My house was crowded with some four dozen men, and for the first time in my life, I found myself steeped in mortal flesh. Those frail bodies of theirs took relentless attention, food and drink, sleep and rest, the cleaning of limbs and fluxes. Such patience mortals must have, I thought, to drag themselves through it hour after hour.

"I am embarrassed to ask this of you, but I did not bring a black cloak with me when we left. Do you have one I might wear? I would mourn for him." I looked at her, as vivid in my doorway as the moon in the autumn sky. Her eyes held mine, gray and steady. It is a common saying that women are delicate creatures, flowers, eggs, anything that may be crushed in a moment s carelessness. If I had ever believed it, I no longer did. "No," I said. "But I have yarn, and a loom. Come."

• The project debdistget is responsible for downloading Release/Packages files (which are the most relevant files from dists/) from apt archives, and works by commiting them into GitLab-hosted git-repositories. I maintain several such repositories for popular apt-archives, including for Trisquel and its upstream Ubuntu. GitLab invokes a schedule pipeline to do the downloading, and there is some race conditions here.
• The project debdistdiff is used to produce the list of added and modified packages, which are the input to actually being able to know what packages to reproduce. It publishes human readable summary of difference for several distributions, including Trisquel vs Ubuntu. Early on I decided that rebuilding all of the upstream Ubuntu packages is out of scope for me: my personal trust in the official Debian/Ubuntu apt archives are greater than my trust of the added/modified packages in Trisquel.
• The final project reproduce-trisquel puts the pieces together briefly as follows, everything being driven from its .gitlab-ci.yml file.
  • There is a (manually triggered) job generate-build-image to create a build image to speed up CI/CD runs, using a simple Dockerfile.
  • There is a (manually triggered) job generate-package-lists that uses debdistdiff to generate and store package lists and puts its output in lists/. The reason this is manually triggered right now is due to a race condition.
  • There is a (scheduled) job that does two things: from the package lists, the script generate-ci-packages.sh builds a GitLab CI/CD instruction file ci-packages.yml that describes jobs for each package to build. The second part is generate-readme.sh that re-generate the project s README.md based on the build logs and diffoscope outputs that stored in the git repository.
  • Through the ci-packages.yml file, there is a large number of jobs that are dynamically defined, which currently are manually triggered to not overload the build servers. The script build-package.sh is invoked and attempts to rebuild a package, and stores build log and diffoscope output in the git project itself.

• We don t support *.buildinfo files. As far as I am aware, Trisquel does not publish them for their builds. Improving this would be a first step forward, anyone able to help? Compare buildinfo.debian.net. For example, many packages differ only in their NT_GNU_BUILD_ID symbol inside the ELF binary, see example diffoscope output for libgpg-error. By poking around in jenkins.trisquel.org I managed to discover that Trisquel built initramfs-utils in the randomized path /build/initramfs-tools-bzRLUp and hard-coding that path allowed me to reproduce that package. I expect the same to hold for many other packages. Unfortunately, this failure turned into success with that package moved the needle from 42% reproducibility to 43% however I didn t let that stand in the way of a good headline.
• The mechanism to download the Release/Package-files from dists/ is not fool-proof: we may not capture all ever published such files. While this is less of a concern for reproducibility, it is more of a concern for apt transparency. Still, having Trisquel provide a service similar to snapshot.debian.org would help.
• Having at least one other CPU architecture would be nice.
• Due to lack of time and mental focus, handling incremental updates of new versions of packages is not yet working. This means we only ever build one version of a package, and never discover any newly published versions of the same package. Now that Trisquel aramo is released, the expected rate of new versions should be low, but still happens due to security or backports.
• Porting this to test supposedly FSDG-compliant distributions such as PureOS and Gnuinos should be relatively easy. I m also looking at Devuan because of Gnuinos.
• The elephant in the room is how reproducible Ubuntu is in the first place.

• [1] https://tinyurl.com/2hn6hgh2
• [2] https://tinyurl.com/2myxdktd
• [3] https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-first-impressions.html
• [4] https://tinyurl.com/25262ohu
• [5] https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/
• [6] https://tinyurl.com/2olyokee
• [7] https://www.theonion.com/christ-article-a-video-1819595653
• [8] https://www.wired.com/story/why-the-floppy-disk-just-wont-die/
• [9] https://tinyurl.com/2e4ku9vm
• [10] https://tinyurl.com/2eo5nj58
• [11] https://www.earth.li/~noodles/blog/2023/02/visionfive-2-impressions.html
• [12] https://tinyurl.com/2zshrngy
• [13] https://tinyurl.com/2f5olx6r
• [14] https://anarc.at/hardware/laptop/framework-12th-gen/

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.

# when asked, press enter to confirm default settings
curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSf https://sh.rustup.rs   sh

rustup target add x86_64-unknown-none

cargo new hack-the-planet
cd hack-the-planet

[package]
name = "hack-the-planet"
version = "0.1.0"
edition = "2021"
# See more keys and their definitions at https://doc.rust-lang.org/cargo/reference/manifest.html
[dependencies]

rm src/main.rs
touch src/main.rs

$ cargo build --release --target x86_64-unknown-none
   Compiling hack-the-planet v0.1.0 (/hack-the-planet)
error[E0463]: can't find crate for  std 
   
  = note: the  x86_64-unknown-none  target may not support the standard library
  = note:  std  is required by  hack_the_planet  because it does not declare  #![no_std] 
error[E0601]:  main  function not found in crate  hack_the_planet 
   
  = note: consider adding a  main  function to  src/main.rs 
Some errors have detailed explanations: E0463, E0601.
For more information about an error, try  rustc --explain E0463 .
error: could not compile  hack-the-planet  due to 2 previous errors

#![no_std]

$ cargo build --release --target x86_64-unknown-none
   Compiling hack-the-planet v0.1.0 (/hack-the-planet)
error[E0601]:  main  function not found in crate  hack_the_planet 
 --> src/main.rs:1:11
   
1   #![no_std]
              ^ consider adding a  main  function to  src/main.rs 
For more information about this error, try  rustc --explain E0601 .
error: could not compile  hack-the-planet  due to previous error

#![no_std]
#![no_main]

$ cargo build
   Compiling hack-the-planet v0.1.0 (/hack-the-planet)
error:  #[panic_handler]  function required, but not found
error: language item required, but not found:  eh_personality 
   
  = note: this can occur when a binary crate with  #![no_std]  is compiled for a target where  eh_personality  is defined in the standard library
  = help: you may be able to compile for a target that doesn't need  eh_personality , specify a target with  --target  or in  .cargo/config 
error: could not compile  hack-the-planet  due to 2 previous errors

