$ sudo apt-get install gobby
$ sudo gobby infinote://gobby.debian.org/debconf17/talk/ayatana-indicators 

• We need to find out what indicator applets are still needed (already there: application, session, power; w-i-p: messages, not yet touch: sound, datetime, transfer). If you maintain a desktop environment and need indicator support, please contact us.
• Rip-out liburl-dispatcher and Mir related code from all ayatana-indicator-* code projects (upstream)
• Build-time disable phone and tablet related code (upstream). If you are from the UBPorts project and have concerns about this, please contact us.
• Fully deprecate all Ubuntu Indicators upstream projects on Launchpad and point to Ayatana Indicators as upstream source for indicators in the Ubuntu ecosystem

• Update https://wiki.debian.org/Ayatana, most important change for packagers: The team will use Git from now on, not Bazaar.
• Get in touch with people maintaining indicator related packages (packages that have libappindicator-dev as build-dependency) to prepare for the transition from Ubuntu Indicators (unmaintained upstream, unmaintained in Debian) to Ayatana Indicators (package list, see DDPO Ayatana Developers Overview)
• File bug reports against all packages still dependending on Ubuntu Indicators in Debian and ideally provide patches to make those packages build against Ayatana Indicators
• Do the Ayatana Indicator transition in Debian

• Ayatana Indicators upstream:
  • #arctica on Freenode IRC
• Ayatana Indicators in Debian:
  • #debian-ayatana on Debian/OFTC IRC
  • Mailing list: pkg-ayatana-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org
• Ubuntu Desktop Developers:
  • #ubuntu-desktop on Freenode IRC

1. I realized how attached I am to "IT-Zukunft Schule" and how much it means to me that our kids grow up in a world of freedom and choice. Also and esp. when it comes to choosing your daily communication tools and computer working environment
2. I met Foteini Tsiami and Alkis Georgopoulos from Greece. They work on LTSP and have deployed 1000+ schools in Greece with LTSP + Debian GNU/Linux + MATE Desktop Environment
3. I met Vagrant Cascadian who is the maintainer of LTSP in Debian and also a major LTSP upstream contributor
4. I received a lot of fine feedback that was very encouraging to go on with our local work in Schleswig-Holstein

• I d like to trigger a full run of the service unit: if the service is not running, it should be started immediately. If it s currently running, it should be started again when it terminates.
• Same as the above, but with queue coalescing: If I do the above multiple times in a row, I only want the guarantee that there s one full run of the service after the last time I triggered it (typical scenario: each run processes all pending events, so there s no point in running multiple times).

edd@bud:~/git/rcpparmadillo/.aspell(master)$ cat defaults.R 
Rd_files <- vignettes <- R_files <- description <-
    list(encoding = "UTF-8",
         language = "en",
         dictionaries = c("en_stats", "RcppArmadillo"))
edd@bud:~/git/rcpparmadillo/.aspell(master)$ r -p -e 'readRDS("RcppArmadillo.rds")'
[1] "MPL"            "Sanderson"      "Templated"
[4] "decompositions" "onwards"        "templated"
edd@bud:~/git/rcpparmadillo/.aspell(master)$     

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

pristine-tar being is unable to reproduce a tarball After importing the latest upstream tarball using gbp import-orig, I tried to build the package but ran into this pristine-tar error:

$ gbp buildpackage
gbp:error: Pristine-tar couldn't checkout "planetfilter_0.7.4.orig.tar.gz": xdelta3: target window checksum mismatch: XD3_INVALID_INPUT
xdelta3: normally this indicates that the source file is incorrect
xdelta3: please verify the source file with sha1sum or equivalent
xdelta3 decode failed! at /usr/share/perl5/Pristine/Tar/DeltaTools.pm line 56.
pristine-tar: command failed: pristine-gz --no-verbose --no-debug --no-keep gengz /tmp/user/1000/pristine-tar.mgnaMjnwlk/wrapper /tmp/user/1000/pristine-tar.EV5aXIPWfn/planetfilter_0.7.4.orig.tar.gz.tmp
pristine-tar: failed to generate tarball

