This post serves as a report from my attendance to Kubecon and CloudNativeCon 2023 Europe that took place in
Amsterdam in April 2023. It was my second time physically attending this conference, the first one was in
Austin, Texas (USA) in 2017. I also attended once in a virtual fashion.
The content here is mostly generated for the sake of my own recollection and learnings, and is written from
the notes I took during the event.
The very first session was the opening keynote, which reunited the whole crowd to bootstrap the event and
share the excitement about the days ahead. Some astonishing numbers were announced: there were more than
10.000 people attending, and apparently it could confidently be said that it was the largest open source
technology conference taking place in Europe in recent times.
It was also communicated that the next couple iteration of the event will be run in China in September 2023
and Paris in March 2024.
More numbers, the CNCF was hosting about 159 projects, involving 1300 maintainers and about 200.000
contributors. The cloud-native community is ever-increasing, and there seems to be a strong trend in the
industry for cloud-native technology adoption and all-things related to PaaS and IaaS.
The event program had different tracks, and in each one there was an interesting mix of low-level and higher
level talks for a variety of audience. On many occasions I found that reading the talk title alone was not
enough to know in advance if a talk was a 101 kind of thing or for experienced engineers. But unlike in
previous editions, I didn t have the feeling that the purpose of the conference was to try selling me
anything. Obviously, speakers would make sure to mention, or highlight in a subtle way, the involvement of a
given company in a given solution or piece of the ecosystem. But it was non-invasive and fair enough for me.
On a different note, I found the breakout rooms to be often small. I think there were only a couple of rooms
that could accommodate more than 500 people, which is a fairly small allowance for 10k attendees. I realized
with frustration that the more interesting talks were immediately fully booked, with people waiting in line
some 45 minutes before the session time. Because of this, I missed a few important sessions that I ll
hopefully watch online later.
Finally, on a more technical side, I ve learned many things, that instead of grouping by session I ll group
by topic, given how some subjects were mentioned in several talks.
On gitops and CI/CD pipelines
Most of the mentions went to FluxCD and ArgoCD. At
that point there were no doubts that gitops was a mature approach and both flux and argoCD could do an
excellent job. ArgoCD seemed a bit more over-engineered to be a more general purpose CD pipeline, and flux
felt a bit more tailored for simpler gitops setups. I discovered that both have nice web user interfaces that
I wasn t previously familiar with.
However, in two different talks I got the impression that the initial setup of them was simple, but migrating
your current workflow to gitops could result in a bumpy ride. This is, the challenge is not deploying
flux/argo itself, but moving everything into a state that both humans and flux/argo can understand. I also
saw some curious mentions to the config drifts that can happen in some cases, even if the goal of gitops is
precisely for that to never happen. Such mentions were usually accompanied by some hints on how to operate
the situation by hand.
Worth mentioning, I missed any practical information about one of the key pieces to this whole gitops story:
building container images. Most of the showcased scenarios were using pre-built container images, so in that
sense they were simple. Building and pushing to an image registry is one of the two key points we would need
to solve in Toolforge Kubernetes if adopting gitops.
In general, even if gitops were already in our radar for
Toolforge Kubernetes,
I think it climbed a few steps in my priority list after the conference.
Another learning was this site: https://opengitops.dev/.
On etcd, performance and resource management
I attended a talk focused on etcd performance tuning that was very encouraging. They were basically talking
about the exactsameproblems we
have had in Toolforge Kubernetes, like api-server and etcd failure modes, and how sensitive etcd is to disk
latency, IO pressure and network throughput. Even though
Toolforge Kubernetes scale is small compared to other Kubernetes deployments out there, I found it very
interesting to see other s approaches to the same set of challenges.
I learned how most Kubernetes components and apps can overload the api-server. Because even the api-server
talks to itself. Simple things like kubectl may have a completely different impact on the API depending on
usage, for example when listing the whole list of objects (very expensive) vs a single object.
The conclusion was to try avoiding hitting the api-server with LIST calls, and use ResourceVersion which
avoids full-dumps from etcd (which, by the way, is the default when using bare kubectl get calls). I
already knew some of this, and for example the jobs-framework-emailer was already making use of this
ResourceVersion functionality.
There have been a lot of improvements in the performance side of Kubernetes in recent times, or more
specifically, in how resources are managed and used by the system. I saw a review of resource management from
the perspective of the container runtime and kubelet, and plans to support fancy things like topology-aware
scheduling decisions and dynamic resource claims (changing the pod resource claims without
re-defining/re-starting the pods).
On cluster management, bootstrapping and multi-tenancy
I attended a couple of talks that mentioned kubeadm, and one in particular was from the maintainers
themselves. This was of interest to me because as of today we use it for
Toolforge. They shared all
the latest developments and improvements, and the plans and roadmap for the future, with a special mention to
something they called kubeadm operator , apparently capable of auto-upgrading the cluster, auto-renewing
certificates and such.
I also saw a comparison between the different cluster bootstrappers, which to me confirmed that kubeadm was
the best, from the point of view of being a well established and well-known workflow, plus having a very
active contributor base. The kubeadm developers invited the audience to submit feature requests,
so I did.
The different talks confirmed that the basic unit for multi-tenancy in kubernetes is the namespace. Any
serious multi-tenant usage should leverage this. There were some ongoing conversations, in official sessions
and in the hallway, about the right tool to implement K8s-whitin-K8s, and vcluster
was mentioned enough times for me to be convinced it was the right candidate. This was despite of my impression
that multiclusters / multicloud are regarded as hard topics in the general community. I definitely would like to play
with it sometime down the road.
On networking
I attended a couple of basic sessions that served really well to understand how Kubernetes instrumented the
network to achieve its goal. The conference program had sessions to cover topics ranging from network
debugging recommendations, CNI implementations, to IPv6 support. Also, one of the keynote sessions had a
reference to how kube-proxy is not able to perform NAT for SIP connections, which is interesting because I
believe Netfilter Conntrack could do it if properly configured. One of the conclusions on the CNI front was
that Calico has a massive community adoption (in Netfilter mode), which is reassuring, especially considering
it is the one we use for Toolforge Kubernetes.
On jobs
I attended a couple of talks that were related to HPC/grid-like usages of Kubernetes. I was truly impressed
by some folks out there who were using Kubernetes Jobs on massive scales, such as to train machine learning
models and other fancy AI projects.
It is acknowledged in the community that the early implementation of things like Jobs and CronJobs had some
limitations that are now gone, or at least greatly improved. Some new functionalities have been added as
well. Indexed Jobs, for example, enables each Job to have a number (index) and process a chunk of a larger
batch of data based on that index. It would allow for full grid-like features like sequential (or again,
indexed) processing, coordination between Job and more graceful Job restarts. My first reaction was: Is that
something we would like to enable in Toolforge Jobs Framework?
On policy and security
A surprisingly good amount of sessions covered interesting topics related to policy and security. It was nice
to learn two realities:
kubernetes is capable of doing pretty much anything security-wise and create
greatly secured environments.
it does not by default. The defaults are not security-strict on purpose.
It kind of made sense to me: Kubernetes was used for a wide range of use cases, and developers didn t know
beforehand to which particular setup they should accommodate the default security levels.
One session in particular covered the most basic security features that should be enabled for any Kubernetes
system that would get exposed to random end users. In my opinion, the Toolforge Kubernetes setup was already
doing a good job in that regard. To my joy, some sessions referred to the Pod Security Admission mechanism,
which is one of the key security features we re about to adopt (when migrating away from
Pod Security Policy).
I also learned a bit more about Secret resources, their current implementation and how to leverage a
combo of CSI and RBAC for a more secure usage of external secrets.
Finally, one of the major takeaways from the conference was learning about kyverno and
kubeaudit. I was previously aware of the
OPA Gatekeeper. From the several demos I saw, it
was to me that kyverno should help us make Toolforge Kubernetes more sustainable by replacing all of our
custom admission controllers
with it. I already opened a ticket to track this idea, which I ll be
proposing to my team soon.
Final notes
In general, I believe I learned many things, and perhaps even more importantly I re-learned some stuff I had
forgotten because of lack of daily exposure. I m really happy that the cloud native way of thinking was
reinforced in me, which I still need because most of my muscle memory to approach systems architecture and
engineering is from the old pre-cloud days.
List of sessions I attended on the first day:
Process
Rust is a trademark owned by the Foundation.
The Rust Foundation still seems to be finding its feet. Evidently, one of the items on its backlog was to update the trademark policy. Apparently they have been working on this for some time, in an informal working group.
In August, there was a survey. (I saw it in This Week In Rust, the community-curated newsletter where most important stuff appears, and responded.) I don t think the results of this survey have been published anywhere.
Last week (12th April) the Foundation published an official Inside Rust blog post linking to a draft. They included a link to a feedback survey, closing on the 17th of April i.e., it was open for 5 days.
This is far too short a period for formal feedback on such a draft. Especially given that this process has apparently already been generating significant controversy within parts of the Rust community.
Substance
Overall, this policy is poor. It is far too restrictive.
It is likely to lead to (further) controversy and argument, including conflicts with Rust s downstreams. It does not serve the needs of the Rust community.
In particular, the Rust community does not need the trademark to:
Maintain the quality of software called Rust.
Prevent people distributing badly-modified versions of its software, even called Rust , provided that users know what they are getting.
The community does need the trademark to:
Prevent people impersonating the Rust Project (for example by registering competing domain names).
Prevent people economically exploiting the value of the brand by holding shabby or vacuous conferences etc. (so requiring approval for e.g. conferences makes sense).
It might be useful to use the trademark to strengthen licensing or CoC compliance. For example, good faith redistributions of a modified Rust, as Rust , would be Free Software, even though the copyright licence permits proprietary derivatives; so use of the Rust trademark should probably require use of a Free licence.
There should be a series of blanket permissions to use the word Rust in for example:
Free Software distributions derived from official Rust software, provided it s recognisably similar. (I.e., you must change its name if you make other big changes too.)
Free Software libraries written in Rust, or interfacing to Rust, in non-Rust-specific software repositories (including source hosting systems like gitlab, distro package managers e.g. Debian apt, and package managers for other languages e.g. npm).
Currently there aren t. For example the current Debian practice of calling Rust libraries rust-<name-of-crate> is probably in violation.
There are a number of more detailed problems with the wording.
Values
The policy has all the hallmarks of excessive influence from traditional trademark lawyers and not enough influence from the Free Software community.
I would like to remind the Free Software activists on the inside of this process that the lawyers are there to serve you and the community.
The values embodied in trademark law often conflict with the values of the Free Software community. The Rust Project should adopt a trademark policy which follows the community s values - even if that might weaken our ability to sue evildoers.
Next steps
The Foundation should take a step back and pause the process.
Then, the Foundation should restart the process from a much earlier stage, with much wider publicity. Each stage should be widely advertised to the whole community, with opportunities for feedback.
This should include publishing the results of the August 2022 survey. The Foundation should publish a sketch of the legal advice they have received, publicly say what the plausible options are and what their consequences might be (for the community, for downstreams, and for the Foundation s enforcement ability).
(Some of this will no doubt repeat the work that has been done in the informal trademark working group. That work wasn t widely enough advertised.)
Echoes of a dispute from 2006
Mozilla made a very similar mistake with Firefox in 2006.
The official policy stated that no-one was allowed to distribute Firefox with any patches, unless those patches had been pre-approved by Mozilla.
Debian is committed to Software Freedom. This must includes the freedom to modify the software as one sees fit, even if the original authors don t agree.
Now, overly-restrictive trademark policies are hardly new. Debian often takes the practical view that usually the upstream with such a policy doesn t really mean it.
But Mozilla decided they did mean it. They contacted Debian asking for Debian to get their patches approved.
Since that wasn t acceptable to Debian, they stopped using the word Firefox . For a decade, Debian s Firefox browser was called Iceweasel .
We don t want something similar happening to Rust .
Previously, I explained why ventilation monitoring is important, and the opportunity I see to help accelerate deployment of high quality ventilation monitoring for small businesses and organisations.
In this post, I m going to discuss my plans to tackle that opportunity:
My journey to ventilation monitoring
I started looking into ventilation monitoring in detail last year when I wanted to ensure that the classrooms of our local primary school were well ventilated during the Omicron outbreak. That research revealed that the existing products on offer were challenging to deploy in a school environment from a cost perspective while also not providing perfect functionality.
I built and deployed a set of monitors to our local school, along with a corresponding set of software and web services that provide management of the monitors and visibility into the collected data and trends. The benefit of the monitoring is evident - CO2 concentration drops immediately after a notification occurs, indicating the intended action of increasing ventilation is taking place. Initially this occurred more frequently, but over time low concentrations of CO2, indicating good ventilation levels, are regularly achieved across the school day thanks to simple changes in routine being established, such as leaving windows cracked open.
As the benefits of the project to the school became clear, my ambition and vision for ventilation monitoring grew from wanting to see my children learn in a safe and effective environment to desiring safe and effective learning, working, living and social spaces for everyone.
co2mon.nz: Ventilation monitoring as a service prototype
co2mon.nz is the service that I have launched to explore this opportunity. Based on the same hardware and software that I used for the school deployment I am selling both a physical CO2 monitor and an ongoing subscription service for the management and monitoring. Together, the monitor and software provide an effective and affordable path to understanding indoor air quality and ventilation status that anyone can use.
CO2 monitor
The CO2 monitor hardware and firmware are based on Oliver Seiler s design using a Sensirion SCD40 module for CO2 measurement and providing immediate in-room feedback via an on-monitor screen as well as a red/orange/green traffic light . In addition to the immediate feedback provided by the monitor itself, a WiFi connection can be configured allowing every measurement to be reported back to the supporting monitoring and management service.
At the current prototype stage, I am building all the hardware, 3D printing the plastic cases and assembling the circuit board from purchased components through a production line in my home workshop. The monitor is powered via a standard USB cable and wall adaptor for simplicity.
The first batch of monitors I built have been operating smoothly for nearly a year now. Further refinement and development of the design is required but already I am impressed with the potential this combination of easily accessible components provides to enable widespread adoption and deployment of ventilation monitoring.
Monitoring and management service
The web service provides a historical record of CO2 levels from each monitor through a set of graphs and other dashboards and allows for this data to be shared or published. This is useful both for providing visibility into ventilation status to those not directly present in the space (e.g. across an entire school) and to allow insights into trends and patterns in ventilation to be observed and acted upon.
When I began the project I approached the software side as an opportunity to explore the real-world equivalents of many of the internal tools and components that I was used to using within Google. That s been a fun process, even though it means I ve invested far more time on the software than the current number of customers or business state can really justify.
Communication with the monitors occurs via MQTT into a custom Go service responsible for maintaining the fleet and exposing the measurement data to Prometheus which acts as the storage layer. A second service (based on the Buffalo web framework) is responsible for serving the web interface containing the dashboards and configuration options. Alongside these core components another small Golang service manages a private X509 certificate authority to provide monitor identity and encryption of the measurement data and an automated pipeline of scripts and triggers takes care of firmware provisioning, sensor calibration and burn-in/failure testing when building batches of monitors.
While simple, the design is easy to manage and could scale to support many, many more monitors without significant effort. I m hosting the infrastructure on AWS, which I ve found pleasant and easy to use, and while not a typical choice, I m very pleased with the performance and flexibility that Prometheus offers as a data storage layer.
Areas of development
The prototype has been effective in proving the feasibility of offering ventilation monitoring as a service, but to evolve the prototype into an actual business is going to require further effort in the following areas:
Finding product market fit
I m confident that what co2mon.nz is offering could provide a useful and needed service for many small business owners and numerous others, but the question of whether it s sufficiently compelling that a sizeable group of customers see enough value that they re willing to regularly pay for it and therefore sustain a business providing the service is not yet proven.
While initial feedback on the idea has been positive, much of it has been from family and friends and I ve spent more time building the software (which has been fun and educational) than I have talking to actual potential customers and understanding their needs and wants.
This is a classic trap that technical founders fall into, and I m guilty despite my best intentions it s comfortable and easy for me to work on the parts where I have existing experience and neglect putting time into the customer-facing sales, marketing and research which are more uncomfortable, new and challenging!
Scaling monitor production
Scaling from the current prototype batches I have built to even modest levels (e.g. hundreds) of sales will require outsourcing. There are several potential New Zealand and overseas providers I can work with which look very promising, but will require iteration of the hardware design (e.g. to remove through-hole components which add complexity and expense to the PCB assembly process). The lead times I ve been quoted for working with these outsourced providers are in the order of 1-2 months per batch, and on top of this there are a number of other risks in terms of component availability and regulatory compliance that may add additional delays or time to resolve, particularly as my experience leans towards the software rather than the hardware.
It seems counter-intuitive to worry about how to scale to meet demand that doesn t yet provably exist, but given the potentially long lead times involved in establishing outsourced production I think it s worth taking some risk in starting this journey early.
Next steps
My aim now is to intentionally change my focus from the software to learning about the market and finding the right product to offer via two channels:
Via online marketing, to reach a wide range of potential customers and allow rapid iteration and testing of a variety of product/service combinations, including referral options for existing customers.
In-person with small businesses in my local area to seek out direct feedback and thoughts on the general issue of ventilation monitoring and the specific service I m offering.
One concrete possibility I m keen to test via both channels is a simple monthly price for the combined service, rather than purchasing a monitor and separate software subscription. This has the potential to be both simpler to market and explain to customers, while also opening the possibility of short-term rental or evaluation to customers who are not willing to make a long-term investment or commitment.
In parallel to the customer-focused discovery work, but as an explicit lower priority, I ll order an initial small batch of outsourced monitors to begin gaining experience with that process accepting the risk that the time and cost may turn out to be wasted if the product is wrong or not a good match for customers needs.
I wrote the Ruby bindings for the Enquo Project, my attempt to bring queryable encryption to all databases, using the Rutie library.
Recently, I ve rewritten the bindings to use Magnus instead, and I thought I d put down my thoughts about the whole situation.
The Story So Far
The Enquo Project core cryptography is all written in Rust, as seems to be the vogue these days.
Rust is fast, safe, and easily interoperable with most of the rest of the modern software development ecosystem, making it a good choice as a language to implement the cryptographic primitives that Enquo needs, like Order-Revealing Encryption.
Of course, since not everyone writes their applications in Rust, we need to provide the functionality of the Enquo client in the languages that people do use, such as Ruby, Python, and so on.
Since re-writing all that cryptographic code in a myriad of languages would be tedious and error-prone, we instead provide bindings to the core Rust code.
These are just thin shims of code that translate the data types and function calls between Rust and the target language.
Wrong sort of shim, but canned language bindings would be handy
As I m most familiar with Ruby and its development ecosystem (particularly Ruby on Rails), it was natural that I d make Ruby bindings for Enquo as my first target.
Rummaging around, it seemed that Rutie was a good library to use, so off I went.
What are Rutie and Magnus, Anyway?
Both libraries share the same goal: provide the ability to write some Rust code, run that through a compiler, and produce something that can be loaded by the Ruby interpreter and used just like any other Ruby class.
They re both fairly high level interfaces, trying to abstract away much of the gory details, and do a lot of the common heavy lifting that can make writing bindings fiddly and annoying.
Things like mapping data types (like strings and integers) between Rust data types and the closest equivalents in Ruby.
This mapping never goes perfectly smoothly.
For example, Ruby integers don t have a fixed range of values they can represent you can store a huge number like 2256 more-or-less as easily as you can the number 12.
But Rust, being a lower-level language, only has a set of integer types that have fixed boundaries, like the u32 type, which can only store integers between zero and about four billion (232 - 1, to be precise).
There s also lots of little things that need to be just right, also, like translating the different memory management approaches of the languages, and dealing with a myriad of fiddly little issues like passing arguments and return values in and out of method calls, helpers for defining classes and methods (and pointing to the correct Rust functions), and so on.
This is what I imagine it looks like inside these libraries
(Herv Cozanet / Wikimedia Commons, CC-BY-SA)
All in all, these libraries are fairly significant pieces of work, and I m mighty glad that someone else has taken on the job of building (and maintaining!) them.
So Why the Change?
Good question.
It s important to say at the outset that there s nothing particularly wrong with Rutie.
I found using Rutie to be very straightforward, and the Ruby bindings came together very quickly and easily.
If someone chose to use Rutie for their project, I m sure they d have a good experience.
What made me take the time to rewrite using Magnus was a set of a few tiny things, which together gave me enough of a shove to do the work.
Firstly, I d had a hiccup with Rutie s support of newer versions of Ruby, particularly 3.2 (PR).
Also, I d hit a couple of segfault issues, which were ultimately caused by Ruby garbage-collecting data out from underneath me.
These were ultimately my fault, of course, but Rutie wasn t helping me out in avoiding the problems in the first place.
Finally, while Rutie helped translate data types, there was still a bit of boilerplate and ugliness that needed to be included.
This wasn t a showstopper, but I m appreciating the extra smoothness that Magnus provides here.
As an example, here s what s required in Rutie to get native Rust data types from Ruby method parameters (and the self reference to the current object):
fn enquo_field_decrypt_text(ciphertext_obj: RString, context_obj: RString) -> RString
let ciphertext = ciphertext_obj.to_str_unchecked();
let context = context_obj.to_vec_u8_unchecked();
let field = rbself.get_data(&*FIELD_WRAPPER);
// etc etc etc
The equivalent in Magnus is just the function signature:
You can also see there that Magnus signals an exception via the Result return value, while Rutie s approach to raising an exception involves poking the Ruby VM directly, which always struck me as a bit ugly.
There are several other minor things in Magnus (like its cleaner approach to wrapping structs so they can be stored in Ruby objects) that I m appreciating, too.
Never discount the power of ergonomics for making a happy developer.
The End Result
I spent a bit over half of last weekend doing the rewrite maybe ten hours of so.
Since Magnus did more type checking and data validation, and its approach to error handling was smoother, I took the opportunity to rewrite a bunch of Ruby wrapper code I d written (which just existed to check things like ranges of values and string encodings) into Rust, as well.
To make sure that the conversion was accurate, I added a heap more unit tests to the bindings.
I also took the opportunity to restructure the codebase to split the code for the different Ruby classes into separate files, which I hadn t done initially as the code had originally accreted, rather than being purposefully written.
All up, though, my rewrite ended up removing over 60 lines (excluding the extra specs I added):
Considering that I was translating from a higher level language into a lower level one, the removal of so much code is quite remarkable.
Magnus was able to automagically replace rather a lot of raise ArgumentError if something.isnt_right code in those .rb files.
So, in conclusion, if you, too, are building Ruby extensions in Rust, while Rutie is a solid choice (and you probably should stick with it if you re already using it), I highly recommend giving Magnus a look for your next extension.
CPUs can't do anything without being told what to do, which leaves the obvious problem of how do you tell a CPU to do something in the first place. On many CPUs this is handled in the form of a reset vector - an address the CPU is hardcoded to start reading instructions from when power is applied. The address the reset vector points to will typically be some form of ROM or flash that can be read by the CPU even if no other hardware has been configured yet. This allows the system vendor to ship code that will be executed immediately after poweron, configuring the rest of the hardware and eventually getting the system into a state where it can run user-supplied code.
The specific nature of the reset vector on x86 systems has varied over time, but it's effectively always been 16 bytes below the top of the address space - so, 0xffff0 on the 20-bit 8086, 0xfffff0 on the 24-bit 80286, and 0xfffffff0 on the 32-bit 80386. Convention on x86 systems is to have RAM starting at address 0, so the top of address space could be used to house the reset vector with as low a probability of conflicting with RAM as possible.
The most notable thing about x86 here, though, is that when it starts running code from the reset vector, it's still in real mode. x86 real mode is a holdover from a much earlier era of computing. Rather than addresses being absolute (ie, if you refer to a 32-bit address, you store the entire address in a 32-bit or larger register), they are 16-bit offsets that are added to the value stored in a "segment register". Different segment registers existed for code, data, and stack, so a 16-bit address could refer to different actual addresses depending on how it was being interpreted - jumping to a 16 bit address would result in that address being added to the code segment register, while reading from a 16 bit address would result in that address being added to the data segment register, and so on. This is all in order to retain compatibility with older chips, to the extent that even 64-bit x86 starts in real mode with segments and everything (and, also, still starts executing at 0xfffffff0 rather than 0xfffffffffffffff0 - 64-bit mode doesn't support real mode, so there's no way to express a 64-bit physical address using the segment registers, so we still start just below 4GB even though we have massively more address space available).
Anyway. Everyone knows all this. For modern UEFI systems, the firmware that's launched from the reset vector then reprograms the CPU into a sensible mode (ie, one without all this segmentation bullshit), does things like configure the memory controller so you can actually access RAM (a process which involves using CPU cache as RAM, because programming a memory controller is sufficiently hard that you need to store more state than you can fit in registers alone, which means you need RAM, but you don't have RAM until the memory controller is working, but thankfully the CPU comes with several megabytes of RAM on its own in the form of cache, so phew). It's kind of ugly, but that's a consequence of a bunch of well-understood legacy decisions.
Except. This is not how modern Intel x86 boots. It's far stranger than that. Oh, yes, this is what it looks like is happening, but there's a bunch of stuff going on behind the scenes. Let's talk about boot security. The idea of any form of verified boot (such as UEFI Secure Boot) is that a signature on the next component of the boot chain is validated before that component is executed. But what verifies the first component in the boot chain? You can't simply ask the BIOS to verify itself - if an attacker can replace the BIOS, they can replace it with one that simply lies about having done so. Intel's solution to this is called Boot Guard.
But before we get to Boot Guard, we need to ensure the CPU is running in as bug-free a state as possible. So, when the CPU starts up, it examines the system flash and looks for a header that points at CPU microcode updates. Intel CPUs ship with built-in microcode, but it's frequently old and buggy and it's up to the system firmware to include a copy that's new enough that it's actually expected to work reliably. The microcode image is pulled out of flash, a signature is verified, and the new microcode starts running. This is true in both the Boot Guard and the non-Boot Guard scenarios. But for Boot Guard, before jumping to the reset vector, the microcode on the CPU reads an Authenticated Code Module (ACM) out of flash and verifies its signature against a hardcoded Intel key. If that checks out, it starts executing the ACM. Now, bear in mind that the CPU can't just verify the ACM and then execute it directly from flash - if it did, the flash could detect this, hand over a legitimate ACM for the verification, and then feed the CPU different instructions when it reads them again to execute them (a Time of Check vs Time of Use, or TOCTOU, vulnerability). So the ACM has to be copied onto the CPU before it's verified and executed, which means we need RAM, which means the CPU already needs to know how to configure its cache to be used as RAM.
