Search Results: "ed"

10 January 2026

Dirk Eddelbuettel: Rcpp 1.1.1 on CRAN: Many Improvements in Semi-Annual Update

rcpp logo Team Rcpp is thrilled to share that an exciting new version 1.1.1 of Rcpp is now on CRAN (and also uploaded to Debian and already built for r2u). Having switchted to C++11 as the minimum standard in the previous 1.1.0 release, this version takes full advantage of it and removes a lot of conditional code catering to older standards that no longer need to be supported. Consequently, the source tarball shrinks by 39% from 3.11 mb to 1.88 mb. That is a big deal. (Size peaked with Rcpp 1.0.12 two years ago at 3.43 mb; relative to its size we are down 45% !!) Removing unused code also makes maintenance easier, and quickens both compilation and installation in general. This release continues as usual with the six-months January-July cycle started with release 1.0.5 in July 2020. Interim snapshots are always available via the r-universe page and repo. We continue to strongly encourage the use of these development released and their testing we tend to run our systems with them too. Rcpp has long established itself as the most popular way of enhancing R with C or C++ code. Right now, 3020 packages on CRAN depend on Rcpp for making analytical code go faster and further. On CRAN, 13.1% of all packages depend (directly) on Rcpp, and 60.9% of all compiled packages do. From the cloud mirror of CRAN (which is but a subset of all CRAN downloads), Rcpp has been downloaded 109.8 million times. The two published papers (also included in the package as preprint vignettes) have, respectively, 2151 (JSS, 2011) and 405 (TAS, 2018) citations, while the the book (Springer useR!, 2013) has another 715. This time, I am not attempting to summarize the different changes. The full list follows below and details all these changes, their respective PRs and, if applicable, issue tickets. Big thanks from all of us to all contributors!

Changes in Rcpp release version 1.1.1 (2026-01-08)
  • Changes in Rcpp API:
    • An unused old R function for a compiler version check has been removed after checking no known package uses it (Dirk in #1395)
    • A narrowing warning is avoided via a cast (Dirk in #1398)
    • Demangling checks have been simplified (I aki in #1401 addressing #1400)
    • The treatment of signed zeros is now improved in the Sugar code (I aki in #1404)
    • Preparations for phasing out use of Rf_error have been made (I aki in #1407)
    • The long-deprecated function loadRcppModules() has been removed (Dirk in #1416 closing #1415)
    • Some non-API includes from R were refactored to accommodate R-devel changes (I aki in #1418 addressing #1417)
    • An accessor to Rf_rnbeta has been removed (Dirk in #1419 also addressing #1420)
    • Code accessing non-API Rf_findVarInFrame now uses R_getVarEx (Dirk in #1423 fixing #1421)
    • Code conditional on the R version now expects at least R 3.5.0; older code has been removed (Dirk in #1426 fixing #1425)
    • The non-API ATTRIB entry point to the R API is no longer used (Dirk in #1430 addressing #1429)
    • The unwind-protect mechanism is now used unconditionally (Dirk in #1437 closing #1436)
  • Changes in Rcpp Attributes:
    • The OpenMP plugin has been generalized for different macOS compiler installations (Kevin in #1414)
  • Changes in Rcpp Documentation:
    • Vignettes are now processed via a new "asis" processor adopted from R.rsp (Dirk in #1394 fixing #1393)
    • R is now cited via its DOI (Dirk)
    • A (very) stale help page has been removed (Dirk in #1428 fixing #1427)
    • The main README.md was updated emphasizing r-universe in favor of the local drat repos (Dirk in #1431)
  • Changes in Rcpp Deployment:
    • A temporary change in R-devel concerning NA part in complex variables was accommodated, and then reverted (Dirk in #1399 fixing #1397)
    • The macOS CI runners now use macos-14 (Dirk in #1405)
    • A message is shown if R.h is included before Rcpp headers as this can lead to errors (Dirk in #1411 closing #1410)
    • Old helper functions use message() to signal they are not used, deprecation and removal to follow (Dirk in #1413 closing #1412)
    • Three tests were being silenced following #1413 (Dirk in #1422)
    • The heuristic whether to run all available tests was refined (Dirk in #1434 addressing #1433)
    • Coverage has been tweaked via additional #nocov tags (Dirk in #1435)
  • Non-release Changes:
    • Two interim non-releases 1.1.0.8.1 and .2 were made in order to unblock CRAN due to changes in R-devel rather than Rcpp

Thanks to my CRANberries, you can also look at a diff to the previous interim release along with pre-releaseds 1.1.0.8, 1.1.0.8.1 and 1.1.0.8.2 that were needed because R-devel all of a sudden decided to move fast and break things. Not our doing. Questions, comments etc should go to the GitHub discussion section list]rcppdevellist off the R-Forge page. Bugs reports are welcome at the GitHub issue tracker as well. Both sections can be searched as well.

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

Matthias Geiger: Building a propagation box for oyster mushrooms

Inspiration In November I watched a short documentary about a guy who grew pearl oyster mushrooms in his backyard. They used pallet boxes (half of a europallet, 60x80x20 cm) as box to keep the substrate the mycelium feeds on in. Since I really enjoy (foraged) mushrooms and had the raw materials lying around, I opted to build it myself. This also had the benefit of using what was available and not just consuming, i.e. buying a pallet box. Preparing the raw materials I had 4.5 m x ~ 25 cm wooden spruce planks at home. My plan was to cut those into 2 m segments, then trim the edges down to 20 cm and then cut them into handy pieces, following the dimension of half a pallet box. This is what they looked after cutting them with an electric chainsaw to around 2 m: raw_planks You can see that the edges are still not straight, because that's how they came out of the sawmill. Once that was done I visited a family member that had a crosscut saw, a table saw and a band saw; all that I would need. First we trimmed the edges of the 2m planks with the table saw so they were somewhat straight; then they were flipped and the other edge was cut straight, and their width cut down to 20 cm. After moving them over to the crosscut saw dividing them into two 60 cm and one 80 cm was fairly easy. When cutting the 2m planks from the 4m ones I calculated with extra offcuts, so I got little waste overall and could use the whole length to get my desired board. This is what the cut pieces looked like: cut_planks Assembly I packed up my planks, now nicely cut to size, and I went to a hardware shop and bought hinges and screws. Assembly was fairly easy and fast: screw a hinge to a corner, hold the other plank onto the hinge so that the corners of both boards touch, and affix the hinge. plank_with_hinge corner_with_hinge When this was done, the frame looked like this: finished_frame As last step I drilled 10mm holes more or less random in the middle of the box. This is where the mushrooms will grow out of later and can be harvested. box_with_holes Closing thoughts This was a fun project I finished in a day. The hinges have the benefit that they allow the box to be folded up lenght-wise: folded This allows for convenient storage. Since it's too cold outside right now, cultivation will have to wait until spring. This also just needs mycelium one can just buy, and some material fungus digests. They can also be fed coffee grounds, and harvest of the fruit body is possible circa every two weeks.

Scarlett Gately Moore: I love KDE too much to retire! Snap beta releases trickling in. Stay tuned.

A short but sweet note to say I am coming out of my short retirement to help with snaps again. My time is extremely limited, however we are working hard on getting snaps on CI and I have some newer snaps in beta trickling in for testing. You must install kf6-core24 from beta as well to test them ( this will likely break older kde snaps in the process so beware. ) This is slow going as I work on them during my hour lunch at day job and spare stolen moments. KDE is coming up on its 30th birthday!!! How cool is that! I KDE Like my work? Consider a donation. Thank you! Donate

9 January 2026

Simon Josefsson: Debian Taco Towards a GitSecDevOps Debian

One of my holiday projects was to understand and gain more trust in how Debian binaries are built, and as the holidays are coming to an end, I d like to introduce a new research project called Debian Taco. I apparently need more holidays, because there are still more work to be done here, so at the end I ll summarize some pending work. Debian Taco, or TacOS, is a GitSecDevOps rebuild of Debian GNU/Linux. The Debian Taco project publish rebuilt binary packages, package repository metadata (InRelease, Packages, etc), container images, cloud images and live images. All packages are built from pristine source packages in the Debian archive. Debian Taco does not modify any Debian source code nor add or remove any packages found in Debian. No servers are involved! Everything is built in GitLab pipelines and results are published through modern GitDevOps mechanism like GitLab Pages and S3 object storage. You can fork the individual projects below on GitLab.com and you will have your own Debian-derived OS available for tweaking. (Of course, at some level, servers are always involved, so this claim is a bit of hyperbole.)