So I decided to throw away what I had, re-import the tarball and try again. This time, I got a different pristine-tar error:

$ gbp buildpackage
gbp:error: Pristine-tar couldn't checkout "planetfilter_0.7.4.orig.tar.gz": xdelta3: target window checksum mismatch: XD3_INVALID_INPUT
xdelta3: normally this indicates that the source file is incorrect
xdelta3: please verify the source file with sha1sum or equivalent
xdelta3 decode failed! at /usr/share/perl5/Pristine/Tar/DeltaTools.pm line 56.
pristine-tar: command failed: pristine-gz --no-verbose --no-debug --no-keep gengz /tmp/user/1000/pristine-tar.mgnaMjnwlk/wrapper /tmp/user/1000/pristine-tar.EV5aXIPWfn/planetfilter_0.7.4.orig.tar.gz.tmp
pristine-tar: failed to generate tarball

I filed bug 871938 for this. As a work-around, I simply symlinked the upstream tarball I already had and then built the package using the tarball directly instead of the upstream git branch:

ln -s ~/deve/remote/planetfilter/dist/planetfilter-0.7.4.tar.gz ../planetfilter_0.7.4.orig.tar.gz
gbp buildpackage --git-tarball-dir=..

Given that only the upstream and master branches are signed, the .delta file on the pristine-tar branch could be fixed at any time in the future by committing a new .delta file once pristine-tar gets fixed. This therefore seems like a reasonable work-around.

git-buildpackage doesn't import the upstream tarball signature The second problem I ran into was a missing upstream signature after building the package with git-buildpackage:

$ lintian -i planetfilter_0.7.4-1_amd64.changes
E: planetfilter changes: orig-tarball-missing-upstream-signature planetfilter_0.7.4.orig.tar.gz
N: 
N:    The packaging includes an upstream signing key but the corresponding
N:    .asc signature for one or more source tarballs are not included in your
N:    .changes file.
N:    
N:    Severity: important, Certainty: certain
N:    
N:    Check: changes-file, Type: changes
N: 

This problem (and the lintian error I suspect) is fairly new and hasn't been solved yet. So until gbp import-orig gets proper support for upstream signatures, my work-around was to copy the upstream signature in the export-dir output directory (which I set in ~/.gbp.conf) so that it can be picked up by the final stages of gbp buildpackage:

ln -s ~/deve/remote/planetfilter/dist/planetfilter-0.7.4.tar.gz.asc ../build-area/planetfilter_0.7.4.orig.tar.gz.asc

If there's a better way to do this, please feel free to leave a comment (authentication not required)!

• source tarballs
• Win32 binaries
• DOS binaries
• drop-in jupprc for JOE 2.8, or to update jupp 2.8
• drop-in jupprc for JOE 3.7
• drop-in jupprc for JOE 4.4

1. start with a Debian machine running Stretch or newer,
2. build and install the gr-gsm package available from http://ppa.launchpad.net/ptrkrysik/gr-gsm/ubuntu/pool/main/g/gr-gsm/,
3. clone the git repostory from https://github.com/Oros42/IMSI-catcher,
4. run grgsm_livemon and adjust the frequency until the terminal where it was started is filled with a stream of text (meaning you found a GSM station).
5. go into the IMSI-catcher directory and run 'sudo python simple_IMSI-catcher.py' to extract the IMSI numbers.

1. Building a bootable disk image that can be used as both a live system and as an OS installer.
2. Running on that live system, to install the target system. Which can just involve copying the live system to the target disk and then letting the configuration management system make the necessary changes to get from the live system configuration to the target system configuration.
3. To support such things as headless arm boards, building customized images tuned for the target board and use case, that can then simply be copied to the board to install.
4. Optionally, running on the installed system later, to futher customize it. Starting from the same configuration that produced the installed system in the first place.

• A user interface that runs on the live system and gets whatever input is needed to install to the target system. This is really just a config editor underneath. I built a prototype gamified interface that's as minimal as such an interface could get.
• With a regular text editor, of course. This is the equivilant of preseeding in d-i, giving advanced users full control over the system that gets built. Unlike with preseeding, users have the full power of a configuration management system, so can specify precisely the system they want installed.
• A separate user interface for customizing disk images, for arm boards and similar use cases. This would run on a server, or on the user's own laptop.

• In Functional Reactive Propellor I found a way to express the commonalities and differences between the installer's configuration and the target system's configuration. This lets the installer disk image be copied to the target and the minimum work be done to convert it into the desired target system.
• In disk partitioning nitty gritty I tackled configuring the partition table of the target system. I extended a DSL propellor already used for partitioning disk images. The result is basically partman in 1/100th the lines of code.
• In end in sight I found a way to make propellor build disk images super fast, so a new 5 gb disk image can be ready in 30 seconds, a quarter of the time that it takes to write a 5 gb file with dd.
• For completeness sake, I also devblogged about unfortunately needing a progress bar, picking the disk to install to and installing grub, dependency yak shaving, high bandwidth propellor hacking and finishing touches

No comment Liked this article? Click here. My blog is Flattr-enabled.

The new systemd time synchronization daemon On a machine running systemd, there is no need to run the full-fledged ntpd daemon anymore. The built-in systemd-timesyncd can do the basic time synchronization job just fine. However, I noticed that the daemon wasn't actually running:

$ systemctl status systemd-timesyncd.service 
  systemd-timesyncd.service - Network Time Synchronization
   Loaded: loaded (/lib/systemd/system/systemd-timesyncd.service; enabled; vendor preset: enabled)
  Drop-In: /lib/systemd/system/systemd-timesyncd.service.d
            disable-with-time-daemon.conf
   Active: inactive (dead)
Condition: start condition failed at Thu 2017-08-03 21:48:13 PDT; 1 day 20h ago
     Docs: man:systemd-timesyncd.service(8)

referring instead to a mysterious "failed condition". Attempting to restart the service did provide more details though:

$ systemctl restart systemd-timesyncd.service 
$ systemctl status systemd-timesyncd.service 
  systemd-timesyncd.service - Network Time Synchronization
   Loaded: loaded (/lib/systemd/system/systemd-timesyncd.service; enabled; vendor preset: enabled)
  Drop-In: /lib/systemd/system/systemd-timesyncd.service.d
            disable-with-time-daemon.conf
   Active: inactive (dead)
Condition: start condition failed at Sat 2017-08-05 18:19:12 PDT; 1s ago
             ConditionFileIsExecutable=!/usr/sbin/ntpd was not met
     Docs: man:systemd-timesyncd.service(8)

The above check for the presence of /usr/sbin/ntpd points to a conflict between ntpd and systemd-timesyncd. The solution of course is to remove the former before enabling the latter:

apt purge ntp

Enabling time synchronization with NTP Once the ntp package has been removed, it is time to enable NTP support in timesyncd. Start by choosing the NTP server pool nearest you and put it in /etc/systemd/timesyncd.conf. For example, mine reads like this:

[Time]
NTP=ca.pool.ntp.org

before restarting the daemon:

systemctl restart systemd-timesyncd.service 

That may not be enough on your machine though. To check whether or not the time has been synchronized with NTP servers, run the following:

$ timedatectl status
...
 Network time on: yes
NTP synchronized: no
 RTC in local TZ: no

If NTP is not enabled, then you can enable it by running this command:

timedatectl set-ntp true

Once that's done, everything should be in place and time should be kept correctly:

$ timedatectl status
...
 Network time on: yes
NTP synchronized: yes
 RTC in local TZ: no

Okay, this is fast, but we need Ludicrous speed All of Jorge's examples seem to leave the system clocks in a fairly default state, excepting turning on the clocks to the peripherals needed during the initialisation phase. Sadly, if we're going to be running the USB at all, we need the clocks to run a tad faster. Since my goal is to run something moderately CPU intensive on the end of the USB too, it makes sense to try and get our STM32 running at maximum clock speed. For the one I have, that's 72MHz rather than the 8MHz it starts out with. Nine times more cycles to do computing in makes a lot of sense. As I said above, I've been doing STM32 in C a lot for many years; and fortunately I have built systems with the exact chip that's on the blue-pill before. As such, if I rummage, I can find some old C code which does what we need...

