Review: Furious Heaven, by Kate Elliott

Series:	Sun Chronicles #2
Publisher:	Tor
Copyright:	2023
ISBN:	1-250-86701-0
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	725

Furious Heaven is the middle book of a trilogy and a direct sequel to Unconquerable Sun. Don't start here. I also had some trouble remembering what happened in the previous book (grumble recaps mutter), and there are a lot of threads, so I would try to minimize the time between books unless you have a good memory for plot details. This is installment two of gender-swapped Alexander the Great in space. When we last left Sun and her Companions, Elliott had established the major players in this interstellar balance of power and set off some opening skirmishes, but the real battles were yet to come. Sun was trying to build her reputation and power base while carefully staying on the good side of Queen-Marshal Eirene, her mother and the person credited with saving the Republic of Chaonia from foreign dominance. The best parts of the first book weren't Sun herself but wily Persephone, one of her Companions, whose viewpoint chapters told a more human-level story of finding her place inside a close-knit pre-existing friendship group. Furious Heaven turns that all on its head. The details are spoilers (insofar as a plot closely tracking the life of Alexander the Great can contain spoilers), but the best parts of the second book are the chapters about or around Sun. What I find most impressive about this series so far is Elliott's ability to write Sun as charismatic in a way that I can believe as a reader. That was hit and miss at the start of the series, got better towards the end of Unconquerable Sun, and was wholly effective here. From me, that's high but perhaps unreliable praise; I typically find people others describe as charismatic to be some combination of disturbing, uncomfortable, dangerous, or obviously fake. This is a rare case of intentionally-written fictional charisma that worked for me. Elliott does not do this by toning down Sun's ambition. Sun, even more than her mother, is explicitly trying to gather power and bend the universe (and the people in it) to her will. She treats people as resources, even those she's the closest to, and she's ruthless in pursuit of her goals. But she's also honorable, straightforward, and generous to the people around her. She doesn't lie about her intentions; she follows a strict moral code of her own, keeps her friends' secrets, listens sincerely to their advice, and has the sort of battlefield charisma where she refuses to ask anyone else to take risks she personally wouldn't take. And her use of symbolism and spectacle isn't just superficial; she finds the points of connection between the symbols and her values so that she can sincerely believe in what she's doing. I am fascinated by how Elliott shapes the story around her charisma. Writing an Alexander analogue is difficult; one has to write a tactical genius with the kind of magnetic attraction that enabled him to lead an army across the known world, and make this believable to the reader. Elliott gives Sun good propaganda outlets and makes her astonishingly decisive (and, of course, uses the power of the author to ensure those decisions are good ones), but she also shows how Sun is constantly absorbing information and updating her assumptions to lay the groundwork for those split-second decisions. Sun uses her Companions like a foundation and a recovery platform, leaning on them and relying on them to gather her breath and flesh out her understanding, and then leaping from them towards her next goal. Elliott writes her as thinking just a tiny bit faster than the reader, taking actions I was starting to expect but slightly before I had put together my expectation. It's a subtle but difficult tightrope to walk as the writer, and it was incredibly effective for me. The downside of Furious Heaven is that, despite kicking the action into a much higher gear, this book sprawls. There are five viewpoint characters (Persephone and the Phene Empire character Apama from the first book, plus two new ones), as well as a few interlude chapters from yet more viewpoints. Apama's thread, which felt like a minor subplot of the first book, starts paying off in this book by showing the internal political details of Sun's enemy. That already means the reader has to track two largely separate and important stories. Add on a Persephone side plot about her family and a new plot thread about other political factions and it's a bit too much. Elliott does a good job avoiding reader confusion, but she still loses narrative momentum and reader interest due to the sheer scope. Persephone's thread in particular was a bit disappointing after being the highlight of the previous book. She spends a lot of her emotional energy on tedious and annoying sniping at Jade, which accomplishes little other than making them both seem immature and out of step with the significance of what's going on elsewhere. This is also a middle book of a trilogy, and it shows. It provides a satisfying increase in intensity and gets the true plot of the trilogy well underway, but nothing is resolved and a lot of new questions and plot threads are raised. I had similar problems with Cold Fire, the middle book of the other Kate Elliott trilogy I've read, and this book is 200 pages longer. Elliott loves world-building and huge, complex plots; I have a soft spot for them too, but they mean the story is full of stuff, and it's hard to maintain the same level of reader interest across all the complications and viewpoints. That said, I truly love the world-building. Elliott gives her world historical layers, with multiple levels of lost technology, lost history, and fallen empires, and backs it up with enough set pieces and fragments of invented history that I was enthralled. There are at least five major factions with different histories, cultures, and approaches to technology, and although they all share a history, they interpret that history in fascinatingly different ways. This world feels both lived in and full of important mysteries. Elliott also has a knack for backing the ambitions of her characters with symbolism that defines the shape of that ambition. The title comes from a (translated) verse of an in-universe song called the Hymn of Leaving, which is sung at funerals and is about the flight on generation ships from the now-lost Celestial Empire, the founding myth of this region of space:

Crossing the ocean of stars we leave our home behind us.
We are the spears cast at the furious heaven
And we will burn one by one into ashes
As with the last sparks we vanish.
This memory we carry to our own death which awaits us
And from which none of us will return.
Do not forget. Goodbye forever.

This is not great poetry, but it explains so much about the psychology of the characters. Sun repeatedly describes herself and her allies as spears cast at the furious heaven. Her mother's life mission was to make Chaonia a respected independent power. Hers is much more than that, reaching back into myth for stories of impossible leaps into space, burning brightly against the hostile power of the universe itself. A question about a series like this is why one should want to read about a gender-swapped Alexander the Great in space, rather than just reading about Alexander himself. One good (and sufficient) answer is that both the gender swap and the space parts are inherently interesting. But the other place that Elliott uses the science fiction background is to give Sun motives beyond sheer personal ambition. At a critical moment in the story, just like Alexander, Sun takes a detour to consult an Oracle. Because this is a science fiction novel, it's a great SF set piece involving a mysterious AI. But also because this is a science fiction story, Sun doesn't only ask about her personal ambitions. I won't spoil the exact questions; I think the moment is better not knowing what she'll ask. But they're science fiction questions, reader questions, the kinds of things Elliott has been building curiosity about for a book and a half by the time we reach that scene. Half the fun of reading a good epic space opera is learning the mysteries hidden in the layers of world-building. Aligning the goals of the protagonist with the goals of the reader is a simple storytelling trick, but oh, so effective. Structurally, this is not that great of a book. There's a lot of build-up and only some payoff, and there were several bits I found grating. But I am thoroughly invested in this universe now. The third book can't come soon enough. Followed by Lady Chaos, which is still being written at the time of this review. Rating: 7 out of 10

src:developers-reference translations wanted I've just uploaded developers-reference 12.19, bringing the German translation status back to 100% complete, thanks to Carsten Schoenert. Some other translations however could use some updates:

$ make status
for l in de fr it ja ru; do     \
    if [ -d source/locales/$l/LC_MESSAGES ] ; then  \
        echo -n "Stats for $l: " ;          \
        msgcat --use-first source/locales/$l/LC_MESSAGES/*.po   msgfmt --statistics - 2>&1 ; \
    fi ;                            \
done
Stats for de: 1374 translated messages.
Stats for fr: 1286 translated messages, 39 fuzzy translations, 49 untranslated messages.
Stats for it: 869 translated messages, 46 fuzzy translations, 459 untranslated messages.
Stats for ja: 891 translated messages, 26 fuzzy translations, 457 untranslated messages.
Stats for ru: 870 translated messages, 44 fuzzy translations, 460 untranslated messages.

Review: A Half-Built Garden, by Ruthanna Emrys

Publisher:	Tordotcom
Copyright:	2022
ISBN:	1-250-21097-6
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	340

The climate apocalypse has happened. Humans woke up to the danger, but a little bit too late. Over one billion people died. But the world on the other side of that apocalypse is not entirely grim. The corporations responsible for so much of the damage have been pushed out of society and isolated on their independent "aislands," traded with only grudgingly for the few commodities the rest of the world has not yet learned how to manufacture without them. Traditional governments have largely collapsed, although they cling to increasingly irrelevant trappings of power. In their place arose the watershed networks: a new way of living with both nature and other humans, built around a mix of anarchic consensus and direct democracy, with conservation and stewardship of the natural environment at its core. Therefore, when the aliens arrive near Bear Island on the Potomac River, they're not detected by powerful telescopes and met by military jets. Instead, their waste sets off water sensors, and they're met by the two women on call for alert duty, carrying a nursing infant and backed by the real-time discussion and consensus technology of the watershed's dandelion network. (Emrys is far from the first person to name something a "dandelion network," so be aware that the usage in this book seems unrelated to the charities or blockchain network.) This is a first contact novel, but it's one that skips over the typical focus of the subgenre. The alien Ringers are completely fluent in English down to subtle nuance of emotion and connotation (supposedly due to observation of our radio and TV signals), have translation devices, and in some cases can make our speech sounds directly. Despite significantly different body shapes, they are immediately comprehensible; differences are limited mostly to family structure, reproduction, and social norms. This is Star Trek first contact, not the type more typical of written science fiction. That feels unrealistic, but it's also obviously an authorial choice to jump directly to the part of the story that Emrys wants to write. The Ringers have come to save humanity. In their experience, technological civilization is inherently incompatible with planets. Technology will destroy the planet, and the planet will in turn destroy the species unless they can escape. They have reached other worlds multiple times before, only to discover that they were too late and everyone is already dead. This is the first time they've arrived in time, and they're eager to help humanity off its dying planet to join them in the Dyson sphere of space habitats they are constructing. Planets, to them, are a nest and a launching pad, something to eventually abandon and break down for spare parts. The small, unexpected wrinkle is that Judy, Carol, and the rest of their watershed network are not interested in leaving Earth. They've finally figured out the most critical pieces of environmental balance. Earth is going to get hotter for a while, but the trend is slowing. What they're doing is working. Humanity would benefit greatly from Ringer technology and the expertise that comes from managing closed habitat ecosystems, but they don't need rescuing. This goes over about as well as a toddler saying that playing in the road is perfectly safe. This is a fantastic hook for a science fiction novel. It does exactly what a great science fiction premise should do: takes current concerns (environmentalism, space boosterism, the debatable primacy of humans as a species, the appropriate role of space colonization, the tension between hopefulness and doomcasting about climate change) and uses the freedom of science fiction to twist them around and come at them from an entirely different angle. The design of the aliens is excellent for this purpose. The Ringers are not one alien species; they are two, evolved on different planets in the same system. The plains dwellers developed space flight first and went to meet the tree dwellers, and while their relationship is not entirely without hierarchy (the plains dwellers clearly lead on most matters), it's extensively symbiotic. They now form mixed families of both species, and have a rich cultural history of stories about first contact, interspecies conflicts and cooperation, and all the perils and misunderstandings that they successfully navigated. It makes their approach to humanity more believable to know that they have done first contact before and are building on a model. Their concern for humanity is credibly sincere. The joining of two species was wildly successful for them and they truly want to add a third. The politics on the human side are satisfyingly complicated. The watershed network may have made first contact, but the US government (in the form of NASA) is close behind, attempting to lean on its widely ignored formal power. The corporations are farther away and therefore slower to arrive, but the alien visitors have a damaged ship and need space to construct a subspace beacon and Asterion is happy to offer a site on one of its New Zealand islands. The corporate representatives are salivating at the chance to escape Earth and its environmental regulation for uncontrolled space construction and a new market of trillions of Ringers. NASA's attitude is more measured, but their representative is easily persuaded that the true future of humanity is in space. The work the watershed networks are doing is difficult, uncertain, and involves a lot of sacrifice, particularly for corporate consumer lifestyles. With such an attractive alien offer on the table, why stay and work so hard for an uncertain future? Maybe the Ringers are right. And then the dandelion networks that the watersheds use as the core of their governance and decision-making system all crash. The setup was great; I was completely invested. The execution was more mixed. There are some things I really liked, some things that I thought were a bit too easy or predictable, and several places where I wish Emrys had dug deeper and provided more detail. I thought the last third of the book fizzled a little, although some of the secondary characters Emrys introduces are delightful and carry the momentum of the story when the politics feel a bit lacking. If you tried to form a mental image of ecofeminist political science fiction with 1970s utopian sensibilities, but updated for the concerns of the 2020s, you would probably come very close to the politics of the watershed networks. There are considerably more breastfeedings and diaper changes than the average SF novel. Two of the primary characters are transgender, but with very different experiences with transition. Pronoun pins are an ubiquitous article of clothing. One of the characters has a prosthetic limb. Another character who becomes important later in the story codes as autistic. None of this felt gratuitous; the characters do come across as obsessed with gender, but in a way that I found believable. The human diversity is well-integrated with the story, shapes the characters, creates practical challenges, and has subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) political ramifications. But, and I say this with love because while these are not quite my people they're closely adjacent to my people, the social politics of this book are a very specific type of white feminist collaborative utopianism. When religion makes an appearance, I was completely unsurprised to find that several of the characters are Jewish. Race never makes a significant appearance at all. It's the sort of book where the throw-away references to other important watershed networks includes African ones, and the characters would doubtless try to be sensitive to racial issues if they came up, but somehow they never do. (If you're wondering if there's polyamory in this book, yes, yes there is, and also I suspect you know exactly what culture I'm talking about.) This is not intended as a criticism, just more of a calibration. All science fiction publishing houses could focus only on this specific political perspective for a year and the results would still be dwarfed by the towering accumulated pile of thoughtless paeans to capitalism. Ecofeminism has a long history in the genre but still doesn't show up in that many books, and we're far from exhausting the space of possibilities for what a consensus-based politics could look like with extensive computer support. But this book has a highly specific point of view, enough so that there won't be many thought-provoking surprises if you're already familiar with this school of political thought. The politics are also very earnest in a way that I admit provoked a bit of eyerolling. Emrys pushes all of the political conflict into the contrasts between the human factions, but I would have liked more internal disagreement within the watershed networks over principles rather than tactics. The degree of ideological agreement within the watershed group felt a bit unrealistic. But, that said, at least politics truly matters and the characters wrestle directly with some tricky questions. I would have liked to see more specifics about the dandelion network and the exact mechanics of the consensus decision process, since that sort of thing is my jam, but we at least get more details than are typical in science fiction. I'll take this over cynical libertarianism any day. Gender plays a huge role in this story, enough so that you should avoid this book if you're not interested in exploring gender conceptions. One of the two alien races is matriarchal and places immense social value on motherhood, and it's culturally expected to bring your children with you for any important negotiation. The watersheds actively embrace this, or at worst find it comfortable to use for their advantage, despite a few hints that the matriarchy of the plains aliens may have a very serious long-term demographic problem. In an interesting twist, it's the mostly-evil corporations that truly challenge gender roles, albeit by turning it into an opportunity to sell more clothing. The Asterion corporate representatives are, as expected, mostly the villains of the plot: flashy, hierarchical, consumerist, greedy, and exploitative. But gender among the corporations is purely a matter of public performance, one of a set of roles that you can put on and off as you choose and signal with clothing. They mostly use neopronouns, change pronouns as frequently as their clothing, and treat any question of body plumbing as intensely private. By comparison, the very 2020 attitudes of the watersheds towards gender felt oddly conservative and essentialist, and the main characters get flustered and annoyed by the ever-fluid corporate gender presentation. I wish Emrys had done more with this. As you can tell, I have a lot of thoughts and a lot of quibbles. Another example: computer security plays an important role in the plot and was sufficiently well-described that I have serious questions about the system architecture and security model of the dandelion networks. But, as with decision-making and gender, the more important takeaway is that Emrys takes enough risks and describes enough interesting ideas that there's a lot of meat here to argue with. That, more than getting everything right, is what a good science fiction novel should do. A Half-Built Garden is written from a very specific political stance that may make it a bit predictable or off-putting, and I thought the tail end of the book had some plot and resolution problems, but arguing with it was one of the more intellectually satisfying science fiction reading experiences I've had recently. You have to be in the right mood, but recommended for when you are. Rating: 7 out of 10

This isn't a book review, although the reason that I am typing this now is because of a book, You Are Not Alone: from the creator and host of Griefcast, Cariad Lloyd, ISBN: 978-1526621870 and I include a handful of quotes from Cariad where there is really no better way of describing things. Many people experience death for the first time as a child, often relating to a family pet. Death is universal but every experience of death is unique. One of the myths of grief is the idea of the Five Stages but this is a misinterpretation. Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression and Acceptance represent the five stage model of death and have nothing to do with grief. The five stages were developed from studying those who are terminally ill, the dying, not those who then grieve for the dead person and have to go on living without them. Grief is for those who loved the person who has died and it varies between each of those people just as people vary in how they love someone. The Five Stages end at the moment of death, grief is what comes next and most people do not grieve in stages, it can be more like a tangled knot. Death has a date and time, so that is why the last stage of the model is Acceptance. Grief has no timetable, those who grieve will carry that grief for the rest of their lives. Death starts the process of grief in those who go on living just as it ends the life of the person who is loved. "Grief eases and changes and returns but it never disappears.". I suspect many will have already stopped reading by this point. People do not talk about death and grief enough and this only adds to the burden of those who carry their grief. It can be of enormous comfort to those who have carried grief for some time to talk directly about the dead, not in vague pleasantries but with specific and strong memories. Find a safe place without distractions and talk with the person grieving face to face. Name the dead person. Go to places with strong memories and be there alongside. Talk about the times with that person before their death. Early on, everything about grief is painful and sad. It does ease but it remains unpredictable. Closing it away in a box inside your head (as I did at one point) is like cutting off a damaged limb but keeping the pain in a box on the shelf. You still miss the limb and eventually, the box starts leaking. For me, there were family pets which died but my first job out of university was to work in hospitals, helping the nurses manage the medication regimen and providing specialist advice as a pharmacist. It will not be long in that environment before everyone on the ward gets direct experience of the death of a person. In some ways, this helped me to separate the process of death from the process of grief. I cared for these people as patients but these were not my loved ones. Later, I worked in specialist terminal care units, including providing potential treatments as part of clinical trials. Here, it was not expected for any patient to be discharged alive. The more aggressive chemotherapies had already been tried and had failed, this was about pain relief, symptom management and helping the loved ones. Palliative care is not just about the patient, it involves helping the loved ones to accept what is happening as this provides comfort to the patient by closing the loop. Grief is stressful. One of the most common causes of personal stress is bereavement. The death of your loved one is outside of your control, it has happened, no amount of regret can change that. Then come all the other stresses, maybe about money or having somewhere to live as a result of what else has changed after the death or having to care for other loved ones. In the early stages, the first two years, I found it helpful to imagine my life as a box containing a ball and a button. The button triggers new waves of pain and loss each time it is hit. The ball bounces around the box and hits the button at random. Initially, the button is large and the ball is enormous, so the button is hit almost constantly. Over time, both the button and the ball change size. Starting off at maximum, initially there is only one direction of change. There are two problems with this analogy. First is that the grief ball has infinite energy which does not happen in reality. The ball may get smaller and the button harder to hit but the ball will continue bouncing. Secondly, the life box is not a predictable shape, so the pattern of movement of the ball is unpredictable. A single stress is one thing, but what has happened since has just kept adding more stress for me. Shortly before my father died 5 years ago now, I had moved house. Then, I was made redundant on the day of the first anniversary of my father's death. A year or so later, my long term relationship failed and a few months after that COVID-19 appeared. As the country eased out of the pandemic in 2021, my mother died (unrelated to COVID itself). A year after that, I had to take early retirement. My brother and sister, of course, share a lot of those stressors. My brother, in particular, took the responsibility for organising both funerals and did most of the visits to my mother before her death. The grief is different for each of the surviving family. Cariad's book helped me understand why I was getting frequent ideas about going back to visit places which my father and I both knew. My parents encouraged each of us to work hard to leave Port Talbot (or Pong Toilet locally) behind, in no small part due to the unrestrained pollution and deprivation that is common to small industrial towns across Wales, the midlands and the north of the UK. It wasn't that I wanted to move house back to our ancestral roots. It was my grief leaking out of the box. Yes, I long for mountains and the sea because I'm now living in a remorselessly flat and landlocked region after moving here for employment. However, it was my grief driving those longings - not for the physical surroundings but out of the shared memories with my father. I can visit those memories without moving house, I just need to arrange things so that I can be undisturbed and undistracted. I am not alone with my grief and I am grateful to my friends who have helped whilst carrying their own grief. It is necessary for everyone to think and talk about death and grief. In respect of your own death, no matter how far ahead that may be, consider Advance Care Planning and Expressions of Wish as well as your Will.