Goals The goal of TacOS is to be bit-by-bit identical with official Debian GNU/Linux, and until that has been completed, publish diffoscope output with differences. The idea is to further categorize all artifact differences into one of the following categories: 1) An obvious bug in Debian. For example, if a package does not build reproducible. 2) An obvious bug in TacOS. For example, if our build environment does not manage to build a package. 3) Something else. This would be input for further research and consideration. This category also include things where it isn t obvious if it is a bug in Debian or in TacOS. Known examples: 3A) Packages in TacOS are rebuilt the latest available source code, not the (potentially) older package that were used to build the Debian packages. This could lead to differences in the packages. These differences may be useful to analyze to identify supply-chain attacks. See some discussion about idempotent rebuilds. Our packages are all built from source code, unless we have not yet managed to build something. In the latter situation, Debian Taco falls back and uses the official Debian artifact. This allows an incremental publication of Debian Taco that still is 100% complete without requiring that everything is rebuilt instantly. The goal is that everything should be rebuilt, and until that has been completed, publish a list of artifacts that we use verbatim from Debian.

Debian Taco Archive The Debian Taco Archive project generate and publish the package archive (dists/tacos-trixie/InRelease, dists/tacos-trixie/main/binary-amd64/Packages.gz, pool/* etc), similar to what is published at https://deb.debian.org/debian/. The output of the Debian Taco Archive is available from https://debdistutils.gitlab.io/tacos/archive/.

Debian Taco Container Images The Debian Taco Container Images project provide container images of Debian Taco for trixie, forky and sid on the amd64, arm64, ppc64el and riscv64 architectures. These images allow quick and simple use of Debian Taco interactively, but makes it easy to deploy for container orchestration frameworks.

Debian Taco Cloud Images The Debian Taco Cloud Images project provide cloud images of Debian Taco for trixie, forky and sid on the amd64, arm64, ppc64el and riscv64 architectures. Launch and install Debian Taco for your cloud environment!

Debian Taco Live Images The Debian Taco Live Images project provide live images of Debian Taco for trixie, forky and sid on the amd64 and arm64 architectures. These images allows running Debian Taco on physical hardware (or virtual machines), and even installation for permanent use.

Debian Taco Build Images and Packages Packages are built using debdistbuild, which was introduced in a blog about Build Debian in a GitLab Pipeline. The first step is to prepare build images, which is done by the Debian Taco Build Images project. They are similar to the Debian Taco containers but have build-essential and debdistbuild installed on them. Debdistbuild is launched in a per-architecture per-suite CI/CD project. Currently only trixie-amd64 is available. That project has built some essential early packages like base-files, debian-archive-keyring and hostname. They are stored in Git LFS backed by a S3 object storage. These packages were all built reproducibly. So this means Debian Taco is still 100% bit-by-bit identical to Debian, except for the renaming. I ve yet to launch a more massive wide-scale package rebuild until some outstanding issues have been resolved. I earlier rebuilt around 7000 packages from Trixie on amd64, so I know that the method easily scales.

Remaining work Where is the diffoscope package outputs and list of package differences? For another holiday! Clearly this is an important remaining work item. Another important outstanding issue is how to orchestrate launching the build of all packages. Clearly a list of packages is needed, and some trigger mechanism to understand when new packages are added to Debian. One goal was to build packages from the tag2upload browse.dgit.debian.org archive, before checking the Debian Archive. This ought to be really simple to implement, but other matters came first.

GitLab or Codeberg? Everything is written using basic POSIX /bin/sh shell scripts. Debian Taco uses the GitLab CI/CD Pipeline mechanism together with a Hetzner S3 object storage to serve packages. The scripts have only weak reliance on GitLab-specific principles, and were designed with the intention to support other platforms. I believe reliance on a particular CI/CD platform is a limitation, so I d like to explore shipping Debian Taco through a Forgejo-based architecture, possibly via Codeberg as soon as I manage to deploy reliable Forgejo runners. The important aspects that are required are: 1) Pipelines that can build and publish web sites similar to GitLab Pages. Codeberg has a pipeline mechanism. I ve successfully used Codeberg Pages to publish the OATH Toolkit homepage homepage. Glueing this together seems feasible. 2) Container Registry. It seems Forgejo supports a Container Registry but I ve not worked with it at Codeberg to understand if there are any limitations. 3) Package Registry. The Deban Taco live images are uploaded into a package registry, because they are too big for being served through GitLab Pages. It may be converted to using a Pages mechanism, or possibly through Release Artifacts if multi-GB artifacts are supported on other platforms. I hope to continue this work and explaining more details in a series of posts, stay tuned!

Russell Coker: LEAF ZE1 After 6 Months

About 6 months ago I got a Nissan LEAF ZE1 (2019 model) [1]. Generally it s going well and I m happy with most things about it. One issue is that as there isn t a lot of weight in the front with the batteries in the centre of the car the front wheels slip easily when accelerating. It s a minor thing but a good reason for wanting AWD in an electric car. When I got the car I got two charging devices, the one to charge from a regular 240V 10A power point (often referred to as a granny charger ) and a cable with a special EV charging connector on each end. The cable with an EV connector on each end is designed for charging that s faster than the granny charger but not as fast as the rapid chargers which have the cable connected to the supply so the cable temperature can be monitored and/or controlled. That cable can be used if you get a fast charger setup at your home (which I never plan to do) and apparently at some small hotels and other places with home-style EV charging. I m considering just selling that cable on ebay as I don t think I have any need to personally own a cable other than the granny charger . The key fob for the LEAF has a battery installed, it s either CR2032 or CR2025 mine has CR2025. Some reports on the Internet suggest that you can stuff a CR2032 battery in anyway but that didn t work for me as the thickness of the battery stopped some of the contacts from making a good connection. I think I could have got it going by putting some metal in between but the batteries aren t expensive enough to make it worth the effort and risk. It would be nice if I could use batteries from my stockpile of CR2032 batteries that came from old PCs but I can afford to spend a few dollars on it. My driveway is short and if I left the charger out it would be visible from the street and at risk of being stolen. I m thinking of chaining the charger to a tree and having some sort of waterproof enclosure for it so I don t have to go to the effort of taking it out of the boot every time I use it. Then I could also configure the car to only charge during the peak sunlight hours when the solar power my home feeds into the grid has a negative price (we have so much solar power that it s causing grid problems). The cruise control is a pain to use, so much so that I haven t yet got it to work usefully ever. The features look good in the documentation but in practice it s not as good as the Kia one I ve used previously where I could just press one button to turn it on, another button to set the current speed as the cruise control speed, and then just have it work. The electronic compass built in to the dash turned out to be surprisingly useful. I regret not gluing a compass to the dash of previous cars. One example is when I start google navigation for a journey and it says go South on street X and I need to know which direction is South so I don t start in the wrong direction. Another example is when I know that I m North of a major road that I need to take to get to my destination so I just need to go roughly South and that is enough to get me to a road I recognise. In the past when there is a bird in the way I don t do anything different, I keep driving at the same speed and rely on the bird to see me and move out of the way. Birds have faster reactions than humans and have evolved to move at the speeds cars travel on all roads other than freeways, also birds that are on roads are usually ones that have an eye in each side of their head so they can t not see my car approaching. For decades this has worked, but recently a bird just stood on the road and got squashed. So I guess that I should honk when there s birds on the road. Generally everything about the car is fine and I m happy to keep driving it.
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Reproducible Builds (diffoscope): diffoscope 310 released

The diffoscope maintainers are pleased to announce the release of diffoscope version 310. This version includes the following changes: 
[ Chris Lamb ]
* Reference the Debian 'ocaml' package instead of 'ocaml-nox'.
  (Closes: #1125094)
You find out more by visiting the project homepage.