    /* Enable HSE */
    RCC_HSEConfig(RCC_HSE_ON);
    /* Wait till HSE is ready */
    HSEStartUpStatus = RCC_WaitForHSEStartUp();
    if (HSEStartUpStatus == SUCCESS)
     
      /* Enable Prefetch Buffer */
      FLASH_PrefetchBufferCmd(FLASH_PrefetchBuffer_Enable);
      /* Flash 2 wait state */
      FLASH_SetLatency(FLASH_Latency_2);
      /* HCLK = SYSCLK */
      RCC_HCLKConfig(RCC_SYSCLK_Div1);
      /* PCLK2 = HCLK */
      RCC_PCLK2Config(RCC_HCLK_Div1);
      /* PCLK1 = HCLK/2 */
      RCC_PCLK1Config(RCC_HCLK_Div2);
      /* ADCCLK = PCLK2/6 */
      RCC_ADCCLKConfig(RCC_PCLK2_Div6);
      /* PLLCLK = 8MHz * 9 = 72 MHz */
      RCC_PLLConfig(RCC_PLLSource_HSE_Div1, RCC_PLLMul_9);
      /* Enable PLL */
      RCC_PLLCmd(ENABLE);
      /* Wait till PLL is ready */
      while (RCC_GetFlagStatus(RCC_FLAG_PLLRDY) == RESET)
       
      /* Select PLL as system clock source */
      RCC_SYSCLKConfig(RCC_SYSCLKSource_PLLCLK);
      /* Wait till PLL is used as system clock source */
      while (RCC_GetSYSCLKSource() != 0x08)
       
     

This code, rather conveniently, uses an 8MHz external crystal so we can almost direct-port it to the blue-pill Rust code and see how we go. If you're used to the CMSIS libraries for STM32, then you won't completely recognise the above since it uses the pre-CMSIS core libraries to do its thing. Library code from 2008 and it's still good on today's STM32s providing they're in the right family :-) A direct conversion to Rust, using Jorge's beautifully easy to work with crates made from svd2rust results in:

    fn make_go_faster(rcc: &RCC, flash: &FLASH)  
        rcc.cr.modify( _, w  w.hseon().enabled());
        while !rcc.cr.read().hserdy().is_ready()  
        flash.acr.modify( _, w  w.prftbe().enabled());
        flash.acr.modify( _, w  w.latency().two());
        rcc.cfgr.modify( _, w  w
                        .hpre().div1()
                        .ppre2().div1()
                        .ppre1().div2()
                        // .adcpre().bits(8)
                        .pllsrc().external()
                        .pllxtpre().div1()
                        .pllmul().mul9()
        );
        rcc.cr.modify( _, w  w.pllon().enabled());
        while rcc.cr.read().pllrdy().is_unlocked()  
        rcc.cfgr.modify( _,w  w.sw().pll());
        while !rcc.cfgr.read().sws().is_pll()  
     

Now, I've not put the comments in which were in the C code, because I'm being very lazy right now, but if you follow the two together you should be able to work it through. I don't have timeouts for the waits, and you'll notice a single comment there (I cannot set up the ADC prescaler because for some reason the SVD is missing any useful information and so the generated crate only carries an unsafe function (bits()) and I'm trying to steer clear of unsafe for now. Still, I don't need the ADC immediately, so I'm okay with this. By using this function in the beginning of the init() function of the blinky example, I can easily demonstrate the clock is going faster since the LED blinks more quickly. This function demonstrates just how simple it is to take bit-manipulation from the C code and turn it into (admittedly bad looking) Rust with relative ease and without any of the actual bit-twiddling. I love it.

