Every year I worry that DebConf might not be as good as I hope, or not as good as previous years. Well, I've yet to be let down! The road trip down to Banja Luka was good fun, even if it took a little longer than planned. We ended up travelling down through Germany on the same Friday as much of the country finished work/school for their summer vacation, so there was a lot of traffic. Meh, we got there in the end. I made my usual mistake of planning some things to hack on during the DebConf week; by now I should know better... :-) I made a start on one small project, but then got so distracted by so many talks and side meetings with people that it's still waiting. As always, my own personal TODO list picked up huge amounts of extra stuff from those discussions. Catching up with, and socialising with, Debian friends from all over the world was also fun as always! Lots of highlights of the week for me, both for technical and social reasons:

• Multi-arch is finally with us! Great talk from Steve Langasek, and a very useful meeting afterwards to unpick what work is still needed. Quite a bit, it seems... :-)
• Useful meetings with Otavio to discuss future changes to how debian-installer is going to work, and how the debian-cd and debian-installer teams can work together better on that.
• Catching up with Martin to work out what's needed to get pancutanfinally integrated with our regular CD builds.
• Talking with Jimmy about where to go next for regular debian-live builds on our core CD build machine.
• The ARM BoF, where things have moved on from "why should I care about ARM?" to "when will you have armhf ready for going in the archive?". W00t!
• Doing our own day trip in the cars from the UK. We got to meet some very friendly and helpful local people, plus we found some incredible roads to drive on. Even if not all of them were technically roads yet... :-)
• Playing poker in a real casino for the first time, along with a bunch of friends. Nice atmosphere, and very good fun.

Banja Luka was a lovely place to visit, and a great host city for DebConf. Looking forwards to Managua now!

The new release switches to GDBus and adds an application icon. Together with the recently released Modem Manager 0.5 it's now able to fetch the balance information via USSD on Huawei and ZTE modems as well. This blog is flattr enabled.

Painless they say, automatically they say. This is what the NetworkManager manual page describes the daemon. I d like to say annoying and intrusive and I know there are a lot of people out there that feel the same. The program is used to set-up network connections and provides a system tray thingy for Gnome and for simple set-ups its great. Sure, I got NetworkManager running on my laptop and we re all friends over there. It just works, it just works for my local network, wireless network and even 3G and VPNs work just like they should. This is the environment where it was designed for and it shows. What about on the server where I login using gdm? We ve had nothing but a world of pain there. It used to be bad enough when it fiddled with /etc/resolv.conf meaning DNS stopped working everytime i logged out. Every stop playing around with my settings and leave me alone option fails to do just that. It got so bad I had to use chattr to make the file immutable; so if you are tearing your hair out, then chattr +i /etc/resolv.conf is your friend. The latest version of NetworkManager takes this insanity to a new level. Now not content with messing around with my resolver files, it reconfigures my statically assigned IP address to a dynamic DNS one AND removes it when I logout. No doubt if it let it, it would muck around with resolver files too. Again, by default on a laptop this is fine. The problem is the would you leave me alone options fail to work, or mean stupid things happen like pidgin doesnt think there is a network so never logs in. So I resorted to reading more about this intrusive program and was there a way of stopping it doing what it was doing. The directory /etc/NetworkManager/system-connections looked promising as they were connections available at boot time and across all users. But then there is the funky format and wow, nothing saying what you might need versus what if you have missing makes the thing fail. What s not obvious is that if you edit your network connections and then select available to all users then your settings go into that system-connections directory and that for the moment appears to be working. It means I have my network settings configured in two places which means all sorts of fun if I change them and forget about the other. This isn t an ideal situation and network manager should start to behave properly and read the ifupdown stuff and use it but not muck around with settings if it is told to. There are options that imply they do this but they don t work. Despite the title, I don t think peace has broken out between me and Network Manager but rather an uneasy truce; I m sure that program is just sitting there thinking of what other settings it could play with when my back is turned.

Related articles

• Network connections on Ubuntu (flatchat.wordpress.com)

During Debconf 11, I got access to a fast s390 machine, and I have started to work on a Debian s390x port, the 64-bit version of the s390 port. One of my goal was to help the SPARC64 port, as some of the issues are the same: both are 64-bit big-endian, don t support unaligned access and behave differently between -fpic and -fPIC. Why such a port? When talking about 64-bit ports, we usually hear: 4GB is enough, handling 64-bit takes more memory . This really sounds like 640K ought to be enough for anybody . The s390 port is actually 31-bit from the address point of view (one bit is reserved for address space extension from 24 to 31 bits), so each process is limited to 2GB only. Nowadays applications which need more than 2GB are not that uncommon, especially on mainframes. Actually the 2GB limit already causes some problem in Debian: in some cases it s not possible to build haskell applications or even C applications using GCC. On the other hand, we already require a 64-bit kernel on the s390 port (only the userland is 32-bit), and applications are handling more and more 64-bit or greater values (files offset, time counters, uid, etc.). What is the status? Bootstrapping the architecture was not really easy (as for any other new architectures), due to a huge amount of dependencies and build-dependencies loops, as explained by Wookey during Debconf11. Now that this part is mostly done, an autobuilder has been started and currently more than 65% of the packages are built. The s390x port is hosted on debian-ports.org. Unfortunately it is not yet deboostrapable, though that should happen in the next few days (only a few packages are missing). The main issues are currently packages which fail to build from source due to linker, gcc-4.6 and curl changes, or due to the libjpeg and multiarch transitions, and thus are not directly related to s390x. If your package is in this case, it would be a good idea to fix it. Otherwise if it has a lot of reverse dependencies and the bug is opened for a while, just expect an NMU (as allowed by the 0-day NMU policy). Of course for a few packages s390x specific fixes are needed, some of them are already in the BTS. How you can help? The list of bugs blocking the s390x port is available through the s390x usertag, fixing these bugs (a lot of them are general FTBFS) would help a lot. Alternatively if you have access to an s390x machine you can take a look at the packages failing to build. Update: Fixed the explanation about the 32th bit, thanks to Bastian Blank for the comment.