#![no_std]
#![no_main]
use core::panic::PanicInfo;
#[panic_handler]
fn panic(_info: &PanicInfo) -> !  
    loop  
 

$ cargo build --release --target x86_64-unknown-none
   Compiling hack-the-planet v0.1.0 (/hack-the-planet)
    Finished release [optimized] target(s) in 0.16s

$ target/x86_64-unknown-none/release/hack-the-planet
Segmentation fault (core dumped)

$ objdump -d target/x86_64-unknown-none/release/hack-the-planet
target/x86_64-unknown-none/release/hack-the-planet:     file format elf64-x86-64

Making a basic program and executing it Ok let s try to make a valid program that basically just cleanly exits. First let s try to add some cpu instructions and verify they re indeed getting executed. Lemme introduce, the INT 3 instruction in x86_64 assembly. In binary it s also known as the 0xCC opcode. It crashes our program in a slightly different way, so if the error message changes, we know it worked. The other tutorials use a #[naked] function for the entry point, but since this feature isn t stabilized at the time of writing we re going to use the global_asm! macro. Also don t worry, I m not going to introduce every assembly instruction individually. Our program now looks like this:

#![no_std]
#![no_main]
use core::arch::global_asm;
use core::panic::PanicInfo;
#[panic_handler]
fn panic(_info: &PanicInfo) -> !  
    loop  
 
global_asm!  
    ".global _start",
    "_start:",
    "int 3"
 

Running the build again (ok basically from now on the build is always going to be expected to work unless I say otherwise):

$ cargo build --release --target x86_64-unknown-none
   Compiling hack-the-planet v0.1.0 (/hack-the-planet)
    Finished release [optimized] target(s) in 0.11s

Let s try to disassemble the binary again:

$ objdump -d target/x86_64-unknown-none/release/hack-the-planet
target/x86_64-unknown-none/release/hack-the-planet:     file format elf64-x86-64
Disassembly of section .text:
0000000000001210 <_start>:
    1210:	cc                   	int3

And sure enough, there s a cc instruction that was identified as int3. Let s try to run this:

$ target/x86_64-unknown-none/release/hack-the-planet
Trace/breakpoint trap (core dumped)

The error message of the crash is now slightly different because it s hitting our breakpoint cpu instruction. Funfact btw, if you run this in strace you can see this isn t making any system calls (aka not talking to the kernel at all, it just crashes):

$ strace -f ./hack-the-planet
execve("./hack-the-planet", ["./hack-the-planet"], 0x74f12430d1d8 /* 39 vars */) = 0
--- SIGTRAP  si_signo=SIGTRAP, si_code=SI_KERNEL, si_addr=NULL  ---
+++ killed by SIGTRAP (core dumped) +++
[1]    2796457 trace trap (core dumped)  strace -f ./hack-the-planet

Let s try to make a program that does a clean shutdown. To do this we inform the kernel with a system call that we may like to exit. We can get more info on this with man 2 exit and it defines exit like this:

[[noreturn]] void _exit(int status);

On Linux this syscall is actually called _exit and exit is implemented as a libc function, but we don t care about any of that today, it s going to do the job just fine. Also note how it takes a single argument of type int. In C-speak this means signed 32 bit , i32 in Rust. Next we need to figure out the syscall number of this syscall. These numbers are cpu architecture specific for some reason (idk, idc). We re looking these numbers up with ripgrep in /usr/include/asm/:

$ rg __NR_exit /usr/include/asm
/usr/include/asm/unistd_64.h
64:#define __NR_exit 60
235:#define __NR_exit_group 231
/usr/include/asm/unistd_x32.h
53:#define __NR_exit (__X32_SYSCALL_BIT + 60)
206:#define __NR_exit_group (__X32_SYSCALL_BIT + 231)
/usr/include/asm/unistd_32.h
5:#define __NR_exit 1
253:#define __NR_exit_group 252

Since we re on x86_64 the correct value is the one in unistd_64.h, 60. Also, on x86_64 the syscall number goes into the rax cpu register, the status argument goes in the rdi register. The return value of the syscall is going to be placed in the rax register after the syscall is done, but for exit the execution is never given back to us. Let s try to write 60 into the rax register and 69 into the rdi register. To copy into registers we re going to use the mov destination, source instruction to copy from source to destination. With these registers setup we can use the syscall cpu instruction to hand execution over to the kernel. Don t worry, there s only one more assembly instruction coming and for everything else we re going to use Rust. Our code now looks like this:

#![no_std]
#![no_main]
use core::arch::global_asm;
use core::panic::PanicInfo;
#[panic_handler]
fn panic(_info: &PanicInfo) -> !  
    loop  
 
global_asm!  
    ".global _start",
    "_start:",
    "mov rax, 60",
    "mov rdi, 69",
    "syscall"
 

Build the binary, run it and print the exit code:

$ cargo build --release --target x86_64-unknown-none
$ target/x86_64-unknown-none/release/hack-the-planet; echo $?
69

Nice. Rust is quite literally putting these cpu instructions into the binary for us, nothing else.

$ objdump -d target/x86_64-unknown-none/release/hack-the-planet
target/x86_64-unknown-none/release/hack-the-planet:     file format elf64-x86-64
Disassembly of section .text:
0000000000001210 <_start>:
    1210:	48 c7 c0 3c 00 00 00 	mov    $0x3c,%rax
    1217:	48 c7 c7 45 00 00 00 	mov    $0x45,%rdi
    121e:	0f 05                	syscall

Running this with strace shows the program does exactly one thing.

$ strace -f ./hack-the-planet
execve("./hack-the-planet", ["./hack-the-planet"], 0x70699fe8c908 /* 39 vars */) = 0
exit(69)                                = ?
+++ exited with 69 +++

Writing Rust Ok but even though cpu instructions can be fun at times, I d rather not deal with them most of the time (this might strike you as odd, considering this blog post). Instead let s try to define a function in Rust and call into that instead. We re going to define this function as unsafe (btw none of this is taking advantage of the safety guarantees by Rust in case it wasn t obvious. This tutorial is mostly going to stick to unsafe Rust, but for bigger projects you can attempt to reduce your usage of unsafe to opt back into normal safe Rust), it also declares the function with #[no_mangle] so the function name is preserved as main and we can call it from our global_asm entry point. Lastely, when our program is started it s going to get the stack address passed in one of the cpu registers, this value is expected to be passed to our function as an argument. Our function declares ! as return type, which means it never returns:

#[no_mangle]
unsafe fn main(_stack_top: *const u8) -> !  
    // TODO: this is missing
 

This won t compile yet, we need to add our assembly for the exit syscall back in.