Anyway. We now have an ACM loaded and verified, and it can safely be executed. The ACM does various things, but the most important from the Boot Guard perspective is that it reads a set of write-once fuses in the motherboard chipset that represent the SHA256 of a public key. It then reads the initial block of the firmware (the Initial Boot Block, or IBB) into RAM (or, well, cache, as previously described) and parses it. There's a block that contains a public key - it hashes that key and verifies that it matches the SHA256 from the fuses. It then uses that key to validate a signature on the IBB. If it all checks out, it executes the IBB and everything starts looking like the nice simple model we had before.
Except, well, doesn't this seem like an awfully complicated bunch of code to implement in real mode? And yes, doing all of this modern crypto with only 16-bit registers does sound like a pain. So, it doesn't. All of this is happening in a perfectly sensible 32 bit mode, and the CPU actually switches back to the awful segmented configuration afterwards so it's still compatible with an 80386 from 1986. The "good" news is that at least firmware can detect that the CPU has already configured the cache as RAM and can skip doing that itself.
I'm skipping over some steps here - the ACM actually does other stuff around measuring the firmware into the TPM and doing various bits of TXT setup for people who want DRTM in their lives, but the short version is that the CPU bootstraps itself into a state where it works like a modern CPU and then deliberately turns a bunch of the sensible functionality off again before it starts executing firmware. I'm also missing out the fact that this entire process only kicks off after the Management Engine says it can, which means we're waiting for an entirely independent x86 to boot an entire OS before our CPU even starts pretending to execute the system firmware.
Of course, as mentioned before, on modern systems the firmware will then reprogram the CPU into something actually sensible so OS developers no longer need to care about this[1][2], which means we've bounced between multiple states for no reason other than the possibility that someone wants to run legacy BIOS and then boot DOS on a CPU with like 5 orders of magnitude more transistors than the 8086.
tl;dr why can't my x86 wake up with the gin protected mode already inside it
[1] Ha uh except that on ACPI resume we're going to skip most of the firmware setup code so we still need to handle the CPU being in fucking 16-bit mode because suspend/resume is basically an extremely long reboot cycle
[2] Oh yeah also you probably have multiple cores on your CPU and well bad news about the state most of the cores are in when the OS boots because the firmware never started them up so they're going to come up in 16-bit real mode even if your boot CPU is already in 64-bit protected mode, unless you were using TXT in which case you have a different sort of nightmare that if we're going to try to map it onto real world nightmare concepts is one that involves a lot of teeth. Or, well, that used to be the case, but ACPI 6.4 (released in 2021) provides a mechanism for the OS to ask the firmware to wake the CPU up for it so this is invisible to the OS, but you're still relying on the firmware to actually do the heavy lifting here
Another short note to myself, and whomever cares/searches later for
nft or nftables, tcp mss clamping.
Somewhat surprising, many/most of the instructions found by Google are
still related to iptables. I guess people stopped writing blog posts
by the time nftables became widely used?
The only official documentation I can find is in the official
wiki,
but it doesn t list/explain exactly how does this work/in which
conditions. I think this results in posts like this
one
that suggest additionally limiting the packets it acts on using a size
limiter, in order to prevent changing small packets.
Looking at the code that actually implements this, in net/netfilter/xt_TCPMSS.c (and not in the lower case-named file, which is about matching, TIL), in the function tcpmss_mangle_packet, first there is this comment:
/* Never increase MSS, even when setting it, as
* doing so results in problems for hosts that rely
* on MSS being set correctly.
*/
So at least the intent is that this always does the right thing (only
decrease).
Second, the code does correctly look at both directions of the packet
when using auto-clamping (set rt mtu rather than set 1452), in the
if
branch
for XT_TCPMSS_CLAMP_PMTU. This means, it s safer to use
auto-clamping, rather than manually set the value.
And finally, there is handling of some corner cases as well (syn
packet with data, syn packet without the MSS option - unlikely for
modern stacks - in which case it defaults to minimal values).
All in all, it seems to me that it should always be correct to simply
do what the wiki recommends, setting this for all packets traversing
the host:
nft add rule ip filter forward tcp flags syn tcp option maxseg size set rt mtu
Of course, if you d rather not do it always, but only for external
interfaces, make sure you set it in both directions:
nft add rule ip filter forward iifname ppp0 tcp flags syn tcp option maxseg size set rt mtu
nft add rule ip filter forward oifname ppp0 tcp flags syn tcp option maxseg size set rt mtu
And that should be it. Well, use iifgroup/oifgroup for better rules .
Babel, or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford
Translators' Revolution, to give it its full title, is a standalone
dark academia fantasy
set in the 1830s and 1840s, primarily in Oxford, England. The first book
of R.F. Kuang's previous trilogy, The Poppy War, was nominated for
multiple awards and won the Compton Crook Award for best first novel.
Babel is her fourth book.
Robin Swift, although that was not his name at the time, was born and
raised in Canton and educated by an inexplicable English tutor his family
could not have afforded. After his entire family dies of cholera, he is
plucked from China by a British professor and offered a life in England as
his ward. What follows is a paradise of books, a hell of relentless and
demanding instruction, and an unpredictably abusive emotional environment,
all aiming him towards admission to Oxford University. Robin will join
University College and the Royal Institute of Translation.
The politics of this imperial Britain are almost precisely the same as in
our history, but one of the engines is profoundly different. This world
has magic. If words from two different languages are engraved on a metal
bar (silver is best), the meaning and nuance lost in translation becomes
magical power. With a careful choice of translation pairs, and sometimes
additional help from other related words and techniques, the silver bar
becomes a persistent spell. Britain's industrial revolution is in
overdrive thanks to the country's vast stores of silver and the applied
translation prowess of Babel.
This means Babel is also the only part of very racist Oxford that accepts
non-white students and women. They need translators (barely) more than
they care about maintaining social hierarchy; translation pairs only work
when the translator is fluent in both languages. The magic is also
stronger when meanings are more distinct, which is creating serious
worries about classical and European languages. Those are still the bulk
of Babel's work, but increased trade and communication within Europe is
eroding the meaning distinctions and thus the amount of magical power.
More remote languages, such as Chinese and Urdu, are full of untapped
promise that Britain's colonial empire wants to capture. Professor
Lowell, Robin's dubious benefactor, is a specialist in Chinese languages;
Robin is a potential tool for his plans.
As Robin discovers shortly after arriving in Oxford, he is not the first
of Lowell's tools. His predecessor turned against Babel and is trying to
break its chokehold on translation magic. He wants Robin to help.
This is one of those books that is hard to review because it does some
things exceptionally well and other things that did not work for me. It's
not obvious if the latter are flaws in the book or a mismatch between book
and reader (or, frankly, flaws in the reader). I'll try to explain as
best I can so that you can draw your own conclusions.
First, this is one of the all-time great magical system hooks. The way
words are tapped for power is fully fleshed out and exceptionally
well-done. Kuang is a professional translator, which shows in the
attention to detail on translation pairs. I think this is the
best-constructed and explained word-based magic system I've read in
fantasy. Many word-based systems treat magic as its own separate language
that is weirdly universal. Here, Kuang does the exact opposite, and the
result is immensely satisfying.
A fantasy reader may expect exploration of this magic system to be the
primary point of the book, however, and this is not the case. It is an
important part of the book, and its implications are essential to the plot
resolution, but this is not the type of fantasy novel where the plot is
driven by character exploration of the magic system. The magic system
exists, the characters use it, and we do get some crunchy details, but the
heart of the book is elsewhere. If you were expecting the typical
relationship of a fantasy novel to its magic system, you may get a bit
wrong-footed.
Similarly, this is historical fantasy, but it is the type of historical
fantasy where the existence of magic causes no significant differences.
For some people, this is a pet peeve; personally, I don't mind that choice
in the abstract, but some of the specifics bugged me.
The villains of this book assert that any country could have done what
Britain did in developing translation magic, and thus their hoarding of it
is not immoral. They are obviously partly lying (this is a classic
justification for imperialism), but it's not clear from the book how they
are lying. Technologies (and magic here works like a technology) tend to
concentrate power when they require significant capital investment, and
tend to dilute power when they are portable and easy to teach.
Translation magic feels like the latter, but its effect in the book is
clearly the former, and I was never sure why.
England is not an obvious choice to be a translation superpower. Yes,
it's a colonial empire, but India, southeast Asia, and most certainly
Africa (the continent largely not appearing in this book) are home to
considerably more languages from more wildly disparate families than
western Europe. Translation is not a peculiarly European idea, and this
magic system does not seem hard to stumble across. It's not clear why
England, and Oxford in particular, is so dramatically far ahead. There is
some sign that Babel is keeping the mechanics of translation magic secret,
but that secret has leaked, seems easy to develop independently, and is
simple enough that a new student can perform basic magic with a few hours
of instruction. This does not feel like the kind of power that would be
easy to concentrate, let alone to the extreme extent required by the last
quarter of this book.
The demand for silver as a base material for translation magic provides a
justification for mercantilism that avoids the confusing complexities of
currency economics in our actual history, so fine, I guess, but it was a
bit disappointing for this great of an idea for a magic system to have
this small of an impact on politics.
I'll come to the actual thrust of this book in a moment, but first
something else Babel does exceptionally well: dark academia.
The remainder of Robin's cohort at Oxford is Remy, a dark-skinned Muslim
from Calcutta; Victoire, a Haitian woman raised in France; and Letty, the
daughter of a British admiral. All of them are non-white except Letty,
and Letty and Victoire additionally have to deal with the blatant sexism
of the time. (For example, they have to live several miles from Oxford
because women living near the college would be a "distraction.")
The interpersonal dynamics between the four are exceptionally well done.
Kuang captures the dislocation of going away to college, the unsettled
life upheaval that makes it both easy and vital to form suddenly tight
friendships, and the way that the immense pressure from classes and exams
leaves one so devoid of spare emotional capacity that those friendships
become both unbreakable and badly strained. Robin and Remy almost
immediately become inseparable in that type of college friendship in which
profound trust and constant companionship happen first and learning about
the other person happens afterwards.
It's tricky to talk about this without spoilers, but one of the things
Kuang sets up with this friend group is a pointed look at
intersectionality. Babel has gotten a lot of positive review buzz,
and I think this is one of the reasons why. Kuang does not pass over or
make excuses for characters in a place where many other books do. This
mostly worked for me, but with a substantial caveat that I think you may
want to be aware of before you dive into this book.
Babel is set in the 1830s, but it is very much about the politics
of 2022. That does not necessarily mean that the politics are off for the
1830s; I haven't done the research to know, and it's possible I'm seeing
the Tiffany problem (Jo Walton's observation that Tiffany is a historical
12th century women's name, but an author can't use it as a medieval name
because readers think it sounds too modern). But I found it hard to shake
the feeling that the characters make sense of their world using modern
analytical frameworks of imperialism, racism, sexism, and intersectional
feminism, although without using modern terminology, and characters from
the 1830s would react somewhat differently. This is a valid authorial
choice; all books are written for the readers of the time when they're
published. But as with magical systems that don't change history, it's a
pet peeve for some readers. If that's you, be aware that's the feel I got
from it.
The true center of this book is not the magic system or the history. It's
advertised directly in the title the necessity of violence although
it's not until well into the book before the reader knows what that means.
This is a book about revolution, what revolution means, what decisions you
have to make along the way, how the personal affects the political, and
the inadequacy of reform politics. It is hard, uncomfortable, and not
gentle on its characters.
The last quarter of this book was exceptional, and I understand why it's
getting so much attention. Kuang directly confronts the desire for
someone else to do the necessary work, the hope that surely the people
with power will see reason, and the feeling of despair when there are no
good plans and every reason to wait and do nothing when atrocities are
about to happen. If you are familiar with radical politics, these aren't
new questions, but this is not the sort of thing that normally shows up in
fantasy. It does not surprise me that Babel struck a nerve with
readers a generation or two younger than me. It captures that heady
feeling on the cusp of adulthood when everything is in flux and one is
assembling an independent politics for the first time. Once I neared the
end of the book, I could not put it down. The ending is brutal, but I
think it was the right ending for this book.
There are two things, though, that I did not like about the political arc.
The first is that Victoire is a much more interesting character than
Robin, but is sidelined for most of the book. The difference of
perspectives between her and Robin is the heart of what makes the end of
this book so good, and I wish that had started 300 pages earlier. Or,
even better, I wish Victoire has been the protagonist; I liked Robin, but
he's a very predictable character for most of the book. Victoire is not;
even the conflicts she had earlier in the book, when she didn't get much
attention in the story, felt more dynamic and more thoughtful than Robin's
mix of guilt and anxiety.
The second is that I wish Kuang had shown more of Robin's intellectual
evolution. All of the pieces of why he makes the decisions that he does
are present in this book, and Kuang shows his emotional state (sometimes
in agonizing detail) at each step, but the sense-making, the development
of theory and ideology beneath the actions, is hinted at but not shown.
This is a stylistic choice with no one right answer, but it felt odd
because so much of the rest of the plot is obvious and telegraphed. If
the reader shares Robin's perspective, I think it's easy to fill in the
gaps, but it felt odd to read Robin giving clearly thought-out political
analyses at the end of the book without seeing the hashing-out and
argument with friends required to develop those analyses. I felt like I
had to do a lot of heavy lifting as the reader, work that I wish had been
done directly by the book.
My final note about this book is that I found much of it extremely
predictable. I think that's part of why reviewers describe it as
accessible and easy to read; accessibility and predictability can be two
sides of the same coin. Kuang did not intend for this book to be subtle,
and I think that's part of the appeal. But very few of Robin's actions
for the first three-quarters of the book surprised me, and that's not
always the reading experience I want. The end of the book is different,
and I therefore found it much more gripping, but it takes a while to get
there.
Babel is, for better or worse, the type of fantasy where the
politics, economics, and magic system exist primarily to justify the plot
the author wanted. I don't think the societal position of the Institute
of Translation that makes the ending possible is that believable given the
nature of the technology in question and the politics of the time, and if
you are inclined to dig into the specifics of the world-building, I think
you will find it frustrating. Where it succeeds brilliantly is in
capturing the social dynamics of hothouse academic cohorts, and in making
a sharp and unfortunately timely argument about the role of violence in
political change, in a way that the traditionally conservative setting of
fantasy rarely does.
I can't say Babel blew me away, but I can see why others liked it
so much. If I had to guess, I'd say that the closer one is in age to the
characters in the book and to that moment of political identity
construction, the more it's likely to appeal.
Rating: 7 out of 10
Probably everyone is familiar with a regular VPN. The traditional use case is to connect to a corporate or home network from a remote location, and access services as if you were there.
But these days, the notion of corporate network and home network are less based around physical location. For instance, a company may have no particular office at all, may have a number of offices plus a number of people working remotely, and so forth. A home network might have, say, a PVR and file server, while highly portable devices such as laptops, tablets, and phones may want to talk to each other regardless of location. For instance, a family member might be traveling with a laptop, another at a coffee shop, and those two devices might want to communicate, in addition to talking to the devices at home.
And, in both scenarios, there might be questions about giving limited access to friends. Perhaps you d like to give a friend access to part of your file server, or as a company, you might have contractors working on a limited project.
Pretty soon you wind up with a mess of VPNs, forwarded ports, and tricks to make it all work. With the increasing prevalence of CGNAT, a lot of times you can t even open a port to the public Internet. Each application or device probably has its own gateway just to make it visible on the Internet, some of which you pay for.
Then you add on the question of: should you really trust your LAN anyhow? With possibilities of guests using it, rogue access points, etc., the answer is probably no .
We can move the responsibility for dealing with NAT, fluctuating IPs, encryption, and authentication, from the application layer further down into the network stack. We then arrive at a much simpler picture for all.
So this page is fundamentally about making the network work, simply and effectively.
How do we make the Internet work in these scenarios?
We re going to combine three concepts:
A VPN, providing fully encrypted and authenticated communication and stable IPs
Mesh Networking, in which devices automatically discover optimal paths to reach each other
Zero-trust networking, in which we do not need to trust anything about the underlying LAN, because all our traffic uses the secure systems in points 1 and 2.
By combining these concepts, we arrive at some nice results:
You can ssh hostname, where hostname is one of your machines (server, laptop, whatever), and as long as hostname is up, you can reach it, wherever it is, wherever you are.
Combined with mosh, these sessions will be durable even across moving to other host networks.
You could just as well use telnet, because the underlying network should be secure.
You don t have to mess with encryption keys, certs, etc., for every internal-only service. Since IPs are now trustworthy, that s all you need. hosts.allow could make a comeback!
You have a way of transiting out of extremely restrictive networks. Every tool discussed here has a way of falling back on routing things via a broker (relay) on TCP port 443 if all else fails.
There might sometimes be tradeoffs. For instance:
On LANs faster than 1Gbps, performance may degrade due to encryption and encapsulation overhead. However, these tools should let hosts discover the locality of each other and not send traffic over the Internet if the devices are local.
With some of these tools, hosts local to each other (on the same LAN) may be unable to find each other if they can t reach the control plane over the Internet (Internet is down or provider is down)
Some other features that some of the tools provide include:
Easy sharing of limited access with friends/guests
Taking care of everything you need, including SSL certs, for exposing a certain on-net service to the public Internet
Optional routing of your outbound Internet traffic via an exit node on your network. Useful, for instance, if your local network is blocking tons of stuff.
Let s dive in.
Types of Mesh VPNs
I ll go over several types of meshes in this article:
Fully decentralized with automatic hop routing
This model has no special central control plane. Nodes discover each other in various ways, and establish routes to each other. These routes can be direct connections over the Internet, or via other nodes. This approach offers the greatest resilience. Examples I ll cover include Yggdrasil and tinc.
Automatic peer-to-peer with centralized control
In this model, nodes, by default, communicate by establishing direct links between them. A regular node never carries traffic on behalf of other nodes. Special-purpose relays are used to handle cases in which NAT traversal is impossible. This approach tends to offer simple setup. Examples I ll cover include Tailscale, Zerotier, Nebula, and Netmaker.
Roll your own and hybrid approaches
This is a grab bag of other ideas; for instance, running Yggdrasil over Tailscale.
Terminology
For the sake of consistency, I m going to use common language to discuss things that have different terms in different ecosystems:
Every tool discussed here has a way of dealing with NAT traversal. It may assist with establishing direct connections (eg, STUN), and if that fails, it may simply relay traffic between nodes. I ll call such a relay a broker . This may or may not be the same system that is a control plane for a tool.
All of these systems operate over lower layers that are unencrypted. Those lower layers may be a LAN (wired or wireless, which may or may not have Internet access), or the public Internet (IPv4 and/or IPv6). I m going to call the unencrypted lower layer, whatever it is, the clearnet .
Evaluation Criteria
Here are the things I want to see from a solution:
Secure, with all communications end-to-end encrypted and authenticated, and prevention of traffic from untrusted devices.
Flexible, adapting to changes in network topology quickly and automatically.
Resilient, without single points of failure, and with devices local to each other able to communicate even if cut off from the Internet or other parts of the network.
Private, minimizing leakage of information or metadata about me and my systems
Able to traverse CGNAT without having to use a broker whenever possible
A lesser requirement for me, but still a nice to have, is the ability to include others via something like Internet publishing or inviting guests.
Fully or nearly fully Open Source
Free or very cheap for personal use
Wide operating system support, including headless Linux on x86_64 and ARM.
Fully Decentralized VPNs with Automatic Hop Routing
Two systems fit this description: Yggdrasil and Tinc. Let s dive in.
Yggdrasil
I ll start with Yggdrasil because I ve written so much about it already. It featured in prior posts such as:
Yggdrasil can be a private mesh VPN, or something more
Yggdrasil can be a private mesh VPN, just like the other tools covered here. It s unique, however, in that a key goal of the project is to also make it useful as a planet-scale global mesh network. As such, Yggdrasil is a testbed of new ideas in distributed routing designed to scale up to massive sizes and all sorts of connection conditions. As of 2023-04-10, the main global Yggdrasil mesh has over 5000 nodes in it. You can choose whether or not to participate.
Every node in a Yggdrasil mesh has a public/private keypair. Each node then has an IPv6 address (in a private address space) derived from its public key. Using these IPv6 addresses, you can communicate right away.
Yggdrasil differs from most of the other tools here in that it does not necessarily seek to establish a direct link on the clearnet between, say, host A and host G for them to communicate. It will prefer such a direct link if it exists, but it is perfectly happy if it doesn t.
The reason is that every Yggdrasil node is also a router in the Yggdrasil mesh. Let s sit with that concept for a moment. Consider:
If you have a bunch of machines on your LAN, but only one of them can peer over the clearnet, that s fine; all the other machines will discover this route to the world and use it when necessary.
All you need to run a broker is just a regular node with a public IP address. If you are participating in the global mesh, you can use one (or more) of the free public peers for this purpose.
It is not necessary for every node to know about the clearnet IP address of every other node (improving privacy). In fact, it s not even necessary for every node to know about the existence of all the other nodes, so long as it can find a route to a given node when it s asked to.
Yggdrasil can find one or more routes between nodes, and it can use this knowledge of multiple routes to aggressively optimize for varying network conditions, including combinations of, say, downloads and low-latency ssh sessions.
Behind the scenes, Yggdrasil calculates optimal routes between nodes as necessary, using a mesh-wide DHT for initial contact and then deriving more optimal paths. (You can also read more details about the routing algorithm.)
One final way that Yggdrasil is different from most of the other tools is that there is no separate control server. No node is special , in charge, the sole keeper of metadata, or anything like that. The entire system is completely distributed and auto-assembling.
Meeting neighbors
There are two ways that Yggdrasil knows about peers:
By broadcast discovery on the local LAN
By listening on a specific port (or being told to connect to a specific host/port)
Sometimes this might lead to multiple ways to connect to a node; Yggdrasil prefers the connection auto-discovered by broadcast first, then the lowest-latency of the defined path. In other words, when your laptops are in the same room as each other on your local LAN, your packets will flow directly between them without traversing the Internet.
Unique uses
Yggdrasil is uniquely suited to network-challenged situations. As an example, in a post-disaster situation, Internet access may be unavailable or flaky, yet there may be many local devices perhaps ones that had never known of each other before that could share information. Yggdrasil meets this situation perfectly. The combination of broadcast auto-detection, distributed routing, and so forth, basically means that if there is any physical path between two nodes, Yggdrasil will find and enable it.
Ad-hoc wifi is rarely used because it is a real pain. Yggdrasil actually makes it useful! Its broadcast discovery doesn t require any IP address provisioned on the interface at all (it just uses the IPv6 link-local address), so you don t need to figure out a DHCP server or some such. And, Yggdrasil will tend to perform routing along the contours of the RF path. So you could have a laptop in the middle of a long distance relaying communications from people farther out, because it could see both. Or even a chain of such things.
Yggdrasil: Security and Privacy
Yggdrasil s mesh is aggressively greedy. It will peer with any node it can find (unless told otherwise) and will find a route to anywhere it can. There are two main ways to make sure you keep unauthorized traffic out: by restricting who can talk to your mesh, and by firewalling the Yggdrasil interface. Both can be used, and they can be used simultaneously.
I ll discuss firewalling more at the end of this article. Basically, you ll almost certainly want to do this if you participate in the public mesh, because doing so is akin to having a globally-routable public IP address direct to your device.
If you want to restrict who can talk to your mesh, you just disable the broadcast feature on all your nodes (empty MulticastInterfaces section in the config), and avoid telling any of your nodes to connect to a public peer. You can set a list of authorized public keys that can connect to your nodes listening interfaces, which you ll probably want to do. You will probably want to either open up some inbound ports (if you can) or set up a node with a known clearnet IP on a place like a $5/mo VPS to help with NAT traversal (again, setting AllowedPublicKeys as appropriate). Yggdrasil doesn t allow filtering multicast clients by public key, only by network interface, so that s why we disable broadcast discovery. You can easily enough teach Yggdrasil about static internal LAN IPs of your nodes and have things work that way. (Or, set up an internal gateway node or two, that the clients just connect to when they re local). But fundamentally, you need to put a bit more thought into this with Yggdrasil than with the other tools here, which are closed-only.
Compared to some of the other tools here, Yggdrasil is better about information leakage; nodes only know details, such as clearnet IPs, of directly-connected peers. You can obtain the list of directly-connected peers of any known node in the mesh but that list is the public keys of the directly-connected peers, not the clearnet IPs.
Some of the other tools contain a limited integrated firewall of sorts (with limited ACLs and such). Yggdrasil does not, but is fully compatible with on-host firewalls. I recommend these anyway even with many other tools.
Yggdrasil: Connectivity and NAT traversal
Compared to the other tools, Yggdrasil is an interesting mix. It provides a fully functional mesh and facilitates connectivity in situations in which no other tool can. Yet its NAT traversal, while it exists and does work, results in using a broker under some of the more challenging CGNAT situations more often than some of the other tools, which can impede performance.
Yggdrasil s underlying protocol is TCP-based. Before you run away screaming that it must be slow and unreliable like OpenVPN over TCP it s not, and it is even surprisingly good around bufferbloat. I ve found its performance to be on par with the other tools here, and it works as well as I d expect even on flaky 4G links.
Overall, the NAT traversal story is mixed. On the one hand, you can run a node that listens on port 443 and Yggdrasil can even make it speak TLS (even though that s unnecessary from a security standpoint), so you can likely get out of most restrictive firewalls you will ever encounter. If you join the public mesh, know that plenty of public peers do listen on port 443 (and other well-known ports like 53, plus random high-numbered ones).
If you connect your system to multiple public peers, there is a chance though a very small one that some public transit traffic might be routed via it. In practice, public peers hopefully are already peered with each other, preventing this from happening (you can verify this with yggdrasilctl debug_remotegetpeers key=ABC...). I have never experienced a problem with this. Also, since latency is a factor in routing for Yggdrasil, it is highly unlikely that random connections we use are going to be competitive with datacenter peers.