Thanks to the tremendous growth of social applications over the past five years, we have our pick of services for collecting, saving and sharing our experiences online. We each have collections of photos, contacts, messages and more, spread across multiple popular services like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, as well as many less popular services which address particular needs or preferences. We re also producing a wealth of exhaust data through our browsing history, mobile sensors, transactions and other activity streams that we rarely if ever examine directly. This ecosystem is becoming so complex that it s easy to lose track of what you ve created, shared or seen. We need new tools to manage this complexity, to make the most of the wealth of information and connections available to us through various services. John Battelle calls these metaservices , and points to growth in the number of connections between the services we use. I expect that this next age of information tools will center around data rather than services. Data is a common denominator for these online experiences, a bridge across disparate services, technologies, social graphs, and life cycles. Personal data, in particular, has this property: the only thing that links together your photos on Flickr, Facebook, Picasa and Twitpic is you. So where s your data center ? I don t anticipate the emergence of a single service where you do everything. There will continue to be innovation in the form of new and specialized services which meet a particular need very well. There won t be a single service which is everything to everybody. Instead, I foresee us wanting to track, save, use and control all of our stuff across the web. That s why my new colleagues and I are working to make that possible. There s open source code available on github, a vibrant IRC channel (#lockerproject on Freeenode), and lots more I d like to write about it. But it s time to get back to work for now

Yesterday I begun using Debian GNU/kFreeBSD squeeze in thorin, my main workstation. During the last few weeks I had to work through some of the limitations that were holding me back, such automated driver load and FUSE. I was lucky enough that other people filled the missing pieces I wanted, such as NFS client support and a GRUB bugfix that broke booting from Mirrored pools. I have to say that I m very satisfied. Barring a pair of small nuissances here and there, the result is quite impressive:

• System responsiveness has noticeably improved, specially on disk-intensive operations such as loading my browser. I believe lightweight ZFS compression (the default algorithm is fast enough that it saves time rather than spending it) has a big influence on this.
• Partition management became a lot simpler. Instead of using a fixed size like legacy file systems, with ZFS the storage is shared. This allows me to add, remove or resize file systems or swap volumes from my running system without having to worry about where they will be allocated (I have two pools, one that is mirrored and one that isn t, and I can add or remove things from either. That s as far as I m concerned with allocation).
• I no longer have to go through long wait periods when adding a new physical disk, or replacing a broken one. I have a lot of old used disks at my disposal due to various reasons, and they tend to break easily, so I used to run badblocks to them before I begun using them, to be sure they were safe (reliability is very important to me). Now I simply plug them in and trust ZFS checksuming to do the right thing.
• No more waiting for long fsck. Specially annoying when I m in a hurry and chance wanted that this was the 30th time I boot my system without fsck.

That s basically my personal experience as newbie Debian GNU/kFreeBSD user. Of course my perspective is very limited because I just started and yes, I am biased. Anyway, what about yours? If you have installed Debian GNU/kFreeBSD, was it meant for production or just a toy machine ? If you considered using it on production, did it succeed at satisfying your needs, or did something hold you back? Leave your comment!

NOTE: This post uses MathML. You will need a modern browser to view things correctly. I just had a fairly annoying experience with pocketronics and have left negative feedback for the first time. Basically they expected the customer (my mother in this case), to contact them when Australia Post failed to deliver. And, rather than sending out another item as they had to anyway they wanted to wait until Australia Post reported back. Which takes 10 working days. So for about ~AUD$30 they decided it was worth throwing away their reputation. Obviously a company with a different view of the life time value of a customer and the earning of goodwill than most. With eBay generally almost never leave 'positive' feedback because, frankly, that should be the default case. Anyway. But some feedback about eBay's feedback system. Limiting to 80 characters is pointless. I could have put in a bit.ly link to a twitter status as my feedback for pocketronics. Or a blog post (like this), linking to their site (as above). If I want to write an article, then let me. And just as I can respond as many times as like via other media, I ought to be able to do the same via the internal ones. The score calculation is weighted towards positive feedback. As explained scores are: $\frac{\mathrm{positive}}{\mathrm{positive}+\mathrm{negative}}$ Which for pocketronics comes to: $\mathrm{99.7}=\frac{\mathrm{5071}}{\mathrm{5071}+\mathrm{16}}\mathrm{100}$ If the calculcation instead took into account neutral feedback too, then things change - not by much, but enough. To wit: $\frac{\mathrm{positive}}{\mathrm{positive}+\mathrm{negative}+\mathrm{neutral}}$ And it becomes: $\mathrm{99.0}=\frac{\mathrm{5071}}{\mathrm{5071}+\mathrm{16}+\mathrm{36}}\mathrm{100}$ I think that also by default feedback to be neutral by default, it would reduce the gaming of feedback. To have a positive score you would need to be exceptional. Not just run of the mill. Which is what the current system encourages.

The first day of the Desktop Summit was yesterday, Saturday, August 6. I loved it and gave a presentation. There are two very different stories I can tell on the topic of gender equality in free software. I'll start with the bad.

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It's pretty easy, in the U.S. at least, to get people of privilege to stop using terms that evoke centuries of oppression from slavery. It's harder to ask people to stop doing that to women. I'm writing this post to ask for that. There were two different times that people I generally respect used words that historically have been used to hurt and minimize women. "Cygnus Solutions is prostitutes." Dave Neary was delivering a talk (that I found impressively informative) called, "The cost of going it alone". When the talk covered the cost (in time and money) of getting your corporation's code into the community branch of an open-source project, he pointed out you could hire someone with the skills. Cygnus was the go-to company for that in the 1990s; to explain that Cygnus does not care who they work for, he said the sentence in bold. "The OpenSuSE Build Service is a slut." I was at a party at a hackerspace last night. Someone who I admire for his work in free in free software, both technical and community, was joking with me about that no one should compile (or use) GTK. I riffed on the joke and remarked, "The OpenSuSE build service will build anything." He replied with the sentence in bold. "Slut" and "prostitute" are terms that recall the objectification of women. They're terms that attempt to measure a woman's worth as a sex object. It's not nice to the many women in attendance to bring that up. You might not have thought this through. You might want to read one woman's take "On Sluts, Rape, and Fuckery". Give it a read. Then, give it a rest. The thing is, this matters all the time. That's why I have to call you two out on it. Now for the happy story.

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While watching the Desktop Summit's intern showcase, I was floored. One hacker implemented Off-The-Record instant messaging for Telepathy. Another implemented pluggable back-ends for Getting Things GNOME, a task manager. I heard about overwhelming documentation and usability improvements to GNOME mainstays Cheese and Anjuta. In a short summer, these students made huge changes. For most of them, this was the first time they delivered any sort of presentation. Every single talk was delivered in earnest and enthusiasm. They told us about the work they had done and what might happen in the future. The other remarkable thing about the intern presentations was the demographics. I didn't keep count, but it seemed like as many women as men presented. We heard about hugely-important changes to documentation, code, and usability. People from central Europe, South Asia (yay), and Brazil took the stage. I hope that is the future of free software.

---

There are two things I want to see for our community. I want to know that people are respected and not reminded of centuries of oppression. I also want to see our community grow in size and diversity. I treat these issues as separate. We should choose respectful words when we speak not because we want more women to show up, but because it part of the expectation of decency that we should be able to expect from each other. And I failed the community when I did not make it clear there and then that this kind of language is not okay with me. It took me a day to understand this failure, so here I am writing this blog post. P.S. Thanks to Karen Rustad for her feedback while writing this post.