8 January 2026

Reproducible Builds: Reproducible Builds in December 2025

Welcome to the December 2025 from the Reproducible Builds project! Our monthly reports outline what we ve been up to over the past month, highlighting items of news from elsewhere in the increasingly-important area of software supply-chain security. As ever, if you are interested in contributing to the Reproducible Builds project, please see the Contribute page on our website.

  1. New orig-check service to validate Debian upstream tarballs
  2. Distribution work
  3. disorderfs updated to FUSE 3
  4. Mailing list updates
  5. Three new academic papers published
  6. Website updates
  7. Upstream patches

New orig-check service to validate Debian upstream tarballs This month, Debian Developer Lucas Nussbaum announced the orig-check service, which attempts to automatically reproduce the generation upstream tarballs (ie. the original source component of a Debian source package), comparing that to the upstream tarball actually shipped with Debian. As of the time of writing, it is possible for a Debian developer to upload a source archive that does not actually correspond to upstream s version. Whilst this is not inherently malicious (it typically indicates some tooling/process issue), the very possibility that a maintainer s version may differ potentially permits a maintainer to make (malicious) changes that would be misattributed to upstream. This service therefore nicely complements the whatsrc.org service, which was reported in our reports for both April and August. The orig-check is dedicated to Lunar, who sadly passed away a year ago.

Distribution work In Arch Linux this month, Robin Candau and Mark Hegreberg worked at making the Arch Linux WSL image bit-for-bit reproducible. Robin also shared some implementation details and future related work on our mailing list. Continuing a series reported in these reports for March, April and July 2025 (etc.), Simon Josefsson has published another interesting article this month, itself a followup to a post Simon published in December 2024 regarding GNU Guix Container Images that are hosted on GitLab. In Debian this month, Micha Lenk posted to the debian-backports-announce mailing list with the news that the Backports archive will now discard binaries generated and uploaded by maintainers: The benefit is that all binary packages [will] get built by the Debian buildds before we distribute them within the archive. Felix Moessbauer of Siemens then filed a bug in the Debian bug tracker to signal their intention to package debsbom, a software bill of materials (SBOM) generator for distributions based on Debian. This generated a discussion on the bug inquiring about the output format as well as a question about how these SBOMs might be distributed. Holger Levsen merged a number of significant changes written by Alper Nebi Yasak to the Debian Installer in order to improve its reproducibility. As noted in Alper s merge request, These are the reproducibility fixes I looked into before bookworm release, but was a bit afraid to send as it s just before the release, because the things like the xorriso conversion changes the content of the files to try to make them reproducible. In addition, 76 reviews of Debian packages were added, 8 were updated and 27 were removed this month adding to our knowledge about identified issues. A new different_package_content_when_built_with_nocheck issue type was added by Holger Levsen. [ ] Arnout Engelen posted to our mailing list reporting that they successfully reproduced the NixOS minimal installation ISO for the 25.11 release without relying on a pre-compiled package archive, with more details on their blog. Lastly, Bernhard M. Wiedemann posted another openSUSE monthly update for his work there.

disorderfs updated to FUSE 3 disorderfs is our FUSE-based filesystem that deliberately introduces non-determinism into system calls to reliably flush out reproducibility issues. This month, however, Roland Clobus upgraded disorderfs* from FUSE 2 to FUSE 3 after its package automatically got removed from Debian testing. Some tests in Debian currently require disorderfs to make the Debian live images reproducible, although disorderfs is not a Debian-specific tool.

Mailing list updates On our mailing list this month:
  • Luca Di Maio announced stampdalf, a filesystem timestamp preservation tool that wraps arbitrary commands and ensures filesystem timestamp reproducibility :
    stampdalf allows you to run any command that modifies files in a directory tree, then automatically resets all timestamps back to their original values. Any new files created during command execution are set to [the UNIX epoch] or a custom timestamp via SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH.
    The project s GitHub page helpfully reveals that the project is pronounced: stamp-dalf (stamp like time-stamp, dalf like Gandalf the wizard) as it s a wizard of time and stamps .)
  • Lastly, Reproducible Builds developer cen1 posted to our list announcing that early/experimental/alpha support for FreeBSD was added to rebuilderd. In their post, cen1 reports that the initial builds are in progress and look quite decent . cen1 also interestingly notes that since the upstream is currently not technically reproducible I had to relax the bit-for-bit identical requirement of rebuilderd [ ] I consider the pkg to be reproducible if the tar is content-identical (via diffoscope), ignoring timestamps and some of the manifest files. .

Three new academic papers published Yogya Gamage and Benoit Baudry of Universit de Montr al, Canada together with Deepika Tiwari and Martin Monperrus of KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden published a paper on The Design Space of Lockfiles Across Package Managers:
Most package managers also generate a lockfile, which records the exact set of resolved dependency versions. Lockfiles are used to reduce build times; to verify the integrity of resolved packages; and to support build reproducibility across environments and time. Despite these beneficial features, developers often struggle with their maintenance, usage, and interpretation. In this study, we unveil the major challenges related to lockfiles, such that future researchers and engineers can address them. [ ]
A PDF of their paper is available online. Benoit Baudry also posted an announcement to our mailing list, which generated a number of replies.
Betul Gokkaya, Leonardo Aniello and Basel Halak of the University of Southampton then published a paper on the A taxonomy of attacks, mitigations and risk assessment strategies within the software supply chain:
While existing studies primarily focus on software supply chain attacks prevention and detection methods, there is a need for a broad overview of attacks and comprehensive risk assessment for software supply chain security. This study conducts a systematic literature review to fill this gap. By analyzing 96 papers published between 2015-2023, we identified 19 distinct SSC attacks, including 6 novel attacks highlighted in recent studies. Additionally, we developed 25 specific security controls and established a precisely mapped taxonomy that transparently links each control to one or more specific attacks. [ ]
A PDF of the paper is available online via the article s canonical page.
Aman Sharma and Martin Monperrus of the KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden along with Benoit Baudry of Universit de Montr al, Canada published a paper this month on Causes and Canonicalization of Unreproducible Builds in Java. The abstract of the paper is as follows:
[Achieving] reproducibility at scale remains difficult, especially in Java, due to a range of non-deterministic factors and caveats in the build process. In this work, we focus on reproducibility in Java-based software, archetypal of enterprise applications. We introduce a conceptual framework for reproducible builds, we analyze a large dataset from Reproducible Central, and we develop a novel taxonomy of six root causes of unreproducibility. [ ]
A PDF of the paper is available online.

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

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

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

Dirk Eddelbuettel: RcppCCTZ 0.2.14 on CRAN: New Upstream, Small Edits

A new release 0.2.14 of RcppCCTZ is now on CRAN, in Debian and built for r2u. RcppCCTZ uses Rcpp to bring CCTZ to R. CCTZ is a C++ library for translating between absolute and civil times using the rules of a time zone. In fact, it is two libraries. One for dealing with civil time: human-readable dates and times, and one for converting between between absolute and civil times via time zones. And while CCTZ is made by Google(rs), it is not an official Google product. The RcppCCTZ page has a few usage examples and details. This package was the first CRAN package to use CCTZ; by now several others packages (four the last time we counted) include its sources too. Not ideal, but beyond our control. This version updates to a new upstream release, and brings some small local edits. CRAN and R-devel were stumbled over us still mentioning C++11 in SystemRequirements (yes, this package is old enough for that to have mattered once). As that is a false positive the package compiles well under any recent standard we removed the mention. The key changes since the last CRAN release are summarised below.

Changes in version 0.2.14 (2026-01-08)
  • Synchronized with upstream CCTZ (Dirk in #46).
  • Explicitly enumerate files to be compiled in src/Makevars* (Dirk in #47)

Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is a diffstat report relative to to the previous version. More details are at the RcppCCTZ page; code, issue tickets etc at the GitHub repository.

