additional runners in the pipeline and !518, proposed by Ahmed to add support for Ubuntu images, that will help to test how some debian packages, including the complex MariaDB are built on Ubuntu. Santiago also prepared !545, which will make the reprotest job more consistent with the result seen on reproducible-builds.
• Santiago worked on different tasks related to DebConf 25. Especially he drafted the fundraising brochure (which is almost ready).
• Thorsten Alteholz uploaded package libcupsfilter to fix the autopkgtest and a dependency problem of this package. After package splix was abandoned by upstream and OpenPrinting.org adopted its maintenance, Thorsten uploaded their first release.
• Anupa published posts on the Debian Administrators group in LinkedIn and moderated the group, one of the tasks of the Debian Publicity Team.
• Anupa helped organize DebUtsav 2024. It had over 100 attendees with hand-on sessions on making initial contributions to Linux Kernel, Debian packaging, submitting documentation to Debian wiki and assisting Debian Installations.