Andreas Tille had a BOF about Debian Med at DebConf 11 in Banja Luka at 30.7.2011. The slides as well as a video record can be downloaded.
Andreas had given an overview about the current status of Debian Med. It can be stated that the project which is one out of several Debian Pure Blends had made good progress over its nine years of existence. While several applications which might be used in medical care in the wider sense (which also stretches to microbiological research) were added to Debian so that we have a count of close to 200 packages it was also stated that the existence of Debian Med itself has attracted new Developers to the Debian project. Saying this Free Software for medicine profits from the Debian distribution and Debian was able to gather new manpower because this software was included.
The following TODO items were raised in the BOF
Visibility:

• Logo
  
• more effective use of social media to attract more users
  
• Work together with Debian Publicity
  
• Release in stable PPA and announce this

Plans for the next Debian Release:

• Hospital information system VistA or at least GT.M (precondition for VistA)
  
• Additional practice management systems FreeMed & FreeMedForms
  
• Further Java packages like Jalview, Beast, Artemis (biology), mayam (medical imaging), dcm4chee (PACS server)
  
• radiation therapy planning Prism
  

FreedomBox activities at Debconf11 I spent the last two weeks of July 2011 in Banja Luka. The occasion was the annual Debian developer's conference, Debconf11 and preceding work week known as Debcamp. This was my tenth successive year attending Debconf, and I had a very productive and pleasant time! The facilities were good, the local team was friendly, enthusiastic, and very helpful, and in addition to giving three talks and hosting a couple panel discussions, I managed to put a burst of energy into work on FreedomBox. Several other developers working on FreedomBox were also present, and a good number of Sheeva and Dream plugs were evident in the hacklabs sporting new FreedomBox stickers. Working together in the same place for several days, we made good progress on several projects, and also had some great discussions about what we want to do going forward. image building tools For some time, I've been working towards a light-weight tool set to build FreedomBox software images. Shortly before Debconf started, I chose the name 'freedom-maker' for this tool and shared a link to a readable copy of my git repository with other developers I expected to work with in Banja Luka. With input from Bert Agaz and Jonas Smedegaard during Debcamp, freedom-maker went from almost useful to actually useful. It still deserves work to be more useful to others, but I have now pushed a copy of the git repository to git.debian.org so that we can take advantage of the tools supported there to enable others to more easily contribute to the code. Very soon, Bert plans to add support to freedom-maker for using Lars Wirzenius' vmdebootstrap to build x86 images suitable for testing in a virtualized environment. At the same time, we plan to refactor the existing code slightly to enable lists of desired packages for the various image flavors we expect to produce independently of the configuration for each specific image building tool. Jonas continued in parallel to work on his alternate packaging toolset boxer. It offers some potentially interesting features for the future, and we may eventually merge some or all of it into freedom-maker, but for now it remains a separate utility. uAP user space tools Several weeks ago, we received from Marvell the source code to two user space programs that are necessary for configuring and monitoring the binary firmware provided for the uAP wireless chip used in the DreamPlug. Early during my stay in Banja Luka, I packaged these for Debian as uaputl and uapevent, and I am pleased to note that they were quickly accepted into the archive and are now present in Debian mirrors. u-boot Another bit of code received very shortly before Debconf started was the source for the version of u-boot shipped by Globalscale in the DreamPlug units we're working with. During Debcamp, Clint Adams passed a copy of this source to Jason Cooper, who was already trying to add support for the DreamPlug to upstream u-boot, but had stalled due to a lack of information. Jason has now merged his own work with the sources we got from the manufacturer, and is making good progress towards merging DreamPlug support into upstream u-boot. Once that happens, we should be able to flash our Sheeva and Dream plug devices with a u-boot image built from the source in the Debian u-boot package, in the process enabling things that matter to us like the ability to boot from an ext2 partition, and hopefully the ability to execute command scripts from that partition instead of having to hard-code kernel filenames in flash. This will allow us to support the ongoing effort in Debian to move away from the need for kernel symlinks. DreamPlug kernels With respect to kernels, another work stream at Debconf primarily involving H ctor Or n and Nick Bane was to analyze the current state of the patches from Marvell and Globalscale used to support the DreamPlug against both upstream and current Debian kernel sources. To my surprise and our collective pleasure, the remaining patch set required against current upstream kernels is much smaller than we previously believed! There are still several patches critical to us that are not merged upstream, but the work remaining to be able to build images for our devices from mainline and Debian kernel source trees now seems like something we might be able to complete before Debian's next stable release. One of our discoveries during the u-boot and kernel work during Debconf was that Globalscale did not obtain a new machine id for the DreamPlug, but instead re-used the one for the GuruPlug series, despite there being some differences in the hardware that require at least one additional driver. After much discussion, we plan to continue using the existing machine id instead of requesting another, particularly because the ARM kernel community has apparently stopped issuing new ids for the moment. We will add a new kernel config option for the DreamPlug, however, and are likely to build distinct Sheeva and Dream kernel packages that do not require initrd for use in FreedomBox images, even if doing so is not strictly necessary. This will allow us to optimize both the in-memory footprint and boot times for our devices. software configuration Another area of investigation in Banja Luka was technology for package configuration. Mirsal Ennaime performed various tests using debconf and Config::Model, with some results reflected in this commit relating to configuring the bitcoind daemon in the bitcoin package for Debian. identity and trust management While we did not actually do any FreedomBox specific work on the trust management layer we know is necessary, after several rounds of conversation, I am now more convinced than ever that the right path forward is to base our trust relationships on OpenPGP keys using GnuPG and Monkeysphere as starting software elements. Our thinking to date is captured on an Identity Management page in the wiki. communication services Another thing that became fairly clear to me during discussions at Debconf is that in the near term, planning to build communication services around XMPP is the approach most likely to give good results. Investigating the software choices available to build an interesting XMPP infrastructure is now a high priority for me. Jonas has done some work towards configuring and integrating ejabberd or Prosody, I've started studying yate as a possible call manager and VoIP server choice with XMPP/jingle support, and we await with great interest a release from the Buddycloud developers to evaluate as a possible basis for deploying social network services. Some of these software choices will lead us to use Apache as our web services base technology because of the need for features that only it supports well among daemons that are Free Software. Jonas completed packaging GNU Sip Witch for Debian, and it is now available in the mirror network. Tzafrir Cohen and Jonas did some initial testing on its use. documentation A number of new wiki pages were written (or at least started) in order to sum up ideas, design various aspects of FreedomBox, and reflect discussions that happened during DebConf11. A lot of work is needed to complete these pages though, as well as others to capture more of the current state of the project. press coverage Finally, while in Banja Luka I got some great press coverage for FreedomBox! On Sunday the 24th, I was interviewed by the main television network serving the Republika Srpska. This led to a couple of minutes of coverage near the top of the national news program that night, immediately following the lead story about the President and several ministers appearing at Debian Day that morning to help open the conference. This interview was later re-used in another TV program that summarized Debconf11. On the morning of Thursday the 28th, I was part of a small group that spent more than an hour meeting with the Minister of Science and Technology in his office, and the relationship between Debian and our work on FreedomBox was one of the items of discussion in that meeting and the associated press conference. I'm told this resulted in more press coverage, but if true I have not seen it yet. summary On Friday afternoon the 29th, I gave a talk in the main Debconf program containing a FreedomBox Progress Report . In it, I talked about the structure of the FreedomBox Foundation, progress the foundation has made, and the work that was still then underway in Banja Luka. It was streamed live over the internet, and replays are available online. The reaction from Debian developers present was very positive, which was good to learn since by that time my energy level was quite low after the nearly two weeks of intense technical and social interaction that is Debconf! All in all, we got lots of work done on FreedomBox in Banja Luka, enough that I think at least the next few steps along the road towards an eventual "1.0" release of a reference implementation are now much clearer than they were two weeks ago!