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

Dima Kogan: Meshroom packaged for Debian

Like the title says, I just packaged Meshroom (and all the adjacent dependencies) for Debian! This is a fancy photogrammetry toolkit that uses modern software development methods. "Modern" meaning that it has a multitude of dependencies that come from lots of disparate places, which make it impossible for a mere mortal to build the thing. The Linux "installer" is 13GB and probably is some sort of container, or something. But now, if you have a Debian/sid box with the non-free repos enabled, you can 
sudo apt install meshroom
And then you can generate and 3D-print a life-size, geometrically-accurate statue of your cat. The colmap package does a similar thing, and has been in Debian for a while. I think it can't do as many things, but it's good to have both tools easily available. These packages are all in contrib, because they depend on a number of non-free things, most notably CUDA. This is currently in Debian/sid, but should be picked up by the downstream distros as they're released. The next noteworthy one is Ubuntu 26.04. Testing and feedback welcome.

Dirk Eddelbuettel: RcppSpdlog 0.0.24 on CRAN: New Upstream

Version 0.0.24 of RcppSpdlog arrived on CRAN today, has been been uploaded to Debian, and also been built for r2u. This follows an upstream release on Sunday which we incorporated immediately, but CRAN was still closed for the winter break until yesterday. RcppSpdlog bundles spdlog, a wonderful header-only C++ logging library with all the bells and whistles you would want that was written by Gabi Melman, and also includes fmt by Victor Zverovich. You can learn more at the nice package documention site. This release updates the code to the version 1.17.0 of spdlog which was released yesterday morning, and includes version 12.1.0 of fmt. No other changes besides tweaks to the documentation site (that was updated to using altdoc last release) have been made. The NEWS entry for this release follows.

Changes in RcppSpdlog version 0.0.24 (2026-01-07)
  • Upgraded to upstream release spdlog 1.17.0 (including fmt 12.1.0)

Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is also a diffstat report detailing changes. More detailed information is on the RcppSpdlog page, or the package documention site.

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

Sven Hoexter: Moving from hexchat to Halloy

I'm not hanging around on IRC a lot these days, but when I do I used hexchat (and xchat before). Probably a bad habbit of clinging to what I got used to for the past 25 years. But in the light of the planned removal of GTK2, it felt like it was time to look for an alternative. Halloy looked interesting, albeit not packaged for Debian. But upstream references a flatpak (another party I did not join so far), good enough to give it a try. 
$ sudo apt install flatpak
$ flatpak remote-add --if-not-exists flathub https://dl.flathub.org/repo/flathub.flatpakrepo
$ flatpak install org.squidowl.halloy
$ flatpak run org.squidowl.halloy
Configuration ends up at ~/.var/app/org.squidowl.halloy/config/halloy/config.toml, which I linked for convenience to ~/.halloy.toml. Since I connect via ZNC in an odd old setup without those virtual networks, but several accounts, and of course never bothered to replace the self signed certificate, it requires some additional configuration to be able to connect. Each account gets its own servers.<foo> block like this: 
[servers.bnc-oftc]
nickname = "my-znc-user-for-this-network"
server = "sven.stormbind.net"
dangerously_accept_invalid_certs = true
password = "mypasssowrd"
port = 4711
use_tls = true
Halloy has also a small ZNC guide. I'm growing old, so a bigger font size is useful. Be aware that font changes require an application restart to take effect. 
[font]
size = 16
family = "Noto Mono"
I also prefer the single-pane mode which could be copy & pasted as documented. Works good enough for now. hexchat was also the last none wayland application I've been using (xlsclients output is finally empty).

7 January 2026

Gunnar Wolf: Artificial Intelligence Play or break the deck

This post is an unpublished review for Artificial Intelligence Play or break the deck
As a little disclaimer, I usually review books or articles written in English, and although I will offer this review to Computing Reviews as usual, it is likely it will not be published. The title of this book in Spanish is Inteligencia artificial: jugar o romper la baraja. I was pointed at this book, published last October by Margarita Padilla Garc a, a well known Free Software activist from Spain who has long worked on analyzing (and shaping) aspects of socio-technological change. As other books published by Traficantes de sue os, this book is published as Open Access, under a CC BY-NC license, and can be downloaded in full. I started casually looking at this book, with too long a backlog of material to read, but soon realized I could just not put it down: it completely captured me. This book presents several aspects of Artificial Intelligence (AI), written for a general, non-technical audience. Many books with a similar target have been published, but this one is quite unique; first of all, it is written in a personal, non-formal tone. Contrary to what s usual in my reading, the author made the explicit decision not to fill the book with references to her sources ( because searching on Internet, it s very easy to find things ), making the book easier to read linearly a decision I somewhat regret, but recognize helps develop the author s style. The book has seven sections, dealing with different aspects of AI. They are the Visions (historical framing of the development of AI); Spectacular (why do we feel AI to be so disrupting, digging particularly into game engines and search space); Strategies , explaining how multilayer neural networks work and linking the various branches of historic AI together, arriving at Natural Language Processing; On the inside , tackling technical details such as algorithms, the importance of training data, bias, discrimination; On the outside , presenting several example AI implementations with socio-ethical implications; Philosophy , presenting the works of Marx, Heidegger and Simondon in their relation with AI, work, justice, ownership; and Doing , presenting aspects of social activism in relation to AI. Each part ends with yet another personal note: Margarita Padilla includes a letter to one of her friends related to said part. Totalling 272 pages (A5, or roughly half-letter, format), this is a rather small book. I read it probably over a week. So, while this book does not provide lots of new information to me, the way how it was written, made it a very pleasing experience, and it will surely influence the way I understand or explain several concepts in this domain.

Ravi Dwivedi: Why my Riseup account got suspended (and reinstated)

Disclaimer: The goal of this post is not to attack Riseup. In fact, I love Riseup and support their work.

Story Riseup is an email provider, known for its privacy-friendly email service. The service requires an invite from an existing Riseup email user to get an account. I created my account on Riseup in the year 2020, of course with the help of a friend who invited me. Since then, I have used the email address only occasionally, although it is logged into my Thunderbird all the time. Fast-forward to the 4th of January 2026, when Thunderbird suddenly told me that it could not log in to my Riseup account. When I tried logging in using their webmail, it said invalid password . Finally, I tried logging in to my account on their website, and was told that
Log in for that account is temporary suspended while we perform maintenance. Please try again later.
At this point, I suspected that the Riseup service itself was facing some issues. I asked a friend who had an account there if the service was up, and they said that it was. The issue seemed to be specific only to my account. I contacted Riseup support and informed them of the issue. They responded the next day (the 5th of January) saying:
The my-username-redacted account was found inviting another account that violated our terms of use. As a security measure we suspend all related accounts to ToS violations.
(Before we continue, I would like to take a moment and reflect upon how nice it was to receive response from a human rather than an AI bot a trend that is unfortunately becoming the norm nowadays.) I didn t know who violated their ToS, so I asked which account violated their terms. Riseup told me:
username-redacted@riseup.net attempted to create aliases that could be abused to impersonate riseup itself.
I asked a friend whom I invited a month before the incident, and they confirmed that the username belonged to them. When I asked what they did, they told me they tried creating aliases such as floatup and risedown. I also asked Riseup which aliases violated their terms, but their support didn t answer this. I explained to the Riseup support that the impersonation wasn t intentional, that the user hadn t sent any emails, and that I had been a user for more than 5 years and had donated to them in the past. Furthermore, I suggested that they should block the creation of such aliases if they think the aliases violate their terms, like how email providers typically don t allow users to create admin@ or abuse@ email addresses. After I explained myself, Riseup reinstated my account. Update on the 10th of January 2025: My friend told me that the alias that violated Riseup s terms was cloudadmin and his account was reinstated on the 7th of January.

Issues with suspension I have the following issues regarding the way the suspension took place
  • There was no way of challenging the suspension before the action was taken
  • The action taken against me was disproportionate. Remember that I didn t violate any terms. It was allegedly done by a user I invited. They could just block the aliases while continuing the discussion in parallel.
  • I was locked out of my account with no way of saving my emails and without any chance to migrate. What if that email address was being used for important stuff such as bank access or train tickets? I know people who use Riseup email for such purposes.
  • The violation wasn t even proven. I wasn t told which alias violated the terms and how could that be used to impersonate Riseup itself
When I brought up the issue of me getting locked out of my account without a way of downloading my emails or migrating my account, Riseup support responded by saying:
You must understand that we react [by] protecting our service, and therefore we cannot provide notice messages on the affected accounts. We need to act preventing any potential damage to the service that might affect the rest of the users, and that measure is not excessive (think on how abusers/spammers/scammers/etc could trick us and attempt any action before their account is suspended).
This didn t address my concerns, so let s move on to the next section.