Mess with time, and you get unexpected consequences Sadly, when you mess with the clock tree on a microcontroller, you throw a lot of things out of whack. Not least, by adjusting the clock frequency up we end up adjusting the AHB, APB1, and APB2 clock frequencies. This has direct consequences for peripherals floating around on those busses. Fortunately Jorge thought of this and while the blue-pill crate hard-wires those frequencies to 8MHz, they are, at least, configurable in code in some sense. If we apply the make_go_faster() function to the serial loopback example, it simply fails to work because now the bus which the USART1 peripheral is connected to (APB2) is going at a different speed from the expected power-on default of 8MHz. If you remember from the function, we did .hpre().div1() which set HCLK to 72MHz, then .ppre1().div2() which sets the APB1 bus clock to be HCLK divided by 2, and .ppre2().div1() which sets APB2 bus clock to be HCLK. This means that we'd need to alter src/lib.rs to reflect these changes in the clock frequences and in theory loopback would start working once more. It'd be awkward to try and demonstrate all that to you since I only have a phone camera to hand, but if you own a blue-pill then you can clone Jorge's repo and have a go yourself and see that I'm not bluffing you. With all this done, it'll be time to see if we can bring the USB peripheral in the STM32 online, and that will be the topic of my next post in this discovery series.

From: Sebastian R. < @gmail.com>
To: joachim@cis.upenn.edu
Subject: re: Errors I've spotted a basic error in your course on Haskell (https://www.seas.upenn.edu/~cis194/fall16/). Before I proceed, it's cool if you're not receptive to errors being indicated; I've come across a number of professors who would rather take offense than admit we're all human and thus capable of making mistakes... My goal is to find a resource that might be useful well into the future, and a good indicator of that is how responsive the author is to change. In your introduction note you have written:

n contrast to a classical intro into Haskell, we do not start with numbers, booleans, tuples, lists and strings, but we start with pictures. These are of course library-defined (hence the input CodeWorld) and not part of the language . But that does not make them less interesting, and in fact, even the basic boolean type is library defined it just happens to be the standard library.

Howeverm there is no input CodeWorld in the code above. Have you been made aware of this error earlier? Regards, ...

From: Joachim Breitner <noscript>joachim at cis dot upenn dot edu</noscript>
To: Sebastian R. < @gmail.com>
Subject: Re: Errors Dear Sebastian, thanks for pointing out errors. But the first piece of code under Basic Haskell starts with

 -# LANGUAGE OverloadedStrings #- 
import CodeWorld

so I am not sure what you are referring to. Note that these are lecture notes, so you have to imagine a lecturer editing code live on stage along with it. If you only have the notes, you might have to infer a few things. Regards, Joachim

From: Sebastian R. < @gmail.com>
To: Joachim Breitner <noscript>joachim at cis dot upenn dot edu</noscript>
Subject: Re: Errors Greetings, Joachim. Kindly open the lecture slides and search for "input CodeWorld" to find the error; it is not in the code, but in the paragraph that implicitly refers back to the code. You might note that I quoted this precisely from the lectures... and so I repeat myself... this came from your lectures; they're not my words!

In contrast to a classical intro into Haskell, we do not start with numbers, booleans, tuples, lists and strings, but we start with pictures. These are of course library-defined (hence the input CodeWorld) and not part of the language . But that does not make them less interesting, and in fact, even the basic boolean type is library defined it just happens to be the standard library.

This time around, I've highlighted the issue. I hope that made it easier for you to spot... Nonetheless, I got my answer. Don't reply if you're going to fight tooth and nail about such a basic fix; it's simply a waste of both of our time. I'd rather learn from somewhere else... On Tue, Aug 1, 2017 at 11:19 PM, Joachim Breitner <noscript>joachim at cis dot upenn dot edu</noscript> wrote:

From: Joachim Breitner <noscript>joachim at cis dot upenn dot edu</noscript>
To: Sebastian R. < @gmail.com>
Betreff: Re: Errors Dear Sebastian, nobody is fighting, and I see the mistake now: The problem is not that the line is not in the code, the problem is that there is a typo in the line and I wrote input instead of import . Thanks for the report, although you did turn it into quite a riddle a simple you wrote import when it should have been import would have been a better user of both our time. Regards, Joachim Am Donnerstag, den 03.08.2017, 13:32 +1000 schrieb Sebastian R.:

From: Sebastian R. < @gmail.com>
To: Joachim Breitner <noscript>joachim at cis dot upenn dot edu</noscript>
Subject: Re: Errors

a simple you wrote import when it should have been import would have been a better user of both our time.