Hello, this is the fourth report for the project. First, I d like to
apologize for being late, I took a short trip over the weekend and
missed the deadline. This time I ve good news for my project. As
expected I ve made the necesary changes to have Eucalyptus support ARM
images. The approach was extending and exposing an arch field that
will be used by libvirt s XML domain file. I m working currently on
having the involved functions working with the new extension and I
expect to have this done over the middle of the next week. What was done so far

- Extended the ncInstance_t struct on util/data.h adding the archId
parameter. This struct keeps the information regarding a node (nc),
say RAM, Kernel, etc. Currently it has no way to set an arch in order
to be used later. typdef struct ncInstance_t
...
char reservationId[CHAR_BUFFER_SIZE];
char userId[CHAR_BUFFER_SIZE];
char archId[CHAR_BUFFER_SIZE]; // arch field added
int retries;
...

The Eucalyptus team was OK with this approach that I ve proposed few
weeks ago. For all my changes the approach is maintain compatibility
with existing features.
We still have to define if we are setting a default value, say amd64,
or keep it unset until the user sets one. For now we will be supporting
amd64 and arm as valid fields. - Modified the allocate_intance() function to support the archId
field. This involved adding a new parameter and detecting whether its
present and setting de value accordingly. This function is later used
by the doRunInstance() function in node/handlers_kvm.c - Modified the involved functions that are called by the KVM handlers
and result in passing parameters to the XML file generator for being
used by libvirt s and KVM and have the image running under
Eucalyptus. The new parameters and field are not required and only
being used if they are set with a value. The archId parameter has been
added as the last one, so existing function calls can work. This could
be rearranged later, but will involve a more extensive revision with
Eucalyptus developers. - I ve set a git local repo in order to keep track of the changes to
Eucalyptus. Since this part is a sort of a Eucalyptus branch I took
this approach. Steffen and I are discussing whether to release this as
a pkg-eucalyptus branch (as dpatch, using existing packaging). Either
way I m putting the diff files form my git repo over the wiki and will
put them on my site too. I plan to use git-svn in order to send them
later to the pkg-eucalyptus repo once we are settled with this. - Updated the project s wiki[1] page with information regarding all that s
involved on my work, so it can be re-played or resumed later. 1- http://wiki.debian.org/SummerOfCode2011/BuildWithEucalyptus/ProjectLog What I plan to to over the next weeks
-
- Finish the modifications to the relevant functions. Expected dealine:
next week.
- Do integration tests:
Write a test program, there s an example under node/ that could be
helpful.
Generate the XML domain definition from Eucalyptus functions. The
full cycle: handler_kvm -> allocate_instance -> get_instance_xml ->
have the XML file properly generated -> qemu-kvm runs the instance
using the proper emulator (arm in our case).
- Test runnning the image I ve worked on the project s begining.
- Fixing bits and cooperate with the pkg-eucalyptus team on the
packaging bits.
- Talk to Eucalyptus so they adopt our patches.
- Rock and roll :) What would be nice to have after the project ends
-
- The Debian packaging *needs* work. I ve already discussed this on the
pkg-eucalyptus mailing list. I ve also committed myself to help on
that side even after the SoC ends.
- Talk with upstream and Ubuntu to coordinate the packaging efforts and
modifications to the software.
- Get adopters to use our work :) By now, few weeks about to finish the SoC, I can say that it s been a
good experience and as I stated I m planning to keep maintaing/working
on the software after that. I ve already joined the pkg-eucalyptus team
and plan to contribute actively. I m sad I didn t managed to get Debconf
this year, time was a constraint again, hopefully we can meet in 2012! I
guess that all by now! Best regards,
Rud

Together with Revolution Analytics, I will be offering two more one-day classes on the Rcpp package for seamless integration of R and C++. The format will follow the workshop Romain and I gave during the tutorial day preceding this year's R/Finance conference. The style will once again be hands-on, with copious concrete examples and solid coverage of most aspects of Rcpp and related packages such as RInside, RcppArmadillo and others. The eight-hour schedule contains about six hours of instruction, split into four sessions of around ninety minutes. This leaves ample time for both lunch and coffee breaks, and for informal discussions and Q+A. Two one-day classes will be offered: The first in New York on Saturday, September 28, 2011 and the second one two weeks later in San Franciso on Saturday, October 8, 2011. Please see the official course page for more details, concrete location info and maps as well as registration details. Feel free to contact me at the usual email address with questions.

apt-get dist-upgrade is getting a little less fun these days. It s not because of a problem with Debian or with apt-get. It s because of things upstream authors are doing. It seems that upstreams, for some reason, like to remove features from new versions of software. The two recent examples to bite me are the removal of the Gnome Terminal features to play the bell through sound card rather than the console speaker, and the recent upgrade to gtkpod the best iPod music manager out there which removed the ability to actually, well, play music. Wha ? Earlier examples where when Gnome removed the ability to type a filename in the Open dialog box (remember that? thankfully reverted eventually.) KDE 4 was infamous for this too, with maybe thousands of instances (and they broke Amarok so badly that it didn t actually play music from my devices either.) I don t understand this. The Gnome people somehow thought that they knew better than I what options I might want, I guess. But I am totally baffled about gtkpod. All it ever did was call xmms (or something like it such as qmmp) with appropriate arguments to play a file. Simple, configurable, and supremely useful. Probably just a few lines of code. And even that is gone. There is a post by Ingo Molnar complaining that perhaps Gnome and KDE are trying to mimic the Apple and Google result without internalizing the process. Perhaps. It all seems so baffling to me though. Updated: rewrote introduction.