Room for improvement Here s how I think Riseup s ban policy could be changed while still protecting against spammers and other bad actors:
  • Even if Riseup can t provide notice to blocked accounts, perhaps they can scale back limitations on the inviting account which wasn t even involved for example, by temporarily disabling invites from that account until the issue is resolved.
  • In this case, the person didn t impersonate Riseup, so Riseup could have just blocked the aliases and let the user know about it, rather than banning the account outright.
  • Riseup should give blocked users access to their existing emails so they have a chance to migrate them to a different provider. (Riseup could disable SMTP and maybe incoming emails but keep IMAP access open). I know people who use Riseup for important things such as bank or train tickets, and a sudden block like this is not a good idea.
  • Riseup should factor in the account profile in making these decisions. I had an account on their service for 5 years and I had only created around 5 invites. (I don t remember the exact number and there s no way to retrieve this information.) This is not exactly an attacker profile. I feel long-term users like this deserve an explanation for a ban.
I understand Riseup is a community-run service and does not have unlimited resources like big corporations or commercial email providers do. Their actions felt disproportionate to me because I don t know what issues they face behind the scenes. I hope someone can help to improve the policies, or at least shed light on why they are the way they are. Signing off now. Meet you in the next one! Thanks to Badri and Contrapunctus for reviewing this blog post

Thorsten Alteholz: My Debian Activities in December 2025

Debian LTS/ELTS This was my hundred-thirty-eighth month that I did some work for the Debian LTS initiative, started by Raphael Hertzog at Freexian. (As the LTS- and ELTS-teams have been merged now, there is only one paragraph left for both activities.) During my allocated time I uploaded or worked on: I also tried to backport the libcoap3-patches to Bookworm, but I am afraid the changes would be too intrusive.When I stumbled upon a comment for 7zip about finding the patches might be a hard , I couldn t believe it. Well, Daniel was right and I didn t find any. Furthermore I worked on suricata, marked some CVEs as not-affected or ignored, and added some new patches. Unfortunately my allocated time was spent before I could do a new upload. I also attended the monthly LTS/ELTS meeting. Last but not least I injected some packages for uploads to security-master. Debian Printing This month I uploaded a new upstream version or a bugfix version of: This work is generously funded by Freexian! Debian Lomiri I started to contribute to Lomiri packages, which are part of the Debian UBports Team. As a first step I took care of failing CI pipelines and tried to fix them. A next step would be to package some new Applications. This work is generously funded by Fre(i)e Software GmbH! Debian Astro This month I uploaded a new upstream version or a bugfix version of: Debian IoT This month I uploaded a new upstream version or a bugfix version of: Debian Mobcom Unfortunately I didn t found any time to work on this topic. misc This month I uploaded a new upstream version or a bugfix version of: Last but not least, I wish (almost) everbody a Happy New Year and hope that you are able to stick to your New Year s resolutions.

5 January 2026

Isoken Ibizugbe: Thinking About My Audience

Thinking about who I am addressing is a challenge, but it is an important one. As I write, I realize I m speaking to three distinct groups: my friends and family who are new to the world of tech, newcomers eager to join programs like Outreachy, and the technical experts who maintain and sustain the projects I work on.

What is FOSS anyway? To my friends and family: Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) refers to software that anyone can freely use, modify, and share. Think of it as a community garden, instead of one company owning the food, people from all over the world contribute, improve, and maintain it so everyone can benefit from it for free.

To the Aspiring Contributors Contributing to an open source project isn t just about writing code. It could involve going over a ton of documentation and understanding a specific coding style. You have to set up your environment and learn to treat documentation as a source of truth, even if it s something you help modify and improve later. Where I come from, this world is fairly unknown, and it seemed quite scary at first. However, I ve learned that asking questions and communicating are your best tools. Don t be afraid to do your part by investigating and reading, but remember that the community is there to help you grow.

Why Quality Matters For the past few weeks, I ve seen the importance of checking software quality before a release. Imagine you download a new desktop environment, try to open the calculator or the clock, and it crashes or refuses to start. How annoying is that? Or worse, you download software and can t even install it successfully. My work on creating tests for Debian using openQA is aimed at preventing these experiences. We simulate real user actions to make sure that when someone clicks Open, the application actually works.

Closing Thoughts In general, FOSS has empowered people to access and build technology freely. Whether you are here to use the software or you have the expertise to modify and explore it, there is a place for you in this community. I m writing this for you, whichever audience you belong to, to show that complex systems become less intimidating when you begin by asking questions.

Hellen Chemtai: Starting out on Open source: Try the OpenQA Debian Image Testing Project

Hello world . I am an intern at Outreachy and contributing to the Debian Images Testing project since October 2025. This project is Open Source and everyone can contribute to it in any way. The project uses Open QA to automatically install Operating System Images and test them . We have a community here of contributors that is always ready to help out. The mentors and project maintainers are very open to contributions. They listen to any innovative ideas and point out what they have been doing so far. So far contributions have been in terms of: Contributing to this project requires some knowledge of Linux commands and Operating Systems. What we will learn later as we go on will be :
Preparation
Before any contribution begins, we would want to first try out the project and run a couple of tests. Get to understand what we are doing first. Let s say you are starting out as a Windows or MacOS user and you want to start contributing. I would recommend dual partitioning your device first. Do enough research and prepare the resources. The network install image just needs at-least 4 GB USB flash drive for dual booting. You will use Debian as the second operating system. Give enough space to Debian, I recommend around 150 GB or more. Also assign at-least 1 GB space to the /boot/efi directory to prevent the low space warnings after a while.This will be a way good way to learn about image installation which is part of the work . I do not recommend Virtual Box because it will hinder full use of system resources. This process will take a day or two.
Set Up and Testing
After dual booting. We log into our Debian System . The next step of instructions will take you through how we set up and run our tests. These instructions have many Linux commands. You will be learning if you are a newbie as you go through the steps. Try to understand these commands and do not blindly copy and paste. You can start your contributions here if you have a suggestion to add to the install docs. Run some tests then log in the Web UI as per the instructions to view your tests progress. Green means they ve passed. Blue means its still running. Red means failed.
Trying Out Ideas
Kudos if you have reached this point. The community of contributors will help if you are stuck. We get to try out our own variations of tests using variables. We will also rely on documentation to understand the configurations / test commands like these 
openqa-cli api -X POST isos ISO=debian-13.1.0-amd64-netinst.iso DISTRI=debian VERSION=stable FLAVOR=netinst-iso ARCH=x86_64 BUILD=1310 #This is the test you will run on the guide
openqa-cli api -X POST isos ISO=debian-13.1.0-amd64-netinst.iso DISTRI=debian VERSION=stable FLAVOR=netinst-iso ARCH=x86_64 BUILD=1310 TEST=cinnamon #I have added a TEST variable that runs only cinnamon test suite
You can check specific test suites from the WebUI :
We get some failures at times. Here are some failed tests from a build I was working on.
Here we find the cinnamon test failed at locale module. Click on any module above and it will lead us to needles and point to the where the test failed. You can check the error or try to add a needle if its needle failure.
Try editing a test module and test your changes. Try out some ideas. Read the documentation folder and write some pseudo code. Interact with the community. Try working on some tasks from the community . Create your tests and add them to the configuration. There is a lot of stuff that can you can work on in this community. It may seem hard to grasp at first as a newbie to Open Source. The community will help you through out even if the problem seems small. We are very friendly and the code maintainers have extensive knowledge. Get to sit with us during one of our meetings and you will learn so much about the project. Learning , networking and communicating is part of contributing to the broader community.