We're both programmers. How about I cut ALL of the unnecessary garbage and just tell you to s/import/input/ on that last quotation (the thing immediately before this paragraph, in case you didn't know). I blatantly quoted the error, like this:

In your introduction note you have written:

n contrast to a classical intro into Haskell, we do not start with numbers, booleans, tuples, lists and strings, but we start with pictures. These are of course library-defined (hence the input CodeWorld) and not part of the language . But that does not make them less interesting, and in fact, even the basic boolean type is library defined it just happens to be the standard library.

Howeverm there is no input CodeWorld in the code above.

Since that apparently wasn't clear enough, in my second email to you I had to highlight it like so:

You might note that I quoted this precisely from the lectures... and so I repeat myself... this came from your lectures; they're not my words!

In contrast to a classical intro into Haskell, we do not start with numbers, booleans, tuples, lists and strings, but we start with pictures. These are of course library-defined (hence the input CodeWorld) and not part of the language . But that does not make them less interesting, and in fact, even the basic boolean type is library defined it just happens to be the standard library.

This time around, I've highlighted the issue. I hope that made it easier for you to spot...

I'm not sure if you're memeing at me or not now, but it seems either your reading comprehension, or your logical deduction skills might be substandard. Unfortunately, there isn't much either of us can do about that, so I'm happy to accept that some people will be so stupid; after all, it's to be expected and if we don't accept that which is to be expected then we live our lives in denial. Happy to wrap up this discusson here, Seb... On Fri, Aug 4, 2017 at 12:22 AM, Joachim Breitner <noscript>joachim at cis dot upenn dot edu</noscript> wrote:

• Append ,discard to the fourth column on relevant lines in /etc/crypttab. For me, this means the fourth column should be luks,discard.
• Change in /etc/lvm/lvm.conf that says issue_discards to enable it (assign 1 instead of 0).
• Append rd.luks.options=discard to the GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT value in /etc/default/grub
• Run sudo update-grub
• Run sudo update-initramfs -u
• Reboot.
• Run sudo fstrim -av - if this works, you're good! If it gives you errors, then you get to debug. I have no idea what I'm talking about.
• Copy /usr/share/doc/util-linux/examples/fstrim.* to /etc/systemd/system and run sudo systemctl enable fstrim.timer. This will tell systemd to run fstrim every week. (If you don't use systemd you'll have to adapt the systemd bits mentioned here. I've no idea how.)

Note, I'll again be talking mostly about USB2.0 low- and full-speed. I believe that high speed is approximately the same but with faster wires, except not quite that simple.

Down to the wire I don't intend to talk about the actual electrical signalling, though it's not un-reasonable for you to know that USB is a pair of wires forming a differentially signalled bidirectional serial communications link. The host is responsible for managing all the framing and timing on the link, and for formatting the communications into packets. There are a number of packet types which can appear on the USB link:

Packet type	Purpose
Token Packet	When the host wishes to send a message to the Control endpoint to configure the device, read data IN, or write data OUT, it uses this to start the transaction.
Data(0/1) Packet	Following a Setup, In, or Out token, a Data packet is a transfer of data (in either direction). The 0 and 1 alternate to provide a measure of confidence against lost packets.
Handshake Packet	Following a data packet of some kind, the other end may ACK the packet (all was well), NAK the packet (report that the device cannot, temporarily, send/receive data, or that an interrupt endpoint isn't triggered), or STALL the bus in which case the host needs to intervene.
Start of Frame	Every 1ms (full-speed) the host will send a SOF packet which carries a frame number. This can be used to help keep time on very simple devices. It also divides the bus into frames within which bandwidth is allocated.