This is my monthly summary of my Debian related activities. If you re among the people who made a donation to support my work (170 , thanks everybody!), then you can learn how I spent your money. Otherwise it s just an interesting status update on my various projects. This month passed by very quickly since I attended both the Libre Software Meeting / RMLL and the DebConf. Libre Software Meeting / RMLL I attended only 3 days out of the 6 but that was a deliberate choice since I was also attending DebConf for a full week later in the month. During those 3 days I helped with the Debian booth that was already well taken care of by Fr d ric Perrenot and Arnaud Gambonnet. Unfortunately we did not have any goodies to sell. We (as in Debian France) should do better in this regard next time. One of the talks I attended presented EnVenteLibre. This website started as an online shop for two French associations (Ubuntu-fr, Framasoft). They externalize all the logistic to a company and only have to care about ordering goodies and delivering to the warehouse of the logistic company. They can also take some goodies from the warehouse and ship them for a conference, etc. We discussed a bit to see how Debian France could join, they are even ready to study what can be done to operate at the international level (that would be interesting for Debian with all the local associations that we have throughout the world). Back to the LSM, while I had 3 good days in Strasbourg, it seems to mee that the event is slowly fading out it s far from being an international event and the number of talks doesn t make for a better quality. BTW, do you remember that Debconf 0 and Debconf 1 were associated to this event while it was in Bordeaux? dpkg-source improvements During my time in Strasbourg (and in particular the travel to go there and back!) I implemented some changes to 3.0 (quilt) source format. It will now fail to build the source package if there are upstream changes that are not properly recorded in a quilt patch:

dpkg-source: info: local changes detected, the modified files are:
 2ping-1.1/README
dpkg-source: info: you can integrate the local changes with dpkg-source --commit
dpkg-source: error: aborting due to unexpected upstream changes, see /tmp/2ping_1.1-1.diff.cki8YB

As the error message hints, there s a new --commit command supported by dpkg-source that will generate the required quilt patch to fix this. In the processe you will have to submit a name and edit the patch header (pre-formatted with DEP3 compatible fields). You can get back the old behavior with the --auto-commit option. Build flags changes Ever since we adopted the Ubuntu changes to let dpkg-buildpackage set some build related environment variables (see #465282), many Debian people expressed their concerns with this approach both because it broke some packages and because those variables are not set if you execute debian/rules directly. In the end, the change was not quickly reverted and we fixed the package that this change broke. Despite this we later decided that the correct approach to inject build flags would be a new interface: dpkg-buildflags. Before changing dpkg-buildpackage to no longer set the compilation flags, I wanted to ensure dpkg-buildflags had some decent coverage in the archive (to avoid breaking too many packages again). My criteria was that CDBS and dh (of debhelper) should be using it. With the recent debhelper change (see #544844) this has been reached so I changed dpkg-buildpackage accordingly. Makefile snippets provided by dpkg At the same time, I also wanted an easy way for maintainers not using dh or CDBS to be able to fix their package easily and go back to injecting the compilation flags in the environment but doing it from the rules files. Starting with the next version of dpkg, this will be possible with something like this:

DPKG_EXPORT_BUILDFLAGS = 1
include /usr/share/dpkg/default.mk

Without DPKG_EXPORT_BUILDFLAGS the variables are not exported in the environment and have no effect unless you use them somewhere. More than build flags, this will also provide a bunch of other variables that can be useful in a rules files: all the variables provided by dpkg-architecture, vendor related variables/macro and some basic package information (mainly version related). dpkg-buildflags improvements Given the renewed importance that dpkg-buildflags will take now that dpkg-buildpackage no longer sets the corresponding environment variables, I thought that I could give it some love by fixing all the open issues and implementing some suggestions I got. I also had a chat with a few members of the technical committee to discuss how hardening build flags could be enabled in Debian and this also resulted in a few ideas of improvements. In the end, here are the main changes implemented:

• new prepend directive to inject flags at the start (see commit);
• new strip directive to strip flags from the result returned by dpkg-buildflags (see commit);
• new environment variables DEB_flag_MAINT_directive that can be set by the maintainer to adjust what dpkg-buildflags will return (see commit);
• new --export=configure command to inject build flags on the ./configure command line (see commit);
• new --dump command that is the default (see #603435).

Will all those changes, the complete set of compilation flags can be returned by dpkg-buildflags (before it would only return the default flags and it was expected that the Debian packaging would add whatever else is required afterwards). Now the maintainer just has to use the new environment variables to ensure the returned values correspond to what the package needs. DebConf: rolling and hardening build flags I spent a full week in DebConf (from Sunday 24th to Sunday 31th) and as usual, it s been a pleasure to meet again all my Debian friends. It s always difficult to find a good balance between attending talks, working in the hacklab and socializing but I m pretty happy with the result. I did not have any goal when I arrived, except managing the Rolling Bof (slides and video here) but all the discussions during talks always lead to a growing TODO list. This year was no exception. The technical committee BoF resulted in some discussions of some of the pending issues, in particular one that interests me: how to enable hardening build flags in Debian (see #552688). We scheduled another discussion on the topic for Tuesday and the outcome is that dpkg-buildflags is the proper interface to inject hardening build flags provided that it offers a mean to drop unwanted flags and a practical way to inject them in the ./configure command line. Given this I got to work and implemented those new features and worked with Kees Cook to prepare a patch that enables the hardening build flags by default. It s not ready to be merged but it s working already (see my last update in the bug log). A few words about the Rolling BoF too. The room was pretty crowded: as usual the topic generates lots of interest. My goal with the BoF was very limited, I wanted to weigh the importance of the various opinions expressed in the last gigantic discussion on debian-devel. It turns out a vast majority of attendants believe that testing is already usable. But when you ask them if we must advertise it more, answers are relatively mixed. When asked if we can sustain lots of testing/rolling users, few people feel qualified to reply but those that do tend to say yes. More dpkg work Lots of small things done:

• I did again some bug triaging on Launchpad. But Brian Murray did a lot of it and the result is impressive, we re down to 154 bugs (from more than 300 a month ago!).
• I updated my multiarch branch multiple times. I was hoping to meet Guillem during DebConf to make some progress on this front but alas he did not attend. I have been asked a status update multiple times during my time in DebConf.
• I fixed a regression in update-alternatives (#633627), a test-suite failure when run as root (#634961), a segfault in findbreakcycle. There have been a bunch of minor improvements too (#634510, #633539, #608260, #632937).