Colin Watson: Free software activity in December 2025

About 95% of my Debian contributions this month were sponsored by Freexian. You can also support my work directly via Liberapay or GitHub Sponsors. Python packaging I upgraded these packages to new upstream versions: Python 3.14 is now a supported version in unstable, and we re working to get that into testing. As usual this is a pretty arduous effort because it requires going round and fixing lots of odds and ends across the whole ecosystem. We can deal with a fair number of problems by keeping up with upstream (see above), but there tends to be a long tail of packages whose upstreams are less active and where we need to chase them, or where problems only show up in Debian for one reason or another. I spent a lot of time working on this: Fixes for pytest 9: I filed lintian: Report Python egg-info files/directories to help us track the migration to pybuild-plugin-pyproject. I did some work on dh-python: Normalize names in pydist lookups and pyproject plugin: Support headers (the latter of which allowed converting python-persistent and zope.proxy to pybuild-plugin-pyproject, although it needed a follow-up fix). I fixed or helped to fix several other build/test failures: Other bugs: Other bits and pieces Code reviews

Bits from Debian: Debian welcomes Outreachy interns for December 2025-March 2026 round

Outreachy logo Debian continues participating in Outreachy, and as you might have already noticed, Debian has selected two interns for the Outreachy December 2025 - March 2026 round. After a busy contribution phase and a competitive selection process, Hellen Chemtai Taylor and Isoken Ibizugbe are officially working as interns on Debian Images Testing with OpenQA for the past month, mentored by T ssia Cam es Ara jo, Roland Clobus and Philip Hands. Congratulations and welcome Hellen Chemtai Taylor and Isoken Ibizugbe! The team also congratulates all candidates for their valuable contributions, with special thanks to those who manage to continue participating as volunteers. From the official website: Outreachy provides three-month internships for people from groups traditionally underrepresented in tech. Interns work remotely with mentors from Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) communities on projects ranging from programming, user experience, documentation, illustration and graphical design, to data science. The Outreachy programme is possible in Debian thanks to the efforts of Debian developers and contributors who dedicate their free time to mentor students and outreach tasks, and the Software Freedom Conservancy's administrative support, as well as the continued support of Debian's donors, who provide funding for the internships. Join us and help to improve Debian! You can follow the work of the Outreachy interns reading their blog posts (syndicated in Planet Debian), and chat with the team at the debian-openqa matrix channel. For Outreachy matters, the programme admins can be reached on #debian-outreach IRC/matrix channel and mailing list.

Vincent Bernat: Using eBPF to load-balance traffic across UDP sockets with Go

Akvorado collects sFlow and IPFIX flows over UDP. Because UDP does not retransmit lost packets, it needs to process them quickly. Akvorado runs several workers listening to the same port. The kernel should load-balance received packets fairly between these workers. However, this does not work as expected. A couple of workers exhibit high packet loss: 
$ curl -s 127.0.0.1:8080/api/v0/inlet/metrics \
>   sed -n s/akvorado_inlet_flow_input_udp_in_dropped//p
packets_total listener="0.0.0.0:2055",worker="0"  0
packets_total listener="0.0.0.0:2055",worker="1"  0
packets_total listener="0.0.0.0:2055",worker="2"  0
packets_total listener="0.0.0.0:2055",worker="3"  1.614933572278264e+15
packets_total listener="0.0.0.0:2055",worker="4"  0
packets_total listener="0.0.0.0:2055",worker="5"  0
packets_total listener="0.0.0.0:2055",worker="6"  9.59964121598348e+14
packets_total listener="0.0.0.0:2055",worker="7"  0
eBPF can help by implementing an alternate balancing algorithm.

Options for load-balancing There are three methods to load-balance UDP packets across workers:
  1. One worker receives the packets and dispatches them to the other workers.
  2. All workers share the same socket.
  3. Each worker has its own socket, listening to the same port, with the SO_REUSEPORT socket option.

SO_REUSEPORT option Tom Hebert added the SO_REUSEPORT socket option in Linux 3.9. The cover letter for his patch series explains why this new option is better than the two existing ones from a performance point of view:
SO_REUSEPORT allows multiple listener sockets to be bound to the same port. [ ] Received packets are distributed to multiple sockets bound to the same port using a 4-tuple hash. The motivating case for SO_RESUSEPORT in TCP would be something like a web server binding to port 80 running with multiple threads, where each thread might have it s own listener socket. This could be done as an alternative to other models:
  1. have one listener thread which dispatches completed connections to workers, or
  2. accept on a single listener socket from multiple threads.
In case #1, the listener thread can easily become the bottleneck with high connection turn-over rate. In case #2, the proportion of connections accepted per thread tends to be uneven under high connection load. [ ] We have seen the disproportion to be as high as 3:1 ratio between thread accepting most connections and the one accepting the fewest. With SO_REUSEPORT the distribution is uniform. The motivating case for SO_REUSEPORT in UDP would be something like a DNS server. An alternative would be to receive on the same socket from multiple threads. As in the case of TCP, the load across these threads tends to be disproportionate and we also see a lot of contection on the socket lock.
Akvorado uses the SO_REUSEPORT option to dispatch the packets across the workers. However, because the distribution uses a 4-tuple hash, a single socket handles all the flows from one exporter.

SO_ATTACH_REUSEPORT_EBPF option In Linux 4.5, Craig Gallek added the SO_ATTACH_REUSEPORT_EBPF option to attach an eBPF program to select the target UDP socket. In Linux 4.6, he extended it to support TCP. The socket(7) manual page documents this mechanism:1
The BPF program must return an index between 0 and N-1 representing the socket which should receive the packet (where N is the number of sockets in the group). If the BPF program returns an invalid index, socket selection will fall back to the plain SO_REUSEPORT mechanism.
In Linux 4.19, Martin KaFai Lau added the BPF_PROG_TYPE_SK_REUSEPORT program type. Such an eBPF program selects the socket from a BPF_MAP_TYPE_REUSEPORT_ARRAY map instead. This new approach is more reliable when switching target sockets from one instance to another for example, when upgrading, a new instance can add its sockets and remove the old ones.

Load-balancing with eBPF and Go Altering the load-balancing algorithm for a group of sockets requires two steps:
  1. write and compile an eBPF program in C,2 and
  2. load it and attach it in Go.

eBPF program in C A simple load-balancing algorithm is to randomly choose the destination socket. The kernel provides the bpf_get_prandom_u32() helper function to get a pseudo-random number. 
volatile const __u32 num_sockets; //  
struct  
    __uint(type, BPF_MAP_TYPE_REUSEPORT_SOCKARRAY);
    __type(key, __u32);
    __type(value, __u64);
    __uint(max_entries, 256);
  socket_map SEC(".maps"); //  
SEC("sk_reuseport")
int reuseport_balance_prog(struct sk_reuseport_md *reuse_md)
 
    __u32 index = bpf_get_prandom_u32() % num_sockets; //  
    bpf_sk_select_reuseport(reuse_md, &socket_map, &index, 0); //  
    return SK_PASS; //  
 
char _license[] SEC("license") = "GPL";
In , we declare a volatile constant for the number of sockets in the group. We will initialize this constant before loading the eBPF program into the kernel. In , we define the socket map. We will populate it with the socket file descriptors. In , we randomly select the index of the target socket.3 In , we invoke the bpf_sk_select_reuseport() helper to record our decision. Finally, in , we accept the packet.

Header files If you compile the C source with clang, you get errors due to missing headers. The recommended way to solve this is to generate a vmlinux.h file with bpftool: 
$ bpftool btf dump file /sys/kernel/btf/vmlinux format c > vmlinux.h
Then, include the following headers:4 
#include "vmlinux.h"
#include <bpf/bpf_helpers.h>
For my 6.17 kernel, the generated vmlinux.h is quite big: 2.7 MiB. Moreover, bpf/bpf_helpers.h is shipped with libbpf. This adds another dependency for users. As the eBPF program is quite small, I prefer to put the strict minimum in vmlinux.h by cherry-picking the definitions I need.