As an example, when the host wishes to perform a control transfer, the following packets are transacted in turn:

1. Setup Token - The host addresses the device and endpoint (OUT0)
2. Data0 Packet - The host transmits a GET_DESCRIPTOR for the device descriptor
3. Ack Packet - The device acknowledges receipt of the request

This marks the end of the first transaction. The device decodes the GET_DESCRIPTOR request and prepares the device descriptor for transmission. The transmission occurs as the next transaction on the bus. In this example, we're assuming 8 byte maximum transmission sizes, for illustrative purposes.

1. In Token - The host addresses the device and endpoint (IN0)
2. Data1 Packet - The device transmits the first 8 bytes of the descriptor
3. Ack Packet - The host acknowledges the data packet
4. In Token - The host addresses the device and endpoint (IN0)
5. Data0 Packet - The device transmits the remaining 4 bytes of the descriptor (padded)
6. Ack Packet - The host acknowledges the data packet

The second transaction is now complete, and the host has all the data it needs to proceed. Finally a status transaction occurs in which:

1. Out Token - The host addresses the device and endpoint (OUT0)
2. Data1 Packet - The host transmits a 0 byte data packet to indicate successful completion
3. Ack Packet - The device acknowledges the completion, indicating its own satisfaction

And thus ends the full control transaction in which the host retrieves the device descriptor. From a high level, we need only consider the activity which occurs at the point of the acknowledgement packets. In the above example:

1. On the first ACK the device prepares IN0 to transmit the descriptor, readying whatever low level device stack there is with a pointer to the descriptor and its length in bytes.
2. On the second ACK the low levels are still thinking.
3. On the third ACK the transmission from IN0 is complete and the endpoint no longer expects to transfer data.
4. On the fourth ACK the control transaction is entirely complete.

Thinking at the low levels of the control interface Before we can build a high level USB stack, we need to consider the activity which might occur at the lower levels. At the low levels, particularly of the device control interface, work has to be done at each and every packet. The hardware likely deals with the token packet for us, leaving the data packets for us to process, and the resultant handshake packets will be likely handled by the hardware in response to our processing the data packets. Since every control transaction is initiated by a setup token, let's look at the setup requests which can come our way...

Setup Packet (Data) Format

Field Name	Byte start	Byte length	Encoding	Meaning
bmRequestType	0	1	Bitmap	Describes the kind of request, and the target of it. See below.
bRequest	1	1	Code	The request code itself, meanings of the rest of the fields vary by bRequest
wValue	2	2	Number	A 16 bit value whose meaning varies by request type
wIndex	4	2	Number	A 16 bit value whose meaning varies by request type but typically encodes an interface number or endpoint.
wLength	6	2	Number	A 16 bit value indicating the length of the transfer to come.

Since bRequest is essentially a switch against which multiple kinds of setup packet are selected between, here's the meanings of a few...

GET_DESCRIPTOR (Device) setup packet

Field Name	Value	Meaning
bmRequestType	0x08	Data direction is IN (from device to host), recipient is the device
bRequest	0x06	GET_DESCRIPTOR (in this instance, the device descriptor is requested)
wValue	0x0001	This means the device descriptor
wIndex	0x0000	Irrelevant, there's only 1 device descriptor anyway
wLength	12	This is the length of a device descriptor (12 bytes)

SET_ADDRESS to set a device's USB address

Field Name	Value	Meaning
bmRequestType	0x00	Data direction is OUT (from host to device), recipient is the device
bRequest	0x05	SET_ADDRESS (Set the device's USB address)
wValue	0x00nn	The address for the device to adopt (max 127)
wIndex	0x0000	Irrelevant for address setting
wLength	0	There's no data transfer expected for this setup operation

Most hardware blocks will implement an interrupt at the point that the Data packet following the Setup packet has been receive. This is typically called receiving a 'Setup' packet and then it's up to the device stack low levels to determine what to do and dispatch a handler. Otherwise an interrupt will fire for the IN or OUT tokens and if the endpoint is zero, the low level stack will handle it once more. One final thing worth noting about SET_ADDRESS is that it doesn't take effect until the completion of the zero-length "status" transaction following the setup transaction. As such, the status request from the host will still be sent to address zero (the default for new devices).