#[no_mangle]
unsafe fn main(_stack_top: *const u8) -> !  
    asm!(
        "syscall",
        in("rax") 60,
        in("rdi") 0,
        options(noreturn)
    );
 

This time we re using the asm! macro, this is a slightly more declarative approach. We want to run the syscall cpu instruction with 60 in the rax register, and this time we want the rdi register to be zero, to indicate a successful exit. We also use options(noreturn) so Rust knows it should assume execution does not resume after this assembly is executed (the Linux kernel guarantees this). We modify our global_asm! entrypoint to call our new main function, and to copy the stack address from rsp into the register for the first argument rdi because it would otherwise get lost forever:

global_asm!  
    ".global _start",
    "_start:",
    "mov rdi, rsp",
    "call main"
 

Our full program now looks like this:

#![no_std]
#![no_main]
use core::arch::asm;
use core::arch::global_asm;
use core::panic::PanicInfo;
#[panic_handler]
fn panic(_info: &PanicInfo) -> !  
    loop  
 
global_asm!  
    ".global _start",
    "_start:",
    "mov rdi, rsp",
    "call main"
 
#[no_mangle]
unsafe fn main(_stack_top: *const u8) -> !  
    asm!(
        "syscall",
        in("rax") 60,
        in("rdi") 0,
        options(noreturn)
    );
 

After building and disassembling this the Rust compiler is slowly starting to do work for us:

$ cargo build --release --target x86_64-unknown-none
$ objdump -d target/x86_64-unknown-none/release/hack-the-planet
target/x86_64-unknown-none/release/hack-the-planet:     file format elf64-x86-64
Disassembly of section .text:
0000000000001210 <_start>:
    1210:	48 89 e7             	mov    %rsp,%rdi
    1213:	e8 08 00 00 00       	call   1220 <main>
    1218:	cc                   	int3
    1219:	cc                   	int3
    121a:	cc                   	int3
    121b:	cc                   	int3
    121c:	cc                   	int3
    121d:	cc                   	int3
    121e:	cc                   	int3
    121f:	cc                   	int3
0000000000001220 <main>:
    1220:	50                   	push   %rax
    1221:	b8 3c 00 00 00       	mov    $0x3c,%eax
    1226:	31 ff                	xor    %edi,%edi
    1228:	0f 05                	syscall
    122a:	0f 0b                	ud2

The mov and syscall instructions are still the same, but it noticed it can XOR the rdi register with itself to set it to zero. It s using x86 assembly language (the 32 bit variant of x86_64, that also happens to work on x86_64) to do so, that s why the register is refered to as edi in the disassembly. You can also see it s inserting a bunch of 0xCC instructions (for alignment) and Rust puts the opcodes 0x0F 0x0B at the end of the function to force an invalid opcode exception so the program is guaranteed to crash in case the exit syscall doesn t do it. This code still executes as expected:

$ strace -f ./hack-the-planet
execve("./hack-the-planet", ["./hack-the-planet"], 0x72dae7e5dc08 /* 39 vars */) = 0
exit(0)                                 = ?
+++ exited with 0 +++

Adding functions Ok we re getting closer but we aren t quite there yet. Let s try to write an exit function for our assembly that we can then call like a normal function. Remember that it takes a signed 32 bit integer that s supposed to go into rdi.

unsafe fn exit(status: i32) -> !  
    asm!(
        "syscall",
        in("rax") 60,
        in("rdi") status,
        options(noreturn)
    );
 

Actually, since this function doesn t take any raw pointers and any i32 is valid for this syscall we re going to remove the unsafe marker of this function. When doing this we still need to use unsafe within the function for our inline assembly.

fn exit(status: i32) -> !  
    unsafe  
        asm!(
            "syscall",
            in("rax") 60,
            in("rdi") status,
            options(noreturn)
        );
     
 

Let s call this function from our main, and also remove the infinity loop of the panic handler with a call to exit(1):

#![no_std]
#![no_main]
use core::arch::asm;
use core::arch::global_asm;
use core::panic::PanicInfo;
#[panic_handler]
fn panic(_info: &PanicInfo) -> !  
    exit(1);
 
global_asm!  
    ".global _start",
    "_start:",
    "mov rdi, rsp",
    "call main"
 
fn exit(status: i32) -> !  
    unsafe  
        asm!(
            "syscall",
            in("rax") 60,
            in("rdi") status,
            options(noreturn)
        );
     
 
#[no_mangle]
unsafe fn main(_stack_top: *const u8) -> !  
    exit(0);
 

Running this still works, but interestingly the generated assembly didn t change at all:

$ cargo build --release --target x86_64-unknown-none
$ objdump -d target/x86_64-unknown-none/release/hack-the-planet
target/x86_64-unknown-none/release/hack-the-planet:     file format elf64-x86-64
Disassembly of section .text:
0000000000001210 <_start>:
    1210:	48 89 e7             	mov    %rsp,%rdi
    1213:	e8 08 00 00 00       	call   1220 <main>
    1218:	cc                   	int3
    1219:	cc                   	int3
    121a:	cc                   	int3
    121b:	cc                   	int3
    121c:	cc                   	int3
    121d:	cc                   	int3
    121e:	cc                   	int3
    121f:	cc                   	int3
0000000000001220 <main>:
    1220:	50                   	push   %rax
    1221:	b8 3c 00 00 00       	mov    $0x3c,%eax
    1226:	31 ff                	xor    %edi,%edi
    1228:	0f 05                	syscall
    122a:	0f 0b                	ud2

Rust noticed there s no need to make it a separate function at runtime and instead merged the instructions of the exit function directly into our main. It also noticed the 0 argument in exit(0) means rdi is supposed to be zero and uses the XOR optimization mentioned before. Since main is not calling any unsafe functions anymore we could mark it as safe too, but in the next few functions we re going to deal with file descriptors and raw pointers, so this is likely the only safe function we re going to write in this tutorial so let s just keep the unsafe marker.

Printing text Ok let s try to do a quick hello world, to do this we re going to call the write syscall. Looking it up with man 2 write:

ssize_t write(int fd, const void buf[.count], size_t count);

The write syscall takes 3 arguments and returns a signed size_t. In Rust this is called isize. In C size_t is an unsigned integer type that can hold any value of sizeof(...) for the given platform, ssize_t can only store half of that because it uses one of the bits to indicate an error has occured (the first s means signed, write returns -1 in case of an error). The arguments for write are:

• the file descriptor to write to. stdout is located on file descriptor 1.
• a pointer/address to some memory.
• the number of bytes that should be written, starting at the given address.

Let s also lookup the syscall number of write:

% rg __NR_write /usr/include/asm
/usr/include/asm/unistd_64.h
5:#define __NR_write 1
24:#define __NR_writev 20
/usr/include/asm/unistd_32.h
8:#define __NR_write 4
150:#define __NR_writev 146
/usr/include/asm/unistd_x32.h
5:#define __NR_write (__X32_SYSCALL_BIT + 1)
323:#define __NR_writev (__X32_SYSCALL_BIT + 516)

The value we re looking for is 1. Let s write our write function (heh).

unsafe fn write(fd: i32, buf: *const u8, count: usize) -> isize  
    let r0;
    asm!(
        "syscall",
        inlateout("rax") 1 => r0,
        in("rdi") fd,
        in("rsi") buf,
        in("rdx") count,
        lateout("rcx") _,
        lateout("r11") _,
        options(nostack, preserves_flags)
    );
    r0
 

Now that s a lot of stuff at once. Since this syscall is actually going to hand execution back to our program we need to let Rust know which cpu registers the syscall is writing to, so Rust doesn t attempt to use them to store data (that would be silently overwritten by the syscall). inlateout("raw") 1 => r0 means we re writing a value to the register and want the result back in variable r0. in("rdi") fd means we want to write the value of fd into the rdi register. lateout("rcx") _ means the Linux kernel may write to that register (so the previous value may get lost), but we don t want to store the value anywhere (the underscore acts as a dummy variable name). This doesn t compile just yet though

$ cargo build --release --target x86_64-unknown-none
   Compiling hack-the-planet v0.1.0 (/hack-the-planet)
error: incompatible types for asm inout argument
  --> src/main.rs:35:26
    
35           inlateout("rax") 1 => r0,
                              ^    ^^ type  isize 
                               
                              type  i32 
    
   = note: asm inout arguments must have the same type, unless they are both pointers or integers of the same size
error: could not compile  hack-the-planet  due to previous error

Rust has inferred the type of r0 is isize since that s what our function returns, but the type of the input value for the register was inferred to be i32. We re going to select a specific number type to fix this.

unsafe fn write(fd: i32, buf: *const u8, count: usize) -> isize  
    let r0;
    asm!(
        "syscall",
        inlateout("rax") 1isize => r0,
        in("rdi") fd,
        in("rsi") buf,
        in("rdx") count,
        lateout("rcx") _,
        lateout("r11") _,
        options(nostack, preserves_flags)
    );
    r0
 

We can now call our new write function like this:

write(1, b"Hello world\n".as_ptr(), 12);

We need to set the number of bytes we want to write explicitly because there s no concept of null-byte termination in the write system call, it s quite literally write the next X bytes, starting from this address . Our program now looks like this:

#![no_std]
#![no_main]
use core::arch::asm;
use core::arch::global_asm;
use core::panic::PanicInfo;
#[panic_handler]
fn panic(_info: &PanicInfo) -> !  
    exit(1);
 
global_asm!  
    ".global _start",
    "_start:",
    "mov rdi, rsp",
    "call main"
 
fn exit(status: i32) -> !  
    unsafe  
        asm!(
            "syscall",
            in("rax") 60,
            in("rdi") status,
            options(noreturn)
        );
     
 
unsafe fn write(fd: i32, buf: *const u8, count: usize) -> isize  
    let r0;
    asm!(
        "syscall",
        inlateout("rax") 1isize => r0,
        in("rdi") fd,
        in("rsi") buf,
        in("rdx") count,
        lateout("rcx") _,
        lateout("r11") _,
        options(nostack, preserves_flags)
    );
    r0
 
#[no_mangle]
unsafe fn main(_stack_top: *const u8) -> !  
    write(1, b"Hello world\n".as_ptr(), 12);
    exit(0);
 

Let s try to build and disassemble it:

$ cargo build --release --target x86_64-unknown-none
$ objdump -d target/x86_64-unknown-none/release/hack-the-planet
target/x86_64-unknown-none/release/hack-the-planet:     file format elf64-x86-64
Disassembly of section .text:
0000000000001220 <_start>:
    1220:	48 89 e7             	mov    %rsp,%rdi
    1223:	e8 08 00 00 00       	call   1230 <main>
    1228:	cc                   	int3
    1229:	cc                   	int3
    122a:	cc                   	int3
    122b:	cc                   	int3
    122c:	cc                   	int3
    122d:	cc                   	int3
    122e:	cc                   	int3
    122f:	cc                   	int3
0000000000001230 <main>:
    1230:	50                   	push   %rax
    1231:	48 8d 35 d5 ef ff ff 	lea    -0x102b(%rip),%rsi        # 20d <_start-0x1013>
    1238:	b8 01 00 00 00       	mov    $0x1,%eax
    123d:	ba 0c 00 00 00       	mov    $0xc,%edx
    1242:	bf 01 00 00 00       	mov    $0x1,%edi
    1247:	0f 05                	syscall
    1249:	b8 3c 00 00 00       	mov    $0x3c,%eax
    124e:	31 ff                	xor    %edi,%edi
    1250:	0f 05                	syscall
    1252:	0f 0b                	ud2

This time there are 2 syscalls, first write, then exit. For write it s setting up the 3 arguments in our cpu registers (rdi, rsi, rdx). The lea instruction subtracts 0x102b from the rip register (the instruction pointer) and places the result in the rsi register. This is effectively saying an address relative to wherever this code was loaded into memory . The instruction pointer is going to point directly behind the opcodes of the lea instruction, so 0x1238 - 0x102b = 0x20d. This address is also pointed out in the disassembly as a comment. We don t see the string in our disassembly but we can convert our 0x20d hex to 525 in decimal and use dd to read 12 bytes from that offset, and sure enough:

$ dd bs=1 skip=525 count=12 if=target/x86_64-unknown-none/release/hack-the-planet
Hello world
12+0 records in
12+0 records out

Execute our binary with strace also shows the new write syscall (and the bytes that are being written mixed up in the output).