• Help your loved ones cope with your death by describing what you would like to happen.

• Document how your life has been arranged so that the executor of your Will can find the right documents to inform:

  • your bank,
  • your mortgage company,
  • your energy company,
  • your mobile phone company,
  • your house and car insurers and the like.

• If you've got a complex home setup with servers and other machines which would be unfamiliar to the executor of your Will, then entrust someone else with the information required to revoke your keys, access your machines etc. and then provide the contact information for that person to your executor.

• Arrange for your pets to be looked after.

• Describe how you would like your belongings to be handled - do you want every effort made to have your clothes and furnishing recycled instead of going to landfill?

• Where are the documents for the oven, the dishwasher and the central heating system so that these can be included in the sale of your property?

• If there are loans outstanding, make sure your executor or a trusted person knows where to find the account numbers and company names.

• What about organ donation? Make sure your executor knows your wishes and make sure your loved ones either agree or are willing to respect your wishes.

• Then the personal stuff, what do you want to happen to your social media accounts, your cloud data, your games, DVD and CD collection, your photos and other media? Some social media companies have explicit settings available in your account to describe if you want the data deleted after a certain amount of time, after a notification from some government service or to set up some kind of memorialised version or hand over control of the account to a trusted person.

Talk to people, document what you want. Your loved ones will be grateful and they deserve that much whilst they try to cope with the first onslaught of grief. Talk to your loved ones and get them to do the same for themselves. Normalise talking about death with your family, especially children. None of us are getting out of this alive and we will all leave behind people who will grieve.

After my father passed away, I brought home most of the personal items he had, both at home and at his office. Among many, many (many, many, many) other things, I brought two of his personal treasures: His photo collection and a box with the 8mm movies he shot approximately between 1956 and 1989, when he was forced into modernity and got a portable videocassette recorder. I have talked with several friends, as I really want to get it all in a digital format, and while I ve been making slow but steady advances scanning the photo reels, I was particularly dismayed (even though it was most expected most personal electronic devices aren t meant to last over 50 years) to find out the 8mm projector was no longer in working conditions; the lamp and the fans work, but the spindles won t spin. Of course, it is quite likely it is easy to fix, but it is beyond my tinkering abilities and finding photographic equipment repair shops is no longer easy. Anyway, even if I got it fixed, filming a movie from a screen, even with a decent camera, is a lousy way to get it digitized. But almost by mere chance, I got in contact with my cousin Daniel, ho came to Mexico to visit his parents, and had precisely brought with him a 8mm/Super8 movie scanner! It is a much simpler piece of equipment than I had expected, and while it does present some minor glitches (i.e. the vertical framing slightly loses alignment over the course of a medium-length film scanning session, and no adjustment is possible while the scan is ongoing), this is something that can be decently fixed in post-processing, and a scanning session can be split with no ill effects. Anyway, it is quite uncommon a mid-length (5min) film can be done without interrupting i.e. to join a splice, mostly given my father didn t just film, but also edited a lot (this is, it s not just family pictures, but all different kinds of fiction and documentary work he did). So, Daniel lent me a great, brand new, entry-level film scanner; I rushed to scan as many movies as possible before his return to the USA this week, but he insisted he bought it to help preserve our family s memory, and given we are still several cousins living in Mexico, I could keep hold of it so any other of the cousins will find it more easily. Of course, I am thankful and delighted! So, this equipment is a Magnasonic FS81. It is entry-level, as it lacks some adjustment abilities a professional one would surely have, and I m sure a better scanner will make the job faster but it s infinitely superior to not having it! The scanner processes roughly two frames per second (while the nominal 8mm/Super8 speed is 24 frames per second), so a 3 minute film reel takes a bit over 35 minutes And a long, ~20 minute film reel takes Close to 4hr, if nothing gets in your way :- And yes, with longer reels, the probability of a splice breaking are way higher than with a short one not only because there is simply a longer film to process, but also because, both at the unwinding and at the receiving reels, mechanics play their roles. The films don t advance smoothly, but jump to position each frame in the scanner s screen, so every bit of film gets its fair share of gentle tugs. My professional consultant on how and what to do is my good friend Chema Serralde, who has stopped me from doing several things I would regret later otherwise (such as joining spliced tapes with acidic chemical adhesives such as Kola Loka, a.k.a. Krazy Glue even if it s a bit trickier to do it, he insisted me on best using simple transparent tape if I m not buying fancy things such as film-adhesive). Chema also explained me the importance of the loopers (las Lupes in his technical Spanish translation), which I feared increased the likelihood of breaking a bit of old glue due to the angle in which the film gets pulled but if skipped, result in films with too much jumping. Not all of the movies I have are for public sharing Some of them are just family movies, with high personal value, but probably of very little interest to others. But some are! I have been uploading some of the movies, after minor post-processing, to the Internet Archive. Among them:

• Pel cula experimental de la c mara Bolex H-8
• CUM: Trabajo de Actividad Est tica 1957
• Majan a Morillotla
• 10 de mayo: D a de la madre (1958)
• Crimen
• Muerte de un planeta
• Un cad ver flota en el espacio

Anyway, I have a long way forward for scanning. I have 20 3min reels, 19 5min reels, and 8 20min reels. I want to check the scanning quality, but I think my 20min reels are mostly processed (we paid for scanning them some years ago). I mostly finished the 3min reels, but might have to go over some of them again due to the learning process. And Well, I m having quite a bit of fun in the process!

While visiting a convention during Easter, it occurred to me that it would be great if I could have a digital Dictaphone with transcribing capabilities, providing me with texts to cut-n-paste into stuff I need to write. The background is that long drives often bring up the urge to write on texts I am working on, which of course is out of the question while driving. With the release of OpenAI Whisper, this seem to be within reach with Free Software, so I decided to give it a go. OpenAI Whisper is a Linux based neural network system to read in audio files and provide text representation of the speech in that audio recording. It handle multiple languages and according to its creators even can translate into a different language than the spoken one. I have not tested the latter feature. It can either use the CPU or a GPU with CUDA support. As far as I can tell, CUDA in practice limit that feature to NVidia graphics cards. I have few of those, as they do not work great with free software drivers, and have not tested the GPU option. While looking into the matter, I did discover some work to provide CUDA support on non-NVidia GPUs, and some work with the library used by Whisper to port it to other GPUs, but have not spent much time looking into GPU support yet. I've so far used an old X220 laptop as my test machine, and only transcribed using its CPU. As it from a privacy standpoint is unthinkable to use computers under control of someone else (aka a "cloud" service) to transcribe ones thoughts and personal notes, I want to run the transcribing system locally on my own computers. The only sensible approach to me is to make the effort I put into this available for any Linux user and to upload the needed packages into Debian. Looking at Debian Bookworm, I discovered that only three packages were missing, tiktoken, triton, and openai-whisper. For a while I also believed ffmpeg-python was needed, but as its upstream seem to have vanished I found it safer to rewrite whisper to stop depending on in than to introduce ffmpeg-python into Debian. I decided to place these packages under the umbrella of the Debian Deep Learning Team, which seem like the best team to look after such packages. Discussing the topic within the group also made me aware that the triton package was already a future dependency of newer versions of the torch package being planned, and would be needed after Bookworm is released. All required code packages have been now waiting in the Debian NEW queue since Wednesday, heading for Debian Experimental until Bookworm is released. An unsolved issue is how to handle the neural network models used by Whisper. The default behaviour of Whisper is to require Internet connectivity and download the model requested to ~/.cache/whisper/ on first invocation. This obviously would fail the deserted island test of free software as the Debian packages would be unusable for someone stranded with only the Debian archive and solar powered computer on a deserted island. Because of this, I would love to include the models in the Debian mirror system. This is problematic, as the models are very large files, which would put a heavy strain on the Debian mirror infrastructure around the globe. The strain would be even higher if the models change often, which luckily as far as I can tell they do not. The small model, which according to its creator is most useful for English and in my experience is not doing a great job there either, is 462 MiB (deb is 414 MiB). The medium model, which to me seem to handle English speech fairly well is 1.5 GiB (deb is 1.3 GiB) and the large model is 2.9 GiB (deb is 2.6 GiB). I would assume everyone with enough resources would prefer to use the large model for highest quality. I believe the models themselves would have to go into the non-free part of the Debian archive, as they are not really including any useful source code for updating the models. The "source", aka the model training set, according to the creators consist of "680,000 hours of multilingual and multitask supervised data collected from the web", which to me reads material with both unknown copyright terms, unavailable to the general public. In other words, the source is not available according to the Debian Free Software Guidelines and the model should be considered non-free. I asked the Debian FTP masters for advice regarding uploading a model package on their IRC channel, and based on the feedback there it is still unclear to me if such package would be accepted into the archive. In any case I wrote build rules for a OpenAI Whisper model package and modified the Whisper code base to prefer shared files under /usr/ and /var/ over user specific files in ~/.cache/whisper/ to be able to use these model packages, to prepare for such possibility. One solution might be to include only one of the models (small or medium, I guess) in the Debian archive, and ask people to download the others from the Internet. Not quite sure what to do here, and advice is most welcome (use the debian-ai mailing list). To make it easier to test the new packages while I wait for them to clear the NEW queue, I created an APT source targeting bookworm. I selected Bookworm instead of Bullseye, even though I know the latter would reach more users, is that some of the required dependencies are missing from Bullseye and I during this phase of testing did not want to backport a lot of packages just to get up and running. Here is a recipe to run as user root if you want to test OpenAI Whisper using Debian packages on your Debian Bookworm installation, first adding the APT repository GPG key to the list of trusted keys, then setting up the APT repository and finally installing the packages and one of the models:

curl https://geekbay.nuug.no/~pere/openai-whisper/D78F5C4796F353D211B119E28200D9B589641240.asc \
  -o /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/pere-whisper.asc
mkdir -p /etc/apt/sources.list.d
cat > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/pere-whisper.list <<EOF
deb https://geekbay.nuug.no/~pere/openai-whisper/ bookworm main
deb-src https://geekbay.nuug.no/~pere/openai-whisper/ bookworm main
EOF
apt update
apt install openai-whisper

The package work for me, but have not yet been tested on any other computer than my own. With it, I have been able to (badly) transcribe a 2 minute 40 second Norwegian audio clip to test using the small model. This took 11 minutes and around 2.2 GiB of RAM. Transcribing the same file with the medium model gave a accurate text in 77 minutes using around 5.2 GiB of RAM. My test machine had too little memory to test the large model, which I believe require 11 GiB of RAM. In short, this now work for me using Debian packages, and I hope it will for you and everyone else once the packages enter Debian. Now I can start on the audio recording part of this project. As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address 15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b.

I wrote the Ruby bindings for the Enquo Project, my attempt to bring queryable encryption to all databases, using the Rutie library. Recently, I ve rewritten the bindings to use Magnus instead, and I thought I d put down my thoughts about the whole situation.

The Story So Far The Enquo Project core cryptography is all written in Rust, as seems to be the vogue these days. Rust is fast, safe, and easily interoperable with most of the rest of the modern software development ecosystem, making it a good choice as a language to implement the cryptographic primitives that Enquo needs, like Order-Revealing Encryption. Of course, since not everyone writes their applications in Rust, we need to provide the functionality of the Enquo client in the languages that people do use, such as Ruby, Python, and so on. Since re-writing all that cryptographic code in a myriad of languages would be tedious and error-prone, we instead provide bindings to the core Rust code. These are just thin shims of code that translate the data types and function calls between Rust and the target language.

Wrong sort of shim, but canned language bindings would be handy

As I m most familiar with Ruby and its development ecosystem (particularly Ruby on Rails), it was natural that I d make Ruby bindings for Enquo as my first target. Rummaging around, it seemed that Rutie was a good library to use, so off I went.

What are Rutie and Magnus, Anyway? Both libraries share the same goal: provide the ability to write some Rust code, run that through a compiler, and produce something that can be loaded by the Ruby interpreter and used just like any other Ruby class. They re both fairly high level interfaces, trying to abstract away much of the gory details, and do a lot of the common heavy lifting that can make writing bindings fiddly and annoying. Things like mapping data types (like strings and integers) between Rust data types and the closest equivalents in Ruby. This mapping never goes perfectly smoothly. For example, Ruby integers don t have a fixed range of values they can represent you can store a huge number like 2²⁵⁶ more-or-less as easily as you can the number 12. But Rust, being a lower-level language, only has a set of integer types that have fixed boundaries, like the u32 type, which can only store integers between zero and about four billion (2³² - 1, to be precise). There s also lots of little things that need to be just right, also, like translating the different memory management approaches of the languages, and dealing with a myriad of fiddly little issues like passing arguments and return values in and out of method calls, helpers for defining classes and methods (and pointing to the correct Rust functions), and so on.

This is what I imagine it looks like inside these libraries
(Herv Cozanet / Wikimedia Commons, CC-BY-SA)

All in all, these libraries are fairly significant pieces of work, and I m mighty glad that someone else has taken on the job of building (and maintaining!) them.

So Why the Change? Good question. It s important to say at the outset that there s nothing particularly wrong with Rutie. I found using Rutie to be very straightforward, and the Ruby bindings came together very quickly and easily. If someone chose to use Rutie for their project, I m sure they d have a good experience. What made me take the time to rewrite using Magnus was a set of a few tiny things, which together gave me enough of a shove to do the work. Firstly, I d had a hiccup with Rutie s support of newer versions of Ruby, particularly 3.2 (PR). Also, I d hit a couple of segfault issues, which were ultimately caused by Ruby garbage-collecting data out from underneath me. These were ultimately my fault, of course, but Rutie wasn t helping me out in avoiding the problems in the first place. Finally, while Rutie helped translate data types, there was still a bit of boilerplate and ugliness that needed to be included. This wasn t a showstopper, but I m appreciating the extra smoothness that Magnus provides here. As an example, here s what s required in Rutie to get native Rust data types from Ruby method parameters (and the self reference to the current object):

fn enquo_field_decrypt_text(ciphertext_obj: RString, context_obj: RString) -> RString  
    let ciphertext = ciphertext_obj.to_str_unchecked();
    let context = context_obj.to_vec_u8_unchecked();
    let field = rbself.get_data(&*FIELD_WRAPPER);
    // etc etc etc

The equivalent in Magnus is just the function signature:

fn decrypt_text(&self, ciphertext: String, context: String) -> Result<String, magnus::Error>  

You can also see there that Magnus signals an exception via the Result return value, while Rutie s approach to raising an exception involves poking the Ruby VM directly, which always struck me as a bit ugly. There are several other minor things in Magnus (like its cleaner approach to wrapping structs so they can be stored in Ruby objects) that I m appreciating, too. Never discount the power of ergonomics for making a happy developer.

The End Result I spent a bit over half of last weekend doing the rewrite maybe ten hours of so. Since Magnus did more type checking and data validation, and its approach to error handling was smoother, I took the opportunity to rewrite a bunch of Ruby wrapper code I d written (which just existed to check things like ranges of values and string encodings) into Rust, as well. To make sure that the conversion was accurate, I added a heap more unit tests to the bindings. I also took the opportunity to restructure the codebase to split the code for the different Ruby classes into separate files, which I hadn t done initially as the code had originally accreted, rather than being purposefully written. All up, though, my rewrite ended up removing over 60 lines (excluding the extra specs I added):

$ git diff --stat -- lib ext/enquo/src
 ruby/ext/enquo/src/field.rs         342 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
 ruby/ext/enquo/src/lib.rs           338 ++++---------------------------------
 ruby/ext/enquo/src/root.rs           39 +++++
 ruby/ext/enquo/src/root_key.rs       67 ++++++++
 ruby/lib/enquo.rb                     6 +-
 ruby/lib/enquo/field.rb             173 -------------------
 ruby/lib/enquo/root.rb               28 ----
 ruby/lib/enquo/root_key.rb            1 -
 ruby/lib/enquo/root_key/static.rb    27 ---
 9 files changed, 479 insertions(+), 542 deletions(-)

Considering that I was translating from a higher level language into a lower level one, the removal of so much code is quite remarkable. Magnus was able to automagically replace rather a lot of raise ArgumentError if something.isnt_right code in those .rb files. So, in conclusion, if you, too, are building Ruby extensions in Rust, while Rutie is a solid choice (and you probably should stick with it if you re already using it), I highly recommend giving Magnus a look for your next extension.