A very basic early "packet trace" This is an example, and is not guaranteed to be the packet sequence in all cases. It's a good indication of the relative complexity involved in getting a fresh USB device onto the bus though... When a device first attaches to the bus, the bus is in RESET state and so the first event a device sees is a RESET which causes it to set its address to zero, clear any endpoints, clear the configuration, and become ready for control transfers. Shortly after this, the device will become suspended. Next, the host kicks in and sends a port reset of around 30ms. After this, the host is ready to interrogate the device. The host sends a GET_DESCRIPTOR to the device, whose address at this point is zero. Using the information it receives from this, it can set up the host-side memory buffers since the device descriptor contains the maximum transfer size which the device supports. The host is now ready to actually 'address' the device, and so it sends another reset to the device, again around 30ms in length. The host sends a SET_ADDRESS control request to the device, telling it that its new address is nn. Once the acknowledgement has been sent from the host for the zero-data status update from the device, the device sets its internal address to the value supplied in the request. From now on, the device shall respond only to requests to nn rather than to zero. At this point, the host will begin interrogating further descriptors, looking at the configuration descriptors and the strings, to build its host-side representation of the device. These will be GET_DESCRIPTOR and GET_STRING_DESCRIPTOR requests and may continue for some time. Once the host has satisfied itself that it knows everything it needs to about the device, it will issue a SET_CONFIGURATION request which basically starts everything up in the device. Once the configuration is set, interrupt endpoints will be polled, bulk traffic will be transferred, Isochronous streams begin to run, etc.

Okay, but how do we make this concrete? So far, everything we've spoken about has been fairly abstract, or at least "soft". But to transfer data over USB does require some hardware. (Okay, okay, we could do it all virtualised, but there's no fun in that). The hardware I'm going to be using for the duration of this series is the STM32 on the blue-pill development board. This is a very simple development board which does (in theory at least) support USB device mode. If we view the schematic for the blue-pill, we can see a very "lightweight" USB interface which has a pullup resistor for D+. This is the way that a device signals to the host that it is present, and that it wants to speak at full-speed. If the pullup were on D- then it would be a low-speed device. High speed devices need a little more complexity which I'm not going to go into for today. The USB lines connect to pins PA11 and PA12 which are the USB pins on the STM32 on the board. Since USB is quite finicky, the STM32 doesn't let you remap that function elsewhere, so this is all looking quite good for us so far. The specific STM32 on the blue-pill is the STM32F103C8T6. By viewing its product page on ST's website we can find the reference manual for the part. Jumping to section 23 we learn that this STM32 supports full-speed USB2.0 which is convenient given the past article and a half. We also learn it supports up to eight endpoints active at any one time, and offers double-buffering for our bulk and isochronous transfers. It has some internal memory for packet buffering, so it won't use our RAM bandwidth while performing transfers, which is lovely. I'm not going to distill the rest of that section here, because there's a large amount of data which explains how the USB macrocell operates. However useful things to note are:

• How IN OUT and SETUP transfers work.
• How the endpoint buffer memory is configured.
• That all bus-powered devices MUST respond to suspend/resume properly
• That the hardware will prioritise endpoint interrupts for us so that we only need deal with the most pressing item at any given time.
• There is an 'Enable Function' bit in the address register which must be set or we won't see any transactions at all.
• How the endpoint registers signal events to the device firmware.

Next time, we're going to begin the process of writing a very hacky setup routine to try and initialise the USB device macrocell so that we can see incoming transactions through the ITM. It should be quite exciting, but given how complex this will be for me to learn, it might be a little while before it comes through.