TL;DR: Do not enable net.ipv4.tcp_tw_recycle. The Linux kernel documentation is not very helpful about what net.ipv4.tcp_tw_recycle does:

Enable fast recycling TIME-WAIT sockets. Default value is 0. It should not be changed without advice/request of technical experts.

Its sibling, net.ipv4.tcp_tw_reuse is a little bit more documented but the language is about the same:

Allow to reuse TIME-WAIT sockets for new connections when it is safe from protocol viewpoint. Default value is 0. It should not be changed without advice/request of technical experts.

The mere result of this lack of documentation is that we find numerous tuning guides advising to set both these settings to 1 to reduce the number of entries in the TIME-WAIT state. However, as stated by tcp(7) manual page, the net.ipv4.tcp_tw_recycle option is quite problematic for public-facing servers as it won t handle connections from two different computers behind the same NAT device, which is a problem hard to detect and waiting to bite you:

Enable fast recycling of TIME-WAIT sockets. Enabling this option is not recommended since this causes problems when working with NAT (Network Address Translation).

I will provide here a more detailed explanation in the hope to teach people who are wrong on the Internet. xkcd illustration

As a sidenote, despite the use of ipv4 in its name, the net.ipv4.tcp_tw_recycle control also applies to IPv6. Also, keep in mind we are looking at the TCP stack of Linux. This is completely unrelated to Netfilter connection tracking which may be tweaked in other ways¹.

About TIME-WAIT state Let s rewind a bit and have a close look at this TIME-WAIT state. What is it? See the TCP state diagram below²:

Only the end closing the connection first will reach the TIME-WAIT state. The other end will follow a path which usually permits to quickly get rid of the connection. You can have a look at the current state of connections with

ss
-tan

$ ss -tan   head -5
LISTEN     0  511             *:80              *:*     
SYN-RECV   0  0     192.0.2.145:80    203.0.113.5:35449
SYN-RECV   0  0     192.0.2.145:80   203.0.113.27:53599
ESTAB      0  0     192.0.2.145:80   203.0.113.27:33605
TIME-WAIT  0  0     192.0.2.145:80   203.0.113.47:50685

Purpose There are two purposes for the TIME-WAIT state:

The most known one is to prevent delayed segments from one connection being accepted by a later connection relying on the same quadruplet (source address, source port, destination address, destination port). The sequence number also needs to be in a certain range to be accepted. This narrows a bit the problem but it still exists, especially on fast connections with large receive windows. RFC 1337 explains in details what happens when the TIME-WAIT state is deficient³. Here is an example of what could be avoided if the TIME-WAIT state wasn t shortened:

Duplicate segments accepted in another connection

The other purpose is to ensure the remote end has closed the connection. When the last ACK is lost, the remote end stays in the LAST-ACK state⁴. Without the TIME-WAIT state, a connection could be reopened while the remote end still thinks the previous connection is valid. When it receives a SYN segment (and the sequence number matches), it will answer with a RST as it is not expecting such a segment. The new connection will be aborted with an error:

RFC 793 requires the TIME-WAIT state to last twice the time of the MSL. On Linux, this duration is not tunable and is defined in include/net/tcp.h as one minute:

#define TCP_TIMEWAIT_LEN (60*HZ) /* how long to wait to destroy TIME-WAIT
                                  * state, about 60 seconds     */

There have been propositions to turn this into a tunable value but it has been refused on the ground the TIME-WAIT state is a good thing.

Problems Now, let s see why this state can be annoying on a server handling a lot of connections. There are three aspects of the problem:

the slot taken in the connection table preventing new connections of the same kind,

the memory occupied by the socket structure in the kernel, and

the additional CPU usage.

The result of `ss -tan state time-wait wc -l` is not a problem per se!

Connection table slot A connection in the TIME-WAIT state is kept for one minute in the connection table. This means, another connection with the same quadruplet (source address, source port, destination address, destination port) cannot exist. For a web server, the destination address and the destination port are likely to be constant. If your web server is behind a L7 load-balancer, the source address will also be constant. On Linux, the client port is by default allocated in a port range of about 30,000 ports (this can be changed by tuning net.ipv4.ip_local_port_range). This means that only 30,000 connections can be established between the web server and the load-balancer every minute, so about 500 connections per second. If the TIME-WAIT sockets are on the client side, such a situation is easy to detect. The call to connect() will return EADDRNOTAVAIL and the application will log some error message about that. On the server side, this is more complex as there is no log and no counter to rely on. In doubt, you should just try to come with something sensible to list the number of used quadruplets:

$ ss -tan 'sport = :80'   awk ' print $(NF)" "$(NF-1) '   \
>     sed 's/:[^ ]*//g'   sort   uniq -c
    696 10.24.2.30 10.33.1.64
   1881 10.24.2.30 10.33.1.65
   5314 10.24.2.30 10.33.1.66
   5293 10.24.2.30 10.33.1.67
   3387 10.24.2.30 10.33.1.68
   2663 10.24.2.30 10.33.1.69
   1129 10.24.2.30 10.33.1.70
  10536 10.24.2.30 10.33.1.73

The solution is more quadruplets⁵. This can be done in several ways (in the order of difficulty to setup):

use more client ports by setting net.ipv4.ip_local_port_range to a wider range,
use more server ports by asking the web server to listen to several additional ports (81, 82, 83, ),
use more client IP by configuring additional IP on the load balancer and use them in a round-robin fashion,
use more server IP by configuring additional IP on the web server⁶.

Of course, a last solution is to tweak net.ipv4.tcp_tw_reuse and net.ipv4.tcp_tw_recycle. Don t do that yet, we will cover those settings later.

Memory With many connections to handle, leaving a socket open for one additional minute may cost your server some memory. For example, if you want to handle about 10,000 new connections per second, you will have about 600,000 sockets in the TIME-WAIT state. How much memory does it represent? Not that much! First, from the application point of view, a TIME-WAIT socket does not consume any memory: the socket has been closed. In the kernel, a TIME-WAIT socket is present in three structures (for three different purposes):

A hash table of connections, named the TCP established hash table (despite containing connections in other states) is used to locate an existing connection, for example when receiving a new segment. Each bucket of this hash table contains both a list of connections in the TIME-WAIT state and a list of regular active connections. The size of the hash table depends on the system memory and is printed at boot:

$ dmesg   grep "TCP established hash table"
[    0.169348] TCP established hash table entries: 65536 (order: 8, 1048576 bytes)

It is possible to override it by specifying the number of entries on the kernel command line with the thash_entries parameter. Each element of the list of connections in the TIME-WAIT state is a struct tcp_timewait_sock, while the type for other states is struct tcp_sock⁷:

struct tcp_timewait_sock  
    struct inet_timewait_sock tw_sk;
    u32    tw_rcv_nxt;
    u32    tw_snd_nxt;
    u32    tw_rcv_wnd;
    u32    tw_ts_offset;
    u32    tw_ts_recent;
    long   tw_ts_recent_stamp;
 ;
struct inet_timewait_sock  
    struct sock_common  __tw_common;
    int                     tw_timeout;
    volatile unsigned char  tw_substate;
    unsigned char           tw_rcv_wscale;
    __be16 tw_sport;
    unsigned int tw_ipv6only     : 1,
                 tw_transparent  : 1,
                 tw_pad          : 6,
                 tw_tos          : 8,
                 tw_ipv6_offset  : 16;
    unsigned long            tw_ttd;
    struct inet_bind_bucket *tw_tb;
    struct hlist_node        tw_death_node;
 ;

A set of lists of connections, called the death row , is used to expire the connections in the TIME-WAIT state. They are ordered by how much time left before expiration. It uses the same memory space as for the entries in the hash table of connections. This is the struct hlist_node tw_death_node member of struct inet_timewait_sock.
A hash table of bound ports, holding the locally bound ports and the associated parameters, is used to determine if it is safe to listen to a given port or to find a free port in the case of dynamic bind. The size of this hash table is the same as the size of the hash table of connections:
```
$ dmesg   grep "TCP bind hash table"
[    0.169962] TCP bind hash table entries: 65536 (order: 8, 1048576 bytes)
```
Each element is a struct inet_bind_socket. There is one element for each locally bound port. A TIME-WAIT connection to a web server is locally bound to the port 80 and shares the same entry as its sibling TIME-WAIT connections. On the other hand, a connection to a remote service is locally bound to some random port and does not share its entry.

So, we are only concerned by the space occupied by

struct
tcp_timewait_sock

and struct inet_bind_socket. There is one

struct
tcp_timewait_sock

for each connection in the TIME-WAIT state, inbound or outbound. There is one dedicated struct inet_bind_socket for each outbound connection and none for an inbound connection. A struct tcp_timewait_sock is only 168 bytes while a

struct
inet_bind_socket

is 48 bytes:

$ sudo apt-get install linux-image-$(uname -r)-dbg
[...]
$ gdb /usr/lib/debug/boot/vmlinux-$(uname -r)
(gdb) print sizeof(struct tcp_timewait_sock)
 $1 = 168
(gdb) print sizeof(struct tcp_sock)
 $2 = 1776
(gdb) print sizeof(struct inet_bind_bucket)
 $3 = 48

So, if you have about 40,000 inbound connections in the TIME-WAIT state, it should eat less than 10MB of memory. If you have about 40,000 outbound connections in the TIME-WAIT state, you need to account for 2.5MB of additional memory. Let s check that by looking at the output of slabtop. Here is the result on a server with about 50,000 connections in the TIME-WAIT state, 45,000 of which are outbound connections:

$ sudo slabtop -o   grep -E '(^  OBJS tw_sock_TCP tcp_bind_bucket)'
  OBJS ACTIVE  USE OBJ SIZE  SLABS OBJ/SLAB CACHE SIZE NAME                   
 50955  49725  97%    0.25K   3397       15     13588K tw_sock_TCP            
 44840  36556  81%    0.06K    760       59      3040K tcp_bind_bucket

There is nothing to change here: the memory used by TIME-WAIT connections is really small. If your server need to handle thousands of new connections per second, you need far more memory to be able to efficiently push data to clients. The overhead of TIME-WAIT connections is negligible.

CPU On the CPU side, searching for a free local port can be a bit expensive. The work is done by the `inet_csk_get_port()` function which uses a lock and iterate on locally bound ports until a free port is found. A large number of entries in this hash table is usually not a problem if you have a lot of outbound connections in the `TIME-WAIT` state (like ephemeral connections to a memcached server): the connections usually share the same profile, the function will quickly find a free port as it iterates on them sequentially.