Package Tracking System and DEHS Christoph Berg recently wrote a replacement for DEHS because the latter was not really reliable and not under control of the QA team. This is a centralized system that uses the watch files to detect new upstream versions of the software available in Debian. I updated the Package Tracking System to use this new tool instead of DEHS. The new thing works well but we re still lacking the mail notifications that DEHS used to send out. If someone wants to contribute it, that would be great! Misc packaging work I did some preliminary work to update the WordPress package to the latest upstream version (3.2). I still have to test the resulting package, replacing upstream shipped copies of javascript/PHP libraries is always a risk and unfortunately all of them had some changes in the integration process. I also updated nautilus-dropbox to version 0.6.8 released upstream. I also uploaded the previous version (that was in testing at that time) to squeeze-backports. So there s now an official package in all the Debian distributions (Squeeze, Wheezy, Sid and Experimental)! Thanks See you next month for a new summary of my activities.

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DebConf 11 -- Banja Luka, Bosnia and Herzegovina I'm writing this on my way back from my fifth DebConf, waiting in the Frankfurt Airport for my flight to Munich then another wait for a flight back to Los Angeles. DebConf is the annual convention of Debian Developers and other interested in how Debian Linux (or Debian BSD) works, and want to help make it better. Debian is an international volunteer project, and Debconf is held each year in a different city, normally not on the same Continent two years in a row. Only one so far has been held in the United States, last year Debconf 10 was in New York City. (Mexico and Canada have also hosted Debconfs.) DebConf is a week long conference, with one day designated as "Debian Day" with more introductory level talks, frequently in the local language, and local people are invited to learn about Debian. The rest of DebConf is held in English. This year had over 350 attendees from a couple of dozen countries. Unlike most computer conferences, DebConf is free to attend. (Professional and Corporate memberships are available for those who would like to financially support DebConf.) If you apply early enough, you can request help paying for food, lodging, and travel as well, but such support is limited and you have to justify it. This is all make possible by our generous sponsors, who include some major corporations who use Debian. This year DebConf was held in Banja Luka, Bosnia and Herzegovina. The Bosnian bid won partially based on the generous support of the Bosnian government, not only financial and letting us use one of their buildings for the conference, but also help with getting visas and other such aid. (Visas are not required from the US or most of Europe, but they are from some other countries.) I arrived on Saturday about 24 hours after I left home, starting with too little sleep. I actually managed to eat dinner before passing out in my hotel bed. The hotel room I had in Hotel Vidovic (accent on the c) was nicer than any I have stayed at in Europe (although I always chose by price), and the conference price was less than half what a similar room goes for at a US hotel. There was a nice breakfast buffet included in the hotel cost. (Hot omelets and sausages as well as the usual cold cuts, cheese, fruit, juice, coffee, tea, cereal, yogurt, etc.) The in-room ethernet connection worked all the time except one morning, although it was not particularly fast. The hotel is relatively new, the Lift (elevator) had a date of 2005 on it and I suspect that is when the building was constructed. Sunday was Debian Day, and I went to a couple of sessions before deciding to take a nap in the afternoon. My nap wound up being from 3pm to after 11pm, sleeping through dinner. I was awake for an hour or so checking my email, and then slept till 4am. That was the morning I made it to breakfast before 7am. This was the first time I ate breakfast at normal breakfast hours for a full week for many years. After breakfast Monday, I spent several hours at the front desk helping give out badges, conference bags, and t-shirts. Lunches and dinners were in the Hotel Bosna, across the street from venue. For lunches we were served soup, salad, a plate of food, and desert. For dinners there was a buffet. The food served at Bosna was fairly good, but repetitive from day to day. (I've had much worse hotel food in the US for much more money.) Tuesday was more or less a repeat of Monday, with me opening the front desk by myself and not nearly as many new arrivals. The sessions varied of course, and I played "Debconf Experimental 5-card Mao". (Mao is a card game, popular in Cambridge and at DebConf.) Wednesday was the Day Trip. One day at DebConf is dedicated to socializing while seeing some of the local culture of the hosting city/country. This year there was an option of rafting (with some white water) or visiting a historical monastery and hiking to a waterfall with several grain mills powered by diverted water. This is the first time I had seen one actually grinding grain. (It's mainly a historical tourist attraction, but I don't know what happens to the flower made.) We then met at the rafting location for a BBQ lunch. Apparently there was some miscommunicaiton and the rafting place was not prepared for 70 or 80 people who wished to go rafting, so some did not get to raft until after lunch, and I'm not sure all that wanted to did. Dinner was back at Bosna. Thursday was another normal conference day, with the new wrinkle of distributing food tickets since Bosna was not willing/able to follow our instructions on who should be allowed to eat at Debconf expense. Those who wished to dine with the other Debconf attendees could purchase the tickets from the front desk, although this was not well publicised and few people took us up on it. The special "Conference Dinner" was Thursday night. This was held at a restaurant on the 14th floor of a building a few blocks away, and was a fancier buffet. There didn't seem to be much difference between the first and second course, and they ran out of desert before many people got any. This one was not as memorable as the one in Mexico, but that one was for the wrong reasons, including an unplanned indoor waterfall. After the dinner I played Mao again, this time till 2am. Friday was the only day I did not arrive at the venue in time for the first session (10am). Saturday I opened the front desk by myself again. In the afternoon was the "Debbugs Skills Exchange" that was requested by several people, so Collin Watson, Ian Jackson and I gave some information about it and Don Armstrong (who has done most of the recent coding on debbugs) participated via voip. (Debbugs is software for the Debian Bug Tracking System, often called the BTS.) Collin and Ian are emeritus members of the BTS team, and not active in it, while I am handling the spam filtering and haven't done much with the rest of the BTS. This was in the small "Meeting Room" (rather than the Auditorium or the round room) so we don't have to worry about video archives of it being available. (All the sessions is the two main rooms were streamed live on the internet, and will be edited and archived on http://meetings-archive.debian.net/pub/debian-meetings/2011/debconf11/.) We created a mini intro to the BTS document at that session that should be cleaned up and published. Less than two hours after that talk, the conference was over and teardown was started. As usual, the teardown and cleanup of what we had set up over several days was done is several hours, with many people helping. Sunday was leaving day. I was one of the people on the 11am charter bus to Zagreb DebConf arranged. The two such charter busses were an excellent idea, since the normal busses and trains would not have been able to manage that many extra passengers. This actually took longer than the planned 4 hours due to the long lines at the border crossing on Sunday afternoon. Both Bosnia and Croatia check passports both coming and leaving, so it is checked on both sides of the river that is the border between the countries. The check is pretty cursory unless you are from a country that needs a visa. I then had a plane flight to Frankfurt, and am currently in the middle of my 11 hour layover here. After that I fly to Munich early in the morning, have an 8 hour layover, and fly to Los Angeles. This schedule was in order to get flights at something resembling reasonable cost when I did it. From what I saw of Banja Luka, it's a nice place to visit, although most of the people do not speak English. Vegetarians may have a hard time finding meals, and sometimes they try to serve fish to them. (Assuming vegetarian means "no meat".) Transportation to Banja Luka is a bit hard, there are only six or so flights per week to the local airport, and one of the airlines is not on the international ticket sites. Most DebConf attendees flew to Zagreb then took busses, trains, vans, or taxis to Banja Luka (a 2.5-5 hour ride depending on border lines, road construction, etc.). The weather was rainy off and on throughout Debconf, but the day of the Day trip the rain held off until most of us were back and we had a lovely day. Temperatures were warm but not overly hot, and I never needed my jacket. There are many large alarm clocks in Banja Luka, (such as the one pictured here, across the street from the venue) but there doesn't seem to be a way to change the time setting or put them on snooze.