$ strace -f ./hack-the-planet
execve("./hack-the-planet", ["./hack-the-planet"], 0x74493abe64a8 /* 39 vars */) = 0
write(1, "Hello world\n", 12Hello world
)           = 12
exit(0)                                 = ?
+++ exited with 0 +++

After running strip on it to remove some symbols the binary is so small, if you open it in a text editor it fits on a screenshot:

Nitrokey Start

$ 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
...
$

jas@kaka:~$ pip3 install --user pynitrokey
Collecting pynitrokey
  Downloading pynitrokey-0.4.34-py3-none-any.whl (572 kB)
Collecting frozendict~=2.3.4
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Requirement already satisfied: click<9,>=8.0.0 in /usr/lib/python3/dist-packages (from pynitrokey) (8.0.3)
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  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)
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  Preparing metadata (setup.py) ... done
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  Preparing metadata (setup.py) ... done
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  Preparing metadata (setup.py) ... done
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  Downloading commentjson-0.9.0.tar.gz (8.7 kB)
  Preparing metadata (setup.py) ... done
Requirement already satisfied: asn1crypto<2,>=1.2 in /usr/lib/python3/dist-packages (from spsdk<1.8.0,>=1.7.0->pynitrokey) (1.4.0)
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  Downloading hexdump-3.3.zip (12 kB)
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Requirement already satisfied: wheel<1.0,>=0.23.0 in /usr/lib/python3/dist-packages (from astunparse<2,>=1.6->spsdk<1.8.0,>=1.7.0->pynitrokey) (0.37.1)
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Collecting milksnake>=0.1.2
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Requirement already satisfied: appdirs>=1.4 in /usr/lib/python3/dist-packages (from cmsis-pack-manager<0.3.0->spsdk<1.8.0,>=1.7.0->pynitrokey) (1.4.4)
Collecting lark-parser<0.8.0,>=0.7.1
  Downloading lark-parser-0.7.8.tar.gz (276 kB)
  Preparing metadata (setup.py) ... done
Requirement already satisfied: MarkupSafe>=2.0 in /usr/lib/python3/dist-packages (from jinja2<3.1,>=2.11->spsdk<1.8.0,>=1.7.0->pynitrokey) (2.0.1)
Collecting asn1crypto<2,>=1.2
  Downloading asn1crypto-1.5.1-py2.py3-none-any.whl (105 kB)
Collecting wrapt
  Downloading wrapt-1.15.0-cp310-cp310-manylinux_2_5_x86_64.manylinux1_x86_64.manylinux_2_17_x86_64.manylinux2014_x86_64.whl (78 kB)
Collecting future
  Downloading future-0.18.3.tar.gz (840 kB)
  Preparing metadata (setup.py) ... done
Collecting psutil>=5.2.2
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Collecting capstone<5.0,>=4.0
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Collecting prettytable<3.0,>=2.0
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Collecting ruamel.yaml.clib>=0.2.6
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Collecting sortedcontainers<3.0,>=2.0
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Requirement already satisfied: wcwidth in /usr/lib/python3/dist-packages (from prettytable<3.0,>=2.0->pyocd<=0.31.0,>=0.28.3->spsdk<1.8.0,>=1.7.0->pynitrokey) (0.2.5)
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
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  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
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  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
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  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
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  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
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  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
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  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:~$

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:~$ 

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:~$ 

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 $PWD/gnupghome-import-nitrokey-5D271572 --edit-key B1D2BD1375BECB784CF4F8C4D73CF638C53C06BE
gpg (GnuPG) 2.2.27; Copyright (C) 2021 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
This is free software: you are free to change and redistribute it.
There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law.
Secret key is available.
sec  ed25519/D73CF638C53C06BE
     created: 2019-03-20  expired: 2019-10-22  usage: SC  
     trust: ultimate      validity: expired
[ expired] (1). Simon Josefsson <simon@josefsson.org>
gpg> keytocard
Really move the primary key? (y/N) y
Please select where to store the key:
   (1) Signature key
   (3) Authentication key
Your selection? 1
sec  ed25519/D73CF638C53C06BE
     created: 2019-03-20  expired: 2019-10-22  usage: SC  
     trust: ultimate      validity: expired
[ expired] (1). Simon Josefsson <simon@josefsson.org>
gpg> 
Save changes? (y/N) y
jas@kaka:/media/jas/2c699cbd-b77e-4434-a0d6-0c4965864296$ 

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:~$ 

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:~$ 

Changes in littler version 0.3.18 (2023-03-25)

• Changes in examples scripts
  • roxy.r can now set an additional --libpath
  • getRStudioDesktop.r and getRStudioServer.r have updated default download file
  • install2.r and installGithub.r can set --type
  • r2u.r now has a --suffix option
  • tt.r removes a redundant library call
  • tttl.r has been added for testthat::test_local()
  • installRub.r has been added to install r-universe binaries on Ubuntu
  • install2.r has updated error capture messages (Tatsuya Shima and Dirk in #104)

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

Changes in RcppSMC version 0.2.7 (2023-03-22)

• Extensive extensions for conditional SMC and resample, updated hello_world example, added skeleton function for easier package creation (Ilya in #67,#72)
• Small package updates (Dirk in #75 fixing #74)

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

Advice for buyers Those are things I wish I would have known before buying:

1. 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
2. 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
3. you have to do some serious tuning to get proper (10h+ idle, 10 days suspend) power savings
4. 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
5. 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
6. the Framework monitor has an unusual aspect ratio (3:2): I like it (and it matches classic and digital photography aspect ratio), but it might surprise you

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:

• AMD Ryzen 7040 and 13th gen Intel board
• 16" laptop version (pre-order) with an expansion "bay" for an upgradeable graphics module which could also fit M.2 storage
• audio expansion card, since the 16 laptop doesn't have a combo jack
• official mainboard case (back-ordered)
• official battery case (no site yet)
• new bezel colors, including transluscent, green, purple and red (back-ordered)
• new, louder (80dB) speakers
• new 61Wh battery
• matte display
• new hinge

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
• Storage: 250-4000GB NVMe (or bring your own)
• Memory: 8-64GB DDR4-3200 (or bring your own)
• WiFi 6e (AX210, vPro optional, or bring your own)
• 296.63mm X 228.98mm X 15.85mm, 1.3Kg
• 13.5" display, 3:2 ratio, 2256px X 1504px, 100% sRGB, >400 nit
• 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
• test account on fwupd.org, "expressed interest to port to coreboot" (according to the Fedora developer) and are testing firmware updates over fwupd, present on LVFS testing, but including for the 12th gen, latest BIOS (3.06) was shipped through LVFS
• excellent documentation of the (proprietary) BIOS
• explicit Linux support with install guides, although you'll have to live with a bit of proprietary firmware, and not everything works correctly
• the 11th gen had good reviews: Ars Technica, Fedora developer, iFixit teardown, phoronix, amazing keyboard and touch pad, according to Linux After Dark, most exciting laptops I've ever broken (Cory Doctorow) ; more critical review from an OpenBSD developer
• the EC (Embedded Controller) is open source so of course people are hacking at it, some documentation on what's possible (e.g. changing LED colors, fan curves, etc), see also