Summary The universal solution is to increase the number of possible quadruplets by using, for example, more server ports. This will allow you to not exhaust the possible connections with `TIME-WAIT` entries. On the server side, do not enable `net.ipv4.tcp_tw_recycle` unless you are pretty sure you will never have NAT devices in the mix. Enabling `net.ipv4.tcp_tw_reuse` is useless for incoming connections. On the client side, enabling `net.ipv4.tcp_tw_reuse` is another almost-safe solution. Enabling `net.ipv4.tcp_tw_recycle` in addition to `net.ipv4.tcp_tw_reuse` is mostly useless. And a final quote by W. Richard Stevens, in Unix Network Programming:
The `TIME_WAIT` state is our friend and is there to help us (i.e., to let old duplicate segments expire in the network). Instead of trying to avoid the state, we should understand it.

Notably, fiddling with `net.netfilter.nf_conntrack_tcp_timeout_time_wait` won t change anything on how the TCP stack will handle the `TIME-WAIT` state.

This diagram is licensed under the LaTeX Project Public License 1.3. The original file is available on this page.

The first work-around proposed in RFC 1337 is to ignore RST segments in the `TIME-WAIT` state. This behaviour is controlled by `net.ipv4.rfc1337` which is not enabled by default on Linux because this is not a complete solution to the problem described in the RFC.

While in the `LAST-ACK` state, a connection will retransmit the last FIN segment until it gets the expected ACK segment. Therfore, it is unlikely we stay long in this state.

On the client side, older kernels also have to find a free local tuple (source address and source port) for each outgoing connection. Increasing the number of server ports or IP won t help in this case. Linux 3.2 is recent enough to be able to share the same local tuple for different destinations. Thanks to Willy Tarreau for his insight on this aspect.

This last solution may seem a bit dumb since you could just use more ports but some servers are not able to be configured this way. The before last solution can also be quite cumbersome to setup, depending on the load-balancing software, but uses less IP than the last solution.

The use of a dedicated memory structure for sockets in the `TIME-WAIT` is here since Linux 2.6.14. The `struct sock_common` structure is a bit more verbose and I won t copy it here.

When the server closes the connection first, it gets the `TIME-WAIT` state while the client will consider the corresponding quadruplet free and hence may reuse it for a new connection.

One problem I have had with my new Dell PowerEdge server/workstation [1] is that sound doesn t work correctly. When I initially installed it things were OK but after installing a new monitor sound stopped working. The command aplay -l showed the following:
**** List of PLAYBACK Hardware Devices ****
card 0: Generic [HD-Audio Generic], device 3: HDMI 0 [HDMI 0]
Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 1: Speaker [Logitech USB Speaker], device 0: USB Audio [USB Audio]
Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0 So the HDMI sound hardware (which had no speakers connected) became ALSA card 0 (default playback) and the USB speakers became card 1. It should be possible to convert KDE to use card 1 and then have other programs inherit this, but I wasn t able to configure that with Debian/Wheezy. My first attempt at solving this was to blacklist the HDMI and motherboard drivers (as suggested by Lindsay on the LUV mailing list). I added the following to /etc/modprobe.d/hdmi-blacklist.conf:
blacklist snd_hda_codec_hdmi
blacklist snd_hda_intel Blacklisting the drivers works well enough. But the problem is that I will eventually want to install HDMI speakers to get better quality than the old Logitech portable USB speakers and it would be convenient to have things just work. Jason white suggested using the module options to specify the ALSA card order. The file /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf in Debian comes with an entry specifying that the USB driver is never to be card 0, which is exactly what I don t want. So I commented out the previous option for snd-usb-audio and put in the following ones to replace it:
# make USB 0 and HDMI/Intel anything else
options snd-usb-audio index=0
options snd_hda_codec_hdmi=-2
options snd_hda_intel=-2 Now I get the following from aplay -l and both KDE and mplayer will play to the desired card by default:
**** List of PLAYBACK Hardware Devices ****
card 0: Speaker [Logitech USB Speaker], device 0: USB Audio [USB Audio]
Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 1: Generic [HD-Audio Generic], device 3: HDMI 0 [HDMI 0]
Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0

[1] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2013/12/15/poweredge-t110/

This post is about the port bootstrap build ordering tool (naming suggestions welcome) which was started as a Debian Google Summer of Code project in 2012 and continued to be developed afterwards. Sources are available through gitorious. In the end of November 2012, I managed to put down an approximation algorithm to the feedback arc set problem which allowed to break the dependency graph into a directed acyclic graph with only few removed build dependencies. I wrote about this effort on our mailinglist but didnt mention it here because it was still too much of a proof-of-concept. Later, in January 2013, I mentioned the result of this algorithm in an email wookey and me wrote to debian-devel mailinglist. Many things happened since November 2012:

Processing pipeline instead of monolithic tools The tools I developed so far tried to accomplish everything by themselves, reusing functionality implemented in a central library. Therefor, if one wanted to try out even trivial new things, it mostly meant to hack some OCaml code. Pietro Abate suggested to instead develop smaller tools which could work independently of each other, would only execute one algorithm each and could easily be connected together in different ways to achieve different effects. This switch is now done and all functionality from the old tools is moved into a new toolset. The exchange format between the tools is either plain text files in deb822 control format (Packages/Sources files) or a dependency graph. The dependency graph is currently marshalled by OCaml but future versions should work with just passing a GraphML (an XML graph format) representation around. This new way of doing things seems close to the UNIX philosophy (each program does one thing well, data is stored as text, every program is a filter). For example the deb822 control output can easily be manipulated using `grep-dctrl(1)` and there exist many tools which can read, analyze and manipulate GraphML. It is a big improvement over the old, monolithic tools which did not allow to manipulate any intermediate result by external, existing tools. Currently, a shell script (`native.sh`) will execute all tools in a meaningful order, connecting them together correctly. The same tools will be used for a future `cross.sh` but they will be connected differently. I wrote about a first proposal of what the individual tools should do and how they should be connected in this email from which I also linked a confusing overview of the pipeline. This overview has recently been improved to be even more confusing and the current version of the lower half (the native part) now looks like this: Solid arrows represent a flow of binary packages, dottend arrows represent a flow of source packages, ovals represent a set of packages, boxes with rounded corners represent set operations, rectangular boxes represent filters. There is only one input to a filter, which is the arrow connected to the top of the box. Outgoing arrows from the bottom represent the filtered input. Ingoing arrows to either side are arguments to the filter and control how the filter behaves depending on the algorithm. I will explain this better once the pipeline proved to be less in flux. The pipeline is currently executed like this by `native.sh`.

Two new ways to break dependency cycles have been discovered So far, we knew of three ways to formally break dependency cycles:

remove build dependencies through build profiles

find out that the build dependency is only used to build arch:all packages and therefor put it into Build-Depends-Indep

cross compile some source packages

Two new methods can be added to the above:

if a dependency relationship is not strong (pdf), then a different installationset can be chosen

if a depended upon package is Multi-Arch:foreign then a binary package of an existing architecture might be able to satisfy the dependency.

Dependency graph definition changed Back in September when I was visiting irill, Pietro found a flaw in how the dependency graph used to be generated. He supplied a new definition of the dependency graph which does away with the problem he found. After fixing some small issues with his code, I changed all the existing algorithms to use the new graph definition. The old graph is as of today removed from the repository. Thanks to Pietro for supplying the new graph definition - I must still admit that my OCaml foo is not strong enough to have come up with his code.

Added complexity for profile built source packages As mentioned in the introduction, wookey and me addressed the debian-devel list with a proposal on necessary changes for an automated bootstrapping of Debian. During the discussiong, two important things came up which are to be considered by the dependency graph algorithms:

profile built source packages may not create all binary packages

profile built source packages may need additional build dependencies

Both things make it necessary to alter the dependency graph during the generation of a feedback arc set and feedback vertex set beyond the simple removal of edges. Luckily, the developed approximation algorithms can be extended to support such changes in the graph.

Different feedback arc set algorithms The initially developed feedback arc set algorithm is well suited to discover build dependency edges which should be dropped. It performs far worse when creating the final build order because it only considers edges by itself and not how many edges of a source package can be dropped by profile building it. The adjusted algorithm for generating a build order is more of a feedback vertex set algorithm because instead of greedily finding the edge with most cycles through it, it greedily finds the source package which would break most cycles if it was profile built.

Generating a build order with less profile built source packages After implementing all the features above I now feel more confident to publish the current status of the tools to a wider audience. The following test shows a run of the aforementioned `./native.sh` shell script. Its final output is a list of source packages which have to be profile built and a build order. Using the resulting build order, starting from a minimal build system (essential:yes, build-essential and debhelper), all source packages will be compiled which are needed to compile all binary packages in the system. The result will therefor be a list of source and binary packages which fulfill the following property:

all binary packages can be built from the available source packages

all source packages can be built with the available binary packages

I called this a "reduceded distribution" in earlier posts. The interesting property of this specific selection is, that it contains the biggest problem set of Debian when bootstrapping it: a 900 to 1000 nodes big strongly connected component. Here is a visualization of the problem: Source packages do not yet come with build profiles and the cross build situation can not yet be analyzed, so the following assumptions were made:

the minimal build system can be cross compiled from nothing

the reduced build dependencies harvested from Gentoo and supplied by Daniel Schepler, Patrick McDermott, Thorsten Glaser and Wookey are correct

the current list of weak build dependencies can be dropped from any source package

even when profile built, all source packages build all binary packages

the 14 forcefully broken build dependencies do not significantly change the output in real life

The last point is about 14 build dependencies which were decided to be broken by the feedback arc set algorithm but for which other data sources did not indicate that they are actually breakable. Those 14 are dynamically generated by `native.sh`. If above assumptions should not be too far from the actual situation, then not more than 73 source packages have to be modified to bootstrap a reduced distribution. This reduced distribution even includes dependency-wise "big" packages like webkit, metacity, iceweasel, network-manager, tracker, gnome-panel, evolution-data-server, kde-runtime, libav and nautilus. By changing one line in `native.sh` one could easily develop a build order which generates gnome-desktop or really any given (meta-)package selection. All of `native.sh` takes only 80 seconds to execute on my system (Core i5, 2.5 GHz, singlethreaded). Here is the final build order which creates 2044 binary packages from 613 source packages.

