Search Results: "ender"

10 May 2023

Charles Plessy: Upvote to patch Firefox to render Markdown

I previously wrote that when Firefox receives a file whose media type is text/markdown, it prompts the user to download it, whereas other browsers display rendered results. Now it is possible to upvote a proposal on connect.mozilla.org asking that Firefox renders Markdown by default.

6 May 2023

Reproducible Builds: Reproducible Builds in April 2023

Welcome to the April 2023 report from the Reproducible Builds project! In these reports we outline the most important things that we have been up to over the past month. And, as always, if you are interested in contributing to the project, please visit our Contribute page on our website.

General news Trisquel is a fully-free operating system building on the work of Ubuntu Linux. This month, Simon Josefsson published an article on his blog titled Trisquel is 42% Reproducible!. Simon wrote:
The absolute number may not be impressive, but what I hope is at least a useful contribution is that there actually is a number on how much of Trisquel is reproducible. Hopefully this will inspire others to help improve the actual metric.
Simon wrote another blog post this month on a new tool to ensure that updates to Linux distribution archive metadata (eg. via apt-get update) will only use files that have been recorded in a globally immutable and tamper-resistant ledger. A similar solution exists for Arch Linux (called pacman-bintrans) which was announced in August 2021 where an archive of all issued signatures is publically accessible.
Joachim Breitner wrote an in-depth blog post on a bootstrap-capable GHC, the primary compiler for the Haskell programming language. As a quick background to what this is trying to solve, in order to generate a fully trustworthy compile chain, trustworthy root binaries are needed and a popular approach to address this problem is called bootstrappable builds where the core idea is to address previously-circular build dependencies by creating a new dependency path using simpler prerequisite versions of software. Joachim takes an somewhat recursive approach to the problem for Haskell, leading to the inadvertently humourous question: Can I turn all of GHC into one module, and compile that? Elsewhere in the world of bootstrapping, Janneke Nieuwenhuizen and Ludovic Court s wrote a blog post on the GNU Guix blog announcing The Full-Source Bootstrap, specifically:
[ ] the third reduction of the Guix bootstrap binaries has now been merged in the main branch of Guix! If you run guix pull today, you get a package graph of more than 22,000 nodes rooted in a 357-byte program something that had never been achieved, to our knowledge, since the birth of Unix.
More info about this change is available on the post itself, including:
The full-source bootstrap was once deemed impossible. Yet, here we are, building the foundations of a GNU/Linux distro entirely from source, a long way towards the ideal that the Guix project has been aiming for from the start. There are still some daunting tasks ahead. For example, what about the Linux kernel? The good news is that the bootstrappable community has grown a lot, from two people six years ago there are now around 100 people in the #bootstrappable IRC channel.

Michael Ablassmeier created a script called pypidiff as they were looking for a way to track differences between packages published on PyPI. According to Micahel, pypidiff uses diffoscope to create reports on the published releases and automatically pushes them to a GitHub repository. This can be seen on the pypi-diff GitHub page (example).
Eleuther AI, a non-profit AI research group, recently unveiled Pythia, a collection of 16 Large Language Model (LLMs) trained on public data in the same order designed specifically to facilitate scientific research. According to a post on MarkTechPost:
Pythia is the only publicly available model suite that includes models that were trained on the same data in the same order [and] all the corresponding data and tools to download and replicate the exact training process are publicly released to facilitate further research.
These properties are intended to allow researchers to understand how gender bias (etc.) can affected by training data and model scale.
Back in February s report we reported on a series of changes to the Sphinx documentation generator that was initiated after attempts to get the alembic Debian package to build reproducibly. Although Chris Lamb was able to identify the source problem and provided a potential patch that might fix it, James Addison has taken the issue in hand, leading to a large amount of activity resulting in a proposed pull request that is waiting to be merged.
WireGuard is a popular Virtual Private Network (VPN) service that aims to be faster, simpler and leaner than other solutions to create secure connections between computing devices. According to a post on the WireGuard developer mailing list, the WireGuard Android app can now be built reproducibly so that its contents can be publicly verified. According to the post by Jason A. Donenfeld, the F-Droid project now does this verification by comparing their build of WireGuard to the build that the WireGuard project publishes. When they match, the new version becomes available. This is very positive news.
Author and public speaker, V. M. Brasseur published a sample chapter from her upcoming book on corporate open source strategy which is the topic of Software Bill of Materials (SBOM):
A software bill of materials (SBOM) is defined as a nested inventory for software, a list of ingredients that make up software components. When you receive a physical delivery of some sort, the bill of materials tells you what s inside the box. Similarly, when you use software created outside of your organisation, the SBOM tells you what s inside that software. The SBOM is a file that declares the software supply chain (SSC) for that specific piece of software. [ ]

Several distributions noticed recent versions of the Linux Kernel are no longer reproducible because the BPF Type Format (BTF) metadata is not generated in a deterministic way. This was discussed on the #reproducible-builds IRC channel, but no solution appears to be in sight for now.

Community news On our mailing list this month: Holger Levsen gave a talk at foss-north 2023 in Gothenburg, Sweden on the topic of Reproducible Builds, the first ten years. Lastly, there were a number of updates to our website, including:
  • Chris Lamb attempted a number of ways to try and fix literal : .lead appearing in the page [ ][ ][ ], made all the Back to who is involved links italics [ ], and corrected the syntax of the _data/sponsors.yml file [ ].
  • Holger Levsen added his recent talk [ ], added Simon Josefsson, Mike Perry and Seth Schoen to the contributors page [ ][ ][ ], reworked the People page a little [ ] [ ], as well as fixed spelling of Arch Linux [ ].
Lastly, Mattia Rizzolo moved some old sponsors to a former section [ ] and Simon Josefsson added Trisquel GNU/Linux. [ ]

Debian
  • Vagrant Cascadian reported on the Debian s build-essential package set, which was inspired by how close we are to making the Debian build-essential set reproducible and how important that set of packages are in general . Vagrant mentioned that: I have some progress, some hope, and I daresay, some fears . [ ]
  • Debian Developer Cyril Brulebois (kibi) filed a bug against snapshot.debian.org after they noticed that there are many missing dinstalls that is to say, the snapshot service is not capturing 100% of all of historical states of the Debian archive. This is relevant to reproducibility because without the availability historical versions, it is becomes impossible to repeat a build at a future date in order to correlate checksums. .
  • 20 reviews of Debian packages were added, 21 were updated and 5 were removed this month adding to our knowledge about identified issues. Chris Lamb added a new build_path_in_line_annotations_added_by_ruby_ragel toolchain issue. [ ]
  • Mattia Rizzolo announced that the data for the stretch archive on tests.reproducible-builds.org has been archived. This matches the archival of stretch within Debian itself. This is of some historical interest, as stretch was the first Debian release regularly tested by the Reproducible Builds project.

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

diffoscope development diffoscope version 241 was uploaded to Debian unstable by Chris Lamb. It included contributions already covered in previous months as well a change by Chris Lamb to add a missing raise statement that was accidentally dropped in a previous commit. [ ]

Testing framework The Reproducible Builds project operates a comprehensive testing framework (available at tests.reproducible-builds.org) in order to check packages and other artifacts for reproducibility. In April, a number of changes were made, including:
  • Holger Levsen:
    • Significant work on a new Documented Jenkins Maintenance (djm) script to support logged maintenance of nodes, etc. [ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ]
    • Add the new APT repo url for Jenkins itself with a new signing key. [ ][ ]
    • In the Jenkins shell monitor, allow 40 GiB of files for diffoscope for the Debian experimental distribution as Debian is frozen around the release at the moment. [ ]
    • Updated Arch Linux testing to cleanup leftover files left in /tmp/archlinux-ci/ after three days. [ ][ ][ ]
    • Mark a number of nodes hosted by Oregon State University Open Source Lab (OSUOSL) as online and offline. [ ][ ][ ]
    • Update the node health checks to detect failures to end schroot sessions. [ ]
    • Filter out another duplicate contributor from the contributor statistics. [ ]
  • Mattia Rizzolo:


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

5 May 2023

Jonathan Dowland: sidebar dividers for mutt

I wanted to start using (neo)mutt's sidebar and I wanted a way of separating groups of mail folders in the list. To achieve that I interleaved a couple of fake "divider" folder names. It looks like this:
Screenshot of neomutt with sidebar Screenshot of neomutt with sidebar
This was spurred on by an attempt to revamp my personal organisation. I've been using mutt for at least 20 years (these days neomutt), which, by default, does not show you a list of mail folders all the time. The default view is an index of your default mailbox, from which you can view a mail (pager view), switch to a mailbox, or do a bunch of other things, some of which involve showing a list of mailboxes. But the list is not omnipresent. That's somewhat of a feature, if you believe that you don't need to see that list until you are actually planning to pick from it. There's an old and widespread "sidebar" patch for mutt (which neomutt ships out of the box). It reserves a portion of the left-hand side of the terminal to render a list of mailboxes. It felt superfluous to me so I never really thought to use it, until now: I wanted to make my Inbox functional again, and to achieve that, I needed to move mail out of it which was serving as a placeholder for a particular Action, or as a reminder that I was Waiting on a response. What was stopping me was a feeling I'd forget to check other mailboxes. So, I need to have them up in my face all the time to remind me. Key for me, to make it useful, is to control the ordering of mailboxes and to divide them up using the interleaved fake mailboxes. The key configuration is therefore 
set sidebar_sort_method = 'unsorted'
mailboxes =INBOX =Action =Waiting
mailboxes '=   ~~~~~~~~' # divider
...
My groupings, for what it's worth, are: the key functional mailboxes (INBOX/Action/Waiting) come first; last, is reference ('2023' is the name of my current Archive folder; the other folders listed are project-specific reference and the two mailing lists I still directly subscribe to). Sandwiched in between is currently a single mailbox which is for a particular project for which it makes sense to have a separate mailbox. Once that's gone, so will that middle section. For my work mail I do something similar, but the groupings are
  1. INBOX/Action/Waiting
  2. Reference (Sent Mail, Starred Mail)
  3. More reference (internal mailing lists I need to closely monitor)
  4. Even more reference (less important mailing lists)
As with everything, these approaches are under constant review.