Compilation The eBPF Library for Go ships bpf2go, a tool to compile eBPF programs and to generate some scaffolding code. We create a gen.go file with the following content: 
package main
//go:generate go tool bpf2go -tags linux reuseport reuseport_kern.c
After running go generate ./..., we can inspect the resulting objects with readelf and llvm-objdump: 
$ readelf -S reuseport_bpfeb.o
There are 14 section headers, starting at offset 0x840:
  [Nr] Name              Type             Address           Offset
[ ]
  [ 3] sk_reuseport      PROGBITS         0000000000000000  00000040
  [ 6] .maps             PROGBITS         0000000000000000  000000c8
  [ 7] license           PROGBITS         0000000000000000  000000e8
[ ]
$ llvm-objdump -S reuseport_bpfeb.o
reuseport_bpfeb.o:  file format elf64-bpf
Disassembly of section sk_reuseport:
0000000000000000 <reuseport_balance_prog>:
;  
       0:   bf 61 00 00 00 00 00 00     r6 = r1
;     __u32 index = bpf_get_prandom_u32() % num_sockets;
       1:   85 00 00 00 00 00 00 07     call 0x7
[ ]

Usage from Go Let s set up 10 workers listening to the same port.5 Each socket enables the SO_REUSEPORT option before binding:6 
var (
    err error
    fds []uintptr
    conns []*net.UDPConn
)
workers := 10
listenAddr := "127.0.0.1:0"
listenConfig := net.ListenConfig 
    Control: func(_, _ string, c syscall.RawConn) error  
        c.Control(func(fd uintptr)  
            err = unix.SetsockoptInt(int(fd), unix.SOL_SOCKET, unix.SO_REUSEPORT, 1)
            fds = append(fds, fd)
         )
        return err
     ,
 
for range workers  
    pconn, err := listenConfig.ListenPacket(t.Context(), "udp", listenAddr)
    if err != nil  
        t.Fatalf("ListenPacket() error:\n%+v", err)
     
    udpConn := pconn.(*net.UDPConn)
    listenAddr = udpConn.LocalAddr().String()
    conns = append(conns, udpConn)
The second step is to load the eBPF program, initialize the num_sockets variable, populate the socket map, and attach the program to the first socket.7 
// Load the eBPF collection.
spec, err := loadReuseport()
if err != nil  
    t.Fatalf("loadVariables() error:\n%+v", err)
 
// Set "num_sockets" global variable to the number of file descriptors we will register
if err := spec.Variables["num_sockets"].Set(uint32(len(fds))); err != nil  
    t.Fatalf("NumSockets.Set() error:\n%+v", err)
 
// Load the map and the program into the kernel.
var objs reuseportObjects
if err := spec.LoadAndAssign(&objs, nil); err != nil  
    t.Fatalf("loadReuseportObjects() error:\n%+v", err)
 
t.Cleanup(func()   objs.Close()  )
// Assign the file descriptors to the socket map.
for worker, fd := range fds  
    if err := objs.reuseportMaps.SocketMap.Put(uint32(worker), uint64(fd)); err != nil  
        t.Fatalf("SocketMap.Put() error:\n%+v", err)
     
 
// Attach the eBPF program to the first socket.
socketFD := int(fds[0])
progFD := objs.reuseportPrograms.ReuseportBalanceProg.FD()
if err := unix.SetsockoptInt(socketFD, unix.SOL_SOCKET, unix.SO_ATTACH_REUSEPORT_EBPF, progFD); err != nil  
    t.Fatalf("SetsockoptInt() error:\n%+v", err)
We are now ready to process incoming packets. Each worker is a Go routine incrementing a counter for each received packet:8 
var wg sync.WaitGroup
receivedPackets := make([]int, workers)
for worker := range workers  
    conn := conns[worker]
    packets := &receivedPackets[worker]
    wg.Go(func()  
        payload := make([]byte, 9000)
        for  
            if _, err := conn.Read(payload); err != nil  
                if errors.Is(err, net.ErrClosed)  
                    return
                 
                t.Logf("Read() error:\n%+v", err)
             
            *packets++
         
     )
Let s send 1000 packets: 
sentPackets := 1000
conn, err := net.Dial("udp", conns[0].LocalAddr().String())
if err != nil  
    t.Fatalf("Dial() error:\n%+v", err)
 
defer conn.Close()
for range sentPackets  
    if _, err := conn.Write([]byte("hello world!")); err != nil  
        t.Fatalf("Write() error:\n%+v", err)
If we print the content of the receivedPackets array, we can check the balancing works as expected, with each worker getting about 100 packets: 
=== RUN   TestUDPWorkerBalancing
    balancing_test.go:84: receivedPackets[0] = 107
    balancing_test.go:84: receivedPackets[1] = 92
    balancing_test.go:84: receivedPackets[2] = 99
    balancing_test.go:84: receivedPackets[3] = 105
    balancing_test.go:84: receivedPackets[4] = 107
    balancing_test.go:84: receivedPackets[5] = 96
    balancing_test.go:84: receivedPackets[6] = 102
    balancing_test.go:84: receivedPackets[7] = 105
    balancing_test.go:84: receivedPackets[8] = 99
    balancing_test.go:84: receivedPackets[9] = 88
    balancing_test.go:91: receivedPackets = 1000
    balancing_test.go:92: sentPackets     = 1000

Graceful restart You can also use SO_ATTACH_REUSEPORT_EBPF to gracefully restart an application. A new instance of the application binds to the same address and prepare its own version of the socket map. Once it attaches the eBPF program to the first socket, the kernel steers incoming packets to this new instance. The old instance needs to drain the already received packets before shutting down. To check we are not losing any packet, we spawn a Go routine to send as many packets as possible: 
sentPackets := 0
notSentPackets := 0
done := make(chan bool)
conn, err := net.Dial("udp", conns1[0].LocalAddr().String())
if err != nil  
    t.Fatalf("Dial() error:\n%+v", err)
 
defer conn.Close()
go func()  
    for  
        if _, err := conn.Write([]byte("hello world!")); err != nil  
            notSentPackets++
          else  
            sentPackets++
         
        select  
        case <-done:
            return
        default:
         
     
 ()
Then, while the Go routine runs, we start the second set of workers. Once they are running, they start receiving packets. If we gracefully stop the initial set of workers, not a single packet is lost!9 
=== RUN   TestGracefulRestart
    graceful_test.go:135: receivedPackets1[0] = 165
    graceful_test.go:135: receivedPackets1[1] = 195
    graceful_test.go:135: receivedPackets1[2] = 194
    graceful_test.go:135: receivedPackets1[3] = 190
    graceful_test.go:135: receivedPackets1[4] = 213
    graceful_test.go:135: receivedPackets1[5] = 187
    graceful_test.go:135: receivedPackets1[6] = 170
    graceful_test.go:135: receivedPackets1[7] = 190
    graceful_test.go:135: receivedPackets1[8] = 194
    graceful_test.go:135: receivedPackets1[9] = 155
    graceful_test.go:139: receivedPackets2[0] = 1631
    graceful_test.go:139: receivedPackets2[1] = 1582
    graceful_test.go:139: receivedPackets2[2] = 1594
    graceful_test.go:139: receivedPackets2[3] = 1611
    graceful_test.go:139: receivedPackets2[4] = 1571
    graceful_test.go:139: receivedPackets2[5] = 1660
    graceful_test.go:139: receivedPackets2[6] = 1587
    graceful_test.go:139: receivedPackets2[7] = 1605
    graceful_test.go:139: receivedPackets2[8] = 1631
    graceful_test.go:139: receivedPackets2[9] = 1689
    graceful_test.go:147: receivedPackets = 18014
    graceful_test.go:148: sentPackets     = 18014
Unfortunately, gracefully shutting down a UDP socket is not trivial in Go.10 Previously, we were terminating workers by closing their sockets. However, if we close them too soon, the application loses packets that were assigned to them but not yet processed. Before stopping, a worker needs to call conn.Read() until there are no more packets. A solution is to set a deadline for conn.Read() and check if we should stop the Go routine when the deadline is exceeded: 
payload := make([]byte, 9000)
for  
    conn.SetReadDeadline(time.Now().Add(50 * time.Millisecond))
    if _, err := conn.Read(payload); err != nil  
        if errors.Is(err, os.ErrDeadlineExceeded)  
            select  
            case <-done:
                return
            default:
                continue
             
         
        t.Logf("Read() error:\n%+v", err)
     
    *packets++
With TCP, this aspect is simpler: after enabling the net.ipv4.tcp_migrate_req sysctl, the kernel automatically migrates waiting connections to a random socket in the same group. Alternatively, eBPF can also control this migration. Both features are available since Linux 5.14.