nspr, libio-pty-perl, libmcrypt, unzip, libdbi-perl, cdparanoia, libelf, c-ares, liblocale-gettext-perl, libibverbs, numactl, ilmbase, tbb, check, libogg, libatomic-ops, libnl($), orc($), libaio, tcl8.4, kmod, libgsm, lame, opencore-amr, tcl8.5, exuberant-ctags, mhash, libtext-iconv-perl, libutempter, pciutils, gperf, hspell, recode, tcp-wrappers, fdupes, chrpath, libbsd, zip, procps, wireless-tools, cpufrequtils, ed, libjpeg8, hesiod, pax, less, dietlibc, netkit-telnet, psmisc, docbook-to-man, libhtml-parser-perl, libonig, opensp($), libterm-size-perl, linux86, libxmltok, db-defaults, java-common, sharutils, libgpg-error, hardening-wrapper, cvsps, p11-kit, libyaml, diffstat, m4

openexr, enca, help2man, speex, libvorbis, libid3tag, patch, openjade1.3, openjade, expat, fakeroot, libgcrypt11($), ustr, sysvinit, netcat, libirman, html2text, libmad, pth, clucene-core, libdaemon($), texinfo, popt, net-tools, tar, libsigsegv, gmp, patchutils($), dirac, cunit, bridge-utils, expect, libgc, nettle, elfutils, jade, bison

sed, indent, findutils, fastjar, cpio, chicken, bzip2, aspell, realpath, dctrl-tools, rsync, ctdb, pkg-config($), libarchive, gpgme1.0, exempi, pump, re2c, klibc, gzip, gawk, flex-old, original-awk, mawk, libtasn1-3($), flex($), libtool

libcap2, mksh, readline6, libcdio, libpipeline, libcroco, schroedinger, desktop-file-utils, eina, fribidi, libusb, binfmt-support, silgraphite2.0, atk1.0($), perl, gnutls26($), netcat-openbsd, ossp-uuid, gsl, libnfnetlink, sg3-utils, jbigkit, lua5.1, unixodbc, sqlite, wayland, radvd, open-iscsi, libpcap, linux-atm, gdbm, id3lib3.8.3, vo-aacenc, vo-amrwbenc, fam, faad2, hunspell, dpkg, tslib, libart-lgpl, libidl, dh-exec, giflib, openslp-dfsg, ppl($), xutils-dev, blcr, bc, time, libdatrie, libpthread-stubs, guile-1.8, libev, attr, libsigc++-2.0, pixman, libpng, libssh2, sqlite3, acpica-unix, acl, a52dec

json-c, cloog-ppl, libverto, glibmm2.4, rtmpdump, libdbd-sqlite3-perl, nss, freetds, slang2, libpciaccess, iptables, e2fsprogs, libnetfilter-conntrack, bash, libthai, python2.6($), libice($), libpaper, libfontenc($), libxau, libxdmcp($), openldap($), cyrus-sasl2($), openssl, python2.7($)

psutils, libevent, stunnel4, libnet-ssleay-perl, libffi, readline5, file, libvoikko, gamin, libieee1284, build-essential, libcap-ng($), lcms($), keyutils, libxml2, libxml++2.6, gcc-4.6($), binutils, dbus($), libsm($), libxslt, doxygen($)

liblqr, rarian, xmlto, policykit-1($), libxml-parser-perl, tdb, devscripts, eet, libasyncns, libusbx, icu, linux, libmng, shadow, xmlstarlet, tidy, gavl, flac, dbus-glib($), libxcb, apr, krb5, alsa-lib

usbutils, enchant, neon27, uw-imap, libsndfile, yasm, xcb-util, gconf($), shared-mime-info($), audiofile, ijs($), jbig2dec, libx11($)

esound, freetype, libxkbfile, xvidcore, xcb-util-image, udev($), libxfixes, libxext($), libxt, libxrender

tk8.4, startup-notification, libatasmart, fontconfig, libxp, libdmx, libvdpau, libdrm, libxres, directfb, libxv, libxxf86dga, libxxf86vm, pcsc-lite, libxss, libxcomposite, libxcursor, libxdamage, libxi($), libxinerama, libxrandr, libxmu($), libxpm, libxfont($)

xfonts-utils, libxvmc, xauth, libxtst($), libxaw($)

pmake, corosync, x11-xserver-utils, x11-xkb-utils, coreutils, xft, nas, cairo

libedit, cairomm, tk8.5, openais, pango1.0($)

ocaml, blt, ruby1.8, firebird2.5, heimdal, lvm2($)

cvs($), python-stdlib-extensions, parted, llvm-2.9, ruby1.9.1, findlib, qt4-x11($)

xen, mesa, audit($), avahi($)

x11-utils, xorg-server, freeglut, libva

jasper, tiff3, python3.2($)

openjpeg, qt-assistant-compat, v4l-utils, qca2, jinja2, markupsafe, lcms2, sip4, imlib2, netpbm-free, cracklib2, cups($), postgresql-9.1

py3cairo, pycairo, pam, libgnomecups, gobject-introspection($)

gdk-pixbuf, libgnomeprint, gnome-menus, gsettings-desktop-schemas, pangomm, consolekit, vala-0.16($), colord($), atkmm1.6

libgee, gtk+3.0($), gtk+2.0($)

gtkmm2.4, poppler($), openssh, libglade2, libiodbc2, gcr($), libwmf, systemd($), gcj-4.7, java-atk-wrapper($)

torque, ecj($), vala-0.14, gnome-keyring($), gcc-defaults, gnome-vfs($)

libidn, libgnome-keyring($), openmpi

mpi-defaults, dnsmasq, wget, lynx-cur, ghostscript, curl

fftw3, gnupg, libquvi, xmlrpc-c, raptor, liboauth, groff, fftw, boost1.49, apt

boost-defaults, libsamplerate, cmake, python-apt

qjson, qtzeitgeist, libssh, qimageblitz, pkg-kde-tools, libical, dwarves-dfsg, automoc, attica, yajl, source-highlight, pygobject, pygobject-2, mysql-5.5($)

libdbd-mysql-perl, polkit-qt-1, libdbusmenu-qt, raptor2, dbus-python, apr-util

rasqal, serf, subversion($), apache2

git, redland

xz-utils, util-linux, rpm, man-db, make-dfsg, libvisual, cryptsetup, libgd2, gstreamer0.10

mscgen, texlive-bin

dvipng, luatex

libconfig, transfig, augeas, blas, libcaca, autogen, libdbi, linuxdoc-tools, gdb, gpm

ncurses, python-numpy($), rrdtool, w3m, iproute, gcc-4.7, libtheora($), gcc-4.4

libraw1394, base-passwd, lm-sensors, netcf, eglibc, gst-plugins-base0.10

libiec61883, qtwebkit, libvirt, libdc1394-22, net-snmp, jack-audio-connection-kit($), bluez

redhat-cluster, gvfs($), pulseaudio($)

phonon, libsdl1.2, openjdk-6($)

phonon-backend-gstreamer($), gettext, libbluray, db, swi-prolog, qdbm, swig2.0($)

highlight, libselinux, talloc, libhdate, libftdi, libplist, python-qt4, libprelude, libsemanage, php5

samba, usbmuxd, libvpx, lirc, bsdmainutils, libiptcdata, libgtop2, libgsf, telepathy-glib, libwnck3, libnotify, libunique3, gnome-desktop3, gmime, glib2.0, json-glib, libgnomecanvas, libcanberra, orbit2, udisks, d-conf, libgusb

libgnomeprintui, libimobiledevice, nautilus($), libbonobo, librsvg

evas, wxwidgets2.8, upower, gnome-disk-utility, libgnome

ecore, libbonoboui

libgnomeui

graphviz

exiv2, libexif, lapack, soprano, libnl3, dbus-c++

atlas, libffado, graphicsmagick, libgphoto2, network-manager

pygtk, jackd2, sane-backends, djvulibre

libav($), gpac($), ntrack, python-imaging, imagemagick, dia

x264($), matplotlib, iceweasel

strigi, opencv, libproxy($), ffms2

kde4libs, frei0r, glib-networking

kde-baseapps, kate, libsoup2.4

geoclue, kde-runtime, totem-pl-parser, libgweather, librest, libgdata

webkit

zenity, gnome-online-accounts

metacity, evolution-data-server

gnome-panel

tracker

The final recompilation of profile built source packages is omitted. Source packages marked with a ($) are selected to be profile built. All source packages listed in the same line can be built in parallel as they do not depend upon each other. This order looks convincing as it first compiles a multitude of source packages which have no or only few build dependencies lacking. Later steps allow fewer source packages to be compiled in parallel. The amount of needed build dependencies is highest in the source packages that are built last.

DRBD is a system for replicating a block device across multiple systems. It s most commonly used for having one system write to the DRBD block device such that all writes are written to a local disk and a remote disk. In the default configuration a write is not complete until it s committed to disk locally and remotely. There is support for having multiple systems write to disk at the same time, but naturally that only works if the filesystem drivers are aware of this. I m installing DRBD on some Debian/Squeeze servers for the purpose of mirroring a mail store across multiple systems. For the virtual machines which run mail queues I m not using DRBD because the failure conditions that I m planning for don t include two disks entirely failing. I m planning for a system having an outage for a while so it s OK to have some inbound and outbound mail delayed but it s not OK for the mail store to be unavailable. Global changes I ve made in /etc/drbd.d/global_common.conf In the common section I changed the protocol from C to B , this means that a write() system call returns after data is committed locally and sent to the other node. This means that if the primary node goes permanently offline AND if the secondary node has a transient power failure or kernel crash causing the buffer contents to be lost then writes can be lost. I don t think that this scenario is likely enough to make it worth choosing protocol C and requiring that all writes go to disk on both nodes before they are considered to be complete. In the net section I added the following: sndbuf-size 512k;
data-integrity-alg sha1; This uses a larger network sending buffer (apparently good for fast local networks although I d have expected that the low delay on a local Gig-E would give a low bandwidth delay product) and to use sha1 hashes on all packets (why does it default to no data integrity). Reserved Numbers The default port number that is used is 7789. I think it s best to use ports below 1024 for system services so I ve setup some systems starting with port 100 and going up from there. I use a different port for every DRBD instance, so if I have two clustered resources on a LAN then I ll use different ports even if they aren t configured to ever run on the same system. You never know when the cluster assignment will change and DRBD port numbers seems like something that could potentially cause real problems if there was a port conflict. Most of the documentation assumes that the DRBD device nodes on a system will start at /dev/drbd0 and increment, but this is not a requirement. I am configuring things such that there will only ever be one /dev/drbd0 on a network. This means that there is no possibility of a cut/paste error in a /etc/fstab file or a Xen configuration file causing data loss. As an aside I recently discovered that a Xen Dom0 can do a read-write mount of a block device that is being used read-write by a Xen DomU, there is some degree of protection against a DomU using a block device that is already being used in the Dom0 but no protection against the Dom0 messing with the DomU s resources. It would be nice if there was an option of using some device name other than /dev/drbdX where X is a number. Using meaningful names would reduce the incidence of doing things to the wrong device. As an aside it would be nice if there was some sort of mount helper for determining which devices shouldn t be mounted locally and which mount options are permitted it MIGHT be OK to do a read-only mount of a DomU s filesystem in the Dom0 but probably all mounting should be prevented. Also a mount helper for such things would ideally be able to change the default mount options, for example it could make the defaults be nosuid,nodev (or even noexec,nodev) when mounting filesystems from removable devices. Initial Synchronisation After a few trials it seems to me that things generally work if you create DRBD on two nodes at the same time and then immediately make one of them primary. If you don t then it will probably refuse to accept one copy of the data as primary as it can t seem to realise that both are inconsistent. I can t understand why it does this in the case where there are two nodes with inconsistent data, you know for sure that there is no good data so there should be an operation to zero both devices and make them equal. Instead there The solution sometimes seems to be to run drbdsetup /dev/drbd0 primary - (where drbd0 is replaced with the appropriate device). This seems to work well and allowed me to create a DRBD installation before I had installed the second server. If the servers have been connected in Inconsistent/Inconsistent state then the solution seems to involve running drbdadm -- --overwrite-data-of-peer primary db0-mysql (for the case of a resource named db0-mysql defined in /etc/drbd.d/db0-mysql.res). Also it seems that some commands can only be run from one node. So if you have a primary node that s in service and another node in Secondary/Unknown state (IE disconnected) with data state Inconsistent/DUnknown then while you would expect to be able to connect from the secondary node is appears that nothing other than a drbdadm connect command run from the primary node will get things going.