4 May 2023

Matthew Garrett: Twitter's e2ee DMs are better than nothing

(Edit 2023-05-10: This has now launched for a subset of Twitter users. The code that existed to notify users that device identities had changed does not appear to have been enabled - as a result, in its current form, Twitter can absolutely MITM conversations and read your messages)

Elon Musk appeared on an interview with Tucker Carlson last month, with one of the topics being the fact that Twitter could be legally compelled to hand over users' direct messages to government agencies since they're held on Twitter's servers and aren't encrypted. Elon talked about how they were in the process of implementing proper encryption for DMs that would prevent this - "You could put a gun to my head and I couldn't tell you. That's how it should be."

tl;dr - in the current implementation, while Twitter could subvert the end-to-end nature of the encryption, it could not do so without users being notified. If any user involved in a conversation were to ignore that notification, all messages in that conversation (including ones sent in the past) could then be decrypted. This isn't ideal, but it still seems like an improvement over having no encryption at all. More technical discussion follows.

For context: all information about Twitter's implementation here has been derived from reverse engineering version 9.86.0 of the Android client and 9.56.1 of the iOS client (the current versions at time of writing), and the feature hasn't yet launched. While it's certainly possible that there could be major changes in the protocol between now launch, Elon has asserted that they plan to launch the feature this week so it's plausible that this reflects what'll ship.

For it to be impossible for Twitter to read DMs, they need to not only be encrypted, they need to be encrypted with a key that's not available to Twitter. This is what's referred to as "end-to-end encryption", or e2ee - it means that the only components in the communication chain that have access to the unencrypted data are the endpoints. Even if the message passes through other systems (and even if it's stored on other systems), those systems do not have access to the keys that would be needed to decrypt the data.

End-to-end encrypted messengers were initially popularised by Signal, but the Signal protocol has since been incorporated into WhatsApp and is probably much more widely used there. Millions of people per day are sending messages to each other that pass through servers controlled by third parties, but those third parties are completely unable to read the contents of those messages. This is the scenario that Elon described, where there's no degree of compulsion that could cause the people relaying messages to and from people to decrypt those messages afterwards.

But for this to be possible, both ends of the communication need to be able to encrypt messages in a way the other end can decrypt. This is usually performed using AES, a well-studied encryption algorithm with no known significant weaknesses. AES is a form of what's referred to as a symmetric encryption, one where encryption and decryption are performed with the same key. This means that both ends need access to that key, which presents us with a bootstrapping problem. Until a shared secret is obtained, there's no way to communicate securely, so how do we generate that shared secret? A common mechanism for this is something called Diffie Hellman key exchange, which makes use of asymmetric encryption. In asymmetric encryption, an encryption key can be split into two components - a public key and a private key. Both devices involved in the communication combine their private key and the other party's public key to generate a secret that can only be decoded with access to the private key. As long as you know the other party's public key, you can now securely generate a shared secret with them. Even a third party with access to all the public keys won't be able to identify this secret. Signal makes use of a variation of Diffie-Hellman called Extended Triple Diffie-Hellman that has some desirable properties, but it's not strictly necessary for the implementation of something that's end-to-end encrypted.

Although it was rumoured that Twitter would make use of the Signal protocol, and in fact there are vestiges of code in the Twitter client that still reference Signal, recent versions of the app have shipped with an entirely different approach that appears to have been written from scratch. It seems simple enough. Each device generates an asymmetric keypair using the NIST P-256 elliptic curve, along with a device identifier. The device identifier and the public half of the key are uploaded to Twitter using a new API endpoint called /1.1/keyregistry/register. When you want to send an encrypted DM to someone, the app calls /1.1/keyregistry/extract_public_keys with the IDs of the users you want to communicate with, and gets back a list of their public keys. It then looks up the conversation ID (a numeric identifier that corresponds to a given DM exchange - for a 1:1 conversation between two people it doesn't appear that this ever changes, so if you DMed an account 5 years ago and then DM them again now from the same account, the conversation ID will be the same) in a local database to retrieve a conversation key. If that key doesn't exist yet, the sender generates a random one. The message is then encrypted with the conversation key using AES in GCM mode, and the conversation key is then put through Diffie-Hellman with each of the recipients' public device keys. The encrypted message is then sent to Twitter along with the list of encrypted conversation keys. When each of the recipients' devices receives the message it checks whether it already has a copy of the conversation key, and if not performs its half of the Diffie-Hellman negotiation to decrypt the encrypted conversation key. One it has the conversation key it decrypts it and shows it to the user.

What would happen if Twitter changed the registered public key associated with a device to one where they held the private key, or added an entirely new device to a user's account? If the app were to just happily send a message with the conversation key encrypted with that new key, Twitter would be able to decrypt that and obtain the conversation key. Since the conversation key is tied to the conversation, not any given pair of devices, obtaining the conversation key means you can then decrypt every message in that conversation, including ones sent before the key was obtained.

(An aside: Signal and WhatsApp make use of a protocol called Sesame which involves additional secret material that's shared between every device a user owns, hence why you have to do that QR code dance whenever you add a new device to your account. I'm grossly over-simplifying how clever the Signal approach is here, largely because I don't understand the details of it myself. The Signal protocol uses something called the Double Ratchet Algorithm to implement the actual message encryption keys in such a way that even if someone were able to successfully impersonate a device they'd only be able to decrypt messages sent after that point even if they had encrypted copies of every previous message in the conversation)

How's this avoided? Based on the UI that exists in the iOS version of the app, in a fairly straightforward way - each user can only have a single device that supports encrypted messages. If the user (or, in our hypothetical, a malicious Twitter) replaces the device key, the client will generate a notification. If the user pays attention to that notification and verifies with the recipient through some out of band mechanism that the device has actually been replaced, then everything is fine. But, if any participant in the conversation ignores this warning, the holder of the subverted key can obtain the conversation key and decrypt the entire history of the conversation. That's strictly worse than anything based on Signal, where such impersonation would simply not work, but even in the Twitter case it's not possible for someone to silently subvert the security.

So when Elon says Twitter wouldn't be able to decrypt these messages even if someone held a gun to his head, there's a condition applied to that - it's true as long as nobody fucks up. This is clearly better than the messages just not being encrypted at all in the first place, but overall it's a weaker solution than Signal. If you're currently using Twitter DMs, should you turn on encryption? As long as the limitations aren't too limiting, definitely! Should you use this in preference to Signal or WhatsApp? Almost certainly not. This seems like a genuine incremental improvement, but it'd be easy to interpret what Elon says as providing stronger guarantees than actually exist.

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18 April 2023

Matthew Garrett: PSA: upgrade your LUKS key derivation function

Here's an article from a French anarchist describing how his (encrypted) laptop was seized after he was arrested, and material from the encrypted partition has since been entered as evidence against him. His encryption password was supposedly greater than 20 characters and included a mixture of cases, numbers, and punctuation, so in the absence of any sort of opsec failures this implies that even relatively complex passwords can now be brute forced, and we should be transitioning to even more secure passphrases.

Or does it? Let's go into what LUKS is doing in the first place. The actual data is typically encrypted with AES, an extremely popular and well-tested encryption algorithm. AES has no known major weaknesses and is not considered to be practically brute-forceable - at least, assuming you have a random key. Unfortunately it's not really practical to ask a user to type in 128 bits of binary every time they want to unlock their drive, so another approach has to be taken.

This is handled using something called a "key derivation function", or KDF. A KDF is a function that takes some input (in this case the user's password) and generates a key. As an extremely simple example, think of MD5 - it takes an input and generates a 128-bit output, so we could simply MD5 the user's password and use the output as an AES key. While this could technically be considered a KDF, it would be an extremely bad one! MD5s can be calculated extremely quickly, so someone attempting to brute-force a disk encryption key could simply generate the MD5 of every plausible password (probably on a lot of machines in parallel, likely using GPUs) and test each of them to see whether it decrypts the drive.

(things are actually slightly more complicated than this - your password is used to generate a key that is then used to encrypt and decrypt the actual encryption key. This is necessary in order to allow you to change your password without having to re-encrypt the entire drive - instead you simply re-encrypt the encryption key with the new password-derived key. This also allows you to have multiple passwords or unlock mechanisms per drive)

Good KDFs reduce this risk by being what's technically referred to as "expensive". Rather than performing one simple calculation to turn a password into a key, they perform a lot of calculations. The number of calculations performed is generally configurable, in order to let you trade off between the amount of security (the number of calculations you'll force an attacker to perform when attempting to generate a key from a potential password) and performance (the amount of time you're willing to wait for your laptop to generate the key after you type in your password so it can actually boot). But, obviously, this tradeoff changes over time - defaults that made sense 10 years ago are not necessarily good defaults now. If you set up your encrypted partition some time ago, the number of calculations required may no longer be considered up to scratch.

And, well, some of these assumptions are kind of bad in the first place! Just making things computationally expensive doesn't help a lot if your adversary has the ability to test a large number of passwords in parallel. GPUs are extremely good at performing the sort of calculations that KDFs generally use, so an attacker can "just" get a whole pile of GPUs and throw them at the problem. KDFs that are computationally expensive don't do a great deal to protect against this. However, there's another axis of expense that can be considered - memory. If the KDF algorithm requires a significant amount of RAM, the degree to which it can be performed in parallel on a GPU is massively reduced. A Geforce 4090 may have 16,384 execution units, but if each password attempt requires 1GB of RAM and the card only has 24GB on board, the attacker is restricted to running 24 attempts in parallel.

So, in these days of attackers with access to a pile of GPUs, a purely computationally expensive KDF is just not a good choice. And, unfortunately, the subject of this story was almost certainly using one of those. Ubuntu 18.04 used the LUKS1 header format, and the only KDF supported in this format is PBKDF2. This is not a memory expensive KDF, and so is vulnerable to GPU-based attacks. But even so, systems using the LUKS2 header format used to default to argon2i, again not a memory expensive KDFwhich is memory strong, but not designed to be resistant to GPU attack (thanks to the comments pointing out my misunderstanding here). New versions default to argon2id, which is. You want to be using argon2id.

What makes this worse is that distributions generally don't update this in any way. If you installed your system and it gave you pbkdf2 as your KDF, you're probably still using pbkdf2 even if you've upgraded to a system that would use argon2id on a fresh install. Thankfully, this can all be fixed-up in place. But note that if anything goes wrong here you could lose access to all your encrypted data, so before doing anything make sure it's all backed up (and figure out how to keep said backup secure so you don't just have your data seized that way).

First, make sure you're running as up-to-date a version of your distribution as possible. Having tools that support the LUKS2 format doesn't mean that your distribution has all of that integrated, and old distribution versions may allow you to update your LUKS setup without actually supporting booting from it. Also, if you're using an encrypted /boot, stop now - very recent versions of grub2 support LUKS2, but they don't support argon2id, and this will render your system unbootable.

Next, figure out which device under /dev corresponds to your encrypted partition. Run

lsblk

and look for entries that have a type of "crypt". The device above that in the tree is the actual encrypted device. Record that name, and run

sudo cryptsetup luksHeaderBackup /dev/whatever --header-backup-file /tmp/luksheader

and copy that to a USB stick or something. If something goes wrong here you'll be able to boot a live image and run

sudo cryptsetup luksHeaderRestore /dev/whatever --header-backup-file luksheader

to restore it.

(Edit to add: Once everything is working, delete this backup! It contains the old weak key, and someone with it can potentially use that to brute force your disk encryption key using the old KDF even if you've updated the on-disk KDF.)

Next, run

sudo cryptsetup luksDump /dev/whatever

and look for the Version: line. If it's version 1, you need to update the header to LUKS2. Run

sudo cryptsetup convert /dev/whatever --type luks2

and follow the prompts. Make sure your system still boots, and if not go back and restore the backup of your header. Assuming everything is ok at this point, run

sudo cryptsetup luksDump /dev/whatever

again and look for the PBKDF: line in each keyslot (pay attention only to the keyslots, ignore any references to pbkdf2 that come after the Digests: line). If the PBKDF is either "pbkdf2" or "argon2i" you should convert to argon2id. Run the following:

sudo cryptsetup luksConvertKey /dev/whatever --pbkdf argon2id

and follow the prompts. If you have multiple passwords associated with your drive you'll have multiple keyslots, and you'll need to repeat this for each password.

Distributions! You should really be handling this sort of thing on upgrade. People who installed their systems with your encryption defaults several years ago are now much less secure than people who perform a fresh install today. Please please please do something about this.

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12 April 2023

Jamie McClelland: Doing whatever Gmail says

As we slowly move our members to our new email infrastructure, an unexpected twist turned up: One member reported getting the Gmail warning:
Be careful with this message The sender hasn t authenticated this message so Gmail can t verify that it actually came from them.
They have their email delivered to May First, but have configured Gmail to pull in that email using the Check mail from other accounts feature. It worked fine on our old infrastructure, but started giving this message when we transitioned. A further twist: he only receives this message from email sent by other people in his organization - in other words email sent via May First gets flagged, email sent from other people does not. These Gmail messages typically warn users about email that has failed (or lacks) both SPF and DKIM. However, before diving into the technical details, my first thought was: why is Gmail giving a warning on a message that wasn t even delivered to them? It s always nice to get confirmation from others that this is totally wrong behavior. Unfortunately, when it s Gmail, it doesn t matter if they are wrong. We all have to deal with it. So next, I decided to investigate why this message failed both DKIM (digital signature) and SPF (ensuring the message was sent from an authorized server). Examining the headers immediately turned up the SPF failure: 
Authentication-Results: mx.google.com;
       spf=fail (google.com: domain of xxx@xxx.org does not designate n.n.n.n as permitted sender) smtp.mailfrom=xxx@xxx.org
The IP address Google checked to ensure the message was sent by an authorized server is the IP address of our internal mail filter server in our new email infrastructure. That s the last hop before delivery to the user s mailbox, so that s the last hop Gmail sees. This is why Gmail is totally wrong to run this check: all email messages retreived via their mail fecthing service are going to fail the SPF test because Gmail has no way of knowing what the actual last hop is. So why is this problem only showing up after we transitioned to our new infrastructure? Because our old infrastructure had only one mail server for every user. The one mail server was the MX server and the relay server, so it was included in their SPF record. And why does this only affect mail sent via May First and not other domains? Because we add our DKIM signature to outgoing email, not to email delivered internally. Therefore, these messages both fail the SPF check and also don t have a DKIM signature. Other messages have a DKIM signature. Ugggg. So what do we do now? Clearly, something dumb and simple is in order: I added the IP addresses of our internal filter servers to our global SPF record. Someday, years from now, after Gmail is long gone (or has fixed this dumb behavior), when I m doing whatever retired people like me do, someone will notice that our internal filter server IPs are included in our SPF record. Hopefully they will fix the problem, but instead they ll probably think: no idea why these are here - something will probably break if I remove them.

11 April 2023

Russ Allbery: Review: Circe

Review: Circe, by Madeline Miller
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Copyright: April 2018
Printing: 2020
ISBN: 0-316-55633-5
Format: Kindle
Pages: 421
Circe is the story of the goddess Circe, best known as a minor character in Homer's Odyssey. Circe was Miller's third book if you count the short novella Galatea. She wrote it after Song of Achilles, a reworking of part of the Iliad, but as with Homer, you do not need to read Song of Achilles first. You will occasionally see Circe marketed or reviewed as a retelling of the Odyssey, but it isn't in any meaningful sense. Odysseus doesn't make an appearance until nearly halfway through the book, and the material directly inspired by the Odyssey is only about a quarter of the book. There is nearly as much here from the Telegony, a lost ancient Greek epic poem that we know about only from summaries by later writers and which picks up after the end of the Odyssey. What this is, instead, is Circe's story, starting with her childhood in the halls of Helios, the Titan sun god and her father. She does not have a happy childhood; her voice is considered weak by the gods (Homer describes her as having "human speech"), and her mother and elder siblings are vicious and cruel. Her father is high in the councils of the Titans, who have been overthrown by Zeus and the other Olympians. She is in awe of him and sits at his feet to observe his rule, but he's a petty tyrant who cares very little about her. Her only true companion is her brother Ae tes. The key event of the early book comes when Prometheus is temporarily chained in Helios's halls after stealing fire from the gods and before Zeus passes judgment on him. A young Circe brings him something to drink and has a brief conversation with him. That's the spark for one of the main themes of this book: Circe slowly developing a conscience and empathy, neither of which are common among Miller's gods. But it's still a long road from there to her first meeting with Odysseus. One of the best things about this book is the way that Miller unravels the individual stories of Greek myth and weaves them into a chronological narrative of Circe's life. Greek mythology is mostly individual stories, often contradictory and with only a loose chronology, but Miller pulls together all the ones that touch on Circe's family and turns them into a coherent history. This is not easy to do, and she makes it feel effortless. We get a bit of Jason and Medea (Jason is as dumb as a sack of rocks, and Circe can tell there's already something not right with Medea), the beginnings of the story of Theseus and Ariadne, and Daedalus (one of my favorite characters in the book) with his son Icarus, in addition to the stories more directly associated with Circe (a respinning of Glaucus and Scylla from Ovid's Metamorphoses that makes Circe more central). By the time Odysseus arrives on Circe's island, this world feels rich and full of history, and Circe has had a long and traumatic history that has left her suspicious and hardened. If you know some Greek mythology already, seeing it deftly woven into this new shape is a delight, but Circe may be even better if this is your first introduction to some of these stories. There are pieces missing, since Circe only knows the parts she's present for or that someone can tell her about later, but what's here is vivid, easy to follow, and recast in a narrative structure that's more familiar to modern readers. Miller captures the larger-than-life feel of myth while giving the characters an interiority and comprehensible emotional heft that often gets summarized out of myth retellings or lost in translation from ancient plays and epics, and she does it without ever calling the reader's attention to the mechanics. The prose, similarly, is straightforward and clear, getting out of the way of the story but still providing a sense of place and description where it's needed. This book feels honed, edited and streamlined until it maintains an irresistible pace. There was only one place where I felt like the story dragged (the raising of Telegonus), and then mostly because it's full of anger and anxiety and frustration and loss of control, which is precisely what Miller was trying to achieve. The rest of the book pulls the reader relentlessly forward while still delivering moments of beauty or sharp observation.
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 did not enjoy reading about Telegonus's childhood (it was too stressful; I don't like reading about characters fighting in that way), but apart from that, the last half of this book is simply beautiful. By the time Odysseus arrives, we're thoroughly in Circe's head and agree with all of the reasons why he might receive a chilly reception. Odysseus talks the readers around at the same time that he talks Circe around. It's one of the better examples of writing intelligent, observant, and thoughtful characters that I have read recently. I also liked that Odysseus has real flaws, and those flaws do not go away even when the reader warms to him. I'll avoid saying too much about the very end of the book to avoid spoilers (insofar as one can spoil Greek myth, but the last quarter of the book is where I think Miller adds the most to the story). I'll just say that both Telemachus and Penelope are exceptional characters while being nothing like Circe or Odysseus, and watching the characters tensely circle each other is a wholly engrossing reading experience. It's a much more satisfying ending than the Telegony traditionally gets (although I have mixed feelings about the final page). I've mostly talked about the Greek mythology part of Circe, since that's what grabbed me the most, but it's quite rightly called a feminist retelling and it lives up to that label with the same subtlety and skill that Miller brings to the prose and characterization. The abusive gender dynamics of Greek myth are woven into the narrative so elegantly you'd think they were always noted in the stories. It is wholly satisfying to see Circe come into her own power in a defiantly different way than that chosen by her mother and her sister. She spends the entire book building an inner strength and sense of herself that allows her to defend her own space and her own identity, and the payoff is pure delight. But even better are the quiet moments between her and Penelope.
"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."
This is as good as everyone says it is. Highly recommended for the next time you're in the mood for a myth retelling. Rating: 8 out of 10

7 April 2023

Matthew Palmer: Database Encryption: If It's So Good, Why Isn't Everyone Doing It?

a wordcloud of organisations who have been reported to have had data breaches in 2022 Just some of the organisations that leaked data in 2022
It seems like just about every day there s another report of another company getting hacked and having its sensitive data (or, worse, the sensitive data of its customers) stolen. Sometimes, people s most intimate information gets dumped for the world to see. Other times it s just used for identity theft, extortion, and other crimes. In the least worst case, the attacker gets cold feet, but people suffer stress and inconvenience from having to replace identity documents. A great way to protect information from being leaked is to encrypt it. We encrypt data while it s being sent over the Internet (with TLS), and we encrypt it when it s at rest (with disk or volume encryption). Yet, everyone s data seems to still get stolen on a regular basis. Why? Because the data is kept online in an unencrypted form, sitting in the database while its being used. This means that attackers can just connect to the database, or trick the application into dumping the database, and all the data is just lying there, waiting to be misused.

It s Not the Devs Fault, Though You may be thinking that leaving an entire database full of sensitive data unencrypted seems like a terrible idea. And you re right: it is a terrible idea. But it s seemingly unavoidable. The problem is that in order to do what a database does best (query, sort, and aggregate data), it needs to be able to know what the data is. When you encrypt data, however, all the database sees is a locked box.
a locked box Not very useful for a database
The database can t tell what s in the locked box whether it s a number equal to 42, or a date that s less than 2023-01-01, or a string that contains the substring foo . Every value is just an opaque blob of stuff , and the database is rendered completely useless. Since modern applications usually rely pretty heavily on their database, it s essentially impossible to build an application if you ve turned your database into a glorified flat-file by encrypting everything in it. Thus, it s hardly surprising that developers have to leave the data laying around unencrypted, for anyone to come along and take.

Introducing Enquo I said before that having data unencrypted in a database is seemingly unavoidable. That s because there are some innovative cryptographic techniques that can make it possible to query encrypted data.
Andy Dwyer being amazed Indeed
The purpose of the Enquo project is to provide a common set of cryptographic primitives that implement ENcrypted QUery Operations (ie Enquo ), and integrate those operations into databases, ORMs, and anywhere else that could benefit. The end goal is to provide the ability to encrypt all the data stored in any database server, while still allowing the data to be queried and aggregated. So far, the project consists of these components:
  • the enquo-core library, that implements queryable encrypted integers, dates, and text in Rust and Ruby;
  • a PostgreSQL extension, pg_enquo, that allows PostgreSQL to query encrypted data; and
  • a Rails ActiveRecord extension, ActiveEnquo, that augments ActiveRecord to do the encryption/decryption required.
Support for other languages and ORMs is designed to be as straightforward as possible, and integration with other databases is mostly dependent on their own extensibility. The project s core tenets emphasise both uncompromising security, and a friendly developer experience. Naturally, all Enquo code is open source, released under the MIT licence.

Would You Like To Know More?
Desire to know more intensifies Everyone who uses a database...
If all this sounds relevant to your interests:
  1. If you use Ruby on Rails and PostgreSQL, you re halfway home already. Follow the ActiveEnquo getting started tutorial and see how much of your data Enquo can already protect. When you find data you want to encrypt but can t, tell me about it.
    • If you use Ruby and PostgreSQL with another ORM, such as Sequel, writing a plugin to support Enquo shouldn t be too difficult. The ActiveEnquo code should give you a good start. If you get stuck, get in touch.
  2. If you use PostgreSQL with another programming language, tell me what language you use and we ll work together to get bindings for that library created.
  3. If you use another database server, support is coming for your database of choice eventually, but at present there s no timeline on support. On the off chance that you happen to be a hard-core database hacking expert, and would like to work on getting Enquo support in your preferred database server, I d love to talk to you.

1 April 2023

Debian Brasil: MiniDebConf Bras lia 2023 - 25 a 27 de maio

Nesse ano a MiniDebConf Brasil est de volta! A comunidade brasileira de usu rios(as) e desenvolvedores(as) Debian convida a todos(as) a participarem da MiniDebConf Bras lia 2023 que acontecer durante 3 dias na capital federal. Nos dias 25 e 26 de maio estaremos no Complexo Avan ado da C mara dos Deputados - LabHacker/CEFOR, promovendo palestras, oficinas e outras atividades. E, no - dia 27 de maio (s bado), estaremos em um coworking (local a definir) para - colocar a m o na massa hackeando software e contribuindo para o Projeto Debian. A MiniDebConf Bras lia 2023 um evento aberto a todos(as), independente do seu n vel de conhecimento sobre Debian. O mais importante ser reunir a comunidade para celebrar o maior projeto de Software Livre do mundo, por isso queremos receber desde usu rios(as) inexperientes que est o iniciando o seu contato com o Debian at Desenvolvedores(as) oficiais do projeto. A programa o da MiniDebConf Bras lia 2023 ser composta de palestras de n vel b sico e intermedi rio para aqueles(as) participantes que est o tendo o primeiro contato com o Debian ou querem conhecer mais sobre determinados assuntos, e workshops/oficinas de n vel intermedi rio e avan ado para usu rios(as) do Debian que querem colocar a m o-na-massa durante o evento. No ltimo dia do evento, teremos um Hacking Day em um espa o de coworking para que todos possam interagir e de fato fazerem contribui es para o projeto. Inscri o A inscri o na MiniDebConf Bras lia 2023 totalmente gratuita e poder ser feita no formul rio dispon vel no site do evento. mandat ria a inscri o pr via para que todos(as) possam acessar a C mara dos Deputados - devido a quest es de seguran a da casa. Al m de auxiliar a organiza o no dimensionamento do evento. O evento organizado de forma volunt ria, e toda ajuda bem-vinda. Portanto, se voc gostaria de contribuir para a realiza o do evento, preencha o formul rio para inscri o de volunt rios. Os formul rios para inscri o (na MiniDebConf e para ajudar na organiza o) e submiss o de atividades ser o abertos no dia 1 de abril (n o tem nenhuma pegadinha, se inicia nesse dia mesmo :) Contato Para entrar em contato com o time local, a lista de emails debian-br-eventos, o canal IRC #debian-bsb no OFTC e o grupo no telegram DebianBras lia podem ser utilizados. Al m do endere o de email: brasil.mini@debconf.org.

30 March 2023

Russell Coker: Links March 2023

Interesting paper about a plan for eugenics in dogs with an aim to get human equivalent IQ within 100 generations [1]. It gets a bit silly when the author predicts IQs of 8000+ as there will eventually be limits of what can fit in one head. But the basic concept is good. Interesting article about what happens inside a proton [2]. This makes some aspects of the Trisolar series and the Dragon s Egg series seem less implausible. Insightful article about how crypto-currencies really work [3]. Basically the vast majority of users trust some company that s outside the scope of most financial regulations to act as their bank. Surprisingly the author doesn t seem to identify such things as a Ponzi scheme. Bruce Schneier wrote an interesting blog post about AIs as hackers [4]. Cory Doctorow wrote an insightful article titled The Enshittification of TikTok which is about the enshittification of commercial Internet platforms in general [5]. We need more regulation of such things. Cat Valente wrote an insightful article titled Stop Talking to Each Other and Start Buying Things: Three Decades of Survival in the Desert of Social Media about the desire to profit from social media repeatedly destroying platforms [6]. This Onion video has a good point, I don t want to watch videos on news sites etc [7]. We need ad-blockers that can block video on all sites other than YouTube etc. Wired has an interesting article about the machines that still need floppy disks, including early versions of the 747 [8]. There are devices to convert the floppy drive interface to a USB storage device which are being used on some systems but which presumably aren t certified for a 747. The article says that 3.5 disks cost $1 each because they are rare that s still cheaper than when they were first released. Android Police has an interesting article about un-redacting information in PNG files [9]. It seems that some software on Pixel devices hasn t been truncating files when editing them, just writing the new data over top and some platforms (notably Discord) send the entire file wuthout parsing it (unlike Twitter for example which removes EXIF data to protect users). Then even though a PNG file is compressed from the later part of the data someone can deduce the earlier data. Teen Vogue has an insightful article about the harm that influencer parents do to their children [10]. Jonathan McDowell wrote a very informative blog post about his new RISC-V computer running Debian [11]. He says that it takes 10 hours to do a full Debian kernel build (compared to 14 minutes for my 18 core E5-2696) so it s about 2% the CPU speed of a high end 2015 server CPU which is pretty good for an embedded devivce. That is similar to some of the low end Thinkpads that were on sale in 2015. The Surviving Tomorrow site has an interesting article about a community where all property is community owned [12]. It s an extremist Christian group and the article is written by a slightly different Christian extremist, but the organisation is interesting. A technology positive atheist versions of this would be good. Bruce Schneier and Nathan E. Sanders co-wrote an insightful article about how AI could exploit the process of making laws [13]. We really need to crack down on political lobbying, any time a constitution is being amender prohibiting lobbying should be included. Anarcat wrote a very informative blog post about the Framework laptops that are designed to be upgraded by the user [14]. The motherboard can be replaced and there are cases designed so you can use the old laptop motherboard as an embedded PC. Before 2017 I would have been very interested in such a laptop. Now I ve moved to low power laptops and servers for serious compiles and a second-hand Thinkpad X1 Carbon costs less than a new Framework motherboard. But this will be a really good product for people with more demanding needs than mine. Pity they don t have a keyboard with the Thinkpad Trackpoint.
Related posts:
  1. Links January 2023 The Intercept has an amusing and interesting article about senior...
  2. Links March 2022 Anarcat wrote a great blog post about switching from OpenNTP...
  3. Links March 2020 Rolling Stone has an insightful article about why the Christian...

15 March 2023

Freexian Collaborators: Debian Contributions: Core python package, Redmine backports, and more! (by Utkarsh Gupta, Stefano Rivera)

Contributing to Debian is part of Freexian s mission. This article covers the latest achievements of Freexian and their collaborators. All of this is made possible by organizations subscribing to our Long Term Support contracts and consulting services.

Core Python Packages, by Stefano Rivera Just before the freeze, pip added support for PEP-668. This is a scheme devised by Debian with other distributions and the Python Packaging Authority, to allow distributors to mark Python installations as being managed by a distribution package manager. When this EXTERNALLY-MANAGED flag is present, installers like pip will refuse to install packages outside a virtual environment. This protects users from breaking unrelated software on their systems, when installing packages with pip or similar tools. Stefano quickly got this version of pip into the archive, marked Debian s Python interpreters as EXTERNALLY-MANAGED, and worked with the upstream to add a mechanism to allow users to override the restriction. Debian bookworm will likely be the first distro release to implement this change. The transition from Python 3.10 to 3.11 was one of the last to complete before the bookworm freeze (as 3.11 only released at the end of October 2022). Stefano helped port some Python packages to 3.11, in January, and also kicked off the final transition to remove Python 3.10 support. Stefano did a big round of bug triage in the cPython interpreter (and related) packages, applying some provided patches, and fixing some long-standing minor bugs in the packaging. To allow Debian packages to more accurately reflect upstream-specified dependencies that only apply under specific Python interpreter versions, in the future, Stefano added more metadata to the python3 binary package. Python s unittest runner would successfully exit with 0 passed tests, if it couldn t find any tests. This means that configuration / layout changes can cause test failures to go unnoticed, because the tests aren t being run any more in Debian packages. Stefano proposed a change to Python 3.12 to change this behavior and treat 0 tests as a kind of failure.

debvm, by Helmut Grohne With support from Johannes Schauer Marin Rodrigues, and Jochen Sprickerhof, Helmut Grohne wrote debvm, a tool for quickly creating and running Debian virtual machine images for various architectures and Debian and Ubuntu releases. This is meant for development and testing purposes and has already identified a number of bugs in e.g. fakechroot (#1029490), Linux (#1029270), and runit (#1028181).

Rails 6 and Redmine 5 available in bullseye-backports, by Utkarsh Gupta Bullseye users can now upgrade to the latest 6.1 branch of Rails, v6.1.7, and the latest Redmine version, v5.0.4. The Ruby team received numerous requests to backport the latest version of Rails and Redmine, especially since there was no redmine shipped in the bullseye release itself. So this is big news for all users as we ve not only successfully backported both the packages, but also fixed all the CVEs and RC bugs in the process! This work was sponsored by Entrouvert.

Patches metadata in the Package Tracker, by Rapha l Hertzog Building on the great Ultimate Debian Database work of Lucas Nussbaum and on his suggestion, Rapha l enhanced the Debian Package Tracker to display action items when the patches metadata indicate that some patches were not forwarded upstream, or when the metadata were invalid. One can now also browse the patches metadata from the Links panel on the right.

Fixed kernel bug that broke debian-installer on computers with Mediatek wifi devices, by Helmut Grohne As part of our regular work on Kali Linux for OffSec, they funded Helmut s work to fix the MT7921e driver. When being loaded without firmware available, it would not register itself, but upon module release it would unregister itself causing a kernel oops. This was commonly observed in Kali Linux when reloading the module to add firmware. Helmut Grohne identified the cause and sent a patch, a different variant of which is now heading into Linux and available from Kali Linux.

Printing in Debian, by Thorsten Alteholz There are about 40 packages in Debian that take care of sending output to printers, scan documents, or even send documents to fax machines. In the light of the upcoming/already ongoing freeze, these packages had to be updated to the latest version and bugs had to be fixed. Basically this applies to large packages like cups, cups-filters, hplip but also the smaller ones that shouldn t be neglected. All in all Thorsten uploaded 13 packages with new upstream versions or improved packaging and could resolve 14 bugs. Further triaging led to 35 bugs that could be closed, either because they were already fixed and not closed in an earlier upload or they could not be reproduced with current software versions. There is also work to do to prepare for the future. Historically, printing on Linux required finding a PPD file for your printer and finding some software that is able to render your documents with this PPD. These days, driverless printing is becoming more common and the use of PPD files has decreased. In the upcoming version 3.0 of cups, PPD files are no longer supported and so called printer applications need to be used. In order not to lose the ability to print documents, this big transition needs to be carefully planned. This started in the beginning of 2023 and will hopefully be finished with the release of Debian Trixie. More information can be found in this Debian Printing Wiki article. In preparation for this transition Thorsten created three new packages.

Yade update, by Anton Gladky Last month, Anton updated the yade package to the newest 2023.02a version, which includes new features. Yade is a software package for discrete element method (DEM) simulations, which are widely used in scientific and engineering fields for the simulation of granular systems. Yade is an open-source project that is being used worldwide for different tasks, such as geomechanics, civil engineering, mining, and materials science. The Yade package in Debian supports different precision levels for its simulations. This means that researchers and engineers can select the needed precision level without recompiling the package, saving time and effort.

Miscellaneous contributions
  • Helmut Grohne continues to improve cross building (mostly Qt) and architecture bootstrap (mostly loong64 and musl).

13 March 2023

Antoine Beaupr : Framework 12th gen laptop review

The Framework is a 13.5" laptop body with swappable parts, which makes it somewhat future-proof and certainly easily repairable, scoring an "exceedingly rare" 10/10 score from ifixit.com. There are two generations of the laptop's main board (both compatible with the same body): the Intel 11th and 12th gen chipsets. I have received my Framework, 12th generation "DIY", device in late September 2022 and will update this page as I go along in the process of ordering, burning-in, setting up and using the device over the years. Overall, the Framework is a good laptop. I like the keyboard, the touch pad, the expansion cards. Clearly there's been some good work done on industrial design, and it's the most repairable laptop I've had in years. Time will tell, but it looks sturdy enough to survive me many years as well. This is also one of the most powerful devices I ever lay my hands on. I have managed, remotely, more powerful servers, but this is the fastest computer I have ever owned, and it fits in this tiny case. It is an amazing machine. On the downside, there's a bit of proprietary firmware required (WiFi, Bluetooth, some graphics) and the Framework ships with a proprietary BIOS, with currently no Coreboot support. Expect to need the latest kernel, firmware, and hacking around a bunch of things to get resolution and keybindings working right. Like others, I have first found significant power management issues, but many issues can actually be solved with some configuration. Some of the expansion ports (HDMI, DP, MicroSD, and SSD) use power when idle, so don't expect week-long suspend, or "full day" battery while those are plugged in. Finally, the expansion ports are nice, but there's only four of them. If you plan to have a two-monitor setup, you're likely going to need a dock. Read on for the detailed review. For context, I'm moving from the Purism Librem 13v4 because it basically exploded on me. I had, in the meantime, reverted back to an old ThinkPad X220, so I sometimes compare the Framework with that venerable laptop as well. This blog post has been maturing for months now. It started in September 2022 and I declared it completed in March 2023. It's the longest single article on this entire website, currently clocking at about 13,000 words. It will take an average reader a full hour to go through this thing, so I don't expect anyone to actually do that. This introduction should be good enough for most people, read the first section if you intend to actually buy a Framework. Jump around the table of contents as you see fit for after you did buy the laptop, as it might include some crucial hints on how to make it work best for you, especially on (Debian) Linux.

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

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: 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

15 February 2023

Lukas M rdian: Netplan v0.106 is now available

I m happy to announce that Netplan version 0.106 is now available on GitHub and is soon to be deployed into an Ubuntu/Debian/Fedora installation near you! Six months and 65 commits after the previous version, this release is brought to you by 4 free software contributors from around the globe. Highlights Highlights of this release include the new netplan status command, which queries your system for IP addresses, routes, DNS information, etc in addition to the Netplan backend renderer (NetworkManager/networkd) in use and the relevant Netplan YAML configuration ID. It displays all this in a nicely formatted way (or alternatively in machine readable YAML/JSON format).
Furthermore, we implemented a clean libnetplan API which can be used by external tools to parse Netplan configuration, migrated away from non-inclusive language (PR#303) and improved the overall Netplan documentation. Another change that should be noted, is that the match.macaddress stanza now only matches on PermanentMACAddress= on the systemd-networkd backend, as has been the case on the NetworkManager backend ever since (see PR#278 for background information on this slight change in behavior). Changelog Bug fixes:

12 February 2023

Russell Coker: T320 iDRAC Failure and new HP Z640

The Dell T320 Almost 2 years ago I made a Dell PowerEdge T320 my home server [1]. It was a decent upgrade from the PowerEdge T110 II that I had used previously. One benefit of that system was that I needed more RAM and the PowerEdge T1xx series use unbuffered ECC RAM which is unreasonably expensive as well as the DIMMs tending to be smaller (no Load Reduced DIMMS) and only having 4 slots. As I had bought two T320s I put all the RAM in a single server getting a total of 96G and then put some cheap DIMMs in the other one and sold it with 48G. The T320 has all the server reliability features including hot-swap redundant PSUs and hot-swap hard drives. One thing it doesn t have redundancy on is the motherboard management system known as iDRAC. 3 days ago my suburb had a power outage and when power came back on the T320 gave an error message about a failure to initialise the iDRAC and put all the fans on maximum speed, which is extremely loud. When a T320 is running in a room that s not particularly hot and it doesn t have SAS disks it s a very quiet server, one of the quietest I ve ever owned. When it goes into emergency cooling mode due to iDRAC failure it s loud enough to be heard from the other end of the house with doors closed in between. Googling this failure gave a few possible answers. One was for some combinations of booting with the iDRAC button held down, turning off for a while and booting with the iDRAC button held down, etc (this didn t work). One was for putting a iDRAC firmware file on the SD card so iDRAC could automatically load it (which I tested even though I didn t have the flashing LED which indicates that it is likely to work, but it didn t do anything). The last was to enable serial console and configure the iDRAC to load new firmware via TFTP, I didn t get a iDRAC message from the serial console just the regular BIOS stuff. So it looks like I ll have to sell the T320 for parts or find someone who wants to run it in it s current form. Currently to boot it I have to press F1 a few times to bypass BIOS messages (someone on the Internet reported making a device to key-jam F1). Then when it boots it s unreasonably loud, but apparently if you are really keen you can buy fans that have temperature sensors to control their own speed and bypass the motherboard control. I d appreciate any advice on how to get this going. At this stage I m not going to go back to it but if I can get it working properly I can sell it for a decent price. The HP Z640 I ve replaced the T320 with a HP Z640 workstation with 32G of RAM which I had recently bought to play with Stable Diffusion. There were hundreds of Z640 workstations with NVidia Quadro M6000 GPUs going on eBay for under $400 each, it looked like a company that did a lot of ML work had either gone bankrupt or upgraded all their employees systems. The price for the systems was surprisingly cheap, at regular eBay prices it seems that the GPU and the RAM go for about the same price as the system. It turned out that Stable Diffusion didn t like the video card in my setup for unknown reasons but also that the E5-1650v3 CPU could render an image in 15 minutes which is fast enough to test it out but not fast enough for serious use. I had been planning to blog about that. When I bought the T320 server the DDR3 Registered ECC RAM it uses cost about $100 for 8*8G DIMMs, with 16G DIMMs being much more expensive. Now the DDR4 Registered ECC RAM used by my Z640 goes for about $120 for 2*16G DIMMs. In the near future I ll upgrade that system to 64G of RAM. It s disappointing that the Z640 only has 4 DIMM sockets per CPU so if you get a single-CPU version (as I did) and don t get the really expensive Load Reduced RAM then you are limited to 64G. So the supposed capacity benefit of going from DDR3 to DDR4 doesn t seem to apply to this upgrade. The Z640 I got has 4 bays for hot-swap SAS/SATA 2.5 SSD/HDDs and 2 internal bays for 3.5 hard drives. The T320 has 8*3.5 hot swap bays and I had 3 hard drives in them in a BTRFS RAID-10 configuration. Currently I ve got one hard drive attached via USB but that s obviously not a long-term solution. The 3 hard drives are 4TB, they have worked since 4TB was a good size. I have a spare 8TB disk so I could buy a second ($179 for a shingle HDD) to make a 8TB RAID-1 array. The other option is to pay $369 for a 4TB SSD (or $389 for a 4TB NVMe + $10 for the PCIe card) to keep the 3 device RAID-10. As tempting as 4TB SSDs are I ll probably get a cheap 8TB disk which will take capacity from 6TB to 8TB and I could use some extra 4TB disks for backups. I haven t played with the AMT/MEBX features on this system, I presume that they will work the same way as AMT/MEBX on the HP Z420 I ve used previously [2]. Update: HP has free updates for the BIOS etc available here [3]. Unfortunately it seems to require loading a kernel module supplied by HP to do this. This is a bad thing, kernel code that isn t in the mainline kernel is either of poor quality or isn t licensed correctly. I had to change my monitoring system to alert on temperatures over 100% of the high range while on the T320 I had it set at 95% of high and never got warnings. This is disappointing, enterprise class gear running in a reasonably cool environment (ambient temperature of about 22C) should be able to run all CPU cores at full performance without hitting 95% of the high temperature level.
Related posts:
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  2. Workstations With ECC RAM The last new PC I bought was a Dell PowerEdge...
  3. Planning Servers for Failure Sometimes computers fail. If you run enough computers then you...