Sevilla is located in the (one of the many actually) oh-boy-is-that-really-the-temperature region of Spain. It has been historically significative for its financial, artistic and cultural value. But it s most important role has been that of hosting lots of GNOME activity. The 3rd ever GUADEC was held here, those cool Emergya guys who are working on a11y live here, and the even more awesome Sugus ETSII group helping with the conference setup and beer availability who helped organize the GNOME 3 launch party in Sevilla.

GUADEC Hispana group picture by Ana Rey (from GUADEC_ES8 set) Not as huge as GUADEC, but certainly as much fun as it, GUADEC Hispana lets the Spanish speaking community get closer together, get bugs fixed and only as a side effect get a bit drunk. A big thank to Ana, Juanje, V ctor, the Sugus team and all the local people that contributed. Also, of course, thanks to our GNOME loving (and loved) companies: Emergya, Igalia and OpenShine. And don t forget Escuela T cnica Superior de Ingenier a Inform tica who hosted the event. Beer time now. See ya at Berlin.

It's a new month, so as usual for the beginning of the month I'm hoping to be a bit better about regularly updating, and ideally with more than just software release announcements and book reviews. Sadly, today has not been a good day for concentration despite a good early start, but I did manage to finally get through a long-delayed revision of my page of notes on using Git for Debian packaging. The revision drops the idea of using a separate debian branch to track Debian-specific changes so that master could be a pure feature branch. While appealing for its conceptual purity, this ended up confusing people horribly and was extra work for no apparent benefit. There are also a variety of other revisions to bring things up to date and a few new minor tips. Unfortunately, I haven't yet had a chance to write up how to maintain the upstream branch as a merge between the upstream Git repository and the released tarball, an idea from Sam Hartman that I'm now using very successfully for the openafs package, but at least now there's a pointer to it. I'm not really sure what to do with the initial part of that page that offers an introduction to Git. I've now written about three of these in separate places, and I'm still unconvinced of how much they actually help. And there are a ton of tools and basic techniques that I use all the time in Git that aren't mentioned in there (like git pull --rebase --stat, which I aliased to git update, or the whole concept of aliases, or how this all plays with 3.0 source packages). I've left the basic instructions for now, but I think at some point I may cede the tutorial aspect to other sites and just collect neat tricks that aren't part of the basic workflow that everyone describes.

On July 30th, 2001, I received a mail from James Troup stating that I was a Debian developer, this 10 days after my Application Manager, namely Martin Michlmayr, sent his AM report. Summarizing these 10 years will be....interesting. Now that I'm on holidays, I'll try too cook something up. Sorry, folks, I completely forgot celebrating this last Saturday.

So, the fifth Debconf I ve had the chance to attend is clearly over now. It was great, and all organizers (and sponsors) really deserve huge thank you for making this event so successful. I m already looking forward to next year s edition. Debconf has been very productive for me. I chaired 4 sessions:

• the usual Quality Assurance BOF, which was a bit depressing: even if work gets done, the QA team doesn t really feel like a team . Maybe that s because a QA team is not needed, and we should instead split it into smaller teams focusing on subsets of the QA work (archive-wide testing, QA services, etc.)?
• a BOF on Ruby, where I demoed the work we have been doing around gem2deb, our new dh-based packaging helper [Ruby team website]
• a tutorial on archive testing, hoping to get more people involved in tests such as archive rebuilds. If you are interested in helping with reporting bugs, please drop me an email [doc about archive tests on wiki.d.o]
• a BOF on finding a standard Git workflows for packaging teams. More work is needed on this, but it looks like a good start. [thread on -devel@, wiki page, BOF notes]

I ve also made numerous uploads of Ruby-related packages, and reduced my backlog on UDD to a reasonable level. I even managed to make a developers-reference upload, integrating all the pending patches from the BTS. In other news, I m very excited about the recent progress on expo.debian.net (a mentors.debian.net replacement), which could help streamline our sponsorship process.

I've recently exchanged my old RE3 harddrives (500GB) with new RE4 (non-green power) 2TB harddrives. Here is some data gathered if anyone is interested (I usually look for this kind of information before buying). Smart information:

smartctl 5.41 2011-06-09 r3365 [x86_64-linux-3.0.0-ruru0] (local build)
Copyright (C) 2002-11 by Bruce Allen, http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net
=== START OF INFORMATION SECTION ===
Model Family:     Western Digital RE4 Serial ATA
Device Model:     WDC WD2003FYYS-02W0B0
Serial Number:    WD-XXXXXXXXXXXX
LU WWN Device Id: X XXXXXX XXXXXXXXX
Firmware Version: 01.01D01
User Capacity:    2,000,398,934,016 bytes [2.00 TB]
Sector Size:      512 bytes logical/physical
Device is:        In smartctl database [for details use: -P show]
ATA Version is:   8
ATA Standard is:  Exact ATA specification draft version not indicated
Local Time is:    Thu Jul 28 20:31:24 2011 CEST
SMART support is: Available - device has SMART capability.
SMART support is: Enabled
=== START OF READ SMART DATA SECTION ===
SMART overall-health self-assessment test result: PASSED
General SMART Values:
Offline data collection status:  (0x80) Offline data collection activity
                                        was never started.
                                        Auto Offline Data Collection: Enabled.
Self-test execution status:      (   0) The previous self-test routine completed
                                        without error or no self-test has ever
                                        been run.
Total time to complete Offline
data collection:                (28860) seconds.
Offline data collection
capabilities:                    (0x7b) SMART execute Offline immediate.
                                        Auto Offline data collection on/off support.
                                        Suspend Offline collection upon new
                                        command.
                                        Offline surface scan supported.
                                        Self-test supported.
                                        Conveyance Self-test supported.
                                        Selective Self-test supported.
SMART capabilities:            (0x0003) Saves SMART data before entering
                                        power-saving mode.
                                        Supports SMART auto save timer.
Error logging capability:        (0x01) Error logging supported.
                                        General Purpose Logging supported.
Short self-test routine
recommended polling time:        (   2) minutes.
Extended self-test routine
recommended polling time:        ( 255) minutes.
Conveyance self-test routine
recommended polling time:        (   5) minutes.
SCT capabilities:              (0x303f) SCT Status supported.
                                        SCT Error Recovery Control supported.
                                        SCT Feature Control supported.
                                        SCT Data Table supported.
SMART Attributes Data Structure revision number: 16
Vendor Specific SMART Attributes with Thresholds:
ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME          FLAG     VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE      UPDATED  WHEN_FAILED RAW_VALUE
  1 Raw_Read_Error_Rate     0x002f   100   253   051    Pre-fail  Always       -       0
  3 Spin_Up_Time            0x0027   100   253   021    Pre-fail  Always       -       0
  4 Start_Stop_Count        0x0032   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       4
  5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct   0x0033   200   200   140    Pre-fail  Always       -       0
  7 Seek_Error_Rate         0x002e   100   253   000    Old_age   Always       -       0
  9 Power_On_Hours          0x0032   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       0
 10 Spin_Retry_Count        0x0032   100   253   000    Old_age   Always       -       0
 11 Calibration_Retry_Count 0x0032   100   253   000    Old_age   Always       -       0
 12 Power_Cycle_Count       0x0032   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       3
192 Power-Off_Retract_Count 0x0032   200   200   000    Old_age   Always       -       2
193 Load_Cycle_Count        0x0032   200   200   000    Old_age   Always       -       1
194 Temperature_Celsius     0x0022   120   116   000    Old_age   Always       -       32
196 Reallocated_Event_Count 0x0032   200   200   000    Old_age   Always       -       0
197 Current_Pending_Sector  0x0032   200   200   000    Old_age   Always       -       0
198 Offline_Uncorrectable   0x0030   100   253   000    Old_age   Offline      -       0
199 UDMA_CRC_Error_Count    0x0032   200   253   000    Old_age   Always       -       0
200 Multi_Zone_Error_Rate   0x0008   100   253   000    Old_age   Offline      -       0
SMART Error Log Version: 1
No Errors Logged
SMART Self-test log structure revision number 1
No self-tests have been logged.  [To run self-tests, use: smartctl -t]
SMART Selective self-test log data structure revision number 1
     SPAN  MIN_LBA  MAX_LBA  CURRENT_TEST_STATUS
        1        0        0  Not_testing
        2        0        0  Not_testing
        3        0        0  Not_testing
        4        0        0  Not_testing
        5        0        0  Not_testing
Selective self-test flags (0x0):
      After scanning selected spans, do NOT read-scan remainder of disk.
If Selective self-test is pending on power-up, resume after 0 minute delay.

hdparm information:

ATA device, with non-removable media
powers-up in standby; SET FEATURES subcmd spins-up.
        Model Number:       WDC WD2003FYYS-02W0B0
        Serial Number:      WD-XXXXXXXXXXXX
        Firmware Revision:  01.01D01
        Transport:          Serial, SATA 1.0a, SATA II Extensions, SATA Rev 2.5, SATA Rev 2.6
Standards:
        Supported: 8 7 6 5
        Likely used: 8
Configuration:
    Logical         max     current
    cylinders       16383   16383
    heads           16      16
    sectors/track   63      63
    --
    CHS current addressable sectors:   16514064
    LBA    user addressable sectors:  268435455
    LBA48  user addressable sectors: 3907029168
    Logical/Physical Sector size:           512 bytes
    device size with M = 1024*1024:     1907729 MBytes
    device size with M = 1000*1000:     2000398 MBytes (2000 GB)
    cache/buffer size  = unknown
    Nominal Media Rotation Rate: 7200
Capabilities:
    LBA, IORDY(can be disabled)
    Queue depth: 32
    Standby timer values: spec'd by Standard, with device specific minimum
    R/W multiple sector transfer: Max = 16  Current = 0
    Advanced power management level: 128
    Recommended acoustic management value: 128, current value: 254
    DMA: mdma0 mdma1 mdma2 udma0 udma1 udma2 udma3 udma4 udma5 *udma6
                 Cycle time: min=120ns recommended=120ns
    PIO: pio0 pio1 pio2 pio3 pio4
                 Cycle time: no flow control=120ns  IORDY flow control=120ns
Commands/features:
        Enabled Supported:
           *    SMART feature set
                Security Mode feature set
           *    Power Management feature set
           *    Write cache
           *    Look-ahead
           *    Host Protected Area feature set
           *    WRITE_BUFFER command
           *    READ_BUFFER command
           *    NOP cmd
           *    DOWNLOAD_MICROCODE
           *    Advanced Power Management feature set
           *    Power-Up In Standby feature set
           *    SET_FEATURES required to spinup after power up
                SET_MAX security extension
           *    Automatic Acoustic Management feature set
           *    48-bit Address feature set
           *    Device Configuration Overlay feature set
           *    Mandatory FLUSH_CACHE
           *    FLUSH_CACHE_EXT
           *    SMART error logging
           *    SMART self-test
           *    General Purpose Logging feature set
           *    WRITE_ DMA MULTIPLE _FUA_EXT
           *    64-bit World wide name
           *    IDLE_IMMEDIATE with UNLOAD
           *    WRITE_UNCORRECTABLE_EXT command
           *     READ,WRITE _DMA_EXT_GPL commands
           *    Segmented DOWNLOAD_MICROCODE
           *    Gen1 signaling speed (1.5Gb/s)
           *    Gen2 signaling speed (3.0Gb/s)
           *    Native Command Queueing (NCQ)
           *    Phy event counters
           *    Idle-Unload when NCQ is active
           *    NCQ priority information
           *    DMA Setup Auto-Activate optimization
           *    Software settings preservation
           *    SMART Command Transport (SCT) feature set
           *    SCT Long Sector Access (AC1)
           *    SCT LBA Segment Access (AC2)
           *    SCT Error Recovery Control (AC3)
           *    SCT Features Control (AC4)
           *    SCT Data Tables (AC5)
                unknown 206[12] (vendor specific)
                unknown 206[13] (vendor specific)
Security:
    Master password revision code = 65534
            supported
    not     enabled
    not     locked
    not     frozen
    not     expired: security count
            supported: enhanced erase
    294min for SECURITY ERASE UNIT. 294min for ENHANCED SECURITY ERASE UNIT.
Logical Unit WWN Device Identifier: XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
    NAA             : X
    IEEE OUI        : XXXXXX
    Unique ID       : XXXXXXXXX
Checksum: correct

Using fio running on all three drives in read mode results in a nice ~420 MiB/s average throughput at the start of the disk, not bad. This is the zone bandwidth graph: and the IOPS graph: The IOPS doesn't compare with either a 10K drive nor any SSD, but the bandwidth is not that bad for a mechanical harddrive.