Review: Babel, by R.F. Kuang

Publisher:	Harper Voyage
Copyright:	August 2022
ISBN:	0-06-302144-7
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	544

Babel, or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators' Revolution, to give it its full title, is a standalone dark academia fantasy set in the 1830s and 1840s, primarily in Oxford, England. The first book of R.F. Kuang's previous trilogy, The Poppy War, was nominated for multiple awards and won the Compton Crook Award for best first novel. Babel is her fourth book. Robin Swift, although that was not his name at the time, was born and raised in Canton and educated by an inexplicable English tutor his family could not have afforded. After his entire family dies of cholera, he is plucked from China by a British professor and offered a life in England as his ward. What follows is a paradise of books, a hell of relentless and demanding instruction, and an unpredictably abusive emotional environment, all aiming him towards admission to Oxford University. Robin will join University College and the Royal Institute of Translation. The politics of this imperial Britain are almost precisely the same as in our history, but one of the engines is profoundly different. This world has magic. If words from two different languages are engraved on a metal bar (silver is best), the meaning and nuance lost in translation becomes magical power. With a careful choice of translation pairs, and sometimes additional help from other related words and techniques, the silver bar becomes a persistent spell. Britain's industrial revolution is in overdrive thanks to the country's vast stores of silver and the applied translation prowess of Babel. This means Babel is also the only part of very racist Oxford that accepts non-white students and women. They need translators (barely) more than they care about maintaining social hierarchy; translation pairs only work when the translator is fluent in both languages. The magic is also stronger when meanings are more distinct, which is creating serious worries about classical and European languages. Those are still the bulk of Babel's work, but increased trade and communication within Europe is eroding the meaning distinctions and thus the amount of magical power. More remote languages, such as Chinese and Urdu, are full of untapped promise that Britain's colonial empire wants to capture. Professor Lowell, Robin's dubious benefactor, is a specialist in Chinese languages; Robin is a potential tool for his plans. As Robin discovers shortly after arriving in Oxford, he is not the first of Lowell's tools. His predecessor turned against Babel and is trying to break its chokehold on translation magic. He wants Robin to help. This is one of those books that is hard to review because it does some things exceptionally well and other things that did not work for me. It's not obvious if the latter are flaws in the book or a mismatch between book and reader (or, frankly, flaws in the reader). I'll try to explain as best I can so that you can draw your own conclusions. First, this is one of the all-time great magical system hooks. The way words are tapped for power is fully fleshed out and exceptionally well-done. Kuang is a professional translator, which shows in the attention to detail on translation pairs. I think this is the best-constructed and explained word-based magic system I've read in fantasy. Many word-based systems treat magic as its own separate language that is weirdly universal. Here, Kuang does the exact opposite, and the result is immensely satisfying. A fantasy reader may expect exploration of this magic system to be the primary point of the book, however, and this is not the case. It is an important part of the book, and its implications are essential to the plot resolution, but this is not the type of fantasy novel where the plot is driven by character exploration of the magic system. The magic system exists, the characters use it, and we do get some crunchy details, but the heart of the book is elsewhere. If you were expecting the typical relationship of a fantasy novel to its magic system, you may get a bit wrong-footed. Similarly, this is historical fantasy, but it is the type of historical fantasy where the existence of magic causes no significant differences. For some people, this is a pet peeve; personally, I don't mind that choice in the abstract, but some of the specifics bugged me. The villains of this book assert that any country could have done what Britain did in developing translation magic, and thus their hoarding of it is not immoral. They are obviously partly lying (this is a classic justification for imperialism), but it's not clear from the book how they are lying. Technologies (and magic here works like a technology) tend to concentrate power when they require significant capital investment, and tend to dilute power when they are portable and easy to teach. Translation magic feels like the latter, but its effect in the book is clearly the former, and I was never sure why. England is not an obvious choice to be a translation superpower. Yes, it's a colonial empire, but India, southeast Asia, and most certainly Africa (the continent largely not appearing in this book) are home to considerably more languages from more wildly disparate families than western Europe. Translation is not a peculiarly European idea, and this magic system does not seem hard to stumble across. It's not clear why England, and Oxford in particular, is so dramatically far ahead. There is some sign that Babel is keeping the mechanics of translation magic secret, but that secret has leaked, seems easy to develop independently, and is simple enough that a new student can perform basic magic with a few hours of instruction. This does not feel like the kind of power that would be easy to concentrate, let alone to the extreme extent required by the last quarter of this book. The demand for silver as a base material for translation magic provides a justification for mercantilism that avoids the confusing complexities of currency economics in our actual history, so fine, I guess, but it was a bit disappointing for this great of an idea for a magic system to have this small of an impact on politics. I'll come to the actual thrust of this book in a moment, but first something else Babel does exceptionally well: dark academia. The remainder of Robin's cohort at Oxford is Remy, a dark-skinned Muslim from Calcutta; Victoire, a Haitian woman raised in France; and Letty, the daughter of a British admiral. All of them are non-white except Letty, and Letty and Victoire additionally have to deal with the blatant sexism of the time. (For example, they have to live several miles from Oxford because women living near the college would be a "distraction.") The interpersonal dynamics between the four are exceptionally well done. Kuang captures the dislocation of going away to college, the unsettled life upheaval that makes it both easy and vital to form suddenly tight friendships, and the way that the immense pressure from classes and exams leaves one so devoid of spare emotional capacity that those friendships become both unbreakable and badly strained. Robin and Remy almost immediately become inseparable in that type of college friendship in which profound trust and constant companionship happen first and learning about the other person happens afterwards. It's tricky to talk about this without spoilers, but one of the things Kuang sets up with this friend group is a pointed look at intersectionality. Babel has gotten a lot of positive review buzz, and I think this is one of the reasons why. Kuang does not pass over or make excuses for characters in a place where many other books do. This mostly worked for me, but with a substantial caveat that I think you may want to be aware of before you dive into this book. Babel is set in the 1830s, but it is very much about the politics of 2022. That does not necessarily mean that the politics are off for the 1830s; I haven't done the research to know, and it's possible I'm seeing the Tiffany problem (Jo Walton's observation that Tiffany is a historical 12th century women's name, but an author can't use it as a medieval name because readers think it sounds too modern). But I found it hard to shake the feeling that the characters make sense of their world using modern analytical frameworks of imperialism, racism, sexism, and intersectional feminism, although without using modern terminology, and characters from the 1830s would react somewhat differently. This is a valid authorial choice; all books are written for the readers of the time when they're published. But as with magical systems that don't change history, it's a pet peeve for some readers. If that's you, be aware that's the feel I got from it. The true center of this book is not the magic system or the history. It's advertised directly in the title the necessity of violence although it's not until well into the book before the reader knows what that means. This is a book about revolution, what revolution means, what decisions you have to make along the way, how the personal affects the political, and the inadequacy of reform politics. It is hard, uncomfortable, and not gentle on its characters. The last quarter of this book was exceptional, and I understand why it's getting so much attention. Kuang directly confronts the desire for someone else to do the necessary work, the hope that surely the people with power will see reason, and the feeling of despair when there are no good plans and every reason to wait and do nothing when atrocities are about to happen. If you are familiar with radical politics, these aren't new questions, but this is not the sort of thing that normally shows up in fantasy. It does not surprise me that Babel struck a nerve with readers a generation or two younger than me. It captures that heady feeling on the cusp of adulthood when everything is in flux and one is assembling an independent politics for the first time. Once I neared the end of the book, I could not put it down. The ending is brutal, but I think it was the right ending for this book. There are two things, though, that I did not like about the political arc. The first is that Victoire is a much more interesting character than Robin, but is sidelined for most of the book. The difference of perspectives between her and Robin is the heart of what makes the end of this book so good, and I wish that had started 300 pages earlier. Or, even better, I wish Victoire has been the protagonist; I liked Robin, but he's a very predictable character for most of the book. Victoire is not; even the conflicts she had earlier in the book, when she didn't get much attention in the story, felt more dynamic and more thoughtful than Robin's mix of guilt and anxiety. The second is that I wish Kuang had shown more of Robin's intellectual evolution. All of the pieces of why he makes the decisions that he does are present in this book, and Kuang shows his emotional state (sometimes in agonizing detail) at each step, but the sense-making, the development of theory and ideology beneath the actions, is hinted at but not shown. This is a stylistic choice with no one right answer, but it felt odd because so much of the rest of the plot is obvious and telegraphed. If the reader shares Robin's perspective, I think it's easy to fill in the gaps, but it felt odd to read Robin giving clearly thought-out political analyses at the end of the book without seeing the hashing-out and argument with friends required to develop those analyses. I felt like I had to do a lot of heavy lifting as the reader, work that I wish had been done directly by the book. My final note about this book is that I found much of it extremely predictable. I think that's part of why reviewers describe it as accessible and easy to read; accessibility and predictability can be two sides of the same coin. Kuang did not intend for this book to be subtle, and I think that's part of the appeal. But very few of Robin's actions for the first three-quarters of the book surprised me, and that's not always the reading experience I want. The end of the book is different, and I therefore found it much more gripping, but it takes a while to get there. Babel is, for better or worse, the type of fantasy where the politics, economics, and magic system exist primarily to justify the plot the author wanted. I don't think the societal position of the Institute of Translation that makes the ending possible is that believable given the nature of the technology in question and the politics of the time, and if you are inclined to dig into the specifics of the world-building, I think you will find it frustrating. Where it succeeds brilliantly is in capturing the social dynamics of hothouse academic cohorts, and in making a sharp and unfortunately timely argument about the role of violence in political change, in a way that the traditionally conservative setting of fantasy rarely does. I can't say Babel blew me away, but I can see why others liked it so much. If I had to guess, I'd say that the closer one is in age to the characters in the book and to that moment of political identity construction, the more it's likely to appeal. Rating: 7 out of 10

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.

Results of the Debian Developer Survey, by Roberto C. S nchez In 2022, Freexian polled Debian Developers about the usage of money in Debian. More than 200 Debian Developers graciously participated, providing useful and constructive answers. Roberto and Utkarsh have worked on reviewing this feedback and summarizing it in a report recently published and announced to the project.

DebConf 23 Website, by Stefano Rivera In preparation for DebConf 23, Stefano did some work on the DebConf website s registration system. To support an expected large number of local registration requests, and a limited venue size, Stefano added a review system for registration requests. There was also some infrastructure work for the website framework. We use the same framework for miniconfs and DebConf, but without the full registration system. Since last DebConf, we have migrated from a pure-JS toolchain for the static assets, to django-compressor, to be friendlier to contributors and have a simpler dependency setup. This required some updates in the full-DebConf registration system that hadn t been noticed yet in miniDebConfs. Finally, with Utkarsh, we started to wind up the DebConf 22 travel bursary reimbursement process.

Debian Reimbursements Web App Progress, by Stefano Rivera In a project funded by Freexian s Project Funding initiative, Stefano made some more progress on the Debian Reimbursements Web App. The first rough implementation core request lifecycle is almost complete. Receipts can be collected and itemized, and the request can be submitted for a reimbursement request.

Debian Printing, by Thorsten Alteholz Due to the upcoming release, only bug fixing uploads are allowed in this part of the release cycle and Thorsten did uploads of three Debian Printing packages. The upload of hplip was rather straightforward and five bugs could be closed. cups-filters suddenly started to FTBFS and thus got an RC bug. It failed due to a compile error in a header file of some dependency. Luckily the maintainer of that dependency knew that his package now needed c++17, so the fix was to just remove an old compile flag that forced the compiler to use c++0x. This flag was once progressive but nowadays it is more of a hindrance than a help. The third package upload was for cups, which got some translation updates. Unfortunately this was the most tricky one as some translations did not appear in the binary packages. After debugging for some time, it turned out that the handling of links did not work properly. Now the version in Bookworm will be the cups version with the most translated man pages ever.

Miscellaneous contributions

• Stefano Rivera updated a few Python modules in the Debian Python Team, to the latest upstream versions.
• Stefano Rivera reviewed the current patch series applied to Python 3.12, as an Arch package maintainer had noticed that we dropped a patch by mistake, and reinstated it.
• Anton Gladky prepared an upload of newer version (9.2.6) of vtk library and uploaded it into the experimental due to a freeze. VTK is the visualization kit - a library used mostly for scientific and engineering applications to visualize complex objects. Transition of dependent packages is planned on after-release phase.
• Helmut Grohne, in the continual effort to improve Debian s cross-build support, provided 22 cross-build patches to packages in the archive.

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

FTP master This month I accepted 78 and rejected 12 packages. The overall number of packages that got accepted was 78. I still love this calm and peaceful time now within the Debian project, when everybody only cares for RC bugs and NEW does not grow. Debian LTS This was my hundred-fifth month that I did some work for the Debian LTS initiative, started by Raphael Hertzog at Freexian. This month my all in all workload has been 14h. During that time I uploaded:

• [DLA 3358-1] mpv security update for one CVE
• [DLA 3372-1] xorg-server embargoed security update for one CVE
• [DLA 3374-1] libmicrohttpd security update for one CVE
• [DLA 3378-1] duktape security update for one CVE
• [1033759] pu-bug for duktape/bullseye

I also participated in the monthly LTS-meeting. Last but not least I did some days of frontdesk duties and took care of issues on security-master. Debian ELTS This month was the fifty sixth ELTS month.

• [ELA-821-1] xorg-server embargoed security update of Jessie and Stretch for one CVE
• [ELA-824-1] libmicrohttpd security update of Jessie and Stretch for one CVE

The duktape update in Stretch is more complicated than expected and I could not finish it this month. I also started to work on openssl1.0 Last but not least I did some days of frontdesk duties Debian Printing This month I uploaded new versions or improved packages of:

• hplip (bug fixing)
• cups (update translations)

The unblock bug for hplip was already processed, the unblock bug for cups is still waiting. Hopefully the last minute work of the translators was not wasted. Parts of this work is generously funded by Freexian! Other stuff Looking at my notes, there is nothing to be reported here.

The Brazilian translation team debian-l10n-portuguese had their first workshop of 2023 in February, with great results:

• The workshop was aimed at beginners, working in DDTP/DDTSS.
• Two days of a hands-on workshop via Jitsi.
• In the following days, translation work continued independently, with team support.
• Subscribers: 29
• New contributors to DDPT/DDTSS: 22
• Translations from new participants: 175
• Revisions from new participants : 261

Our focus was to complete the descriptions of the 500 most popular packages (popcon). Although we were unable to reach 100% of the translation cycle, much of these descriptions are in progress and with a little more work will be available to the community. The Brazilian Portuguese translation team

The Brazilian translation team debian-l10n-portuguese realizou a primeira oficina de 2023 em fevereiro, com timos resultados:

• A oficina foi direcionada para iniciantes, usando o DDTP/DDTSS.
• Dois dias de oficina m o-na-massa via Jitsi.
• Nos dias seguintes, continuidade dos trabalho de tradu o de forma independente, com o suporte da equipe.
• Quantidade de pessoas inscritos(as): 29
• Novos(as) contribuidores(as) no DDPT/DDTSS: 22
• Tradu es dos(as) novos(as) participantes: 175
• Revis es dos(as) novos(as) participantes : 261

Nosso foco era completar as descri es dos 500 pacotes mais populares (popcon). Apesar de n o termos conseguido chegar 100% do ciclo de tradu o, grande parte dessas descri es est o em andamento e com um pouco mais de trabalho estar o dispon veis comunidade. Agrade o aos( s) participantes pelas contribui es. As oficinas foram bem movimentadas e, muito al m das tradu es em si, conversamos sobre diversas faces da comunidade Debian. Esperamos ter ajudado aos( s) iniciantes a contribuir com o projeto de maneira frequente. Agrade o em especial ao Charles (charles) que ministrou um dos dias da oficina, ao Paulo (phls) que sempre est a dando uma for a, e ao Fred Maranh o pelo seu incans vel trabalho no DDTSS. Equipe de tradu o do portugu s do Brasil

Three Ancient Civilizations I have been reading books for a long time but somehow I don t know how or when I realized that there are three medieval civilizations that time and again seem to fascinate the authors, either American or European. The three civilizations that do get mentioned every now and then are Egyptian, Greece and Roman and I have no clue as to why. Another two civilizations closely follow them, Mesopotian and Sumerian Civilizations. Why most of the authors irrespective of genre are mystified by these 5 civilizations is beyond me but they also conjure lot of imagination. Now if I was on the right side of 40, maybe 22-25 onwards and had the means or the opportunity or both, I would have gone and tried to learn as much as I can about these various civilizations. There is still a lot of enigma attached and it seems that the official explanations of how these various civilizations ended seems too good to be true or whatever. One of the more interesting points has been how Greece mythology were subverted and flipped to make Roman mythology. Apparently, many Greek gods have a Roman aspect and the qualities are opposite to the Greek aspect. I haven t learned the reason why it is so, yet. Apart from the Iziko Natural Museum in South Africa which did have its share of wonders (the whole South African experience was surreal) nowhere I have witnessed stuff from the above other than in Africa. The whole thing seemed just surreal. I could go on but as I don t know what is real and what is mythology when it comes to various cultures including whatever little I experienced in Africa.

Recent History Having said the above, I also find that many Indians somehow do not either know or are not interested in understanding recent history. I am talking of the time between 1800s and 1950 s. British apologist Mr. William Dalrymple in his book Anarchy has shared how the East Indian Company looted India and gave less than half back to the British. So where did the rest of the money go ? It basically went to the tax free havens around UK. That tale is very much similar as to how the Axis gold was used to have an entity called Switzerland from scratch. There have been books as well as couple of miniseries or two that document that fact. But for me this is not the real story, this is more of a side dish per-se. The real story perhaps is how the EU peace project was born. Because of Hitler s rise and the way World War 2 happened, the Allies knew that they couldn t subjugate Germany through another humiliation as they had after World War 1, who knows another Hitler might come. So while they did fine the Germans, they also helped them via the Marshall plan. Germany also realized that it had been warring with other European countries for over a thousand years as well as quite a few other countries. The first sort of treaty immediately in that regard was the Western Union Alliance . While on the face of it, it was a defense treaty between sovereign powers. Interestingly, as can be seen UK at that point in time wanted more countries to be part of the Treaty of Dunkirk. This was quickly followed 2 years later by the Treaty of London which made way for the Council of Europe to be formed. The reason I am sharing is because a lot of Indians whom I meet on SM do not know that UK was instrumental front and center for the formation of European Union (EU). Also they perhaps don t realize that after World War 2, UK was greatly diminished both financially and militarily. That is the reason it gave back its erstwhile colonies including India and other countries. If UK hadn t become a part of EU they would have been called the poor man of Europe as they had been called few hundred years ago. In fact, after Brexit, UK has been the only nation that has fallen on the dire times as much as it has. They have practically no food, supermarkets running out of veggies and whatnot. electricity sky-high as they don t want to curtail profits of the gas companies which in turn donate money to Tory coffers. Sadly, most of my brethen do not know that hence I have had to share it. The EU became a power in its own right due to Gravity model of trade. The U.S. is attempting the same thing and calls it near off-shoring.