8 February 2023

Chris Lamb: Most anticipated films of 2023

Very few highly-anticipated movies appear in January and February, as the bigger releases are timed so they can be considered for the Golden Globes in January and the Oscars in late February or early March, so film fans have the advantage of a few weeks after the New Year to collect their thoughts on the year ahead. In other words, I'm not actually late in outlining below the films I'm most looking forward to in 2023...

Barbie No, seriously! If anyone can make a good film about a doll franchise, it's probably Greta Gerwig. Not only was Little Women (2019) more than admirable, the same could be definitely said for Lady Bird (2017). More importantly, I can't help feel she was the real 'Driver' behind Frances Ha (2012), one of the better modern takes on Claudia Weill's revelatory Girlfriends (1978). Still, whenever I remember that Barbie will be a film about a billion-dollar toy and media franchise with a nettlesome history, I recall I rubbished the "Facebook film" that turned into The Social Network (2010). Anyway, the trailer for Barbie is worth watching, if only because it seems like a parody of itself.

Blitz It's difficult to overstate just how important the aerial bombing of London during World War II is crucial to understanding the British psyche, despite it being a constructed phenomenon from the outset. Without wishing to underplay the deaths of over 40,000 civilian deaths, Angus Calder pointed out in the 1990s that the modern mythology surrounding the event "did not evolve spontaneously; it was a propaganda construct directed as much at [then neutral] American opinion as at British." It will therefore be interesting to see how British Grenadian Trinidadian director Steve McQueen addresses a topic so essential to the British self-conception. (Remember the controversy in right-wing circles about the sole Indian soldier in Christopher Nolan's Dunkirk (2017)?) McQueen is perhaps best known for his 12 Years a Slave (2013), but he recently directed a six-part film anthology for the BBC which addressed the realities of post-Empire immigration to Britain, and this leads me to suspect he sees the Blitz and its surrounding mythology with a more critical perspective. But any attempt to complicate the story of World War II will be vigorously opposed in a way that will make the recent hullabaloo surrounding The Crown seem tame. All this is to say that the discourse surrounding this release may be as interesting as the film itself.

Dune, Part II Coming out of the cinema after the first part of Denis Vileneve's adaptation of Dune (2021), I was struck by the conception that it was less of a fresh adaptation of the 1965 novel by Frank Herbert than an attempt to rehabilitate David Lynch's 1984 version and in a broader sense, it was also an attempt to reestablish the primacy of cinema over streaming TV and the myriad of other distractions in our lives. I must admit I'm not a huge fan of the original novel, finding within it a certain prurience regarding hereditary military regimes and writing about them with a certain sense of glee that belies a secret admiration for them... not to mention an eyebrow-raising allegory for the Middle East. Still, Dune, Part II is going to be a fantastic spectacle.

Ferrari It'll be curious to see how this differs substantially from the recent Ford v Ferrari (2019), but given that Michael Mann's Heat (1995) so effectively re-energised the gangster/heist genre, I'm more than willing to kick the tires of this about the founder of the eponymous car manufacturer. I'm in the minority for preferring Mann's Thief (1981) over Heat, in part because the former deals in more abstract themes, so I'd have perhaps prefered to look forward to a more conceptual film from Mann over a story about one specific guy.

How Do You Live There are a few directors one can look forward to watching almost without qualification, and Hayao Miyazaki (My Neighbor Totoro, Kiki's Delivery Service, Princess Mononoke Howl's Moving Castle, etc.) is one of them. And this is especially so given that The Wind Rises (2013) was meant to be the last collaboration between Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli. Let's hope he is able to come out of retirement in another ten years.

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny Given I had a strong dislike of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008), I seriously doubt I will enjoy anything this film has to show me, but with 1981's Raiders of the Lost Ark remaining one of my most treasured films (read my brief homage), I still feel a strong sense of obligation towards the Indiana Jones name, despite it feeling like the copper is being pulled out of the walls of this franchise today.

Kafka I only know Polish filmmaker Agnieszka Holland through her Spoor (2017), an adaptation of Olga Tokarczuk's 2009 eco-crime novel Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead. I wasn't an unqualified fan of Spoor (nor the book on which it is based), but I am interested in Holland's take on the life of Czech author Franz Kafka, an author enmeshed with twentieth-century art and philosophy, especially that of central Europe. Holland has mentioned she intends to tell the story "as a kind of collage," and I can hope that it is an adventurous take on the over-furrowed biopic genre. Or perhaps Gregor Samsa will awake from uneasy dreams to find himself transformed in his bed into a huge verminous biopic.

The Killer It'll be interesting to see what path David Fincher is taking today, especially after his puzzling and strangely cold Mank (2020) portraying the writing process behind Orson Welles' Citizen Kane (1941). The Killer is said to be a straight-to-Netflix thriller based on the graphic novel about a hired assassin, which makes me think of Fincher's Zodiac (2007), and, of course, Se7en (1995). I'm not as entranced by Fincher as I used to be, but any film with Michael Fassbender and Tilda Swinton (with a score by Trent Reznor) is always going to get my attention.

Killers of the Flower Moon In Killers of the Flower Moon, Martin Scorsese directs an adaptation of a book about the FBI's investigation into a conspiracy to murder Osage tribe members in the early years of the twentieth century in order to deprive them of their oil-rich land. (The only thing more quintessentially American than apple pie is a conspiracy combined with a genocide.) Separate from learning more about this disquieting chapter of American history, I'd love to discover what attracted Scorsese to this particular story: he's one of the few top-level directors who have the ability to lucidly articulate their intentions and motivations.

Napoleon It often strikes me that, despite all of his achievements and fame, it's somehow still possible to claim that Ridley Scott is relatively underrated compared to other directors working at the top level today. Besides that, though, I'm especially interested in this film, not least of all because I just read Tolstoy's War and Peace (read my recent review) and am working my way through the mind-boggling 431-minute Soviet TV adaptation, but also because several auteur filmmakers (including Stanley Kubrick) have tried to make a Napoleon epic and failed.

Oppenheimer In a way, a biopic about the scientist responsible for the atomic bomb and the Manhattan Project seems almost perfect material for Christopher Nolan. He can certainly rely on stars to queue up to be in his movies (Robert Downey Jr., Matt Damon, Kenneth Branagh, etc.), but whilst I'm certain it will be entertaining on many fronts, I fear it will fall into the well-established Nolan mould of yet another single man struggling with obsession, deception and guilt who is trying in vain to balance order and chaos in the world.

The Way of the Wind Marked by philosophical and spiritual overtones, all of Terrence Malick's films are perfumed with themes of transcendence, nature and the inevitable conflict between instinct and reason. My particular favourite is his stunning Days of Heaven (1978), but The Thin Red Line (1998) and A Hidden Life (2019) also touched me ways difficult to relate, and are one of the few films about the Second World War that don't touch off my sensitivity about them (see my remarks about Blitz above). It is therefore somewhat Malickian that his next film will be a biblical drama about the life of Jesus. Given Malick's filmography, I suspect this will be far more subdued than William Wyler's 1959 Ben-Hur and significantly more equivocal in its conviction compared to Paolo Pasolini's ardently progressive The Gospel According to St. Matthew (1964). However, little beyond that can be guessed, and the film may not even appear until 2024 or even 2025.

Zone of Interest I was mesmerised by Jonathan Glazer's Under the Skin (2013), and there is much to admire in his borderline 'revisionist gangster' film Sexy Beast (2000), so I will definitely be on the lookout for this one. The only thing making me hesitate is that Zone of Interest is based on a book by Martin Amis about a romance set inside the Auschwitz concentration camp. I haven't read the book, but Amis has something of a history in his grappling with the history of the twentieth century, and he seems to do it in a way that never sits right with me. But if Paul Verhoeven's Starship Troopers (1997) proves anything at all, it's all in the adaption.