Yggdrasil: Sharing with friends
If you re open to participating in the public mesh, this is one of the easiest things of all. Have your friend install Yggdrasil, point them to a public peer, give them your Yggdrasil IP, and that s it. (Well, presumably you also open up your firewall you did follow my advice to set one up, right?)
If your friend is visiting at your location, they can just hop on your wifi, install Yggdrasil, and it will automatically discover a route to you. Yggdrasil even has a zero-config mode for ephemeral nodes such as certain Docker containers.
Yggdrasil doesn t directly support publishing to the clearnet, but it is certainly possible to proxy (or even NAT) to/from the clearnet, and people do.
Yggdrasil: DNS
There is no particular extra DNS in Yggdrasil. You can, of course, run a DNS server within Yggdrasil, just as you can anywhere else. Personally I just add relevant hosts to /etc/hosts and leave it at that, but it s up to you.
Yggdrasil: Source code, pricing, and portability
Yggdrasil is fully open source (LGPLv3 plus additional permissions in an exception) and highly portable. It is written in Go, and has prebuilt binaries for all major platforms (including a Debian package which I made).
There is no charge for anything with Yggdrasil. Listed public peers are free and run by volunteers. You can run your own peers if you like; they can be public and unlisted, public and listed (just submit a PR to get it listed), or private (accepting connections only from certain nodes keys). A peer in this case is just a node with a known clearnet IP address.
Yggdrasil encourages use in other projects. For instance, NNCP integrates a Yggdrasil node for easy communication with other NNCP nodes.
Yggdrasil conclusions
Yggdrasil is tops in reliability (having no single point of failure) and flexibility. It will maintain opportunistic connections between peers even if the Internet is down.
The unique added feature of being able to be part of a global mesh is a nice one.
The tradeoffs include being more prone to need to use a broker in restrictive CGNAT environments. Some other tools have clients that override the OS DNS resolver to also provide resolution of hostnames of member nodes; Yggdrasil doesn t, though you can certainly run your own DNS infrastructure over Yggdrasil (or, for that matter, let public DNS servers provide Yggdrasil answers if you wish).
There is also a need to pay more attention to firewalling or maintaining separation from the public mesh. However, as I explain below, many other options have potential impacts if the control plane, or your account for it, are compromised, meaning you ought to firewall those, too. Still, it may be a more immediate concern with Yggdrasil.
Although Yggdrasil is listed as experimental, I have been using it for over a year and have found it to be rock-solid. They did change how mesh IPs were calculated when moving from 0.3 to 0.4, causing a global renumbering, so just be aware that this is a possibility while it is experimental.
tinc
tinc is the oldest tool on this list; version 1.0 came out in 2003! You can think of tinc as something akin to an older Yggdrasil without the public option.
I will be discussing tinc 1.0.36, the latest stable version, which came out in 2019. The development branch, 1.1, has been going since 2011 and had its latest release in 2021. The last commit to the Github repo was in June 2022.
Tinc is the only tool here to support both tun and tap style interfaces. I go into the difference more in the Zerotier review below. Tinc actually provides a better tap implementation than Zerotier, with various sane options for broadcasts, but I still think the call for an Ethernet, as opposed to IP, VPN is small.
To configure tinc, you generate a per-host configuration and then distribute it to every tinc node. It contains a host s public key. Therefore, adding a host to the mesh means distributing its key everywhere; de-authorizing it means removing its key everywhere. This makes it rather unwieldy.
tinc can do LAN broadcast discovery and mesh routing, but generally speaking you must manually teach it where to connect initially. Somewhat confusingly, the examples all mention listing a public address for a node. This doesn t make sense for a laptop, and I suspect you d just omit it. I think that address is used for something akin to a Yggdrasil peer with a clearnet IP.
Unlike all of the other tools described here, tinc has no tool to inspect the running state of the mesh.
Some of the properties of tinc made it clear I was unlikely to adopt it, so this review wasn t as thorough as that of Yggdrasil.
tinc: Security and Privacy
As mentioned above, every host in the tinc mesh is authenticated based on its public key. However, to be more precise, this key is validated only at the point it connects to its next hop peer. (To be sure, this is also the same as how the list of allowed pubkeys works in Yggdrasil.) Since IPs in tinc are not derived from their key, and any host can assign itself whatever mesh IP it likes, this implies that a compromised host could impersonate another.
It is unclear whether packets are end-to-end encrypted when using a tinc node as a router. The fact that they can be routed at the kernel level by the tun interface implies that they may not be.
tinc: Connectivity and NAT traversal
I was unable to find much information about NAT traversal in tinc, other than that it does support it. tinc can run over UDP or TCP and auto-detects which to use, preferring UDP.
tinc: Sharing with friends
tinc has no special support for this, and the difficulty of configuration makes it unlikely you d do this with tinc.
tinc: Source code, pricing, and portability
tinc is fully open source (GPLv2). It is written in C and generally portable. It supports some very old operating systems. Mobile support is iffy.
tinc does not seem to be very actively maintained.
tinc conclusions
I haven t mentioned performance in my other reviews (see the section at the end of this post). But, it is so poor as to only run about 300Mbps on my 2.5Gbps network. That s 1/3 the speed of Yggdrasil or Tailscale. Combine that with the unwieldiness of adding hosts and some uncertainties in security, and I m not going to be using tinc.
Automatic Peer-to-Peer Mesh VPNs with centralized control
These tend to be the options that are frequently discussed. Let s talk about the options.
Tailscale
Tailscale is a popular choice in this type of VPN. To use Tailscale, you first sign up on tailscale.com. Then, you install the tailscale client on each machine. On first run, it prints a URL for you to click on to authorize the client to your mesh ( tailnet ). Tailscale assigns a mesh IP to each system. The Tailscale client lets the Tailscale control plane gather IP information about each node, including all detectable public and private clearnet IPs.
When you attempt to contact a node via Tailscale, the client will fetch the known contact information from the control plane and attempt to establish a link. If it can contact over the local LAN, it will (it doesn t have broadcast autodetection like Yggdrasil; the information must come from the control plane). Otherwise, it will try various NAT traversal options. If all else fails, it will use a broker to relay traffic; Tailscale calls a broker a DERP relay server. Unlike Yggdrasil, a Tailscale node never relays traffic for another; all connections are either direct P2P or via a broker.
Tailscale, like several others, is based around Wireguard; though wireguard-go rather than the in-kernel Wireguard.
Tailscale has a number of somewhat unique features in this space:
Funnel, which lets you expose ports on your system to the public Internet via the VPN.
Exit nodes, which automate the process of routing your public Internet traffic over some other node in the network. This is possible with every tool mentioned here, but Tailscale makes switching it on or off a couple of quick commands away.
Node sharing, which lets you share a subset of your network with guests
Funnel, in particular, is interesting. With a couple of tailscale serve -style commands, you can expose a directory tree (or a development webserver) to the world. Tailscale gives you a public hostname, obtains a cert for it, and proxies inbound traffic to you. This is subject to some unspecified bandwidth limits, and you can only choose from three public ports, so it s not really a production solution but as a quick and easy way to demonstrate something cool to a friend, it s a neat feature.
Tailscale: Security and Privacy
With Tailscale, as with the other tools in this category, one of the main threats to consider is the control plane. What are the consequences of a compromise of Tailscale s control plane, or of the credentials you use to access it?
Let s begin with the credentials used to access it. Tailscale operates no identity system itself, instead relying on third parties. For individuals, this means Google, Github, or Microsoft accounts; Okta and other SAML and similar identity providers are also supported, but this runs into complexity and expense that most individuals aren t wanting to take on. Unfortunately, all three of those types of accounts often have saved auth tokens in a browser. Personally I would rather have a separate, very secure, login.
If a person does compromise your account or the Tailscale servers themselves, they can t directly eavesdrop on your traffic because it is end-to-end encrypted. However, assuming an attacker obtains access to your account, they could:
Tamper with your Tailscale ACLs, permitting new actions
Add new nodes to the network
Forcibly remove nodes from the network
Enable or disable optional features
Of note is that they cannot just commandeer an existing IP. I would say the riskiest possibility here is that could add new nodes to the mesh. Because they could also tamper with your ACLs, they could then proceed to attempt to access all your internal services. They could even turn on service collection and have Tailscale tell them what and where all the services are.
Therefore, as with other tools, I recommend a local firewall on each machine with Tailscale. More on that below.
Tailscale has a new alpha feature called tailnet lock which helps with this problem. It requires existing nodes in the mesh to sign a request for a new node to join. Although this doesn t address ACL tampering and some of the other things, it does represent a significant help with the most significant concern. However, tailnet lock is in alpha, only available on the Enterprise plan, and has a waitlist, so I have been unable to test it.
Any Tailscale node can request the IP addresses belonging to any other Tailscale node. The Tailscale control plane captures, and exposes to you, this information about every node in your network: the OS hostname, IP addresses and port numbers, operating system, creation date, last seen timestamp, and NAT traversal parameters. You can optionally enable service data capture as well, which sends data about open ports on each node to the control plane.
Tailscale likes to highlight their key expiry and rotation feature. By default, all keys expire after 180 days, and traffic to and from the expired node will be interrupted until they are renewed (basically, you re-login with your provider and do a renew operation). Unfortunately, the only mention I can see of warning of impeding expiration is in the Windows client, and even there you need to edit a registry key to get the warning more than the default 24 hours in advance. In short, it seems likely to cut off communications when it s most important. You can disable key expiry on a per-node basis in the admin console web interface, and I mostly do, due to not wanting to lose connectivity at an inopportune time.
Tailscale: Connectivity and NAT traversal
When thinking about reliability, the primary consideration here is being able to reach the Tailscale control plane. While it is possible in limited circumstances to reach nodes without the Tailscale control plane, it is a fairly brittle setup and notably will not survive a client restart. So if you use Tailscale to reach other nodes on your LAN, that won t work unless your Internet is up and the control plane is reachable.
Assuming your Internet is up and Tailscale s infrastructure is up, there is little to be concerned with. Your own comfort level with cloud providers and your Internet should guide you here.
Tailscale wrote a fantastic article about NAT traversal and they, predictably, do very well with it. Tailscale prefers UDP but falls back to TCP if needed. Broker (DERP) servers step in as a last resort, and Tailscale clients automatically select the best ones. I m not aware of anything that is more successful with NAT traversal than Tailscale. This maximizes the situations in which a direct P2P connection can be used without a broker.
I have found Tailscale to be a bit slow to notice changes in network topography compared to Yggdrasil, and sometimes needs a kick in the form of restarting the client process to re-establish communications after a network change. However, it s possible (maybe even probable) that if I d waited a bit longer, it would have sorted this all out.
Tailscale: Sharing with friends
I touched on the funnel feature earlier. The sharing feature lets you give an invite to an outsider. By default, a person accepting a share can make only outgoing connections to the network they re invited to, and cannot receive incoming connections from that network this makes sense. When sharing an exit node, you get a checkbox that lets you share access to the exit node as well. Of course, the person accepting the share needs to install the Tailnet client. The combination of funnel and sharing make Tailscale the best for ad-hoc sharing.
Tailscale: DNS
Tailscale s DNS is called MagicDNS. It runs as a layer atop your standard DNS taking over /etc/resolv.conf on Linux and provides resolution of mesh hostnames and some other features. This is a concept that is pretty slick.
It also is a bit flaky on Linux; dueling programs want to write to /etc/resolv.conf. I can t really say this is entirely Tailscale s fault; they document the problem and some workarounds.
I would love to be able to add custom records to this service; for instance, to override the public IP for a service to use the in-mesh IP. Unfortunately, that s not yet possible. However, MagicDNS can query existing nameservers for certain domains in a split DNS setup.
Tailscale: Source code, pricing, and portability
Tailscale is almost fully open source and the client is highly portable. The client is open source (BSD 3-clause) on open source platforms, and closed source on closed source platforms. The DERP servers are open source. The coordination server is closed source, although there is an open source coordination server called Headscale (also BSD 3-clause) made available with Tailscale s blessing and informal support. It supports most, but not all, features in the Tailscale coordination server.
Tailscale s pricing (which does not apply when using Headscale) provides a free plan for 1 user with up to 20 devices. A Personal Pro plan expands that to 100 devices for $48 per year - not a bad deal at $4/mo. A Community on Github plan also exists, and then there are more business-oriented plans as well. See the pricing page for details.
As a small note, I appreciated Tailscale s install script. It properly added Tailscale s apt key in a way that it can only be used to authenticate the Tailscale repo, rather than as a systemwide authenticator. This is a nice touch and speaks well of their developers.
Tailscale conclusions
Tailscale is tops in sharing and has a broad feature set and excellent documentation. Like other solutions with a centralized control plane, device communications can stop working if the control plane is unreachable, and the threat model of the control plane should be carefully considered.
Zerotier
Zerotier is a close competitor to Tailscale, and is similar to it in a lot of ways. So rather than duplicate all of the Tailscale information here, I m mainly going to describe how it differs from Tailscale.
The primary difference between the two is that Zerotier emulates an Ethernet network via a Linux tap interface, while Tailscale emulates a TCP/IP network via a Linux tun interface.
However, Zerotier has a number of things that make it be a somewhat imperfect Ethernet emulator. For one, it has a problem with broadcast amplification; the machine sending the broadcast sends it to all the other nodes that should receive it (up to a set maximum). I wouldn t want to have a lot of programs broadcasting on a slow link. While in theory this could let you run Netware or DECNet across Zerotier, I m not really convinced there s much call for that these days, and Zerotier is clearly IP-focused as it allocates IP addresses and such anyhow. Zerotier provides special support for emulated ARP (IPv4) and NDP (IPv6). While you could theoretically run Zerotier as a bridge, this eliminates the zero trust principle, and Tailscale supports subnet routers, which provide much of the same feature set anyhow.
A somewhat obscure feature, but possibly useful, is Zerotier s built-in support for multipath WAN for the public interface. This actually lets you do a somewhat basic kind of channel bonding for WAN.
Zerotier: Security and Privacy
The picture here is similar to Tailscale, with the difference that you can create a Zerotier-local account rather than relying on cloud authentication. I was unable to find as much detail about Zerotier as I could about Tailscale - notably I couldn t find anything about how sticky an IP address is. However, the configuration screen lets me delete a node and assign additional arbitrary IPs within a subnet to other nodes, so I think the assumption here is that if your Zerotier account (or the Zerotier control plane) is compromised, an attacker could remove a legit device, add a malicious one, and assign the previous IP of the legit device to the malicious one. I m not sure how to mitigate against that risk, as firewalling specific IPs is ineffective if an attacker can simply take them over. Zerotier also lacks anything akin to Tailnet Lock.
For this reason, I didn t proceed much further in my Zerotier evaluation.
Zerotier: Connectivity and NAT traversal
Like Tailscale, Zerotier has NAT traversal with STUN. However, it looks like it s more limited than Tailscale s, and in particular is incompatible with double NAT that is often seen these days. Zerotier operates brokers ( root servers ) that can do relaying, including TCP relaying. So you should be able to connect even from hostile networks, but you are less likely to form a P2P connection than with Tailscale.
Zerotier: Sharing with friends
I was unable to find any special features relating to this in the Zerotier documentation. Therefore, it would be at the same level as Yggdrasil: possible, maybe even not too difficult, but without any specific help.
Zerotier: DNS
Unlike Tailscale, Zerotier does not support automatically adding DNS entries for your hosts. Therefore, your options are approximately the same as Yggdrasil, though with the added option of pushing configuration pointing to your own non-Zerotier DNS servers to the client.
Zerotier: Source code, pricing, and portability
The client ZeroTier One is available on Github under a custom business source license which prevents you from using it in certain settings. This license would preclude it being included in Debian. Their library, libzt, is available under the same license. The pricing page mentions a community edition for self hosting, but the documentation is sparse and it was difficult to understand what its feature set really is.
The free plan lets you have 1 user with up to 25 devices. Paid plans are also available.
Zerotier conclusions
Frankly I don t see much reason to use Zerotier. The virtual Ethernet model seems to be a weird hybrid that doesn t bring much value. I m concerned about the implications of a compromise of a user account or the control plane, and it lacks a lot of Tailscale features (MagicDNS and sharing). The only thing it may offer in particular is multipath WAN, but that s esoteric enough and also solvable at other layers that it doesn t seem all that compelling to me. Add to that the strange license and, to me anyhow, I don t see much reason to bother with it.
Netmaker
Netmaker is one of the projects that is making noise these days. Netmaker is the only one here that is a wrapper around in-kernel Wireguard, which can make a performance difference when talking to peers on a 1Gbps or faster link. Also, unlike other tools, it has an ingress gateway feature that lets people that don t have the Netmaker client, but do have Wireguard, participate in the VPN. I believe I also saw a reference somewhere to nodes as routers as with Yggdrasil, but I m failing to dig it up now.
The project is in a bit of an early state; you can sign up for an upcoming closed beta with a SaaS host, but really you are generally pointed to self-hosting using the code in the github repo. There are community and enterprise editions, but it s not clear how to actually choose. The server has a bunch of components: binary, CoreDNS, database, and web server. It also requires elevated privileges on the host, in addition to a container engine. Contrast that to the single binary that some others provide.
It looks like releases are frequent, but sometimes break things, and have a somewhat more laborious upgrade processes than most.
I don t want to spend a lot of time managing my mesh. So because of the heavy needs of the server, the upgrades being labor-intensive, it taking over iptables and such on the server, I didn t proceed with a more in-depth evaluation of Netmaker. It has a lot of promise, but for me, it doesn t seem to be in a state that will meet my needs yet.
Nebula
Nebula is an interesting mesh project that originated within Slack, seems to still be primarily sponsored by Slack, but is also being developed by Defined Networking (though their product looks early right now). Unlike the other tools in this section, Nebula doesn t have a web interface at all. Defined Networking looks likely to provide something of a SaaS service, but for now, you will need to run a broker ( lighthouse ) yourself; perhaps on a $5/mo VPS.
Due to the poor firewall traversal properties, I didn t do a full evaluation of Nebula, but it still has a very interesting design.
Nebula: Security and Privacy
Since Nebula lacks a traditional control plane, the root of trust in Nebula is a CA (certificate authority). The documentation gives this example of setting it up:
So the cert contains your IP, hostname, and group allocation. Each host in the mesh gets your CA certificate, and the per-host cert and key generated from each of these steps.
This leads to a really nice security model. Your CA is the gatekeeper to what is trusted in your mesh. You can even have it airgapped or something to make it exceptionally difficult to breach the perimeter.
Nebula contains an integrated firewall. Because the ability to keep out unwanted nodes is so strong, I would say this may be the one mesh VPN you might consider using without bothering with an additional on-host firewall.
You can define static mappings from a Nebula mesh IP to a clearnet IP. I haven t found information on this, but theoretically if NAT traversal isn t required, these static mappings may allow Nebula nodes to reach each other even if Internet is down. I don t know if this is truly the case, however.
Nebula: Connectivity and NAT traversal
This is a weak point of Nebula. Nebula sends all traffic over a single UDP port; there is no provision for using TCP. This is an issue at certain hotel and other public networks which open only TCP egress ports 80 and 443.
I couldn t find a lot of detail on what Nebula s NAT traversal is capable of, but according to a certain Github issue, this has been a sore spot for years and isn t as capable as Tailscale.
You can designate nodes in Nebula as brokers (relays). The concept is the same as Yggdrasil, but it s less versatile. You have to manually designate what relay to use. It s unclear to me what happens if different nodes designate different relays. Keep in mind that this always happens over a UDP port.
Nebula: Sharing with friends
There is no particular support here.
Nebula: DNS
Nebula has experimental DNS support. In contrast with Tailscale, which has an internal DNS server on every node, Nebula only runs a DNS server on a lighthouse. This means that it can t forward requests to a DNS server that s upstream for your laptop s particular current location. Actually, Nebula s DNS server doesn t forward at all. It also doesn t resolve its own name.
The Nebula documentation makes reference to using multiple lighthouses, which you may want to do for DNS redundancy or performance, but it s unclear to me if this would make each lighthouse form a complete picture of the network.
Nebula: Source code, pricing, and portability
Nebula is fully open source (MIT). It consists of a single Go binary and configuration. It is fairly portable.
Nebula conclusions
I am attracted to Nebula s unique security model. I would probably be more seriously considering it if not for the lack of support for TCP and poor general NAT traversal properties. Its datacenter connectivity heritage does show through.
Roll your own and hybrid
Here is a grab bag of ideas:
Running Yggdrasil over Tailscale
One possibility would be to use Tailscale for its superior NAT traversal, then allow Yggdrasil to run over it. (You will need a firewall to prevent Tailscale from trying to run over Yggdrasil at the same time!) This creates a closed network with all the benefits of Yggdrasil, yet getting the NAT traversal from Tailscale.
Drawbacks might be the overhead of the double encryption and double encapsulation. A good Yggdrasil peer may wind up being faster than this anyhow.
Public VPN provider for NAT traversal
A public VPN provider such as Mullvad will often offer incoming port forwarding and nodes in many cities. This could be an attractive way to solve a bunch of NAT traversal problems: just use one of those services to get you an incoming port, and run whatever you like over that.
Be aware that a number of public VPN clients have a kill switch to prevent any traffic from egressing without using the VPN; see, for instance, Mullvad s. You ll need to disable this if you are running a mesh atop it.
Other
Combining with local firewalls
For most of these tools, I recommend using a local firewal in conjunction with them. I have been using firehol and find it to be quite nice. This means you don t have to trust the mesh, the control plane, or whatever. The catch is that you do need your mesh VPN to provide strong association between IP address and node. Most, but not all, do.
Performance
I tested some of these for performance using iperf3 on a 2.5Gbps LAN. Here are the results. All speeds are in Mbps.
Tool
iperf3 (default)
iperf3 -P 10
iperf3 -R
Direct (no VPN)
2406
2406
2764
Wireguard (kernel)
1515
1566
2027
Yggdrasil
892
1126
1105
Tailscale
950
1034
1085
Tinc
296
300
277
You can see that Wireguard was significantly faster than the other options. Tailscale and Yggdrasil were roughly comparable, and Tinc was terrible.
IP collisions
When you are communicating over a network such as these, you need to trust that the IP address you are communicating with belongs to the system you think it does. This protects against two malicious actor scenarios:
Someone compromises one machine on your mesh and reconfigures it to impersonate a more important one
Someone connects an unauthorized system to the mesh, taking over a trusted IP, and uses the privileges of the trusted IP to access resources
To summarize the state of play as highlighted in the reviews above:
Yggdrasil derives IPv6 addresses from a public key
tinc allows any node to set any IP
Tailscale IPs aren t user-assignable, but the assignment algorithm is unknown
Zerotier allows any IP to be allocated to any node at the control plane
I don t know what Netmaker does
Nebula IPs are baked into the cert and signed by the CA, but I haven t verified the enforcement algorithm
So this discussion really only applies to Yggdrasil and Tailscale. tinc and Zerotier lack detailed IP security, while Nebula expects IP allocations to be handled outside of the tool and baked into the certs (therefore enforcing rigidity at that level).
So the question for Yggdrasil and Tailscale is: how easy is it to commandeer a trusted IP?
Yggdrasil has a brief discussion of this. In short, Yggdrasil offers you both a dedicated IP and a rarely-used /64 prefix which you can delegate to other machines on your LAN. Obviously by taking the dedicated IP, a lot more bits are available for the hash of the node s public key, making collisions technically impractical, if not outright impossible. However, if you use the /64 prefix, a collision may be more possible. Yggdrasil s hashing algorithm includes some optimizations to make this more difficult. Yggdrasil includes a genkeys tool that uses more CPU cycles to generate keys that are maximally difficult to collide with.
Tailscale doesn t document their IP assignment algorithm, but I think it is safe to say that the larger subnet you use, the better. If you try to use a /24 for your mesh, it is certainly conceivable that an attacker could remove your trusted node, then just manually add the 240 or so machines it would take to get that IP reassigned. It might be a good idea to use a purely IPv6 mesh with Tailscale to minimize this problem as well.
So, I think the risk is low in the default configurations of both Yggdrasil and Tailscale (certainly lower than with tinc or Zerotier). You can drive the risk even lower with both.
Final thoughts
For my own purposes, I suspect I will remain with Yggdrasil in some fashion. Maybe I will just take the small performance hit that using a relay node implies. Or perhaps I will get clever and use an incoming VPN port forward or go over Tailscale.
Tailscale was the other option that seemed most interesting. However, living in a region with Internet that goes down more often than I d like, I would like to just be able to send as much traffic over a mesh as possible, trusting that if the LAN is up, the mesh is up.
I have one thing that really benefits from performance in excess of Yggdrasil or Tailscale: NFS. That s between two machines that never leave my LAN, so I will probably just set up a direct Wireguard link between them. Heck of a lot easier than trying to do Kerberos!
Finally, I wrote this intending to be useful. I dealt with a lot of complexity and under-documentation, so it s possible I got something wrong somewhere. Please let me know if you find any errors.
This blog post is a copy of a page on my website. That page may be periodically updated.
It s been 2 years since my last blog post about storage trends [1].
Minimum Storage <=2TB
In 2021 I stated that as MSY had 2TB disks for $72 and 2TB SSD for $245 it was barely worth considering a 2TB disk and anything less than 2TB wasn t worth considering. Now for 2TB storage from MSY NVMe starts at $129, SATA SSD starts at $143, and hard disks start at $75. I guess that NVMe is slightly cheaper due to some combination of economies of scale for manufacture/sales and having less postage costs. It really doesn t make sense to consider hard disks for storing 2TB or less.
For storage for a small system (PC or laptop) the cheapest storage device is $19 for a 128G SATA SSD. But it wouldn t make sense to buy that when you can get a 256G SATA SSD for $22 or a 240G NVMe device for $23, saving $3 on storage wouldn t make any sense. For 512G of storage the prices are $32 for NVMe and $33 for SATA SSD. For 1TB of storage the prices start at $68 for SATA SSD and $74 for NVMe. Probably for the vast majority of home users 1TB of SATA SSD or NVMe is the minimum storage capacity to consider, the $50 price difference isn t much when considering the entire price of a PC or laptop and anything less than 1TB will run out quickly with modern use.
Larger Storage 4TB+
The price for 4TB of storage from MSY is NVMe starting at $349, SATA SSD starting at $369, and hard disks starting at $115. If you need 4TB of RAID-1 storage then it might be worth saving $470 and getting hard drives for a home user. For business use it wouldn t make sense. Some laptops have two NVMe sockets so 8TB of storage (or 4TB of RAID-1) in a laptop would be interesting.
For 8TB of storage the MSY prices are SATA SSD for $739 and hard drives starting at $179. Probably hard drives are the best choice for most situations where there is a need to store 8TB or more of data. But the prices are low enough to make 8TB SSD something that can be considered for home use, it doesn t seem that long ago that the 4TB hard drives I bought for my home server were almost that expensive.
Big Storage
MSY doesn t have 8TB NVMe, such devices are on eBay for $1700 for regular M.2 NVMe and just under $1000 for U.2 (server hot-swap devices). So if you need more than 8TB of NVMe storage then probably buying a server with U.2 built in is the correct solution.
For home users who need more than 8TB of storage hard drives are a good solution. One issue is that the more affordable and larger drives use Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR) which has some different performance characteristics for certain workloads. Apparently SMR performs badly for anything other than large file storage.
Why MSY?
I primarily used MSY prices for this post because they are a reliable local store that has a list of prices that is easy to read. For everything in this post I can get better prices by using eBay, the StaticIce.com.au price comparison site [2], and the computing section of the OzBargain site that gamifies finding good prices [3]. But a good shopping strategy nowadays is to compare prices in a store to determine what items are in your price range and then shop around for price on the item you want. Checking all the different bargain sites for all these items would take much more time than I want to spend writing a blog post!
Conclusion
Hard drives don t make sense for the vast majority of systems. Not for laptops, not for typical desktop PCs, and not for small business servers (say 8TB or less of RAID storage). Hard drives only make sense for dozens or hundreds of TB of storage and even then finding out how to deal with SMR issues is going to increase the pain of deployment. Maybe using a combination of SSD and hard drives to deal with the SMR issues is going to be a competitive advantage for NAS vendors in future.
NVMe looks like it s on the way to being cheaper than SATA SSD. There is likely to be a good market for systems with NVMe as the only internal storage option.
The long term trend of systems without DVD drives and with maybe 2.5 SATA devices but no 3.5 SATA devices seems to lead to the GPU being the major part that needs to fit into a PC case that determines the overall size. Maybe there will be a new trend of GPUs connected to riser cards so they can be parallel to the motherboard for compact PCs.
For business desktop systems (IE low powered graphics hardware as it s not for gaming) I expect that the trend will be towards NUC type devices which are already based around the M.2 as a storage device size.
Welcome to the March 2023 report from the Reproducible Builds project.
In these reports we outline the most important things that we have been up to over the past month. As a quick recap, the motivation behind the reproducible builds effort is to ensure no malicious flaws have been introduced during compilation and distributing processes. It does this by ensuring identical results are always generated from a given source, thus allowing multiple third-parties to come to a consensus on whether a build was compromised.
If you are interested in contributing to the project, please do visit our Contribute page on our website.
News
There was progress towards making the Go programming language reproducible this month, with the overall goal remaining making the Go binaries distributed from Google and by Arch Linux (and others) to be bit-for-bit identical. These changes could become part of the upcoming version 1.21 release of Go. An issue in the Go issue tracker (#57120) is being used to follow and record progress on this.
Arnout Engelen updated our website to add and update reproducibility-related links for NixOS to reproducible.nixos.org. []. In addition, Chris Lamb made some cosmetic changes to our presentations and resources page. [][]
Intel published a guide on how to reproducibly build their Trust Domain Extensions (TDX) firmware. TDX here refers to an Intel technology that combines their existing virtual machine and memory encryption technology with a new kind of virtual machine guest called a Trust Domain. This runs the CPU in a mode that protects the confidentiality of its memory contents and its state from any other software.
A reproducibility-related bug from early 2020 in the GNU GCC compiler as been fixed. The issues was that if GCC was invoked via the as frontend, the -ffile-prefix-map was being ignored. We were tracking this in Debian via the build_path_captured_in_assembly_objects issue. It has now been fixed and will be reflected in GCC version 13.
Holger Levsen will present at foss-north 2023 in April of this year in Gothenburg, Sweden on the topic of Reproducible Builds, the first ten years.
Anthony Andreoli, Anis Lounis, Mourad Debbabi and Aiman Hanna of the Security Research Centre at Concordia University, Montreal published a paper this month entitled On the prevalence of software supply chain attacks: Empirical study and investigative framework:
Software Supply Chain Attacks (SSCAs) typically compromise hosts through trusted but infected software. The intent of this paper is twofold: First, we present an empirical study of the most prominent software supply chain attacks and their characteristics. Second, we propose an investigative framework for identifying, expressing, and evaluating characteristic behaviours of newfound attacks for mitigation and future defense purposes. We hypothesize that these behaviours are statistically malicious, existed in the past, and thus could have been thwarted in modernity through their cementation x-years ago. []
Mattia Rizzolo is asking everyone in the community to save the date for the 2023 s Reproducible Builds summit which will take place between October 31st and November 2nd at Dock Europe in Hamburg, Germany. Separate announcement(s) to follow. []
ahojlm posted an message announcing a new project which is the first project offering bootstrappable and verifiable builds without any binary seeds. That is to say, a way of providing a verifiable path towards trusted software development platform without relying on pre-provided binary code in order to prevent against various forms of compiler backdoors. The project s homepage is hosted on Tor (mirror).
The minutes and logs from our March 2023 IRC meeting have been published. In case you missed this one, our next IRC meeting will take place on Tuesday 25th April at 15:00 UTC on #reproducible-builds on the OFTC network.
and as a Valentines Day present, Holger Levsen wrote on his blog on 14th February to express his thanks to OSUOSL for their continuous support of reproducible-builds.org. []
Debian
Vagrant Cascadian developed an easier setup for testing debian packages which uses sbuild s unshare mode along and reprotest, our tool for building the same source code twice in different environments and then checking the binaries produced by each build for any differences. []
Over 30 reviews of Debian packages were added, 14 were updated and 7 were removed this month, all adding to our knowledge about identified issues. A number of issues were updated, including the Holger Levsen updating build_path_captured_in_assembly_objects to note that it has been fixed for GCC 13 [] and Vagrant Cascadian added new issues to mark packages where the build path is being captured via the Rust toolchain [] as well as new categorisation for where virtual packages have nondeterministic versioned dependencies [].
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:
Testing framework
The Reproducible Builds project operates a comprehensive testing framework (available at tests.reproducible-builds.org) in order to check packages and other artifacts for reproducibility. In March, the following changes were made by Holger Levsen:
Add/update openQA configuration [], and use the actual timestamp for openQA builds [].
Moved adding the user to the docker group from the janitor_setup_worker script to the (more general) update_jdn.sh script. []
Use the (short-term) reproducible source when generating live-build images. []
diffoscope development
diffoscope is our in-depth and content-aware diff utility. Not only can it locate and diagnose reproducibility issues, it can provide human-readable diffs from many kinds of binary formats as well. This month, Mattia Rizzolo released versions 238, and Chris Lamb released versions 239 and 240. Chris Lamb also made the following changes:
Fix compatibility with PyPDF 3.x, and correctly restore test data. []
Rework PDF annotation handling into a separate method. []
In addition, Holger Levsen performed a long-overdue overhaul of the Lintian overrides in the Debian packaging [][][][], and Mattia Rizzolo updated the packaging to silence an include_package_data=True [], fixed the build under Debian bullseye [], fixed tool name in a list of tools permitted to be absent during package build tests [] and as well as documented sending out an email upon [].
In addition, Vagrant Cascadian updated the version of GNU Guix to 238 [ and 239 []. Vagrant also updated reprotest to version 0.7.23. []
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:
Armadillo is a powerful
and expressive C++ template library for linear algebra and scientific
computing. It aims towards a good balance between speed and ease of use,
has a syntax deliberately close to Matlab, and is useful for algorithm
development directly in C++, or quick conversion of research code into
production environments. RcppArmadillo
integrates this library with the R environment and language and is
widely used by (currently) 1052 other packages on CRAN, downloaded 28.6 million
times (per the partial logs from the cloud mirrors of CRAN), and the CSDA paper (preprint
/ vignette) by Conrad and myself has been cited 522 times according
to Google Scholar.
This release brings a new upstream release 12.2.0 made by Conrad a
day or so ago. We prepared the usual release candidate, tested on the
over 1000 reverse depends, found no issues and sent it to CRAN. Where it
got tested again and was auto-processed smoothly by CRAN.
The releases actually has a relatively small set of changes as a
first follow-up release in the 12.2.* series.
Changes
in RcppArmadillo version 0.12.2.0.0 (2023-04-04)
Upgraded to Armadillo release 12.2.0 (Cortisol Profusion
Deluxe)
more efficient use of FFTW3 by fft() and
ifft()
faster in-place element-wise multiplication of sparse matrices by
dense matrices
added spsolve_factoriser class to allow reuse of sparse matrix
factorisation for solving systems of linear equations
The key decision I made mid-March was to commit to pursuing ventilation monitoring as my primary product development focus.
Prior to that decision, I hoped to use my writing plan to drive a breadth-first survey of the opportunities for each of my product ideas before deciding which had the best business potential to focus on first. Two factors changed my mind:
As noted last month, I m finding the writing process much slower and harder than I expected the survey across all the ideas may not complete until mid-year or later!
I ve realised that having begun building co2mon.nz last year, to stop work on the project at this point would leave me feeling that I had not done justice to developing the product and testing the market - seeing it to a conclusion is important to me.
This decision is an explicit choice to prioritize seeing a project through to a conclusion (successful, or otherwise) regardless of whether or not it has the highest potential of the various ideas I could invest time into. I m comfortable making that trade-off in this instance, but I am going to bound my time investment to two months. I ll evaluate at the end of May whether I m seeing sufficient traction and potential to justify continuing further with the idea.
I had only one fully uninterrupted work week in March due to a combination of days out due to school trips, two LandSAR call outs and various farm maintenance tasks. April will be similarly disrupted given school holidays and a planned family trip to Brisbane. Sharpening my focus feels particularly necessary given this reality to ensure I m not spread overly thin.
Consulting - 4/10
Goal: Execute a series of successful consulting engagements, building a reputation for myself and leaving happy customers willing to provide testimonials that support a pipeline of future opportunities.
Consulting hours were down from February, hitting only 31% of target this month as the client didn t make use of all the hours I had allocated for them. I didn t invest any time in advertising my services or developing new clients or projects over the month, which will now become a priority for April.
Product Development - 4/10
Goal: Grow my product development skill set by taking several ideas to MVP stage with customer feedback received, and launch at least one product which generates revenue and has growth potential.
With the new focus entirely on co2mon.nz, I spent a lot of time re-working and developing my thinking around how I want to take this forward, specifically trying to analyse where I saw an opportunity in the market. After attending a workshop on finding product market fit using quantifiable metrics at the Southern SaaS conference this month, I ve realised that much of the time I spent on this analysis is too insular and focused on my own observations - I need to get out and talk to a lot more people and get more feedback on their needs and understanding of the space instead. Seems obvious in retrospect!
I also spent a few days beginning to build another batch of prototype CO2 monitors so I have some units to use for experimentation and testing with potential customers as I get out and have those conversations. I can probably build one or two more batches of prototype monitors before needing to look at PCB assembly in earnest.
Professional Network Development - 8/10
Goal: To build a professional relationship with at least 30 new people this year.
This goal continues to be my highlight with 8 new contacts added this month and catch-ups with 4 existing people I had not spoken to for a while. I joined the KiwiSaaS central community and attended the SouthernSaas conference this month as well, which has been time well spent given the workshop learnings discussed above.
Writing - 3/10
Goal: To publish a high-quality piece of writing on this site at least once a week.
I published a single post, the first half of my updated ventilation monitoring business plan. I continue to find the writing process much harder and slower than I hoped or expected and remain well below my target publishing rate, but one post is better than zero!
I tested working with an editor I contracted via UpWork who provided some very useful feedback on the structure of my writing which helped to unblock some of my progress. I plan to continue doing this for at least a few more posts.
Community - 5/10
Goal: To support the growth of my local technical community by volunteering my experience and knowledge with others through activities such as mentoring, conference talks and similar.
I completed my review assignments for the SREcon23 APAC program committee. The conference looks to have a very exciting line up of talks scheduled, unfortunately the 2 talks I proposed didn t make the cut with my fellow PC members.
Yesterday, the UBports core developer team released Ubuntu Touch Focal OTA-1
(In fact, Raoul, Marius and I were in a conference call when Marius froze and said: the PR team already posted the release blog post; the post is out, but we haven't released yet... ahhhh... panic... Shall I?, Marius said, and we said: GO!!! This is why the release occurred in public five hours ahead of schedule. OMG.)
For all the details, please study: https://ubports.com/blog/ubports-news-1/post/ubuntu-touch-ota-1-focal-re...
Credits
Thanks to all the developers, other contributors and funding providers that helped to reach this massive milestone. I dare to drop some names here at the risk of forgetting others (I put them in alphanumerical order): Alan, Alfred, Brian, Christoffer, Daniel, Eline, Florian, Guido, Jami, Jonathan, Kugi, Lionel, Maciek, Mardy, Marius, Mike, Nigel, Nikita, Raoul, Ratchanan, Robert, Sergey.
I have been involved in the development and release process over the past four years and I feel honoured to work with so many fine and genuine people on such a unique project.
It is a pleasure to work with you guys!!!
Also a big thanks to the UBports Foundation and its BoD for being the umbrella organisation of all Ubuntu Touch related initiatives.
Consumer-Ready
Ubuntu Touch is one of the very few Open Source projects that brings fourth a 100% FLOSS phone operating system.
After using Ubuntu Touch myself for several months now, I can confirm that it is a consumer grade OS that can be used by non-tech people as a daily driver for mobile communications and connectivity.
Go for it and try it out.
The importance of clean, fresh indoor air is one of the most tangible takeaways of the Covid-19 pandemic. In addition to being an effective risk mitigation strategy for reducing the spread of respiratory illnesses, clean, fresh air is necessary to enable effective cognitive performance.
Monitoring indoor air quality is relatively easy to do, but traditionally has not been a key focus. I believe air quality monitoring should be accessible for any indoor space, and for highly occupied indoor spaces should be provided on a continuous basis. This post explores the need and an opportunity for a business that can accelerate the adoption of ventilation monitoring through the following topics:
The importance of indoor air quality
Clean, fresh air is fundamental to life and health. That might sound obvious, but unfortunately being obvious is not enough to ensure the air we breathe is in fact always clean and healthy. Repeated studies have revealed that in many cases the air you re breathing at school, in the bus or at work and probably also at home falls well below the ideal of what clean, fresh air should be.
Unclean air has potential long-term health impacts and has also been shown to lower cognitive performance impacting the ability to learn and work as well as increasing the risk of transmission of respiratory illnesses like Covid-19 and the flu.
Ventilation (replacing old stale air with clean fresh air) is the most effective and economical method of improving and maintaining high indoor air quality. Most New Zealand buildings (including schools and houses) are designed to rely on manual ventilation (opening windows), while newer buildings, often including larger or commercial buildings may use mechanical ventilation involving fans and ducts. Mechanical ventilation including filtration may also be required in situations where the outdoor air is not clean and fresh such as in a city or next to a busy intersection.
Observing the invisible
Overall air quality is a complex topic involving many contributing factors, many of which are invisible and not perceptible to us until well after adverse effects or irritation occur. This complexity and lack of visible signal is a large contributing factor to the ignorance and lack of attention towards indoor air quality that is prevalent in most buildings and indoor spaces today. Our attention is biased towards the risks that we can see, and this default bias has not been helped by hesitation and resistance to the idea that aerosol transmission and air quality is an important factor in preventing disease transmission that has only recently started to change. Zeynep Tufekci has a great overview that provides fascinating context for how an overreaction to the early incorrect theories of bad air and miasma causing disease contributed to aerosol transmission and air quality being incorrectly neglected for so long.
Correcting this history of inattention to indoor air quality is going to take time and effort, but one significant step that we can take to help start the journey to ensuring all indoor spaces have clean, healthy air is to make the invisible part visible. The concentration of carbon dioxide (CO2) in a space is an incredibly effective and easy to measure proxy for the ventilation of a space. The atmospheric background level of CO2 is around 420 parts per million (ppm), while our exhaled breath has concentrations as high as 40,000 ppm. Without effective ventilation, one or more people breathing in an enclosed space will rapidly lead to an observable increase in CO2 concentration, which in turn provides a signal that the ventilation is insufficient and needs to be improved.
Monitoring CO2 and improving ventilation is not a panacea for all possible air quality issues, but for the majority of buildings and indoor spaces, using CO2 as a proxy for ventilation and increasing ventilation when CO2 levels rise above recommended levels is a simple, effective and achievable approach that will deliver improvements in cognitive performance and reduction in the risk of disease transmission with few, if any, downsides or risks. See this Public Health Communication Centre briefing for a more detailed explanation.
Adding clean air to our hygiene practices
We have well established expectations of hygiene for the food we eat and the water we drink and these expectations are codified in regulations that ensure those providing these services do so in a way that gives us confidence that we re not going to be at risk of illness. You may recall seeing food grade ratings prominently displayed on the walls of restaurants and cafes that you visit as an example of this.
Why should the air we breathe be treated any differently?
I think there is a strong argument that indoor air quality deserves regulation, both of the absolute quality of the air and ensuring that the practices and achieved air quality are clearly advertised and available. Ventilation monitoring via measurement of CO2 concentration provides an effective and achievable method that can be used to achieve this, and countries like Belgium and Japan are already starting to regulate indoor air quality. In the UK, the independent SAGE group of scientists has published Scores on the Doors , a proposal which demonstrates how CO2 monitoring can be helpful in providing information about the air quality of indoor spaces.
Unfortunately there is no movement in any of these directions in New Zealand yet, and no sign that regulation or even a basic campaign to raise awareness of ventilation and air quality is even being planned. This is disappointing, but even if such work was planned, it would still require appropriate ventilation monitoring products and services to enable it, and while there are some options available, it is not a fully solved space yet.
Existing ventilation monitoring options
Until recently the available offerings for ventilation monitoring have sat at two distinct ends of the price and quality spectrum:
Handheld air quality meters advertised as measuring CO2, but in reality reporting only an approximation. These meters do not contain actual CO2 sensors, and only approximate CO2 levels based on measurements of other components of the air. While cheap (often less than $100), these meters are not useful for providing reliable data that can be systematically used to assess and improve ventilation and should be avoided.
High-end building management systems (BMS), and industrial measurement products targeted at large buildings such as offices or commercial applications such as food production. These systems require specialist installation, often integrated with large whole-building air conditioning systems. These systems, if appropriately configured, can be a great solution for the types of buildings and spaces that can afford them, but by their nature and cost, they do not offer a solution for the majority of smaller buildings and indoor spaces where we tend to spend a lot of our time.
Over the last few years a growing number of companies have developed products that fit in between the unreliable air quality meters and the expensive BMS/industrial measurement products. Promising NZ-based options in this space include Air Suite, Tether and Monkeytronics. These products are wall mountable, resemble a smoke alarm and utilise a WiFi network to report their measurements to a supporting web service. Pricing varies between $200 and $300 ex GST per unit.
Aranet, while not NZ based, provides a handheld monitor the Aranet4 Home, which is well regarded for quality and accuracy. Aranet4 Home devices are the most expensive in this space, retailing at $386 ex GST and offer a clunkier and less convenient set of connectivity options via a Bluetooth connection to an associated phone. To obtain similar reporting functionality to the other products requires upgrading to their Pro model and purchasing a separate base station at a combined cost of $1255 ex GST.
Outside the commercial product offerings are a number of open source DIY options, which can be built by anyone with basic electronics knowledge. AirGradient is a leading example based in Thailand, and within New Zealand Oliver Seiler s CO2 Monitor provides similar functionality. These open source options have a parts cost in the $100-$150 range, depending on volume built and provide high-quality measurements via trusted CO2 sensors while also offering huge flexibility in terms of how they operate, interact with users and potential supporting web services.
An opportunity: Small businesses and organisations
While a growing number of high-quality CO2 monitors has the potential to help drive increased adoption of ventilation monitoring, the plethora of small businesses and organisations that own, operate and manage many of the indoor spaces we visit on a day-to-day basis do not appear to be well served by these existing products.
To deploy ventilation monitoring a small business or organisation needs to first become aware of the need or demand for it, and then have a simple and easy path to acquire and install the monitor and access the data. Little to no marketing or demand generation appears to be targeted towards this market from the existing businesses and tellingly, several of the products are not directly available for sale, requiring interaction with a salesperson to purchase. This indicates a focus on selling to larger customers who have a campus or portfolio of buildings and will purchase in larger quantities than the typical small business or organisation will.
Small businesses and organisations are likely to occupy smaller buildings and spaces where manual ventilation is the prevalent method of improving and maintaining air quality. Maintaining clean, fresh air via manual ventilation requires the occupants of the space to receive an obvious and straightforward signal when action (opening windows, etc) is required. While the products above all tend to provide some form of local feedback and display in the room, the indication provided and notification of when to take action is less obvious and prominent than would be ideal in a situation where manual ventilation is being relied upon.
Informally testing this opportunity with family and friends running small businesses over the last few months has resulted in promising feedback. One particular success story was the discovery of a fresh air duct on the air conditioning unit in a small office that had never been connected to the outside air and was simply recirculating air from the ceiling space back into an office! The resulting stuffiness and poor air quality had been noticed, but without the clear indication from the CO2 monitor that the air conditioning was actually making things worse, rather than better, the underlying issue had not been understood. With the issue fixed and the duct now connected, that business is now enjoying much more productive and healthy working conditions.
Next steps
Many small businesses and organisations are likely to have poor air quality and opportunities for improvement similar to the example above that are waiting to be found and fixed, and the existing products available are neither focused or ideal for the needs of this market.
I have spent some time over the past six months building a basic CO2 monitoring service that I have used to deploy ventilation monitoring to our local school, and a few other local businesses. There are a number of challenges that still need to be addressed in order to scale the business up, but I think there is a reasonable chance that I can build a viable business that offers an attractive and useful solution that would accelerate the deployment of ventilation monitoring for small businesses and organisations.
In an upcoming post, I will explain the foundations of the service that I have built to date, the challenges that need to be overcome and how I plan to evolve the service from the current prototype into a sustainable, bootstrapped business.
I ve used hardware-backed OpenPGP keys since 2006 when I imported newly generated rsa1024 subkeys to a FSFE Fellowship card. This worked well for several years, and I recall buying more ZeitControl cards for multi-machine usage and backup purposes. As a side note, I recall being unsatisfied with the weak 1024-bit RSA subkeys at the time my primary key was a somewhat stronger 1280-bit RSA key created back in 2002 but OpenPGP cards at the time didn t support more than 1024 bit RSA, and were (and still often are) also limited to power-of-two RSA key sizes which I dislike.
I had my master key on disk with a strong password for a while, mostly to refresh expiration time of the subkeys and to sign other s OpenPGP keys. At some point I stopped carrying around encrypted copies of my master key. That was my main setup when I migrated to a new stronger RSA 3744 bit key with rsa2048 subkeys on a YubiKey NEO back in 2014. At that point, signing other s OpenPGP keys was a rare enough occurrence that I settled with bringing out my offline machine to perform this operation, transferring the public key to sign on USB sticks. In 2019 I re-evaluated my OpenPGP setup and ended up creating a offline Ed25519 key with subkeys on a FST-01G running Gnuk. My approach for signing other s OpenPGP keys were still to bring out my offline machine and sign things using the master secret using USB sticks for storage and transport. Which meant I almost never did that, because it took too much effort. So my 2019-era Ed25519 key still only has a handful of signatures on it, since I had essentially stopped signing other s keys which is the traditional way of getting signatures in return.
None of this caused any critical problem for me because I continued to use my old 2014-era RSA3744 key in parallel with my new 2019-era Ed25519 key, since too many systems didn t handle Ed25519. However, during 2022 this changed, and the only remaining environment that I still used my RSA3744 key for was in Debian and they require OpenPGP signatures on the new key to allow it to replace an older key. I was in denial about this sub-optimal solution during 2022 and endured its practical consequences, having to use the YubiKey NEO (which I had replaced with a permanently inserted YubiKey Nano at some point) for Debian-related purposes alone.
In December 2022 I bought a new laptop and setup a FST-01SZ with my Ed25519 key, and while I have taken a vacation from Debian, I continue to extend the expiration period on the old RSA3744-key in case I will ever have to use it again, so the overall OpenPGP setup was still sub-optimal. Having two valid OpenPGP keys at the same time causes people to use both for email encryption (leading me to have to use both devices), and the WKD Key Discovery protocol doesn t like two valid keys either. At FOSDEM 23 I ran into Andre Heinecke at GnuPG and I couldn t help complain about how complex and unsatisfying all OpenPGP-related matters were, and he mildly ignored my rant and asked why I didn t put the master key on another smartcard. The comment sunk in when I came home, and recently I connected all the dots and this post is a summary of what I did to move my offline OpenPGP master key to a Nitrokey Start.
First a word about device choice, I still prefer to use hardware devices that are as compatible with free software as possible, but the FST-01G or FST-01SZ are no longer easily available for purchase. I got a comment about Nitrokey start in my last post, and had two of them available to experiment with. There are things to dislike with the Nitrokey Start compared to the YubiKey (e.g., relative insecure chip architecture, the bulkier form factor and lack of FIDO/U2F/OATH support) but as far as I know there is no more widely available owner-controlled device that is manufactured for an intended purpose of implementing an OpenPGP card. Thus it hits the sweet spot for me.
Nitrokey Start
The first step is to run latest firmware on the Nitrokey Start for bug-fixes and important OpenSSH 9.0 compatibility and there are reproducible-built firmware published that you can install using pynitrokey. I run Trisquel 11 aramo on my laptop, which does not include the Python Pip package (likely because it promotes installing non-free software) so that was a slight complication. Building the firmware locally may have worked, and I would like to do that eventually to confirm the published firmware, however to save time I settled with installing the Ubuntu 22.04 packages on my machine:
$ sha256sum python3-pip*
ded6b3867a4a4cbaff0940cab366975d6aeecc76b9f2d2efa3deceb062668b1c python3-pip_22.0.2+dfsg-1ubuntu0.2_all.deb
e1561575130c41dc3309023a345de337e84b4b04c21c74db57f599e267114325 python3-pip-whl_22.0.2+dfsg-1ubuntu0.2_all.deb
$ doas dpkg -i python3-pip*
...