Tesla, Investor Day Presentation, Toyota and Free Software The above brings it nicely about the Tesla Investor Day that happened couple of weeks back. The biggest news though was broken just 24 hours earlier when the governor of Monterrey] shared how Giga New Mexico would be happening and shared some site photographs. There have been bits of news on that off-and-on since then. Toyota meanwhile has been putting lot of anti-EV posters and whatnot. In fact, India seems to be mirroring Japan in a lot of ways, the only difference is Japan is still superior economically than India. I do sincerely hope that at least Japan can get out of its lost decades. I have asked privately if any of the Japanese translators would be willing to translate the anti-EV poster so we may all know.

Anti-EV poster by Toyota

Urinal outside UK Embassy About a week back few people chanting Khalistan entered the Indian Embassy and showed the flags. This was in the UK. Now in a retaliatory move against a friendly nation, we want to make a Urinal. after making a security downgrade for the Embassy. The pettiness being shown by Indian Govt. especially when it has very few friends. There are also plans to do the same for the U.S. and other embassies as well. I do not know when we will get common sense.

Holi Just a few weeks back, Holi happened. It used to be a sweet and innocent festival. But from the last few years, I have been hearing and seeing sexual harassment on the rise. In fact, saw quite a few lewd posts written to women on Holi or verge of Holi and also videos of the same. One of the most shameful incidents occurred with a Japanese tourist. She was not only sexually molested but also terrorized that if she were to report then she could be raped and murdered. She promptly left Delhi. Once it was reported in mass media, Delhi Police tried to show it was doing something. FWIW, Delhi s crime against women stats have been at record high and conviction at record low.

Ecommerce Rules being changed, logistics gonna be tough. Just today there have been changes in Ecommerce rules (again) and this is gonna be a pain for almost all companies big and small with the exception of Adani and Ambani. Almost all players including the Tatas have called them out. Of course, all such laws have been passed without debate. In such a scenario, small startups like these cannot hope to grow their business.

Inertial Measurement Unit or Full Body Tracking with cheap hardware. Apparently, a whole host of companies are looking at 3-D tracking using cheap hardware apparently known as IMU sensors. Sooner than later cheap 3-D glasses and IMU sensors should explode the 3-D market worldwide. There is a huge potential and upside to it and will probably overtake smartphones as well. But then the danger will be of our thoughts, ideas, nightmares etc. to be shared without our consent. The more we tap into a virtual world, what stops anybody from tapping into our brain and practically stealing our identity in more than one way. I dunno if there are any Debian people or FSF projects working on the above. Even Laws can only do so much, until and unless there are alternative places and ways it would be difficult to say the least

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:

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

The recording is available in this video and it's not your typical keynote. It starts ~25 minutes late, audio is crap, lightning and camera are crap, clapping seems to be from whatever staff they managed to get together in a room, decor is bizarre, colors are shit. It's amazing.

Specifications Those are the specifications of the 12th gen, in general terms. Your build will of course vary according to your needs.

• CPU: i5-1240P, i7-1260P, or i7-1280P (Up to 4.4-4.8 GHz, 4+8 cores), Iris Xe graphics
• Storage: 250-4000GB NVMe (or bring your own)
• Memory: 8-64GB DDR4-3200 (or bring your own)
• WiFi 6e (AX210, vPro optional, or bring your own)
• 296.63mm X 228.98mm X 15.85mm, 1.3Kg
• 13.5" display, 3:2 ratio, 2256px X 1504px, 100% sRGB, >400 nit
• 4 x USB-C user-selectable expansion ports, including
  • USB-C
  • USB-A
  • HDMI
  • DP
  • Ethernet
  • MicroSD
  • 250-1000GB SSD
• 3.5mm combo headphone jack
• Kill switches for microphone and camera
• Battery: 55Wh
• Camera: 1080p 60fps
• Biometrics: Fingerprint Reader
• Backlit keyboard
• Power Adapter: 60W USB-C (or bring your own)
• ships with a screwdriver/spludger
• 1 year warranty
• base price: 1000$CAD, but doesn't give you much, typical builds around 1500-2000$CAD

Actual build This is the actual build I ordered. Amounts in CAD. (1CAD = ~0.75EUR/USD.)

Base configuration

• CPU: Intel Core i5-1240P (AKA Alder Lake P 8 4.4GHz P-threads, 8 3.2GHz E-threads, 16 total, 28-64W), 1079$
• Memory: 16GB (1 x 16GB) DDR4-3200, 104$

Customization

• Keyboard: US English, included

Expansion Cards

• 2 USB-C $24
• 3 USB-A $36
• 2 HDMI $50
• 1 DP $50
• 1 MicroSD $25
• 1 Storage 1TB $199
• Sub-total: 384$

Accessories

• Power Adapter - US/Canada $64.00

Total

• Before tax: 1606$
• After tax and duties: 1847$
• Free shipping

Quick evaluation This is basically the TL;DR: here, just focusing on broad pros/cons of the laptop.

Pros

• easily repairable (complete with QR codes pointing to repair guides!), the 11th gen received a 10/10 score from ifixit.com, which they call "exceedingly rare", the 12th gen has a similar hardware design and would probably rate similarly
• replaceable motherboard!!! can be reused as a NUC-like device, with a 3d-printed case, 12th gen board can be bought standalone and retrofitted into an 11th gen case
• not a passing fad: they made a first laptop with the 11th gen Intel chipset in 2021, and a second motherboard with the 12th Intel chipset in 2022
• four modular USB-C ports which can fit HDMI, USB-C (pass-through, can provide power on both sides), USB-A, DisplayPort, MicroSD, external storage (250GB, 1TB), active modding community
• nice power led indicating power level (charging, charged, etc) when plugged
• test account on fwupd.org, "expressed interest to port to coreboot" (according to the Fedora developer) and are testing firmware updates over fwupd, present on LVFS testing, but including for the 12th gen, latest BIOS (3.06) was shipped through LVFS
• excellent documentation of the (proprietary) BIOS
• explicit Linux support with install guides, although you'll have to live with a bit of proprietary firmware, and not everything works correctly
• the 11th gen had good reviews: Ars Technica, Fedora developer, iFixit teardown, phoronix, amazing keyboard and touch pad, according to Linux After Dark, most exciting laptops I've ever broken (Cory Doctorow) ; more critical review from an OpenBSD developer
• the EC (Embedded Controller) is open source so of course people are hacking at it, some documentation on what's possible (e.g. changing LED colors, fan curves, etc), see also

Cons

• the 11th gen is out of stock, except for the higher-end CPUs, which are much less affordable (700$+)
• the 12th gen has compatibility issues with Debian, followup in the DebianOn page, but basically: brightness hotkeys, power management, wifi, the webcam is okay even though the chipset is the infamous alder lake because it does not have the fancy camera; most issues currently seem solvable, and upstream is working with mainline to get their shit working
• 12th gen might have issues with thunderbolt docks
• they used to have some difficulty keeping up with the orders: first two batches shipped, third batch sold out, fourth batch should have shipped in October 2021. they generally seem to keep up with shipping. update (august 2022): they rolled out a second line of laptops (12th gen), first batch shipped, second batch shipped late, September 2022 batch was generally on time, see this spreadsheet for a crowdsourced effort to track those supply chain issues seem to be under control as of early 2023. I got the Ethernet expansion card shipped within a week.
• compared to my previous laptop (Purism Librem 13v4), it feels strangely bulkier and heavier; it's actually lighter than the purism (1.3kg vs 1.4kg) and thinner (15.85mm vs 18mm) but the design of the Purism laptop (tapered edges) makes it feel thinner
• no space for a 2.5" drive
• rather bright LED around power button, but can be dimmed in the BIOS (not low enough to my taste) I got used to it
• fan quiet when idle, but can be noisy when running, for example if you max a CPU for a while
• battery described as "mediocre" by Ars Technica (above), confirmed poor in my tests (see below)
• no RJ-45 port, and attempts at designing ones are failing because the modular plugs are too thin to fit (according to Linux After Dark), so unlikely to have one in the future Update: they cracked that nut and ship an 2.5 gbps Ethernet expansion card with a realtek chipset, without any firmware blob
• a bit pricey for the performance, especially when compared to the competition (e.g. Dell XPS, Apple M1)
• 12th gen Intel has glitchy graphics, seems like Intel hasn't fully landed proper Linux support for that chipset yet

Initial hardware setup A breeze.

Accessing the board The internals are accessed through five TorX screws, but there's a nice screwdriver/spudger that works well enough. The screws actually hold in place so you can't even lose them. The first setup is a bit counter-intuitive coming from the Librem laptop, as I expected the back cover to lift and give me access to the internals. But instead the screws is release the keyboard and touch pad assembly, so you actually need to flip the laptop back upright and lift the assembly off to get access to the internals. Kind of scary. I also actually unplugged a connector in lifting the assembly because I lifted it towards the monitor, while you actually need to lift it to the right. Thankfully, the connector didn't break, it just snapped off and I could plug it back in, no harm done. Once there, everything is well indicated, with QR codes all over the place supposedly leading to online instructions.

Bad QR codes Unfortunately, the QR codes I tested (in the expansion card slot, the memory slot and CPU slots) did not actually work so I wonder how useful those actually are. After all, they need to point to something and that means a URL, a running website that will answer those requests forever. I bet those will break sooner than later and in fact, as far as I can tell, they just don't work at all. I prefer the approach taken by the MNT reform here which designed (with the 100 rabbits folks) an actual paper handbook (PDF). The first QR code that's immediately visible from the back of the laptop, in an expansion cord slot, is a 404. It seems to be some serial number URL, but I can't actually tell because, well, the page is a 404. I was expecting that bar code to lead me to an introduction page, something like "how to setup your Framework laptop". Support actually confirmed that it should point a quickstart guide. But in a bizarre twist, they somehow sent me the URL with the plus (+) signs escaped, like this:

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

... which Firefox immediately transforms in:

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

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

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

(They have also "let the team know about this for feedback and help resolve the problem with the link" which is a support code word for "ha-ha! nope! not my problem right now!" Trust me, I know, my own code word is "can you please make a ticket?")

Seating disks and memory The "DIY" kit doesn't actually have that much of a setup. If you bought RAM, it's shipped outside the laptop in a little plastic case, so you just seat it in as usual. Then you insert your NVMe drive, and, if that's your fancy, you also install your own mPCI WiFi card. If you ordered one (which was my case), it's pre-installed. Closing the laptop is also kind of amazing, because the keyboard assembly snaps into place with magnets. I have actually used the laptop with the keyboard unscrewed as I was putting the drives in and out, and it actually works fine (and will probably void your warranty, so don't do that). (But you can.) (But don't, really.)

Hardware review

Keyboard and touch pad The keyboard feels nice, for a laptop. I'm used to mechanical keyboard and I'm rather violent with those poor things. Yet the key travel is nice and it's clickety enough that I don't feel too disoriented. At first, I felt the keyboard as being more laggy than my normal workstation setup, but it turned out this was a graphics driver issues. After enabling a composition manager, everything feels snappy. The touch pad feels good. The double-finger scroll works well enough, and I don't have to wonder too much where the middle button is, it just works. Taps don't work, out of the box: that needs to be enabled in Xorg, with something like this:

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

But be aware that once you enable that tapping, you'll need to deal with palm detection... So I have not actually enabled this in the end.

Power button The power button is a little dangerous. It's quite easy to hit, as it's right next to one expansion card where you are likely to plug in a cable power. And because the expansion cards are kind of hard to remove, you might squeeze the laptop (and the power key) when trying to remove the expansion card next to the power button. So obviously, don't do that. But that's not very helpful. An alternative is to make the power button do something else. With systemd-managed systems, it's actually quite easy. Add a HandlePowerKey stanza to (say) /etc/systemd/logind.conf.d/power-suspends.conf:

[Login]
HandlePowerKey=suspend
HandlePowerKeyLongPress=poweroff

You might have to create the directory first:

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

Then restart logind:

systemctl restart systemd-logind

And the power button will suspend! Long-press to power off doesn't actually work as the laptop immediately suspends... Note that there's probably half a dozen other ways of doing this, see this, this, or that.

Special keybindings There is a series of "hidden" (as in: not labeled on the key) keybindings related to the fn keybinding that I actually find quite useful.

Key	Equivalent	Effect	Command
p	Pause	lock screen	xset s activate
b	Break	?	?
k	ScrLk	switch keyboard layout	N/A

It looks like those are defined in the microcontroller so it would be possible to add some. For example, the SysRq key is almost bound to fn s in there. Note that most other shortcuts like this are clearly documented (volume, brightness, etc). One key that's less obvious is F12 that only has the Framework logo on it. That actually calls the keysym XF86AudioMedia which, interestingly, does absolutely nothing here. By default, on Windows, it opens your browser to the Framework website and, on Linux, your "default media player". The keyboard backlight can be cycled with fn-space. The dimmer version is dim enough, and the keybinding is easy to find in the dark. A skinny elephant would be performed with alt PrtScr (above F11) KEY, so for example alt fn F11 b should do a hard reset. This comment suggests you need to hold the fn only if "function lock" is on, but that's actually the opposite of my experience. Out of the box, some of the fn keys don't work. Mute, volume up/down, brightness, monitor changes, and the airplane mode key all do basically nothing. They don't send proper keysyms to Xorg at all. This is a known problem and it's related to the fact that the laptop has light sensors to adjust the brightness automatically. Somehow some of those keys (e.g. the brightness controls) are supposed to show up as a different input device, but don't seem to work correctly. It seems like the solution is for the Framework team to write a driver specifically for this, but so far no progress since July 2022. In the meantime, the fancy functionality can be supposedly disabled with:

echo 'blacklist hid_sensor_hub'   sudo tee /etc/modprobe.d/framework-als-blacklist.conf

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

Kill switches The Framework has two "kill switches": one for the camera and the other for the microphone. The camera one actually disconnects the USB device when turned off, and the mic one seems to cut the circuit. It doesn't show up as muted, it just stops feeding the sound. Both kill switches are around the main camera, on top of the monitor, and quite discreet. Then turn "red" when enabled (i.e. "red" means "turned off").

Monitor The monitor looks pretty good to my untrained eyes. I have yet to do photography work on it, but some photos I looked at look sharp and the colors are bright and lively. The blacks are dark and the screen is bright. I have yet to use it in full sunlight. The dimmed light is very dim, which I like.

Screen backlight I bind brightness keys to xbacklight in i3, but out of the box I get this error:

sep 29 22:09:14 angela i3[5661]: No outputs have backlight property

It just requires this blob in /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/backlight.conf:

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

This way I can control the actual backlight power with the brightness keys, and they do significantly reduce power usage.

Multiple monitor support I have been able to hook up my two old monitors to the HDMI and DisplayPort expansion cards on the laptop. The lid closes without suspending the machine, and everything works great. I actually run out of ports, even with a 4-port USB-A hub, which gives me a total of 7 ports:

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

Now the latter, I might be able to get rid of if I switch to a combo-jack headset, which I do have (and still need to test). But still, this is a problem. I'll probably need a powered USB-C dock and better monitors, possibly with some Thunderbolt chaining, to save yet more ports. But that means more money into this setup, argh. And figuring out my monitor situation is the kind of thing I'm not that big of a fan of. And neither is shopping for USB-C (or is it Thunderbolt?) hubs. My normal autorandr setup doesn't work: I have tried saving a profile and it doesn't get autodetected, so I also first need to do:

autorandr -l framework-external-dual-lg-acer

The magic:

autorandr -l horizontal

... also works well. The worst problem with those monitors right now is that they have a radically smaller resolution than the main screen on the laptop, which means I need to reset the font scaling to normal every time I switch back and forth between those monitors and the laptop, which means I actually need to do this:

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

Kind of disruptive.

Expansion ports I ordered a total of 10 expansion ports. I did manage to initialize the 1TB drive as an encrypted storage, mostly to keep photos as this is something that takes a massive amount of space (500GB and counting) and that I (unfortunately) don't work on very often (but still carry around). The expansion ports are fancy and nice, but not actually that convenient. They're a bit hard to take out: you really need to crimp your fingernails on there and pull hard to take them out. There's a little button next to them to release, I think, but at first it feels a little scary to pull those pucks out of there. You get used to it though, and it's one of those things you can do without looking eventually. There's only four expansion ports. Once you have two monitors, the drive, and power plugged in, bam, you're out of ports; there's nowhere to plug my Yubikey. So if this is going to be my daily driver, with a dual monitor setup, I will need a dock, which means more crap firmware and uncertainty, which isn't great. There are actually plans to make a dual-USB card, but that is blocked on designing an actual board for this. I can't wait to see more expansion ports produced. There's a ethernet expansion card which quickly went out of stock basically the day it was announced, but was eventually restocked. I would like to see a proper SD-card reader. There's a MicroSD card reader, but that obviously doesn't work for normal SD cards, which would be more broadly compatible anyways (because you can have a MicroSD to SD card adapter, but I have never heard of the reverse). Someone actually found a SD card reader that fits and then someone else managed to cram it in a 3D printed case, which is kind of amazing. Still, I really like that idea that I can carry all those little adapters in a pouch when I travel and can basically do anything I want. It does mean I need to shuffle through them to find the right one which is a little annoying. I have an elastic band to keep them lined up so that all the ports show the same side, to make it easier to find the right one. But that quickly gets undone and instead I have a pouch full of expansion cards. Another awesome thing with the expansion cards is that they don't just work on the laptop: anything that takes USB-C can take those cards, which means you can use it to connect an SD card to your phone, for backups, for example. Heck, you could even connect an external display to your phone that way, assuming that's supported by your phone of course (and it probably isn't). The expansion ports do take up some power, even when idle. See the power management section below, and particularly the power usage tests for details.

USB-C charging One thing that is really a game changer for me is USB-C charging. It's hard to overstate how convenient this is. I often have a USB-C cable lying around to charge my phone, and I can just grab that thing and pop it in my laptop. And while it will obviously not charge as fast as the provided charger, it will stop draining the battery at least. (As I wrote this, I had the laptop plugged in the Samsung charger that came with a phone, and it was telling me it would take 6 hours to charge the remaining 15%. With the provided charger, that flew down to 15 minutes. Similarly, I can power the laptop from the power grommet on my desk, reducing clutter as I have that single wire out there instead of the bulky power adapter.) I also really like the idea that I can charge my laptop with a power bank or, heck, with my phone, if push comes to shove. (And vice-versa!) This is awesome. And it works from any of the expansion ports, of course. There's a little led next to the expansion ports as well, which indicate the charge status:

• red/amber: charging
• white: charged
• off: unplugged

I couldn't find documentation about this, but the forum answered. This is something of a recurring theme with the Framework. While it has a good knowledge base and repair/setup guides (and the forum is awesome) but it doesn't have a good "owner manual" that shows you the different parts of the laptop and what they do. Again, something the MNT reform did well. Another thing that people are asking about is an external sleep indicator: because the power LED is on the main keyboard assembly, you don't actually see whether the device is active or not when the lid is closed. Finally, I wondered what happens when you plug in multiple power sources and it turns out the charge controller is actually pretty smart: it will pick the best power source and use it. The only downside is it can't use multiple power sources, but that seems like a bit much to ask.

Multimedia and other devices Those things also work:

• webcam: splendid, best webcam I've ever had (but my standards are really low)
• onboard mic: works well, good gain (maybe a bit much)
• onboard speakers: sound okay, a little metal-ish, loud enough to be annoying, see this thread for benchmarks, apparently pretty good speakers
• combo jack: works, with slight hiss, see below

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

Combo jack mic tests The Framework laptop ships with a combo jack on the left side, which allows you to plug in a CTIA (source) headset. In human terms, it's a device that has both a stereo output and a mono input, typically a headset or ear buds with a microphone somewhere. It works, which is better than the Purism (which only had audio out), but is on par for the course for that kind of onboard hardware. Because of electrical interference, such sound cards very often get lots of noise from the board. With a Jabra Evolve 40, the built-in USB sound card generates basically zero noise on silence (invisible down to -60dB in Audacity) while plugging it in directly generates a solid -30dB hiss. There is a noise-reduction system in that sound card, but the difference is still quite striking. On a comparable setup (curie, a 2017 Intel NUC), there is also a his with the Jabra headset, but it's quieter, more in the order of -40/-50 dB, a noticeable difference. Interestingly, testing with my Mee Audio Pro M6 earbuds leads to a little more hiss on curie, more on the -35/-40 dB range, close to the Framework. Also note that another sound card, the Antlion USB adapter that comes with the ModMic 4, also gives me pretty close to silence on a quiet recording, picking up less than -50dB of background noise. It's actually probably picking up the fans in the office, which do make audible noises. In other words, the hiss of the sound card built in the Framework laptop is so loud that it makes more noise than the quiet fans in the office. Or, another way to put it is that two USB sound cards (the Jabra and the Antlion) are able to pick up ambient noise in my office but not the Framework laptop. See also my audio page.

Performance tests

Compiling Linux 5.19.11 On a single core, compiling the Debian version of the Linux kernel takes around 100 minutes:

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

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

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

I had to plug the normal power supply after a few minutes because battery would actually run out using my desk's power grommet (34 watts). During compilation, fans were spinning really hard, quite noisy, but not painfully so. The laptop was sucking 55 watts of power, steadily:

  Time    User  Nice   Sys  Idle    IO  Run Ctxt/s  IRQ/s Fork Exec Exit  Watts
-------- ----- ----- ----- ----- ----- ---- ------ ------ ---- ---- ---- ------
 Average  87.9   0.0  10.7   1.4   0.1 17.8 6583.6 5054.3 233.0 223.9 233.1  55.96
 GeoMean  87.9   0.0  10.6   1.2   0.0 17.6 6427.8 5048.1 227.6 218.7 227.7  55.96
  StdDev   1.4   0.0   1.2   0.6   0.2  3.0 1436.8  255.5 50.0 47.5 49.7   0.20
-------- ----- ----- ----- ----- ----- ---- ------ ------ ---- ---- ---- ------
 Minimum  85.0   0.0   7.8   0.5   0.0 13.0 3594.0 4638.0 117.0 111.0 120.0  55.52
 Maximum  90.8   0.0  12.9   3.5   0.8 38.0 10174.0 5901.0 374.0 362.0 375.0  56.41
-------- ----- ----- ----- ----- ----- ---- ------ ------ ---- ---- ---- ------
Summary:
CPU:  55.96 Watts on average with standard deviation 0.20
Note: power read from RAPL domains: package-0, uncore, package-0, core, psys.
These readings do not cover all the hardware in this device.

memtest86+ I ran Memtest86+ v6.00b3. It shows something like this:

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

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

Software setup Once I had everything in the hardware setup, I figured, voil , I'm done, I'm just going to boot this beautiful machine and I can get back to work. I don't understand why I am so na ve some times. It's mind boggling. Obviously, it didn't happen that way at all, and I spent the best of the three following days tinkering with the laptop.

Secure boot and EFI First, I couldn't boot off of the NVMe drive I transferred from the previous laptop (the Purism) and the BIOS was not very helpful: it was just complaining about not finding any boot device, without dropping me in the real BIOS. At first, I thought it was a problem with my NVMe drive, because it's not listed in the compatible SSD drives from upstream. But I figured out how to enter BIOS (press F2 manically, of course), which showed the NVMe drive was actually detected. It just didn't boot, because it was an old (2010!!) Debian install without EFI. So from there, I disabled secure boot, and booted a grml image to try to recover. And by "boot" I mean, I managed to get to the grml boot loader which promptly failed to load its own root file system somehow. I still have to investigate exactly what happened there, but it failed some time after the initrd load with:

Unable to find medium containing a live file system

This, it turns out, was fixed in Debian lately, so a daily GRML build will not have this problems. The upcoming 2022 release (likely 2022.10 or 2022.11) will also get the fix. I did manage to boot the development version of the Debian installer which was a surprisingly good experience: it mounted the encrypted drives and did everything pretty smoothly. It even offered me to reinstall the boot loader, but that ultimately (and correctly, as it turns out) failed because I didn't have a /boot/efi partition. At this point, I realized there was no easy way out of this, and I just proceeded to completely reinstall Debian. I had a spare NVMe drive lying around (backups FTW!) so I just swapped that in, rebooted in the Debian installer, and did a clean install. I wanted to switch to bookworm anyways, so I guess that's done too.

Storage limitations Another thing that happened during setup is that I tried to copy over the internal 2.5" SSD drive from the Purism to the Framework 1TB expansion card. There's no 2.5" slot in the new laptop, so that's pretty much the only option for storage expansion. I was tired and did something wrong. I ended up wiping the partition table on the original 2.5" drive. Oops. It might be recoverable, but just restoring the partition table didn't work either, so I'm not sure how I recover the data there. Normally, everything on my laptops and workstations is designed to be disposable, so that wasn't that big of a problem. I did manage to recover most of the data thanks to git-annex reinit, but that was a little hairy.

Bootstrapping Puppet Once I had some networking, I had to install all the packages I needed. The time I spent setting up my workstations with Puppet has finally paid off. What I actually did was to restore two critical directories:

/etc/ssh
/var/lib/puppet

So that I would keep the previous machine's identity. That way I could contact the Puppet server and install whatever was missing. I used my Puppet optimization trick to do a batch install and then I had a good base setup, although not exactly as it was before. 1700 packages were installed manually on angela before the reinstall, and not in Puppet. I did not inspect each one individually, but I did go through /etc and copied over more SSH keys, for backups and SMTP over SSH.

LVFS support It looks like there's support for the (de-facto) standard LVFS firmware update system. At least I was able to update the UEFI firmware with a simple:

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

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

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

Those instructions come from the beta forum post. I performed the BIOS update on 2023-01-16T16:00-0500.

Resolution tweaks The Framework laptop resolution (2256px X 1504px) is big enough to give you a pretty small font size, so welcome to the marvelous world of "scaling". The Debian wiki page has a few tricks for this.

Console This will make the console and grub fonts more readable:

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

Xorg Adding this to your .Xresources will make everything look much bigger:

! 1.5*96
Xft.dpi: 144

Apparently, some of this can also help:

! These might also be useful depending on your monitor and personal preference:
Xft.autohint: 0
Xft.lcdfilter:  lcddefault
Xft.hintstyle:  hintfull
Xft.hinting: 1
Xft.antialias: 1
Xft.rgba: rgb

It my experience it also makes things look a little fuzzier, which is frustrating because you have this awesome monitor but everything looks out of focus. Just bumping Xft.dpi by a 1.5 factor looks good to me. The Debian Wiki has a page on HiDPI, but it's not as good as the Arch Wiki, where the above blurb comes from. I am not using the latter because I suspect it's causing some of the "fuzziness". TODO: find the equivalent of this GNOME hack in i3? (gsettings set org.gnome.mutter experimental-features "['scale-monitor-framebuffer']"), taken from this Framework guide

Issues

BIOS configuration The Framework BIOS has some minor issues. One issue I personally encountered is that I had disabled Quick boot and Quiet boot in the BIOS to diagnose the above boot issues. This, in turn, triggers a bug where the BIOS boot manager (F12) would just hang completely. It would also fail to boot from an external USB drive. The current fix (as of BIOS 3.03) is to re-enable both Quick boot and Quiet boot. Presumably this is something that will get fixed in a future BIOS update. Note that the following keybindings are active in the BIOS POST check:

Key	Meaning
F2	Enter BIOS setup menu
F12	Enter BIOS boot manager
Delete	Enter BIOS setup menu

WiFi compatibility issues I couldn't make WiFi work at first. Obviously, the default Debian installer doesn't ship with proprietary firmware (although that might change soon) so the WiFi card didn't work out of the box. But even after copying the firmware through a USB stick, I couldn't quite manage to find the right combination of ip/iw/wpa-supplicant (yes, after repeatedly copying a bunch more packages over to get those bootstrapped). (Next time I should probably try something like this post.) Thankfully, I had a little USB-C dongle with a RJ-45 jack lying around. That also required a firmware blob, but it was a single package to copy over, and with that loaded, I had network. Eventually, I did managed to make WiFi work; the problem was more on the side of "I forgot how to configure a WPA network by hand from the commandline" than anything else. NetworkManager worked fine and got WiFi working correctly. Note that this is with Debian bookworm, which has the 5.19 Linux kernel, and with the firmware-nonfree (firmware-iwlwifi, specifically) package.

Battery life I was having between about 7 hours of battery on the Purism Librem 13v4, and that's after a year or two of battery life. Now, I still have about 7 hours of battery life, which is nicer than my old ThinkPad X220 (20 minutes!) but really, it's not that good for a new generation laptop. The 12th generation Intel chipset probably improved things compared to the previous one Framework laptop, but I don't have a 11th gen Framework to compare with). (Note that those are estimates from my status bar, not wall clock measurements. They should still be comparable between the Purism and Framework, that said.) The battery life doesn't seem up to, say, Dell XPS 13, ThinkPad X1, and of course not the Apple M1, where I would expect 10+ hours of battery life out of the box. That said, I do get those kind estimates when the machine is fully charged and idle. In fact, when everything is quiet and nothing is plugged in, I get dozens of hours of battery life estimated (I've seen 25h!). So power usage fluctuates quite a bit depending on usage, which I guess is expected. Concretely, so far, light web browsing, reading emails and writing notes in Emacs (e.g. this file) takes about 8W of power:

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

Expansion cards matter a lot in the battery life (see below for a thorough discussion), my normal setup is 2xUSB-C and 1xUSB-A (yes, with an empty slot, and yes, to save power). Interestingly, playing a video in a (720p) window in a window takes up more power (10.5W) than in full screen (9.5W) but I blame that on my desktop setup (i3 + compton)... Not sure if mpv hits the VA-API, maybe not in windowed mode. Similar results with 1080p, interestingly, except the window struggles to keep up altogether. Full screen playback takes a relatively comfortable 9.5W, which means a solid 5h+ of playback, which is fine by me. Fooling around the web, small edits, youtube-dl, and I'm at around 80% battery after about an hour, with an estimated 5h left, which is a little disappointing. I had a 7h remaining estimate before I started goofing around Discourse, so I suspect the website is a pretty big battery drain, actually. I see about 10-12 W, while I was probably at half that (6-8W) just playing music with mpv in the background... In other words, it looks like editing posts in Discourse with Firefox takes a solid 4-6W of power. Amazing and gross. (When writing about abusive power usage generates more power usage, is that an heisenbug? Or schr dinbug?)

Power management Compared to the Purism Librem 13v4, the ongoing power usage seems to be slightly better. An anecdotal metric is that the Purism would take 800mA idle, while the more powerful Framework manages a little over 500mA as I'm typing this, fluctuating between 450 and 600mA. That is without any active expansion card, except the storage. Those numbers come from the output of tlp-stat -b and, unfortunately, the "ampere" unit makes it quite hard to compare those, because voltage is not necessarily the same between the two platforms.

• TODO: review Arch Linux's tips on power saving
• TODO: i915 driver has a lot of parameters, including some about power saving, see, again, the arch wiki, and particularly enable_fbc=1

TL:DR; power management on the laptop is an issue, but there's various tweaks you can make to improve it. Try:

• powertop --auto-tune
• apt install tlp && systemctl enable tlp
• nvme.noacpi=1 mem_sleep_default=deep on the kernel command line may help with standby power usage
• keep only USB-C expansion cards plugged in, all others suck power even when idle
• consider upgrading the BIOS to latest beta (3.06 at the time of writing), unverified power savings
• latest Linux kernels (6.2) promise power savings as well (unverified)

Update: also try to follow the official optimization guide. It was made for Ubuntu but will probably also work for your distribution of choice with a few tweaks. They recommend using tlpui but it's not packaged in Debian. There is, however, a Flatpak release. In my case, it resulted in the following diff to tlp.conf: tlp.patch.

Background on CPU architecture There were power problems in the 11th gen Framework laptop, according to this report from Linux After Dark, so the issues with power management on the Framework are not new. The 12th generation Intel CPU (AKA "Alder Lake") is a big-little architecture with "power-saving" and "performance" cores. There used to be performance problems introduced by the scheduler in Linux 5.16 but those were eventually fixed in 5.18, which uses Intel's hardware as an "intelligent, low-latency hardware-assisted scheduler". According to Phoronix, the 5.19 release improved the power saving, at the cost of some penalty cost. There were also patch series to make the scheduler configurable, but it doesn't look those have been merged as of 5.19. There was also a session about this at the 2022 Linux Plumbers, but they stopped short of talking more about the specific problems Linux is facing in Alder lake:

Specifically, the kernel's energy-aware scheduling heuristics don't work well on those CPUs. A number of features present there complicate the energy picture; these include SMT, Intel's "turbo boost" mode, and the CPU's internal power-management mechanisms. For many workloads, running on an ostensibly more power-hungry Pcore can be more efficient than using an Ecore. Time for discussion of the problem was lacking, though, and the session came to a close.

All this to say that the 12gen Intel line shipped with this Framework series should have better power management thanks to its power-saving cores. And Linux has had the scheduler changes to make use of this (but maybe is still having trouble). In any case, this might not be the source of power management problems on my laptop, quite the opposite. Also note that the firmware updates for various chipsets are supposed to improve things eventually. On the other hand, The Verge simply declared the whole P-series a mistake...

Attempts at improving power usage I did try to follow some of the tips in this forum post. The tricks powertop --auto-tune and tlp's PCIE_ASPM_ON_BAT=powersupersave basically did nothing: I was stuck at 10W power usage in powertop (600+mA in tlp-stat). Apparently, I should be able to reach the C8 CPU power state (or even C9, C10) in powertop, but I seem to be stock at C7. (Although I'm not sure how to read that tab in powertop: in the Core(HW) column there's only C3/C6/C7 states, and most cores are 85% in C7 or maybe C6. But the next column over does show many CPUs in C10 states... As it turns out, the graphics card actually takes up a good chunk of power unless proper power management is enabled (see below). After tweaking this, I did manage to get down to around 7W power usage in powertop. Expansion cards actually do take up power, and so does the screen, obviously. The fully-lit screen takes a solid 2-3W of power compared to the fully dimmed screen. When removing all expansion cards and making the laptop idle, I can spin it down to 4 watts power usage at the moment, and an amazing 2 watts when the screen turned off.

Caveats Abusive (10W+) power usage that I initially found could be a problem with my desktop configuration: I have this silly status bar that updates every second and probably causes redraws... The CPU certainly doesn't seem to spin down below 1GHz. Also note that this is with an actual desktop running with everything: it could very well be that some things (I'm looking at you Signal Desktop) take up unreasonable amount of power on their own (hello, 1W/electron, sheesh). Syncthing and containerd (Docker!) also seem to take a good 500mW just sitting there. Beyond my desktop configuration, this could, of course, be a Debian-specific problem; your favorite distribution might be better at power management.

Idle power usage tests Some expansion cards waste energy, even when unused. Here is a summary of the findings from the powerstat page. I also include other devices tested in this page for completeness:

Device	Minimum	Average	Max	Stdev	Note
Screen, 100%	2.4W	2.6W	2.8W	N/A
Screen, 1%	30mW	140mW	250mW	N/A
Backlight 1	290mW	?	?	?	fairly small, all things considered
Backlight 2	890mW	1.2W	3W?	460mW?	geometric progression
Backlight 3	1.69W	1.5W	1.8W?	390mW?	significant power use
Radios	100mW	250mW	N/A	N/A
USB-C	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A	negligible power drain
USB-A	10mW	10mW	?	10mW	almost negligible
DisplayPort	300mW	390mW	600mW	N/A	not passive
HDMI	380mW	440mW	1W?	20mW	not passive
1TB SSD	1.65W	1.79W	2W	12mW	significant, probably higher when busy
MicroSD	1.6W	3W	6W	1.93W	highest power usage, possibly even higher when busy
Ethernet	1.69W	1.64W	1.76W	N/A	comparable to the SSD card

So it looks like all expansion cards but the USB-C ones are active, i.e. they draw power with idle. The USB-A cards are the least concern, sucking out 10mW, pretty much within the margin of error. But both the DisplayPort and HDMI do take a few hundred miliwatts. It looks like USB-A connectors have this fundamental flaw that they necessarily draw some powers because they lack the power negotiation features of USB-C. At least according to this post:

It seems the USB A must have power going to it all the time, that the old USB 2 and 3 protocols, the USB C only provides power when there is a connection. Old versus new.

Apparently, this is a problem specific to the USB-C to USB-A adapter that ships with the Framework. Some people have actually changed their orders to all USB-C because of this problem, but I'm not sure the problem is as serious as claimed in the forums. I couldn't reproduce the "one watt" power drains suggested elsewhere, at least not repeatedly. (A previous version of this post did show such a power drain, but it was in a less controlled test environment than the series of more rigorous tests above.) The worst offenders are the storage cards: the SSD drive takes at least one watt of power and the MicroSD card seems to want to take all the way up to 6 watts of power, both just sitting there doing nothing. This confirms claims of 1.4W for the SSD (but not 5W) power usage found elsewhere. The former post has instructions on how to disable the card in software. The MicroSD card has been reported as using 2 watts, but I've seen it as high as 6 watts, which is pretty damning. The Framework team has a beta update for the DisplayPort adapter but currently only for Windows (LVFS technically possible, "under investigation"). A USB-A firmware update is also under investigation. It is therefore likely at least some of those power management issues will eventually be fixed. Note that the upcoming Ethernet card has a reported 2-8W power usage, depending on traffic. I did my own power usage tests in powerstat-wayland and they seem lower than 2W. The upcoming 6.2 Linux kernel might also improve battery usage when idle, see this Phoronix article for details, likely in early 2023.

Idle power usage tests under Wayland Update: I redid those tests under Wayland, see powerstat-wayland for details. The TL;DR: is that power consumption is either smaller or similar.

Idle power usage tests, 3.06 beta BIOS I redid the idle tests after the 3.06 beta BIOS update and ended up with this results:

Device	Minimum	Average	Max	Stdev	Note
Baseline	1.96W	2.01W	2.11W	30mW	1 USB-C, screen off, backlight off, no radios
2 USB-C	1.95W	2.16W	3.69W	430mW	USB-C confirmed as mostly passive...
3 USB-C	1.95W	2.16W	3.69W	430mW	... although with extra stdev
1TB SSD	3.72W	3.85W	4.62W	200mW	unchanged from before upgrade
1 USB-A	1.97W	2.18W	4.02W	530mW	unchanged
2 USB-A	1.97W	2.00W	2.08W	30mW	unchanged
3 USB-A	1.94W	1.99W	2.03W	20mW	unchanged
MicroSD w/o card	3.54W	3.58W	3.71W	40mW	significant improvement! 2-3W power saving!
MicroSD w/ card	3.53W	3.72W	5.23W	370mW	new measurement! increased deviation
DisplayPort	2.28W	2.31W	2.37W	20mW	unchanged
1 HDMI	2.43W	2.69W	4.53W	460mW	unchanged
2 HDMI	2.53W	2.59W	2.67W	30mW	unchanged
External USB	3.85W	3.89W	3.94W	30mW	new result
Ethernet	3.60W	3.70W	4.91W	230mW	unchanged

Note that the table summary is different than the previous table: here we show the absolute numbers while the previous table was doing a confusing attempt at showing relative (to the baseline) numbers. Conclusion: the 3.06 BIOS update did not significantly change idle power usage stats except for the MicroSD card which has significantly improved. The new "external USB" test is also interesting: it shows how the provided 1TB SSD card performs (admirably) compared to existing devices. The other new result is the MicroSD card with a card which, interestingly, uses less power than the 1TB SSD drive.

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

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

... to this:

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

That's 8mAh per 10 minutes (and 2 seconds), or 48mA, or, with this battery, about 127 hours or roughly 5 days of standby. Not bad! In comparison, here is my really old x220, before:

sep 29 22:13:54 emma systemd-sleep[176315]: /sys/class/power_supply/BAT0/energy_now                     =   5070 [mWh]

... after:

sep 29 22:23:54 emma systemd-sleep[176486]: /sys/class/power_supply/BAT0/energy_now                     =   4980 [mWh]

... which is 90 mwH in 10 minutes, or a whopping 540mA, which was possibly okay when this battery was new (62000 mAh, so about 100 hours, or about 5 days), but this battery is almost dead and has only 5210 mAh when full, so only 10 hours standby. And here is the Framework performing a similar test, before:

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

... after:

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

... which is 49mAh in a little over 10 minutes (and 4 seconds), or 292mA, much more than the Purism, but half of the X220. At this rate, the battery would last on standby only 12 hours!! That is pretty bad. Note that this was done with the following expansion cards:

• 2 USB-C
• 1 1TB SSD drive
• 1 USB-A with a hub connected to it, with keyboard and LAN

Preliminary tests without the hub (over one minute) show that it doesn't significantly affect this power consumption (300mA). This guide also suggests booting with nvme.noacpi=1 but this still gives me about 5mAh/min (or 300mA). Adding mem_sleep_default=deep to the kernel command line does make a difference. Before:

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

... after:

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

... which is 2mAh in 74 seconds, which is 97mA, brings us to a more reasonable 36 hours, or a day and a half. It's still above the x220 power usage, and more than an order of magnitude more than the Purism laptop. It's also far from the 0.4% promised by upstream, which would be 14mA for the 3500mAh battery. It should also be noted that this "deep" sleep mode is a little more disruptive than regular sleep. As you can see by the timing, it took more than 10 seconds for the laptop to resume, which feels a little alarming as your banging the keyboard to bring it back to life. You can confirm the current sleep mode with:

# cat /sys/power/mem_sleep
s2idle [deep]

In the above, deep is selected. You can change it on the fly with:

printf s2idle > /sys/power/mem_sleep

Here's another test:

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

... better! 6 mAh in about 6 minutes, works out to 63.5mA, so more than two days standby. A longer test:

oct 01 09:22:56 angela systemd-sleep[62978]: /sys/class/power_supply/BAT1/charge_now                     =   3327 [mAh]
oct 01 12:47:35 angela systemd-sleep[63219]: /sys/class/power_supply/BAT1/charge_now                     =   3147 [mAh]

That's 180mAh in about 3.5h, 52mA! Now at 66h, or almost 3 days. I wasn't sure why I was seeing such fluctuations in those tests, but as it turns out, expansion card power tests show that they do significantly affect power usage, especially the SSD drive, which can take up to two full watts of power even when idle. I didn't control for expansion cards in the above tests running them with whatever card I had plugged in without paying attention so it's likely the cause of the high power usage and fluctuations. It might be possible to work around this problem by disabling USB devices before suspend. TODO. See also this post. In the meantime, I have been able to get much better suspend performance by unplugging all modules. Then I get this result:

oct 04 11:15:38 angela systemd-sleep[257571]: /sys/class/power_supply/BAT1/charge_now                     =   3203 [mAh]
oct 04 15:09:32 angela systemd-sleep[257866]: /sys/class/power_supply/BAT1/charge_now                     =   3145 [mAh]

Which is 14.8mA! Almost exactly the number promised by Framework! With a full battery, that means a 10 days suspend time. This is actually pretty good, and far beyond what I was expecting when starting down this journey. So, once the expansion cards are unplugged, suspend power usage is actually quite reasonable. More detailed standby tests are available in the standby-tests page, with a summary below. There is also some hope that the Chromebook edition specifically designed with a specification of 14 days standby time could bring some firmware improvements back down to the normal line. Some of those issues were reported upstream in April 2022, but there doesn't seem to have been any progress there since. TODO: one final solution here is suspend-then-hibernate, which Windows uses for this TODO: consider implementing the S0ix sleep states , see also troubleshooting TODO: consider https://github.com/intel/pm-graph

Standby expansion cards test results This table is a summary of the more extensive standby-tests I have performed:

Device	Wattage	Amperage	Days	Note
baseline	0.25W	16mA	9	sleep=deep nvme.noacpi=1
s2idle	0.29W	18.9mA	~7	sleep=s2idle nvme.noacpi=1
normal nvme	0.31W	20mA	~7	sleep=s2idle without nvme.noacpi=1
1 USB-C	0.23W	15mA	~10
2 USB-C	0.23W	14.9mA		same as above
1 USB-A	0.75W	48.7mA	3	+500mW (!!) for the first USB-A card!
2 USB-A	1.11W	72mA	2	+360mW
3 USB-A	1.48W	96mA	<2	+370mW
1TB SSD	0.49W	32mA	<5	+260mW
MicroSD	0.52W	34mA	~4	+290mW
DisplayPort	0.85W	55mA	<3	+620mW (!!)
1 HDMI	0.58W	38mA	~4	+250mW
2 HDMI	0.65W	42mA	<4	+70mW

Conclusions:

• USB-C cards take no extra power on suspend, possibly less than empty slots, more testing required
• USB-A cards take a lot more power on suspend (300-500mW) than on regular idle (~10mW, almost negligible)
• 1TB SSD and MicroSD cards seem to take a reasonable amount of power (260-290mW), compared to their runtime equivalents (1-6W!)
• DisplayPort takes a surprising lot of power (620mW), almost double its average runtime usage (390mW)
• HDMI cards take, surprisingly, less power (250mW) in standby than the DP card (620mW)
• and oddly, a second card adds less power usage (70mW?!) than the first, maybe a circuit is used by both?

A discussion of those results is in this forum post.

Standby expansion cards test results, 3.06 beta BIOS Framework recently (2022-11-07) announced that they will publish a firmware upgrade to address some of the USB-C issues, including power management. This could positively affect the above result, improving both standby and runtime power usage. The update came out in December 2022 and I redid my analysis with the following results:

Device	Wattage	Amperage	Days	Note
baseline	0.25W	16mA	9	no cards, same as before upgrade
1 USB-C	0.25W	16mA	9	same as before
2 USB-C	0.25W	16mA	9	same
1 USB-A	0.80W	62mA	3	+550mW!! worse than before
2 USB-A	1.12W	73mA	<2	+320mW, on top of the above, bad!
Ethernet	0.62W	40mA	3-4	new result, decent
1TB SSD	0.52W	34mA	4	a bit worse than before (+2mA)
MicroSD	0.51W	22mA	4	same
DisplayPort	0.52W	34mA	4+	upgrade improved by 300mW
1 HDMI	?	38mA	?	same
2 HDMI	?	45mA	?	a bit worse than before (+3mA)
Normal	1.08W	70mA	~2	Ethernet, 2 USB-C, USB-A

Full results in standby-tests-306. The big takeaway for me is that the update did not improve power usage on the USB-A ports which is a big problem for my use case. There is a notable improvement on the DisplayPort power consumption which brings it more in line with the HDMI connector, but it still doesn't properly turn off on suspend either. Even worse, the USB-A ports now sometimes fails to resume after suspend, which is pretty annoying. This is a known problem that will hopefully get fixed in the final release.

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

sudo ectool fwchargelimit 80

I looked at building this myself but failed to run it. I opened a RFP in Debian so that we can ship this in Debian, and also documented my work there. Note that there is now a counter that tracks charge/discharge cycles. It's visible in tlp-stat -b, which is a nice improvement:

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

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

Ethernet expansion card The Framework ethernet expansion card is a fancy little doodle: "2.5Gbit/s and 10/100/1000Mbit/s Ethernet", the "clear housing lets you peek at the RTL8156 controller that powers it". Which is another way to say "we didn't completely finish prod on this one, so it kind of looks like we 3D-printed this in the shop".... The card is a little bulky, but I guess that's inevitable considering the RJ-45 form factor when compared to the thin Framework laptop. I have had a serious issue when trying it at first: the link LEDs just wouldn't come up. I made a full bug report in the forum and with upstream support, but eventually figured it out on my own. It's (of course) a power saving issue: if you reboot the machine, the links come up when the laptop is running the BIOS POST check and even when the Linux kernel boots. I first thought that the problem is likely related to the powertop service which I run at boot time to tweak some power saving settings. It seems like this:

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

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

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

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

By default, USB power saving is active in the kernel, but not force-enabled for incompatible drivers. That is, devices that support suspension will suspend, drivers that do not, will not.

So the fix is actually to uninstall tlp or disable that setting by adding this to /etc/tlp.conf:

USB_AUTOSUSPEND=0

... but that disables auto-suspend on all USB devices, which may hurt other power usage performance. I have found that a a combination of:

USB_AUTOSUSPEND=1
USB_DENYLIST="0bda:8156"

and this on the kernel commandline:

usbcore.quirks=0bda:8156:k

... actually does work correctly. I now have this in my /etc/default/grub.d/framework-tweaks.cfg file:

# net.ifnames=0: normal interface names ffs (e.g. eth0, wlan0, not wlp166
s0)
# nvme.noacpi=1: reduce SSD disk power usage (not working)
# mem_sleep_default=deep: reduce power usage during sleep (not working)
# usbcore.quirk is a workaround for the ethernet card suspend bug: https:
//guides.frame.work/Guide/Fedora+37+Installation+on+the+Framework+Laptop/
108?lang=en
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="net.ifnames=0 nvme.noacpi=1 mem_sleep_default=deep usbcore.quirks=0bda:8156:k"
# fix the resolution in grub for fonts to not be tiny
GRUB_GFXMODE=1024x768

Other than that, I haven't been able to max out the card because I don't have other 2.5Gbit/s equipment at home, which is strangely satisfying. But running against my Turris Omnia router, I could pretty much max a gigabit fairly easily:

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

The card doesn't require any proprietary firmware blobs which is surprising. Other than the power saving issues, it just works. In my power tests (see powerstat-wayland), the Ethernet card seems to use about 1.6W of power idle, without link, in the above "quirky" configuration where the card is functional but without autosuspend.

Proprietary firmware blobs The framework does need proprietary firmware to operate. Specifically:

• the WiFi network card shipped with the DIY kit is a AX210 card that requires a 5.19 kernel or later, and the firmware-iwlwifi non-free firmware package
• the Bluetooth adapter also loads the firmware-iwlwifi package (untested)
• the graphics work out of the box without firmware, but certain power management features come only with special proprietary firmware, normally shipped in the firmware-misc-nonfree but currently missing from the package

Note that, at the time of writing, the latest i915 firmware from linux-firmware has a serious bug where loading all the accessible firmware results in noticeable I estimate 200-500ms lag between the keyboard (not the mouse!) and the display. Symptoms also include tearing and shearing of windows, it's pretty nasty. One workaround is to delete the two affected firmware files:

cd /lib/firmware && rm adlp_guc_70.1.1.bin adlp_guc_69.0.3.bin
update-initramfs -u

You will get the following warning during build, which is good as it means the problematic firmware is disabled:

W: Possible missing firmware /lib/firmware/i915/adlp_guc_69.0.3.bin for module i915
W: Possible missing firmware /lib/firmware/i915/adlp_guc_70.1.1.bin for module i915

But then it also means that critical firmware isn't loaded, which means, among other things, a higher battery drain. I was able to move from 8.5-10W down to the 7W range after making the firmware work properly. This is also after turning the backlight all the way down, as that takes a solid 2-3W in full blast. The proper fix is to use some compositing manager. I ended up using compton with the following systemd unit:

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

compton is orphaned however, so you might be tempted to use picom instead, but in my experience the latter uses much more power (1-2W extra, similar experience). I also tried compiz but it would just crash with:

anarcat@angela:~$ compiz --replace
compiz (core) - Warn: No XI2 extension
compiz (core) - Error: Another composite manager is already running on screen: 0
compiz (core) - Fatal: No manageable screens found on display :0

When running from the base session, I would get this instead:

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

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

Also note that the iwlwifi firmware also looks incomplete. Even with the package installed, I get those errors in dmesg:

[   19.534429] Intel(R) Wireless WiFi driver for Linux
[   19.534691] iwlwifi 0000:a6:00.0: enabling device (0000 -> 0002)
[   19.541867] iwlwifi 0000:a6:00.0: firmware: failed to load iwlwifi-ty-a0-gf-a0-72.ucode (-2)
[   19.541881] iwlwifi 0000:a6:00.0: firmware: failed to load iwlwifi-ty-a0-gf-a0-72.ucode (-2)
[   19.541882] iwlwifi 0000:a6:00.0: Direct firmware load for iwlwifi-ty-a0-gf-a0-72.ucode failed with error -2
[   19.541890] iwlwifi 0000:a6:00.0: firmware: failed to load iwlwifi-ty-a0-gf-a0-71.ucode (-2)
[   19.541895] iwlwifi 0000:a6:00.0: firmware: failed to load iwlwifi-ty-a0-gf-a0-71.ucode (-2)
[   19.541896] iwlwifi 0000:a6:00.0: Direct firmware load for iwlwifi-ty-a0-gf-a0-71.ucode failed with error -2
[   19.541903] iwlwifi 0000:a6:00.0: firmware: failed to load iwlwifi-ty-a0-gf-a0-70.ucode (-2)
[   19.541907] iwlwifi 0000:a6:00.0: firmware: failed to load iwlwifi-ty-a0-gf-a0-70.ucode (-2)
[   19.541908] iwlwifi 0000:a6:00.0: Direct firmware load for iwlwifi-ty-a0-gf-a0-70.ucode failed with error -2
[   19.541913] iwlwifi 0000:a6:00.0: firmware: failed to load iwlwifi-ty-a0-gf-a0-69.ucode (-2)
[   19.541916] iwlwifi 0000:a6:00.0: firmware: failed to load iwlwifi-ty-a0-gf-a0-69.ucode (-2)
[   19.541917] iwlwifi 0000:a6:00.0: Direct firmware load for iwlwifi-ty-a0-gf-a0-69.ucode failed with error -2
[   19.541922] iwlwifi 0000:a6:00.0: firmware: failed to load iwlwifi-ty-a0-gf-a0-68.ucode (-2)
[   19.541926] iwlwifi 0000:a6:00.0: firmware: failed to load iwlwifi-ty-a0-gf-a0-68.ucode (-2)
[   19.541927] iwlwifi 0000:a6:00.0: Direct firmware load for iwlwifi-ty-a0-gf-a0-68.ucode failed with error -2
[   19.541933] iwlwifi 0000:a6:00.0: firmware: failed to load iwlwifi-ty-a0-gf-a0-67.ucode (-2)
[   19.541937] iwlwifi 0000:a6:00.0: firmware: failed to load iwlwifi-ty-a0-gf-a0-67.ucode (-2)
[   19.541937] iwlwifi 0000:a6:00.0: Direct firmware load for iwlwifi-ty-a0-gf-a0-67.ucode failed with error -2
[   19.544244] iwlwifi 0000:a6:00.0: firmware: direct-loading firmware iwlwifi-ty-a0-gf-a0-66.ucode
[   19.544257] iwlwifi 0000:a6:00.0: api flags index 2 larger than supported by driver
[   19.544270] iwlwifi 0000:a6:00.0: TLV_FW_FSEQ_VERSION: FSEQ Version: 0.63.2.1
[   19.544523] iwlwifi 0000:a6:00.0: firmware: failed to load iwl-debug-yoyo.bin (-2)
[   19.544528] iwlwifi 0000:a6:00.0: firmware: failed to load iwl-debug-yoyo.bin (-2)
[   19.544530] iwlwifi 0000:a6:00.0: loaded firmware version 66.55c64978.0 ty-a0-gf-a0-66.ucode op_mode iwlmvm

Some of those are available in the latest upstream firmware package (iwlwifi-ty-a0-gf-a0-71.ucode, -68, and -67), but not all (e.g. iwlwifi-ty-a0-gf-a0-72.ucode is missing) . It's unclear what those do or don't, as the WiFi seems to work well without them. I still copied them in from the latest linux-firmware package in the hope they would help with power management, but I did not notice a change after loading them. There are also multiple knobs on the iwlwifi and iwlmvm drivers. The latter has a power_schmeme setting which defaults to 2 (balanced), setting it to 3 (low power) could improve battery usage as well, in theory. The iwlwifi driver also has power_save (defaults to disabled) and power_level (1-5, defaults to 1) settings. See also the output of modinfo iwlwifi and modinfo iwlmvm for other driver options.