Cons

• the 11th gen is out of stock, except for the higher-end CPUs, which are much less affordable (700$+)
• the 12th gen has compatibility issues with Debian, followup in the DebianOn page, but basically: brightness hotkeys, power management, wifi, the webcam is okay even though the chipset is the infamous alder lake because it does not have the fancy camera; most issues currently seem solvable, and upstream is working with mainline to get their shit working
• 12th gen might have issues with thunderbolt docks
• 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:

https://guides.frame.work/Guide/Framework\+Laptop\+DIY\+Edition\+Quick\+Start\+Guide/57

... which Firefox immediately transforms in:

https://guides.frame.work/Guide/Framework/+Laptop/+DIY/+Edition/+Quick/+Start/+Guide/57

I'm puzzled as to why they would send the URL that way, the proper URL is of course:

https://guides.frame.work/Guide/Framework+Laptop+DIY+Edition+Quick+Start+Guide/57

(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:

cat > /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/40-libinput.conf <<EOF
Section "InputClass"
      Identifier "libinput touch pad catchall"
      MatchIsTouchpad "on"
      MatchDevicePath "/dev/input/event*"
      Driver "libinput"
      Option "Tapping" "on"
      Option "TappingButtonMap" "lmr"
EndSection
EOF

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:

[Login]
HandlePowerKey=suspend
HandlePowerKeyLongPress=poweroff

You might have to create the directory first:

mkdir /etc/systemd/logind.conf.d/

Then restart logind:

systemctl restart systemd-logind

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 fn s 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 alt PrtScr (above F11) KEY, so for example alt fn F11 b should do a hard reset. This comment suggests you need to hold the fn only 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

... and a reboot. This solution is also documented in the upstream guide. Note that there's another solution flying around that fixes this by changing permissions on the input device but I haven't tested that or seen confirmation it works.

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:

Section "Device"
    Identifier  "Card0"
    Driver      "intel"
    Option      "Backlight"  "intel_backlight"
EndSection

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:

1. power (USB-C)
2. monitor 1 (DisplayPort)
3. monitor 2 (HDMI)
4. USB-A hub, which adds:
5. keyboard (USB-A)
6. mouse (USB-A)
7. Yubikey
8. 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:

autorandr -l horizontal &&
eho Xft.dpi: 96   xrdb -merge &&
systemctl restart terminal xcolortaillog background-image emacs &&
i3-msg restart

Kind of disruptive.

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: works, with slight hiss, see below

There's also a light sensor, but it conflicts with the keyboard brightness controls (see above). There's also an accelerometer, but it's off by default and will be removed from future builds.

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:

5411.85user 673.33system 1:37:46elapsed 103%CPU (0avgtext+0avgdata 831700maxresident)k
10594704inputs+87448000outputs (9131major+410636783minor)pagefaults 0swaps

This was using 16 watts of power, with full screen brightness. With all 16 cores (make -j16), it takes less than 25 minutes:

19251.06user 2467.47system 24:13.07elapsed 1494%CPU (0avgtext+0avgdata 831676maxresident)k
8321856inputs+87427848outputs (30792major+409145263minor)pagefaults 0swaps

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:

Memtest86+ v6.00b3        12th Gen Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-1240P
CLK/Temp: 2112MHz    78/78 C   Pass  2% #
L1 Cache:   48KB    414 GB/s   Test 46% ##################
L2 Cache: 1.25MB    118 GB/s   Test #3 [Moving inversions, 1s & 0s] 
L3 Cache:   12MB     43 GB/s   Testing: 16GB - 18GB [1GB of 15.7GB]
Memory  :  15.7GB  14.9 GB/s   Pattern: 
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
CPU: 4P+8E-Cores (16T)    SMP: 8T (PAR))    Time:  0:27:23  Status: Pass     \
RAM: 1600MHz (DDR4-3200) CAS 22-22-22-51    Pass:  1        Errors: 0
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Memory SPD Information
----------------------
 - Slot 2: 16GB DDR-4-3200 - Crucial CT16G4SFRA32A.C16FP (2022-W23)
                          Framework FRANMACP04
 <ESC> Exit  <F1> Configuration  <Space> Scroll Lock            6.00.unknown.x64

So about 30 minutes for a full 16GB memory test.

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-annex reinit, 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:

apt install fwupd-amd64-signed
fwupdmgr refresh
fwupdmgr get-updates
fwupdmgr update

Nice. The 12th gen BIOS updates, currently (January 2023) beta, can be deployed through LVFS with:

fwupdmgr enable-remote lvfs-testing
echo 'DisableCapsuleUpdateOnDisk=true' >> /etc/fwupd/uefi_capsule.conf 
fwupdmgr update

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:

cat >> /etc/default/console-setup <<EOF
FONTFACE="Terminus"
FONTSIZE=32x16
EOF
echo GRUB_GFXMODE=1024x768 >> /etc/default/grub
update-grub

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:

Time    User  Nice   Sys  Idle    IO  Run Ctxt/s  IRQ/s Fork Exec Exit  Watts
-------- ----- ----- ----- ----- ----- ---- ------ ------ ---- ---- ---- ------
 Average   1.7   0.0   0.5  97.6   0.2  1.2 4684.9 1985.2 126.6 39.1 128.0   7.57
 GeoMean   1.4   0.0   0.4  97.6   0.1  1.2 4416.6 1734.5 111.6 27.9 113.3   7.54
  StdDev   1.0   0.2   0.2   1.2   0.0  0.5 1584.7 1058.3 82.1 44.0 80.2   0.71
-------- ----- ----- ----- ----- ----- ---- ------ ------ ---- ---- ---- ------
 Minimum   0.2   0.0   0.2  94.9   0.1  1.0 2242.0  698.2 82.0 17.0 82.0   6.36
 Maximum   4.1   1.1   1.0  99.4   0.2  3.0 8687.4 4445.1 463.0 249.0 449.0   9.10
-------- ----- ----- ----- ----- ----- ---- ------ ------ ---- ---- ---- ------
Summary:
System:   7.57 Watts on average with standard deviation 0.71

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: review Arch Linux's tips on power saving
• 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 also under 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.