$ doas apt install -f
...
$
Installing pynitrokey downloaded a bunch of dependencies, and it would be nice to audit the license and security vulnerabilities for each of them. (Verbose output below slightly redacted.)
jas@kaka:~$ pip3 install --user pynitrokey
Collecting pynitrokey
Downloading pynitrokey-0.4.34-py3-none-any.whl (572 kB)
Collecting frozendict~=2.3.4
Downloading frozendict-2.3.5-cp310-cp310-manylinux_2_17_x86_64.manylinux2014_x86_64.whl (113 kB)
Requirement already satisfied: click<9,>=8.0.0 in /usr/lib/python3/dist-packages (from pynitrokey) (8.0.3)
Collecting ecdsa
Downloading ecdsa-0.18.0-py2.py3-none-any.whl (142 kB)
Collecting python-dateutil~=2.7.0
Downloading python_dateutil-2.7.5-py2.py3-none-any.whl (225 kB)
Collecting fido2<2,>=1.1.0
Downloading fido2-1.1.0-py3-none-any.whl (201 kB)
Collecting tlv8
Downloading tlv8-0.10.0.tar.gz (16 kB)
Preparing metadata (setup.py) ... done
Requirement already satisfied: certifi>=14.5.14 in /usr/lib/python3/dist-packages (from pynitrokey) (2020.6.20)
Requirement already satisfied: pyusb in /usr/lib/python3/dist-packages (from pynitrokey) (1.2.1.post1)
Collecting urllib3~=1.26.7
Downloading urllib3-1.26.15-py2.py3-none-any.whl (140 kB)
Collecting spsdk<1.8.0,>=1.7.0
Downloading spsdk-1.7.1-py3-none-any.whl (684 kB)
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Requirement already satisfied: cryptography<37,>=3.4.4 in /usr/lib/python3/dist-packages (from pynitrokey) (3.4.8)
Collecting intelhex
Downloading intelhex-2.3.0-py2.py3-none-any.whl (50 kB)
Collecting nkdfu
Downloading nkdfu-0.2-py3-none-any.whl (16 kB)
Requirement already satisfied: requests in /usr/lib/python3/dist-packages (from pynitrokey) (2.25.1)
Collecting tqdm
Downloading tqdm-4.65.0-py3-none-any.whl (77 kB)
Collecting nrfutil<7,>=6.1.4
Downloading nrfutil-6.1.7.tar.gz (845 kB)
Preparing metadata (setup.py) ... done
Requirement already satisfied: cffi in /usr/lib/python3/dist-packages (from pynitrokey) (1.15.0)
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Downloading crcmod-1.7.tar.gz (89 kB)
Preparing metadata (setup.py) ... done
Collecting libusb1==1.9.3
Downloading libusb1-1.9.3-py3-none-any.whl (60 kB)
Collecting pc_ble_driver_py>=0.16.4
Downloading pc_ble_driver_py-0.17.0-cp310-cp310-manylinux_2_17_x86_64.manylinux2014_x86_64.whl (2.9 MB)
Collecting piccata
Downloading piccata-2.0.3-py3-none-any.whl (21 kB)
Collecting protobuf<4.0.0,>=3.17.3
Downloading protobuf-3.20.3-cp310-cp310-manylinux_2_12_x86_64.manylinux2010_x86_64.whl (1.1 MB)
Collecting pyserial
Downloading pyserial-3.5-py2.py3-none-any.whl (90 kB)
Collecting pyspinel>=1.0.0a3
Downloading pyspinel-1.0.3.tar.gz (58 kB)
Preparing metadata (setup.py) ... done
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Building wheels for collected packages: nrfutil, crcmod, sly, tlv8, commentjson, hexdump, pyspinel, fire, intervaltree, lark-parser, naturalsort, future
Building wheel for nrfutil (setup.py) ... done
Created wheel for nrfutil: filename=nrfutil-6.1.7-py3-none-any.whl size=898520 sha256=de6f8803f51d6c26d24dc7df6292064a468ff3f389d73370433fde5582b84a10
Stored in directory: /home/jas/.cache/pip/wheels/39/2b/9b/98ab2dd716da746290e6728bdb557b14c1c9a54cb9ed86e13b
Building wheel for crcmod (setup.py) ... done
Created wheel for crcmod: filename=crcmod-1.7-cp310-cp310-linux_x86_64.whl size=31422 sha256=5149ac56fcbfa0606760eef5220fcedc66be560adf68cf38c604af3ad0e4a8b0
Stored in directory: /home/jas/.cache/pip/wheels/85/4c/07/72215c529bd59d67e3dac29711d7aba1b692f543c808ba9e86
Building wheel for sly (setup.py) ... done
Created wheel for sly: filename=sly-0.4-py3-none-any.whl size=27352 sha256=f614e413918de45c73d1e9a8dca61ca07dc760d9740553400efc234c891f7fde
Stored in directory: /home/jas/.cache/pip/wheels/a2/23/4a/6a84282a0d2c29f003012dc565b3126e427972e8b8157ea51f
Building wheel for tlv8 (setup.py) ... done
Created wheel for tlv8: filename=tlv8-0.10.0-py3-none-any.whl size=11266 sha256=3ec8b3c45977a3addbc66b7b99e1d81b146607c3a269502b9b5651900a0e2d08
Stored in directory: /home/jas/.cache/pip/wheels/e9/35/86/66a473cc2abb0c7f21ed39c30a3b2219b16bd2cdb4b33cfc2c
Building wheel for commentjson (setup.py) ... done
Created wheel for commentjson: filename=commentjson-0.9.0-py3-none-any.whl size=12092 sha256=28b6413132d6d7798a18cf8c76885dc69f676ea763ffcb08775a3c2c43444f4a
Stored in directory: /home/jas/.cache/pip/wheels/7d/90/23/6358a234ca5b4ec0866d447079b97fedf9883387d1d7d074e5
Building wheel for hexdump (setup.py) ... done
Created wheel for hexdump: filename=hexdump-3.3-py3-none-any.whl size=8913 sha256=79dfadd42edbc9acaeac1987464f2df4053784fff18b96408c1309b74fd09f50
Stored in directory: /home/jas/.cache/pip/wheels/26/28/f7/f47d7ecd9ae44c4457e72c8bb617ef18ab332ee2b2a1047e87
Building wheel for pyspinel (setup.py) ... done
Created wheel for pyspinel: filename=pyspinel-1.0.3-py3-none-any.whl size=65033 sha256=01dc27f81f28b4830a0cf2336dc737ef309a1287fcf33f57a8a4c5bed3b5f0a6
Stored in directory: /home/jas/.cache/pip/wheels/95/ec/4b/6e3e2ee18e7292d26a65659f75d07411a6e69158bb05507590
Building wheel for fire (setup.py) ... done
Created wheel for fire: filename=fire-0.5.0-py2.py3-none-any.whl size=116951 sha256=3d288585478c91a6914629eb739ea789828eb2d0267febc7c5390cb24ba153e8
Stored in directory: /home/jas/.cache/pip/wheels/90/d4/f7/9404e5db0116bd4d43e5666eaa3e70ab53723e1e3ea40c9a95
Building wheel for intervaltree (setup.py) ... done
Created wheel for intervaltree: filename=intervaltree-3.1.0-py2.py3-none-any.whl size=26119 sha256=5ff1def22ba883af25c90d90ef7c6518496fcd47dd2cbc53a57ec04cd60dc21d
Stored in directory: /home/jas/.cache/pip/wheels/fa/80/8c/43488a924a046b733b64de3fac99252674c892a4c3801c0a61
Building wheel for lark-parser (setup.py) ... done
Created wheel for lark-parser: filename=lark_parser-0.7.8-py2.py3-none-any.whl size=62527 sha256=3d2ec1d0f926fc2688d40777f7ef93c9986f874169132b1af590b6afc038f4be
Stored in directory: /home/jas/.cache/pip/wheels/29/30/94/33e8b58318aa05cb1842b365843036e0280af5983abb966b83
Building wheel for naturalsort (setup.py) ... done
Created wheel for naturalsort: filename=naturalsort-1.5.1-py3-none-any.whl size=7526 sha256=bdecac4a49f2416924548cae6c124c85d5333e9e61c563232678ed182969d453
Stored in directory: /home/jas/.cache/pip/wheels/a6/8e/c9/98cfa614fff2979b457fa2d9ad45ec85fa417e7e3e2e43be51
Building wheel for future (setup.py) ... done
Created wheel for future: filename=future-0.18.3-py3-none-any.whl size=492037 sha256=57a01e68feca2b5563f5f624141267f399082d2f05f55886f71b5d6e6cf2b02c
Stored in directory: /home/jas/.cache/pip/wheels/5e/a9/47/f118e66afd12240e4662752cc22cefae5d97275623aa8ef57d
Successfully built nrfutil crcmod sly tlv8 commentjson hexdump pyspinel fire intervaltree lark-parser naturalsort future
Installing collected packages: tlv8, sortedcontainers, sly, pyserial, pyelftools, piccata, naturalsort, libusb1, lark-parser, intelhex, hexdump, fastjsonschema, crcmod, asn1crypto, wrapt, urllib3, typing_extensions, tqdm, termcolor, ruamel.yaml.clib, python-dateutil, pyspinel, pypemicro, pycryptodome, psutil, protobuf, prettytable, oscrypto, milksnake, libusbsio, jinja2, intervaltree, humanfriendly, future, frozendict, fido2, ecdsa, deepmerge, commentjson, click-option-group, click-command-tree, capstone, astunparse, argparse-addons, ruamel.yaml, pyocd-pemicro, pylink-square, pc_ble_driver_py, fire, cmsis-pack-manager, bincopy, pyocd, nrfutil, nkdfu, spsdk, pynitrokey
WARNING: The script nitropy is installed in '/home/jas/.local/bin' which is not on PATH.
Consider adding this directory to PATH or, if you prefer to suppress this warning, use --no-warn-script-location.
Successfully installed argparse-addons-0.12.0 asn1crypto-1.5.1 astunparse-1.6.3 bincopy-17.10.3 capstone-4.0.2 click-command-tree-1.1.0 click-option-group-0.5.5 cmsis-pack-manager-0.2.10 commentjson-0.9.0 crcmod-1.7 deepmerge-0.3.0 ecdsa-0.18.0 fastjsonschema-2.16.3 fido2-1.1.0 fire-0.5.0 frozendict-2.3.5 future-0.18.3 hexdump-3.3 humanfriendly-10.0 intelhex-2.3.0 intervaltree-3.1.0 jinja2-3.0.3 lark-parser-0.7.8 libusb1-1.9.3 libusbsio-2.1.11 milksnake-0.1.5 naturalsort-1.5.1 nkdfu-0.2 nrfutil-6.1.7 oscrypto-1.3.0 pc_ble_driver_py-0.17.0 piccata-2.0.3 prettytable-2.5.0 protobuf-3.20.3 psutil-5.9.4 pycryptodome-3.17 pyelftools-0.29 pylink-square-0.11.1 pynitrokey-0.4.34 pyocd-0.31.0 pyocd-pemicro-1.1.5 pypemicro-0.1.11 pyserial-3.5 pyspinel-1.0.3 python-dateutil-2.7.5 ruamel.yaml-0.17.21 ruamel.yaml.clib-0.2.7 sly-0.4 sortedcontainers-2.4.0 spsdk-1.7.1 termcolor-2.2.0 tlv8-0.10.0 tqdm-4.65.0 typing_extensions-4.3.0 urllib3-1.26.15 wrapt-1.15.0
jas@kaka:~$
Then upgrading the device worked remarkable well, although I wish that the tool would have printed URLs and checksums for the firmware files to allow easy confirmation.
jas@kaka:~$ PATH=$PATH:/home/jas/.local/bin
jas@kaka:~$ nitropy start list
Command line tool to interact with Nitrokey devices 0.4.34
:: 'Nitrokey Start' keys:
FSIJ-1.2.15-5D271572: Nitrokey Nitrokey Start (RTM.12.1-RC2-modified)
jas@kaka:~$ nitropy start update
Command line tool to interact with Nitrokey devices 0.4.34
Nitrokey Start firmware update tool
Platform: Linux-5.15.0-67-generic-x86_64-with-glibc2.35
System: Linux, is_linux: True
Python: 3.10.6
Saving run log to: /tmp/nitropy.log.gc5753a8
Admin PIN:
Firmware data to be used:
- FirmwareType.REGNUAL: 4408, hash: ...b'72a30389' valid (from ...built/RTM.13/regnual.bin)
- FirmwareType.GNUK: 129024, hash: ...b'25a4289b' valid (from ...prebuilt/RTM.13/gnuk.bin)
Currently connected device strings:
Device:
Vendor: Nitrokey
Product: Nitrokey Start
Serial: FSIJ-1.2.15-5D271572
Revision: RTM.12.1-RC2-modified
Config: *:*:8e82
Sys: 3.0
Board: NITROKEY-START-G
initial device strings: [ 'name': '', 'Vendor': 'Nitrokey', 'Product': 'Nitrokey Start', 'Serial': 'FSIJ-1.2.15-5D271572', 'Revision': 'RTM.12.1-RC2-modified', 'Config': '*:*:8e82', 'Sys': '3.0', 'Board': 'NITROKEY-START-G' ]
Please note:
- Latest firmware available is:
RTM.13 (published: 2022-12-08T10:59:11Z)
- provided firmware: None
- all data will be removed from the device!
- do not interrupt update process - the device may not run properly!
- the process should not take more than 1 minute
Do you want to continue? [yes/no]: yes
...
Starting bootloader upload procedure
Device: Nitrokey Start FSIJ-1.2.15-5D271572
Connected to the device
Running update!
Do NOT remove the device from the USB slot, until further notice
Downloading flash upgrade program...
Executing flash upgrade...
Waiting for device to appear:
Wait 20 seconds.....
Downloading the program
Protecting device
Finish flashing
Resetting device
Update procedure finished. Device could be removed from USB slot.
Currently connected device strings (after upgrade):
Device:
Vendor: Nitrokey
Product: Nitrokey Start
Serial: FSIJ-1.2.19-5D271572
Revision: RTM.13
Config: *:*:8e82
Sys: 3.0
Board: NITROKEY-START-G
device can now be safely removed from the USB slot
final device strings: [ 'name': '', 'Vendor': 'Nitrokey', 'Product': 'Nitrokey Start', 'Serial': 'FSIJ-1.2.19-5D271572', 'Revision': 'RTM.13', 'Config': '*:*:8e82', 'Sys': '3.0', 'Board': 'NITROKEY-START-G' ]
finishing session 2023-03-16 21:49:07.371291
Log saved to: /tmp/nitropy.log.gc5753a8
jas@kaka:~$
jas@kaka:~$ nitropy start list
Command line tool to interact with Nitrokey devices 0.4.34
:: 'Nitrokey Start' keys:
FSIJ-1.2.19-5D271572: Nitrokey Nitrokey Start (RTM.13)
jas@kaka:~$
Before importing the master key to this device, it should be configured. Note the commands in the beginning to make sure scdaemon/pcscd is not running because they may have cached state from earlier cards. Change PIN code as you like after this, my experience with Gnuk was that the Admin PIN had to be changed first, then you import the key, and then you change the PIN.
jas@kaka:~$ gpg-connect-agent "SCD KILLSCD" "SCD BYE" /bye
OK
ERR 67125247 Slut p fil <GPG Agent>
jas@kaka:~$ ps auxww grep -e pcsc -e scd
jas 11651 0.0 0.0 3468 1672 pts/0 R+ 21:54 0:00 grep --color=auto -e pcsc -e scd
jas@kaka:~$ gpg --card-edit
Reader ...........: 20A0:4211:FSIJ-1.2.19-5D271572:0
Application ID ...: D276000124010200FFFE5D2715720000
Application type .: OpenPGP
Version ..........: 2.0
Manufacturer .....: unmanaged S/N range
Serial number ....: 5D271572
Name of cardholder: [not set]
Language prefs ...: [not set]
Salutation .......:
URL of public key : [not set]
Login data .......: [not set]
Signature PIN ....: forced
Key attributes ...: rsa2048 rsa2048 rsa2048
Max. PIN lengths .: 127 127 127
PIN retry counter : 3 3 3
Signature counter : 0
KDF setting ......: off
Signature key ....: [none]
Encryption key....: [none]
Authentication key: [none]
General key info..: [none]
gpg/card> admin
Admin commands are allowed
gpg/card> kdf-setup
gpg/card> passwd
gpg: OpenPGP card no. D276000124010200FFFE5D2715720000 detected
1 - change PIN
2 - unblock PIN
3 - change Admin PIN
4 - set the Reset Code
Q - quit
Your selection? 3
PIN changed.
1 - change PIN
2 - unblock PIN
3 - change Admin PIN
4 - set the Reset Code
Q - quit
Your selection? q
gpg/card> name
Cardholder's surname: Josefsson
Cardholder's given name: Simon
gpg/card> lang
Language preferences: sv
gpg/card> sex
Salutation (M = Mr., F = Ms., or space): m
gpg/card> login
Login data (account name): jas
gpg/card> url
URL to retrieve public key: https://josefsson.org/key-20190320.txt
gpg/card> forcesig
gpg/card> key-attr
Changing card key attribute for: Signature key
Please select what kind of key you want:
(1) RSA
(2) ECC
Your selection? 2
Please select which elliptic curve you want:
(1) Curve 25519
(4) NIST P-384
Your selection? 1
The card will now be re-configured to generate a key of type: ed25519
Note: There is no guarantee that the card supports the requested size.
If the key generation does not succeed, please check the
documentation of your card to see what sizes are allowed.
Changing card key attribute for: Encryption key
Please select what kind of key you want:
(1) RSA
(2) ECC
Your selection? 2
Please select which elliptic curve you want:
(1) Curve 25519
(4) NIST P-384
Your selection? 1
The card will now be re-configured to generate a key of type: cv25519
Changing card key attribute for: Authentication key
Please select what kind of key you want:
(1) RSA
(2) ECC
Your selection? 2
Please select which elliptic curve you want:
(1) Curve 25519
(4) NIST P-384
Your selection? 1
The card will now be re-configured to generate a key of type: ed25519
gpg/card>
jas@kaka:~$ gpg --card-edit
Reader ...........: 20A0:4211:FSIJ-1.2.19-5D271572:0
Application ID ...: D276000124010200FFFE5D2715720000
Application type .: OpenPGP
Version ..........: 2.0
Manufacturer .....: unmanaged S/N range
Serial number ....: 5D271572
Name of cardholder: Simon Josefsson
Language prefs ...: sv
Salutation .......: Mr.
URL of public key : https://josefsson.org/key-20190320.txt
Login data .......: jas
Signature PIN ....: not forced
Key attributes ...: ed25519 cv25519 ed25519
Max. PIN lengths .: 127 127 127
PIN retry counter : 3 3 3
Signature counter : 0
KDF setting ......: on
Signature key ....: [none]
Encryption key....: [none]
Authentication key: [none]
General key info..: [none]
jas@kaka:~$
Once setup, bring out your offline machine and boot it and mount your USB stick with the offline key. The paths below will be different, and this is using a somewhat unorthodox approach of working with fresh GnuPG configuration paths that I chose for the USB stick.
jas@kaka:/media/jas/2c699cbd-b77e-4434-a0d6-0c4965864296$ cp -a gnupghome-backup-masterkey gnupghome-import-nitrokey-5D271572
jas@kaka:/media/jas/2c699cbd-b77e-4434-a0d6-0c4965864296$ gpg --homedir $PWD/gnupghome-import-nitrokey-5D271572 --edit-key B1D2BD1375BECB784CF4F8C4D73CF638C53C06BE
gpg (GnuPG) 2.2.27; Copyright (C) 2021 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
This is free software: you are free to change and redistribute it.
There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law.
Secret key is available.
sec ed25519/D73CF638C53C06BE
created: 2019-03-20 expired: 2019-10-22 usage: SC
trust: ultimate validity: expired
[ expired] (1). Simon Josefsson <simon@josefsson.org>
gpg> keytocard
Really move the primary key? (y/N) y
Please select where to store the key:
(1) Signature key
(3) Authentication key
Your selection? 1
sec ed25519/D73CF638C53C06BE
created: 2019-03-20 expired: 2019-10-22 usage: SC
trust: ultimate validity: expired
[ expired] (1). Simon Josefsson <simon@josefsson.org>
gpg>
Save changes? (y/N) y
jas@kaka:/media/jas/2c699cbd-b77e-4434-a0d6-0c4965864296$
At this point it is useful to confirm that the Nitrokey has the master key available and that is possible to sign statements with it, back on your regular machine:
jas@kaka:~$ gpg --card-status
Reader ...........: 20A0:4211:FSIJ-1.2.19-5D271572:0
Application ID ...: D276000124010200FFFE5D2715720000
Application type .: OpenPGP
Version ..........: 2.0
Manufacturer .....: unmanaged S/N range
Serial number ....: 5D271572
Name of cardholder: Simon Josefsson
Language prefs ...: sv
Salutation .......: Mr.
URL of public key : https://josefsson.org/key-20190320.txt
Login data .......: jas
Signature PIN ....: not forced
Key attributes ...: ed25519 cv25519 ed25519
Max. PIN lengths .: 127 127 127
PIN retry counter : 3 3 3
Signature counter : 1
KDF setting ......: on
Signature key ....: B1D2 BD13 75BE CB78 4CF4 F8C4 D73C F638 C53C 06BE
created ....: 2019-03-20 23:37:24
Encryption key....: [none]
Authentication key: [none]
General key info..: pub ed25519/D73CF638C53C06BE 2019-03-20 Simon Josefsson <simon@josefsson.org>
sec> ed25519/D73CF638C53C06BE created: 2019-03-20 expires: 2023-09-19
card-no: FFFE 5D271572
ssb> ed25519/80260EE8A9B92B2B created: 2019-03-20 expires: 2023-09-19
card-no: FFFE 42315277
ssb> ed25519/51722B08FE4745A2 created: 2019-03-20 expires: 2023-09-19
card-no: FFFE 42315277
ssb> cv25519/02923D7EE76EBD60 created: 2019-03-20 expires: 2023-09-19
card-no: FFFE 42315277
jas@kaka:~$ echo foo gpg -a --sign gpg --verify
gpg: Signature made Thu Mar 16 22:11:02 2023 CET
gpg: using EDDSA key B1D2BD1375BECB784CF4F8C4D73CF638C53C06BE
gpg: Good signature from "Simon Josefsson <simon@josefsson.org>" [ultimate]
jas@kaka:~$
Finally to retrieve and sign a key, for example Andre Heinecke s that I could confirm the OpenPGP key identifier from his business card.
jas@kaka:~$ gpg --locate-external-keys aheinecke@gnupg.com
gpg: key 1FDF723CF462B6B1: public key "Andre Heinecke <aheinecke@gnupg.com>" imported
gpg: Total number processed: 1
gpg: imported: 1
gpg: marginals needed: 3 completes needed: 1 trust model: pgp
gpg: depth: 0 valid: 2 signed: 7 trust: 0-, 0q, 0n, 0m, 0f, 2u
gpg: depth: 1 valid: 7 signed: 64 trust: 7-, 0q, 0n, 0m, 0f, 0u
gpg: next trustdb check due at 2023-05-26
pub rsa3072 2015-12-08 [SC] [expires: 2025-12-05]
94A5C9A03C2FE5CA3B095D8E1FDF723CF462B6B1
uid [ unknown] Andre Heinecke <aheinecke@gnupg.com>
sub ed25519 2017-02-13 [S]
sub ed25519 2017-02-13 [A]
sub rsa3072 2015-12-08 [E] [expires: 2025-12-05]
sub rsa3072 2015-12-08 [A] [expires: 2025-12-05]
jas@kaka:~$ gpg --edit-key "94A5C9A03C2FE5CA3B095D8E1FDF723CF462B6B1"
gpg (GnuPG) 2.2.27; Copyright (C) 2021 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
This is free software: you are free to change and redistribute it.
There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law.
pub rsa3072/1FDF723CF462B6B1
created: 2015-12-08 expires: 2025-12-05 usage: SC
trust: unknown validity: unknown
sub ed25519/2978E9D40CBABA5C
created: 2017-02-13 expires: never usage: S
sub ed25519/DC74D901C8E2DD47
created: 2017-02-13 expires: never usage: A
The following key was revoked on 2017-02-23 by RSA key 1FDF723CF462B6B1 Andre Heinecke <aheinecke@gnupg.com>
sub cv25519/1FFE3151683260AB
created: 2017-02-13 revoked: 2017-02-23 usage: E
sub rsa3072/8CC999BDAA45C71F
created: 2015-12-08 expires: 2025-12-05 usage: E
sub rsa3072/6304A4B539CE444A
created: 2015-12-08 expires: 2025-12-05 usage: A
[ unknown] (1). Andre Heinecke <aheinecke@gnupg.com>
gpg> sign
pub rsa3072/1FDF723CF462B6B1
created: 2015-12-08 expires: 2025-12-05 usage: SC
trust: unknown validity: unknown
Primary key fingerprint: 94A5 C9A0 3C2F E5CA 3B09 5D8E 1FDF 723C F462 B6B1
Andre Heinecke <aheinecke@gnupg.com>
This key is due to expire on 2025-12-05.
Are you sure that you want to sign this key with your
key "Simon Josefsson <simon@josefsson.org>" (D73CF638C53C06BE)
Really sign? (y/N) y
gpg> quit
Save changes? (y/N) y
jas@kaka:~$
This is on my day-to-day machine, using the NitroKey Start with the offline key. No need to boot the old offline machine just to sign keys or extend expiry anymore! At FOSDEM 23 I managed to get at least one DD signature on my new key, and the Debian keyring maintainers accepted my Ed25519 key. Hopefully I can now finally let my 2014-era RSA3744 key expire in 2023-09-19 and not extend it any further. This should finish my transition to a simpler OpenPGP key setup, yay!
Update on 2023-03-23: thanks to Daniel Roschka for mentioning the Mandos and TPM approaches, which might be better alternatives, depending on your options and needs. Peter Palfrader furthermore pointed me towards clevis-initramfs and tang.
A customer of mine runs dedicated servers inside a foreign data-center, remote hands only. In such an environment you might need a disk replacement because you need bigger or faster disks, though also a disk might (start to) fail and you need a replacement. One has to be prepared for such a scenario, but fully wiping your used disk then might not always be an option, especially once disks (start to) fail. On the other hand you don t want to end up with (partial) data on your disk handed over to someone unexpected.
By encrypting the data on your disks upfront you can prevent against this scenario. But if you have a fleet of servers you might not want to manually jump on servers during boot and unlock crypto volumes manually. It s especially annoying if it s about the root filesystem where a solution like dropbear-initramfs needs to be used for remote access during initramfs boot stage. So my task for the customer was to adjust encrypted LUKS devices such that no one needs to manually unlock the encrypted device during server boot (with some specific assumptions about possible attack vectors one has to live with, see the disclaimer at the end).
The documentation about this use-case was rather inconsistent, especially because special rules apply for the root filesystem (no key file usage), we see different behavior between what s supported by systemd (hello key file again), initramfs-tools and dracut, not to mention the changes between different distributions. Since tests with this tend to be rather annoying (better make sure to have a Grml live system available :)), I m hereby documenting what worked for us (Debian/bullseye with initramfs-tools and cryptsetup-initramfs).
The system was installed with LVM on-top of an encrypted Software-RAID device, only the /boot partition is unencrypted. But even if you don t use Software-RAID nor LVM the same instructions apply. The system looks like this:
The server will then boot without prompting for a crypto password.
Note that initramfs-tools by default uses an insecure umask of 0022, resulting in the initrd being accessible to everyone. But if you have the dropbear-initramfs package installed, its /usr/share/initramfs-tools/conf-hooks.d/dropbear sets UMASK=0077 , so the resulting /boot/initrd* file should automatically have proper permissions (0600). The cryptsetup hook warns about a permissive umask configuration during update-initramfs runs, but if you want to be sure, explicitly set it via e.g.:
# cat > /etc/initramfs-tools/conf.d/umask << EOF
# restrictive umask to avoid non-root access to initrd:
UMASK=0077
EOF
# update-initramfs -k all -u
Disclaimer: Of course you need to trust users with access to /etc/initramfs-tools/unlock.sh as well as the initramfs/initrd on your system. Furthermore you should wipe the boot partition (to destroy the keyfile information) before handing over such a disk. But that is a risk my customer can live with, YMMV.
I m working in a very small web agency with 4 employees, one of them part time and our boss who doesn t do programming. It shouldn t come as a surprise, that our development infrastructure is not perfect. We have many ideas and dreams how we could improve it, but not the time. Now we have two obvious choices: Either we just do nothing or we buy services from specialized vendors like github, atlassian, travis-ci, heroku, google and others.
Doing nothing does not work for me. But just buying all this stuff doesn t please me either. We d depend on proprietary software, lock-in effects or one-size-fits-all offerings. Another option would be to find other small web shops like us, form a cooperative and share essential services. There are thousands of web shops in the same situation like us and we all need the same things:
public and private Git hosting
continuous integration (Jenkins)
code review (Gerrit)
file sharing (e.g. git-annex + webdav)
wiki
issue tracking
virtual windows systems for Internet Explorer testing
MySQL / Postgres databases
PaaS for PHP, Python, Ruby, Java
staging environment
Mails, Mailing Lists
simple calendar, CRM
monitoring
As I said, all of the above is available as commercial offerings. But I d prefer the following to be satisfied:
The infrastructure itself should be open (but not free of charge), like the OpenStack Project Infrastructure as presented at LCA. I especially like how they review their puppet config with Gerrit.
The process to become an admin for the infrastructure should work much the same like the process to become a Debian Developer. I d also like the same attitude towards quality as present in Debian.
Does something like that already exists? There already is the German cooperative hostsharing which is kind of similar but does provide mainly hosting, not services. But I ll ask them next after writing this blog post.
Is your company interested in joining such an effort? Does it sound silly?
Comments:
Sounds promising. I already answered by mail. Dirk Deimeke (Homepage) am 16.02.2014 08:16 Homepage: http://d5e.org
I m sorry for accidentily removing a comment that linked to https://mayfirst.org while moderating comments. I m really looking forward to another blogging engine Thomas Koch am 16.02.2014 12:20
Why? What are you missing? I am using s9y for 9 years now. Dirk Deimeke (Homepage) am 16.02.2014 12:57
Core Python Packages, by Stefano Rivera
Just before the freeze, pip added support for PEP-668.
This is a scheme devised by Debian with other distributions and the Python
Packaging Authority, to allow distributors to mark Python installations as
being managed by a distribution package manager. When this EXTERNALLY-MANAGED
flag is present, installers like pip will refuse to install packages outside
a virtual environment. This protects users from breaking unrelated software
on their systems, when installing packages with pip or similar tools. Stefano
quickly got this version of pip into the archive, marked Debian s Python
interpreters as EXTERNALLY-MANAGED, and worked with the upstream to add a
mechanism to allow users to override the restriction. Debian bookworm will
likely be the first distro release to implement this change.
The transition from Python 3.10 to 3.11 was one of the last to complete before
the bookworm freeze (as 3.11 only released at the end of October 2022). Stefano
helped port some Python packages to 3.11, in January, and also kicked off the
final transition to remove Python 3.10 support.
Stefano did a big round of bug triage in the cPython interpreter (and related)
packages, applying some provided patches, and fixing some long-standing minor
bugs in the packaging.
To allow Debian packages to more accurately reflect upstream-specified
dependencies that only apply under specific Python interpreter versions, in the
future, Stefano
added more metadata
to the python3 binary package.
Python s unittest runner would successfully exit with 0 passed tests, if it
couldn t find any tests. This means that configuration / layout changes can
cause test failures to go unnoticed, because the tests aren t being run any
more in Debian packages. Stefano
proposed a change to Python
3.12 to change this behavior and treat 0 tests as a kind of failure.
debvm, by Helmut Grohne
With support from Johannes Schauer Marin Rodrigues, and Jochen Sprickerhof,
Helmut Grohne wrote debvm, a tool for
quickly creating and running Debian virtual machine images for various
architectures and Debian and Ubuntu releases. This is meant for development
and testing purposes and has already identified a number of bugs in e.g.
fakechroot (#1029490), Linux
(#1029270), and runit
(#1028181).
Rails 6 and Redmine 5 available in bullseye-backports, by Utkarsh Gupta
Bullseye users can now upgrade to the latest 6.1 branch of Rails, v6.1.7, and
the latest Redmine version, v5.0.4. The Ruby team received numerous requests
to backport the latest version of Rails and Redmine, especially since there was
no redmine shipped in the bullseye release itself. So this is big news for all
users as we ve not only successfully backported both the packages, but also
fixed all the CVEs and RC bugs in the process!
This work was sponsored by Entrouvert.
Patches metadata in the Package Tracker, by Rapha l Hertzog
Building on the great Ultimate Debian Database work of Lucas Nussbaum and on
his suggestion, Rapha l enhanced the
Debian Package Tracker to display action items
when the patches metadata indicate that some patches were not forwarded
upstream, or when the metadata were invalid. One can now also browse the
patches metadata from the Links panel on the right.
Fixed kernel bug that broke debian-installer on computers with Mediatek wifi devices, by Helmut Grohne
As part of our regular work on Kali Linux for OffSec,
they funded Helmut s work to fix the MT7921e driver. When being loaded without
firmware available, it would not register itself, but upon module release it
would unregister itself causing a kernel oops.
This was commonly observed in Kali Linux when reloading the module to add
firmware. Helmut Grohne identified the cause and
sent a patch, a
different variant of which is now
heading into Linux
and available from Kali Linux.
Printing in Debian, by Thorsten Alteholz
There are about 40 packages in Debian that take care of sending output to
printers, scan documents, or even send documents to fax machines. In the light
of the upcoming/already ongoing freeze, these packages had to be updated to
the latest version and bugs had to be fixed. Basically this applies to large
packages like cups, cups-filters, hplip but also the smaller ones that
shouldn t be neglected. All in all Thorsten uploaded 13 packages with new
upstream versions or improved packaging and could resolve 14 bugs. Further
triaging led to 35 bugs that could be closed, either because they were already
fixed and not closed in an earlier upload or they could not be reproduced with
current software versions.
There is also work to do to prepare for the future. Historically, printing on
Linux required finding a PPD file for your printer and finding some software
that is able to render your documents with this PPD. These days, driverless
printing is becoming more common and the use of PPD files has decreased.
In the upcoming version 3.0 of cups, PPD files are no longer supported and so
called printer applications need to be used. In order not to lose the ability
to print documents, this big transition needs to be carefully planned. This
started in the beginning of 2023 and will hopefully be finished with the
release of Debian Trixie. More information can be found in
this Debian Printing Wiki article.
In preparation for this transition Thorsten created three new packages.
Yade update, by Anton Gladky
Last month, Anton updated the yade package to the newest 2023.02a version,
which includes new features.
Yade is a software package for discrete element method (DEM) simulations, which
are widely used in scientific and engineering fields for the simulation of
granular systems. Yade is an open-source project that is being used worldwide
for different tasks, such as geomechanics, civil engineering, mining, and
materials science.
The Yade package in Debian supports different precision levels for its
simulations. This means that researchers and engineers can select the needed
precision level without recompiling the package, saving time and effort.
Miscellaneous contributions
Helmut Grohne continues to improve cross building (mostly Qt) and
architecture bootstrap (mostly loong64 and musl).
The Framework is a 13.5" laptop body with swappable parts, which
makes it somewhat future-proof and certainly easily repairable,
scoring an "exceedingly rare" 10/10 score from ifixit.com.
There are two generations of the laptop's main board (both compatible
with the same body): the Intel 11th and 12th gen chipsets.
I have received my Framework, 12th generation "DIY", device in late
September 2022 and will update this page as I go along in the process
of ordering, burning-in, setting up and using the device over the
years.
Overall, the Framework is a good laptop. I like the keyboard, the
touch pad, the expansion cards. Clearly there's been some good work
done on industrial design, and it's the most repairable laptop I've
had in years. Time will tell, but it looks sturdy enough to survive me
many years as well.
This is also one of the most powerful devices I ever lay my hands
on. I have managed, remotely, more powerful servers, but this is the
fastest computer I have ever owned, and it fits in this tiny case. It
is an amazing machine.
On the downside, there's a bit of proprietary firmware required (WiFi,
Bluetooth, some graphics) and the Framework ships with a proprietary
BIOS, with currently no Coreboot support. Expect to need the
latest kernel, firmware, and hacking around a bunch of things to get
resolution and keybindings working right.
Like others, I have first found significant power management issues,
but many issues can actually be solved with some configuration. Some
of the expansion ports (HDMI, DP, MicroSD, and SSD) use power when
idle, so don't expect week-long suspend, or "full day" battery while
those are plugged in.
Finally, the expansion ports are nice, but there's only four of
them. If you plan to have a two-monitor setup, you're likely going to
need a dock.
Read on for the detailed review. For context, I'm moving from the
Purism Librem 13v4 because it
basically exploded on me. I
had, in the meantime, reverted back to an old ThinkPad X220, so I
sometimes compare the Framework with that venerable laptop as well.
This blog post has been maturing for months now. It started in
September 2022 and I declared it completed in March 2023. It's the
longest single article on this entire website, currently clocking at
about 13,000 words. It will take an average reader a full hour to go
through this thing, so I don't expect anyone to actually do
that. This introduction should be good enough for most people, read
the first section if you intend to actually buy a Framework. Jump
around the table of contents as you see fit for after you did buy the
laptop, as it might include some crucial hints on how to make it work
best for you, especially on (Debian) Linux.
Advice for buyers
Those are things I wish I would have known before buying:
consider buying 4 USB-C expansion cards, or at least a mix of 4
USB-A or USB-C cards, as they use less power than other cards and
you do want to fill those expansion slots otherwise they snag
around and feel insecure
you will likely need a dock or at least a USB hub if you want a
two-monitor setup, otherwise you'll run out of ports
you have to do some serious tuning to get proper (10h+ idle, 10
days suspend) power savings
in particular, beware that the HDMI, DisplayPort and
particularly the SSD and MicroSD cards take a significant amount
power, even when sleeping, up to 2-6W for the latter two
beware that the MicroSD card is what it says: Micro, normal SD
cards won't fit, and while there might be full sized one
eventually, it's currently only at the prototyping stage
Current status
I have the framework! It's setup with a fresh new Debian bookworm
installation. I've ran through a large number of tests and burn in.
I have decided to use the Framework as my daily driver, and had to buy
a USB-C dock to get my two monitors
connected, which was own adventure.
Update: Framework just (2023-03-23) just announced a whole bunch of
new stuff:
The recording is available in this video and it's not your
typical keynote. It starts ~25 minutes late, audio is crap, lightning
and camera are crap, clapping seems to be from whatever staff they
managed to get together in a room, decor is bizarre, colors are
shit. It's amazing.
Specifications
Those are the specifications of the 12th gen, in general terms. Your
build will of course vary according to your needs.
CPU: i5-1240P, i7-1260P, or i7-1280P (Up to 4.4-4.8 GHz, 4+8
cores), Iris Xe graphics
4 x USB-C user-selectable expansion ports, including
USB-C
USB-A
HDMI
DP
Ethernet
MicroSD
250-1000GB SSD
3.5mm combo headphone jack
Kill switches for microphone and camera
Battery: 55Wh
Camera: 1080p 60fps
Biometrics: Fingerprint Reader
Backlit keyboard
Power Adapter: 60W USB-C (or bring your own)
ships with a screwdriver/spludger
1 year warranty
base price: 1000$CAD, but doesn't give you much, typical builds
around 1500-2000$CAD
Actual build
This is the actual build I ordered. Amounts in CAD. (1CAD =
~0.75EUR/USD.)
Base configuration
CPU: Intel Core i5-1240P (AKA Alder Lake P 8 4.4GHz
P-threads, 8 3.2GHz E-threads, 16 total, 28-64W), 1079$
Memory: 16GB (1 x 16GB) DDR4-3200, 104$
Customization
Keyboard: US English, included
Expansion Cards
2 USB-C $24
3 USB-A $36
2 HDMI $50
1 DP $50
1 MicroSD $25
1 Storage 1TB $199
Sub-total: 384$
Accessories
Power Adapter - US/Canada $64.00
Total
Before tax: 1606$
After tax and duties: 1847$
Free shipping
Quick evaluation
This is basically the TL;DR: here, just focusing on broad pros/cons of
the laptop.
Pros
easily repairable (complete with QR codes pointing to repair
guides!), the 11th gen received a 10/10 score from
ifixit.com, which they call "exceedingly rare", the 12th gen
has a similar hardware design and would probably rate similarly
replaceable motherboard!!! can be reused as a NUC-like device, with a
3d-printed case, 12th gen board can be bought standalone and
retrofitted into an 11th gen case
not a passing fad: they made a first laptop with the 11th gen Intel
chipset in 2021, and a second motherboard with the 12th Intel
chipset in 2022
four modular USB-C ports which can fit HDMI, USB-C (pass-through,
can provide power on both sides), USB-A, DisplayPort, MicroSD,
external storage (250GB, 1TB), active modding community
nice power led indicating power level (charging, charged, etc) when
plugged
they used to have some difficulty keeping up with the orders: first
two batches shipped, third batch sold out, fourth batch should have
shipped in October 2021. they generally seem to keep up with
shipping. update (august 2022): they rolled out a second line of
laptops (12th gen), first batch shipped, second batch shipped
late, September 2022 batch was generally on time, see this
spreadsheet for a crowdsourced effort to track those
supply chain issues seem to be under control as of early 2023. I
got the Ethernet expansion card shipped within a week.
compared to my previous laptop (Purism Librem
13v4), it feels strangely
bulkier and heavier; it's actually lighter than the purism (1.3kg
vs 1.4kg) and thinner (15.85mm vs 18mm) but the design of the
Purism laptop (tapered edges) makes it feel thinner
no space for a 2.5" drive
rather bright LED around power button, but can be dimmed in the
BIOS (not low enough to my taste) I got used to it
fan quiet when idle, but can be noisy when running, for example if
you max a CPU for a while
battery described as "mediocre" by Ars Technica (above), confirmed
poor in my tests (see below)
no RJ-45 port, and attempts at designing ones are failing
because the modular plugs are too thin to fit (according to Linux
After Dark), so unlikely to have one in the future
Update: they cracked that nut and ship an 2.5 gbps Ethernet
expansion card with a realtek chipset, without any
firmware blob
a bit pricey for the performance, especially when compared to the
competition (e.g. Dell XPS, Apple M1)
12th gen Intel has glitchy graphics, seems like Intel hasn't fully
landed proper Linux support for that chipset yet
Initial hardware setup
A breeze.
Accessing the board
The internals are accessed through five TorX screws, but there's a nice
screwdriver/spudger that works well enough. The screws actually hold in
place so you can't even lose them.
The first setup is a bit counter-intuitive coming from the Librem
laptop, as I expected the back cover to lift and give me access to the
internals. But instead the screws is release the keyboard and touch
pad assembly, so you actually need to flip the laptop back upright and
lift the assembly off to get access to the internals. Kind of
scary.
I also actually unplugged a connector in lifting the assembly because
I lifted it towards the monitor, while you actually need to lift it
to the right. Thankfully, the connector didn't break, it just
snapped off and I could plug it back in, no harm done.
Once there, everything is well indicated, with QR codes all over the
place supposedly leading to online instructions.
Bad QR codes
Unfortunately, the QR codes I tested (in the expansion card slot, the
memory slot and CPU slots) did not actually work so I wonder how
useful those actually are.
After all, they need to point to something and that means a URL, a
running website that will answer those requests forever. I bet those
will break sooner than later and in fact, as far as I can tell, they
just don't work at all. I prefer the approach taken by the MNT reform
here which designed (with the 100 rabbits folks) an actual paper
handbook (PDF).
The first QR code that's immediately visible from the back of the
laptop, in an expansion cord slot, is a 404. It seems to be some
serial number URL, but I can't actually tell because, well, the page
is a 404.
I was expecting that bar code to lead me to an introduction page,
something like "how to setup your Framework laptop". Support actually
confirmed that it should point a quickstart guide. But in a
bizarre twist, they somehow sent me the URL with the plus (+) signs
escaped, like this:
(They have also "let the team know about this for feedback and help
resolve the problem with the link" which is a support code word for
"ha-ha! nope! not my problem right now!" Trust me, I know, my own
code word is "can you please make a ticket?")
Seating disks and memory
The "DIY" kit doesn't actually have that much of a setup. If you
bought RAM, it's shipped outside the laptop in a little plastic case,
so you just seat it in as usual.
Then you insert your NVMe drive, and, if that's your fancy, you also
install your own mPCI WiFi card. If you ordered one (which was my
case), it's pre-installed.
Closing the laptop is also kind of amazing, because the keyboard
assembly snaps into place with magnets. I have actually used the
laptop with the keyboard unscrewed as I was putting the drives in and
out, and it actually works fine (and will probably void your warranty,
so don't do that). (But you can.) (But don't, really.)
Hardware review
Keyboard and touch pad
The keyboard feels nice, for a laptop. I'm used to mechanical keyboard
and I'm rather violent with those poor things. Yet the key travel is
nice and it's clickety enough that I don't feel too disoriented.
At first, I felt the keyboard as being more laggy than my normal
workstation setup, but it turned out this was a graphics driver
issues. After enabling a composition manager, everything feels snappy.
The touch pad feels good. The double-finger scroll works well enough,
and I don't have to wonder too much where the middle button is, it
just works.
Taps don't work, out of the box: that needs to be enabled in Xorg,
with something like this:
But be aware that once you enable that tapping, you'll need to deal
with palm detection... So I have not actually enabled this in the end.
Power button
The power button is a little dangerous. It's quite easy to hit, as
it's right next to one expansion card where you are likely to plug in
a cable power. And because the expansion cards are kind of hard to
remove, you might squeeze the laptop (and the power key) when trying
to remove the expansion card next to the power button.
So obviously, don't do that. But that's not very helpful.
An alternative is to make the power button do something else. With
systemd-managed systems, it's actually quite easy. Add a
HandlePowerKey stanza to (say)
/etc/systemd/logind.conf.d/power-suspends.conf:
And the power button will suspend! Long-press to power off doesn't
actually work as the laptop immediately suspends...
Note that there's probably half a dozen other ways of doing this,
see this, this, or that.
Special keybindings
There is a series of "hidden" (as in: not labeled on the key)
keybindings related to the fn keybinding that I actually
find quite useful.
Key
Equivalent
Effect
Command
p
Pause
lock screen
xset s activate
b
Break
?
?
k
ScrLk
switch keyboard layout
N/A
It looks like those are defined in the microcontroller so it
would be possible to add some. For example, the SysRq key
is almost bound to fns in there.
Note that most other shortcuts like this are clearly documented
(volume, brightness, etc). One key that's less obvious is
F12 that only has the Framework logo on it. That actually
calls the keysym XF86AudioMedia which, interestingly, does
absolutely nothing here. By default, on Windows, it opens your
browser to the Framework website and, on Linux, your "default
media player".
The keyboard backlight can be cycled with fn-space. The
dimmer version is dim enough, and the keybinding is easy to find in
the dark.
A skinny elephant would be performed with altPrtScr (above F11) KEY, so for
example altfnF11b
should do a hard reset. This comment suggests you need to hold
the fnonly if "function lock" is on, but that's
actually the opposite of my experience.
Out of the box, some of the fn keys don't work. Mute,
volume up/down, brightness, monitor changes, and the airplane mode key
all do basically nothing. They don't send proper keysyms to Xorg at
all.
This is a known problem and it's related to the fact that the
laptop has light sensors to adjust the brightness
automatically. Somehow some of those keys (e.g. the brightness
controls) are supposed to show up as a different input device, but
don't seem to work correctly. It seems like the solution is for the
Framework team to write a driver specifically for this, but so far no
progress since July 2022.
In the meantime, the fancy functionality can be supposedly disabled with:
echo 'blacklist hid_sensor_hub' sudo tee /etc/modprobe.d/framework-als-blacklist.conf
Kill switches
The Framework has two "kill switches": one for the camera and the
other for the microphone. The camera one actually disconnects the USB
device when turned off, and the mic one seems to cut the circuit. It
doesn't show up as muted, it just stops feeding the sound.
Both kill switches are around the main camera, on top of the monitor,
and quite discreet. Then turn "red" when enabled (i.e. "red" means
"turned off").
Monitor
The monitor looks pretty good to my untrained eyes. I have yet to do
photography work on it, but some photos I looked at look sharp and the
colors are bright and lively. The blacks are dark and the screen is
bright.
I have yet to use it in full sunlight.
The dimmed light is very dim, which I like.
Screen backlight
I bind brightness keys to xbacklight in i3, but out of the box I get
this error:
sep 29 22:09:14 angela i3[5661]: No outputs have backlight property
It just requires this blob in /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/backlight.conf:
This way I can control the actual backlight power with the brightness
keys, and they do significantly reduce power usage.
Multiple monitor support
I have been able to hook up my two old monitors to the HDMI and
DisplayPort expansion cards on the laptop. The lid closes without
suspending the machine, and everything works great.
I actually run out of ports, even with a 4-port USB-A hub, which gives
me a total of 7 ports:
power (USB-C)
monitor 1 (DisplayPort)
monitor 2 (HDMI)
USB-A hub, which adds:
keyboard (USB-A)
mouse (USB-A)
Yubikey
external sound card
Now the latter, I might be able to get rid of if I switch to a
combo-jack headset, which I do have (and still need to test).
But still, this is a problem. I'll probably need a powered USB-C dock
and better monitors, possibly with some Thunderbolt chaining, to
save yet more ports.
But that means more money into this setup, argh. And figuring out my
monitor situation is the kind of thing I'm not that big
of a fan of. And neither is shopping for USB-C (or is it Thunderbolt?)
hubs.
My normal autorandr setup doesn't work: I have tried saving a
profile and it doesn't get autodetected, so I also first need to do:
autorandr -l framework-external-dual-lg-acer
The magic:
autorandr -l horizontal
... also works well.
The worst problem with those monitors right now is that they have a
radically smaller resolution than the main screen on the laptop, which
means I need to reset the font scaling to normal every time I switch
back and forth between those monitors and the laptop, which means I
actually need to do this:
Expansion ports
I ordered a total of 10 expansion ports.
I did manage to initialize the 1TB drive as an encrypted storage,
mostly to keep photos as this is something that takes a massive amount
of space (500GB and counting) and that I (unfortunately) don't work on
very often (but still carry around).
The expansion ports are fancy and nice, but not actually that
convenient. They're a bit hard to take out: you really need to crimp
your fingernails on there and pull hard to take them out. There's a
little button next to them to release, I think, but at first it feels
a little scary to pull those pucks out of there. You get used to it
though, and it's one of those things you can do without looking
eventually.
There's only four expansion ports. Once you have two monitors, the
drive, and power plugged in, bam, you're out of ports; there's nowhere
to plug my Yubikey. So if this is going to be my daily driver, with a
dual monitor setup, I will need a dock, which means more crap firmware
and uncertainty, which isn't great. There are actually plans to make a
dual-USB card, but that is blocked on designing an actual
board for this.
I can't wait to see more expansion ports produced. There's a ethernet
expansion card which quickly went out of stock basically the day
it was announced, but was eventually restocked.
I would like to see a proper SD-card reader. There's a MicroSD card
reader, but that obviously doesn't work for normal SD cards, which
would be more broadly compatible anyways (because you can have a
MicroSD to SD card adapter, but I have never heard of the
reverse). Someone actually found a SD card reader that fits and
then someone else managed to cram it in a 3D printed case, which
is kind of amazing.
Still, I really like that idea that I can carry all those little
adapters in a pouch when I travel and can basically do anything I
want. It does mean I need to shuffle through them to find the right
one which is a little annoying. I have an elastic band to keep them
lined up so that all the ports show the same side, to make it easier
to find the right one. But that quickly gets undone and instead I have
a pouch full of expansion cards.
Another awesome thing with the expansion cards is that they don't just
work on the laptop: anything that takes USB-C can take those cards,
which means you can use it to connect an SD card to your phone, for
backups, for example. Heck, you could even connect an external display
to your phone that way, assuming that's supported by your phone of
course (and it probably isn't).
The expansion ports do take up some power, even when idle. See the
power management section below, and particularly the power usage
tests for details.
USB-C charging
One thing that is really a game changer for me is USB-C charging. It's
hard to overstate how convenient this is. I often have a USB-C cable
lying around to charge my phone, and I can just grab that thing and
pop it in my laptop. And while it will obviously not charge as fast as
the provided charger, it will stop draining the battery at least.
(As I wrote this, I had the laptop plugged in the Samsung charger that
came with a phone, and it was telling me it would take 6 hours to
charge the remaining 15%. With the provided charger, that flew down to
15 minutes. Similarly, I can power the laptop from the power grommet
on my desk, reducing clutter as I have that single wire out there
instead of the bulky power adapter.)
I also really like the idea that I can charge my laptop with a power
bank or, heck, with my phone, if push comes to shove. (And
vice-versa!)
This is awesome. And it works from any of the expansion ports, of
course. There's a little led next to the expansion ports as well,
which indicate the charge status:
red/amber: charging
white: charged
off: unplugged
I couldn't find documentation about this, but the forum
answered.
This is something of a recurring theme with the Framework. While it
has a good knowledge base and repair/setup guides (and the
forum is awesome) but it doesn't have a good "owner manual" that
shows you the different parts of the laptop and what they do. Again,
something the MNT reform did well.
Another thing that people are asking about is an external sleep
indicator: because the power LED is on the main keyboard assembly,
you don't actually see whether the device is active or not when the
lid is closed.
Finally, I wondered what happens when you plug in multiple power
sources and it turns out the charge controller is actually pretty
smart: it will pick the best power source and use it. The only
downside is it can't use multiple power sources, but that seems like
a bit much to ask.
Multimedia and other devices
Those things also work:
webcam: splendid, best webcam I've ever had (but my standards are
really low)
onboard mic: works well, good gain (maybe a bit much)
onboard speakers: sound okay, a little metal-ish, loud enough to be
annoying, see this thread for benchmarks, apparently pretty
good speakers
Combo jack mic tests
The Framework laptop ships with a combo jack on the left side, which
allows you to plug in a CTIA (source) headset. In human
terms, it's a device that has both a stereo output and a mono input,
typically a headset or ear buds with a microphone somewhere.
It works, which is better than the Purism (which only had audio
out), but is on par for the course for that kind of onboard
hardware. Because of electrical interference, such sound cards very
often get lots of noise from the board.
With a Jabra Evolve 40, the built-in USB sound card generates
basically zero noise on silence (invisible down to -60dB in Audacity)
while plugging it in directly generates a solid -30dB hiss. There is
a noise-reduction system in that sound card, but the difference is
still quite striking.
On a comparable setup (curie, a 2017 Intel NUC), there is
also a his with the Jabra headset, but it's quieter, more in the order
of -40/-50 dB, a noticeable difference. Interestingly, testing with my
Mee Audio Pro M6 earbuds leads to a little more hiss on curie, more on
the -35/-40 dB range, close to the Framework.
Also note that another sound card, the Antlion USB adapter that comes
with the ModMic 4, also gives me pretty close to silence on a quiet
recording, picking up less than -50dB of background noise. It's
actually probably picking up the fans in the office, which do make
audible noises.
In other words, the hiss of the sound card built in the Framework
laptop is so loud that it makes more noise than the quiet fans in the
office. Or, another way to put it is that two USB sound cards (the
Jabra and the Antlion) are able to pick up ambient noise in my office
but not the Framework laptop.
See also my audio page.
Performance tests
Compiling Linux 5.19.11
On a single core, compiling the Debian version of the Linux kernel
takes around 100 minutes:
I had to plug the normal power supply after a few minutes because
battery would actually run out using my desk's power grommet (34
watts).
During compilation, fans were spinning really hard, quite noisy, but
not painfully so.
The laptop was sucking 55 watts of power, steadily:
Time User Nice Sys Idle IO Run Ctxt/s IRQ/s Fork Exec Exit Watts
-------- ----- ----- ----- ----- ----- ---- ------ ------ ---- ---- ---- ------
Average 87.9 0.0 10.7 1.4 0.1 17.8 6583.6 5054.3 233.0 223.9 233.1 55.96
GeoMean 87.9 0.0 10.6 1.2 0.0 17.6 6427.8 5048.1 227.6 218.7 227.7 55.96
StdDev 1.4 0.0 1.2 0.6 0.2 3.0 1436.8 255.5 50.0 47.5 49.7 0.20
-------- ----- ----- ----- ----- ----- ---- ------ ------ ---- ---- ---- ------
Minimum 85.0 0.0 7.8 0.5 0.0 13.0 3594.0 4638.0 117.0 111.0 120.0 55.52
Maximum 90.8 0.0 12.9 3.5 0.8 38.0 10174.0 5901.0 374.0 362.0 375.0 56.41
-------- ----- ----- ----- ----- ----- ---- ------ ------ ---- ---- ---- ------
Summary:
CPU: 55.96 Watts on average with standard deviation 0.20
Note: power read from RAPL domains: package-0, uncore, package-0, core, psys.
These readings do not cover all the hardware in this device.
memtest86+
I ran Memtest86+ v6.00b3. It shows something like this:
Software setup
Once I had everything in the hardware setup, I figured, voil , I'm
done, I'm just going to boot this beautiful machine and I can get back
to work.
I don't understand why I am so na ve some times. It's mind boggling.
Obviously, it didn't happen that way at all, and I spent the best of
the three following days tinkering with the laptop.
Secure boot and EFI
First, I couldn't boot off of the NVMe drive I transferred from the
previous laptop (the Purism) and the
BIOS was not very helpful: it was just complaining about not finding
any boot device, without dropping me in the real BIOS.
At first, I thought it was a problem with my NVMe drive, because it's
not listed in the compatible SSD drives from upstream. But I
figured out how to enter BIOS (press F2 manically, of
course), which showed the NVMe drive was actually detected. It just
didn't boot, because it was an old (2010!!) Debian install without
EFI.
So from there, I disabled secure boot, and booted a grml image to
try to recover. And by "boot" I mean, I managed to get to the grml
boot loader which promptly failed to load its own root file system
somehow. I still have to investigate exactly what happened there, but
it failed some time after the initrd load with:
Unable to find medium containing a live file system
This, it turns out, was fixed in Debian lately, so a daily GRML
build will not have this problems. The upcoming 2022 release
(likely 2022.10 or 2022.11) will also get the fix.
I did manage to boot the development version of the Debian
installer which was a surprisingly good experience: it mounted the
encrypted drives and did everything pretty smoothly. It even offered
me to reinstall the boot loader, but that ultimately (and correctly, as
it turns out) failed because I didn't have a /boot/efi partition.
At this point, I realized there was no easy way out of this, and I
just proceeded to completely reinstall Debian. I had a spare NVMe
drive lying around (backups FTW!) so I just swapped that in, rebooted
in the Debian installer, and did a clean install. I wanted to switch
to bookworm anyways, so I guess that's done too.
Storage limitations
Another thing that happened during setup is that I tried to copy over
the internal 2.5" SSD drive from the Purism to the Framework 1TB
expansion card. There's no 2.5" slot in the new laptop, so that's
pretty much the only option for storage expansion.
I was tired and did something wrong. I ended up wiping the partition
table on the original 2.5" drive.
Oops.
It might be recoverable, but just restoring the partition table
didn't work either, so I'm not sure how I recover the data
there. Normally, everything on my laptops and workstations is designed
to be disposable, so that wasn't that big of a problem. I did manage
to recover most of the data thanks to git-annexreinit, but
that was a little hairy.
Bootstrapping Puppet
Once I had some networking, I had to install all the packages I
needed. The time I spent setting up my workstations with Puppet has
finally paid off. What I actually did was to restore two critical
directories:
/etc/ssh
/var/lib/puppet
So that I would keep the previous machine's identity. That way I could
contact the Puppet server and install whatever was missing. I used my
Puppet optimization
trick to do a batch
install and then I had a good base setup, although not exactly as it
was before. 1700 packages were installed manually on angela before
the reinstall, and not in Puppet.
I did not inspect each one individually, but I did go through /etc
and copied over more SSH keys, for backups and SMTP over SSH.
LVFS support
It looks like there's support for the (de-facto) standard LVFS
firmware update system. At least I was able to update the UEFI
firmware with a simple:
Those instructions come from the beta forum post. I performed the
BIOS update on 2023-01-16T16:00-0500.
Resolution tweaks
The Framework laptop resolution (2256px X 1504px) is big enough to
give you a pretty small font size, so welcome to the marvelous world
of "scaling".
The Debian wiki page has a few tricks for this.
Console
This will make the console and grub fonts more readable:
Xorg
Adding this to your .Xresources will make everything look much bigger:
! 1.5*96
Xft.dpi: 144
Apparently, some of this can also help:
! These might also be useful depending on your monitor and personal preference:
Xft.autohint: 0
Xft.lcdfilter: lcddefault
Xft.hintstyle: hintfull
Xft.hinting: 1
Xft.antialias: 1
Xft.rgba: rgb
It my experience it also makes things look a little fuzzier, which is
frustrating because you have this awesome monitor but everything looks
out of focus. Just bumping Xft.dpi by a 1.5 factor looks good to me.
The Debian Wiki has a page on HiDPI, but it's not as good as the
Arch Wiki, where the above blurb comes from. I am not using the
latter because I suspect it's causing some of the "fuzziness".
TODO: find the equivalent of this GNOME hack in i3? (gsettings set
org.gnome.mutter experimental-features
"['scale-monitor-framebuffer']"), taken from this Framework
guide
Issues
BIOS configuration
The Framework BIOS has some minor issues. One issue I personally
encountered is that I had disabled Quick boot and Quiet boot in
the BIOS to diagnose the above boot issues. This, in turn, triggers a
bug where the BIOS boot manager (F12) would just hang
completely. It would also fail to boot from an external USB drive.
The current fix (as of BIOS 3.03) is to re-enable both Quick
boot and Quiet boot. Presumably this is something that will get
fixed in a future BIOS update.
Note that the following keybindings are active in the BIOS POST
check:
Key
Meaning
F2
Enter BIOS setup menu
F12
Enter BIOS boot manager
Delete
Enter BIOS setup menu
WiFi compatibility issues
I couldn't make WiFi work at first. Obviously, the default Debian
installer doesn't ship with proprietary firmware (although that might
change soon) so the WiFi card didn't work out of the box. But even
after copying the firmware through a USB stick, I couldn't quite
manage to find the right combination of ip/iw/wpa-supplicant
(yes, after repeatedly copying a bunch more packages over to get
those bootstrapped). (Next time I should probably try something like
this post.)
Thankfully, I had a little USB-C dongle with a RJ-45 jack lying
around. That also required a firmware blob, but it was a single
package to copy over, and with that loaded, I had network.
Eventually, I did managed to make WiFi work; the problem was more on
the side of "I forgot how to configure a WPA network by hand from the
commandline" than anything else. NetworkManager worked fine and got
WiFi working correctly.
Note that this is with Debian bookworm, which has the 5.19 Linux
kernel, and with the firmware-nonfree (firmware-iwlwifi,
specifically) package.
Battery life
I was having between about 7 hours of battery on the Purism Librem
13v4, and that's after a year or two of battery life. Now, I still
have about 7 hours of battery life, which is nicer than my old
ThinkPad X220 (20 minutes!) but really, it's not that good for a new
generation laptop. The 12th generation Intel chipset probably improved
things compared to the previous one Framework laptop, but I don't have
a 11th gen Framework to compare with).
(Note that those are estimates from my status bar, not wall clock
measurements. They should still be comparable between the Purism and
Framework, that said.)
The battery life doesn't seem up to, say, Dell XPS 13, ThinkPad X1, and
of course not the Apple M1, where I would expect 10+ hours of battery
life out of the box.
That said, I do get those kind estimates when the machine is fully
charged and idle. In fact, when everything is quiet and nothing is
plugged in, I get dozens of hours of battery life estimated (I've
seen 25h!). So power usage fluctuates quite a bit depending on usage,
which I guess is expected.
Concretely, so far, light web browsing, reading emails and writing
notes in Emacs (e.g. this file) takes about 8W of power:
Expansion cards matter a lot in the battery life (see below for a
thorough discussion), my normal setup is 2xUSB-C and 1xUSB-A (yes,
with an empty slot, and yes, to save power).
Interestingly, playing a video in a (720p) window in a window takes up
more power (10.5W) than in full screen (9.5W) but I blame that on my
desktop setup (i3 + compton)... Not sure if mpv hits the
VA-API, maybe not in windowed mode. Similar results with 1080p,
interestingly, except the window struggles to keep up altogether. Full
screen playback takes a relatively comfortable 9.5W, which means a
solid 5h+ of playback, which is fine by me.
Fooling around the web, small edits, youtube-dl, and I'm at around 80%
battery after about an hour, with an estimated 5h left, which is a
little disappointing. I had a 7h remaining estimate before I started
goofing around Discourse, so I suspect the website is a pretty
big battery drain, actually. I see about 10-12 W, while I was probably at
half that (6-8W) just playing music with mpv in the background...
In other words, it looks like editing posts in Discourse with Firefox
takes a solid 4-6W of power. Amazing and gross.
(When writing about abusive power usage generates more power usage, is
that an heisenbug? Or schr dinbug?)
Power management
Compared to the Purism Librem 13v4, the ongoing power usage seems to
be slightly better. An anecdotal metric is that the Purism would take
800mA idle, while the more powerful Framework manages a little over
500mA as I'm typing this, fluctuating between 450 and 600mA. That is
without any active expansion card, except the storage. Those numbers
come from the output of tlp-stat -b and, unfortunately, the "ampere"
unit makes it quite hard to compare those, because voltage is not
necessarily the same between the two platforms.
TODO: i915 driver has a lot of parameters, including some about
power saving, see, again, the arch wiki, and particularly
enable_fbc=1
TL:DR; power management on the laptop is an issue, but there's various
tweaks you can make to improve it. Try:
powertop --auto-tune
apt install tlp && systemctl enable tlp
nvme.noacpi=1 mem_sleep_default=deep on the kernel command line
may help with standby power usage
keep only USB-C expansion cards plugged in, all others suck power
even when idle
consider upgrading the BIOS to latest beta (3.06 at the time of
writing), unverified power savings
latest Linux kernels (6.2) promise power savings as well
(unverified)
Update: also try to follow the official optimization guide. It
was made for Ubuntu but will probably also work for your distribution
of choice with a few tweaks. They recommend using tlpui but it's
not packaged in Debian. There is, however, a Flatpak
release. In my case, it resulted in the following diff to
tlp.conf: tlp.patch.
Background on CPU architecture
There were power problems in the 11th gen Framework laptop, according
to this report from Linux After Dark, so the issues with power
management on the Framework are not new.
The 12th generation Intel CPU (AKA "Alder Lake") is a big-little
architecture with "power-saving" and "performance" cores. There
used to be performance problems introduced by the scheduler in Linux
5.16 but those were eventually fixed in 5.18, which uses
Intel's hardware as an "intelligent, low-latency hardware-assisted
scheduler". According to Phoronix, the 5.19 release improved the
power saving, at the cost of some penalty cost. There were also patch
series to make the scheduler configurable, but it doesn't look
those have been merged as of 5.19. There was also a session about this
at the 2022 Linux Plumbers, but they stopped short of
talking more about the specific problems Linux is facing in Alder
lake:
Specifically, the kernel's energy-aware scheduling heuristics don't
work well on those CPUs. A number of features present there
complicate the energy picture; these include SMT, Intel's "turbo
boost" mode, and the CPU's internal power-management mechanisms. For
many workloads, running on an ostensibly more power-hungry Pcore can
be more efficient than using an Ecore. Time for discussion of the
problem was lacking, though, and the session came to a close.
All this to say that the 12gen Intel line shipped with this Framework
series should have better power management thanks to its
power-saving cores. And Linux has had the scheduler changes to make
use of this (but maybe is still having trouble). In any case, this
might not be the source of power management problems on my laptop,
quite the opposite.
Also note that the firmware updates for various chipsets are
supposed to improve things eventually.
On the other hand, The Verge simply declared the whole P-series
a mistake...
Attempts at improving power usage
I did try to follow some of the tips in this forum post. The
tricks powertop --auto-tune and tlp's
PCIE_ASPM_ON_BAT=powersupersave basically did nothing: I was stuck
at 10W power usage in powertop (600+mA in tlp-stat).
Apparently, I should be able to reach the C8 CPU power state (or
even C9, C10) in powertop, but I seem to be stock at
C7. (Although I'm not sure how to read that tab in powertop: in the
Core(HW) column there's only C3/C6/C7 states, and most cores are 85%
in C7 or maybe C6. But the next column over does show many CPUs in
C10 states...
As it turns out, the graphics card actually takes up a good chunk of
power unless proper power management is enabled (see below). After
tweaking this, I did manage to get down to around 7W power usage in
powertop.
Expansion cards actually do take up power, and so does the screen,
obviously. The fully-lit screen takes a solid 2-3W of power compared
to the fully dimmed screen. When removing all expansion cards and
making the laptop idle, I can spin it down to 4 watts power usage at
the moment, and an amazing 2 watts when the screen turned off.
Caveats
Abusive (10W+) power usage that I initially found could be a problem
with my desktop configuration: I have this silly status bar that
updates every second and probably causes redraws... The CPU certainly
doesn't seem to spin down below 1GHz. Also note that this is with an
actual desktop running with everything: it could very well be that
some things (I'm looking at you Signal Desktop) take up unreasonable
amount of power on their own (hello, 1W/electron, sheesh). Syncthing
and containerd (Docker!) also seem to take a good 500mW just sitting
there.
Beyond my desktop configuration, this could, of course, be a
Debian-specific problem; your favorite distribution might be better at
power management.
Idle power usage tests
Some expansion cards waste energy, even when unused. Here is a summary
of the findings from the powerstat page. I also include other
devices tested in this page for completeness:
Device
Minimum
Average
Max
Stdev
Note
Screen, 100%
2.4W
2.6W
2.8W
N/A
Screen, 1%
30mW
140mW
250mW
N/A
Backlight 1
290mW
?
?
?
fairly small, all things considered
Backlight 2
890mW
1.2W
3W?
460mW?
geometric progression
Backlight 3
1.69W
1.5W
1.8W?
390mW?
significant power use
Radios
100mW
250mW
N/A
N/A
USB-C
N/A
N/A
N/A
N/A
negligible power drain
USB-A
10mW
10mW
?
10mW
almost negligible
DisplayPort
300mW
390mW
600mW
N/A
not passive
HDMI
380mW
440mW
1W?
20mW
not passive
1TB SSD
1.65W
1.79W
2W
12mW
significant, probably higher when busy
MicroSD
1.6W
3W
6W
1.93W
highest power usage, possibly even higher when busy
Ethernet
1.69W
1.64W
1.76W
N/A
comparable to the SSD card
So it looks like all expansion cards but the USB-C ones are active,
i.e. they draw power with idle. The USB-A cards are the least concern,
sucking out 10mW, pretty much within the margin of error. But both the
DisplayPort and HDMI do take a few hundred miliwatts. It looks like
USB-A connectors have this fundamental flaw that they necessarily draw
some powers because they lack the power negotiation features of
USB-C. At least according to this post:
It seems the USB A must have power going to it all the time, that
the old USB 2 and 3 protocols, the USB C only provides power when
there is a connection. Old versus new.
Apparently, this is a problem specific to the USB-C to USB-A
adapter that ships with the Framework. Some people have actually
changed their orders to all USB-C because of this problem, but I'm
not sure the problem is as serious as claimed in the forums. I
couldn't reproduce the "one watt" power drains suggested elsewhere,
at least not repeatedly. (A previous version of this post did show
such a power drain, but it was in a less controlled test
environment than the series of more rigorous tests above.)
The worst offenders are the storage cards: the SSD drive takes at
least one watt of power and the MicroSD card seems to want to take all
the way up to 6 watts of power, both just sitting there doing
nothing. This confirms claims of 1.4W for the SSD (but not
5W) power usage found elsewhere. The former post has
instructions on how to disable the card in software. The MicroSD card
has been reported as using 2 watts, but I've seen it as high as 6
watts, which is pretty damning.
The Framework team has a beta update for the DisplayPort adapter
but currently only for Windows (LVFS technically possible, "under
investigation"). A USB-A firmware update is alsounder
investigation. It is therefore likely at least some of those power
management issues will eventually be fixed.
Note that the upcoming Ethernet card has a reported 2-8W power usage,
depending on traffic. I did my own power usage tests in
powerstat-wayland and they seem lower than 2W.
The upcoming 6.2 Linux kernel might also improve battery usage when
idle, see this Phoronix article for details, likely in early
2023.
Idle power usage tests under Wayland
Update: I redid those tests under Wayland, see powerstat-wayland
for details. The TL;DR: is that power consumption is either smaller or
similar.
Idle power usage tests, 3.06 beta BIOS
I redid the idle tests after the 3.06 beta BIOS update and ended
up with this results:
Device
Minimum
Average
Max
Stdev
Note
Baseline
1.96W
2.01W
2.11W
30mW
1 USB-C, screen off, backlight off, no radios
2 USB-C
1.95W
2.16W
3.69W
430mW
USB-C confirmed as mostly passive...
3 USB-C
1.95W
2.16W
3.69W
430mW
... although with extra stdev
1TB SSD
3.72W
3.85W
4.62W
200mW
unchanged from before upgrade
1 USB-A
1.97W
2.18W
4.02W
530mW
unchanged
2 USB-A
1.97W
2.00W
2.08W
30mW
unchanged
3 USB-A
1.94W
1.99W
2.03W
20mW
unchanged
MicroSD w/o card
3.54W
3.58W
3.71W
40mW
significant improvement! 2-3W power saving!
MicroSD w/ card
3.53W
3.72W
5.23W
370mW
new measurement! increased deviation
DisplayPort
2.28W
2.31W
2.37W
20mW
unchanged
1 HDMI
2.43W
2.69W
4.53W
460mW
unchanged
2 HDMI
2.53W
2.59W
2.67W
30mW
unchanged
External USB
3.85W
3.89W
3.94W
30mW
new result
Ethernet
3.60W
3.70W
4.91W
230mW
unchanged
Note that the table summary is different than the previous table: here
we show the absolute numbers while the previous table was doing a
confusing attempt at showing relative (to the baseline) numbers.
Conclusion: the 3.06 BIOS update did not significantly change idle
power usage stats except for the MicroSD card which has
significantly improved.
The new "external USB" test is also interesting: it shows how the
provided 1TB SSD card performs (admirably) compared to existing
devices. The other new result is the MicroSD card with a card which,
interestingly, uses less power than the 1TB SSD drive.
That's 8mAh per 10 minutes (and 2 seconds), or 48mA, or, with this
battery, about 127 hours or roughly 5 days of standby. Not bad!
In comparison, here is my really old x220, before:
sep 29 22:13:54 emma systemd-sleep[176315]: /sys/class/power_supply/BAT0/energy_now = 5070 [mWh]
... after:
sep 29 22:23:54 emma systemd-sleep[176486]: /sys/class/power_supply/BAT0/energy_now = 4980 [mWh]
... which is 90 mwH in 10 minutes, or a whopping 540mA, which was
possibly okay when this battery was new (62000 mAh, so about 100
hours, or about 5 days), but this battery is almost dead and has
only 5210 mAh when full, so only 10 hours standby.
And here is the Framework performing a similar test, before:
... which is 49mAh in a little over 10 minutes (and 4 seconds), or
292mA, much more than the Purism, but half of the X220. At this rate,
the battery would last on standby only 12 hours!! That is pretty
bad.
Note that this was done with the following expansion cards:
2 USB-C
1 1TB SSD drive
1 USB-A with a hub connected to it, with keyboard and LAN
Preliminary tests without the hub (over one minute) show that it
doesn't significantly affect this power consumption (300mA).
This guide also suggests booting with nvme.noacpi=1 but this
still gives me about 5mAh/min (or 300mA).
Adding mem_sleep_default=deep to the kernel command line does make a
difference. Before:
... which is 2mAh in 74 seconds, which is 97mA, brings us to a more
reasonable 36 hours, or a day and a half. It's still above the x220
power usage, and more than an order of magnitude more than the Purism
laptop. It's also far from the 0.4% promised by upstream, which
would be 14mA for the 3500mAh battery.
It should also be noted that this "deep" sleep mode is a little more
disruptive than regular sleep. As you can see by the timing, it took
more than 10 seconds for the laptop to resume, which feels a little
alarming as your banging the keyboard to bring it back to life.
You can confirm the current sleep mode with:
# cat /sys/power/mem_sleep
s2idle [deep]
In the above, deep is selected. You can change it on the fly with:
... better! 6 mAh in about 6 minutes, works out to 63.5mA, so more
than two days standby.
A longer test:
oct 01 09:22:56 angela systemd-sleep[62978]: /sys/class/power_supply/BAT1/charge_now = 3327 [mAh]
oct 01 12:47:35 angela systemd-sleep[63219]: /sys/class/power_supply/BAT1/charge_now = 3147 [mAh]
That's 180mAh in about 3.5h, 52mA! Now at 66h, or almost 3 days.
I wasn't sure why I was seeing such fluctuations in those tests, but
as it turns out, expansion card power tests show that they do
significantly affect power usage, especially the SSD drive, which can
take up to two full watts of power even when idle. I didn't control
for expansion cards in the above tests running them with whatever
card I had plugged in without paying attention so it's likely the
cause of the high power usage and fluctuations.
It might be possible to work around this problem by disabling USB
devices before suspend. TODO. See also this post.
In the meantime, I have been able to get much better suspend
performance by unplugging all modules. Then I get this result:
oct 04 11:15:38 angela systemd-sleep[257571]: /sys/class/power_supply/BAT1/charge_now = 3203 [mAh]
oct 04 15:09:32 angela systemd-sleep[257866]: /sys/class/power_supply/BAT1/charge_now = 3145 [mAh]
Which is 14.8mA! Almost exactly the number promised by Framework! With
a full battery, that means a 10 days suspend time. This is actually
pretty good, and far beyond what I was expecting when starting down
this journey.
So, once the expansion cards are unplugged, suspend power usage is
actually quite reasonable. More detailed standby tests are available
in the standby-tests page, with a summary below.
There is also some hope that the Chromebook edition
specifically designed with a specification of 14 days standby
time could bring some firmware improvements back down to the
normal line. Some of those issues were reported upstream in April
2022, but there doesn't seem to have been any progress there
since.
TODO: one final solution here is suspend-then-hibernate, which
Windows uses for this
TODO: consider implementing the S0ix sleep states , see also troubleshooting
TODO: consider https://github.com/intel/pm-graph
Standby expansion cards test results
This table is a summary of the more extensive standby-tests I have performed:
Device
Wattage
Amperage
Days
Note
baseline
0.25W
16mA
9
sleep=deep nvme.noacpi=1
s2idle
0.29W
18.9mA
~7
sleep=s2idle nvme.noacpi=1
normal nvme
0.31W
20mA
~7
sleep=s2idle without nvme.noacpi=1
1 USB-C
0.23W
15mA
~10
2 USB-C
0.23W
14.9mA
same as above
1 USB-A
0.75W
48.7mA
3
+500mW (!!) for the first USB-A card!
2 USB-A
1.11W
72mA
2
+360mW
3 USB-A
1.48W
96mA
<2
+370mW
1TB SSD
0.49W
32mA
<5
+260mW
MicroSD
0.52W
34mA
~4
+290mW
DisplayPort
0.85W
55mA
<3
+620mW (!!)
1 HDMI
0.58W
38mA
~4
+250mW
2 HDMI
0.65W
42mA
<4
+70mW
Conclusions:
USB-C cards take no extra power on suspend, possibly less
than empty slots, more testing required
USB-A cards take a lot more power on suspend
(300-500mW) than on regular idle (~10mW, almost negligible)
1TB SSD and MicroSD cards seem to take a reasonable
amount of power (260-290mW), compared to their runtime
equivalents (1-6W!)
DisplayPort takes a surprising lot of power (620mW), almost
double its average runtime usage (390mW)
HDMI cards take, surprisingly, less power (250mW) in
standby than the DP card (620mW)
and oddly, a second card adds less power usage (70mW?!) than the
first, maybe a circuit is used by both?
Standby expansion cards test results, 3.06 beta BIOS
Framework recently (2022-11-07) announced that they will publish
a firmware upgrade to address some of the USB-C issues, including
power management. This could positively affect the above result,
improving both standby and runtime power usage.
The update came out in December 2022 and I redid my analysis with
the following results:
Device
Wattage
Amperage
Days
Note
baseline
0.25W
16mA
9
no cards, same as before upgrade
1 USB-C
0.25W
16mA
9
same as before
2 USB-C
0.25W
16mA
9
same
1 USB-A
0.80W
62mA
3
+550mW!! worse than before
2 USB-A
1.12W
73mA
<2
+320mW, on top of the above, bad!
Ethernet
0.62W
40mA
3-4
new result, decent
1TB SSD
0.52W
34mA
4
a bit worse than before (+2mA)
MicroSD
0.51W
22mA
4
same
DisplayPort
0.52W
34mA
4+
upgrade improved by 300mW
1 HDMI
?
38mA
?
same
2 HDMI
?
45mA
?
a bit worse than before (+3mA)
Normal
1.08W
70mA
~2
Ethernet, 2 USB-C, USB-A
Full results in standby-tests-306. The big takeaway for me is that
the update did not improve power usage on the USB-A ports which is a
big problem for my use case. There is a notable improvement on the
DisplayPort power consumption which brings it more in line with the
HDMI connector, but it still doesn't properly turn off on suspend
either.
Even worse, the USB-A ports now sometimes fails to resume after
suspend, which is pretty annoying. This is a known problem
that will hopefully get fixed in the final release.
I looked at building this myself but failed to run it. I opened a
RFP in Debian so that we can ship this in Debian, and also documented
my work there.
Note that there is now a counter that tracks charge/discharge
cycles. It's visible in tlp-stat -b, which is a nice
improvement:
Ethernet expansion card
The Framework ethernet expansion card is a fancy little doodle:
"2.5Gbit/s and 10/100/1000Mbit/s Ethernet", the "clear housing lets
you peek at the RTL8156 controller that powers it". Which is another
way to say "we didn't completely finish prod on this one, so it kind
of looks like we 3D-printed this in the shop"....
The card is a little bulky, but I guess that's inevitable considering
the RJ-45 form factor when compared to the thin Framework laptop.
I have had a serious issue when trying it at first: the link LEDs
just wouldn't come up. I made a full bug report in the forum and
with upstream support, but eventually figured it out on my own. It's
(of course) a power saving issue: if you reboot the machine, the links
come up when the laptop is running the BIOS POST check and even when
the Linux kernel boots.
I first thought that the problem is likely related to the
powertop service which I run at boot time to tweak some power saving
settings.
It seems like this:
By default, USB power saving is active in the kernel, but not
force-enabled for incompatible drivers. That is, devices that
support suspension will suspend, drivers that do not, will not.
So the fix is actually to uninstall tlp or disable that setting by
adding this to /etc/tlp.conf:
USB_AUTOSUSPEND=0
... but that disables auto-suspend on all USB devices, which may
hurt other power usage performance. I have found that a a
combination of:
USB_AUTOSUSPEND=1
USB_DENYLIST="0bda:8156"
and this on the kernel commandline:
usbcore.quirks=0bda:8156:k
... actually does work correctly. I now have this in my
/etc/default/grub.d/framework-tweaks.cfg file:
# net.ifnames=0: normal interface names ffs (e.g. eth0, wlan0, not wlp166
s0)
# nvme.noacpi=1: reduce SSD disk power usage (not working)
# mem_sleep_default=deep: reduce power usage during sleep (not working)
# usbcore.quirk is a workaround for the ethernet card suspend bug: https:
//guides.frame.work/Guide/Fedora+37+Installation+on+the+Framework+Laptop/
108?lang=en
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="net.ifnames=0 nvme.noacpi=1 mem_sleep_default=deep usbcore.quirks=0bda:8156:k"
# fix the resolution in grub for fonts to not be tiny
GRUB_GFXMODE=1024x768
Other than that, I haven't been able to max out the card because I
don't have other 2.5Gbit/s equipment at home, which is strangely
satisfying. But running against my Turris Omnia
router, I could pretty much max a gigabit fairly easily:
The card doesn't require any proprietary firmware blobs which is
surprising. Other than the power saving issues, it just works.
In my power tests (see powerstat-wayland), the Ethernet card seems
to use about 1.6W of power idle, without link, in the above "quirky"
configuration where the card is functional but without autosuspend.
Proprietary firmware blobs
The framework does need proprietary firmware to operate. Specifically:
the WiFi network card shipped with the DIY kit is a AX210 card that
requires a 5.19 kernel or later, and the firmware-iwlwifi non-free firmware package
the Bluetooth adapter also loads the firmware-iwlwifi
package (untested)
the graphics work out of the box without firmware, but certain
power management features come only with special proprietary
firmware, normally shipped in the firmware-misc-nonfree
but currently missing from the package
Note that, at the time of writing, the latest i915 firmware from
linux-firmware has a serious bug where loading all the
accessible firmware results in noticeable I estimate 200-500ms lag
between the keyboard (not the mouse!) and the display. Symptoms also
include tearing and shearing of windows, it's pretty nasty.
One workaround is to delete the two affected firmware files:
cd /lib/firmware && rm adlp_guc_70.1.1.bin adlp_guc_69.0.3.bin
update-initramfs -u
You will get the following warning during build, which is good as
it means the problematic firmware is disabled:
W: Possible missing firmware /lib/firmware/i915/adlp_guc_69.0.3.bin for module i915
W: Possible missing firmware /lib/firmware/i915/adlp_guc_70.1.1.bin for module i915
But then it also means that critical firmware isn't loaded, which
means, among other things, a higher battery drain. I was able to move
from 8.5-10W down to the 7W range after making the firmware work
properly. This is also after turning the backlight all the way down,
as that takes a solid 2-3W in full blast.
The proper fix is to use some compositing manager. I ended up using
compton with the following systemd unit:
compton is orphaned however, so you might be tempted to use
picom instead, but in my experience the latter uses much
more power (1-2W extra, similar experience). I also tried
compiz but it would just crash with:
anarcat@angela:~$ compiz --replace
compiz (core) - Warn: No XI2 extension
compiz (core) - Error: Another composite manager is already running on screen: 0
compiz (core) - Fatal: No manageable screens found on display :0
When running from the base session, I would get this instead:
Also note that the iwlwifi firmware also looks incomplete. Even with
the package installed, I get those errors in dmesg:
[ 19.534429] Intel(R) Wireless WiFi driver for Linux
[ 19.534691] iwlwifi 0000:a6:00.0: enabling device (0000 -> 0002)
[ 19.541867] iwlwifi 0000:a6:00.0: firmware: failed to load iwlwifi-ty-a0-gf-a0-72.ucode (-2)
[ 19.541881] iwlwifi 0000:a6:00.0: firmware: failed to load iwlwifi-ty-a0-gf-a0-72.ucode (-2)
[ 19.541882] iwlwifi 0000:a6:00.0: Direct firmware load for iwlwifi-ty-a0-gf-a0-72.ucode failed with error -2
[ 19.541890] iwlwifi 0000:a6:00.0: firmware: failed to load iwlwifi-ty-a0-gf-a0-71.ucode (-2)
[ 19.541895] iwlwifi 0000:a6:00.0: firmware: failed to load iwlwifi-ty-a0-gf-a0-71.ucode (-2)
[ 19.541896] iwlwifi 0000:a6:00.0: Direct firmware load for iwlwifi-ty-a0-gf-a0-71.ucode failed with error -2
[ 19.541903] iwlwifi 0000:a6:00.0: firmware: failed to load iwlwifi-ty-a0-gf-a0-70.ucode (-2)
[ 19.541907] iwlwifi 0000:a6:00.0: firmware: failed to load iwlwifi-ty-a0-gf-a0-70.ucode (-2)
[ 19.541908] iwlwifi 0000:a6:00.0: Direct firmware load for iwlwifi-ty-a0-gf-a0-70.ucode failed with error -2
[ 19.541913] iwlwifi 0000:a6:00.0: firmware: failed to load iwlwifi-ty-a0-gf-a0-69.ucode (-2)
[ 19.541916] iwlwifi 0000:a6:00.0: firmware: failed to load iwlwifi-ty-a0-gf-a0-69.ucode (-2)
[ 19.541917] iwlwifi 0000:a6:00.0: Direct firmware load for iwlwifi-ty-a0-gf-a0-69.ucode failed with error -2
[ 19.541922] iwlwifi 0000:a6:00.0: firmware: failed to load iwlwifi-ty-a0-gf-a0-68.ucode (-2)
[ 19.541926] iwlwifi 0000:a6:00.0: firmware: failed to load iwlwifi-ty-a0-gf-a0-68.ucode (-2)
[ 19.541927] iwlwifi 0000:a6:00.0: Direct firmware load for iwlwifi-ty-a0-gf-a0-68.ucode failed with error -2
[ 19.541933] iwlwifi 0000:a6:00.0: firmware: failed to load iwlwifi-ty-a0-gf-a0-67.ucode (-2)
[ 19.541937] iwlwifi 0000:a6:00.0: firmware: failed to load iwlwifi-ty-a0-gf-a0-67.ucode (-2)
[ 19.541937] iwlwifi 0000:a6:00.0: Direct firmware load for iwlwifi-ty-a0-gf-a0-67.ucode failed with error -2
[ 19.544244] iwlwifi 0000:a6:00.0: firmware: direct-loading firmware iwlwifi-ty-a0-gf-a0-66.ucode
[ 19.544257] iwlwifi 0000:a6:00.0: api flags index 2 larger than supported by driver
[ 19.544270] iwlwifi 0000:a6:00.0: TLV_FW_FSEQ_VERSION: FSEQ Version: 0.63.2.1
[ 19.544523] iwlwifi 0000:a6:00.0: firmware: failed to load iwl-debug-yoyo.bin (-2)
[ 19.544528] iwlwifi 0000:a6:00.0: firmware: failed to load iwl-debug-yoyo.bin (-2)
[ 19.544530] iwlwifi 0000:a6:00.0: loaded firmware version 66.55c64978.0 ty-a0-gf-a0-66.ucode op_mode iwlmvm
Some of those are available in the latest upstream firmware package
(iwlwifi-ty-a0-gf-a0-71.ucode, -68, and -67), but not all
(e.g. iwlwifi-ty-a0-gf-a0-72.ucode is missing) . It's unclear what
those do or don't, as the WiFi seems to work well without them.
I still copied them in from the latest linux-firmware package in the
hope they would help with power management, but I did not notice a
change after loading them.
There are also multiple knobs on the iwlwifi and iwlmvm
drivers. The latter has a power_schmeme setting which defaults to
2 (balanced), setting it to 3 (low power) could improve
battery usage as well, in theory. The iwlwifi driver also has
power_save (defaults to disabled) and power_level (1-5, defaults
to 1) settings. See also the output of modinfo iwlwifi and
modinfo iwlmvm for other driver options.
Graphics acceleration
After loading the latest upstream firmware and setting up a
compositing manager (compton, above), I tested the classic
glxgears.
Running in a window gives me odd results, as the gears basically grind
to a halt:
Running synchronized to the vertical refresh. The framerate should be
approximately the same as the monitor refresh rate.
137 frames in 5.1 seconds = 26.984 FPS
27 frames in 5.4 seconds = 5.022 FPS
Ouch. 5FPS!
But interestingly, once the window is in full screen, it does hit the
monitor refresh rate:
300 frames in 5.0 seconds = 60.000 FPS
I'm not really a gamer and I'm not normally using any of that fancy
graphics acceleration stuff (except maybe my browser does?).
I installed intel-gpu-tools for the intel_gpu_top
command to confirm the GPU was engaged when doing those simulations. A
nice find. Other useful diagnostic tools include glxgears and
glxinfo (in mesa-utils) and (vainfo in vainfo).
Following to this post, I also made sure to have those settings
in my about:config in Firefox, or, in user.js:
user_pref("media.ffmpeg.vaapi.enabled", true);
Note that the guide suggests many other settings to tweak, but those
might actually be overkill, see this comment and its parents. I
did try forcing hardware acceleration by setting gfx.webrender.all
to true, but everything became choppy and weird.
The guide also mentions installing the intel-media-driver package,
but I could not find that in Debian.
The Arch wiki has, as usual, an excellent reference on hardware
acceleration in Firefox.
Chromium / Signal desktop bugs
It looks like both Chromium and Signal Desktop misbehave with my
compositor setup (compton + i3). The fix is to add a persistent
flag to Chromium. In Arch, it's conveniently in
~/.config/chromium-flags.conf but that doesn't actually work in
Debian. I had to put the flag in
/etc/chromium.d/disable-compositing, like this:
It's possible another one of the hundreds of flags might fix this
issue better, but I don't really have time to go through this entire,
incomplete, and unofficial list (!?!).
Signal Desktop is a similar problem, and doesn't reuse those flags
(because of course it doesn't). Instead I had to rewrite the wrapper
script in /usr/local/bin/signal-desktop to use this instead:
exec /usr/bin/flatpak run --branch=stable --arch=x86_64 org.signal.Signal --disable-gpu-compositing "$@"
This was mostly done in this Puppet commit.
I haven't figured out the root of this problem. I did try using
picom and xcompmgr; they both suffer from the same issue. Another
Debian testing user on Wayland told me they haven't seen this problem,
so hopefully this can be fixed by switching to
wayland.
Graphics card hangs
I believe I might have this bug which results in a total
graphical hang for 15-30 seconds. It's fairly rare so it's not too
disruptive, but when it does happen, it's pretty alarming.
The comments on that bug report are encouraging though: it seems this
is a bug in either mesa or the Intel graphics driver, which means many
people have this problem so it's likely to be fixed. There's actually
a merge request on mesa already (2022-12-29).
It could also be that bug because the error message I get is
actually:
Jan 20 12:49:10 angela kernel: Asynchronous wait on fence 0000:00:02.0:sway[104431]:cb0ae timed out (hint:intel_atomic_commit_ready [i915])
Jan 20 12:49:15 angela kernel: i915 0000:00:02.0: [drm] GPU HANG: ecode 12:0:00000000
Jan 20 12:49:15 angela kernel: i915 0000:00:02.0: [drm] Resetting chip for stopped heartbeat on rcs0
Jan 20 12:49:15 angela kernel: i915 0000:00:02.0: [drm] GuC firmware i915/adlp_guc_70.1.1.bin version 70.1
Jan 20 12:49:15 angela kernel: i915 0000:00:02.0: [drm] HuC firmware i915/tgl_huc_7.9.3.bin version 7.9
Jan 20 12:49:15 angela kernel: i915 0000:00:02.0: [drm] HuC authenticated
Jan 20 12:49:15 angela kernel: i915 0000:00:02.0: [drm] GuC submission enabled
Jan 20 12:49:15 angela kernel: i915 0000:00:02.0: [drm] GuC SLPC enabled
It's a solid 30 seconds graphical hang. Maybe the keyboard and
everything else keeps working. The latter bug report is quite long,
with many comments, but this one from January 2023 seems to say
that Sway 1.8 fixed the problem. There's also an earlier patch to
add an extra kernel parameter that supposedly fixes that too. There's
all sorts of other workarounds in there, for example this:
from this comment... So that one is unsolved, as far as the
upstream drivers are concerned, but maybe could be fixed through Sway.
Weird USB hangs / graphical glitches
I have had weird connectivity glitches better described in this
post, but basically: my USB keyboard and mice (connected over a
USB hub) drop keys, lag a lot or hang, and I get visual glitches.
The fix was to tighten the screws around the CPU on the motherboard
(!), which is, thankfully, a rather simple repair.
USB docks are hell
Note that the monitors are hooked up to angela through a USB-C /
Thunderbolt dock from Cable Matters, with the lovely name of
201053-SIL. It has issues, see this blog
post for an in-depth discussion.
Shipping details
I ordered the Framework in August 2022 and received it about a month
later, which is sooner than expected because the August batch was
late.
People (including me) expected this to have an impact on the September
batch, but it seems Framework have been able to fix the delivery
problems and keep up with the demand.
As of early 2023, their website announces that laptops ship "within 5
days". I have myself ordered a few expansion cards in November 2022,
and they shipped on the same day, arriving 3-4 days later.
The supply pipeline
There are basically 6 steps in the Framework shipping pipeline, each
(except the last) accompanied with an email notification:
pre-order
preparing batch
preparing order
payment complete
shipping
(received)
This comes from the crowdsourced spreadsheet, which should be
updated when the status changes here.
I was part of the "third batch" of the 12th generation laptop, which
was supposed to ship in September. It ended up arriving on my door
step on September 27th, about 33 days after ordering.
It seems current orders are not processed in "batches", but in real
time, see this blog post for details on shipping.
Shipping trivia
I don't know about the others, but my laptop shipped through no less
than four different airplane flights. Here are the hops it took:
I can't quite figure out how to calculate exactly how much mileage
that is, but it's huge. The ride through Alaska is surprising enough
but the bounce back through Winnipeg is especially weird. I guess
the route happens that way because of Fedex shipping hubs.
There was a related oddity when I had my Purism laptop shipped: it
left from the west coast and seemed to enter on an endless, two week
long road trip across the continental US.
A new minor release 0.2.3 of our RcppRedis
package arrived on CRAN today.
RcppRedis
is one of several packages connecting R to the fabulous Redis in-memory datastructure store (and
much more). RcppRedis
does not pretend to be feature complete, but it may do some things
faster than the other interfaces, and also offers an optional coupling
with MessagePack binary
(de)serialization via RcppMsgPack. The
package has carried production loads on a trading floor for several
years.
This update is fairly mechanical. CRAN wants everybody off the C++11
train which is fair game given that it 2023 and most sane and lucky
people are facing sane and modern compilers so this makes sense. (And I
raise a toast to all those poor souls facing RHEL 7 / CentOS 7 with a
compiler from many moons ago: I hear it is a vibrant job market
out there so maybe time to make a switch ). As with a few of my other
packages, this release simply does away with the imposition of C++11 as
the package will compile just fine under C++14 or C++17 (as governed by
your version of R).
The detailed changes list follows.
Changes in version 0.2.3
(2023-03-08)
No longer set a C++ compilation standard as the default choices
by R are sufficient for the package
Switch include to Rcpp/Rcpp which signals use of all Rcpp
features including Modules
This post serves as a report from my attendance to Kubecon and CloudNativeCon 2023 Europe that took place in
Amsterdam in April 2023. It was my second time physically attending this conference, the first one was in
Austin, Texas (USA) in 2017. I also attended once in a virtual fashion.
The content here is mostly generated for the sake of my own recollection and learnings, and is written from
the notes I took during the event.
The very first session was the opening keynote, which reunited the whole crowd to bootstrap the event and
share the excitement about the days ahead. Some astonishing numbers were announced: there were more than
10.000 people attending, and apparently it could confidently be said that it was the largest open source
technology conference taking place in Europe in recent times.
It was also communicated that the next couple iteration of the event will be run in China in September 2023
and Paris in March 2024.
More numbers, the CNCF was hosting about 159 projects, involving 1300 maintainers and about 200.000
contributors. The cloud-native community is ever-increasing, and there seems to be a strong trend in the
industry for cloud-native technology adoption and all-things related to PaaS and IaaS.
The event program had different tracks, and in each one there was an interesting mix of low-level and higher
level talks for a variety of audience. On many occasions I found that reading the talk title alone was not
enough to know in advance if a talk was a 101 kind of thing or for experienced engineers. But unlike in
previous editions, I didn t have the feeling that the purpose of the conference was to try selling me
anything. Obviously, speakers would make sure to mention, or highlight in a subtle way, the involvement of a
given company in a given solution or piece of the ecosystem. But it was non-invasive and fair enough for me.
On a different note, I found the breakout rooms to be often small. I think there were only a couple of rooms
that could accommodate more than 500 people, which is a fairly small allowance for 10k attendees. I realized
with frustration that the more interesting talks were immediately fully booked, with people waiting in line
some 45 minutes before the session time. Because of this, I missed a few important sessions that I ll
hopefully watch online later.
Finally, on a more technical side, I ve learned many things, that instead of grouping by session I ll group
by topic, given how some subjects were mentioned in several talks.
On gitops and CI/CD pipelines
Most of the mentions went to FluxCD and ArgoCD. At
that point there were no doubts that gitops was a mature approach and both flux and argoCD could do an
excellent job. ArgoCD seemed a bit more over-engineered to be a more general purpose CD pipeline, and flux
felt a bit more tailored for simpler gitops setups. I discovered that both have nice web user interfaces that
I wasn t previously familiar with.
However, in two different talks I got the impression that the initial setup of them was simple, but migrating
your current workflow to gitops could result in a bumpy ride. This is, the challenge is not deploying
flux/argo itself, but moving everything into a state that both humans and flux/argo can understand. I also
saw some curious mentions to the config drifts that can happen in some cases, even if the goal of gitops is
precisely for that to never happen. Such mentions were usually accompanied by some hints on how to operate
the situation by hand.
Worth mentioning, I missed any practical information about one of the key pieces to this whole gitops story:
building container images. Most of the showcased scenarios were using pre-built container images, so in that
sense they were simple. Building and pushing to an image registry is one of the two key points we would need
to solve in Toolforge Kubernetes if adopting gitops.
In general, even if gitops were already in our radar for
Toolforge Kubernetes,
I think it climbed a few steps in my priority list after the conference.
Another learning was this site: https://opengitops.dev/.
On etcd, performance and resource management
I attended a talk focused on etcd performance tuning that was very encouraging. They were basically talking
about the exact
same problems we
have had in Toolforge Kubernetes, like api-server and etcd failure modes, and how sensitive etcd is to disk
latency, IO pressure and network throughput. Even though
Toolforge Kubernetes scale is small compared to other Kubernetes deployments out there, I found it very
interesting to see other s approaches to the same set of challenges.
I learned how most Kubernetes components and apps can overload the api-server. Because even the api-server
talks to itself. Simple things like 
On jobs
I attended a couple of talks that were related to HPC/grid-like usages of Kubernetes. I was truly impressed
by some folks out there who were using Kubernetes Jobs on massive scales, such as to train machine learning
models and other fancy AI projects.
It is acknowledged in the community that the early implementation of things like Jobs and CronJobs had some
limitations that are now gone, or at least greatly improved. Some new functionalities have been added as
well. Indexed Jobs, for example, enables each Job to have a number (index) and process a chunk of a larger
batch of data based on that index. It would allow for full grid-like features like sequential (or again,
indexed) processing, coordination between Job and more graceful Job restarts. My first reaction was: Is that
something we would like to enable in Toolforge Jobs Framework?
On policy and security
A surprisingly good amount of sessions covered interesting topics related to policy and security. It was nice
to learn two realities:
Previously, I explained 
I wrote the 
Wrong sort of shim, but canned language bindings would be handy
This is what I imagine it looks like inside these libraries
CPUs can't do anything without being told what to do, which leaves the obvious problem of how do you tell a CPU to do something in the first place. On many CPUs this is handled in the form of a 
Yesterday, the UBports core developer team released Ubuntu Touch Focal OTA-1
(In fact, Raoul, Marius and I were in a conference call when Marius froze and said: the PR team already posted the release blog post; the post is out, but we haven't released yet... ahhhh... panic... Shall I?, Marius said, and we said: GO!!! This is why the release occurred in public five hours ahead of schedule. OMG.)
For all the details, please study:
Nitrokey Start
Update on 2023-03-23: thanks to Daniel Roschka for mentioning the 
(no site yet)
in October 2021. they generally seem to keep up with
shipping. update (august 2022): they rolled out a second line of
laptops (12th gen), first batch shipped, second batch 