All started in December last year. I saw a red and a green pixel on my monitor. Moving the window containing the wrong-colors pixels corrected them. The wrong-colored pixels reappear from time to time in increased quantity. Then a second symptom appeared: The screen went black and came back one second later. This was triggered by moving a window and scrolling. I wasn t sure what the reason was. Either it was a bug somewhere in the X stack or some hardware was dying. dmesg showed multiple problems with the radeon driver:

[283808.667454] radeon 0000:01:00.0: ffff88021f815c00 unpin not necessary
[283808.667820] radeon 0000:01:00.0: GPU softreset
[283808.667823] radeon 0000:01:00.0: R_008010_GRBM_STATUS=0xE57024A4
[283808.667825] radeon 0000:01:00.0: R_008014_GRBM_STATUS2=0 00330302
[283808.667826] radeon 0000:01:00.0: R_000E50_SRBM_STATUS=0x200000C0
[283808.667832] radeon 0000:01:00.0: R_008020_GRBM_SOFT_RESET=0x00007FEE
[283808.682844] radeon 0000:01:00.0: R_008020_GRBM_SOFT_RESET=0 00000001
[283808.698840] radeon 0000:01:00.0: R_008010_GRBM_STATUS=0 00003028
[283808.698843] radeon 0000:01:00.0: R_008014_GRBM_STATUS2=0 00000002
[283808.698845] radeon 0000:01:00.0: R_000E50_SRBM_STATUS=0x200000C0
[283808.699845] radeon 0000:01:00.0: GPU reset succeed
[283808.717570] [drm] Clocks initialized !
[283808.765829] [drm] ring test succeeded in 0 usecs
[283808.765838] [drm] ib test succeeded in 1 usecs
[283808.765840] [drm] Enabling audio support
[283812.521265] radeon 0000:01:00.0: GPU lockup CP stall for more than 1000msec
[283812.521269] [ cut here ]
[283812.521294] WARNING: at /build/buildd/linux-2.6.35/drivers/gpu/drm/radeon/radeon_fence.c:235 radeon_fence_wait+0 365/0x3d0 [radeon]()
[283812.521297] Hardware name:
[283812.521299] GPU lockup (waiting for 0x00AE670A last fence id 0x00AE6705)
[283812.521301] Modules linked in: btrfs zlib_deflate crc32c libcrc32c ufs qnx4 hfsplus hfs minix ntfs vfat msdos fat jfs xfs exportfs reiserfs nls_utf8 udf ip6table_filter ip6_tables binfmt_misc ipt_MASQUERADE iptable_nat nf_nat nf_conntrack_ipv4 nf_defrag_ipv4 xt_state nf_conntrack ipt_REJECT xt_tcpudp iptable_filter ip_tables x_tables bridge stp kvm_intel kvm parport_pc ppdev snd_emu10k1_synth snd_emux_synth snd_seq_virmidi snd_seq_midi_emul snd_emu10k1 snd_ac97_codec ac97_bus snd_pcm snd_page_alloc snd_util_mem snd_hwdep snd_seq_midi radeon snd_rawmidi snd_seq_midi_event snd_seq snd_timer snd_seq_device ttm snd pl2303 drm_kms_helper coretemp usbserial joydev psmouse soundcore drm serio_raw intel_agp i2c_algo_bit lp parport hid_cherry usbhid hid firewire_ohci firewire_core usb_storage crc_itu_t e1000e ahci libahci pata_marvell
[283812.521360] Pid: 2194, comm: compiz Tainted: G W 2.6.35-24-generic #42-Ubuntu
[283812.521362] Call Trace:
[283812.521370] [<ffffffff8106089f>] warn_slowpath_common+0x7f/0xc0
[283812.521374] [<ffffffff81060996>] warn_slowpath_fmt+0 46/0 50
[283812.521390] [<ffffffffa01bd775>] radeon_fence_wait+0 365/0x3d0 [radeon]
[283812.521394] [<ffffffff8107f730>] ? autoremove_wake_function+0 0/0 40
[283812.521410] [<ffffffffa01bdf71>] radeon_sync_obj_wait+0 11/0 20 [radeon]
[283812.521418] [<ffffffffa01751a3>] ttm_bo_wait+0 103/0x1c0 [ttm]
[283812.521435] [<ffffffffa01d4e1a>] radeon_gem_wait_idle_ioctl+0x9a/0 150 [radeon]
[283812.521447] [<ffffffffa010f433>] drm_ioctl+0 463/0 520 [drm]
[283812.521465] [<ffffffffa01d4d80>] ? radeon_gem_wait_idle_ioctl+0 0/0 150 [radeon]
[283812.521470] [<ffffffff81162f0d>] vfs_ioctl+0x3d/0xd0
[283812.521473] [<ffffffff811637e1>] do_vfs_ioctl+0 81/0 340
[283812.521477] [<ffffffff811535f1>] ? vfs_read+0 181/0x1a0
[283812.521480] [<ffffffff81163b21>] sys_ioctl+0 81/0xa0
[283812.521484] [<ffffffff8100a0f2>] system_call_fastpath+0 16/0x1b
[283812.521487] [ end trace 6d5e03bab743abfa ]
[283812.521493] [drm] Disabling audio support
[283812.525575] [drm:radeon_ib_schedule] *ERROR* radeon: couldn t schedule IB(10).
[283812.525579] [drm:radeon_cs_ioctl] *ERROR* Faild to schedule IB !
[283812.527021] [drm:radeon_ib_schedule] *ERROR* radeon: couldn t schedule IB(11).
[283812.527024] [drm:radeon_cs_ioctl] *ERROR* Faild to schedule IB !
[283812.527921] [drm:radeon_ib_schedule] *ERROR* radeon: couldn t schedule IB(12).
[283812.527923] [drm:radeon_cs_ioctl] *ERROR* Faild to schedule IB !

The time between going black reduces every time. The system wasn t usable any more in the end. After testing that the screen was going blank on other systems like a live CD of Ubuntu and a not noteworthy proprietary system, it was clear that some hardware component was dying. My first assumption was verified after replacing it: My graphic card, a Radeon HD 4670, died. This was three weeks ago and around 25 month after I bought the graphics card. So I didn t have to worry if replacing the fan voided the guarantee, because the guarantee lasts only 24 month. Conclusion:

Not every error is a software bug.
The hardware component with the highest failure rate is the graphics card, followed by the motherboard. Four graphics cards died last year (in four different systems owned by four different people, in three different households).
Not every error is a software bug.

After todays or yesterdays daily package update (Sid) several kernel modules, namely thinkpad_acpi, snd-hda-intel and probably others are not loaded automatically anymore. So my Thinkpad T500 had no support for audio and several power management functions anymore. Once I found out that the missing kernel modules where the problem, the fix was easy: just add the corresponding module names to /etc/modules to enforce loading of the modules. But I wonder what caused the sudden change? Why are the modules not loaded automatically anymore? I usually update my Sid packages every morning so some package update from yesterday or today might have caused this. Looking at the packages which where updated, I found nothing suspicious. Has anyone an idea at which package I should look? Update: Looks like the problem was related to the recent update of base-files to version 6.2 which introduced the new /run directory in combination with udev. Downgrading base-files to version 6.1 (via snapshot.debian.org) fixed the problem.

In the discover-data package in Debian, there is a script to report useful information about the running hardware for use when people report missing information. One part of this script that I find very useful when debugging hardware problems, is the part mapping loaded kernel module to the PCI device it claims. It allow me to quickly see if the kernel module I expect is driving the hardware I am struggling with. To see the output, make sure discover-data is installed and run /usr/share/bug/discover-data 3>&1. The relevant output on one of my machines like this:

loaded modules:
10de:03eb i2c_nforce2
10de:03f1 ohci_hcd
10de:03f2 ehci_hcd
10de:03f0 snd_hda_intel
10de:03ec pata_amd
10de:03f6 sata_nv
1022:1103 k8temp
109e:036e bttv
109e:0878 snd_bt87x
11ab:4364 sky2

The code in question look like this, slightly modified for readability and to drop the output to file descriptor 3:

if [ -d /sys/bus/pci/devices/ ] ; then
    echo loaded pci modules:
    (
        cd /sys/bus/pci/devices/
        for address in * ; do
            if [ -d "$address/driver/module" ] ; then
                module= cd $address/driver/module ; pwd -P   xargs basename 
                if grep -q "^$module " /proc/modules ; then
                    address=$(echo $address  sed s/0000://)
                    id= lspci -n -s $address   tail -n 1   awk ' print $3 ' 
                    echo "$id $module"
                fi
            fi
        done
    )
    echo
fi

Similar code could be used to extract USB device module mappings:

if [ -d /sys/bus/usb/devices/ ] ; then
    echo loaded usb modules:
    (
        cd /sys/bus/usb/devices/
        for address in * ; do
            if [ -d "$address/driver/module" ] ; then
                module= cd $address/driver/module ; pwd -P   xargs basename 
                if grep -q "^$module " /proc/modules ; then
                    address=$(echo $address  sed s/0000://)
                    id=$(lsusb -s $address   tail -n 1   awk ' print $6 ')
                    if [ "$id" ] ; then
                        echo "$id $module"
                    fi
                fi
            fi
        done
    )
    echo
fi

This might perhaps be something to include in other tools as well.

Kernel 2.6.38 will add support for tracing ASoC using trace points. Previously all logging for ASoC had been done using printk(), meaning that changing the active logging required a kernel rebuild and that when trace was enabled the volume of trace could easily become very disruptive to other logging within the system. Trace points solve these problems by providing a framework for enabling and disabling individual traces dynamically and separate logging infrastructure designed for easy filtering and post-processing. When using trace points it s reasonable to leave them enabled all the time, making life much easier especially when debugging intermittent problems. There s a bunch of existing documentation out there for the trace subsystem, including some in the kernel under Documentation/trace, which I won t repeat here. The ASoC events are grouped together under asoc . The raw log can be viewed by looking at the file tracing/trace in debugfs. Here s a sample output from starting playback of an MP3 on a Samsung SMDK6410 reference system using WM8580, a high performance six channel CODEC with a very simple software interface:

mplayer-1673  [000]   183.920000: snd_soc_dapm_start: card=SMDK-I2S
mplayer-1673  [000]   183.920000: snd_soc_dapm_widget_power: widget=Rear val=1
mplayer-1673  [000]   183.920000: snd_soc_dapm_widget_power: widget=Center+Sub val=1
mplayer-1673  [000]   183.920000: snd_soc_dapm_widget_power: widget=Front val=1
mplayer-1673  [000]   183.920000: snd_soc_dapm_widget_power: widget=VOUT3R val=1
mplayer-1673  [000]   183.920000: snd_soc_dapm_widget_power: widget=VOUT3L val=1
mplayer-1673  [000]   183.920000: snd_soc_dapm_widget_power: widget=VOUT2R val=1
mplayer-1673  [000]   183.920000: snd_soc_dapm_widget_power: widget=VOUT2L val=1
mplayer-1673  [000]   183.920000: snd_soc_dapm_widget_power: widget=VOUT1R val=1
mplayer-1673  [000]   183.920000: snd_soc_dapm_widget_power: widget=VOUT1L val=1
mplayer-1673  [000]   183.920000: snd_soc_dapm_widget_power: widget=DAC3 val=1
mplayer-1673  [000]   183.920000: snd_soc_dapm_widget_power: widget=DAC2 val=1
mplayer-1673  [000]   183.920000: snd_soc_dapm_widget_power: widget=DAC1 val=1
mplayer-1673  [000]   183.920000: snd_soc_bias_level_start: card=SMDK-I2S val=2
mplayer-1673  [000]   183.920000: snd_soc_bias_level_done: card=SMDK-I2S val=2
mplayer-1673  [000]   183.920000: snd_soc_reg_read: codec=wm8580-codec.0-001b.27 reg=32 val=1e
mplayer-1673  [000]   183.920000: snd_soc_reg_write: codec=wm8580-codec.0-001b.27 reg=32 val=2
mplayer-1673  [000]   183.920000: snd_soc_bias_level_start: card=SMDK-I2S val=3
mplayer-1673  [000]   183.920000: snd_soc_bias_level_done: card=SMDK-I2S val=3
mplayer-1673  [000]   183.920000: snd_soc_dapm_done: card=SMDK-I2S
mplayer-1673  [000]   183.920000: snd_soc_reg_read: codec=wm8580-codec.0-001b.27 reg=13 val=10
mplayer-1673  [000]   183.920000: snd_soc_reg_write: codec=wm8580-codec.0-001b.27 reg=13 val=0

Each line represents a trace event, showing the process that initiated the event, the CPU it ran on and the time it was recorded at together with event-specific details. On this system the time is reported with 10ms accuracy and the CODEC is very simple so the timing information is not terribly informative, but more accurate timers can be really helpful in analysing what s going on with more complex CODECs. The set of events available will change over time, the key ones currently present in the kernel are:

snd_soc_dapm_start and snd_soc_dapm_done: These events show the start and stop of the DAPM algorithms, showing the time spent on power management decisions.
snd_soc_dapm_widget_power events are generated for each of the widgets which DAPM has determined needs to change state. The val=1 means that all these widgets are being powered up, val=0 would show power down.
snd_soc_reg_write events show values written to registers.
snd_soc_reg_read events show values read from registers these reads may be done from the register cache, or may be from the hardware.
snd_soc_dapm_widget_event_start and snd_soc_dapm_widget_event_done show the time spent in per-widget event callbacks.

The set of events traced will change as the subsystem develops and as people gain more experience with using the trace API.

So when I was travveling to my parent's for christmas it looked like I'd have limited computer access. My Netbook is quite OK for reading mail but not really useable for any real hacking. And my trusty Thinkpad (Z61m) was oopsing when X was running so not much useable either. But as some Live CDs placed here were working well I decided that this would be fixed by an reinstall. And as I was reinstalling anyway I decided I could just choose kfreebsd-amd64. Turned out to be a quite entertaining decision with lots of stuff to hack away with wireless Bad news: there's no wireless support on Debian GNU/kFreeBSD at the moment. This problem is tracked as Bug #601803 so for wireless internet you will need a (plain) Freebsd chroot. Haven't tried this myself yet -- busy figuring other stuff out. SBCL Having a FreeBSD chroot I decided to give SBCL on GNU/kFreeBSD another try after having failed to get it working in a VM some time ago. With quite some help on SBCL's IRC channel I managed to build a patch that enables building (you need to force a :os-provides-dlopen to the feature list additionally). There's currently no multi-threading working so I hae a project for the rest of the hoidays (well lots of other stuff to do as well ;)) Audio Some more user-related stuff now. As it is this time of the year I wanted to listen to some 27c3 streams so I needed working audio. However there's no OSS device available. Turned out you just need to kldload the right module (here snd_hda) to get sound working. Volume was rather low although hardware controls of the soundcard where at max. As that's all OSS there's no point looking for alsamixer. Turns out aumix can do that here. IPv6 aiccu stuff Installing aiccu, copying the config in and starting did not work out as well. I already tried to do that from within the FreeBSD chroot already (which doesn't work for some reason) until I discovered just loading the if_tun kernel module solves the aiccu on Debian issue quite well. To get a default route up the last step was finding /lib/freebsd/route again -- /sbin/route is a wrapper around that abstracting differences in BSD route but not supporting IPv6.

This essay is a summary of my presentation at the workshop Inlaws and Outlaws, held on August 19-20, 2010 in Split, Croatia. The workshop brought together advocates of piracy with participants in the free culture and free software movements.

In Why Software Should Not Have Owners, Richard Stallman explains that, if a friend asks you for a piece of software and the license of the software bars you from sharing, you will have to choose between being a bad friend or violating the license of the software. Stallman suggests that users will have to choose between the lesser of two evils and will choose to violate the license. He emphasizes that it's unfair to ask a user to make such a choice. Over the past few years, pirate parties have grown across much of the developed world. Of course, piracy remains the primary means of distributing media across most of the rest. Advocates of access to information have gathered and organized under the "pirate" banner, representing the choice of sharing with friends over compliance with license terms. The free/libre and open source software (FLOSS) and free culture movements seem to have a confused and conflicted reaction to all this. On one hand, major proponents of several pirate parties are FLOSS and free culture stalwarts and several pirate parties have made FLOSS advocacy a component of their political platforms. Pirate Parties' clear opposition to software patents and DRM resonates with both FLOSS and free culture communities. On the other hand, FLOSS leaders, including Stallman, have warned us about "pirate" anti-copyright policies. Free culture leaders, like Lawrence Lessig, have repeatedly and vociferously denounced piracy, treated even the intimation of an association with piracy as an affront, and systematically distanced themselves and their work from piracy. Should FLOSS and free culture advocates embrace pirates as comrades in arms or condemn them? Must we choose between being either with the pirates or against them? Our communities seem to have no clearly and consistently articulated consensus. I believe that, unintuitively, if you take a strong principled position in favor of information freedom and distinguish between principles and tactics, a more nuanced "middle ground" response to piracy is possible. In light of a principled belief that users should be able to share information, we can conclude there is nothing ethically wrong with piracy. Licenses have the power of the law but they are protected by unjust "intellectual property" laws. That said, principles are not the only reason activists choose to do things. Many political stunts are bad ideas not because they are wrong, but because they won't work and have negative side effects. Tactics matter too. Even though there might not be anything ethically wrong with piracy from the perspective of free software or free culture, it might still be a bad idea. There are at least three such tactical reasons that might motivate free software and culture to not support piracy or participate in pro-piracy movements and politics. First, a systematic disrespect for copyright undermines respect for all licenses which have been of a huge tactical benefit to free software and a increasingly important factor in the success of free culture. Copyleft licenses like the GPL or CC BY-SA have power only because copyright does. As Stallman has suggested, anti-copyright actions are anti-copyleft. That needn't be an argument against attempts to limit copyright. Indeed, I think we must limit and reduce copyright. But we must tread carefully. In the current copyright climate, I believe that copyleft offers a net advantage. Why should others respect our licenses if we don't respect theirs? Looking at the long term, we must weigh the benefits of promoting the systematic violation of proprietary licenses with the benefits of adherence to free software and free culture. Second, piracy is fundamentally reactionary. Part of its resonance as a political symbol comes from the fact that the piracy represents a way that consumers of media can fight back against a set of companies which have attacked them -- with lawsuits, DRM systems, and demonization in propaganda -- for sharing in ways that most consumers think are natural and socially positive. But piracy focuses on reaction rather the fundamental importance of sharing that drives it. As a result, most pirates do not support, or are even familiar with, a principled approach to access to information. As a result, many piracy advocates who speak out against DRM on DVDs will be as happy to use NetFlix to stream DRMed movies for $5 a month as they were to download for free. The best rallying cries do not always translate into be the most robust movements. Third, through its focus on a reaction, a dialog about piracy avoids engagement with the tough questions of what we will replace the current broken copyright system with. A principled position suggests that it is our ethical prerogative to create alternative models. The free software movement has succeeded because it created such a prerogative and then, slowly over time, provided examples of workable alternatives. A principled position on free software did not require that one provide working new systems immediately, but it makes the development of creative, sustainable approaches a priority. Attacking the system without even trying to speak about alternative modes of production is unsustainable. Free software and free culture call for a revolution. Piracy only calls for a riot. Piracy, in these three senses, can be seen as tactically unwise, without necessarily being unethical. By taking a principled position, one can go build on, and go beyond, RMS's comment. On free culture and free software's terms, we can suggest that piracy is not ethically wrong, but that it is an unwise way to try to promote sharing. Without being hypocritical, we can say: "I don't think piracy is unethical. But I also do not support it."

I've got a pretty packed August. I just wrapped the Open and User Innovation Conference at MIT -- the academic conference on user and open innovation connected to my research. I organized the program and was MC for the 120+(!) talks and research updates on the program so it's a huge relief to see it come off successfully. On Thursday, August 5th (at 14:30 UTC) I'll be giving a talk on antifeatures at DebConf (the Annual Debian conference). It was accidentally listed as "Revealing Errors" until a few minutes ago -- sorry about that! It will be streamed live (details on the DC site) for those outside of New York City who might want to follow it. As soon as DebConf is done on August 8th, I'm going to head to Kor ula in Croatia to relax, read, and hopefully get a bit of research done, before I head off to Outlaws and Inlaws in Split on the 19th, a sort of piracy and (vs?) free software summit put on by mi2 connected to the recurring Nothing Will Happen where, from what I hear, quite a lot does. I'm going to have to leave Nothing Will Happen a little early to head to FrOSCon on the 21st where I'll be doing an antifeatures keynote again on the 22nd. I tend not to like to do the same talk too many times, or for more than a year, so this might be one of the last times I present on antifeatures in this form. After that, I'm going to head to Italy where I'll be between the 23rd and the 3rd of September. I'll fly and in and out of Rome and plan to spend some time in Rome, Tuscany, and Florence, but don't have a lot of set plans and might travel to Bologna or elsewhere. My schedule is pretty open. As always, I'm interested in meeting up for coffee or a drink with like-minded hackers, Wikipedians, researchers, activists, etc. If folks are interested in organizing talks or presentations, that sounds fun too. I'm keeping a brief description of my schedule updated alongside a bunch of ways to get in touch with me on my contact page. Don't hesitate to drop me a line!

Linux 2.6.35 has been a fairly interesting release from an ASoC point of view, with several notable framework enhancements:

Support for keeping audio paths through the CODEC up during system suspend, primarily intended for use with devices where the Linux system is one of several independent systems running on the device and the other systems (like the cellular modem in a phone) can maintain useful audio paths even when the Linux system is inactive.
Enhancements to the jack detection infrastructure, including the addition of notifiers on jack status changes (allowing better integration of physical jack detection with electronic methods) and snd_soc_dapm_force_enable_pin() (which allows DAPM managed supplies such as microphone biases to be forced on). For example, jack status change notifications can be used to enable microphone detection via bias current sense only when a microphone is physically present.
Support for knot and continuous PCM rates in the core.
SMDK6410 5.1 audio support, TI SDP4030 audio support, and basic support for playback on the 1133-EV1 PMIC module for Freescale i.MX31ADS systems (currently limited by the support for the SSI interface on the i.MX31).
Support for DaVinci integrated voice CODECs, Philips UDA1345 CODEC, SuperH FSI2 interfaces, TI OMAP4, TWL6040 CODECs, WM9090 audio subsystem.

Like you, dear Internet readers, I have no shortage of reading material. I have ready access to more engaging, high quality, informative and relevant information than I can possibly digest. Every day, I have to choose what to read, and what to pass by. This seems like an important thing to do well, and I wonder if I do a good enough job of it. This is just one example of a larger breadth/depth problem, but I m finding the general problem difficult to stomach, so I m focusing on reading for the moment. These are my primary sources of reading material on a day-to-day basis:

Email I read everything which is addressed to me personally. I don t reply to all of it, and my reply time can vary greatly, but I am able to keep up with reading it, and I consider it important to do so. I am still subscribed to a selection of mailing lists, but I find them increasingly awkward to manage. There are a few which I scan on a daily basis, but most of them I process in batches when I m offline and traveling. I m subscribed to far fewer mailing lists than I was five years ago, though I feel they are still the most effective online discussion facility available. I find myself doing more and more discussing in real-time on IRC and by phone rather than by email.
Blogs I subscribe to a few big aggregators and a random sampling of individual blogs. Most of them I scan rather than read. I do most of this offline, while in transit, and so I don t tend to follow links unless they re promising enough to save for later. I ve recently stopped trying to keep up (scan every post) on most of them, and instead just sample whatever is current at the time. It feels like turning on a television, flipping through all of the channels, and turning it off again. Even when I do find something which I feel is worth reading, it s hard for me to focus my attention after a long session of scanning. I do find a lot of good stuff this way, but I m pretty dissatisfied with the overall experience. I never feel like I m looking in the right places.
Shared links I share my own links publicly, and follow those shared by friends and acquaintances. I do this with multiple groups of people who don t connect directly, and pass items back and forth between those groups. I place an increasingly high priority on reading items which are shared by people I know, more than on trying to follow the original sources, because the signal-to-noise ratio is so good: my personal network acts as a pretty good filter for what will interest me. I have the nagging feeling that I need to maintain a balance here, though. If I read mostly what other people are sending me, I feel like I m living in a bubble of like-minded people and fear that I ll lose perspective.
News I read hardly any proper news. I don t subscribe to any newspapers, and generally don t read the online versions either. I do read articles which are shared by people in my network. Traditional media never seems to have the right scope for me. There may be particular journalists, or particular topics I d like to follow, but news outlets simply don t group their content in a way which fits my mind.
Books Remember these? My diet of books has shrunk drastically since I started reading more online media. Devoting my full attention to a book just doesn t feel as energizing as it used to. I hesitate at the prospect of sinking so many hours into a book, only to decide that it wasn t worthwhile, or worse, to forget what I learned as I m bombarded by bite-sized, digestible tidbits from the Internet. I feel sad about losing the joy of reading I once had, and want to find a way to reintegrate books into my regular diet.

How do you decide what to read, and what not to read? How does your experience differ between your primary information sources? How have you tried to improve?

Haskell provides type classes to support polymorphism. A type class defines a few methods, which can then be implemented for a concrete type in the type class instance. This is a powerful system, but it also has it drawbacks. Most notably, each type can have at most one implementation of the type class. But sometimes you need to use a different implementation. If, for example, you used the Binary class to store data on disk. Now you changed your data type and the binary instance, and you can not read the old data any more. One solution is to re-name your type using newtype and implement another type instance for that. Often, this is enough. But still, instances are not first-class-citizens. You can not pass them around or modify them, as you can pass around and modify data and functions. Under the hood of the compiler, things look different. The ghc puts the methods of the instance in a dictionary and passes that implicitly to any functions having a (Class a) constraint. (Other implementations exist though) If one could make that behavior explicit, one could easily modify the instance before passing it to the function. But this is unfortunately not possible. But it is possible to pass an explicit dictionary along the data. I use the Monoid class as an example, and define a representation of the dictionary to-be-passed, as well as the dictionary of the default instance:

data MonoidDict a = MonoidDict
    ed_mempty :: a
  , ed_mappend :: a -> a -> a
   
monoidDict :: Monoid a => MonoidDict a
monoidDict = MonoidDict mempty mappend

(For conciseness, I ignore the mconcat method.) My first idea was to pass this instance along with data: (MonoidDict a, a). But this would not work because there are methods, such as mempty, who need the dictionary without getting passed a value to use. Therefore, I need to put the dictionary both in the covariant and the contravariant position:

newtype WithMonoidDict a = WithMonoidDict (MonoidDict a -> (MonoidDict a, a))

We need functions to clamp a dictionary to a value, and to extract it again:

wrapWithCustomMonoidDict :: MonoidDict a -> a -> WithMonoidDict a
wrapWithCustomMonoidDict dict val = WithMonoidDict $ const (dict, val)
extractFromCustomMonoidDict :: MonoidDict a -> WithMonoidDict a -> a
extractFromCustomMonoidDict dict (WithMonoidDict f) = snd (f dict)

Note that both expect the dictionary, so that it can be fed into WithMonoidDict from both sides . For convenience, we can define variants that use the standard instance:

wrapWithMonoidDict :: Monoid a => a -> WithMonoidDict a
wrapWithMonoidDict = wrapWithCustomMonoidDict monoidDict
extractFromMonoidDict :: Monoid a => WithMonoidDict a -> a
extractFromMonoidDict = extractFromCustomMonoidDict monoidDict

We want to be able to pass the wrapped values as any other value with a Monoid instance, so we need to declare that:

instance Monoid (WithMonoidDict a) where
  mempty = WithMonoidDict (\d -> (d, ed_mempty d))
  mappend (WithMonoidDict f1) (WithMonoidDict f2) = WithMonoidDict $ \d ->
  let (d1,v1) = f1 d
  (d2,v2) = f2 d
  in  (d1, ed_mappend d1 v1 v2)

Note that mappend has the choice between three dictionaries This is not a good sign, but let s hope that they are all the same. Does it work? Let s see:

listInstance :: MonoidDict [a]
listInstance = monoidDict
reverseInstance :: MonoidDict [a]
reverseInstance = monoidDict   ed_mappend = \l1 l2 -> l2 ++ l1  
examples = do
  let l1 = [1,2,3]
  let l2 = [4,5,6]
  putStrLn $ "Example lists: " ++ show l1 ++ " " ++ show l2
  putStrLn $ "l1 ++ l2: " ++ show (l1 ++ l2) 
  putStrLn $ "l1  mappend  l2: " ++ show (l1  mappend  l2) 
  putStrLn $ "Wrapped with default instance:"
  putStrLn $ "l1  mappend  l2: " ++ show (
  extractFromMonoidDict $ wrapWithMonoidDict l1  mappend  wrapWithMonoidDict l2)
  putStrLn $ "Same with reversed monoid instance:"
  putStrLn $ "l1  mappend  l2: " ++ show (
  extractFromCustomMonoidDict reverseInstance $
  wrapWithCustomMonoidDict reverseInstance l1  mappend 
  wrapWithCustomMonoidDict reverseInstance l2)

Running examples gives this output:

Example lists: [1,2,3] [4,5,6]
l1 ++ l2: [1,2,3,4,5,6]
l1  mappend  l2: [1,2,3,4,5,6]
Wrapped with default instance:
l1  mappend  l2: [1,2,3,4,5,6]
Same with reversed monoid instance:
l1  mappend  l2: [4,5,6,1,2,3]

Indeed it works. Unfortunately, this approach is not sufficient for all cases. It is perfectly valid to have functions with signature (Monoid a => Int -> Int). Obviously, this function would have no access to the explicit dictionary, because no value of type a is passed to or from it.<monoid a="a"> I wonder if it would be possible to extend the syntax somehow to be able to properly pass an alternative dictionary to such functions. But given that not all compilers use dictionary passing, my hopes are low.

data MonoidDict a = MonoidDict
    ed_mempty :: a
  , ed_mappend :: a -> a -> a
   
monoidDict :: Monoid a => MonoidDict a
monoidDict = MonoidDict mempty mappend

newtype WithMonoidDict a = WithMonoidDict (MonoidDict a -> (MonoidDict a, a))

We need functions to clamp a dictionary to a value, and to extract it again:

wrapWithCustomMonoidDict :: MonoidDict a -> a -> WithMonoidDict a
wrapWithCustomMonoidDict dict val = WithMonoidDict $ const (dict, val)
extractFromCustomMonoidDict :: MonoidDict a -> WithMonoidDict a -> a
extractFromCustomMonoidDict dict (WithMonoidDict f) = snd (f dict)

Note that both expect the dictionary, so that it can be fed into WithMonoidDict from both sides . For convenience, we can define variants that use the standard instance:

wrapWithMonoidDict :: Monoid a => a -> WithMonoidDict a
wrapWithMonoidDict = wrapWithCustomMonoidDict monoidDict
extractFromMonoidDict :: Monoid a => WithMonoidDict a -> a
extractFromMonoidDict = extractFromCustomMonoidDict monoidDict

We want to be able to pass the wrapped values as any other value with a Monoid instance, so we need to declare that:

instance Monoid (WithMonoidDict a) where
  mempty = WithMonoidDict (\d -> (d, ed_mempty d))
  mappend (WithMonoidDict f1) (WithMonoidDict f2) = WithMonoidDict $ \d ->
  let (d1,v1) = f1 d
  (d2,v2) = f2 d
  in  (d1, ed_mappend d1 v1 v2)

Note that mappend has the choice between three dictionaries This is not a good sign, but let s hope that they are all the same. Does it work? Let s see:

listInstance :: MonoidDict [a]
listInstance = monoidDict
reverseInstance :: MonoidDict [a]
reverseInstance = monoidDict   ed_mappend = \l1 l2 -> l2 ++ l1  
examples = do
  let l1 = [1,2,3]
  let l2 = [4,5,6]
  putStrLn $ "Example lists: " ++ show l1 ++ " " ++ show l2
  putStrLn $ "l1 ++ l2: " ++ show (l1 ++ l2) 
  putStrLn $ "l1  mappend  l2: " ++ show (l1  mappend  l2) 
  putStrLn $ "Wrapped with default instance:"
  putStrLn $ "l1  mappend  l2: " ++ show (
  extractFromMonoidDict $ wrapWithMonoidDict l1  mappend  wrapWithMonoidDict l2)
  putStrLn $ "Same with reversed monoid instance:"
  putStrLn $ "l1  mappend  l2: " ++ show (
  extractFromCustomMonoidDict reverseInstance $
  wrapWithCustomMonoidDict reverseInstance l1  mappend 
  wrapWithCustomMonoidDict reverseInstance l2)

Running examples gives this output:

Example lists: [1,2,3] [4,5,6]
l1 ++ l2: [1,2,3,4,5,6]
l1  mappend  l2: [1,2,3,4,5,6]
Wrapped with default instance:
l1  mappend  l2: [1,2,3,4,5,6]
Same with reversed monoid instance:
l1  mappend  l2: [4,5,6,1,2,3]

Indeed it works. Unfortunately, this approach is not sufficient for all cases. It is perfectly valid to have a function with signature (Monoid a => Maybe a -> Maybe a), whose behavior depends on the instance of a, even when being passed Nothing and returning Nothing. Such a function woul<monoid a="a">d have a problem here, because the dictionary would not be passed to the function.
</monoid> I wonder if it would be possible to extend the Haskell language somehow to be able to properly pass an alternative dictionary to such functions. But given that not all compilers use dictionary passing, my hopes are low.

It takes a lot to prepare for a big trip if you want to really enjoy it. This time, we re going to Japan, and we bought some stuff to stay connected there. First, there s the new camera: that s a Sony 230. We haven t made a photo trip to see all its capabilities yet, but it looks like an excellent toy so far. You ll see probably more photos on this blog in the future. And there s the new laptop: a Packard-Bell Dot-M/A.

Theoretically it s called a netbook, but in practice it has everything a real laptop has. The reason I chose this model is that it features Radeon (X1270) graphics and a 64-bit processor, all in a 11,6" laptop which is one of the cheapest of all. Lots of power in one kilogram for a low price, although the drawback is more cells in the battery. Getting the Dot-M/A to work under Debian I first tried to install lenny on it, and while it worked nicely there are several problems with hardware support.

The CPU runs extremely slow; you would think it is an Atom. It takes no less than one minute to boot a minimal installation. This is a very strange issue.
Wi-Fi doesn t work, even after installing the firmware.
2D works out of the box, but 3D doesn t: the kernel doesn t recognize the PCI ID.
Frequency scaling doesn t work, it always runs at full speed which eats battery at an impressive pace.

Upgrading to squeeze solved the first three issues in a blink. The CPU is now as fast as you can expect from an Athlon 64 @1,2 GHz, there s wifi and 3D. OTOH I was hit by a GStreamer bug when the useless snd_pcsp module was loaded why isn t this thing blacklisted by default? ACPI nightmare CPU frequency scaling is another story. I discovered that the BIOS for such Athlon L110 computers does not expose P-states in the ACPI DSDT table. Which means Linux cannot tell at which frequencies it is supposed to work. However, thanks to the awesome work from a guy named Krists Krilovs and the awesome tutorial from the Gentoo wiki I was able to:

rip the DSDT table from the CPU that s the easy part;
disassemble it using Intel tools still easy;
debug the table, which is written in an arcane language no one understands, and using references to a tutorial that was probably excellent until it disappeared from the intarwebs;
integrate the P-states for the Athlon L110, basing again on the work of Krists Krilovs who wrote the corresponding ASL code;
build a custom kernel using it that s the easy, but long part, that s done on a faster computer.

After a reboot, I immediately noticed the fan slowing down. Under GNOME, the CPU was no less than 10 C cooler and the CPU frequency applet started to work. <hrule> The Debian kernel maintainers deliberately chose not to provide support for loading a DSDT table from the initrd. There are very good reasons for this, and anyway it shouldn t be necessary to hack something as awful as that to have power saving support. The question remains: how do we deal with this madness? There needs to be some kind of support out-of-the-box for the Athlon L110, which is otherwise a very nice beast. Could the powernow-k8 module set hard-coded defaults when it detects this CPU model? It would be better than the current situation. Other pieces of the toy Otherwise this laptop is very good hardware. Among other things, I enjoyed:

the keyboard which is very comfortable for this size;
the awesome screen, quite small, yet 1366 768 and very bright and sharp;
the quite fast SATA disk (~60 MB/s);
the card reader, which makes a useful replacement for a CD drive;
the webcam that worked out of the box;
power management that works just as expected too.

There is one minor annoyance: the integrated RealTek Ethernet card is only 100 Mbits/s. With all this performance otherwise, you would have expected Gigabit, but well, not everyone has GigE at home yet.

Audio information can be stored in a wide variety of formats, which vary in sound quality, file size, compatibility, etc. There are lots of extensions that cannot be read by some players. For this reason, many audiophiles are often confronted with compatibility issues. There are lots of audio conversion tools available on the web, but there are much more formats out there than they support. Most converters support only a few extensions and therefore they fail to satisfy users requirements.

Finding a high quality mp3 converter
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By aid of Factory Audio Converter, you can convert wma to mp3 right from the desktop. Once installed on a PC, the program integrates into Windows seamlessly, and Convert to option appears in the right-button menu. All you need to do is right-click on a wma file and select Convert to. You can also run Factory Audio Converter from within other programs via command line.

Advanced users do not only want toconvert wma to mp3
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The more new features a program has, the more likely it is to enjoy demand. Factory Audio Converter incorporates a built-in audio player and CD ripper. You can listen to your tracks prior to conversion and compare output and input files. The CD ripper will rip your CD files and help you save them on any type of hard drive. Factory Audio Converter permits you to change wav to mp3
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I recently got a Toshiba Tecra A10-1HU laptop. This is a series describing my experiences with this hardware using Debian Sid. This one comes without any operating system. So I got a recent testing-netinstall CD-image and ran the installer procedure (in expert mode). Everything went fine and I ended with a shiny Squeeze and kernel 2.6.30. Because I use Sid as my usual system, my first action was a dist-upgrade to Sid. This is what lspci -nn tells:

00:00.0 Host bridge [0600]: Intel Corporation Mobile 4 Series Chipset Memory Controller Hub [8086:2a40] (rev 07)
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: Intel Corporation Mobile 4 Series Chipset Integrated Graphics Controller [8086:2a42] (rev 07)
00:02.1 Display controller [0380]: Intel Corporation Mobile 4 Series Chipset Integrated Graphics Controller [8086:2a43] (rev 07)
00:03.0 Communication controller [0780]: Intel Corporation Mobile 4 Series Chipset MEI Controller [8086:2a44] (rev 07)
00:19.0 Ethernet controller [0200]: Intel Corporation 82567LM Gigabit Network Connection [8086:10f5] (rev 03)
00:1a.0 USB Controller [0c03]: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB UHCI Controller #4 [8086:2937] (rev 03)
00:1a.1 USB Controller [0c03]: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB UHCI Controller #5 [8086:2938] (rev 03)
00:1a.2 USB Controller [0c03]: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB UHCI Controller #6 [8086:2939] (rev 03)
00:1a.7 USB Controller [0c03]: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB2 EHCI Controller #2 [8086:293c] (rev 03)
00:1b.0 Audio device [0403]: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) HD Audio Controller [8086:293e] (rev 03)
00:1c.0 PCI bridge [0604]: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) PCI Express Port 1 [8086:2940] (rev 03)
00:1c.1 PCI bridge [0604]: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) PCI Express Port 2 [8086:2942] (rev 03)
00:1c.2 PCI bridge [0604]: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) PCI Express Port 3 [8086:2944] (rev 03)
00:1d.0 USB Controller [0c03]: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB UHCI Controller #1 [8086:2934] (rev 03)
00:1d.1 USB Controller [0c03]: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB UHCI Controller #2 [8086:2935] (rev 03)
00:1d.2 USB Controller [0c03]: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB UHCI Controller #3 [8086:2936] (rev 03)
00:1d.7 USB Controller [0c03]: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB2 EHCI Controller #1 [8086:293a] (rev 03)
00:1e.0 PCI bridge [0604]: Intel Corporation 82801 Mobile PCI Bridge [8086:2448] (rev 93)
00:1f.0 ISA bridge [0601]: Intel Corporation ICH9M-E LPC Interface Controller [8086:2917] (rev 03)
00:1f.2 SATA controller [0106]: Intel Corporation ICH9M/M-E SATA AHCI Controller [8086:2929] (rev 03)
01:00.0 Network controller [0280]: Intel Corporation Wireless WiFi Link 5100 [8086:4232]
05:0b.0 CardBus bridge [0607]: Ricoh Co Ltd RL5c476 II [1180:0476] (rev ba)
05:0b.1 FireWire (IEEE 1394) [0c00]: Ricoh Co Ltd R5C832 IEEE 1394 Controller [1180:0832] (rev 04)
05:0b.2 SD Host controller [0805]: Ricoh Co Ltd R5C822 SD/SDIO/MMC/MS/MSPro Host Adapter [1180:0822] (rev 21)
05:0b.3 System peripheral [0880]: Ricoh Co Ltd R5C843 MMC Host Controller [1180:0843] (rev ff)
05:0b.4 System peripheral [0880]: Ricoh Co Ltd R5C592 Memory Stick Bus Host Adapter [1180:0592] (rev 11)
05:0b.5 System peripheral [0880]: Ricoh Co Ltd xD-Picture Card Controller [1180:0852] (rev 11)