Graphics acceleration After loading the latest upstream firmware and setting up a compositing manager (compton, above), I tested the classic glxgears. Running in a window gives me odd results, as the gears basically grind to a halt:

Running synchronized to the vertical refresh.  The framerate should be
approximately the same as the monitor refresh rate.
137 frames in 5.1 seconds = 26.984 FPS
27 frames in 5.4 seconds =  5.022 FPS

Ouch. 5FPS! But interestingly, once the window is in full screen, it does hit the monitor refresh rate:

300 frames in 5.0 seconds = 60.000 FPS

I'm not really a gamer and I'm not normally using any of that fancy graphics acceleration stuff (except maybe my browser does?). I installed intel-gpu-tools for the intel_gpu_top command to confirm the GPU was engaged when doing those simulations. A nice find. Other useful diagnostic tools include glxgears and glxinfo (in mesa-utils) and (vainfo in vainfo). Following to this post, I also made sure to have those settings in my about:config in Firefox, or, in user.js:

user_pref("media.ffmpeg.vaapi.enabled", true);

Note that the guide suggests many other settings to tweak, but those might actually be overkill, see this comment and its parents. I did try forcing hardware acceleration by setting gfx.webrender.all to true, but everything became choppy and weird. The guide also mentions installing the intel-media-driver package, but I could not find that in Debian. The Arch wiki has, as usual, an excellent reference on hardware acceleration in Firefox.

Chromium / Signal desktop bugs It looks like both Chromium and Signal Desktop misbehave with my compositor setup (compton + i3). The fix is to add a persistent flag to Chromium. In Arch, it's conveniently in ~/.config/chromium-flags.conf but that doesn't actually work in Debian. I had to put the flag in /etc/chromium.d/disable-compositing, like this:

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

It's possible another one of the hundreds of flags might fix this issue better, but I don't really have time to go through this entire, incomplete, and unofficial list (!?!). Signal Desktop is a similar problem, and doesn't reuse those flags (because of course it doesn't). Instead I had to rewrite the wrapper script in /usr/local/bin/signal-desktop to use this instead:

exec /usr/bin/flatpak run --branch=stable --arch=x86_64 org.signal.Signal --disable-gpu-compositing "$@"

This was mostly done in this Puppet commit. I haven't figured out the root of this problem. I did try using picom and xcompmgr; they both suffer from the same issue. Another Debian testing user on Wayland told me they haven't seen this problem, so hopefully this can be fixed by switching to wayland.

Graphics card hangs I believe I might have this bug which results in a total graphical hang for 15-30 seconds. It's fairly rare so it's not too disruptive, but when it does happen, it's pretty alarming. The comments on that bug report are encouraging though: it seems this is a bug in either mesa or the Intel graphics driver, which means many people have this problem so it's likely to be fixed. There's actually a merge request on mesa already (2022-12-29). It could also be that bug because the error message I get is actually:

Jan 20 12:49:10 angela kernel: Asynchronous wait on fence 0000:00:02.0:sway[104431]:cb0ae timed out (hint:intel_atomic_commit_ready [i915]) 
Jan 20 12:49:15 angela kernel: i915 0000:00:02.0: [drm] GPU HANG: ecode 12:0:00000000 
Jan 20 12:49:15 angela kernel: i915 0000:00:02.0: [drm] Resetting chip for stopped heartbeat on rcs0 
Jan 20 12:49:15 angela kernel: i915 0000:00:02.0: [drm] GuC firmware i915/adlp_guc_70.1.1.bin version 70.1 
Jan 20 12:49:15 angela kernel: i915 0000:00:02.0: [drm] HuC firmware i915/tgl_huc_7.9.3.bin version 7.9 
Jan 20 12:49:15 angela kernel: i915 0000:00:02.0: [drm] HuC authenticated 
Jan 20 12:49:15 angela kernel: i915 0000:00:02.0: [drm] GuC submission enabled 
Jan 20 12:49:15 angela kernel: i915 0000:00:02.0: [drm] GuC SLPC enabled

It's a solid 30 seconds graphical hang. Maybe the keyboard and everything else keeps working. The latter bug report is quite long, with many comments, but this one from January 2023 seems to say that Sway 1.8 fixed the problem. There's also an earlier patch to add an extra kernel parameter that supposedly fixes that too. There's all sorts of other workarounds in there, for example this:

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

from this comment... So that one is unsolved, as far as the upstream drivers are concerned, but maybe could be fixed through Sway.

Weird USB hangs / graphical glitches I have had weird connectivity glitches better described in this post, but basically: my USB keyboard and mice (connected over a USB hub) drop keys, lag a lot or hang, and I get visual glitches. The fix was to tighten the screws around the CPU on the motherboard (!), which is, thankfully, a rather simple repair.

USB docks are hell Note that the monitors are hooked up to angela through a USB-C / Thunderbolt dock from Cable Matters, with the lovely name of 201053-SIL. It has issues, see this blog post for an in-depth discussion.

Shipping details I ordered the Framework in August 2022 and received it about a month later, which is sooner than expected because the August batch was late. People (including me) expected this to have an impact on the September batch, but it seems Framework have been able to fix the delivery problems and keep up with the demand. As of early 2023, their website announces that laptops ship "within 5 days". I have myself ordered a few expansion cards in November 2022, and they shipped on the same day, arriving 3-4 days later.

The supply pipeline There are basically 6 steps in the Framework shipping pipeline, each (except the last) accompanied with an email notification:

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

This comes from the crowdsourced spreadsheet, which should be updated when the status changes here. I was part of the "third batch" of the 12th generation laptop, which was supposed to ship in September. It ended up arriving on my door step on September 27th, about 33 days after ordering. It seems current orders are not processed in "batches", but in real time, see this blog post for details on shipping.

Shipping trivia I don't know about the others, but my laptop shipped through no less than four different airplane flights. Here are the hops it took:

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

I can't quite figure out how to calculate exactly how much mileage that is, but it's huge. The ride through Alaska is surprising enough but the bounce back through Winnipeg is especially weird. I guess the route happens that way because of Fedex shipping hubs. There was a related oddity when I had my Purism laptop shipped: it left from the west coast and seemed to enter on an endless, two week long road trip across the continental US.

Other resources

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

Akvorado collects sFlow and IPFIX flows, stores them in a ClickHouse database, and presents them in a web console. Although it lacks built-in DDoS detection, it s possible to create one by crafting custom ClickHouse queries.

DDoS detection Let s assume we want to detect DDoS targeting our customers. As an example, we consider a DDoS attack as a collection of flows over one minute targeting a single customer IP address, from a single source port and matching one of these conditions:

• an average bandwidth of 1 Gbps,
• an average bandwidth of 200 Mbps when the protocol is UDP,
• more than 20 source IP addresses and an average bandwidth of 100 Mbps, or
• more than 10 source countries and an average bandwidth of 100 Mbps.

Here is the SQL query to detect such attacks over the last 5 minutes:

SELECT *
FROM (
  SELECT
    toStartOfMinute(TimeReceived) AS TimeReceived,
    DstAddr,
    SrcPort,
    dictGetOrDefault('protocols', 'name', Proto, '???') AS Proto,
    SUM(((((Bytes * SamplingRate) * 8) / 1000) / 1000) / 1000) / 60 AS Gbps,
    uniq(SrcAddr) AS sources,
    uniq(SrcCountry) AS countries
  FROM flows
  WHERE TimeReceived > now() - INTERVAL 5 MINUTE
    AND DstNetRole = 'customers'
  GROUP BY
    TimeReceived,
    DstAddr,
    SrcPort,
    Proto
)
WHERE (Gbps > 1)
   OR ((Proto = 'UDP') AND (Gbps > 0.2)) 
   OR ((sources > 20) AND (Gbps > 0.1)) 
   OR ((countries > 10) AND (Gbps > 0.1))
ORDER BY
  TimeReceived DESC,
  Gbps DESC

Here is an example output¹ where two of our users are under attack. One from what looks like an NTP amplification attack, the other from a DNS amplification attack:

TimeReceived	DstAddr	SrcPort	Proto	Gbps	sources	countries
2023-02-26 17:44:00	::ffff:203.0.113.206	123	UDP	0.102	109	13
2023-02-26 17:43:00	::ffff:203.0.113.206	123	UDP	0.130	133	17
2023-02-26 17:43:00	::ffff:203.0.113.68	53	UDP	0.129	364	63
2023-02-26 17:43:00	::ffff:203.0.113.206	123	UDP	0.113	129	21
2023-02-26 17:42:00	::ffff:203.0.113.206	123	UDP	0.139	50	14
2023-02-26 17:42:00	::ffff:203.0.113.206	123	UDP	0.105	42	14
2023-02-26 17:40:00	::ffff:203.0.113.68	53	UDP	0.121	340	65

DDoS remediation Once detected, there are at least two ways to stop the attack at the network level:

• blackhole the traffic to the targeted user (RTBH), or
• selectively drop packets matching the attack patterns (Flowspec).

Traffic blackhole The easiest method is to sacrifice the attacked user. While this helps the attacker, this protects your network. It is a method supported by all routers. You can also offload this protection to many transit providers. This is useful if the attack volume exceeds your internet capacity. This works by advertising with BGP a route to the attacked user with a specific community. The border router modifies the next hop address of these routes to a specific IP address configured to forward the traffic to a null interface. RFC 7999 defines 65535:666 for this purpose. This is known as a remote-triggered blackhole (RTBH) and is explained in more detail in RFC 3882. It is also possible to blackhole the source of the attacks by leveraging unicast Reverse Path Forwarding (uRPF) from RFC 3704, as explained in RFC 5635. However, uRPF can be a serious tax on your router resources. See NCS5500 uRPF: Configuration and Impact on Scale for an example of the kind of restrictions you have to expect when enabling uRPF. On the advertising side, we can use BIRD. Here is a complete configuration file to allow any router to collect them:

log stderr all;
router id 192.0.2.1;
protocol device  
  scan time 10;
 
protocol bgp exporter  
  ipv4  
    import none;
    export where proto = "blackhole4";
   ;
  ipv6  
    import none;
    export where proto = "blackhole6";
   ;
  local as 64666;
  neighbor range 192.0.2.0/24 external;
  multihop;
  dynamic name "exporter";
  dynamic name digits 2;
  graceful restart yes;
  graceful restart time 0;
  long lived graceful restart yes;
  long lived stale time 3600;  # keep routes for 1 hour!
 
protocol static blackhole4  
  ipv4;
  route 203.0.113.206/32 blackhole  
    bgp_community.add((65535, 666));
   ;
  route 203.0.113.68/32 blackhole  
    bgp_community.add((65535, 666));
   ;
 
protocol static blackhole6  
  ipv6;
 

We use BGP long-lived graceful restart to ensure routes are kept for one hour, even if the BGP connection goes down, notably during maintenance. On the receiver side, if you have a Cisco router running IOS XR, you can use the following configuration to blackhole traffic received on the BGP session. As the BGP session is dedicated to this usage, The community is not used, but you can also forward these routes to your transit providers.

router static
 vrf public
  address-family ipv4 unicast
   192.0.2.1/32 Null0 description "BGP blackhole"
  !
  address-family ipv6 unicast
   2001:db8::1/128 Null0 description "BGP blackhole"
  !
 !
!
route-policy blackhole_ipv4_in_public
  if destination in (0.0.0.0/0 le 31) then
    drop
  endif
  set next-hop 192.0.2.1
  done
end-policy
!
route-policy blackhole_ipv6_in_public
  if destination in (::/0 le 127) then
    drop
  endif
  set next-hop 2001:db8::1
  done
end-policy
!
router bgp 12322
 neighbor-group BLACKHOLE_IPV4_PUBLIC
  remote-as 64666
  ebgp-multihop 255
  update-source Loopback10
  address-family ipv4 unicast
   maximum-prefix 100 90
   route-policy blackhole_ipv4_in_public in
   route-policy drop out
   long-lived-graceful-restart stale-time send 86400 accept 86400
  !
  address-family ipv6 unicast
   maximum-prefix 100 90
   route-policy blackhole_ipv6_in_public in
   route-policy drop out
   long-lived-graceful-restart stale-time send 86400 accept 86400
  !
 !
 vrf public
  neighbor 192.0.2.1
   use neighbor-group BLACKHOLE_IPV4_PUBLIC
   description akvorado-1

When the traffic is blackholed, it is still reported by IPFIX and sFlow. In Akvorado, use ForwardingStatus >= 128 as a filter. While this method is compatible with all routers, it makes the attack successful as the target is completely unreachable. If your router supports it, Flowspec can selectively filter flows to stop the attack without impacting the customer.

Flowspec Flowspec is defined in RFC 8955 and enables the transmission of flow specifications in BGP sessions. A flow specification is a set of matching criteria to apply to IP traffic. These criteria include the source and destination prefix, the IP protocol, the source and destination port, and the packet length. Each flow specification is associated with an action, encoded as an extended community: traffic shaping, traffic marking, or redirection. To announce flow specifications with BIRD, we extend our configuration. The extended community used shapes the matching traffic to 0 bytes per second.

flow4 table flowtab4;
flow6 table flowtab6;
protocol bgp exporter  
  flow4  
    import none;
    export where proto = "flowspec4";
   ;
  flow6  
    import none;
    export where proto = "flowspec6";
   ;
  # [ ]
 
protocol static flowspec4  
  flow4;
  route flow4  
    dst 203.0.113.68/32;
    sport = 53;
    length >= 1476 && <= 1500;
    proto = 17;
   
    bgp_ext_community.add((generic, 0x80060000, 0x00000000));
   ;
  route flow4  
    dst 203.0.113.206/32;
    sport = 123;
    length = 468;
    proto = 17;
   
    bgp_ext_community.add((generic, 0x80060000, 0x00000000));
   ;
 
protocol static flowspec6  
  flow6;
 

If you have a Cisco router running IOS XR, the configuration may look like this:

vrf public
 address-family ipv4 flowspec
 address-family ipv6 flowspec
!
router bgp 12322
 address-family vpnv4 flowspec
 address-family vpnv6 flowspec
 neighbor-group FLOWSPEC_IPV4_PUBLIC
  remote-as 64666
  ebgp-multihop 255
  update-source Loopback10
  address-family ipv4 flowspec
   long-lived-graceful-restart stale-time send 86400 accept 86400
   route-policy accept in
   route-policy drop out
   maximum-prefix 100 90
   validation disable
  !
  address-family ipv6 flowspec
   long-lived-graceful-restart stale-time send 86400 accept 86400
   route-policy accept in
   route-policy drop out
   maximum-prefix 100 90
   validation disable
  !
 !
 vrf public
  address-family ipv4 flowspec
  address-family ipv6 flowspec
  neighbor 192.0.2.1
   use neighbor-group FLOWSPEC_IPV4_PUBLIC
   description akvorado-1

Then, you need to enable Flowspec on all interfaces with:

flowspec
 vrf public
  address-family ipv4
   local-install interface-all
  !
  address-family ipv6
   local-install interface-all
  !
 !
!

As with the RTBH setup, you can filter dropped flows with ForwardingStatus >= 128.

DDoS detection (continued) In the example using Flowspec, the flows were also filtered on the length of the packet:

route flow4  
  dst 203.0.113.68/32;
  sport = 53;
  length >= 1476 && <= 1500;
  proto = 17;
 
  bgp_ext_community.add((generic, 0x80060000, 0x00000000));
 ;

This is an important addition: legitimate DNS requests are smaller than this and therefore not filtered.² With ClickHouse, you can get the 10^th and 90^th percentiles of the packet sizes with quantiles(0.1, 0.9)(Bytes/Packets). The last issue we need to tackle is how to optimize the request: it may need several seconds to collect the data and it is likely to consume substantial resources from your ClickHouse database. One solution is to create a materialized view to pre-aggregate results:

CREATE TABLE ddos_logs (
  TimeReceived DateTime,
  DstAddr IPv6,
  Proto UInt32,
  SrcPort UInt16,
  Gbps SimpleAggregateFunction(sum, Float64),
  Mpps SimpleAggregateFunction(sum, Float64),
  sources AggregateFunction(uniqCombined(12), IPv6),
  countries AggregateFunction(uniqCombined(12), FixedString(2)),
  size AggregateFunction(quantiles(0.1, 0.9), UInt64)
) ENGINE = SummingMergeTree
PARTITION BY toStartOfHour(TimeReceived)
ORDER BY (TimeReceived, DstAddr, Proto, SrcPort)
TTL toStartOfHour(TimeReceived) + INTERVAL 6 HOUR DELETE ;
CREATE MATERIALIZED VIEW ddos_logs_view TO ddos_logs AS
  SELECT
    toStartOfMinute(TimeReceived) AS TimeReceived,
    DstAddr,
    Proto,
    SrcPort,
    sum(((((Bytes * SamplingRate) * 8) / 1000) / 1000) / 1000) / 60 AS Gbps,
    sum(((Packets * SamplingRate) / 1000) / 1000) / 60 AS Mpps,
    uniqCombinedState(12)(SrcAddr) AS sources,
    uniqCombinedState(12)(SrcCountry) AS countries,
    quantilesState(0.1, 0.9)(toUInt64(Bytes/Packets)) AS size
  FROM flows
  WHERE DstNetRole = 'customers'
  GROUP BY
    TimeReceived,
    DstAddr,
    Proto,
    SrcPort

The ddos_logs table is using the SummingMergeTree engine. When the table receives new data, ClickHouse replaces all the rows with the same sorting key, as defined by the ORDER BY directive, with one row which contains summarized values using either the sum() function or the explicitly specified aggregate function (uniqCombined and quantiles in our example).³ Finally, we can modify our initial query with the following one:

SELECT *
FROM (
  SELECT
    TimeReceived,
    DstAddr,
    dictGetOrDefault('protocols', 'name', Proto, '???') AS Proto,
    SrcPort,
    sum(Gbps) AS Gbps,
    sum(Mpps) AS Mpps,
    uniqCombinedMerge(12)(sources) AS sources,
    uniqCombinedMerge(12)(countries) AS countries,
    quantilesMerge(0.1, 0.9)(size) AS size
  FROM ddos_logs
  WHERE TimeReceived > now() - INTERVAL 60 MINUTE
  GROUP BY
    TimeReceived,
    DstAddr,
    Proto,
    SrcPort
)
WHERE (Gbps > 1)
   OR ((Proto = 'UDP') AND (Gbps > 0.2)) 
   OR ((sources > 20) AND (Gbps > 0.1)) 
   OR ((countries > 10) AND (Gbps > 0.1))
ORDER BY
  TimeReceived DESC,
  Gbps DESC

Gluing everything together To sum up, building an anti-DDoS system requires to following these steps:

1. define a set of criteria to detect a DDoS attack,
2. translate these criteria into SQL requests,
3. pre-aggregate flows into SummingMergeTree tables,
4. query and transform the results to a BIRD configuration file, and
5. configure your routers to pull the routes from BIRD.

