The following contributors got their Debian Developer accounts in the last two months:
Last week we held our promised miniDebConf in Santa Fe City, Santa Fe province,
Argentina just across the river from Paran , where I have spent almost six
beautiful months I will never forget.
Around 500 Kilometers North from Buenos Aires, Santa Fe and Paran are separated
by the beautiful and majestic Paran river, which flows from Brazil, marks the
Eastern border of Paraguay, and continues within Argentina as the heart of the
litoral region of the country, until it merges with the Uruguay river (you
guessed right the river marking the Eastern border of Argentina, first with
Brazil and then with Uruguay), and they become the R o de la Plata.
This was a short miniDebConf: we were lent the APUL union s building for the
weekend (thank you very much!); during Saturday, we had a cycle of talks, and on
sunday we had more of a hacklab logic, having some unstructured time to work
each on their own projects, and to talk and have a good time together.
We were five Debian people attending:
santiago debacle eamanu dererk gwolf @debian.org. My main contact to
kickstart organization was Mart n Bayo. Mart n was for many years the leader of
the Technical Degree on Free Software at Universidad Nacional del
Litoral,
where I was also a teacher for several years. Together with Leo Mart nez, also a
teacher at the tecnicatura, they contacted us with Guillermo and Gabriela,
from the APUL non-teaching-staff union of said university.
We had the following set of talks (for which there is a promise to get
electronic record, as APUL was kind enough to record them! of course, I will
push them to our usual conference video archiving service as soon as I get them)
| Hour | Title (Spanish) | Title (English) | Presented by |
|---|---|---|---|
| 10:00-10:25 | Introducci n al Software Libre | Introduction to Free Software | Mart n Bayo |
| 10:30-10:55 | Debian y su comunidad | Debian and its community | Emanuel Arias |
| 11:00-11:25 | Por qu sigo contribuyendo a Debian despu s de 20 a os? | Why am I still contributing to Debian after 20 years? | Santiago Ruano |
| 11:30-11:55 | Mi identidad y el proyecto Debian: Qu es el llavero OpenPGP y por qu ? | My identity and the Debian project: What is the OpenPGP keyring and why? | Gunnar Wolf |
| 12:00-13:00 | Explorando las masculinidades en el contexto del Software Libre | Exploring masculinities in the context of Free Software | Gora Ortiz Fuentes - Jos Francisco Ferro |
| 13:00-14:30 | Lunch | ||
| 14:30-14:55 | Debian para el d a a d a | Debian for our every day | Leonardo Mart nez |
| 15:00-15:25 | Debian en las Raspberry Pi | Debian in the Raspberry Pi | Gunnar Wolf |
| 15:30-15:55 | Device Trees | Device Trees | Lisandro Dami n Nicanor Perez Meyer (videoconferencia) |
| 16:00-16:25 | Python en Debian | Python in Debian | Emmanuel Arias |
| 16:30-16:55 | Debian y XMPP en la medici n de viento para la energ a e lica | Debian and XMPP for wind measuring for eolic energy | Martin Borgert |
Leonardo and I are happy to
announce the release of a very minor maintenance release 0.1.2 of our dtts package
which has been on CRAN for a
little under two years now.
dtts
builds upon our nanotime
package as well as the beloved data.table to bring
high-performance and high-resolution indexing at the
nanosecond level to data frames. dtts aims to
offers the time-series indexing versatility of xts (and zoo) to the immense
power of data.table while
supporting highest nanosecond resolution.
This release follows yesterday s long-awaited release of data.table version 1.5.0 which had
been some time in the making as the first new major.minor release since
Matt drifted into being less active and the forefront. The release also
renamed the one C-level API accessor to data.table (which was added, if
memory serves, by Leonardo
with our use in mind). So we have to catch up to the renamed identifier;
this release does that, and adds a versioned imports statement on data.table.
The short list of changes follows.
Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is also a report with diffstat for this release. Questions, comments, issue tickets can be brought to the GitHub repo. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can now sponsor me at GitHub.Changes in version 0.1.2 (2024-01-31)
- Update the one exported C-level identifier from data.table following its 1.5.0 release and a renaming
- Routine continuous integration updates
This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.
(click for diagram scans as pdfs).
The DigiSpark has just a USB tongue, which is very wobbly in a normal USB socket. I designed a 3D printed case which also had an approximation of the rest of the USB A plug. The plug is out of spec; our printer won t go fine enough - and anyway, the shield is supposed to be metal, not fragile plastic. But it fit in the USB PSU I was using, satisfactorily if a bit stiffly, and also into the connector for programming via my laptop.
Inside the coffee machine, there s the boundary between the original, coupled to mains, UI board, and the isolated low voltage of the microcontroller. I used a reasonably substantial cable to bring out the low voltage connection, past all the other hazardous innards, to make sure it stays isolated.
I added a drain power supply resistor on another of the GPIOs. This is enabled, with a draw of about 30mA, when the microcontroller is soon going to off / on cycle the coffee machine. That reduces the risk that the user will turn off the smart plug, and turn off the machine, but that the microcontroller turns the coffee machine back on again using the remaining power from USB PSU. Empirically in my setup it reduces the time from smart plug off to microcontroller stops from about 2-3s to more like 1s.
Optoisolator board (inside coffee machine) pictures
(Click through for full size images.)
Microcontroller board (in USB-plug-ish housing) pictures
Implementation - software
I originally used the Arduino IDE, writing my program in C. I had a bad time with that and rewrote it in Rust.
The firmware is in a repository on Debian s gitlab
Results
I can now cause the coffee to start, from my phone. It can be programmed more than 12h in advance. And it stays warm until we ve drunk it.
UI is worse
There s one aspect of the original Morphy Richards machine that I haven t improved: the user interface is still poor. Indeed, it s now even worse:
To turn the machine on, you probably want to turn on the smart plug instead. Unhappily, the power button for that is invisible in its installed location.
In particular, in the usual case, if you want to turn it off, you should ideally turn off both the smart plug (which can be done with the button on it) and the coffee machine itself. If you forget to turn off the smart plug, the machine can end up being turned on, very briefly, a handful of times, over the next hour or two.
Epilogue
We had used the new features a handful of times when one morning the coffee machine just wouldn t make coffee. The UI showed it turning on, but it wouldn t get hot, so no coffee. I thought oh no, I ve broken it!
But, on investigation, I found that the machine s heating element was open circuit (ie, completely broken). I didn t mess with that part. So, hooray! Not my fault. Probably, just being inverted a number of times and generally lightly jostled, had precipitated a latent fault. The machine was a number of years old.
Happily I found a replacement, identical, machine, online. I ve transplanted my modification and now it all works well.
Bonus pictures
(Click through for full size images.)
edited 2023-11-26 14:59 UTC in an attempt to fix TOC links Meeting Debian people for having a good time together, for some good hacking,
for learning, for teaching Is always fun and welcome. It brings energy, life
and joy. And this year, due to the six-months-long relocation my family and me
decided to have to Argentina, I was unable to attend the real deal, DebConf23 at
India.
And while I know DebConf is an experience like no other, this year I took part
in two miniDebConfs. One I have already shared in this same blog: I was in
MiniDebConf Tamil Nadu in
India, followed by
some days of pre-DebConf preparation and scouting in Kochi proper, where I got
to interact with the absolutely great and loving team that prepared DebConf.
The other one is still ongoing (but close to finishing). Some months ago, I
talked with Santiago Ruano, jokin as we were Spanish-speaking DDs announcing to
the debian-private mailing list we d be relocating to around R o de la
Plata. And things worked out normally: He has been for several months in
Uruguay already, so he decided to rent a house for some days, and invite Debian
people to do what we do best.
I left Paran Tuesday night (and missed my online class at UNAM! Well, you
cannot have everything, right?). I arrived early on Wednesday, and around noon
came to the house of the keysigning (well, the place is properly called Casa
Key , it s a publicity agency that is also rented as a guesthouse in a very nice
area of Montevideo, close to Nuevo Pocitos beach).
In case you don t know it, Montevideo is on the Northern (or Eastern) shore of
R o de la Plata, the widest river in the world (up to 300Km wide, with current
and non-salty water). But most important for some Debian contributors: You can
even come here by boat!
That first evening, we received Ilu, who was in Uruguay by chance for other
issues (and we were very happy about it!) and a young and enthusiastic
Uruguayan, Felipe, interested in getting involved in Debian. We spent the
evening talking about life, the universe and everything Which was a bit
tiring, as I had to interface between Spanish and English, talking with two
friends that didn t share a common language
On Thursday morning, I went out for an early walk at the beach. And lets say, if
only just for the narrative, that I found a lost penguin emerging from R o de la
Plata!
For those that don t know (who d be most of you, as he has not been seen at
Debian events for 15 years), that s Lisandro Dami n Nicanor P rez Meyer (or just
lisandro), long-time maintainer of the Qt ecosystem, and one of our embedded
world extraordinaires. So, after we got him dry and fed him fresh river fishes,
he gave us a great impromptu talk about understanding and finding our way around
the Device Tree Source files for development boards and similar machines, mostly
in the ARM world.
From Argentina, we also had Emanuel (eamanu) crossing all the way from La
Rioja.
I spent most of our first workday getting my laptop in shape to be useful as
the driver for my online class on Thursday (which is no small feat people that
know the particularities of my much loved ARM-based laptop will understand), and
running a set of tests again on my Raspberry Pi labortory, which I had not
updated in several months.
I am happy to say we are also finally also building Raspberry images for Trixie
(Debian 13, Testing)! Sadly, I managed
to burn my USB-to-serial-console (UART) adaptor, and could neither test those,
nor the oldstable ones we are still building (and will probably soon be dropped,
if not for anything else, to save disk space).
We enjoyed a lot of socialization time. An important highlight of the conference
for me was that we reconnected with a long-lost DD, Eduardo Tr pani, and got him
interested in getting involved in the project again! This second day, another
local Uruguayan, Mauricio, joined us together with his girlfriend,
Alicia, and Felipe came again to hang out with us. Sadly, we didn t get
photographic evidence of them (nor the permission to post it).
The nice house Santiago got for us was very well equipped for a
miniDebConf. There were a couple of rounds of pool played by those that enjoyed
it (I was very happy just to stand around, take some photos and enjoy the
atmosphere and the conversation).
Today (Saturday) is the last full-house day of miniDebConf; tomorrow we will be
leaving the house by noon. It was also a very productive day! We had a long,
important conversation about an important discussion that we are about to
present on debian-vote@lists.debian.org.
It has been a great couple of days! Sadly, it s coming to an end But this at
least gives me the opportunity (and moral obligation!) to write a long blog
post. And to thank Santiago for organizing this, and Debian, for sponsoring our
trip, stay, foods and healthy enjoyment!
Welcome to the October 2023 report from the Reproducible Builds project. In these reports we outline the most important things that we have been up to over the past month. As a quick recap, whilst anyone may inspect the source code of free software for malicious flaws, almost all software is distributed to end users as pre-compiled binaries.
Between October 31st and November 2nd, we held our seventh Reproducible Builds Summit in Hamburg, Germany!
Our summits are a unique gathering that brings together attendees from diverse projects, united by a shared vision of advancing the Reproducible Builds effort, and this instance was no different.
During this enriching event, participants had the opportunity to engage in discussions, establish connections and exchange ideas to drive progress in this vital field. A number of concrete outcomes from the summit will documented in the report for November 2023 and elsewhere.
Amazingly the agenda and all notes from all sessions are already online.
The Reproducible Builds team would like to thank our event sponsors who include Mullvad VPN, openSUSE, Debian, Software Freedom Conservancy, Allotropia and Aspiration Tech.
Russ Cox posted a fascinating article on his blog prompted by the fortieth anniversary of Ken Thompson s award-winning paper, Reflections on Trusting Trust:
[ ] In March 2023, Ken gave the closing keynote [and] during the Q&A session, someone jokingly asked about the Turing award lecture, specifically can you tell us right now whether you have a backdoor into every copy of gcc and Linux still today?Although Ken reveals (or at least claims!) that he has no such backdoor, he does admit that he has the actual code which Russ requests and subsequently dissects in great but accessible detail.
Rahul Bajaj, Eduardo Fernandes, Bram Adams and Ahmed E. Hassan from the Maintenance, Construction and Intelligence of Software (MCIS) laboratory within the School of Computing, Queen s University in Ontario, Canada have published a paper on the Time to fix, causes and correlation with external ecosystem factors of unreproducible builds.
The authors compare various response times within the Debian and Arch Linux distributions including, for example:
Arch Linux packages become reproducible a median of 30 days quicker when compared to Debian packages, while Debian packages remain reproducible for a median of 68 days longer once fixed.A full PDF of their paper is available online, as are many other interesting papers on MCIS publication page.
On the NixOS Discourse instance, Arnout Engelen (raboof) announced that NixOS have created an independent, bit-for-bit identical rebuilding of the nixos-minimal image that is used to install NixOS. In their post, Arnout details what exactly can be reproduced, and even includes some of the history of this endeavour:
You may remember a 2021 announcement that the minimal ISO was 100% reproducible. While back then we successfully tested that all packages that were needed to build the ISO were individually reproducible, actually rebuilding the ISO still introduced differences. This was due to some remaining problems in the hydra cache and the way the ISO was created. By the time we fixed those, regressions had popped up (notably an upstream problem in Python 3.10), and it isn t until this week that we were back to having everything reproducible and being able to validate the complete chain.Congratulations to NixOS team for reaching this important milestone! Discussion about this announcement can be found underneath the post itself, as well as on Hacker News.
Seth Larson published a blog post investigating the reproducibility of the CPython source tarballs. Using diffoscope, reprotest and other tools, Seth documents his work that led to a pull request to make these files reproducible which was merged by ukasz Langa.
arm64 hardware from Codethink
Long-time sponsor of the project, Codethink, have generously replaced our old Moonshot-Slides , which they have generously hosted since 2016 with new KVM-based arm64 hardware. Holger Levsen integrated these new nodes to the Reproducible Builds continuous integration framework.
ext4 filesystem images. [ ]
distro-info is a Debian-oriented tool that can provide information about Debian (and Ubuntu) distributions such as their codenames (eg. bookworm) and so on. This month, Benjamin Drung uploaded a new version of distro-info that added support for the SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH environment variable in order to close bug #1034422. In addition, 8 reviews of packages were added, 74 were updated and 56 were removed this month, all adding to our knowledge about identified issues.
Bernhard M. Wiedemann published another monthly report about reproducibility within openSUSE.
edje_cc (race condition)elasticsearch (build failure)erlang-retest (embedded .zip timestamp)fdo-client (embeds private keys)fftw3 (random ordering)gsoap (date issue)gutenprint (date)hub/golang (embeds random build path)Hyprland (filesystem issue)kitty (sort-related issue, .tar file embeds modification time)libpinyin (ASLR)maildir-utils (date embedded in copyright)mame (order-related issue)mingw32-binutils & mingw64-binutils (date)MooseX (date from perl-MooseX-App)occt (sorting issue)openblas (embeds CPU count)OpenRGB (corruption-related issue)python-numpy (random file names)python-pandas (FTBFS)python-quantities (date)python3-pyside2 (order)qemu (date and Sphinx issue)qpid (sorting problem)rakudo (filesystem ordering issue)SLOF (date-related issue)spack (CPU counting issue)xemacs-packages (date-related issue)file -i returns text/plain, fallback to comparing as a text file. This was originally filed as Debian bug #1053668) by Niels Thykier. [ ] This was then uploaded to Debian (and elsewhere) as version 251.
The Reproducible Builds project operates a comprehensive testing framework (available at tests.reproducible-builds.org) in order to check packages and other artifacts for reproducibility. In October, a number of changes were made by Holger Levsen:
#debian-reproducible-changes IRC channel. [ ][ ][ ]systemd-oomd on all Debian bookworm nodes (re. Debian bug #1052257). [ ]schroots. [ ]arm64 machines from Codethink. [ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ]#reproducible-builds on irc.oftc.net.
rb-general@lists.reproducible-builds.org
by Thiago Pezzo,
Debian contributor, pt_BR localization team
This year's Debian Day was a pretty special one, we are celebrating 30 years!
Giving the importance of this event, the Brazilian community planned a very
special week. Instead of only local gatherings, we had a week of online talks
streamed via Debian Brazil's youtube channel
(soon the recordings will be uploaded to our team's
peertube instance).
Nonetheless the local celebrations happened around the country and one was
organized in Pouso Alegre, MG, Brazil,
at the Instituto Federal de Educa o, Ci ncia e Tecnologia do Sul de Minas Gerais
(IFSULDEMINAS - Federal Institute of Education, