Search Results: "spa"

1 May 2025

Ian Jackson: Free Software, internal politics, and governance

There is a thread of opinion in some Free Software communities, that we shouldn t be doing politics , and instead should just focus on technology. But that s impossible. This approach is naive, harmful, and, ultimately, self-defeating, even on its own narrow terms. Today I m talking about small-p politics In this article I m using politics in the very wide sense: us humans managing our disagreements with each other. I m not going to talk about culture wars, woke, racism, trans rights, and so on. I am not going to talk about how Free Software has always had explicitly political goals; or how it s impossible to be neutral because choosing not to take a stand is itself to take a stand. Those issues are all are important and Free Software definitely must engage with them. Many of the points I make are applicable there too. But those are not my focus today. Today I m talking in more general terms about politics, power, and governance. Many people working together always entails politics Computers are incredibly complicated nowadays. Making software is a joint enterprise. Even if an individual program has only a single maintainer, it fits into an ecosystem of other software, maintained by countless other developers. Larger projects can have thousands of maintainers and hundreds of thousands of contributors. Humans don t always agree about everything. This is natural. Indeed, it s healthy: to write the best code, we need a wide range of knowledge and experience. When we can t come to agreement, we need a way to deal with that: a way that lets us still make progress, but also leaves us able to work together afterwards. A way that feels OK for everyone. Providing a framework for disagreement is the job of a governance system. The rules say which people make which decisions, who must be consulted, how the decisions are made, and, how, if any, they can be reviewed. This is all politics. Consensus is great but always requiring it is harmful Ideally a discussion will converge to a synthesis that satisfies everyone, or at least a consensus. When consensus can t be achieved, we can hope for compromise: something everyone can live with. Compromise is achieved through negotiation. If every decision requires consensus, then the proponents of any wide-ranging improvement have an almost insurmountable hurdle: those who are favoured by the status quo and find it convenient can always object. So there will never be consensus for change. If there is any objection at all, no matter how ill-founded, the status quo will always win. This is where governance comes in. Governance is like backups: we need to practice it Governance processes are the backstop for when discussions, and then negotiations, fail, and people still don t see eye to eye. In a healthy community, everyone needs to know how the governance works and what the rules are. The participants need to accept the system s legitimacy. Everyone, including the losing side, must be prepared to accept and implement (or, at least not obstruct) whatever the decision is, and hopefully live with it and stay around. That means we need to practice our governance processes. We can t just leave them for the day we have a huge and controversial decision to make. If we do that, then when it comes to the crunch we ll have toxic rows where no-one can agree the rules; where determined people bend the rules to fit their outcome; and where afterwards people feel like the whole thing was horrible and unfair. So our decisionmaking bodies and roles need to be making decisions, as a matter of routine, and we need to get used to that. First-line decisionmaking bodies should be making decisions frequently. Last-line appeal mechanisms (large-scale votes, for example) are naturally going to be exercised more rarely, but they must happen, be seen as legitimate, and their outcomes must be implemented in full. Governance should usually be routine and boring When governance is working well it s quite boring. People offer their input, and are heard. Angles are debated, and concerns are addressed. If agreement still isn t reached, the committee, or elected leader, makes a decision. Hopefully everyone thinks the leadership is legitimate, and that it properly considered and heard their arguments, and made the decision for good reasons. Hopefully the losing side can still get their work done (and make their own computer work the way they want); so while they will be disappointed, they can live with the outcome. Many human institutions manage this most of the time. It does take some knowledge about principles of governance, and ideally some experience. Governance means deciding, not just mediating By making decisions I mean exercising their authority to rule on an actual disagreement: one that wasn t resolved by debate or negotiation. Governance processes by definition involve deciding, not just mediating. It s not governance if we re advising or cajoling: in that case, we re back to demanding consensus. Governance is necessary precisely when consensus is not achieved. If the governance systems are to mean anything, they must be able to (over)rule; that means (over)ruling must be normal and accepted. Otherwise, when the we need to overrule, we ll find that we can t, because we lack the collective practice. To be legitimate (and seen as legitimate) decisions must usually be made based on the merits, not on participants status, and not only on process questions. On the autonomy of the programmer Many programmers seem to find the very concept of governance, and binding decisionmaking, deeply uncomfortable. Ultimately, it means sometimes overruling someone s technical decision. As programmers and maintainers we naturally see how this erodes our autonomy. But we have all seen projects where the maintainers are unpleasant, obstinate, or destructive. We have all found this frustrating. Software is all interconnected, and one programmer s bad decisions can cause problems for many of the rest of us. We exasperate, why won t they just do the right thing . This is futile. People have never just ed and they re not going to start just ing now. So often the boot is on the other foot. More broadly, as software developers, we have a responsibility to our users, and a duty to write code that does good rather than ill in the world. We ought to be accountable. (And not just to capitalist bosses!) Governance mechanisms are the answer. (No, forking anything but the smallest project is very rarely a practical answer.) Mitigate the consequences of decisions retain flexibility In software, it is often possible to soften the bad social effects of a controversial decision, by retaining flexibility. With a bit of extra work, we can often provide hooks, non-default configuration options, or plugin arrangements. If we can convert the question from how will the software always behave into merely what should the default be , we can often save ourselves a lot of drama. So it is often worth keeping even suboptimal or untidy features or options, if people want to use them and are willing to maintain them. There is a tradeoff here, of course. But Free Software projects often significantly under-value the social benefits of keeping everyone happy. Wrestling software even crusty or buggy software is a lot more fun than having unpleasant arguments. But don t do decisionmaking like a corporation Many programmers experience of formal decisionmaking is from their boss at work. But corporations are often a very bad example. They typically don t have as much trouble actually making decisions, but the actual decisions are often terrible, and not just because corporations goals are often bad. You get to be a decisionmaker in a corporation by spouting plausible nonsense, sounding confident, buttering up the even-more-vacuous people further up the chain, and sometimes by sabotaging your rivals. Corporate senior managers are hardly ever held accountable typically the effects of their tenure are only properly felt well after they ve left to mess up somewhere else. We should select our leaders more wisely, and base decisions on substance. If you won t do politics, politics will do you As a participant in a project, or a society, you can of course opt out of getting involved in politics. You can opt out of learning how to do politics generally, and opt out of understanding your project s governance structures. You can opt out of making judgements about disputed questions, and tell yourself there s merit on both sides . You can hate politicians indiscriminately, and criticise anyone you see doing politics. If you do this, then you are abdicating your decisionmaking authority, to those who are the most effective manipulators, or the most committed to getting their way. You re tacitly supporting the existing power bases. You re ceding power to the best liars, to those with the least scruples, and to the people who are most motivated by dominance. This is precisely the opposite of what you wanted. If enough people won t do politics, and hate anyone who does, your discussion spaces will be reduced to a battleground of only the hardiest and the most toxic. If you don t see the politics, it s still happening If your governance systems don t work, then there is no effective redress against bad or even malicious decisions. Your roleholders and subteams are unaccountable power centres. Power radically distorts every human relationship, and it takes great strength of character for an unaccountable power centre not to eventually become an unaccountable toxic cabal. So if you have a reasonable sized community, but don t see your formal governance systems working people debating things, votes, leadership making explicit decisions that doesn t mean everything is fine, and all the decisions are great, and there s no politics happening. It just means that most of your community have given up on the official process. It also probably means that some parts of your project have formed toxic and unaccountable cabals. Those who won t put up with that will leave. The same is true if the only governance actions that ever happen are massive drama. That means that only the most determined victim of a bad decision, will even consider using such a process. Conclusions

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Jonathan McDowell: Local Voice Assistant Step 2: Speech to Text and back

Having setup an ATOM Echo Voice Satellite and hooked it up to Home Assistant we now need to actually do something with the captured audio. Home Assistant largely deals with voice assistants using the Wyoming Protocol, which describes itself as essentially JSONL + PCM audio. It works nicely in terms of meaning everything can exist as separate modules that then just communicate over network sockets, and there are a whole bunch of Python implementations of the pieces necessary. The first bit I looked at was speech to text; how do I get what I say to the voice satellite into something that Home Assistant can try and parse? There is a nice self contained speech recognition tool called whisper.cpp, which is a low dependency implementation of inference using OpenAI s Whisper model. This is wrapped up for Wyoming as part of wyoming-whisper-cpp. Here we get into something that unfortunately seems common in this space; the repo contains a forked copy of whisper.cpp with enough differences that I couldn t trivially make it work with regular whisper.cpp. That means missing out on new development, and potential improvements (the fork appears to be at v1.5.4, upstream is up to v1.7.5 at the time of writing). However it was possible to get up and running easily enough. [I note there is a Wyoming Whisper API client that can use the whisper.cpp server, and that might be a cleaner way to go in the future, especially if whisper.cpp ends up in Debian.] I stated previously I wanted all of this to be as clean an installed on Debian stable as possible. Given most of this isn t packaged, that s meant I ve packaged things up as I go. I m not at the stage anything is suitable for upload to Debian proper, but equally I ve tried to make them a reasonable starting point. No pre-built binaries available, just Salsa git repos. https://salsa.debian.org/noodles/wyoming-whisper-cpp in this case. You need python3-wyoming from trixie if you re building for bookworm, but it doesn t need rebuilt. You need a Whisper model that s been converts to ggml format; they can be found on Hugging Face. I ve ended up using the base.en model. I found small.en gave more accurate results, but took a little longer, when doing random testing, but it doesn t seem to make much of a difference for voice control rather than plain transcribing. [One of the open questions about uploading this to Debian is around the use of a prebuilt AI model. I don t know what the right answer is here, and whether the voice infrastructure could ever be part of Debian proper, but the current discussion on the interpretation of the DFSG on AI models is very relevant.] I run this in the same container as my Home Assistant install, using a systemd unit file dropped in /etc/systemd/system/wyoming-whisper-cpp.service: 
[Unit]
Description=Wyoming whisper.cpp server
After=network.target
[Service]
Type=simple
DynamicUser=yes
ExecStart=wyoming-whisper-cpp --uri tcp://localhost:10030 --model base.en
MemoryDenyWriteExecute=false
ProtectControlGroups=true
PrivateDevices=false
ProtectKernelTunables=true
ProtectSystem=true
RestrictRealtime=true
RestrictNamespaces=true
[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target
It needs the Wyoming Protocol integration enabled in Home Assistant; you can Add Entry and enter localhost + 10030 for host + port and it ll get added. Then in the Voice Assistant configuration there ll be a whisper.cpp option available. Text to speech turns out to be weirdly harder. The right answer is something like Wyoming Piper, but that turns out to be hard on bookworm. I ll come back to that in a future post. For now I took the easy option and used the built in Google Translate option in Home Assistant. That needed an extra stanza in configuration.yaml that wasn t entirely obvious: 
media_source:
With this, and the ATOM voice satellite, I could now do basic voice control of my Home Assistant setup, with everything except the text-to-speech piece happening locally! Things such as Hey Jarvis, turn on the study light work out of the box. I haven t yet got into defining my own phrases, partly because I know some of the things I want ( What time is it? ) are already added in later Home Assistant versions than the one I m running. Overall I found this initially complicated to setup given my self-imposed constraints about actually understanding the building blocks and compiling them myself, but I ve been pretty impressed with the work that s gone into it all. Next step, running a voice satellite on a Debian box.

Guido G nther: Free Software Activities April 2025

Another short status update of what happened on my side last month. Notable might be the Cell Broadcast support for Qualcomm SoCs, the rest is smaller fixes and QoL improvements. phosh phoc phosh-mobile-settings pfs feedbackd feedbackd-device-themes gmobile Debian git-buildpackage wlroots ModemManager Libqmi gnome-clocks gnome-calls qmi-parse-kernel-dump xwayland-run osmo-cbc phosh-nightly Blog posts Bugs Reviews This is not code by me but reviews on other peoples code. The list is (as usual) slightly incomplete. Thanks for the contributions! Help Development If you want to support my work see donations. Comments? Join the Fediverse thread

Russ Allbery: Review: Beyond Pain

Review: Beyond Pain, by Kit Rocha
Series: Beyond #3
Publisher: Kit Rocha
Copyright: December 2013
ASIN: B00GIA4GN8
Format: Kindle
Pages: 328
Beyond Pain is a science fiction dystopian erotic romance novel and a direct sequel to Beyond Control. Following the romance series convention, each book features new protagonists who were supporting characters in the previous book. You could probably start here if you wanted, but there are significant spoilers here for earlier books in the series. I read this book as part of the Beyond Series Bundle (Books 1-3), which is what the sidebar information is for. Six has had a brutally hard life. She was rescued from an awful situation in a previous book and is now lurking around the edges of the Sector Four gang, oddly fascinated (as are we all) with their constant sexuality and trying to decide if she wants to, and can, be part of their world. Bren is one of the few people she lets get close: a huge bruiser who likes cage fights and pain but treats Six with a protective, careful respect that she finds comforting. This book is the story of Six and Bren getting to the bottom of each other's psychological hangups while the O'Kanes start taking over Six's former sector. Yes, as threatened, I read another entry in the dystopian erotica series because I keep wondering how these people will fuck their way into a revolution. This is not happening very quickly, but it seems obvious that is the direction the series is going. It's been a while since I've reviewed one of these, so here's another variation of the massive disclaimer: I think erotica is harder to review than any other genre because what people like is so intensely personal and individual. This is not even an attempt at an erotica review. I'm both wholly unqualified and also less interested in that part of the book, which should lead you to question my reading choices since that's a good half of the book. Rather, I'm reading these somewhat for the plot and mostly for the vibes. This is not the most competent collection of individuals, and to the extent that they are, it's mostly because the men (who are, as a rule, charismatic but rather dim) are willing to listen to the women. What they are good at is communication, or rather, they're good about banging their heads (and other parts) against communication barriers until they figure out a way around them. Part of this is an obsession with consent that goes quite a bit deeper than the normal simplistic treatment. When you spend this much time trying to understand what other people want, you have to spend a lot of time communicating about sex, and in these books that means spending a lot of time communicating about everything else as well. They are also obsessively loyal and understand the merits of both collective action and in making space for people to do the things that they are the best at, while still insisting that people contribute when they can. On the surface, the O'Kanes are a dictatorship, but they're run more like a high-functioning collaboration. Dallas leads because Dallas is good at playing the role of leader (and listening to Lex), which is refreshingly contrary to how things work in the real world right now. I want to be clear that not only is this erotica, this is not the sort of erotica where there's a stand-alone plot that is periodically interrupted by vaguely-motivated sex scenes that you can skim past. These people use sex to communicate, and therefore most of the important exchanges in the book are in the middle of a sex scene. This is going to make this novel, and this series, very much not to the taste of a lot of people, and I cannot be emphatic enough about that warning. But, also, this is such a fascinating inversion. It's common in media for the surface plot of the story to be full of sexual tension, sometimes to the extent that the story is just a metaphor for the sex that the characters want to have. This is the exact opposite of that: The sex is a metaphor for everything else that's going on in the story. These people quite literally fuck their way out of their communication problems, and not in an obvious or cringy way. It's weirdly fascinating? It's also possible that my reaction to this series is so unusual as to not be shared by a single other reader. Anyway, the setup in this story is that Six has major trust issues and Bren is slowly and carefully trying to win her trust. It's a classic hurt/comfort setup, and if that had played out in the way that this story often does, Bren would have taken the role of the gentle hero and Six the role of the person he rescued. That is not at all where this story goes. Six doesn't need comfort; Six needs self-confidence and the ability to demand what she wants, and although the way Beyond Pain gets her there is a little ham-handed, it mostly worked for me. As with Beyond Shame, I felt like the moral of the story is that the O'Kane men are just bright enough to stop doing stupid things at the last possible moment. I think Beyond Pain worked a bit better than the previous book because Bren is not quite as dim as Dallas, so the reader doesn't have to suffer through quite as many stupid decisions. The erotica continues to mostly (although not entirely) follow traditional gender roles, with dangerous men and women who like attention. Presumably most people are reading these books for the sex, which I am wholly unqualified to review. For whatever it's worth, the physical descriptions are too mechanical for me, too obsessed with the precise structural assemblage of parts in novel configurations. I am not recommending (or disrecommending) these books, for a whole host of reasons. But I think the authors deserve to be rewarded for understanding that sex can be communication and that good communication about difficult topics is inherently interesting in a way that (at least for me) transcends the erotica. I bet I'm going to pick up another one of these about a year from now because I'm still thinking about these people and am still curious about how they are going to succeed. Followed by Beyond Temptation, an interstitial novella. The next novel is Beyond Jealousy. Rating: 6 out of 10

30 April 2025

Simon Josefsson: Building Debian in a GitLab Pipeline

After thinking about multi-stage Debian rebuilds I wanted to implement the idea. Recall my illustration:
Earlier I rebuilt all packages that make up the difference between Ubuntu and Trisquel. It turned out to be a 42% bit-by-bit identical similarity. To check the generality of my approach, I rebuilt the difference between Debian and Devuan too. That was the debdistreproduce project. It only had to orchestrate building up to around 500 packages for each distribution and per architecture. Differential reproducible rebuilds doesn t give you the full picture: it ignore the shared package between the distribution, which make up over 90% of the packages. So I felt a desire to do full archive rebuilds. The motivation is that in order to trust Trisquel binary packages, I need to trust Ubuntu binary packages (because that make up 90% of the Trisquel packages), and many of those Ubuntu binaries are derived from Debian source packages. How to approach all of this? Last year I created the debdistrebuild project, and did top-50 popcon package rebuilds of Debian bullseye, bookworm, trixie, and Ubuntu noble and jammy, on a mix of amd64 and arm64. The amount of reproducibility was lower. Primarily the differences were caused by using different build inputs. Last year I spent (too much) time creating a mirror of snapshot.debian.org, to be able to have older packages available for use as build inputs. I have two copies hosted at different datacentres for reliability and archival safety. At the time, snapshot.d.o had serious rate-limiting making it pretty unusable for massive rebuild usage or even basic downloads. Watching the multi-month download complete last year had a meditating effect. The completion of my snapshot download co-incided with me realizing something about the nature of rebuilding packages. Let me below give a recap of the idempotent rebuilds idea, because it motivate my work to build all of Debian from a GitLab pipeline. One purpose for my effort is to be able to trust the binaries that I use on my laptop. I believe that without building binaries from source code, there is no practically feasible way to trust binaries. To trust any binary you receive, you can de-assemble the bits and audit the assembler instructions for the CPU you will execute it on. Doing that on a OS-wide level this is unpractical. A more practical approach is to audit the source code, and then confirm that the binary is 100% bit-by-bit identical to one that you can build yourself (from the same source) on your own trusted toolchain. This is similar to a reproducible build. My initial goal with debdistrebuild was to get to 100% bit-by-bit identical rebuilds, and then I would have trustworthy binaries. Or so I thought. This also appears to be the goal of reproduce.debian.net. They want to reproduce the official Debian binaries. That is a worthy and important goal. They achieve this by building packages using the build inputs that were used to build the binaries. The build inputs are earlier versions of Debian packages (not necessarily from any public Debian release), archived at snapshot.debian.org. I realized that these rebuilds would be not be sufficient for me: it doesn t solve the problem of how to trust the toolchain. Let s assume the reproduce.debian.net effort succeeds and is able to 100% bit-by-bit identically reproduce the official Debian binaries. Which appears to be within reach. To have trusted binaries we would only have to audit the source code for the latest version of the packages AND audit the tool chain used. There is no escaping from auditing all the source code that s what I think we all would prefer to focus on, to be able to improve upstream source code. The trouble is about auditing the tool chain. With the Reproduce.debian.net approach, that is a recursive problem back to really ancient Debian packages, some of them which may no longer build or work, or even be legally distributable. Auditing all those old packages is a LARGER effort than auditing all current packages! Doing auditing of old packages is of less use to making contributions: those releases are old, and chances are any improvements have already been implemented and released. Or that improvements are no longer applicable because the projects evolved since the earlier version. See where this is going now? I reached the conclusion that reproducing official binaries using the same build inputs is not what I m interested in. I want to be able to build the binaries that I use from source using a toolchain that I can also build from source. And preferably that all of this is using latest version of all packages, so that I can contribute and send patches for them, to improve matters. The toolchain that Reproduce.Debian.Net is using is not trustworthy unless all those ancient packages are audited or rebuilt bit-by-bit identically, and I don t see any practical way forward to achieve that goal. Nor have I seen anyone working on that problem. It is possible to do, though, but I think there are simpler ways to achieve the same goal. My approach to reach trusted binaries on my laptop appears to be a three-step effort: How to go about achieving this? Today s Debian build architecture is something that lack transparency and end-user control. The build environment and signing keys are managed by, or influenced by, unidentified people following undocumented (or at least not public) security procedures, under unknown legal jurisdictions. I always wondered why none of the Debian-derivates have adopted a modern GitDevOps-style approach as a method to improve binary build transparency, maybe I missed some project? If you want to contribute to some GitHub or GitLab project, you click the Fork button and get a CI/CD pipeline running which rebuild artifacts for the project. This makes it easy for people to contribute, and you get good QA control because the entire chain up until its artifact release are produced and tested. At least in theory. Many projects are behind on this, but it seems like this is a useful goal for all projects. This is also liberating: all users are able to reproduce artifacts. There is no longer any magic involved in preparing release artifacts. As we ve seen with many software supply-chain security incidents for the past years, where the magic is involved is a good place to introduce malicious code. To allow me to continue with my experiment, I thought the simplest way forward was to setup a GitDevOps-centric and user-controllable way to build the entire Debian archive. Let me introduce the debdistbuild project. Debdistbuild is a re-usable GitLab CI/CD pipeline, similar to the Salsa CI pipeline. It provide one build job definition and one deploy job definition. The pipeline can run on GitLab.org Shared Runners or you can set up your own runners, like my GitLab riscv64 runner setup. I have concerns about relying on GitLab (both as software and as a service), but my ideas are easy to transfer to some other GitDevSecOps setup such as Codeberg.org. Self-hosting GitLab, including self-hosted runners, is common today, and Debian rely increasingly on Salsa for this. All of the build infrastructure could be hosted on Salsa eventually. The build job is simple. From within an official Debian container image build packages using dpkg-buildpackage essentially by invoking the following commands. 
sed -i 's/ deb$/ deb deb-src/' /etc/apt/sources.list.d/*.sources
apt-get -o Acquire::Check-Valid-Until=false update
apt-get dist-upgrade -q -y
apt-get install -q -y --no-install-recommends build-essential fakeroot
env DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive \
    apt-get build-dep -y --only-source $PACKAGE=$VERSION
useradd -m build
DDB_BUILDDIR=/build/reproducible-path
chgrp build $DDB_BUILDDIR
chmod g+w $DDB_BUILDDIR
su build -c "apt-get source --only-source $PACKAGE=$VERSION" > ../$PACKAGE_$VERSION.build
cd $DDB_BUILDDIR
su build -c "dpkg-buildpackage"
cd ..
mkdir out
mv -v $(find $DDB_BUILDDIR -maxdepth 1 -type f) out/
The deploy job is also simple. It commit artifacts to a Git project using Git-LFS to handle large objects, essentially something like this: 
if ! grep -q '^pool/**' .gitattributes; then
    git lfs track 'pool/**'
    git add .gitattributes
    git commit -m"Track pool/* with Git-LFS." .gitattributes
fi
POOLDIR=$(if test "$(echo "$PACKAGE"   cut -c1-3)" = "lib"; then C=4; else C=1; fi; echo "$DDB_PACKAGE"   cut -c1-$C)
mkdir -pv pool/main/$POOLDIR/
rm -rfv pool/main/$POOLDIR/$PACKAGE
mv -v out pool/main/$POOLDIR/$PACKAGE
git add pool
git commit -m"Add $PACKAGE." -m "$CI_JOB_URL" -m "$VERSION" -a
if test "$ DDB_GIT_TOKEN:- " = ""; then
    echo "SKIP: Skipping git push due to missing DDB_GIT_TOKEN (see README)."
else
    git push -o ci.skip
fi
That s it! The actual implementation is a bit longer, but the major difference is for log and error handling. You may review the source code of the base Debdistbuild pipeline definition, the base Debdistbuild script and the rc.d/-style scripts implementing the build.d/ process and the deploy.d/ commands. There was one complication related to artifact size. GitLab.org job artifacts are limited to 1GB. Several packages in Debian produce artifacts larger than this. What to do? GitLab supports up to 5GB for files stored in its package registry, but this limit is too close for my comfort, having seen some multi-GB artifacts already. I made the build job optionally upload artifacts to a S3 bucket using SHA256 hashed file hierarchy. I m using Hetzner Object Storage but there are many S3 providers around, including self-hosting options. This hierarchy is compatible with the Git-LFS .git/lfs/object/ hierarchy, and it is easy to setup a separate Git-LFS object URL to allow Git-LFS object downloads from the S3 bucket. In this mode, only Git-LFS stubs are pushed to the git repository. It should have no trouble handling the large number of files, since I have earlier experience with Apt mirrors in Git-LFS. To speed up job execution, and to guarantee a stable build environment, instead of installing build-essential packages on every build job execution, I prepare some build container images. The project responsible for this is tentatively called stage-N-containers. Right now it create containers suitable for rolling builds of trixie on amd64, arm64, and riscv64, and a container intended for as use the stage-0 based on the 20250407 docker images of bookworm on amd64 and arm64 using the snapshot.d.o 20250407 archive. Or actually, I m using snapshot-cloudflare.d.o because of download speed and reliability. I would have prefered to use my own snapshot mirror with Hetzner bandwidth, alas the Debian snapshot team have concerns about me publishing the list of (SHA1 hash) filenames publicly and I haven t been bothered to set up non-public access. Debdistbuild has built around 2.500 packages for bookworm on amd64 and bookworm on arm64. To confirm the generality of my approach, it also build trixie on amd64, trixie on arm64 and trixie on riscv64. The riscv64 builds are all on my own hosted runners. For amd64 and arm64 my own runners are only used for large packages where the GitLab.com shared runners run into the 3 hour time limit. What s next in this venture? Some ideas include: What do you think?

28 April 2025

Sergio Talens-Oliag: ArgoCD Autopilot

For a long time I ve been wanting to try GitOps tools, but I haven t had the chance to try them for real on the projects I was working on. As now I have some spare time I ve decided I m going to play a little with Argo CD, Flux and Kluctl to test them and be able to use one of them in a real project in the future if it looks appropriate. On this post I will use Argo-CD Autopilot to install argocd on a k3d local cluster installed using OpenTofu to test the autopilot approach of managing argocd and test the tool (as it manages argocd using a git repository it can be used to test argocd as well).

Installing tools locally with arkadeRecently I ve been using the arkade tool to install kubernetes related applications on Linux servers and containers, I usually get the applications with it and install them on the /usr/local/bin folder. For this post I ve created a simple script that checks if the tools I ll be using are available and installs them on the $HOME/.arkade/bin folder if missing (I m assuming that docker is already available, as it is not installable with arkade): 
#!/bin/sh
# TOOLS LIST
ARKADE_APPS="argocd argocd-autopilot k3d kubectl sops tofu"
# Add the arkade binary directory to the path if missing
case ":$ PATH :" in
  *:"$ HOME /.arkade/bin":*) ;;
  *) export PATH="$ PATH :$ HOME /.arkade/bin" ;;
esac
# Install or update arkade
if command -v arkade >/dev/null; then
  echo "Trying to update the arkade application"
  sudo arkade update
else
  echo "Installing the arkade application"
  curl -sLS https://get.arkade.dev   sudo sh
fi
echo ""
echo "Installing tools with arkade"
echo ""
for app in $ARKADE_APPS; do
  app_path="$(command -v $app)"   true
  if [ "$app_path" ]; then
    echo "The application '$app' already available on '$app_path'"
  else
    arkade get "$app"
  fi
done
cat <<EOF
Add the ~/.arkade/bin directory to your PATH if tools have been installed there
EOF
The rest of scripts will add the binary directory to the PATH if missing to make sure things work if something was installed there.

Creating a k3d cluster with opentofuAlthough using k3d directly will be a good choice for the creation of the cluster, I m using tofu to do it because that will probably be the tool used to do it if we were working with Cloud Platforms like AWS or Google. The main.tf file is as follows: 
terraform  
  required_providers  
    k3d =  
      source  = "moio/k3d"
      version = "0.0.12"
     
    sops =  
      source = "carlpett/sops"
      version = "1.2.0"
     
   
 
data "sops_file" "secrets"  
    source_file = "secrets.yaml"
 
resource "k3d_cluster" "argocd_cluster"  
  name    = "argocd"
  servers = 1
  agents  = 2
  image   = "rancher/k3s:v1.31.5-k3s1"
  network = "argocd"
  token   = data.sops_file.secrets.data["token"]
  port  
    host_port      = 8443
    container_port = 443
    node_filters = [
      "loadbalancer",
    ]
   
  k3d  
    disable_load_balancer     = false
    disable_image_volume      = false
   
  kubeconfig  
    update_default_kubeconfig = true
    switch_current_context    = true
   
  runtime  
    gpu_request = "all"
The k3d configuration is quite simple, as I plan to use the default traefik ingress controller with TLS I publish the 443 port on the hosts 8443 port, I ll explain how I add a valid certificate on the next step. I ve prepared the following script to initialize and apply the changes: 
#!/bin/sh
set -e
# VARIABLES
# Default token for the argocd cluster
K3D_CLUSTER_TOKEN="argocdToken"
# Relative PATH to install the k3d cluster using terr-iaform
K3D_TF_RELPATH="k3d-tf"
# Secrets yaml file
SECRETS_YAML="secrets.yaml"
# Relative PATH to the workdir from the script directory
WORK_DIR_RELPATH=".."
# Compute WORKDIR
SCRIPT="$(readlink -f "$0")"
SCRIPT_DIR="$(dirname "$SCRIPT")"
WORK_DIR="$(readlink -f "$SCRIPT_DIR/$WORK_DIR_RELPATH")"
# Update the PATH to add the arkade bin directory
# Add the arkade binary directory to the path if missing
case ":$ PATH :" in
  *:"$ HOME /.arkade/bin":*) ;;
  *) export PATH="$ PATH :$ HOME /.arkade/bin" ;;
esac
# Go to the k3d-tf dir
cd "$WORK_DIR/$K3D_TF_RELPATH"   exit 1
# Create secrets.yaml file and encode it with sops if missing
if [ ! -f "$SECRETS_YAML" ]; then
  echo "token: $K3D_CLUSTER_TOKEN" >"$SECRETS_YAML"
  sops encrypt -i "$SECRETS_YAML"
fi
# Initialize terraform
tofu init
# Apply the configuration
tofu apply

Adding a wildcard certificate to the k3d ingressAs an optional step, after creating the k3d cluster I m going to add a default wildcard certificate for the traefik ingress server to be able to use everything with HTTPS without certificate issues. As I manage my own DNS domain I ve created the lo.mixinet.net and *.lo.mixinet.net DNS entries on my public and private DNS servers (both return 127.0.0.1 and ::1) and I ve created a TLS certificate for both entries using Let s Encrypt with Certbot. The certificate is updated automatically on one of my servers and when I need it I copy the contents of the fullchain.pem and privkey.pem files from the /etc/letsencrypt/live/lo.mixinet.net server directory to the local files lo.mixinet.net.crt and lo.mixinet.net.key. After copying the files I run the following file to install or update the certificate and configure it as the default for traefik: 
#!/bin/sh
# Script to update the
secret="lo-mixinet-net-ingress-cert"
cert="$ 1:-lo.mixinet.net.crt "
key="$ 2:-lo.mixinet.net.key "
if [ -f "$cert" ] && [ -f "$key" ]; then
  kubectl -n kube-system create secret tls $secret \
    --key=$key \
    --cert=$cert \
    --dry-run=client --save-config -o yaml    kubectl apply -f -
  kubectl apply -f - << EOF
apiVersion: traefik.containo.us/v1alpha1
kind: TLSStore
metadata:
  name: default
  namespace: kube-system
spec:
  defaultCertificate:
    secretName: $secret
EOF
else
  cat <<EOF
To add or update the traefik TLS certificate the following files are needed:
- cert: '$cert'
- key: '$key'
Note: you can pass the paths as arguments to this script.
EOF
fi
Once it is installed if I connect to https://foo.lo.mixinet.net:8443/ I get a 404 but the certificate is valid.

Installing argocd with argocd-autopilot

Creating a repository and a token for autopilotI ll be using a project on my forgejo instance to manage argocd, the repository I ve created is on the URL https://forgejo.mixinet.net/blogops/argocd and I ve created a private user named argocd that only has write access to that repository. Logging as the argocd user on forgejo I ve created a token with permission to read and write repositories that I ve saved on my pass password store on the mixinet.net/argocd@forgejo/repository-write entry.

Bootstrapping the installationTo bootstrap the installation I ve used the following script (it uses the previous GIT_REPO and GIT_TOKEN values): 
#!/bin/sh
set -e
# VARIABLES
# Relative PATH to the workdir from the script directory
WORK_DIR_RELPATH=".."
# Compute WORKDIR
SCRIPT="$(readlink -f "$0")"
SCRIPT_DIR="$(dirname "$SCRIPT")"
WORK_DIR="$(readlink -f "$SCRIPT_DIR/$WORK_DIR_RELPATH")"
# Update the PATH to add the arkade bin directory
# Add the arkade binary directory to the path if missing
case ":$ PATH :" in
  *:"$ HOME /.arkade/bin":*) ;;
  *) export PATH="$ PATH :$ HOME /.arkade/bin" ;;
esac
# Go to the working directory
cd "$WORK_DIR"   exit 1
# Set GIT variables
if [ -z "$GIT_REPO" ]; then
  export GIT_REPO="https://forgejo.mixinet.net/blogops/argocd.git"
fi
if [ -z "$GIT_TOKEN" ]; then
  GIT_TOKEN="$(pass mixinet.net/argocd@forgejo/repository-write)"
  export GIT_TOKEN
fi
argocd-autopilot repo bootstrap --provider gitea
The output of the execution is as follows: 
  bin/argocd-bootstrap.sh
INFO cloning repo: https://forgejo.mixinet.net/blogops/argocd.git
INFO empty repository, initializing a new one with specified remote
INFO using revision: "", installation path: ""
INFO using context: "k3d-argocd", namespace: "argocd"
INFO applying bootstrap manifests to cluster...
namespace/argocd created
customresourcedefinition.apiextensions.k8s.io/applications.argoproj.io created
customresourcedefinition.apiextensions.k8s.io/applicationsets.argoproj.io created
customresourcedefinition.apiextensions.k8s.io/appprojects.argoproj.io created
serviceaccount/argocd-application-controller created
serviceaccount/argocd-applicationset-controller created
serviceaccount/argocd-dex-server created
serviceaccount/argocd-notifications-controller created
serviceaccount/argocd-redis created
serviceaccount/argocd-repo-server created
serviceaccount/argocd-server created
role.rbac.authorization.k8s.io/argocd-application-controller created
role.rbac.authorization.k8s.io/argocd-applicationset-controller created
role.rbac.authorization.k8s.io/argocd-dex-server created
role.rbac.authorization.k8s.io/argocd-notifications-controller created
role.rbac.authorization.k8s.io/argocd-redis created
role.rbac.authorization.k8s.io/argocd-server created
clusterrole.rbac.authorization.k8s.io/argocd-application-controller created
clusterrole.rbac.authorization.k8s.io/argocd-applicationset-controller created
clusterrole.rbac.authorization.k8s.io/argocd-server created
rolebinding.rbac.authorization.k8s.io/argocd-application-controller created
rolebinding.rbac.authorization.k8s.io/argocd-applicationset-controller created
rolebinding.rbac.authorization.k8s.io/argocd-dex-server created
rolebinding.rbac.authorization.k8s.io/argocd-notifications-controller created
rolebinding.rbac.authorization.k8s.io/argocd-redis created
rolebinding.rbac.authorization.k8s.io/argocd-server created
clusterrolebinding.rbac.authorization.k8s.io/argocd-application-controller created
clusterrolebinding.rbac.authorization.k8s.io/argocd-applicationset-controller created
clusterrolebinding.rbac.authorization.k8s.io/argocd-server created
configmap/argocd-cm created
configmap/argocd-cmd-params-cm created
configmap/argocd-gpg-keys-cm created
configmap/argocd-notifications-cm created
configmap/argocd-rbac-cm created
configmap/argocd-ssh-known-hosts-cm created
configmap/argocd-tls-certs-cm created
secret/argocd-notifications-secret created
secret/argocd-secret created
service/argocd-applicationset-controller created
service/argocd-dex-server created
service/argocd-metrics created
service/argocd-notifications-controller-metrics created
service/argocd-redis created
service/argocd-repo-server created
service/argocd-server created
service/argocd-server-metrics created
deployment.apps/argocd-applicationset-controller created
deployment.apps/argocd-dex-server created
deployment.apps/argocd-notifications-controller created
deployment.apps/argocd-redis created
deployment.apps/argocd-repo-server created
deployment.apps/argocd-server created
statefulset.apps/argocd-application-controller created
networkpolicy.networking.k8s.io/argocd-application-controller-network-policy created
networkpolicy.networking.k8s.io/argocd-applicationset-controller-network-policy created
networkpolicy.networking.k8s.io/argocd-dex-server-network-policy created
networkpolicy.networking.k8s.io/argocd-notifications-controller-network-policy created
networkpolicy.networking.k8s.io/argocd-redis-network-policy created
networkpolicy.networking.k8s.io/argocd-repo-server-network-policy created
networkpolicy.networking.k8s.io/argocd-server-network-policy created
secret/autopilot-secret created
INFO pushing bootstrap manifests to repo
INFO applying argo-cd bootstrap application
INFO pushing bootstrap manifests to repo
INFO applying argo-cd bootstrap application
application.argoproj.io/autopilot-bootstrap created
INFO running argocd login to initialize argocd config
Context 'autopilot' updated
INFO argocd initialized. password: XXXXXXX-XXXXXXXX
INFO run:
    kubectl port-forward -n argocd svc/argocd-server 8080:80
Now we have the argocd installed and running, it can be checked using the port-forward and connecting to https://localhost:8080/ (the certificate will be wrong, we are going to fix that in the next step).

Updating the argocd installation in gitNow that we have the application deployed we can clone the argocd repository and edit the deployment to disable TLS for the argocd server (we are going to use TLS termination with traefik and that needs the server running as insecure, see the Argo CD documentation) 
  ssh clone ssh://git@forgejo.mixinet.net/blogops/argocd.git
  cd argocd
  edit bootstrap/argo-cd/kustomization.yaml
  git commit -m 'Disable TLS for the argocd-server'
The changes made to the kustomization.yaml file are the following: 
--- a/bootstrap/argo-cd/kustomization.yaml
+++ b/bootstrap/argo-cd/kustomization.yaml
@@ -11,6 +11,11 @@ configMapGenerator:
         key: git_username
         name: autopilot-secret
   name: argocd-cm
+  # Disable TLS for the Argo Server (see https://argo-cd.readthedocs.io/en/stable/operator-manual/ingress/#traefik-v30)
+- behavior: merge
+  literals:
+  - "server.insecure=true"
+  name: argocd-cmd-params-cm
 kind: Kustomization
 namespace: argocd
 resources:
Once the changes are pushed we sync the argo-cd application manually to make sure they are applied:
argo cd sync
As a test we can download the argocd-cmd-params-cm ConfigMap to make sure everything is OK: 
apiVersion: v1
data:
  server.insecure: "true"
kind: ConfigMap
metadata:
  annotations:
    kubectl.kubernetes.io/last-applied-configuration:  
       "apiVersion":"v1","data": "server.insecure":"true" ,"kind":"ConfigMap","metadata": "annotations": ,"labels": "app.kubernetes.io/instance":"argo-cd","app.kubernetes.io/name":"argocd-cmd-params-cm","app.kubernetes.io/part-of":"argocd" ,"name":"argocd-cmd-params-cm","namespace":"argocd" 
  creationTimestamp: "2025-04-27T17:31:54Z"
  labels:
    app.kubernetes.io/instance: argo-cd
    app.kubernetes.io/name: argocd-cmd-params-cm
    app.kubernetes.io/part-of: argocd
  name: argocd-cmd-params-cm
  namespace: argocd
  resourceVersion: "16731"
  uid: a460638f-1d82-47f6-982c-3017699d5f14
As this simply changes the ConfigMap we have to restart the argocd-server to read it again, to do it we delete the server pods so they are re-created using the updated resource: 
  kubectl delete pods -n argocd -l app.kubernetes.io/name=argocd-server
After doing this the port-forward command is killed automatically, if we run it again the connection to get to the argocd-server has to be done using HTTP instead of HTTPS. Instead of testing that we are going to add an ingress definition to be able to connect to the server using HTTPS and GRPC against the address argocd.lo.mixinet.net using the wildcard TLS certificate we installed earlier. To do it we to edit the bootstrap/argo-cd/kustomization.yaml file to add the ingress_route.yaml file to the deployment: 
--- a/bootstrap/argo-cd/kustomization.yaml
+++ b/bootstrap/argo-cd/kustomization.yaml
@@ -20,3 +20,4 @@ kind: Kustomization
 namespace: argocd
 resources:
 - github.com/argoproj-labs/argocd-autopilot/manifests/base?ref=v0.4.19
+- ingress_route.yaml
The ingress_route.yaml file contents are the following: 
apiVersion: traefik.io/v1alpha1
kind: IngressRoute
metadata:
  name: argocd-server
  namespace: argocd
spec:
  entryPoints:
    - websecure
  routes:
    - kind: Rule
      match: Host( argocd.lo.mixinet.net )
      priority: 10
      services:
        - name: argocd-server
          port: 80
    - kind: Rule
      match: Host( argocd.lo.mixinet.net ) && Header( Content-Type ,  application/grpc )
      priority: 11
      services:
        - name: argocd-server
          port: 80
          scheme: h2c
  tls:
    certResolver: default
After pushing the changes and waiting a little bit the change is applied and we can access the server using HTTPS and GRPC, the first way can be tested from a browser and the GRPC using the command line interface: 
  argocd --grpc-web login argocd.lo.mixinet.net:8443
Username: admin
Password:
'admin:login' logged in successfully
Context 'argocd.lo.mixinet.net:8443' updated
  argocd app list -o name
argocd/argo-cd
argocd/autopilot-bootstrap
argocd/cluster-resources-in-cluster
argocd/root
So things are working fine and that is all on this post, folks!

Freexian Collaborators: Monthly report about Debian Long Term Support, March 2025 (by Roberto C. S nchez)

Like each month, have a look at the work funded by Freexian s Debian LTS offering.

Debian LTS contributors In March, 20 contributors have been paid to work on Debian LTS, their reports are available:
  • Adrian Bunk did 51.5h (out of 0.0h assigned and 51.5h from previous period).
  • Andreas Henriksson did 20.0h (out of 20.0h assigned).
  • Andrej Shadura did 6.0h (out of 10.0h assigned), thus carrying over 4.0h to the next month.
  • Bastien Roucari s did 20.0h (out of 20.0h assigned).
  • Ben Hutchings did 12.0h (out of 12.0h assigned and 12.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 12.0h to the next month.
  • Chris Lamb did 18.0h (out of 18.0h assigned).
  • Daniel Leidert did 26.0h (out of 23.0h assigned and 3.0h from previous period).
  • Emilio Pozuelo Monfort did 37.0h (out of 36.5h assigned and 0.75h from previous period), thus carrying over 0.25h to the next month.
  • Guilhem Moulin did 8.25h (out of 11.0h assigned and 9.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 11.75h to the next month.
  • Jochen Sprickerhof did 18.0h (out of 24.25h assigned and 3.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 9.25h to the next month.
  • Lee Garrett did 10.25h (out of 0.0h assigned and 42.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 31.75h to the next month.
  • Lucas Kanashiro did 4.0h (out of 0.0h assigned and 56.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 52.0h to the next month.
  • Markus Koschany did 27.25h (out of 27.25h assigned).
  • Roberto C. S nchez did 8.25h (out of 7.0h assigned and 17.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 15.75h to the next month.
  • Santiago Ruano Rinc n did 17.5h (out of 19.75h assigned and 5.25h from previous period), thus carrying over 7.5h to the next month.
  • Sean Whitton did 7.0h (out of 7.0h assigned).
  • Sylvain Beucler did 32.0h (out of 31.0h assigned and 1.25h from previous period), thus carrying over 0.25h to the next month.
  • Thorsten Alteholz did 11.0h (out of 11.0h assigned).
  • Tobias Frost did 7.75h (out of 12.0h assigned), thus carrying over 4.25h to the next month.
  • Utkarsh Gupta did 15.0h (out of 15.0h assigned).

Evolution of the situation In March, we have released 31 DLAs.
  • Notable security updates:
    • linux-6.1 (1 2)and linux, prepared by Ben Hutchings, fixed an extensive list of vulnerabilities
    • firefox-esr, prepared by Emilio Pozuelo Monfort, fixed a variety of vulnerabilities
    • intel-microcode, prepared by Tobias Frost, fixed several local privilege escalation, denial of service, and information disclosure vulnerabilities
    • vim, prepared by Sean Whitton, fixed a multitude of vulnerabilities, including many application crashes, buffer overflows, and out-of-bounds reads
The recent trend of contributions from contributors external to the formal LTS team has continued. LTS contributor Sylvain Beucler reviewed and facilitated an update to openvpn proposed by Aquila Macedo, resulting in the publication of DLA 4079-1. Thanks a lot to Aquila for preparing the update. The LTS Team continues to make contributions to the current stable Debian release, Debian 12 (codename bookworm ). LTS contributor Bastien Roucari s prepared a stable upload of krb5 to ensure that fixes made in the LTS release, Debian 11 (codename bullseye ) were also made available to stable users. Additional stable updates, for tomcat10 and jetty9, were prepared by LTS contributor Markus Koschany. And, finally, LTS contributor Utkarsh Gupta prepared stable updates for rails and ruby-rack. LTS contributor Emilio Pozuelo Monfort has continued his ongoing improvements to the Debian security tracker and its associated tooling, making the data contained in the tracker more reliable and easing interaction with it. The ckeditor3 package, which has been EOL by upstream for some time, is still depended upon by the PHP Horde packages in Debian. Sylvain, along with Bastien, did monumental work in coordinating with maintainers, security team fellows, and other Debian teams, to formally declare the EOL of the ckeditor3 package in Debian 11 and in Debian 12. Additionally, as a result of this work Sylvain has worked towards the removal of ckeditor3 as a dependency by other packages in order to facilitate the complete removal of ckeditor3 from all future Debian releases.

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

24 April 2025

Dirk Eddelbuettel: RQuantLib 0.4.26 on CRAN: Small Updates

A new minor release 0.4.26 of RQuantLib arrived on CRAN this morning, and has just now been uploaded to Debian too. QuantLib is a rather comprehensice free/open-source library for quantitative finance. RQuantLib connects (some parts of) it to the R environment and language, and has been part of CRAN for nearly twenty-two years (!!) as it was one of the first packages I uploaded to CRAN. This release of RQuantLib brings updated Windows build support taking advantage of updated Rtools, thanks to a PR by Tomas Kalibera. We also updated expected results for three of the schedule tests (in a way that is dependent on the upstream library version) as the just-released QuantLib 1.38 differs slightly.

Changes in RQuantLib version 0.4.26 (2025-04-24)
  • Use system QuantLib (if found by pkg-config) on Windows too (Tomas Kalibera in #192)
  • Accommodate same test changes for schedules in QuantLib 1.38

Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is also a diffstat report for the this release. As always, more detailed information is on the RQuantLib page. Questions, comments etc should go to the rquantlib-devel mailing list. Issue tickets can be filed at the GitHub repo.

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

Jonathan McDowell: Local Voice Assistant Step 1: An ATOM Echo voice satellite

Back when I setup my home automation I ended up with one piece that used an external service: Amazon Alexa. I d rather not have done this, but voice control is extremely convenient, both for us, and guests. Since then Home Assistant has done a lot of work in developing the capability of a local voice assistant - 2023 was their Year of Voice. I ve had brief looks at this in the past, but never quite had the time to dig into setting it up, and was put off by the fact a lot of the setup instructions were just Download our prebuilt components . While I admire the efforts to get Home Assistant fully packaged for Debian I accept that s a tricky proposition, and settle for running it in a venv on a Debian stable container. Voice requires a lot more binary components, and I want to have voice satellites in more than one location, so I set about trying to understand a bit better what I was deploying, and actually building the binary bits myself. This is the start of a write-up of that. I ll break it into a bunch of posts, trying to cover one bit in each, because otherwise this will get massive. Let s start with some requirements: My house server is an AMD Ryzen 7 5700G, so my expectation was that I d have enough local processing power to be able to do this. That turned out to be a valid assumption - speech to text really has come a long way in recent years. I m still running Home Assistant 2024.3.3 - the last one that supports (but complains about) Python 3.11. Trixie has started the freeze process, so once it releases I ll look at updating the HA install. For now what I have has turned out to be Good Enough, but I know there have been improvements upstream I m missing. Finally, before I get into the details, I should point out that if you just want to get started with a voice assistant on Home Assistant and don t care about what s under the hood, there are a bunch of more user friendly details on Home Assistant s site itself, and they have pre-built images you can just deploy. My first step was sorting out a voice satellite . This is the device that actually has a microphone and speaker and communicates with the main Home Assistant setup. I d seen the post about a $13 voice assistant, and as a result had an ATOM Echo sitting on my desk I hadn t got around to setting up. Here, we ignore a bit about delving into exactly what s going on under the hood, even if we re compiling locally. This is a constrained embedded device and while I m familiar with the ESP32 IDF build system I just accepted that using ESPHome and letting it do it s thing was the quickest way to get up and running. It is possible to do this all via the web with a pre-built image, but I wanted to change the wake word to Hey Jarvis rather than the default Okay Nabu , and that was a good reason to bother doing a local build. We ll get into actually building a voice satellite on Debian in later posts. I started with the default upstream assistant config and tweaked it a little for my setup:
diff of my configuration tweaks 
$ diff -u m5stack-atom-echo.yaml assistant.yaml
--- m5stack-atom-echo.yaml    2025-04-18 13:41:21.812766112 +0100
+++ assistant.yaml  2025-01-20 17:33:24.918585244 +0000
@@ -1,7 +1,7 @@
 substitutions:
-  name: m5stack-atom-echo
+  name: study-atom-echo
   friendly_name: M5Stack Atom Echo
-  micro_wake_word_model: okay_nabu  # alexa, hey_jarvis, hey_mycroft are also supported
+  micro_wake_word_model: hey_jarvis  # alexa, hey_jarvis, hey_mycroft are also supported
 
 esphome:
   name: $ name 
@@ -16,15 +16,26 @@
     version: 4.4.8
     platform_version: 5.4.0
 
+# Enable logging
 logger:
+
+# Enable Home Assistant API
 api:
+  encryption:
+    key: "TGlrZVRoaXNJc1JlYWxseUl0Rm9vbGlzaFBlb3BsZSE="
 
 ota:
   - platform: esphome
-    id: ota_esphome
+    password: "itsnotarealthing"
 
 wifi:
+  ssid: "My Wifi Goes Here"
+  password: "AndThePasswordGoesHere"
+
+  # Enable fallback hotspot (captive portal) in case wifi connection fails
   ap:
+    ssid: "Study-Atom-Echo Fallback Hotspot"
+    password: "ThisIsRandom"
 
 captive_portal:

(I note that the current upstream config has moved on a bit since I first did this, but I double checked the above instructions still work at the time of writing. I end up pinning ESPHome to the right version below due to that.) It turns out to be fairly easy to setup ESPHome in a venv and get it to build + flash the image for you:
Instructions for building + flashing ESPHome to ATOM Echo 
noodles@sevai:~$ python3 -m venv esphome-atom-echo
noodles@sevai:~$ . esphome-atom-echo/bin/activate
(esphome-atom-echo) noodles@sevai:~$ cd esphome-atom-echo/
(esphome-atom-echo) noodles@sevai:~/esphome-atom-echo$  pip install esphome==2024.12.4
Collecting esphome==2024.12.4
  Using cached esphome-2024.12.4-py3-none-any.whl (4.1 MB)
 
Successfully installed FontTools-4.57.0 PyYAML-6.0.2 appdirs-1.4.4 attrs-25.3.0 bottle-0.13.2 defcon-0.12.1 esphome-2024.12.4 esphome-dashboard-20241217.1 freetype-py-2.5.1 fs-2.4.16 gflanguages-0.7.3 glyphsLib-6.10.1 glyphsets-1.0.0 openstep-plist-0.5.0 pillow-10.4.0 platformio-6.1.16 protobuf-3.20.3 puremagic-1.27 ufoLib2-0.17.1 unicodedata2-16.0.0
(esphome-atom-echo) noodles@sevai:~/esphome-atom-echo$ esphome compile assistant.yaml 
INFO ESPHome 2024.12.4
INFO Reading configuration assistant.yaml...
INFO Updating https://github.com/esphome/esphome.git@pull/5230/head
INFO Updating https://github.com/jesserockz/esphome-components.git@None
 
Linking .pioenvs/study-atom-echo/firmware.elf
/home/noodles/.platformio/packages/toolchain-xtensa-esp32@8.4.0+2021r2-patch5/bin/../lib/gcc/xtensa-esp32-elf/8.4.0/../../../../xtensa-esp32-elf/bin/ld: missing --end-group; added as last command line option
RAM:   [=         ]  10.6% (used 34632 bytes from 327680 bytes)
Flash: [========  ]  79.8% (used 1463813 bytes from 1835008 bytes)
Building .pioenvs/study-atom-echo/firmware.bin
Creating esp32 image...
Successfully created esp32 image.
esp32_create_combined_bin([".pioenvs/study-atom-echo/firmware.bin"], [".pioenvs/study-atom-echo/firmware.elf"])
Wrote 0x176fb0 bytes to file /home/noodles/esphome-atom-echo/.esphome/build/study-atom-echo/.pioenvs/study-atom-echo/firmware.factory.bin, ready to flash to offset 0x0
esp32_copy_ota_bin([".pioenvs/study-atom-echo/firmware.bin"], [".pioenvs/study-atom-echo/firmware.elf"])
==================================================================================== [SUCCESS] Took 130.57 seconds ====================================================================================
INFO Successfully compiled program.
(esphome-atom-echo) noodles@sevai:~/esphome-atom-echo$ esphome upload --device /dev/serial/by-id/usb-Hades2001_M5stack_9552AF8367-if00-port0 assistant.yaml 
INFO ESPHome 2024.12.4
INFO Reading configuration assistant.yaml...
INFO Updating https://github.com/esphome/esphome.git@pull/5230/head
INFO Updating https://github.com/jesserockz/esphome-components.git@None
 
INFO Upload with baud rate 460800 failed. Trying again with baud rate 115200.
esptool.py v4.7.0
Serial port /dev/serial/by-id/usb-Hades2001_M5stack_9552AF8367-if00-port0
Connecting....
Chip is ESP32-PICO-D4 (revision v1.1)
Features: WiFi, BT, Dual Core, 240MHz, Embedded Flash, VRef calibration in efuse, Coding Scheme None
Crystal is 40MHz
MAC: 64:b7:08:8a:1b:c0
Uploading stub...
Running stub...
Stub running...
Configuring flash size...
Auto-detected Flash size: 4MB
Flash will be erased from 0x00010000 to 0x00176fff...
Flash will be erased from 0x00001000 to 0x00007fff...
Flash will be erased from 0x00008000 to 0x00008fff...
Flash will be erased from 0x00009000 to 0x0000afff...
Compressed 1470384 bytes to 914252...
Wrote 1470384 bytes (914252 compressed) at 0x00010000 in 82.0 seconds (effective 143.5 kbit/s)...
Hash of data verified.
Compressed 25632 bytes to 16088...
Wrote 25632 bytes (16088 compressed) at 0x00001000 in 1.8 seconds (effective 113.1 kbit/s)...
Hash of data verified.
Compressed 3072 bytes to 134...
Wrote 3072 bytes (134 compressed) at 0x00008000 in 0.1 seconds (effective 383.7 kbit/s)...
Hash of data verified.
Compressed 8192 bytes to 31...
Wrote 8192 bytes (31 compressed) at 0x00009000 in 0.1 seconds (effective 813.5 kbit/s)...
Hash of data verified.
Leaving...
Hard resetting via RTS pin...
INFO Successfully uploaded program.

And then you can watch it boot (this is mine already configured up in Home Assistant):
Watching the ATOM Echo boot 
$ picocom --quiet --imap lfcrlf --baud 115200 /dev/serial/by-id/usb-Hades2001_M5stack_9552AF8367-if00-port0
I (29) boot: ESP-IDF 4.4.8 2nd stage bootloader
I (29) boot: compile time 17:31:08
I (29) boot: Multicore bootloader
I (32) boot: chip revision: v1.1
I (36) boot.esp32: SPI Speed      : 40MHz
I (40) boot.esp32: SPI Mode       : DIO
I (45) boot.esp32: SPI Flash Size : 4MB
I (49) boot: Enabling RNG early entropy source...
I (55) boot: Partition Table:
I (58) boot: ## Label            Usage          Type ST Offset   Length
I (66) boot:  0 otadata          OTA data         01 00 00009000 00002000
I (73) boot:  1 phy_init         RF data          01 01 0000b000 00001000
I (81) boot:  2 app0             OTA app          00 10 00010000 001c0000
I (88) boot:  3 app1             OTA app          00 11 001d0000 001c0000
I (96) boot:  4 nvs              WiFi data        01 02 00390000 0006d000
I (103) boot: End of partition table
I (107) esp_image: segment 0: paddr=00010020 vaddr=3f400020 size=58974h (362868) map
I (247) esp_image: segment 1: paddr=0006899c vaddr=3ffb0000 size=03400h ( 13312) load
I (253) esp_image: segment 2: paddr=0006bda4 vaddr=40080000 size=04274h ( 17012) load
I (260) esp_image: segment 3: paddr=00070020 vaddr=400d0020 size=f5cb8h (1006776) map
I (626) esp_image: segment 4: paddr=00165ce0 vaddr=40084274 size=112ach ( 70316) load
I (665) boot: Loaded app from partition at offset 0x10000
I (665) boot: Disabling RNG early entropy source...
I (677) cpu_start: Multicore app
I (677) cpu_start: Pro cpu up.
I (677) cpu_start: Starting app cpu, entry point is 0x400825c8
I (0) cpu_start: App cpu up.
I (695) cpu_start: Pro cpu start user code
I (695) cpu_start: cpu freq: 160000000
I (695) cpu_start: Application information:
I (700) cpu_start: Project name:     study-atom-echo
I (705) cpu_start: App version:      2024.12.4
I (710) cpu_start: Compile time:     Apr 18 2025 17:29:39
I (716) cpu_start: ELF file SHA256:  1db4989a56c6c930...
I (722) cpu_start: ESP-IDF:          4.4.8
I (727) cpu_start: Min chip rev:     v0.0
I (732) cpu_start: Max chip rev:     v3.99 
I (737) cpu_start: Chip rev:         v1.1
I (742) heap_init: Initializing. RAM available for dynamic allocation:
I (749) heap_init: At 3FFAE6E0 len 00001920 (6 KiB): DRAM
I (755) heap_init: At 3FFB8748 len 000278B8 (158 KiB): DRAM
I (761) heap_init: At 3FFE0440 len 00003AE0 (14 KiB): D/IRAM
I (767) heap_init: At 3FFE4350 len 0001BCB0 (111 KiB): D/IRAM
I (774) heap_init: At 40095520 len 0000AAE0 (42 KiB): IRAM
I (781) spi_flash: detected chip: gd
I (784) spi_flash: flash io: dio
I (790) cpu_start: Starting scheduler on PRO CPU.
I (0) cpu_start: Starting scheduler on APP CPU.
[I][logger:171]: Log initialized
[C][safe_mode:079]: There have been 0 suspected unsuccessful boot attempts
[D][esp32.preferences:114]: Saving 1 preferences to flash...
[D][esp32.preferences:143]: Saving 1 preferences to flash: 0 cached, 1 written, 0 failed
[I][app:029]: Running through setup()...
[C][esp32_rmt_led_strip:021]: Setting up ESP32 LED Strip...
[D][template.select:014]: Setting up Template Select
[D][template.select:023]: State from initial (could not load stored index): On device
[D][select:015]: 'Wake word engine location': Sending state On device (index 1)
[D][esp-idf:000]: I (100) gpio: GPIO[39]  InputEn: 1  OutputEn: 0  OpenDrain: 0  Pullup: 0  Pulldown: 0  Intr:0 
[D][binary_sensor:034]: 'Button': Sending initial state OFF
[C][light:021]: Setting up light 'M5Stack Atom Echo 8a1bc0'...
[D][light:036]: 'M5Stack Atom Echo 8a1bc0' Setting:
[D][light:041]:   Color mode: RGB
[D][template.switch:046]:   Restored state ON
[D][switch:012]: 'Use listen light' Turning ON.
[D][switch:055]: 'Use listen light': Sending state ON
[D][light:036]: 'M5Stack Atom Echo 8a1bc0' Setting:
[D][light:047]:   State: ON
[D][light:051]:   Brightness: 60%
[D][light:059]:   Red: 100%, Green: 89%, Blue: 71%
[D][template.switch:046]:   Restored state OFF
[D][switch:016]: 'timer_ringing' Turning OFF.
[D][switch:055]: 'timer_ringing': Sending state OFF
[C][i2s_audio:028]: Setting up I2S Audio...
[C][i2s_audio.microphone:018]: Setting up I2S Audio Microphone...
[C][i2s_audio.speaker:096]: Setting up I2S Audio Speaker...
[C][wifi:048]: Setting up WiFi...
[D][esp-idf:000]: I (206) wifi:
[D][esp-idf:000]: wifi driver task: 3ffc8544, prio:23, stack:6656, core=0
[D][esp-idf:000]: 
[D][esp-idf:000][wifi]: I (1238) system_api: Base MAC address is not set
[D][esp-idf:000][wifi]: I (1239) system_api: read default base MAC address from EFUSE
[D][esp-idf:000][wifi]: I (1274) wifi:
[D][esp-idf:000][wifi]: wifi firmware version: ff661c3
[D][esp-idf:000][wifi]: 
[D][esp-idf:000][wifi]: I (1274) wifi:
[D][esp-idf:000][wifi]: wifi certification version: v7.0
[D][esp-idf:000][wifi]: 
[D][esp-idf:000][wifi]: I (1286) wifi:
[D][esp-idf:000][wifi]: config NVS flash: enabled
[D][esp-idf:000][wifi]: 
[D][esp-idf:000][wifi]: I (1297) wifi:
[D][esp-idf:000][wifi]: config nano formating: disabled
[D][esp-idf:000][wifi]: 
[D][esp-idf:000][wifi]: I (1317) wifi:
[D][esp-idf:000][wifi]: Init data frame dynamic rx buffer num: 32
[D][esp-idf:000][wifi]: 
[D][esp-idf:000][wifi]: I (1338) wifi:
[D][esp-idf:000][wifi]: Init static rx mgmt buffer num: 5
[D][esp-idf:000][wifi]: 
[D][esp-idf:000][wifi]: I (1348) wifi:
[D][esp-idf:000][wifi]: Init management short buffer num: 32
[D][esp-idf:000][wifi]: 
[D][esp-idf:000][wifi]: I (1368) wifi:
[D][esp-idf:000][wifi]: Init dynamic tx buffer num: 32
[D][esp-idf:000][wifi]: 
[D][esp-idf:000][wifi]: I (1389) wifi:
[D][esp-idf:000][wifi]: Init static rx buffer size: 1600
[D][esp-idf:000][wifi]: 
[D][esp-idf:000][wifi]: I (1399) wifi:
[D][esp-idf:000][wifi]: Init static rx buffer num: 10
[D][esp-idf:000][wifi]: 
[D][esp-idf:000][wifi]: I (1419) wifi:
[D][esp-idf:000][wifi]: Init dynamic rx buffer num: 32
[D][esp-idf:000][wifi]: 
[D][esp-idf:000]: I (1441) wifi_init: rx ba win: 6
[D][esp-idf:000]: I (1441) wifi_init: tcpip mbox: 32
[D][esp-idf:000]: I (1450) wifi_init: udp mbox: 6
[D][esp-idf:000]: I (1450) wifi_init: tcp mbox: 6
[D][esp-idf:000]: I (1460) wifi_init: tcp tx win: 5760
[D][esp-idf:000]: I (1471) wifi_init: tcp rx win: 5760
[D][esp-idf:000]: I (1481) wifi_init: tcp mss: 1440
[D][esp-idf:000]: I (1481) wifi_init: WiFi IRAM OP enabled
[D][esp-idf:000]: I (1491) wifi_init: WiFi RX IRAM OP enabled
[C][wifi:061]: Starting WiFi...
[C][wifi:062]:   Local MAC: 64:B7:08:8A:1B:C0
[D][esp-idf:000][wifi]: I (1513) phy_init: phy_version 4791,2c4672b,Dec 20 2023,16:06:06
[D][esp-idf:000][wifi]: I (1599) wifi:
[D][esp-idf:000][wifi]: mode : sta (64:b7:08:8a:1b:c0)
[D][esp-idf:000][wifi]: 
[D][esp-idf:000][wifi]: I (1600) wifi:
[D][esp-idf:000][wifi]: enable tsf
[D][esp-idf:000][wifi]: 
[D][esp-idf:000][wifi]: I (1605) wifi:
[D][esp-idf:000][wifi]: Set ps type: 1
[D][esp-idf:000][wifi]: 
[D][wifi:482]: Starting scan...
[D][esp32.preferences:114]: Saving 1 preferences to flash...
[D][esp32.preferences:143]: Saving 1 preferences to flash: 1 cached, 0 written, 0 failed
[W][micro_wake_word:151]: Wake word detection can't start as the component hasn't been setup yet
[D][esp-idf:000][wifi]: I (1646) wifi:
[D][esp-idf:000][wifi]: Set ps type: 1
[D][esp-idf:000][wifi]: 
[W][component:157]: Component wifi set Warning flag: scanning for networks
 
[I][wifi:617]: WiFi Connected!
 
[D][wifi:626]: Disabling AP...
[C][api:026]: Setting up Home Assistant API server...
[C][micro_wake_word:062]: Setting up microWakeWord...
[C][micro_wake_word:069]: Micro Wake Word initialized
[I][app:062]: setup() finished successfully!
[W][component:170]: Component wifi cleared Warning flag
[W][component:157]: Component api set Warning flag: unspecified
[I][app:100]: ESPHome version 2024.12.4 compiled on Apr 18 2025, 17:29:39
 
[C][logger:185]: Logger:
[C][logger:186]:   Level: DEBUG
[C][logger:188]:   Log Baud Rate: 115200
[C][logger:189]:   Hardware UART: UART0
[C][esp32_rmt_led_strip:187]: ESP32 RMT LED Strip:
[C][esp32_rmt_led_strip:188]:   Pin: 27
[C][esp32_rmt_led_strip:189]:   Channel: 0
[C][esp32_rmt_led_strip:214]:   RGB Order: GRB
[C][esp32_rmt_led_strip:215]:   Max refresh rate: 0
[C][esp32_rmt_led_strip:216]:   Number of LEDs: 1
[C][template.select:065]: Template Select 'Wake word engine location'
[C][template.select:066]:   Update Interval: 60.0s
[C][template.select:069]:   Optimistic: YES
[C][template.select:070]:   Initial Option: On device
[C][template.select:071]:   Restore Value: YES
[C][gpio.binary_sensor:015]: GPIO Binary Sensor 'Button'
[C][gpio.binary_sensor:016]:   Pin: GPIO39
[C][light:092]: Light 'M5Stack Atom Echo 8a1bc0'
[C][light:094]:   Default Transition Length: 0.0s
[C][light:095]:   Gamma Correct: 2.80
[C][template.switch:068]: Template Switch 'Use listen light'
[C][template.switch:091]:   Restore Mode: restore defaults to ON
[C][template.switch:057]:   Optimistic: YES
[C][template.switch:068]: Template Switch 'timer_ringing'
[C][template.switch:091]:   Restore Mode: always OFF
[C][template.switch:057]:   Optimistic: YES
[C][factory_reset.button:011]: Factory Reset Button 'Factory reset'
[C][factory_reset.button:011]:   Icon: 'mdi:restart-alert'
[C][captive_portal:089]: Captive Portal:
[C][mdns:116]: mDNS:
[C][mdns:117]:   Hostname: study-atom-echo-8a1bc0
[C][esphome.ota:073]: Over-The-Air updates:
[C][esphome.ota:074]:   Address: study-atom-echo.local:3232
[C][esphome.ota:075]:   Version: 2
[C][esphome.ota:078]:   Password configured
[C][safe_mode:018]: Safe Mode:
[C][safe_mode:020]:   Boot considered successful after 60 seconds
[C][safe_mode:021]:   Invoke after 10 boot attempts
[C][safe_mode:023]:   Remain in safe mode for 300 seconds
[C][api:140]: API Server:
[C][api:141]:   Address: study-atom-echo.local:6053
[C][api:143]:   Using noise encryption: YES
[C][micro_wake_word:051]: microWakeWord:
[C][micro_wake_word:052]:   models:
[C][micro_wake_word:015]:     - Wake Word: Hey Jarvis
[C][micro_wake_word:016]:       Probability cutoff: 0.970
[C][micro_wake_word:017]:       Sliding window size: 5
[C][micro_wake_word:021]:     - VAD Model
[C][micro_wake_word:022]:       Probability cutoff: 0.500
[C][micro_wake_word:023]:       Sliding window size: 5
[D][api:103]: Accepted 192.168.39.6
[W][component:170]: Component api cleared Warning flag
[W][component:237]: Component api took a long time for an operation (58 ms).
[W][component:238]: Components should block for at most 30 ms.
[D][api.connection:1446]: Home Assistant 2024.3.3 (192.168.39.6): Connected successfully
[D][ring_buffer:034]: Created ring buffer with size 2048
[D][micro_wake_word:399]: Resetting buffers and probabilities
[D][micro_wake_word:195]: State changed from IDLE to START_MICROPHONE
[D][micro_wake_word:107]: Starting Microphone
[D][micro_wake_word:195]: State changed from START_MICROPHONE to STARTING_MICROPHONE
[D][esp-idf:000]: I (11279) I2S: DMA Malloc info, datalen=blocksize=1024, dma_buf_count=4
[D][micro_wake_word:195]: State changed from STARTING_MICROPHONE to DETECTING_WAKE_WORD

That s enough to get a voice satellite that can be configured up in Home Assistant; you ll need the ESPHome Integration added, then for the noise_psk key you use the same string as I have under api/encryption/key in my diff above (obviously do your own, I used dd if=/dev/urandom bs=32 count=1 base64 to generate mine). If you re like me and a compulsive VLANer and firewaller even within your own network then you need to allow Home Assistant to connect on TCP port 6053 to the ATOM Echo, and also allow access to/from UDP port 6055 on the Echo (it ll send audio from that port to Home Assistant, then receive back audio to the same port). At this point you can now shout Hey Jarvis, what time is it? at the Echo, and the white light will turn flashing blue (indicating it s heard the wake word). Which means we re ready to teach Home Assistant how to do something with the incoming audio.

22 April 2025

Melissa Wen: 2025 FOSDEM: Don't let your motivation go, save time with kworkflow

2025 was my first year at FOSDEM, and I can say it was an incredible experience where I met many colleagues from Igalia who live around the world, and also many friends from the Linux display stack who are part of my daily work and contributions to DRM/KMS. In addition, I met new faces and recognized others with whom I had interacted on some online forums and we had good and long conversations. During FOSDEM 2025 I had the opportunity to present about kworkflow in the kernel devroom. Kworkflow is a set of tools that help kernel developers with their routine tasks and it is the tool I use for my development tasks. In short, every contribution I make to the Linux kernel is assisted by kworkflow. The goal of my presentation was to spread the word about kworkflow. I aimed to show how the suite consolidates good practices and recommendations of the kernel workflow in short commands. These commands are easily configurable and memorized for your current work setup, or for your multiple setups. For me, Kworkflow is a tool that accommodates the needs of different agents in the Linux kernel community. Active developers and maintainers are the main target audience for kworkflow, but it is also inviting for users and user-space developers who just want to report a problem and validate a solution without needing to know every detail of the kernel development workflow. Something I didn t emphasize during the presentation but would like to correct this flaw here is that the main author and developer of kworkflow is my colleague at Igalia, Rodrigo Siqueira. Being honest, my contributions are mostly on requesting and validating new features, fixing bugs, and sharing scripts to increase feature coverage. So, the video and slide deck of my FOSDEM presentation are available for download here. And, as usual, you will find in this blog post the script of this presentation and more detailed explanation of the demo presented there.

Kworkflow at FOSDEM 2025: Speaker Notes and Demo Hi, I m Melissa, a GPU kernel driver developer at Igalia and today I ll be giving a very inclusive talk to not let your motivation go by saving time with kworkflow. So, you re a kernel developer, or you want to be a kernel developer, or you don t want to be a kernel developer. But you re all united by a single need: you need to validate a custom kernel with just one change, and you need to verify that it fixes or improves something in the kernel. And that s a given change for a given distribution, or for a given device, or for a given subsystem Look to this diagram and try to figure out the number of subsystems and related work trees you can handle in the kernel. So, whether you are a kernel developer or not, at some point you may come across this type of situation: There is a userspace developer who wants to report a kernel issue and says:
  • Oh, there is a problem in your driver that can only be reproduced by running this specific distribution. And the kernel developer asks:
  • Oh, have you checked if this issue is still present in the latest kernel version of this branch?
But the userspace developer has never compiled and installed a custom kernel before. So they have to read a lot of tutorials and kernel documentation to create a kernel compilation and deployment script. Finally, the reporter managed to compile and deploy a custom kernel and reports:
  • Sorry for the delay, this is the first time I have installed a custom kernel. I am not sure if I did it right, but the issue is still present in the kernel of the branch you pointed out.
And then, the kernel developer needs to reproduce this issue on their side, but they have never worked with this distribution, so they just created a new script, but the same script created by the reporter. What s the problem of this situation? The problem is that you keep creating new scripts! Every time you change distribution, change architecture, change hardware, change project - even in the same company - the development setup may change when you switch to a different project, you create another script for your new kernel development workflow! You know, you have a lot of babies, you have a collection of my precious scripts , like Sm agol (Lord of the Rings) with the precious ring. Instead of creating and accumulating scripts, save yourself time with kworkflow. Here is a typical script that many of you may have. This is a Raspberry Pi 4 script and contains everything you need to memorize to compile and deploy a kernel on your Raspberry Pi 4. With kworkflow, you only need to memorize two commands, and those commands are not specific to Raspberry Pi. They are the same commands to different architecture, kernel configuration, target device.

What is kworkflow? Kworkflow is a collection of tools and software combined to:
  • Optimize Linux kernel development workflow.
  • Reduce time spent on repetitive tasks, since we are spending our lives compiling kernels.
  • Standardize best practices.
  • Ensure reliable data exchange across kernel workflow. For example: two people describe the same setup, but they are not seeing the same thing, kworkflow can ensure both are actually with the same kernel, modules and options enabled.
I don t know if you will get this analogy, but kworkflow is for me a megazord of scripts. You are combining all of your scripts to create a very powerful tool.

What is the main feature of kworflow? There are many, but these are the most important for me:
  • Build & deploy custom kernels across devices & distros.
  • Handle cross-compilation seamlessly.
  • Manage multiple architecture, settings and target devices in the same work tree.
  • Organize kernel configuration files.
  • Facilitate remote debugging & code inspection.
  • Standardize Linux kernel patch submission guidelines. You don t need to double check documentantion neither Greg needs to tell you that you are not following Linux kernel guidelines.
  • Upcoming: Interface to bookmark, apply and reviewed-by patches from mailing lists (lore.kernel.org).
This is the list of commands you can run with kworkflow. The first subset is to configure your tool for various situations you may face in your daily tasks. 
# Manage kw and kw configurations
kw init             - Initialize kw config file
kw self-update (u)  - Update kw
kw config (g)       - Manage kernel .config files
The second subset is to build and deploy custom kernels. 
# Build & Deploy custom kernels
kw kernel-config-manager (k) - Manage kernel .config files
kw build (b)        - Build kernel
kw deploy (d)       - Deploy kernel image (local/remote)
kw bd               - Build and deploy kernel
We have some tools to manage and interact with target machines. 
# Manage and interact with target machines
kw ssh (s)          - SSH support
kw remote (r)       - Manage machines available via ssh
kw vm               - QEMU support
To inspect and debug a kernel. 
# Inspect and debug
kw device           - Show basic hardware information
kw explore (e)      - Explore string patterns in the work tree and git logs
kw debug            - Linux kernel debug utilities
kw drm              - Set of commands to work with DRM drivers
To automatize best practices for patch submission like codestyle, maintainers and the correct list of recipients and mailing lists of this change, to ensure we are sending the patch to who is interested in it. 
# Automatize best practices for patch submission
kw codestyle (c)    - Check code style
kw maintainers (m)  - Get maintainers/mailing list
kw send-patch       - Send patches via email
And the last one, the upcoming patch hub. 
# Upcoming
kw patch-hub        - Interact with patches (lore.kernel.org)

How can you save time with Kworkflow? So how can you save time building and deploying a custom kernel? First, you need a .config file.
  • Without kworkflow: You may be manually extracting and managing .config files from different targets and saving them with different suffixes to link the kernel to the target device or distribution, or any descriptive suffix to help identify which is which. Or even copying and pasting from somewhere.
  • With kworkflow: you can use the kernel-config-manager command, or simply kw k, to store, describe and retrieve a specific .config file very easily, according to your current needs.
Then you want to build the kernel:
  • Without kworkflow: You are probably now memorizing a combination of commands and options.
  • With kworkflow: you just need kw b (kw build) to build the kernel with the correct settings for cross-compilation, compilation warnings, cflags, etc. It also shows some information about the kernel, like number of modules.
Finally, to deploy the kernel in a target machine.
  • Without kworkflow: You might be doing things like: SSH connecting to the remote machine, copying and removing files according to distributions and architecture, and manually updating the bootloader for the target distribution.
  • With kworkflow: you just need kw d which does a lot of things for you, like: deploying the kernel, preparing the target machine for the new installation, listing available kernels and uninstall them, creating a tarball, rebooting the machine after deploying the kernel, etc.
You can also save time on debugging kernels locally or remotely.
  • Without kworkflow: you do: ssh, manual setup and traces enablement, copy&paste logs.
  • With kworkflow: more straighforward access to debug utilities: events, trace, dmesg.
You can save time on managing multiple kernel images in the same work tree.
  • Without kworkflow: now you can be cloning multiple times the same repository so you don t lose compiled files when changing kernel configuration or compilation options and manually managing build and deployment scripts.
  • With kworkflow: you can use kw env to isolate multiple contexts in the same worktree as environments, so you can keep different configurations in the same worktree and switch between them easily without losing anything from the last time you worked in a specific context.
Finally, you can save time when submitting kernel patches. In kworkflow, you can find everything you need to wrap your changes in patch format and submit them to the right list of recipients, those who can review, comment on, and accept your changes. This is a demo that the lead developer of the kw patch-hub feature sent me. With this feature, you will be able to check out a series on a specific mailing list, bookmark those patches in the kernel for validation, and when you are satisfied with the proposed changes, you can automatically submit a reviewed-by for that whole series to the mailing list.

Demo Now a demo of how to use kw environment to deal with different devices, architectures and distributions in the same work tree without losing compiled files, build and deploy settings, .config file, remote access configuration and other settings specific for those three devices that I have.

Setup
  • Three devices:
    • laptop (debian x86 intel local)
    • SteamDeck (steamos x86 amd remote)
    • RaspberryPi 4 (raspbian arm64 broadcomm remote)
  • Goal: To validate a change on DRM/VKMS using a single kernel tree.
  • Kworkflow commands:
    • kw env
    • kw d
    • kw bd
    • kw device
    • kw debug
    • kw drm

Demo script In the same terminal and worktree.

First target device: Laptop (debian x86 intel local) 
$ kw env --list # list environments available in this work tree
$ kw env --use LOCAL # select the environment of local machine (laptop) to use: loading pre-compiled files, kernel and kworkflow settings.
$ kw device # show device information
$ sudo modinfo vkms # show VKMS module information before applying kernel changes.
$ <open VKMS file and change module info>
$ kw bd # compile and install kernel with the given change
$ sudo modinfo vkms # show VKMS module information after kernel changes.
$ git checkout -- drivers
Second target device: RaspberryPi 4 (raspbian arm64 broadcomm remote) 
$ kw env --use RPI_64 # move to the environment for a different target device.
$ kw device # show device information and kernel image name
$ kw drm --gui-off-after-reboot # set the system to not load graphical layer after reboot
$ kw b # build the kernel with the VKMS change
$ kw d --reboot # deploy the custom kernel in a Raspberry Pi 4 with Raspbian 64, and reboot
$ kw s # connect with the target machine via ssh and check the kernel image name
$ exit
Third target device: SteamDeck (steamos x86 amd remote) 
$ kw env --use STEAMDECK # move to the environment for a different target device
$ kw device # show device information
$ kw debug --dmesg --follow --history --cmd="modprobe vkms" # run a command and show the related dmesg output
$ kw debug --dmesg --follow --history --cmd="modprobe -r vkms" # run a command and show the related dmesg output
$ <add a printk with a random msg to appear on dmesg log>
$ kw bd # deploy and install custom kernel to the target device
$ kw debug --dmesg --follow --history --cmd="modprobe vkms" # run a command and show the related dmesg output after build and deploy the kernel change

Q&A Most of the questions raised at the end of the presentation were actually suggestions and additions of new features to kworkflow. The first participant, that is also a kernel maintainer, asked about two features: (1) automatize getting patches from patchwork (or lore) and triggering the process of building, deploying and validating them using the existing workflow, (2) bisecting support. They are both very interesting features. The first one fits well the patch-hub subproject, that is under-development, and I ve actually made a similar request a couple of weeks before the talk. The second is an already existing request in kworkflow github project. Another request was to use kexec and avoid rebooting the kernel for testing. Reviewing my presentation I realized I wasn t very clear that kworkflow doesn t support kexec. As I replied, what it does is to install the modules and you can load/unload them for validations, but for built-in parts, you need to reboot the kernel. Another two questions: one about Android Debug Bridge (ADB) support instead of SSH and another about support to alternative ways of booting when the custom kernel ended up broken but you only have one kernel image there. Kworkflow doesn t manage it yet, but I agree this is a very useful feature for embedded devices. On Raspberry Pi 4, kworkflow mitigates this issue by preserving the distro kernel image and using config.txt file to set a custom kernel for booting. For ADB, there is no support too, and as I don t see currently users of KW working with Android, I don t think we will have this support any time soon, except if we find new volunteers and increase the pool of contributors. The last two questions were regarding the status of b4 integration, that is under development, and other debugging features that the tool doesn t support yet. Finally, when Andrea and I were changing turn on the stage, he suggested to add support for virtme-ng to kworkflow. So I opened an issue for tracking this feature request in the project github. With all these questions and requests, I could see the general need for a tool that integrates the variety of kernel developer workflows, as proposed by kworflow. Also, there are still many cases to be covered by kworkflow. Despite the high demand, this is a completely voluntary project and it is unlikely that we will be able to meet these needs given the limited resources. We will keep trying our best in the hope we can increase the pool of users and contributors too.

21 April 2025

Louis-Philippe V ronneau: One last Bookworm for the road report from the Montreal 2025 BSP

Hello, hello, hello! This report for the Bug Squashing Party we held in Montreal on March 28-29th is very late ... but better late than never? We're now at our fifth BSP in a row1, which is both nice and somewhat terrifying. Have I really been around for five Debian releases already? Geez... This year, around 13 different people showed up, including some brand new folks! All in all, we ended up working on 77 bugs, 61 of which have since been closed. This is somewhat skewed by the large number of Lintian bugs I closed by merging and releasing the very many patches submitted by Maytham Alsudany (hello Maytham!), but that was still work :D For our past few events, we have been renting a space at Ateliers de la transition socio- cologique. This building used to be nunnery (thus the huge cross on the top floor), but has since been transformed into a multi-faceted project. A drawing of the building where the BSP was hosted BSPs are great and this one was no exception. You should try to join an upcoming event or to organise one if you can. It is loads of fun and you will be helping the Debian project release its next stable version sooner! As always, thanks to Debian for granting us a budget for the food and to rent the venue. Pictures Here are a bunch of pictures of the BSP, mixed in with some other pictures I took at this venue during a previous event. Some of the people present on Friday, in the smaller room we had that day A picture of a previous event, which includes many of the folks present at the BSP and the larger room we used on Saturday A sticker on the door of the bathroom with text saying 'All Employees Must Wash Away Sin Before Returning To Work', a tongue-in-cheek reference to the building's previous purpose A wall with posters for upcoming events A drawing on one of the single-occupancy rooms in the building, warning people the door can't be opened from the inside (yikes!) A table at the entrance with many flyers for social and political events
  1. See our previous BSPs in 2017, 2019, 2021 and 2023!

20 April 2025

Russ Allbery: Review: Up the Down Staircase

Review: Up the Down Staircase, by Bel Kaufman
Publisher: Vintage Books
Copyright: 1964, 1991, 2019
Printing: 2019
ISBN: 0-525-56566-3
Format: Kindle
Pages: 360
Up the Down Staircase is a novel (in an unconventional format, which I'll describe in a moment) about the experiences of a new teacher in a fictional New York City high school. It was a massive best-seller in the 1960s, including a 1967 movie, but seems to have dropped out of the public discussion. I read it from the library sometime in the late 1980s or early 1990s and have thought about it periodically ever since. It was Bel Kaufman's first novel. Sylvia Barrett is a new graduate with a master's degree in English, where she specialized in Chaucer. As Up the Down Staircase opens, it is her first day as an English teacher in Calvin Coolidge High School. As she says in a letter to a college friend:
What I really had in mind was to do a little teaching. "And gladly wolde he lerne, and gladly teche" like Chaucer's Clerke of Oxenford. I had come eager to share all I know and feel; to imbue the young with a love for their language and literature; to instruct and to inspire. What happened in real life (when I had asked why they were taking English, a boy said: "To help us in real life") was something else again, and even if I could describe it, you would think I am exaggerating.
She instead encounters chaos and bureaucracy, broken windows and mindless regulations, a librarian who is so protective of her books that she doesn't let any students touch them, a school guidance counselor who thinks she's Freud, and a principal whose sole interaction with the school is to occasionally float through on a cushion of cliches, dispensing utterly useless wisdom only to vanish again.
I want to take this opportunity to extend a warm welcome to all faculty and staff, and the sincere hope that you have returned from a healthful and fruitful summer vacation with renewed vim and vigor, ready to gird your loins and tackle the many important and vital tasks that lie ahead undaunted. Thank you for your help and cooperation in the past and future. Maxwell E. Clarke
Principal
In practice, the school is run by James J. McHare, Clarke's administrative assistant, who signs his messages JJ McH, Adm. Asst. and who Sylvia immediately starts calling Admiral Ass. McHare is a micro-managing control freak who spends the book desperately attempting to impose order over school procedures, the teachers, and the students, with very little success. The title of the book comes from one of his detention slips:
Please admit bearer to class Detained by me for going Up the Down staircase and subsequent insolence. JJ McH
The conceit of this book is that, except for the first and last chapters, it consists only of memos, letters, notes, circulars, and other paper detritus, often said to come from Sylvia's wastepaper basket. Sylvia serves as the first-person narrator through her long letters to her college friend, and through shorter but more frequent exchanges via intraschool memo with Beatrice Schachter, another English teacher at the same school, but much of the book lies outside her narration. The reader has to piece together what's happening from the discarded paper of a dysfunctional institution. Amid the bureaucratic and personal communications, there are frequent chapters with notes from the students, usually from the suggestion box that Sylvia establishes early in the book. These start as chaotic glimpses of often-misspelled wariness or open hostility, but over the course of Up the Down Staircase, some of the students become characters with fragmentary but still visible story arcs. This remains confusing throughout the novel there are too many students to keep them entirely straight, and several of them use pseudonyms for the suggestion box but it's the sort of confusion that feels like an intentional authorial choice. It mirrors the difficulty a teacher has in piecing together and remembering the stories of individual students in overstuffed classrooms, even if (like Sylvia and unlike several of her colleagues) the teacher is trying to pay attention. At the start, Up the Down Staircase reads as mostly-disconnected humor. There is a strong "kids say the darnedest things" vibe, which didn't entirely work for me, but the send-up of chaotic bureaucracy is both more sophisticated and more entertaining. It has the "laugh so that you don't cry" absurdity of a system with insufficient resources, entirely absent management, and colleagues who have let their quirks take over their personalities. Sylvia alternates between incredulity and stubbornness, and I think this book is at its best when it shows the small acts of practical defiance that one uses to carve out space and coherence from mismanaged bureaucracy. But this book is not just a collection of humorous anecdotes about teaching high school. Sylvia is sincere in her desire to teach, which crystallizes around, but is not limited to, a quixotic attempt to reach one delinquent that everyone else in the school has written off. She slowly finds her footing, she has a few breakthroughs in reaching her students, and the book slowly turns into an earnest portrayal of an attempt to make the system work despite its obvious unfitness for purpose. This part of the book is hard to review. Parts of it worked brilliantly; I could feel myself both adjusting my expectations alongside Sylvia to something less idealistic and also celebrating the rare breakthrough with her. Parts of it were weirdly uncomfortable in ways that I'm not sure I enjoyed. That includes Sylvia's climactic conversation with the boy she's been trying to reach, which was weirdly charged and ambiguous in a way that felt like the author's reach exceeding their grasp. One thing that didn't help my enjoyment is Sylvia's relationship with Paul Barringer, another of the English teachers and a frustrated novelist and poet. Everyone who works at the school has found their own way to cope with the stress and chaos, and many of the ways that seem humorous turn out to have a deeper logic and even heroism. Paul's, however, is to retreat into indifference and alcohol. He is a believable character who works with Kaufman's themes, but he's also entirely unlikable. I never understood why Sylvia tolerated that creepy asshole, let alone kept having lunch with him. It is clear from the plot of the book that Kaufman at least partially understands Paul's deficiencies, but that did not help me enjoy reading about him. This is a great example of a book that tried to do something unusual and risky and didn't entirely pull it off. I like books that take a risk, and sometimes Up the Down Staircase is very funny or suddenly insightful in a way that I'm not sure Kaufman could have reached with a more traditional novel. It takes a hard look at what it means to try to make a system work when it's clearly broken and you can't change it, and the way all of the characters arrive at different answers that are much deeper than their initial impressions was subtle and effective. It's the sort of book that sticks in your head, as shown by the fact I bought it on a whim to re-read some 35 years after I first read it. But it's not consistently great. Some parts of it drag, the characters are frustratingly hard to keep track of, and the emotional climax points are odd and unsatisfying, at least to me. I'm not sure whether to recommend it or not, but it's certainly unusual. I'm glad I read it again, but I probably won't re-read it for another 35 years, at least. If you are considering getting this book, be aware that it has a lot of drawings and several hand-written letters. The publisher of the edition I read did a reasonably good job formatting this for an ebook, but some of the pages, particularly the hand-written letters, were extremely hard to read on a Kindle. Consider paper, or at least reading on a tablet or computer screen, if you don't want to have to puzzle over low-resolution images. The 1991 trade paperback had a new introduction by the author, reproduced in the edition I read as an afterward (which is a better choice than an introduction). It is a long and fascinating essay from Kaufman about her experience with the reaction to this book, culminating in a passionate plea for supporting public schools and public school teachers. Kaufman's personal account adds a lot of depth to the story; I highly recommend it. Content note: Self-harm, plus several scenes that are closely adjacent to student-teacher relationships. Kaufman deals frankly with the problems of mostly-poor high school kids, including sexuality, so be warned that this is not the humorous romp that it might appear on first glance. A couple of the scenes made me uncomfortable; there isn't anything explicit, but the emotional overtones can be pretty disturbing. Rating: 7 out of 10

17 April 2025

Scarlett Gately Moore: KDE Applications 25.04 Snaps and Kubuntu Plucky Puffin 25.04 Released!

Very busy releasetastic week! The versions being the same is a complete coincidence https://kde.org/announcements/gear/25.04.0 Which can be downloaded here: https://snapcraft.io/publisher/kde !
Kubuntu 25.04 Plucky Puffin released
In addition to all the regular testing I am testing our snaps in a non KDE environment, so far it is not looking good in Xubuntu. We have kernel/glibc crashes on startup for some and for file open for others. I am working on a hopeful fix. Next week I will have ( I hope ) my final surgery. If you can spare any change to help bring me over the finish line, I will be forever grateful

16 April 2025

Otto Kek l inen: Going Full-Time as an Open Source Developer

Featured image of post Going Full-Time as an Open Source DeveloperAfter careful consideration, I ve decided to embark on a new chapter in my professional journey. I ve left my position at AWS to dedicate at least the next six months to developing open source software and strengthening digital ecosystems. My focus will be on contributing to Linux distributions (primarily Debian) and other critical infrastructure components that our modern society depends on, but which may not receive adequate attention or resources.

The Evolution of Open Source Open source won. Over the 25+ years I ve been involved in the open source movement, I ve witnessed its remarkable evolution. Today, Linux powers billions of devices from tiny embedded systems and Android smartphones to massive cloud datacenters and even space stations. Examine any modern large-scale digital system, and you ll discover it s built upon thousands of open source projects. I feel the priority for the open source movement should no longer be increasing adoption, but rather solving how to best maintain the vast ecosystem of software. This requires building robust institutions and processes to secure proper resourcing and ensure the collaborative development process remains efficient and leads to ever-increasing quality of software.

What is Special About Debian? Debian, established in 1993 by Ian Murdock, stands as one of these institutions that has demonstrated exceptional resilience. There is no single authority, but instead a complex web of various stakeholders, each with their own goals and sources of funding. Every idea needs to be championed at length to a wide audience and implemented through a process of organic evolution. Thanks to this approach, Debian has been consistently delivering production-quality, universally useful software for over three decades. Having been a Debian Developer for more than ten years, I m well-positioned to contribute meaningfully to this community. If your organization relies on Debian or its derivatives such as Ubuntu, and you re interested in funding cyber infrastructure maintenance by sponsoring Debian work, please don t hesitate to reach out. This could include package maintenance and version currency, improving automated upgrade testing, general quality assurance and supply chain security enhancements.
Best way to reach me is by e-mail otto at debian.org. You can also book a 15-minute chat with me for a quick introduction.

Grow or Die My four-year tenure as a Software Development Manager at Amazon Web Services was very interesting. I m grateful for my time at AWS and proud of my team s accomplishments, particularly for creating an open source contribution process that got Amazon from zero to the largest external contributor to the MariaDB open source database. During this time, I got to experience and witness a plethora of interesting things. I will surely share some of my key learnings in future blog posts. Unfortunately, the rate of progress in this mammoth 1.5 million employee organization was slowing down, and I didn t feel I learned much new in the last years. This realization, combined with the opportunity cost of not spending enough time on new cutting-edge technology, motivated me to take this leap. Being a full-time open source developer may not be financially the most lucrative idea, but I think it is an excellent way to force myself to truly assess what is important on a global scale and what areas I want to contribute to. Working fully on open source presents a fascinating duality: you re not bound by any external resource or schedule limitations, and can the progress you make is directly proportional to how much energy you decide to invest. Yet, you also depend on collaboration with people you might never meet and who are not financially incentivized to collaborate. This will undoubtedly expose me to all kinds of challenges. But what would be better in fostering holistic personal growth? I know that deep down in my DNA, I am not made to stay cozy or to do easy things. I need momentum. OK, let s get going

15 April 2025

Russell Coker: What Desktop PCs Need

It seems to me that we haven t had much change in the overall design of desktop PCs since floppy drives were removed, and modern PCs still have bays the size of 5.25 floppy drives despite having nothing modern that can fit in such spaces other than DVD drives (which aren t really modern) and carriers for 4*2.5 drives both of which most people don t use. We had the PC System Design Guide [1] which was last updated in 2001 which should have been updated more recently to address some of these issues, the thing that most people will find familiar in that standard is the colours for audio ports. Microsoft developed the Legacy Free PC [2] concept which was a good one. There s a lot of things that could be added to the list of legacy stuff to avoid, TPM 1.2, 5.25 drive bays, inefficient PSUs, hardware that doesn t sleep when idle or which prevents the CPU from sleeping, VGA and DVI ports, ethernet slower than 2.5Gbit, and video that doesn t include HDMI 2.1 or DisplayPort 2.1 for 8K support. There are recently released high-end PCs on sale right now with 1gbit ethernet as standard and hardly any PCs support resolutions above 4K properly. Here are some of the things that I think should be in a modern PC System Design Guide. Power Supply The power supply is a core part of the computer and it s central location dictates the layout of the rest of the PC. GaN PSUs are more power efficient and therefore require less cooling. A 400W USB power supply is about 1/4 the size of a standard PC PSU and doesn t have a cooling fan. A new PC standard should include less space for the PSU except for systems with multiple CPUs or that are designed for multiple GPUs. A Dell T630 server has an option of a 1600W PSU that is 20*8.5*4cm = 680cc. The typical dimensions of an ATX PSU are 15*8.6*14cm = 1806cc. The SFX (small form factor variant of ATX) PSU is 12.5*6.3*10cm = 787cc. There is a reason for the ATX and SFX PSUs having a much worse ratio of power to size and that is the airflow. Server class systems are designed for good airflow and can efficiently cool the PSU with less space and they are also designed for uses where people are less concerned about fan noise. But the 680cc used for a 1600W Dell server PSU that predates GaN technology could be used for a modern GaN PSU that supplies the ~600W needed for a modern PC while being quiet. There are several different smaller size PSUs for name-brand PCs (where compatibility with other systems isn t needed) that have been around for ~20 years but there hasn t been a standard so all white-box PC systems have had really large PSUs. PCs need USB-C PD ports that can charge a laptop etc. There are phones that can draw 80W for fast charging and it s not unreasonable to expect a PC to be able to charge a phone at it s maximum speed. GPUs should have USB-C alternate mode output and support full USB functionality over the cable as well as PD that can power the monitor. Having a monitor with a separate PSU, a HDMI or DP cable to the PC, and a USB cable between PC and monitor is an annoyance. There should be one cable between PC and monitor and then keyboard, mouse, etc should connect to the monior. All devices that are connected to a PC should use USB-C for power connection. That includes monitors that are using HDMI or DisplayPort for video, desktop switches, home Wifi APs, printers, and speakers (even when using line-in for the audio signal). The European Commission Common Charger Directive is really good but it only covers portable devices, keyboards, and mice. Motherboard Features Latest verions of Wifi and Bluetooth on the motherboard (this is becoming a standard feature). On motherboard video that supports 8K resolution. An option of a PCIe GPU is a good thing to have but it would be nice if the motherboard had enough video capabilities to satisfy most users. There are several options for video that have a higher resolution than 4K and making things just work at 8K means that there will be less e-waste in future. ECC RAM should be a standard feature on all motherboards, having a single bit error cause a system crash is a MS-DOS thing, we need to move past that. There should be built in hardware for monitoring the system status that is better than BIOS beeps on boot. Lenovo laptops have a feature for having the BIOS play a tune on a serious error with an Android app to decode the meaning of the tune, we could have a standard for this. For desktop PCs there should be a standard for LCD status displays similar to the ones on servers, this would be cheap if everyone did it. Case Features The way the Framework Laptop can be expanded with modules is really good [3]. There should be something similar for PC cases. While you can buy USB devices for these things they are messy and risk getting knocked out of their sockets when moving cables around. While the Framework laptop expansion cards are much more expensive than other devices with similar functions that are aimed at a mass market if there was a standard for PCs then the devices to fit them would become cheap. The PC System Design Guide specifies colors for ports (which is good) but not the feel of them. While some ports like Ethernet ports allow someone to feel which way the connector should go it isn t possible to easily feel which way a HDMI or DisplayPort connector should go. It would be good if there was a standard that required plastic spikes on one side or some other way of feeling which way a connector should go. GPU Placement In modern systems it s fairly common to have a high heatsink on the CPU with a fan to blow air in at the front and out the back of the PC. The GPU (which often dissipates twice as much heat as the CPU) has fans blowing air in sideways and not out the back. This gives some sort of compromise between poor cooling and excessive noise. What we need is to have air blown directly through a GPU heatsink and out of the case. One option for a tower case that needs minimal changes is to have the PCIe slot nearest the bottom of the case used for the GPU and have a grille in the bottom to allow air to go out, the case could have feet to keep it a few cm above the floor or desk. Another possibility is to have a PCIe slot parallel to the rear surface of the case (right angles to the other PCIe slots). A common case with desktop PCs is to have the GPU use more than half the total power of the PC. The placement of the GPU shouldn t be an afterthought, it should be central to the design. Is a PCIe card even a good way of installing a GPU? Could we have a standard GPU socket on the motherboard next to the CPU socket and use the same type of heatsink and fan for GPU and CPU? External Cooling There are a range of aftermarket cooling devices for laptops that push cool air in the bottom or suck it out the side. We need to have similar options for desktop PCs. I think it would be ideal to have a standard attachments for airflow on the front and back of tower PCs. The larger a fan is the slower it can spin to give the same airflow and therefore the less noise it will produce. Instead of just relying on 10cm fans at the front and back of a PC to push air in and suck it out you could have a conical rubber duct connected to a 30cm diameter fan. That would allow quieter fans to do most of the work in pushing air through the PC and also allow the hot air to be directed somewhere suitable. When doing computer work in summer it s not great to have a PC sending 300+W of waste heat into the room you are in. If it could be directed out a window that would be good. Noise For restricting noise of PCs we have industrial relations legislation that seems to basically require that workers not be exposed to noise louder than a blender, so if a PC is quieter than that then it s OK. For name brand PCs there are specs about how much noise is produced but there are usually caveats like under typical load or with a typical feature set that excuse them from liability if the noise is louder than expected. It doesn t seem possible for someone to own a PC, determine that the noise from it is what is acceptable, and then buy another that is close to the same. We need regulations about this, and the EU seems the best jurisdiction for it as they cover the purchase of a lot of computer equipment that is also sold without change in other countries. The regulations need to also cover updates, for example I have a Dell T630 which is unreasonably loud and Dell support doesn t have much incentive to be particularly helpful about it. BIOS updates routinely tweak things like fan speeds without the developers having an incentive to keep it as quiet as it was when it was sold. What Else? Please comment about other things you think should be standard PC features.
Related posts:
  1. Do Desktop Computers Make Sense? Laptop vs Desktop Price Currently the smaller and cheaper USB-C...
  2. Desktop Machines and ECC RAM In a comment on my post about memory errors Chris...
  3. Desktop Equivalent Augmented Reality Augmented reality is available on all relatively modern smart phones....

Russell Coker: Storage Trends 2025

It s been almost 15 months since I blogged about Storage Trends 2024 [1]. There hasn t been much change in this time (in Australia at least I m not tracking prices in other countries). The change was so small I had to check how the Australian dollar has performed against other currencies to see if changes to currencies had countered changes to storage prices, but there has been little overall change when compared to the Chinese Yuan and the Australian dollar is only about 11% worse against the US dollar when compared to a year ago. Generally there s a trend of computer parts decreasing in price by significantly more than 11% per annum. Small Storage The cheapest storage device from MSY now is a Patriot P210 128G SATA SSD for $19, cheaper than the $24 last year and the same price as the year before. So over the last 2 years there has been no change to the cheapest storage device on sale. It would almost never make sense to buy that as a 256G SATA SSD (also Patriot P210) is $25 and has twice the lifetime (120TBW vs 60TBW). There are also 256G NVMe devices for $29 and $30 which would be better options if the system has a NVMe socket built in. The cheapest 500G devices are $42.50 for a 512G SATA SSD and $45 for a 500G NVMe. Last year the prices were $33 for SATA and $36 for NVMe in that size so there s been a significant increase in price there. The difference is enough that if someone was on a tight budget they might reasonably decide to use smaller storage than they might have used last year! 2TB hard drives are still $89 the same price as last year! Last year a 2TB SATA SSD was $118 and a 2TB NVMe was $145, now a 2TB SATA SSD is $157 and a 2TB NVMe is $127. So NVMe has become cheaper than SATA in that segment but overall prices are higher than last year. Again for business use 2TB seems a sensible minimum for most systems if you are paying MSY rates (or similar rates from Amazon etc). Medium Storage Last year 4TB HDDs were $135, now they are $148. Last year the cheapest 4TB SSD was $299, now the cheapest is a $309 NVMe. While the prices have all gone up the price difference between hard drives and SSD has decreased in that size range. So for a small server (a lot of home servers and small business servers) 4TB of RAID-1 storage is all that s needed and for that SSDs are the best option. The price difference between $296 for 4TB of RAID-1 HDDs and $618 for RAID-1 NVMe is small enough to be justified by the benefits of speed and being quiet for most small server uses. In 2023 a 8TB hard drive cost $179 and a 8TB SSD cost $739. Last year a 8TB hard drive cost $239 and a 8TB SATA SSD cost, $899. Now a 8TB HDD costs $229 and MSY doesn t sell 8TB SSDs but for comparison Amazon has a Samsung 8TB SATA SSD for $919. So for storing 8TB+ there are benefits of hard drives as SSDs are difficult to get in that size range and more expensive than they were before. It seems that 8TB SSDs aren t used by enough people to have a large market in the home and small office space, so those of us who want the larger storage sizes will have to get second hand enterprise gear. It will probably be another few years before 8TB enterprise SSDs start appearing on the second hand market. Serious Storage Last year I wrote about the affordability of U.2 devices. I regret not buying some then as there are fewer on sale now and prices are higher. For hard drives they still aren t a good choice for most users because most users don t have more than 4TB of data. For large quantities of data hard drives are still a good option, a 22TB disk costs $899. For companies this is a good option for many situations. For home users there is the additional problem that determining whether a drive is Shingled Magnetic Recording which has some serious performance issues for some use and it s very difficult to determine which drives use it. Conclusion For corporate purchases the options for serious storage are probably decent. But for small companies and home users things definitely don t seem to have improved as much as we expect from the computer industry, I had expected 8TB SSDs to go for $450 by now and SSDs less than 500G to not even be sold new any more. The prices on 8TB SSDs have gone up more in the last 2 yeas than the ASX 200 (index of 200 biggest companies in the Australian stock market). I would never recommend using SSDs as an investment, but in retrospect 8TB SSDs could have been a good one. $20 seems to be about the minimum cost that SSDs approach while hard drives have a higher minimum price of a bit under $100 because they are larger, heavier, and more fragile. It seems that the market is likely to move to most SSDs being close to $20, if they can make 2TB SSDs cheaply enough to sell for about that price then that would cover the majority of the market. I ve created a table of the prices, I should have done this before but I initially didn t plan an ongoing series of posts on this topic.
Jun 2020 Apr 2021 Apr 2023 Jan 2024 Apr 2025
128G SSD $49 $19 $24 $19
500G SSD $97 $73 $32 $33 $42.50
2TB HDD $95 $72 $75 $89 $89
2TB SSD $335 $245 $149
4TB HDD $115 $135 $148
4TB SSD $895 $349 $299 $309
8TB HDD $179 $239 $229
8TB SSD $949 $739 $899 $919
10TB HDD $549 $395
Related posts:
  1. Storage Trends 2024 It has been less than a year since my last...
  2. Storage Trends 2021 The Viability of Small Disks Less than a year ago...
  3. Storage Trends 2023 It s been 2 years since my last blog post about...

13 April 2025

Michael Prokop: OpenSSH penalty behavior in Debian/trixie #newintrixie

This topic came up at a customer of mine in September 2024, when working on Debian/trixie support. Since then I wanted to blog about it to make people aware of this new OpenSSH feature and behavior. I finally found some spare minutes at Debian s BSP in Vienna, so here we are. :) Some of our Q/A jobs failed to run against Debian/trixie, in the debug logs we found: 
debug1: kex_exchange_identification: banner line 0: Not allowed at this time
This Not allowed at this time pointed to a new OpenSSH feature. OpenSSH introduced options to penalize undesirable behavior with version 9.8p1, see OpenSSH Release Notes, and also sshd source code. FTR, on the SSH server side, you ll see messages like that: 
Apr 13 08:57:11 grml sshd-session[2135]: error: maximum authentication attempts exceeded for root from 10.100.15.42 port 55792 ssh2 [preauth]
Apr 13 08:57:11 grml sshd-session[2135]: Disconnecting authenticating user root 10.100.15.42 port 55792: Too many authentication failures [preauth]
Apr 13 08:57:12 grml sshd-session[2137]: error: maximum authentication attempts exceeded for root from 10.100.15.42 port 55800 ssh2 [preauth]
Apr 13 08:57:12 grml sshd-session[2137]: Disconnecting authenticating user root 10.100.15.42 port 55800: Too many authentication failures [preauth]
Apr 13 08:57:13 grml sshd-session[2139]: error: maximum authentication attempts exceeded for root from 10.100.15.42 port 55804 ssh2 [preauth]
Apr 13 08:57:13 grml sshd-session[2139]: Disconnecting authenticating user root 10.100.15.42 port 55804: Too many authentication failures [preauth]
Apr 13 08:57:13 grml sshd-session[2141]: error: maximum authentication attempts exceeded for root from 10.100.15.42 port 55810 ssh2 [preauth]
Apr 13 08:57:13 grml sshd-session[2141]: Disconnecting authenticating user root 10.100.15.42 port 55810: Too many authentication failures [preauth]
Apr 13 08:57:13 grml sshd[1417]: drop connection #0 from [10.100.15.42]:55818 on [10.100.15.230]:22 penalty: failed authentication
Apr 13 08:57:14 grml sshd[1417]: drop connection #0 from [10.100.15.42]:55824 on [10.100.15.230]:22 penalty: failed authentication
Apr 13 08:57:14 grml sshd[1417]: drop connection #0 from [10.100.15.42]:55838 on [10.100.15.230]:22 penalty: failed authentication
Apr 13 08:57:14 grml sshd[1417]: drop connection #0 from [10.100.15.42]:55854 on [10.100.15.230]:22 penalty: failed authentication
This feature certainly is useful and has its use cases. But if you f.e. run automated checks to ensure that specific logins aren t working, be careful: you might hit the penalty feature, lock yourself out but also consecutive checks then don t behave as expected. Your login checks might fail, but only because the penalty behavior kicks in. The login you re verifying still might be working underneath, but you don t actually check for it exactly. Furthermore legitimate traffic from systems which accept connections from many users or behind shared IP addresses, like NAT and proxies could be denied. To disable this new behavior, you can set PerSourcePenalties no in your sshd_config, but there are also further configuration options available, see PerSourcePenalties and PerSourcePenaltyExemptList settings in sshd_config(5) for further details.

Ben Hutchings: FOSS activity in November 2024

12 April 2025

Kalyani Kenekar: Nextcloud Installation HowTo: Secure Your Data with a Private Cloud

Logo NGinx Nextcloud is an open-source software suite that enables you to set up and manage your own cloud storage and collaboration platform. It offers a range of features similar to popular cloud services like Google Drive or Dropbox but with the added benefit of complete control over your data and the server where it s hosted. I wanted to have a look at Nextcloud and the steps to setup a own instance with a PostgreSQL based database together with NGinx as the webserver to serve the WebUI. Before doing a full productive setup I wanted to play around locally with all the needed steps and worked out all the steps within KVM machine. While doing this I wrote down some notes to mostly document for myself what I need to do to get a Nextcloud installation running and usable. So this manual describes how to setup a Nextcloud installation on Debian 12 Bookworm based on NGinx and PostgreSQL.

Nextcloud Installation

Install PHP and PHP extensions for Nextcloud Nextcloud is basically a PHP application so we need to install PHP packages to get it working in the end. The following steps are based on the upstream documentation about how to install a own Nextcloud instance. Installing the virtual package package php on a Debian Bookworm system would pull in the depending meta package php8.2. This package itself would then pull also the package libapache2-mod-php8.2 as an dependency which then would pull in also the apache2 webserver as a depending package. This is something I don t wanted to have as I want to use NGinx that is already installed on the system instead. To get this we need to explicitly exclude the package libapache2-mod-php8.2 from the list of packages which we want to install, to achieve this we have to append a hyphen - at the end of the package name, so we need to use libapache2-mod-php8.2- within the package list that is telling apt to ignore this package as an dependency. I ended up with this call to get all needed dependencies installed. 
$ sudo apt install php php-cli php-fpm php-json php-common php-zip \
  php-gd php-intl php-curl php-xml php-mbstring php-bcmath php-gmp \
  php-pgsql libapache2-mod-php8.2-
  • Check php version (optional step) $ php -v 
PHP 8.2.28 (cli) (built: Mar 13 2025 18:21:38) (NTS)
Copyright (c) The PHP Group
Zend Engine v4.2.28, Copyright (c) Zend Technologies
    with Zend OPcache v8.2.28, Copyright (c), by Zend Technologies
  • After installing all the packages, edit the php.ini file: $ sudo vi /etc/php/8.2/fpm/php.ini
  • Change the following settings per your requirements: 
max_execution_time = 300
memory_limit = 512M
post_max_size = 128M
upload_max_filesize = 128M
  • To make these settings effective, restart the php-fpm service $ sudo systemctl restart php8.2-fpm

Install PostgreSQL, Create a database and user This manual assumes we will use a PostgreSQL server on localhost, if you have a server instance on some remote site you can skip the installation step here. $ sudo apt install postgresql postgresql-contrib postgresql-client
  • Check version after installation (optinal step): $ sudo -i -u postgres $ psql -version
  • This output will be seen: psql (15.12 (Debian 15.12-0+deb12u2))
  • Exit the PSQL shell by using the command \q. postgres=# \q
  • Exit the CLI of the postgres user: postgres@host:~$ exit

Create a PostgreSQL Database and User:
  1. Create a new PostgreSQL user (Use a strong password!): $ sudo -u postgres psql -c "CREATE USER nextcloud_user PASSWORD '1234';"
  2. Create new database and grant access: $ sudo -u postgres psql -c "CREATE DATABASE nextcloud_db WITH OWNER nextcloud_user ENCODING=UTF8;"
  3. (Optional) Check if we now can connect to the database server and the database in detail (you will get a question about the password for the database user!). If this is not working it makes no sense to proceed further! We need to fix first the access then! $ psql -h localhost -U nextcloud_user -d nextcloud_db or $ psql -h 127.0.0.1 -U nextcloud_user -d nextcloud_db
  • Log out from postgres shell using the command \q.

Download and install Nextcloud
  • Use the following command to download the latest version of Nextcloud: $ wget https://download.nextcloud.com/server/releases/latest.zip
  • Extract file into the folder /var/www/html with the following command: $ sudo unzip latest.zip -d /var/www/html
  • Change ownership of the /var/www/html/nextcloud directory to www-data. $ sudo chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www/html/nextcloud

Configure NGinx for Nextcloud to use a certificate In case you want to use self signed certificate, e.g. if you play around to setup Nextcloud locally for testing purposes you can do the following steps.
  • Generate the private key and certificate: $ sudo openssl req -x509 -nodes -days 365 -newkey rsa:2048 -keyout nextcloud.key -out nextcloud.crt $ sudo cp nextcloud.crt /etc/ssl/certs/ && sudo cp nextcloud.key /etc/ssl/private/
  • If you want or need to use the service of Let s Encrypt (or similar) drop the step above and create your required key data by using this command: $ sudo certbot --nginx -d nextcloud.your-domain.com You will need to adjust the path to the key and certificate in the next step!
  • Change the NGinx configuration: $ sudo vi /etc/nginx/sites-available/nextcloud.conf
  • Add the following snippet into the file and save it. 
# /etc/nginx/sites-available/nextcloud.conf
upstream php-handler  
    #server 127.0.0.1:9000;
    server unix:/run/php/php8.2-fpm.sock;
 

# Set the  immutable  cache control options only for assets with a cache
# busting  v  argument

map $arg_v $asset_immutable  
    "" "";
    default ", immutable";
 

server  
    listen 80;
    listen [::]:80;
    # Adjust this to the correct server name!
    server_name nextcloud.local;

    # Prevent NGinx HTTP Server Detection
    server_tokens off;

    # Enforce HTTPS
    return 301 https://$server_name$request_uri;
 

server  
    listen 443      ssl http2;
    listen [::]:443 ssl http2;
    # Adjust this to the correct server name!
    server_name nextcloud.local;

    # Path to the root of your installation
    root /var/www/html/nextcloud;

    # Use Mozilla's guidelines for SSL/TLS settings
    # https://mozilla.github.io/server-side-tls/ssl-config-generator/
    # Adjust the usage and paths of the correct key data! E.g. it you want to use Let's Encrypt key material!
    ssl_certificate /etc/ssl/certs/nextcloud.crt;
    ssl_certificate_key /etc/ssl/private/nextcloud.key;
    # ssl_certificate /etc/letsencrypt/live/nextcloud.your-domain.com/fullchain.pem; 
    # ssl_certificate_key /etc/letsencrypt/live/nextcloud.your-domain.com/privkey.pem;

    # Prevent NGinx HTTP Server Detection
    server_tokens off;

    # HSTS settings
    # WARNING: Only add the preload option once you read about
    # the consequences in https://hstspreload.org/. This option
    # will add the domain to a hardcoded list that is shipped
    # in all major browsers and getting removed from this list
    # could take several months.
    #add_header Strict-Transport-Security "max-age=15768000; includeSubDomains; preload" always;

    # set max upload size and increase upload timeout:
    client_max_body_size 512M;
    client_body_timeout 300s;
    fastcgi_buffers 64 4K;

    # Enable gzip but do not remove ETag headers
    gzip on;
    gzip_vary on;
    gzip_comp_level 4;
    gzip_min_length 256;
    gzip_proxied expired no-cache no-store private no_last_modified no_etag auth;
    gzip_types application/atom+xml text/javascript application/javascript application/json application/ld+json application/manifest+json application/rss+xml application/vnd.geo+json application/vnd.ms-fontobject application/wasm application/x-font-ttf application/x-web-app-manifest+json application/xhtml+xml application/xml font/opentype image/bmp image/svg+xml image/x-icon text/cache-manifest text/css text/plain text/vcard text/vnd.rim.location.xloc text/vtt text/x-component text/x-cross-domain-policy;

    # Pagespeed is not supported by Nextcloud, so if your server is built
    # with the  ngx_pagespeed  module, uncomment this line to disable it.
    #pagespeed off;

    # The settings allows you to optimize the HTTP2 bandwidth.
    # See https://blog.cloudflare.com/delivering-http-2-upload-speed-improvements/
    # for tuning hints
    client_body_buffer_size 512k;

    # HTTP response headers borrowed from Nextcloud  .htaccess 
    add_header Referrer-Policy                   "no-referrer"       always;
    add_header X-Content-Type-Options            "nosniff"           always;
    add_header X-Frame-Options                   "SAMEORIGIN"        always;
    add_header X-Permitted-Cross-Domain-Policies "none"              always;
    add_header X-Robots-Tag                      "noindex, nofollow" always;
    add_header X-XSS-Protection                  "1; mode=block"     always;

    # Remove X-Powered-By, which is an information leak
    fastcgi_hide_header X-Powered-By;

    # Set .mjs and .wasm MIME types
    # Either include it in the default mime.types list
    # and include that list explicitly or add the file extension
    # only for Nextcloud like below:
    include mime.types;
    types  
        text/javascript js mjs;
        application/wasm wasm;
     

    # Specify how to handle directories -- specifying  /index.php$request_uri 
    # here as the fallback means that NGinx always exhibits the desired behaviour
    # when a client requests a path that corresponds to a directory that exists
    # on the server. In particular, if that directory contains an index.php file,
    # that file is correctly served; if it doesn't, then the request is passed to
    # the front-end controller. This consistent behaviour means that we don't need
    # to specify custom rules for certain paths (e.g. images and other assets,
    #  /updater ,  /ocs-provider ), and thus
    #  try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php$request_uri 
    # always provides the desired behaviour.
    index index.php index.html /index.php$request_uri;

    # Rule borrowed from  .htaccess  to handle Microsoft DAV clients
    location = /  
        if ( $http_user_agent ~ ^DavClnt )  
            return 302 /remote.php/webdav/$is_args$args;
         
     

    location = /robots.txt  
        allow all;
        log_not_found off;
        access_log off;
     

    # Make a regex exception for  /.well-known  so that clients can still
    # access it despite the existence of the regex rule
    #  location ~ /(\. autotest ...)  which would otherwise handle requests
    # for  /.well-known .
    location ^~ /.well-known  
        # The rules in this block are an adaptation of the rules
        # in  .htaccess  that concern  /.well-known .

        location = /.well-known/carddav   return 301 /remote.php/dav/;  
        location = /.well-known/caldav    return 301 /remote.php/dav/;  

        location /.well-known/acme-challenge      try_files $uri $uri/ =404;  
        location /.well-known/pki-validation      try_files $uri $uri/ =404;  

        # Let Nextcloud's API for  /.well-known  URIs handle all other
        # requests by passing them to the front-end controller.
        return 301 /index.php$request_uri;
     

    # Rules borrowed from  .htaccess  to hide certain paths from clients
    location ~ ^/(?:build tests config lib 3rdparty templates data)(?:$ /)    return 404;  
    location ~ ^/(?:\. autotest occ issue indie db_ console)                  return 404;  

    # Ensure this block, which passes PHP files to the PHP process, is above the blocks
    # which handle static assets (as seen below). If this block is not declared first,
    # then NGinx will encounter an infinite rewriting loop when it prepend  /index.php 
    # to the URI, resulting in a HTTP 500 error response.
    location ~ \.php(?:$ /)  
        # Required for legacy support
        rewrite ^/(?!index remote public cron core\/ajax\/update status ocs\/v[12] updater\/.+ ocs-provider\/.+ .+\/richdocumentscode(_arm64)?\/proxy) /index.php$request_uri;

        fastcgi_split_path_info ^(.+?\.php)(/.*)$;
        set $path_info $fastcgi_path_info;

        try_files $fastcgi_script_name =404;

        include fastcgi_params;
        fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
        fastcgi_param PATH_INFO $path_info;
        fastcgi_param HTTPS on;

        fastcgi_param modHeadersAvailable true;         # Avoid sending the security headers twice
        fastcgi_param front_controller_active true;     # Enable pretty urls
        fastcgi_pass php-handler;

        fastcgi_intercept_errors on;
        fastcgi_request_buffering off;

        fastcgi_max_temp_file_size 0;
     

    # Serve static files
    location ~ \.(?:css js mjs svg gif png jpg ico wasm tflite map ogg flac)$  
        try_files $uri /index.php$request_uri;
        # HTTP response headers borrowed from Nextcloud  .htaccess 
        add_header Cache-Control                     "public, max-age=15778463$asset_immutable";
        add_header Referrer-Policy                   "no-referrer"       always;
        add_header X-Content-Type-Options            "nosniff"           always;
        add_header X-Frame-Options                   "SAMEORIGIN"        always;
        add_header X-Permitted-Cross-Domain-Policies "none"              always;
        add_header X-Robots-Tag                      "noindex, nofollow" always;
        add_header X-XSS-Protection                  "1; mode=block"     always;
        access_log off;     # Optional: Don't log access to assets
     

    location ~ \.woff2?$  
        try_files $uri /index.php$request_uri;
        expires 7d;         # Cache-Control policy borrowed from  .htaccess 
        access_log off;     # Optional: Don't log access to assets
     

    # Rule borrowed from  .htaccess 
    location /remote  
        return 301 /remote.php$request_uri;
     

    location /  
        try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php$request_uri;
  • Symlink configuration site available to site enabled. $ ln -s /etc/nginx/sites-available/nextcloud.conf /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/
  • Restart NGinx and access the URI in the browser.
  • Go through the installation of Nextcloud.
  • The user data on the installation dialog should point e.g to administrator or similar, that user will become administrative access rights in Nextcloud!
  • To adjust the database connection detail you have to edit the file $install_folder/config/config.php. Means here in the example within this post you would need to modify /var/www/html/nextcloud/config/config.php to control or change the database connection. 
---%<---
    'dbname' => 'nextcloud_db',
    'dbhost' => 'localhost', #(Or your remote PostgreSQL server address if you have.)
    'dbport' => '',
    'dbtableprefix' => 'oc_',
    'dbuser' => 'nextcloud_user',
    'dbpassword' => '1234', #(The password you set for database user.)
--->%---
After the installation and setup of the Nextcloud PHP application there are more steps to be done. Have a look into the WebUI what you will need to do as additional steps like create a cronjob or tuning of some more PHP configurations. If you ve done all things correct you should see a login page similar to this: Login Page of your Nextcloud instance

Optional other steps for more enhanced configuration modifications

Move the data folder to somewhere else The data folder is the root folder for all user content. By default it is located in $install_folder/data, so in our case here it is in /var/www/html/nextcloud/data.
  • Move the data directory outside the web server document root. $ sudo mv /var/www/html/nextcloud/data /var/nextcloud_data
  • Ensure access permissions, mostly not needed if you move the folder. $ sudo chown -R www-data:www-data /var/nextcloud_data $ sudo chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www/html/nextcloud/
  • Update the Nextcloud configuration:
    1. Open the config/config.php file of your Nextcloud installation. $ sudo vi /var/www/html/nextcloud/config/config.php
    2. Update the datadirectory parameter to point to the new location of your data directory. 
  ---%<---
     'datadirectory' => '/var/nextcloud_data'
  --->%---
  • Restart NGinx service: $ sudo systemctl restart nginx

Make the installation available for multiple FQDNs on the same server
  • Adjust the Nextcloud configuration to listen and accept requests for different domain names. Configure and adjust the key trusted_domains accordingly. $ sudo vi /var/www/html/nextcloud/config/config.php 
  ---%<---
    'trusted_domains' => 
    array (
      0 => 'domain.your-domain.com',
      1 => 'domain.other-domain.com',
    ),
  --->%---
  • Create and adjust the needed site configurations for the webserver.
  • Restart the NGinx unit.

An error message about .ocdata might occur
  • .ocdata is not found inside the data directory
    • Create file using touch and set necessary permissions. $ sudo touch /var/nextcloud_data/.ocdata $ sudo chown -R www-data:www-data /var/nextcloud_data/

The password for the administrator user is unknown
  1. Log in to your server:
    • SSH into the server where your PostgreSQL database is hosted.
  2. Switch to the PostgreSQL user:
    • $ sudo -i -u postgres
  3. Access the PostgreSQL command line
    • psql
  4. List the databases: (If you re unsure which database is being used by Nextcloud, you can list all the databases by the list command.)
    • \l
  5. Switch to the Nextcloud database:
    • Switch to the specific database that Nextcloud is using.
    • \c nextclouddb
  6. Reset the password for the Nextcloud database user:
    • ALTER USER nextcloud_user WITH PASSWORD 'new_password';
  7. Exit the PostgreSQL command line:
    • \q
  8. Verify Database Configuration:
    • Check the database connection details in the config.php file to ensure they are correct. sudo vi /var/www/html/nextcloud/config/config.php
    • Replace nextcloud_db, nextcloud_user, and your_password with your actual database name, user, and password. 
---%<---
    'dbname' => 'nextcloud_db',
    'dbhost' => 'localhost', #(or your PostgreSQL server address)
    'dbport' => '',
    'dbtableprefix' => 'oc_',
    'dbuser' => 'nextcloud_user',
    'dbpassword' => '1234', #(The password you set for nextcloud_user.)
--->%---
  1. Restart NGinx and access the UI through the browser.

11 April 2025

Reproducible Builds: Reproducible Builds in March 2025

Welcome to the third report in 2025 from the Reproducible Builds project. Our monthly reports outline what we ve been up to over the past month, and highlight items of news from elsewhere in the increasingly-important area of software supply-chain security. As usual, however, if you are interested in contributing to the Reproducible Builds project, please visit our Contribute page on our website. Table of contents:
  1. Debian bookworm live images now fully reproducible from their binary packages
  2. How NixOS and reproducible builds could have detected the xz backdoor
  3. LWN: Fedora change aims for 99% package reproducibility
  4. Python adopts PEP standard for specifying package dependencies
  5. OSS Rebuild real-time validation and tooling improvements
  6. SimpleX Chat server components now reproducible
  7. Three new scholarly papers
  8. Distribution roundup
  9. An overview of Supply Chain Attacks on Linux distributions
  10. diffoscope & strip-nondeterminism
  11. Website updates
  12. Reproducibility testing framework
  13. Upstream patches

Debian bookworm live images now fully reproducible from their binary packages Roland Clobus announced on our mailing list this month that all the major desktop variants (ie. Gnome, KDE, etc.) can be reproducibly created for Debian bullseye, bookworm and trixie from their (pre-compiled) binary packages. Building reproducible Debian live images does not require building from reproducible source code, but this is still a remarkable achievement. Some large proportion of the binary packages that comprise these live images can (and were) built reproducibly, but live image generation works at a higher level. (By contrast, full or end-to-end reproducibility of a bootable OS image will, in time, require both the compile-the-packages the build-the-bootable-image stages to be reproducible.) Nevertheless, in response, Roland s announcement generated significant congratulations as well as some discussion regarding the finer points of the terms employed: a full outline of the replies can be found here. The news was also picked up by Linux Weekly News (LWN) as well as to Hacker News.

How NixOS and reproducible builds could have detected the xz backdoor Julien Malka aka luj published an in-depth blog post this month with the highly-stimulating title How NixOS and reproducible builds could have detected the xz backdoor for the benefit of all . Starting with an dive into the relevant technical details of the XZ Utils backdoor, Julien s article goes on to describe how we might avoid the xz catastrophe in the future by building software from trusted sources and building trust into untrusted release tarballs by way of comparing sources and leveraging bitwise reproducibility, i.e. applying the practices of Reproducible Builds. The article generated significant discussion on Hacker News as well as on Linux Weekly News (LWN).

LWN: Fedora change aims for 99% package reproducibility Linux Weekly News (LWN) contributor Joe Brockmeier has published a detailed round-up on how Fedora change aims for 99% package reproducibility. The article opens by mentioning that although Debian has been working toward reproducible builds for more than a decade , the Fedora project has now:
progressed far enough that the project is now considering a change proposal for the Fedora 43 development cycle, expected to be released in October, with a goal of making 99% of Fedora s package builds reproducible. So far, reaction to the proposal seems favorable and focused primarily on how to achieve the goal with minimal pain for packagers rather than whether to attempt it.
The Change Proposal itself is worth reading:
Over the last few releases, we [Fedora] changed our build infrastructure to make package builds reproducible. This is enough to reach 90%. The remaining issues need to be fixed in individual packages. After this Change, package builds are expected to be reproducible. Bugs will be filed against packages when an irreproducibility is detected. The goal is to have no fewer than 99% of package builds reproducible.
Further discussion can be found on the Fedora mailing list as well as on Fedora s Discourse instance.

Python adopts PEP standard for specifying package dependencies Python developer Brett Cannon reported on Fosstodon that PEP 751 was recently accepted. This design document has the purpose of describing a file format to record Python dependencies for installation reproducibility . As the abstract of the proposal writes:
This PEP proposes a new file format for specifying dependencies to enable reproducible installation in a Python environment. The format is designed to be human-readable and machine-generated. Installers consuming the file should be able to calculate what to install without the need for dependency resolution at install-time.
The PEP, which itself supersedes PEP 665, mentions that there are at least five well-known solutions to this problem in the community .

OSS Rebuild real-time validation and tooling improvements OSS Rebuild aims to automate rebuilding upstream language packages (e.g. from PyPI, crates.io, npm registries) and publish signed attestations and build definitions for public use. OSS Rebuild is now attempting rebuilds as packages are published, shortening the time to validating rebuilds and publishing attestations. Aman Sharma contributed classifiers and fixes for common sources of non-determinism in JAR packages. Improvements were also made to some of the core tools in the project:
  • timewarp for simulating the registry responses from sometime in the past.
  • proxy for transparent interception and logging of network activity.
  • and stabilize, yet another nondeterminism fixer.

SimpleX Chat server components now reproducible SimpleX Chat is a privacy-oriented decentralised messaging platform that eliminates user identifiers and metadata, offers end-to-end encryption and has a unique approach to decentralised identity. Starting from version 6.3, however, Simplex has implemented reproducible builds for its server components. This advancement allows anyone to verify that the binaries distributed by SimpleX match the source code, improving transparency and trustworthiness.

Three new scholarly papers Aman Sharma of the KTH Royal Institute of Technology of Stockholm, Sweden published a paper on Build and Runtime Integrity for Java (PDF). The paper s abstract notes that Software Supply Chain attacks are increasingly threatening the security of software systems and goes on to compare build- and run-time integrity:
Build-time integrity ensures that the software artifact creation process, from source code to compiled binaries, remains untampered. Runtime integrity, on the other hand, guarantees that the executing application loads and runs only trusted code, preventing dynamic injection of malicious components.
Aman s paper explores solutions to safeguard Java applications and proposes some novel techniques to detect malicious code injection. A full PDF of the paper is available.
In addition, Hamed Okhravi and Nathan Burow of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Lincoln Laboratory along with Fred B. Schneider of Cornell University published a paper in the most recent edition of IEEE Security & Privacy on Software Bill of Materials as a Proactive Defense:
The recently mandated software bill of materials (SBOM) is intended to help mitigate software supply-chain risk. We discuss extensions that would enable an SBOM to serve as a basis for making trust assessments thus also serving as a proactive defense.
A full PDF of the paper is available.
Lastly, congratulations to Giacomo Benedetti of the University of Genoa for publishing their PhD thesis. Titled Improving Transparency, Trust, and Automation in the Software Supply Chain, Giacomo s thesis:
addresses three critical aspects of the software supply chain to enhance security: transparency, trust, and automation. First, it investigates transparency as a mechanism to empower developers with accurate and complete insights into the software components integrated into their applications. To this end, the thesis introduces SUNSET and PIP-SBOM, leveraging modeling and SBOMs (Software Bill of Materials) as foundational tools for transparency and security. Second, it examines software trust, focusing on the effectiveness of reproducible builds in major ecosystems and proposing solutions to bolster their adoption. Finally, it emphasizes the role of automation in modern software management, particularly in ensuring user safety and application reliability. This includes developing a tool for automated security testing of GitHub Actions and analyzing the permission models of prominent platforms like GitHub, GitLab, and BitBucket.

Distribution roundup In Debian this month:
The IzzyOnDroid Android APK repository reached another milestone in March, crossing the 40% coverage mark specifically, more than 42% of the apps in the repository is now reproducible Thanks to funding by NLnet/Mobifree, the project was also to put more time into their tooling. For instance, developers can now run easily their own verification builder in less than 5 minutes . This currently supports Debian-based systems, but support for RPM-based systems is incoming. Future work in the pipeline, including documentation, guidelines and helpers for debugging.
Fedora developer Zbigniew J drzejewski-Szmek announced a work-in-progress script called fedora-repro-build which attempts to reproduce an existing package within a Koji build environment. Although the project s README file lists a number of fields will always or almost always vary (and there are a non-zero list of other known issues), this is an excellent first step towards full Fedora reproducibility (see above for more information).
Lastly, in openSUSE news, Bernhard M. Wiedemann posted another monthly update for his work there.

An overview of Supply Chain Attacks on Linux distributions Fenrisk, a cybersecurity risk-management company, has published a lengthy overview of Supply Chain Attacks on Linux distributions. Authored by Maxime Rinaudo, the article asks:
[What] would it take to compromise an entire Linux distribution directly through their public infrastructure? Is it possible to perform such a compromise as simple security researchers with no available resources but time?

diffoscope & strip-nondeterminism 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 290, 291, 292 and 293 and 293 to Debian:
  • Bug fixes:
    • file(1) version 5.46 now returns XHTML document for .xhtml files such as those found nested within our .epub tests. [ ]
    • Also consider .aar files as APK files, at least for the sake of diffoscope. [ ]
    • Require the new, upcoming, version of file(1) and update our quine-related testcase. [ ]
  • Codebase improvements:
    • Ensure all calls to our_check_output in the ELF comparator have the potential CalledProcessError exception caught. [ ][ ]
    • Correct an import masking issue. [ ]
    • Add a missing subprocess import. [ ]
    • Reformat openssl.py. [ ]
    • Update copyright years. [ ][ ][ ]
In addition, Ivan Trubach contributed a change to ignore the st_size metadata entry for directories as it is essentially arbitrary and introduces unnecessary or even spurious changes. [ ]

Website updates Once again, there were a number of improvements made to our website this month, including:

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 March, a number of changes were made by Holger Levsen, including:
  • reproduce.debian.net-related:
    • Add links to two related bugs about buildinfos.debian.net. [ ]
    • Add an extra sync to the database backup. [ ]
    • Overhaul description of what the service is about. [ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ]
    • Improve the documentation to indicate that need to fix syncronisation pipes. [ ][ ]
    • Improve the statistics page by breaking down output by architecture. [ ]
    • Add a copyright statement. [ ]
    • Add a space after the package name so one can search for specific packages more easily. [ ]
    • Add a script to work around/implement a missing feature of debrebuild. [ ]
  • Misc:
    • Run debian-repro-status at the end of the chroot-install tests. [ ][ ]
    • Document that we have unused diskspace at Ionos. [ ]
In addition:
  • James Addison made a number of changes to the reproduce.debian.net homepage. [ ][ ].
  • Jochen Sprickerhof updated the statistics generation to catch No space left on device issues. [ ]
  • Mattia Rizzolo added a better command to stop the builders [ ] and fixed the reStructuredText syntax in the README.infrastructure file. [ ]
And finally, node maintenance was performed by Holger Levsen [ ][ ][ ] and Mattia Rizzolo [ ][ ].

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:
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:

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