30 January 2023

Arturo Borrero Gonz lez: Debian and the adventure of the screen resolution

Post logo I read somewhere a nice meme about Linux: Do you want an operating system or do you want an adventure? I love it, because it is so true. What you are about to read is my adventure to set a usable screen resolution in a fresh Debian testing installation. The context is that I have two different Lenovo Thinkpad laptops with 16 screen and nvidia graphic cards. They are both installed with the latest Debian testing. I use the closed-source nvidia drivers (they seem to work better than the nouveau module). The desktop manager and environment that I use is lightdm + XFCE4. The monitor native resolution in both machines is very high: 3840x2160 (or 4K UHD if you will). The thing is that both laptops show an identical problem: when freshly installed with the Debian default config, the native resolution is in use. For a 16 screen laptop, this high resolution means that the font is tiny. Therefore, the raw native resolution renders the machine almost unusable. This is a picture of what you get by running htop in the console (tty1, the terminal you would get by hitting CTRL+ALT+F1) with the default install: Linux tty console with high resolution and tiny fonts Everything in the system is affected by this:
  1. the grub menu is unreadable. Thanksfully the right option is selected by default.
  2. the tty console, with the boot splash by systemd is unreadable as well. There are some colors, so you at least see some systemd stuff happening in green .
  3. when lightdm starts, the resolution keeps being very high. Can barely click the login button.
  4. when XFCE4 starts, it is a pain to navigate the menu and click the right buttons to set a more reasonable resolution.
The adventure begins after installing the system. Each of these four points must be fixed by hand by the user. XFCE4 Point #4 is the easiest. Navigate with the mouse pointer to the tiny Applications menu, then Settings, then Displays. This is more or less the same in every other desktop operating system. There are no further actions required to persist this setting. Thanks you XFCE4. lightdm Point #3, about lightdm, is more tricky to solve. It involves running xrandr when lightdm sets up the display. Nobody will tell you this trick. You have to search for it on the internet. Thankfully is a common problem, and a person who knows what to search for can find good results. The file /etc/lightdm/lightdm.conf needs to contain something like this: 
[LightDM]
[Seat:*]
# set up correct display resolution
display-setup-script=sh -c -- "xrandr -s 1920x1080"
By the way, depending on your system hardware setup, you may also need an additional call to xrandr here. If you want to plug in an HDMI monitor, chances are you require something like xrandr --setprovideroutputsource NVIDIA-G0 modesetting && xrandr --auto to instruct the NVIDIA graphic card to work will with the kernel graphic system. In my case, one of my laptops require it, so I have: 
[LightDM]
[Seat:*]
# don't ask me to type my username
greeter-hide-users=false
# set up correct display resolution, and prepare NVIDIA card for HDMI output
display-setup-script=sh -c "xrandr -s 1920x1080 && xrandr --setprovideroutputsource NVIDIA-G0 modesetting && xrandr --auto"
grub Point #1 about the grub menu is also not trivial to solve, but also widely known on the internet. Grub allows you to set arbitrary graphical modes. In Debian systems, adding something like GRUB_GFXMODE=1024x768 to /etc/default/grub and then running sudo update-grub should do the magic. console So we get to point #2 about the tty1 console. For months, I ve been investing my scarce personal time into trying to solve this annoyance. There are a lot of conflicting information about this on the internet. Plenty of misleading solutions, essays about framebuffer, kernel modeset, and other stuff I don t want to read just to get my tty1 in a readable status. People point in different directions, like using GRUB_GFXPAYLOAD_LINUX=keep in /etc/default/grub. Which is a good solution, but won t work: my best bet is that the kernel indeed keeps the resolution as told by grub, but the moment systemd loads the nvidia driver, it enables 4K in the display and the console gets the high resolution. Actually, for a few weeks, I blamed plymouth. Because the plymouth service is loaded early by systemd, it could be responsible for setting some of the display settings. It actually contains some (undocummented) DeviceScale configuration option that is seemingly aimed to integrate into high resolution scenarios. I played with it to no avail. Some folks from IRC suggested reconfiguring the console-font package. Back-then unknown to me. Running sudo dpkg-reconfigure console-font would indeed show a menu to select some preferences for the console, including font size. But apparently, a freshly installed system already uses the biggest possible, so this was a dead end. Other option I evaluted for a few days was touching the kernel framebuffer setting. I honestly don t understand this, and all the solutions pointing to use fbset didn t work for me anyways. This is the default framebuffer configuration in one of the laptops: 
user@debian:~$ fbset -i

mode "3840x2160"
    geometry 3840 2160 3840 2160 32
    timings 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
    accel true
    rgba 8/16,8/8,8/0,0/0
endmode
Frame buffer device information:
    Name        : i915drmfb
    Address     : 0
    Size        : 33177600
    Type        : PACKED PIXELS
    Visual      : TRUECOLOR
    XPanStep    : 1
    YPanStep    : 1
    YWrapStep   : 0
    LineLength  : 15360
    Accelerator : No
Playing with these numbers, I was able to modify the geometry of the console, only to reduce the panel to a tiny square in the console display (with equally small fonts anyway). If it was possible to scale or resize the panel in other way, I was unable to understand how to do so by reading the associated docs. One day, out of despair, I tried disabling kernel modesetting (or KMS). It indeed got me a more readable tty1, only to prevent the whole graphic stack from starting, with Xorg complaining about the lack of kernel modeset. After lots of wasted time, I decided to blame the NVIDIA graphic card. Because why not: a closed source module in my system looks fishy. I registered in their official forum and wrote a message about my suspicion on the module, asking for advice on how to modify the driver default resolution. I was hoping that something like modprobe nvidia my_desired_resolution=1920x1080 could exist. Apparently not :-( I was about to give up. I had walked every corner of the known internet. I even tried summoning the ancient gods, I used ChatGPT. I asked the AI god for mercy, for a working solution to no avail. Then I decided to change the kind of queries I was issuing the search engines (don t ask me, I no longer remember). Eventually I landed in this askubuntu.com page. The question described the exact same problem I was experiencing. Finally, that was encouraging! I was not alone in my adventure after all! The solution section included a font size I hadn t seen before in my previous tests: 16x32. More excitement! I did all the steps. I installed the xfonts-terminus package, and in the file /etc/default/console-setup I put: 
ACTIVE_CONSOLES="/dev/tty[1-6]"
CHARMAP="ISO-8859-15"
CODESET="guess"
FONTFACE="Terminus"
FONTSIZE="16x32"
VIDEOMODE=
Then I run setupcon from a tty, and the miracle happened! I finally got a bigger font in the tty1 console! Turned out a potential solution was about playing with console-setup, which I had tried wihtout success before. I m not even sure if the additional package was required. This is how my console looks now: Linux tty console with high resolution but not so tiny fonts The truth is the solution is satisfying only to a degree. I m a person with good eyesight and can work with these bit larger fonts. I m not sure if I can get larger fonts using this method, honestly. After some search, I discovered that some folks already managed to describe the problem in detail and filed a proper bug report in Debian, see #595696 opened more than 10 years ago. 2023 is the year of linux on the desktop Nope. I honestly don t see how this disconnected pile of settings can be all reconciled together. Can we please have a systemd-whatever that homogeinizes all of this mess? I m referring to grub + kernel drivers + console + lightdm + XFCE4. Next adventure When I lock the desktop (with CTRL+ALT+L) and close the laptop lid to suspend it, then reopen it, type the login info into the lightdm greeter, then the desktop environment never loads, black screen. I have already tried the first few search results without luck. Perhaps the nvidia card is to blame this time? Perhaps poorly coupled power management by the different system software pieces? Who knows what s going on here. This will probably be my next Debian desktop adventure.

28 January 2023

Emmanuel Kasper: Table of correspondence between AWS / Azure / Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform / upstream projects

If you know the Amazon Web Services or Azure portfolio, and you are interested in OpenShift or the OKD OpenShift community distribution, this is a table of corresponding technologies. OpenShift is Red Hat s Kubernetes distribution: it is basically the upstream Kubernetes delivered with monitoring, logging, CI/CD, underlying OS, tested upgrade paths not found with a manual kubernetes.io kubeadm install. After passing the two corresponding certifications, my opinion on cloud operators is that it is very much a step back in the direction of proprietary software. You can rebuild their cloud stack with opensource components, but it is also a lot of integration work, similar to using the Linux from scratch distribution instead of something like Debian. A good middle point are the OpenShift and OKD Kubernetes distributions, who integrate the most common cloud components, but allow an installation on your own hardware or cloud provider of your choice.
AWS Azure OpenShift *OpenShift upstream project&
Cloud Trail Kubernetes API Server audit log Kubernetes
Cloud Watch Azure Monitor, Azure Log Analytics OpenShift Monitoring Prometheus, Kubernetes Metrics
AWS Artifact Compliance Operator OpenSCAP
AWS Trusted Advisor Azure Advisor Insights
AWS Marketplace Red Hat Market place Operator Hub
AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) Azure Active Directory, Azure AD DS Red Hat SSO Keycloack
AWS Elastisc Beanstalk Azure App Services OpenShift Source2Image (S2I) Source2Image (S2I)
AWS S3 Azure Blob Storage** ODF Rados Gateway Rook RGW
AWS Elastic Block Storage Azure Disk Storage ODF Rados Block Device Rook RBD
AWS Elastic File System Azure Files ODF Ceph FS Rook CephFS
AWS ELB Classic Azure Load Balancer MetalLB Operator MetalLB
AWS ELB Application Load Balancer Azure Application Gateway OpenShift Router HAProxy
Amazon Simple Notification Service OpenShift Streams for Apache Kafka Apache Kafka
Amazon Guard Duty Microsoft Defender for Cloud API Server audit log review, ACS Runtime detection Stackrox
Amazon Inspector Microsoft Defender for Cloud Quay.io container scanner, ACS Vulnerability Assessment Clair, Stackrox
AWS Lambda Azure Serverless Openshift Serverless* Knative
AWS Key Management System Azure Key Vault could be done with Hashicorp Vault Vault
AWS WAF NGINX Ingress Controller Operator with ModSecurity NGINX ModSecurity
Amazon Elasticache Redis Enterprise Operator Redis, memcached as alternative
AWS Relational Database Service Azure SQL Crunchy Data Operator PostgreSQL
Azure Arc OpenShift ACM Open Cluster Management
AWS Scaling Group Azure Scale Set OpenShift Autoscaler OKD Autoscaler
* OpenShift Serverless requires the application to be packaged as a container, something AWS Lambda does not require. ** Azure Blob Storage covers the object storage use case of S3, but is itself not S3 compatible