Things that worked out-of-the-box: Display/Graphics (Intel GMA 4500M HD) The integrated graphics chipset, an Intel GMA 4500M HD, works with the xserver-xorg-video-intel package and the default X.org configuration. No custom /etc/X11/xorg.conf is necessary. The (IMHO non-reflecting?) display runs at 1280 800 at 60 Hz. Cable network device The integrated Intel 82567LM Gigabit Network device works with the e1000e kernel module. No customization was necessary. Touchpad/Trackpoint The notebook comes with the so called Toshiba Dual Pointing Device a touchpad (+2 buttons) and a trackpoint (+2 buttons). Both worked without customization. Energy savings/Suspend/Resume apmd and acpid handle this. No problems yet. Suspend/Resume works. I did not yet test (and I m not sure if I should) hibernate and uswsusp. Webcam The webcam is a CNA7157 model or at least detected as such. The video4linux modules handle it and the cheese application produces pictures. Volume-control wheel It works. Module and package information will follow as soon as I figure them out. Things that needed customization WLAN (Intel WiFi Link 5100) The notebook comes with an Intel WiFi Link 5100 device. It does not work out-of-the-box. Following this article, I ve installed the firmware-iwlwifi package and loaded the iwlagn module. Sound (Intel) For the sound device to work the snd_hda_intel module is necessary. Further the following lines must be added to /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf

# not sure about the first line, start adding the second only
options snd-cmipci mpu_port=0x330 fm_port=0x388
options snd-hda-intel index=0 model=toshiba position_fix=1

Unsure/Not yet working Temperature sensor After installing the sensors-applet I got two identical temperature displays. I m not sure what they show. Anybody an idea how to examine this? Modem The notebook comes with an internal modem device:

00:03.0 Communication controller [0780]: Intel Corporation Mobile 4 Series Chipset MEI Controller [8086:2a44] (rev 07)

From what I read I need hsfmodem or the sl-modem packages. Unfortunately the latest version is not available for amd64 from the archive, although it seems to have been built. Untested I did not yet test

Bluetooth (icon there, kernel module loaded)
Firewire (kernel module loaded)
Card-reader (kernel modules loaded)

Summit This what lspci -k -nn tells about the used kernel modules:

00:00.0 Host bridge [0600]: Intel Corporation Mobile 4 Series Chipset Memory Controller Hub [8086:2a40] (rev 07)
	Subsystem: Toshiba America Info Systems Device [1179:0001]
	Kernel driver in use: agpgart-intel
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: Intel Corporation Mobile 4 Series Chipset Integrated Graphics Controller [8086:2a42] (rev 07)
	Subsystem: Toshiba America Info Systems Device [1179:0004]
00:02.1 Display controller [0380]: Intel Corporation Mobile 4 Series Chipset Integrated Graphics Controller [8086:2a43] (rev 07)
	Subsystem: Toshiba America Info Systems Device [1179:0004]
00:03.0 Communication controller [0780]: Intel Corporation Mobile 4 Series Chipset MEI Controller [8086:2a44] (rev 07)
	Subsystem: Toshiba America Info Systems Device [1179:0001]
00:19.0 Ethernet controller [0200]: Intel Corporation 82567LM Gigabit Network Connection [8086:10f5] (rev 03)
	Subsystem: Toshiba America Info Systems Device [1179:0001]
	Kernel driver in use: e1000e
00:1a.0 USB Controller [0c03]: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB UHCI Controller #4 [8086:2937] (rev 03)
	Subsystem: Toshiba America Info Systems Device [1179:0001]
	Kernel driver in use: uhci_hcd
00:1a.1 USB Controller [0c03]: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB UHCI Controller #5 [8086:2938] (rev 03)
	Subsystem: Toshiba America Info Systems Device [1179:0001]
	Kernel driver in use: uhci_hcd
00:1a.2 USB Controller [0c03]: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB UHCI Controller #6 [8086:2939] (rev 03)
	Subsystem: Toshiba America Info Systems Device [1179:0001]
	Kernel driver in use: uhci_hcd
00:1a.7 USB Controller [0c03]: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB2 EHCI Controller #2 [8086:293c] (rev 03)
	Subsystem: Toshiba America Info Systems Device [1179:0001]
	Kernel driver in use: ehci_hcd
00:1b.0 Audio device [0403]: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) HD Audio Controller [8086:293e] (rev 03)
	Subsystem: Toshiba America Info Systems Device [1179:0001]
	Kernel driver in use: HDA Intel
00:1c.0 PCI bridge [0604]: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) PCI Express Port 1 [8086:2940] (rev 03)
	Kernel driver in use: pcieport-driver
00:1c.1 PCI bridge [0604]: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) PCI Express Port 2 [8086:2942] (rev 03)
	Kernel driver in use: pcieport-driver
00:1c.2 PCI bridge [0604]: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) PCI Express Port 3 [8086:2944] (rev 03)
	Kernel driver in use: pcieport-driver
00:1d.0 USB Controller [0c03]: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB UHCI Controller #1 [8086:2934] (rev 03)
	Subsystem: Toshiba America Info Systems Device [1179:0001]
	Kernel driver in use: uhci_hcd
00:1d.1 USB Controller [0c03]: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB UHCI Controller #2 [8086:2935] (rev 03)
	Subsystem: Toshiba America Info Systems Device [1179:0001]
	Kernel driver in use: uhci_hcd
00:1d.2 USB Controller [0c03]: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB UHCI Controller #3 [8086:2936] (rev 03)
	Subsystem: Toshiba America Info Systems Device [1179:0001]
	Kernel driver in use: uhci_hcd
00:1d.7 USB Controller [0c03]: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB2 EHCI Controller #1 [8086:293a] (rev 03)
	Subsystem: Toshiba America Info Systems Device [1179:0001]
	Kernel driver in use: ehci_hcd
00:1e.0 PCI bridge [0604]: Intel Corporation 82801 Mobile PCI Bridge [8086:2448] (rev 93)
00:1f.0 ISA bridge [0601]: Intel Corporation ICH9M-E LPC Interface Controller [8086:2917] (rev 03)
	Subsystem: Toshiba America Info Systems Device [1179:0001]
00:1f.2 SATA controller [0106]: Intel Corporation ICH9M/M-E SATA AHCI Controller [8086:2929] (rev 03)
	Subsystem: Toshiba America Info Systems Device [1179:0001]
	Kernel driver in use: ahci
01:00.0 Network controller [0280]: Intel Corporation Wireless WiFi Link 5100 [8086:4232]
	Subsystem: Intel Corporation Device [8086:1201]
	Kernel driver in use: iwlagn
05:0b.0 CardBus bridge [0607]: Ricoh Co Ltd RL5c476 II [1180:0476] (rev ba)
	Subsystem: Toshiba America Info Systems Device [1179:0001]
	Kernel driver in use: yenta_cardbus
05:0b.1 FireWire (IEEE 1394) [0c00]: Ricoh Co Ltd R5C832 IEEE 1394 Controller [1180:0832] (rev 04)
	Subsystem: Toshiba America Info Systems Device [1179:0001]
	Kernel driver in use: firewire_ohci
05:0b.2 SD Host controller [0805]: Ricoh Co Ltd R5C822 SD/SDIO/MMC/MS/MSPro Host Adapter [1180:0822] (rev 21)
	Subsystem: Toshiba America Info Systems Device [1179:0001]
	Kernel driver in use: sdhci-pci
05:0b.3 System peripheral [0880]: Ricoh Co Ltd R5C843 MMC Host Controller [1180:0843] (rev ff)
	Kernel driver in use: ricoh-mmc
05:0b.4 System peripheral [0880]: Ricoh Co Ltd R5C592 Memory Stick Bus Host Adapter [1180:0592] (rev 11)
	Subsystem: Toshiba America Info Systems Device [1179:0001]
05:0b.5 System peripheral [0880]: Ricoh Co Ltd xD-Picture Card Controller [1180:0852] (rev 11)
	Subsystem: Toshiba America Info Systems Device [1179:0001]

Arnt Karlsen reported bug #550000 on Wednesday October 7th, against the sndfile-programs package. Bug #540000 was reported as of August 5th 2009. We're apparently back to our "10,000 bugs in 2 months pace"...or close to it. Halfway to bug #600000...

Bug #550000 has been filed! It's in sndfile-programs, and congrats to Arnt Karlsen for having filed it. :-)

Search Results: "snd"

24 February 2014

Vincent Bernat: Coping with the TCP TIME-WAIT state on busy Linux servers

Other solutions If you still think you have a problem with `TIME-WAIT` connections after reading the previous section, there are three additional solutions to solve them:

disable socket lingering,

`net.ipv4.tcp_tw_reuse`, and

`net.ipv4.tcp_tw_recycle`.

27 December 2013

Russell Coker: Sound Device Order with ALSA

25 January 2013

Johannes Schauer: Bootstrappable Debian - New Milestone

17 December 2011

Russell Coker: Some Notes on DRBD

3 July 2011

Benjamin Drung: Symptoms of a dying graphic card

6 April 2011

Bastian Venthur: Dear Lazyweb

22 January 2011

Petter Reinholdtsen: Which module is loaded for a given PCI and USB device?

Mark Brown: Tracing ASoC with trace events

29 December 2010

Christoph Egger: Debian GNU/kFreeBSD

11 October 2010

Benjamin Mako Hill: Piracy and Free Software

5 August 2010

Benjamin Mako Hill: My August

3 August 2010

Mark Brown: ASoC updates in 2.6.35

12 June 2010

Matt Zimmerman: How to decide what to read (and what not to read)?

23 April 2010

Joachim Breitner: Making dictionary passting explicit in Haskell

Joachim Breitner: Making dictionary passing explicit in Haskell

15 April 2010

Josselin Mouette: A new toy

5 February 2010

Brandon Holtsclaw: My Friend Audio Business Converter Product

3 November 2009

Daniel Leidert: Toshiba Tecra A10 (PTSB5E) - Part I

7 October 2009

Christian Perrier: Bug #550000

6 October 2009

Kumar Appaiah: Bug #550000 filed