A Python script like the following one can handle the fourth step. For each attacked target, it generates both a Flowspec rule and a blackhole route.

import socket
import types
from clickhouse_driver import Client as CHClient
# Put your SQL query here!
SQL_QUERY = " "
# How many anti-DDoS rules we want at the same time?
MAX_DDOS_RULES = 20
def empty_ruleset():
    ruleset = types.SimpleNamespace()
    ruleset.flowspec = types.SimpleNamespace()
    ruleset.blackhole = types.SimpleNamespace()
    ruleset.flowspec.v4 = []
    ruleset.flowspec.v6 = []
    ruleset.blackhole.v4 = []
    ruleset.blackhole.v6 = []
    return ruleset
current_ruleset = empty_ruleset()
client = CHClient(host="clickhouse.akvorado.net")
while True:
    results = client.execute(SQL_QUERY)
    seen =  
    new_ruleset = empty_ruleset()
    for (t, addr, proto, port, gbps, mpps, sources, countries, size) in results:
        if (addr, proto, port) in seen:
            continue
        seen[(addr, proto, port)] = True
        # Flowspec
        if addr.ipv4_mapped:
            address = addr.ipv4_mapped
            rules = new_ruleset.flowspec.v4
            table = "flow4"
            mask = 32
            nh = "proto"
        else:
            address = addr
            rules = new_ruleset.flowspec.v6
            table = "flow6"
            mask = 128
            nh = "next header"
        if size[0] == size[1]:
            length = f"length =  int(size[0]) "
        else:
            length = f"length >=  int(size[0])  && <=  int(size[1]) "
        header = f"""
# Time:  t 
# Source:  address , protocol:  proto , port:  port 
# Gbps/Mpps:  gbps:.3 / mpps:.3 , packet size:  int(size[0]) <=X<= int(size[1]) 
# Flows:  flows , sources:  sources , countries:  countries 
"""
        rules.append(
                f""" header 
route  table   
  dst  address / mask ;
  sport =  port ;
   length ;
   nh  =  socket.getprotobyname(proto) ;
 
  bgp_ext_community.add((generic, 0x80060000, 0x00000000));
 ;
"""
        )
        # Blackhole
        if addr.ipv4_mapped:
            rules = new_ruleset.blackhole.v4
        else:
            rules = new_ruleset.blackhole.v6
        rules.append(
            f""" header 
route  address / mask  blackhole  
  bgp_community.add((65535, 666));
 ;
"""
        )
        new_ruleset.flowspec.v4 = list(
            set(new_ruleset.flowspec.v4[:MAX_DDOS_RULES])
        )
        new_ruleset.flowspec.v6 = list(
            set(new_ruleset.flowspec.v6[:MAX_DDOS_RULES])
        )
        # TODO: advertise changes by mail, chat, ...
        current_ruleset = new_ruleset
        changes = False
        for rules, path in (
            (current_ruleset.flowspec.v4, "v4-flowspec"),
            (current_ruleset.flowspec.v6, "v6-flowspec"),
            (current_ruleset.blackhole.v4, "v4-blackhole"),
            (current_ruleset.blackhole.v6, "v6-blackhole"),
        ):
            path = os.path.join("/etc/bird/", f" path .conf")
            with open(f" path .tmp", "w") as f:
                for r in rules:
                    f.write(r)
            changes = (
                changes or not os.path.exists(path) or not samefile(path, f" path .tmp")
            )
            os.rename(f" path .tmp", path)
        if not changes:
            continue
        proc = subprocess.Popen(
            ["birdc", "configure"],
            stdin=subprocess.DEVNULL,
            stdout=subprocess.PIPE,
            stderr=subprocess.PIPE,
        )
        stdout, stderr = proc.communicate(None)
        stdout = stdout.decode("utf-8", "replace")
        stderr = stderr.decode("utf-8", "replace")
        if proc.returncode != 0:
            logger.error(
                "  error:\n \n ".format(
                    "birdc reconfigure",
                    "\n".join(
                        [" O:  ".format(line) for line in stdout.rstrip().split("\n")]
                    ),
                    "\n".join(
                        [" E:  ".format(line) for line in stderr.rstrip().split("\n")]
                    ),
                )
            )

---

Until Akvorado integrates DDoS detection and mitigation, the ideas presented in this blog post provide a solid foundation to get started with your own anti-DDoS system.

---

1. ClickHouse can export results using Markdown format when appending FORMAT Markdown to the query.
2. While most DNS clients should retry with TCP on failures, this is not always the case: until recently, musl libc did not implement this.
3. The materialized view also aggregates the data at hand, both for efficiency and to ensure we work with the right data types.

Focus This month I didn't have any particular focus. I just worked on issues in my info bubble.

Changes

• translate-shell: https, typo
• pyemd: fix dep
• duck: sort, add moved site indicators
• devscripts: fix https, UTF-8, wnpp-alert
• reportbug: fix URLs/data
• Debian QA services: excuses improvements
• Debian package uploads: pyemd (1 2), sptag
• Debian sysadmin wiki pages: ports/hardware-requirements
• Debian wiki pages: DebianEdu (DebianEdu/Documentation (Buster, Etch, Jessie, Lenny, Squeeze, Stretch, Wheezy), GSoD2023Proposal, PageFragment/ObsoleteRelease), DebianIndia/MiniDebConfTamilNadu2023, DebianName, HardwareQualification, LibreOffice, PortsDocs/New, Ports/loong64, PortTemplate, PrivacyIssues, ReleaseParty, (Bookworm), Salsa, Security/U2F, Sparc64, Statistics, SummerOfCode2023/PendingProjects/DebianRustCoreutils, Teams (Debbugs/ArchitectureTags, ReleaseTeam/ReleaseCheckList (BookwormCheckList))
• FOSSjobs wiki pages: Resources

Issues

• Feature in evolution
• Privacy issue in a communications client (sent privately)
• Packaging preparation needed for scancode-toolkit
• Conffile removal needed in puppet-agent
• New release needed for pyemd
• Incorrect link in dmitry

Review

• Spam: reported 36 Debian mailing list posts
• Debian wiki: RecentChanges for the month
• Debian BTS usertags: changes for the month
• Debian screenshots:
  • approved baobab clamtk-gnome claws-mail davegnukem far2l fonts-monofur freecell-solver-bin gadmin-samba gimp-plugin-registry goldendict-webengine grub-imageboot kdiff3 mate-system-monitor memtest86+ micro netplan.io opensnitch oxygen-cursor-theme plasma-mobile sabnzbdplus wine wmaker wordgrinder-ncurses yoshimi
  • rejected torcs (advertising?), chromedriver/libomxil-bellagio0-components-xvideo (selfie), weboob-qt (Windows), intel-microcode (Fedora, non-free), chromium-chromedriver (white screen)

Administration

• Debian BTS: unarchive/reopen/triage bugs for reintroduced package servefile
• Debian IRC: turn an old channel into a redirect to the right one
• Debian wiki: unblock IP addresses, approve accounts

Communication

• Respond to queries from Debian users and contributors on the mailing lists and IRC

Sponsors The pyemd/sptag work was sponsored. All other work was done on a volunteer basis.

Akvorado collects network flows using IPFIX or sFlow. It stores them in a ClickHouse database. A web console allows a user to query the data and plot some graphs. A nice aspect of this console is how we can filter flows with a SQL-like language:

Filter editor in Akvorado console

Often, web interfaces expose a query builder to build such filters. I think combining a SQL-like language with an editor supporting completion, syntax highlighting, and linting is a better approach.¹ The language parser is built with pigeon (Go) from a parsing expression grammar or PEG. The editor component is CodeMirror (TypeScript).

Language parser PEG grammars are relatively recent² and are an alternative to context-free grammars. They are easier to write and they can generate better error messages. Python switched from an LL(1)-based parser to a PEG-based parser in Python 3.9. pigeon generates a parser for Go. A grammar is a set of rules. Each rule is an identifier, with an optional user-friendly label for error messages, an expression, and an action in Go to be executed on match. You can find the complete grammar in parser.peg. Here is a simplified rule:

ConditionIPExpr "condition on IP"  
  column:("ExporterAddress"i   return "ExporterAddress", nil  
        / "SrcAddr"i   return "SrcAddr", nil  
        / "DstAddr"i   return "DstAddr", nil  ) _ 
  operator:("=" / "!=") _ 
  ip:IP  
    return fmt.Sprintf("%s %s IPv6StringToNum(%s)",
      toString(column), toString(operator), quote(ip)), nil
   

The rule identifier is ConditionIPExpr. It case-insensitively matches ExporterAddress, SrcAddr, or DstAddr. The action for each case returns the proper case for the column name. That s what is stored in the column variable. Then, it matches one of the possible operators. As there is no code block, it stores the matched string directly in the operator variable. Then, it tries to match the IP rule, which is defined elsewhere in the grammar. If it succeeds, it stores the result of the match in the ip variable and executes the final action. The action turns the column, operator, and IP into a proper expression for ClickHouse. For example, if we have ExporterAddress = 203.0.113.15, we get ExporterAddress = IPv6StringToNum('203.0.113.15'). The IP rule uses a rudimentary regular expression but checks if the matched address is correct in the action block, thanks to netip.ParseAddr():

IP "IP address"   [0-9A-Fa-f:.]+  
  ip, err := netip.ParseAddr(string(c.text))
  if err != nil  
    return "", errors.New("expecting an IP address")
   
  return ip.String(), nil
 

Our parser safely turns the filter into a WHERE clause accepted by ClickHouse:³

WHERE InIfBoundary = 'external' 
AND ExporterRegion = 'france' 
AND InIfConnectivity = 'transit' 
AND SrcAS = 15169 
AND DstAddr BETWEEN toIPv6('2a01:e0f:ffff::') 
                AND toIPv6('2a01:e0f:ffff:ffff:ffff:ffff:ffff:ffff')

Integration in CodeMirror CodeMirror is a versatile code editor that can be easily integrated into JavaScript projects. In Akvorado, the Vue.js component, InputFilter, uses CodeMirror as its foundation and leverages features such as syntax highlighting, linting, and completion. The source code for these capabilities can be found in the codemirror/lang-filter/ directory.

Syntax highlighting The PEG grammar for Go cannot be utilized directly⁴ and the requirements for parsers for editors are distinct: they should be error-tolerant and operate incrementally, as code is typically updated character by character. CodeMirror offers a solution through its own parser generator, Lezer. We don t need this additional parser to fully understand the filter language. Only the basic structure is needed: column names, comparison and logic operators, quoted and unquoted values. The grammar is therefore quite short and does not need to be updated often:

@top Filter  
  expression
 
expression  
 Not expression  
 "(" expression ")"  
 "(" expression ")" And expression  
 "(" expression ")" Or expression  
 comparisonExpression And expression  
 comparisonExpression Or expression  
 comparisonExpression
 
comparisonExpression  
 Column Operator Value
 
Value  
  String   Literal   ValueLParen ListOfValues ValueRParen
 
ListOfValues  
  ListOfValues ValueComma (String   Literal)  
  String   Literal
 
// [ ]
@tokens  
  // [ ]
  Column   std.asciiLetter (std.asciiLetter std.digit)*  
  Operator   $[a-zA-Z!=><]+  
  String  
    '"' (![\\\n"]   "\\" _)* '"'?  
    "'" (![\\\n']   "\\" _)* "'"?
   
  Literal   (std.digit   std.asciiLetter   $[.:/])+  
  // [ ]
 

The expression SrcAS = 12322 AND (DstAS = 1299 OR SrcAS = 29447) is parsed to:

Filter(Column, Operator, Value(Literal),
  And, Column, Operator, Value(Literal),
  Or, Column, Operator, Value(Literal))

The last step is to teach CodeMirror how to map each token to a highlighting tag:

export const FilterLanguage = LRLanguage.define( 
  parser: parser.configure( 
    props: [
      styleTags( 
        Column: t.propertyName,
        String: t.string,
        Literal: t.literal,
        LineComment: t.lineComment,
        BlockComment: t.blockComment,
        Or: t.logicOperator,
        And: t.logicOperator,
        Not: t.logicOperator,
        Operator: t.compareOperator,
        "( )": t.paren,
       ),
    ],
   ),
 );

Linting We offload linting to the original parser in Go. The /api/v0/console/filter/validate endpoint accepts a filter and returns a JSON structure with the errors that were found:

 
  "message": "at line 1, position 12: string literal not terminated",
  "errors": [ 
    "line":    1,
    "column":  12,
    "offset":  11,
    "message": "string literal not terminated",
   ]
 

The linter source for CodeMirror queries the API and turns each error into a diagnostic.

Completion The completion system takes a hybrid approach. It splits the work between the frontend and the backend to offer useful suggestions for completing filters. The frontend uses the parser built with Lezer to determine the context of the completion: do we complete a column name, an operator, or a value? It also extracts the column name if we are completing something else. It forwards the result to the backend through the /api/v0/console/filter/complete endpoint. Walking the syntax tree was not as easy as I thought, but unit tests helped a lot. The backend uses the parser generated by pigeon to complete a column name or a comparison operator. For values, the completions are either static or extracted from the ClickHouse database. A user can complete an AS number from an organization name thanks to the following snippet:

results := []struct  
  Label  string  ch:"label" 
  Detail string  ch:"detail" 
 
columnName := "DstAS"
sqlQuery := fmt.Sprintf( 
 SELECT concat('AS', toString(%s)) AS label, dictGet('asns', 'name', %s) AS detail
 FROM flows
 WHERE TimeReceived > date_sub(minute, 1, now())
 AND detail != ''
 AND positionCaseInsensitive(detail, $1) >= 1
 GROUP BY label, detail
 ORDER BY COUNT(*) DESC
 LIMIT 20
 , columnName, columnName)
if err := conn.Select(ctx, &results, sqlQuery, input.Prefix); err != nil  
  c.r.Err(err).Msg("unable to query database")
  break
 
for _, result := range results  
  completions = append(completions, filterCompletion 
    Label:  result.Label,
    Detail: result.Detail,
    Quoted: false,
   )
 

In my opinion, the completion system is a major factor in making the field editor an efficient way to select flows. While a query builder may have been more beginner-friendly, the completion system s ease of use and functionality make it more enjoyable to use once you become familiar.

---

1. Moreover, building a query builder did not seem like a fun task for me.
2. They were introduced in 2004 in Parsing Expression Grammars: A Recognition-Based Syntactic Foundation. LR parsers were introduced in 1965, LALR parsers in 1969, and LL parsers in the 1970s. Yacc, a popular parser generator, was written in 1975.
3. The parser returns a string. It does not generate an intermediate AST. This makes it simpler and it currently fits our needs.
4. It could be manually translated to JavaScript with PEG.js.

This post is very late, but better late than never! I want to take a look back at the work that was done on FreedomBox during 2022. Several apps were added to FreedomBox in 2022. The email server app (that was developed by a Google Summer of Code student back in 2021) was finally made available to the general audience of FreedomBox users. You will find it under the name Postfix/Dovecot , which are the main services configured by this app. Another app that was added is Janus, which has the description video room . It is called video room instead of video conference because the room itself is persistent. People can join the room or leave, but there isn t a concept of calling or ending the call . Actually, Janus is a lightweight WebRTC server that can be used as a backend for many different types of applications. But as implemented currently, there is just the simple video room app. In the future, more advanced apps such as Jangouts may be packaged in Debian and made available to FreedomBox. RSS-Bridge is an app that generates RSS feeds for websites that don t provide their own (for example, YouTube). It can be used together with any RSS news feed reader application, such as TT-RSS which is also available in FreedomBox. There is now a Privacy page in the System menu, which allows enabling or disabling the Debian popularity-contest tool. If enabled, it reports the Debian packages that are installed on the system. The results can be seen at https://popcon.debian.org, which currently shows over 400 FreedomBoxes are reporting data. A major feature added to FreedomBox in 2022 is the ability to uninstall apps. This feature is still considered experimental (it won t work for every app), but many issues have been fixed already. There is an option to take a backup of the app s data before uninstalling. There is also now an operations queue in case the user starts multiple install or uninstall operations concurrently. XEP-0363 (HTTP File Upload) has been enabled for Ejabberd Chat Server. This allows files to be transferred between XMPP clients that support this feature. There were a number of security improvements to FreedomBox, such as adding fail2ban jails for Dovecot, Matrix Synapse, and WordPress. Firewall rules were added to ensure that authentication and authorization for services proxied through Apache web server cannot be bypassed by programs running locally on the system. Also, we are no longer using libpam-tmpdir to provide temporary folder isolation, because it causes issues for several packages. Instead we use systemd s sandboxing features, which provide even better isolation for services. Some things were removed in 2022. The ez-ipupdate package is no longer used for Dynamic DNS, since it is replaced by a Python implementation of GnuDIP. An option to restrict who can log in to the system was removed, due to various issues that arose from it. Instead there is an option to restrict who can login through SSH. The DNSSEC diagnostic test was removed, because it caused confusion for many users (although use of DNSSEC is still recommended). Finally, some statistics. There were 31 releases in 2022 (including
point releases). There were 68 unique contributors to the git
repository; this includes code contributions and translations (but not
contributions to the manual pages). In total, there were 980 commits to the git repository.