19 January 2023

Antoine Beaupr : Mastodon comments in ikiwiki

Today I noticed bounces in my mail box. They were from ikiwiki trying to send registration confirmation email to users who probably never asked for it. I'm getting truly fed up with spam in my wiki. At this point, all comments are manually approved and I still get trouble: now it's scammers spamming the registration form with dummy accounts, which bounce back to me when I make new posts, or just generate backscatter spam for the confirmation email. It's really bad. I have hundreds of users registered on my blog, and I don't know which are spammy, which aren't. So. I'm considering ditching ikiwiki comments altogether. I am testing Mastodon as a commenting platforms. Others (e.g. JAK) have implemented this as a server but a simpler approach is toload them dynamically from Mastodon, which is what Carl Shwan has done. They are using Hugo, however, so they can easily embed page metadata in the template to load the right server with the right comment ID. I wasn't sure how to do this in ikiwiki: it's typically hard to access page-specific metadata in templates. Even the page name is not there, for example. I have tried using templates, and that (obviously?) fails because the <script> stuff gets sanitized away. It seems I would need to split the JavaScript out of the template into a base template and then make the page template refer to a function in there. It's kind of horrible and messy. I wish there was a way to just access page metadata from the page template itself... I found out the meta plugin passes along its metadata, but that's not (easily) extensible. So i'd need to either patch that module, and my history of merged patches is not great so far. So: another plugin. I have something that kind of works that's a combination of a page.tmpl patch and a plugin. The plugin adds a mastodon directive that feeds the page.tmpl with the right stuff. On clicking a button, it injects comments from the Mastodon API, with a JavaScript callback. It's not pretty (it's not themed at all!), but it works. If you want to do this at home, you need this page.tmpl (or at least this patch and that one) and the mastodon.pm plugin from my mastodon-plugin branch. I'm not sure this is a good idea. The first test I did was a "test comment" which led to half a dozen "test reply". I then realized I couldn't redact individual posts from there. I don't even know if, when I mute a user, it actually gets hidden from everyone else too... So I'll test this for a while, I guess. I have also turned off all CGI on this site. It will keep users from registering while I cleanup this mess and think about next steps. I have other options as well if push comes to shove, but I'm unlikely to go back to ikiwiki comments. Mastodon comments are nice because they don't require me to run any extra software: either I have my own federated service I reuse, or I use someone else's, but I don't need to run something extra. And, of course, comments are published in a standard way that's interoperable with everything... On the other hand, now I won't have comments enabled until the blog is posted on Mastodon... Right now this happens only when feed2exec runs and the HTTP cache expires, which can take up to a day. I should probably do this some other way, like flush the cache when a new post arrives, or run post-commit hooks, but for now, this will have to do. Update: I figured out a way to make this work in a timely manner:
  1. there's a post-merge hook in my ikiwiki git repository which calls feed2exec in /home/w-anarcat/source/.git/hooks/ took me a while to find it! I tried post-update and post-receive first, but ikiwiki actually pulls from the bare directory in the source directory, so only post-merge fires (even though it's not a merge)
  2. feed2exec then finds new blog posts (if any!) and fires up the new ikiwikitoot plugin which then...
  3. posts the toot using the toot command (it just works, why reinvent the wheel), keeping the toot URL
  4. finds the Markdown source file associated with the post, and adds the magic mastodon directive
  5. commits and pushes the result
This will make the interaction with Mastodon much smoother: as soon as a blog post is out of "draft" (i.e. when it hits the RSS feeds), this will immediately trigger and post the blog entry to Mastodon, enabling comments. It's kind of a tangled mess of stuff, but it works! I have briefly considered not using feed2exec for this, but it turns out it does an important job of parsing the result of ikiwiki's rendering. Otherwise I would have to guess which post is really a blog post, is this just an update or is it new, is it a draft, and so on... all sorts of questions where the business logic already resides in ikiwiki, and that I would need to reimplement myself. Plus it goes alongside moving more stuff (like my feed reader) to dedicated UNIX accounts (in this case, the blog sandbox) for security reasons. Whee!

9 January 2023

Russ Allbery: Review: Black Stars

Review: Black Stars, edited by Nisi Shawl & Latoya Peterson
Publisher: Amazon Original Stories
Copyright: August 2021
ISBN: 1-5420-3272-5
ISBN: 1-5420-3270-9
ISBN: 1-5420-3271-7
ISBN: 1-5420-3273-3
ISBN: 1-5420-3268-7
ISBN: 1-5420-3269-5
Format: Kindle
Pages: 168
This is a bit of an odd duck from a metadata standpoint. Black Stars is a series of short stories (maybe one creeps into novelette range) published by Amazon for Kindle and audiobook. Each one can be purchased separately (or "borrowed" with Amazon Prime), and they have separate ISBNs, so my normal practice would be to give each its own review. They're much too short for that, though, so I'm reviewing the whole group as an anthology. The cover in the sidebar is for the first story of the series. The other covers have similar designs. I think the one for "We Travel the Spaceways" was my favorite. Each story is by a Black author and most of them are science fiction. ("The Black Pages" is fantasy.) I would classify them as afrofuturism, although I don't have a firm grasp on its definition. This anthology included several authors I've been meaning to read and was conveniently available, so I gave it a try, even though I'm not much of a short fiction reader. That will be apparent in the forthcoming grumbling. "The Visit" by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: This is a me problem rather than a story problem, and I suspect it's partly because the story is not for me, but I am very done with gender-swapped sexism. I get the point of telling stories of our own society with enough alienation to force the reader to approach them from a fresh angle, but the problem with a story where women are sexist and condescending to men is that you're still reading a story of condescending sexism. That's particularly true when the analogies to our world are more obvious than the internal logic of the story world, as they are here. "The Visit" tells the story of a reunion between two college friends, one of whom is now a stay-at-home husband and the other of whom has stayed single. There's not much story beyond that, just obvious political metaphor (the Male Masturbatory Act to ensure no potential child is wasted, blatant harrassment of the two men by female cops) and depressing character studies. Everyone in this story is an ass except maybe Obinna's single friend Eze, which means there's nothing to focus on except the sexism. The writing is competent and effective, but I didn't care in the slightest about any of these people or anything that was happening in their awful, dreary world. (4) "The Black Pages" by Nnedi Okorafor: Issaka has been living in Chicago, but the story opens with him returning to Timbouctou where he grew up. His parents know he's coming for a visit, but he's a week early as a surprise. Unfortunately, he's arriving at the same time as an al-Qaeda attack on the library. They set it on fire, but most of the books they were trying to destroy were already saved by his father and are now in Issaka's childhood bedroom. Unbeknownst to al-Qaeda, one of the books they did burn was imprisoning a djinn. A djinn who is now free and resident in Issaka's iPad. This was a great first chapter of a novel. The combination of a modern setting and a djinn trapped in books with an instant affinity with technology was great. Issaka is an interesting character who is well-placed to introduce the reader to the setting, and I was fully invested in Issaka and Faro negotiating their relationship. Then the story just stopped. I didn't understand the ending, which was probably me being dim, but the real problem was that I was not at all ready for an ending. I would read the novel this was setting up, though. (6) "2043... (A Merman I Should Turn to Be)" by Nisi Shawl: This is another story that felt like the setup for a novel, although not as good of a novel. The premise is that the United States has developed biological engineering that allows humans to live underwater for extended periods (although they still have to surface occasionally for air, like whales). The use to which that technology is being put is a rerun of Liberia with less colonialism: Blacks are given the option to be modified into merpeople and live under the sea off the US coast as a solution. White supremacists are not happy, of course, and try to stop them from claiming their patch of ocean floor. This was fine, as far as it went, but I wasn't fond of the lead character and there wasn't much plot. There was some sort of semi-secret plan that the protagonist stumbles across and that never made much sense to me. The best parts of the story were the underwater setting and the semi-realistic details about the merman transformation. (6) "These Alien Skies" by C.T. Rwizi: In the far future, humans are expanding across the galaxy via automatically-constructed wormhole gates. Msizi's job is to be the first ship through a new wormhole to survey the system previously reached only by the AI construction ship. The wormhole is not supposed to explode shortly after he goes through, leaving him stranded in an alien system with only his companion Tariro, who is not who she seems to be. This was a classic SF plot, but I still hadn't guessed where it was going, or the relevance of some undiscussed bits of Tariro's past. Once the plot happens, it's a bit predictable, but I enjoyed it despite the depressed protagonist. (6) "Clap Back" by Nalo Hopkinson: Apart from "The Visit," this was the most directly political of the stories. It opens with Wenda, a protest artist, whose final class project uses nanotech to put racist tchotchkes to an unexpected use. This is intercut with news clippings about a (white and much richer) designer who has found a way to embed memories into clothing and is using this to spread quotes of rather pointed "forgiveness" from a Malawi quilt. This was one of the few entries in this anthology that fit the short story shape for me. Wenda's project and Burri's clothing interact fifty years later in a surprising way. This was the second-best story of the group. (7) "We Travel the Spaceways" by Victor LaValle: Grimace (so named because he wears a huge purple coat) is a homeless man in New York who talks to cans. Most of his life is about finding food, but the cans occasionally give him missions and provide minor assistance. Apart from his cans, he's very much alone, but when he comforts a woman in McDonalds (after getting caught thinking about stealing her cheeseburger), he hopes he may have found a partner. If, that is, she still likes him when she discovers the nature of the cans' missions. This was the best-written story of the six. Grimace is the first-person narrator, and LaValle's handling of characterization and voice is excellent. Grimace makes perfect sense from inside his head, but the reader can also see how unsettling he is to those around him. This could have been a disturbing, realistic story about a schitzophrenic man. As one may have guessed from the theme of the anthology, that's not what it is. I admired the craft of this story, but I found Grimace's missions too horrific to truly like it. There is an in-story justification for them; suffice it to say that I didn't find it believable. An expansion with considerably more detail and history might have bridged that gap, but alas, short fiction. (6) Rating: 6 out of 10

4 January 2023

Enrico Zini: Staticsite redesign

These are some notes about my redesign work in staticsite 2.x. Maping constraints and invariants I started keeping notes of constraints and invariants, and this helped a lot in keeping bounds on the cognitive efforts of design. I particularly liked how mapping the set of constraints added during site generation has helped breaking down processing into a series of well defined steps. Code that handles each step now has a specific task, and can rely on clear assumptions. Declarative page metadata I designed page metadata as declarative fields added to the Page class. I used typed descriptors for the fields, so that metadata fields can now have logic and validation, and are self-documenting! This is the core of the Field implementation. Lean core I tried to implement as much as possible in feature plugins, leaving to the staticsite core only what is essential to create the structure for plugins to build on. The core provides a tree structure, an abstract Page object that can render to a file and resolve references to other pages, a Site that holds settings and controls the various loading steps, and little else. The only type of content supported by the core is static asset files: Markdown, RestructuredText, images, taxonomies, feeds, directory indices, and so on, are all provided via feature plugins. Feature plugins Feature plugins work by providing functions to be called at the various loading steps, and mixins to be added to site pages. Mixins provided by feature plugins can add new declarative metadata fields, and extend Page methods: this ends up being very clean and powerful, and plays decently well with mypy's static type checking, too! See for example the code of the alias feature, that allows a page to declare aliases that redirect to it, useful for example when moving content around. It has a mixin (AliasPageMixin) that adds an aliases field that holds a list of page paths. During the "generate" step, when autogenerated pages can be created, the aliases feature iterates through all pages that defined an aliases metadata, and generates the corresponding redirection pages. Self-documenting code Staticsite can list loaded features, features can list the page subclasses that they use, and pages can list metadata fields. As a result, each feature, each type of page, and each field of each page can generate documentation about itself: the staticsite reference is autogenerated in that way, mostly from Feature, Page, and Field docstrings. Understand the language, stay close to the language Python has matured massively in the last years, and I like to stay on top of the language and standard library release notes for each release. I like how what used to be dirty hacks have now found a clean way into the language:

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