Addendum After implementing this strategy in Akvorado, all workers now drop packets! 
$ curl -s 127.0.0.1:8080/api/v0/inlet/metrics \
>   sed -n s/akvorado_inlet_flow_input_udp_in_dropped//p
packets_total listener="0.0.0.0:2055",worker="0"  838673
packets_total listener="0.0.0.0:2055",worker="1"  843675
packets_total listener="0.0.0.0:2055",worker="2"  837922
packets_total listener="0.0.0.0:2055",worker="3"  841443
packets_total listener="0.0.0.0:2055",worker="4"  840668
packets_total listener="0.0.0.0:2055",worker="5"  850274
packets_total listener="0.0.0.0:2055",worker="6"  835488
packets_total listener="0.0.0.0:2055",worker="7"  834479
The root cause is the default limit of 32 records for Kafka batch sizes. This limit is too low because the brokers have a large overhead when handling each batch: they need to ensure they persist correctly before acknowledging them. Increasing the limit to 4096 records fixes this issue. While load-balancing incoming flows with eBPF remains useful, it did not solve the main issue. At least the even distribution of dropped packets helped identify the real bottleneck.
  1. The current version of the manual page is incomplete and does not cover the evolution introduced in Linux 4.19. There is a pending patch about this.
  2. Rust is another option. However, the program we use is so trivial that it does not make sense to use Rust.
  3. As bpf_get_prandom_u32() returns a pseudo-random 32-bit unsigned value, this method exhibits a very slight bias towards the first indexes. This is unlikely to be worth fixing.
  4. Some examples include <linux/bpf.h> instead of "vmlinux.h". This makes your eBPF program dependent on the installed kernel headers.
  5. listenAddr is initially set to 127.0.0.1:0 to allocate a random port. After the first iteration, it is updated with the allocated port.
  6. This is the setupSockets() function in fixtures_test.go.
  7. This is the setupEBPF() function in fixtures_test.go.
  8. The complete code is in balancing_test.go
  9. The complete code is in graceful_test.go
  10. In C, we would poll() both the socket and a pipe used to signal for shutdown. When the second condition is triggered, we drain the socket by executing a series of non-blocking read() until we get EWOULDBLOCK.

Jonathan McDowell: Free Software Activities for 2025

Given we ve entered a new year it s time for my annual recap of my Free Software activities for the previous calendar year. For previous years see 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023 + 2024.

Conferences My first conference of the year was FOSDEM. I d submitted a talk proposal about system attestation in production environments for the attestation devroom, but they had a lot of good submissions and mine was a bit more this is how we do it rather than here s some neat Free Software that does it . I m still trying to work out how to make some of the bits we do more open, but the problem is a lot of the neat stuff is about taking internal knowledge about what should be running and making sure that s the case, and what you end up with if you abstract that is a toolkit that still needs a lot of work to get something useful. I d more luck at DebConf25 where I gave a talk (Don t fear the TPM) trying to explain how TPMs could be useful in a Debian context. Naturally the comments section descended into a discussion about UEFI Secure Boot, which is a separate, if related, thing. DebConf also featured the usual catch up with fellow team members, hanging out with folk I hadn t seen in ages, and generally feeling a bit more invigorated about Debian. Other conferences I considered, but couldn t justify, were All Systems Go! and the Linux Plumbers Conference. I ve no doubt both would have had a bunch of interesting and relevant talks + discussions, but not enough this year. I m going to have to miss FOSDEM this year, due to travel later in the month, and I m uncertain if I m going to make DebConf (for a variety of reasons). That means I don t have a Free Software conference planned for 2026. Ironically FOSSY moving away from Portland makes it a less appealing option (I have Portland friends it would be good to visit). Other than potential Debian MiniConfs, anything else European I should consider?

Debian I continue to try and keep RetroArch in shape, with 1.22.2+dfsg-1 (and, shortly after, 1.22.2+dfsg-2 - git-buildpackage in trixie seems more strict about Build-Depends existing in the outside environment, and I keep forgetting I need Build-Depends-Arch and Build-Depends-Indep to be pretty much the same with a minimal Build-Depends that just has enough for the clean target) getting uploaded in December, and 1.20.0+dfsg-1, 1.20+dfsg-2 + 1.20+dfsg-3 all being uploaded earlier in the year. retroarch-assets had 1.20.0+dfsg-1 uploaded back in April. I need to find some time to get 1.22.0 packaged. libretro-snes9x got updated to 1.63+dfsg-1. sdcc saw 4.5.0+dfsg-1, 4.5.0+dfsg-2, 4.5.0+dfsg-3 (I love major GCC upgrades) and 4.5.0-dfsg-4 uploads. There s an outstanding bug around a LaTeX error building the manual, but this turns out to be a bug in the 2.5 RC for LyX. Huge credit to Tobias Quathamer for engaging with this, and Pavel Sanda + J rgen Spitzm ller from the LyX upstream for figuring out the issue + a fix. Pulseview saw 0.4.2-4 uploaded to fix issues with the GCC 15 + CMake upgrades. I should probably chase the sigrok upstream about new releases; I think there are a bunch of devices that have gained support in git without seeing a tagged release yet. I did an Electronics Team upload for gputils 1.5.2-2 to fix compilation with GCC 15. While I don t do a lot with storage devices these days if I can help it I still pay a little bit of attention to sg3-utils. That resulted in 1.48-2 and 1.48-3 uploads in 2025. libcli got a 1.10.7-3 upload to deal with the libcrypt-dev split out. Finally I got more up-to-date versions of libtorrent (0.15.7-1) and rtorrent (also 0.15.7-1) uploaded to experimental. There s a ppc64el build failure in libtorrent, but having asked on debian-powerpc this looks like a flaky test/code and I should probably go ahead and upload to unstable. I sponsored some uploads for Michel Lind - the initial uploads of plymouth-theme-hot-dog, and the separated out pykdumpfile package. Recognising the fact I wasn t contributing in a useful fashion to the Data Protection Team I set about trying to resign in an orderly fashion - see Andreas call for volunteers that went out in the last week. Shout out to Enrico for pointing out in the past that we should gracefully step down from things we re not actually managing to do, to avoid the perception it s all fine and no one else needs to step up. Took me too long to act on it. The Debian keyring team continues to operate smoothly, maintaining our monthly release cadence with a 3 month rotation ensuring all team members stay familiar with the process, and ensure their setups are still operational (especially important after Debian releases). I handled the 2025.03.23, 2025.06.24, 2025.06.27, 2025.09.18, 2025.12.08 + 2025.12.26 pushes.

Linux TPM related fixes were the theme of my kernel contributions in 2025, all within a work context. Some were just cleanups, but several fixed real issues that were causing us issues. I ve also tried to be more proactive about reviewing diffs in the TPM subsystem; it feels like a useful way to contribute, as well as making me more actively pay attention to what s going on there.

Personal projects I did some work on onak, my OpenPGP keyserver. That resulted in a 0.6.4 release, mainly driven by fixes for building with more recent CMake + GCC versions in Debian. I ve got a set of changes that should add RFC9580 (v6) support, but there s not a lot of test keys out there at present for making sure I m handling things properly. Equally there s a plan to remove Berkeley DB from Debian, which I m completely down with, but that means I need a new primary backend. I ve got a draft of LMDB support to replace that, but I need to go back and confirm I ve got all the important bits implemented before publishing it and committing to a DB layout. I d also like to add sqlite support as an option, but that needs some thought about trying to take proper advantage of its features, rather than just treating it as a key-value store. (I know everyone likes to hate on OpenPGP these days, but I continue to be interested by the whole web-of-trust piece of it, which nothing else I m aware of offers.) That about wraps up 2025. Nothing particularly earth shaking in there, more a case of continuing to tread water on the various things I m involved. I highly doubt 2026 will be much different, but I think that s ok. I scratch my own itches, and if that helps out other folk too then that s lovely, but not the primary goal.

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