Standby battery usage I wrote some quick hack to evaluate how much power is used during sleep. Apparently, this is one of the areas that should have improved since the first Framework model, let's find out. My baseline for comparison is the Purism laptop, which, in 10 minutes, went from this:

sep 28 11:19:45 angela systemd-sleep[209379]: /sys/class/power_supply/BAT/charge_now                      =   6045 [mAh]

... to this:

sep 28 11:29:47 angela systemd-sleep[209725]: /sys/class/power_supply/BAT/charge_now                      =   6037 [mAh]

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:

sep 29 22:27:04 angela systemd-sleep[4515]: /sys/class/power_supply/BAT1/charge_full                    =   3518 [mAh]
sep 29 22:27:04 angela systemd-sleep[4515]: /sys/class/power_supply/BAT1/charge_now                     =   2861 [mAh]

... after:

sep 29 22:37:08 angela systemd-sleep[4743]: /sys/class/power_supply/BAT1/charge_now                     =   2812 [mAh]

... 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:

sep 29 23:03:11 angela systemd-sleep[3699]: /sys/class/power_supply/BAT1/charge_now                     =   2544 [mAh]

... after:

sep 29 23:04:25 angela systemd-sleep[4039]: /sys/class/power_supply/BAT1/charge_now                     =   2542 [mAh]

... 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:

printf s2idle > /sys/power/mem_sleep

Here's another test:

sep 30 22:25:50 angela systemd-sleep[32207]: /sys/class/power_supply/BAT1/charge_now                     =   1619 [mAh]
sep 30 22:31:30 angela systemd-sleep[32516]: /sys/class/power_supply/BAT1/charge_now                     =   1613 [mAh]

... 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?

A discussion of those results is in this forum post.

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.

Battery wear protection The BIOS has an option to limit charge to 80% to mitigate battery wear. There's a way to control the embedded controller from runtime with fw-ectool, partly documented here. The command would be:

sudo ectool fwchargelimit 80

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:

root@angela:/home/anarcat# tlp-stat -b
--- TLP 1.5.0 --------------------------------------------
+++ Battery Care
Plugin: generic
Supported features: none available
+++ Battery Status: BAT1
/sys/class/power_supply/BAT1/manufacturer                   = NVT
/sys/class/power_supply/BAT1/model_name                     = Framewo
/sys/class/power_supply/BAT1/cycle_count                    =      3
/sys/class/power_supply/BAT1/charge_full_design             =   3572 [mAh]
/sys/class/power_supply/BAT1/charge_full                    =   3541 [mAh]
/sys/class/power_supply/BAT1/charge_now                     =   1625 [mAh]
/sys/class/power_supply/BAT1/current_now                    =    178 [mA]
/sys/class/power_supply/BAT1/status                         = Discharging
/sys/class/power_supply/BAT1/charge_control_start_threshold = (not available)
/sys/class/power_supply/BAT1/charge_control_end_threshold   = (not available)
Charge                                                      =   45.9 [%]
Capacity                                                    =   99.1 [%]

One thing that is still missing is the charge threshold data (the (not available) above). There's been some work to make that accessible in August, stay tuned? This would also make it possible implement hysteresis support.

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:

echo 'on' > '/sys/bus/usb/devices/4-2/power/control'

... is a good workaround to bring the card back online. You can even return to power saving mode and the card will still work:

echo 'auto' > '/sys/bus/usb/devices/4-2/power/control'

Further research by Matt_Hartley from the Framework Team found this issue in the tlp tracker that shows how the USB_AUTOSUSPEND setting enables the power saving even if the driver doesn't support it, which, in retrospect, just sounds like a bad idea. To quote that issue:

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:

[ ID] Interval           Transfer     Bitrate         Retr
[  5]   0.00-10.00  sec  1.09 GBytes   937 Mbits/sec  238             sender
[  5]   0.00-10.00  sec  1.09 GBytes   934 Mbits/sec                  receiver

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:

[Unit]
Description=start compositing manager
PartOf=graphical-session.target
ConditionHost=angela
[Service]
Type=exec
ExecStart=compton --show-all-xerrors --backend glx --vsync opengl-swc
Restart=on-failure
[Install]
RequiredBy=graphical-session.target

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:

compiz (core) - Warn: No XI2 extension
compiz (core) - Error: Couldn't load plugin 'ccp'
compiz (core) - Error: Couldn't load plugin 'ccp'

Thanks to EmanueleRocca for figuring all that out. See also this discussion about power management on the Framework forum. Note that Wayland environments do not require any special configuration here and actually work better, see my Wayland migration notes for details.

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:

export CHROMIUM_FLAGS="$CHROMIUM_FLAGS --disable-gpu-compositing"

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:

echo "options i915 enable_dc=1 enable_guc_loading=1 enable_guc_submission=1 edp_vswing=0 enable_guc=2 enable_fbc=1 enable_psr=1 disable_power_well=0"   sudo tee /etc/modprobe.d/i915.conf

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:

1. pre-order
2. preparing batch
3. preparing order
4. payment complete
5. shipping
6. (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:

• Taoyuan, Taiwan 2022-09-23
• Anchorage, Alaska, USA (?!) 2022-09-24
• Memphis, Tennessee, USA 2022-09-25
• Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada (!! back the wrong way!) 2022-09-26
• Mirabel, Qu bec, Canada 2022-09-27
• Montr al, Qu bec, Canada

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.

Other resources

• dock questions:
  • list of compatible USB-C docks but beware of the above compatibility problems on the 12th gen
  • see also this comprehensive post on USB/TB/DP/docks which has a section on the Framework specifically
  • anelki recommended the OWC docks which primarily target Macs but apparently "make really good ones"
  • someone else recommended buying "Thunderbolt" docks instead of "USB-C" as the latter don't necessarily include the former, recommending CalDigit docks
• mods:
  • desktop mod (from this discussion), also a normal desktop adapter to reuse an existing case (from this thread)
  • mainboard case (official!)
  • battery case (!), the verge has extra photos of the mainboard and battery cases
  • tablet mod (kind of clunky, but works!)
  • keyboard mod (i.e. turn the Framework keyboard, touch pad, fingerprint reader and power buttons into a "normal" USB keyboard and hub)
  • triple screen laptop mod (video)
  • Thinkpad 701C transplant
  • Braille laptop
• Debian installation report, has good tips on the firmware hacks necessary
• Excellent 12th gen review from an Arch Linux user
• cool expansion port mods:
  • empty drawer
  • dual USB-C (mockup only), expansion hub (just an idea, references other discussions), actually seriously considered by Framework, limited by existing chipsets for now
  • full-size SD card reader
  • magnetic charger
  • Yubikey 5 case and solokey case
  • screwdriver
  • Ethernet (official, back-order as of 2022-09-13, now shipping as of 2023)
  • votes seem to go towards Ethernet and full-sized SD card reader
  • 3D printed expansion card holder
  • LTE modem card (design stage)
  • check out this forum category for a cornucopia of those
• upstream resources:
  • community forum, lots of information, much support, wow!
  • knowledge base
  • repair guides
  • Linux-specific guides
  • blog (RSS)
  • chat is on Discord, but bridged with Matrix, there's talk of bridging it with IRC as well, for now there's a handful of us in #framework on https://libera.chat/
  • GitHub organization, interesting repositories include the Expansion Cards, Input Modules, Expansion Bay, mainboard, EmbeddedController

netstat -anpe

netstat -pleunt   sort

ss -pleuntO

ss -plunt0

ss -pluntO --no-header   sed 's/^\([a-z]*\) *[A-Z]* *[0-9]* [0-9]* *[0-9]* */\1/'   sed 's/^[^:]*:\(:\]:\)\?//;s/\([0-9]*\) *[^ ]*/\1\t/;s/,fd=[0-9]*//'   sort -gu

anarcat@angela:~$ sudo ss -pluntO --no-header   sed 's/^\([a-z]*\) *[A-Z]* *[0-9]* [0-9]* *[0-9]* */\1/'   sed 's/^[^:]*:\(:\]:\)\?//;s/\([0-9]*\) *[^ ]*/\1\t/;s/,fd=[0-9]*//'   sort -gu
          [::]:* users:(("unbound",pid=1864))        
22  users:(("sshd",pid=1830))           
25  users:(("master",pid=3150))        
53  users:(("unbound",pid=1864))        
323 users:(("chronyd",pid=1876))        
500 users:(("charon",pid=2817))        
631 users:(("cups-browsed",pid=2744))   
2628    users:(("dictd",pid=2825))          
4001    users:(("emacs",pid=3578))          
4500    users:(("charon",pid=2817))        
5353    users:(("avahi-daemon",pid=1423))  
6600    users:(("systemd",pid=3461))       
8384    users:(("syncthing",pid=232169))   
9050    users:(("tor",pid=2857))            
21027   users:(("syncthing",pid=232169))   
22000   users:(("syncthing",pid=232169))   
33231   users:(("syncthing",pid=232169))   
34953   users:(("syncthing",pid=232169))   
35770   users:(("syncthing",pid=232169))   
44944   users:(("syncthing",pid=232169))   
47337   users:(("syncthing",pid=232169))   
48903   users:(("mosh-client",pid=234126))  
52774   users:(("syncthing",pid=232169))   
52938   users:(("avahi-daemon",pid=1423))  
54029   users:(("avahi-daemon",pid=1423))  
anarcat@angela:~$

ss -pluntO --no-header   \
    sed 's/^\([a-z]*\) *[A-Z]* *[0-9]* [0-9]* *[0-9]* */\1/;s/^tcp//;s/^udp//'   \
    grep -v -e '^\[fe80::' -e '^127.0.0.1' -e '^\[::1\]' -e '^192\.' -e '^172\.'   \
    sed 's/^[^:]*:\(:\]:\)\?//;s/\([0-9]*\) *[^ ]*/\1\t/;s/,fd=[0-9]*//'  \
    sort -gu

anarcat@angela:~$ sudo ss -pluntO --no-header           sed 's/^\([a-
z]*\) *[A-Z]* *[0-9]* [0-9]* *[0-9]* */\1/;s/^tcp//;s/^udp//'        
   grep -v -e '^\[fe80::' -e '^127.0.0.1' -e '^\[::1\]' -e '^192\.' -
e '^172\.'           sed 's/^[^:]*:\(:\]:\)\?//;s/\([0-9]*\) *[^ ]*/\
1\t/;s/,fd=[0-9]*//'          sort -gu
22  users:(("sshd",pid=1830))           
500 users:(("charon",pid=2817))        
631 users:(("cups-browsed",pid=2744))   
4500    users:(("charon",pid=2817))        
5353    users:(("avahi-daemon",pid=1423))  
6600    users:(("systemd",pid=3461))       
21027   users:(("syncthing",pid=232169))   
22000   users:(("syncthing",pid=232169))   
34953   users:(("syncthing",pid=232169))   
35770   users:(("syncthing",pid=232169))   
48903   users:(("mosh-client",pid=234126))  
52938   users:(("avahi-daemon",pid=1423))  
54029   users:(("avahi-daemon",pid=1423))

lsof -iTCP -sTCP:LISTEN +c 15   grep -v localhost   sort

lsof -i @localhost

lsof -iUDP -sUDP:^Idle

lsof: no UDP state names available: UDP:^Idle

ss -pluO

ss -plurO   grep -v localhost

ss -pluntO '! ( src = localhost )'

ss -nplutO '! ( src = localhost )'    \
    sed 's/\(udp\ tcp\).*:\([0-9][0-9]*\)/\2\t\1\t/;s/\([0-9][0-9]*\t[udtcp]*\t\)[^u]*users:(("/\1/;s/".*//;s/.*Address:Port.*/Netid\tPort\tProcess/'   \
    sort -nu

anarcat@angela:~$ sudo ss -nplutO '! ( src = localhost )'    sed 's/\(udp\ tcp\).*:\([0-9][0-9]*\)/\2\t\1\t/;s/\([0-9][0-9]*\t[udtcp]*\t\)[^u]*users:(("/\1/;s/".*//;s/.*Address:Port.*/Port\tNetid\tProcess/'   sort -nu
Port    Netid   Process
22  tcp sshd
500 udp charon
546 udp NetworkManager
631 udp cups-browsed
4500    udp charon
5353    udp avahi-daemon
6600    tcp systemd
21027   udp syncthing
22000   udp syncthing
34953   udp syncthing
35770   udp syncthing
48903   udp mosh-client
52938   udp avahi-daemon
54029   udp avahi-daemon

• Where Flathub is today as a strong ecosystem with 2,000 apps
• Our progress on evolving Flathub from a build service to an app store
• The economic barrier to growing the ecosystem, and its consequences
• What s next to overcome our challenges with focused initiatives

2022-12-31  pay credit card
  asset:bank      -500
  liabilities:credit card  ;  date:2022-12-15

2023-01-25  buy some shoes. hedging on the size
  liabilities:credit card      -200
  expenses:shoes
2023-02-05  return the ones that don't fit
  liabilities:credit card       150
  expenses:shoes

Balance changes in 2023-01-01..2023-02-28:
$ hledger bal -Mt expenses:shoes
                    Jan     Feb 
================++===============
 expenses:shoes     200    -150 
----------------++---------------
                    200    -150 

2023-02-05  return the ones that don't fit
  liabilities:credit card       150
  expenses:shoes  ; date:2023-01-25

$ hledger bal -Mt expenses:shoes
Balance changes in 2023-01-01..2023-02-28:
                   Jan  Feb 
================++===========
 expenses:shoes     50    0 
----------------++-----------
                    50    0 

Changes in version 0.0.2 (2023-03-05)

• One C++ operation is protected from operating on a nullptr
• Additional tests have been added, tests now cover all three demo / example functions
• Return values and code for the examples linear_regression and quadratic_expression have been adjusted

Changes in version 0.0.1 (2023-02-24)

• Initial release version and CRAN upload

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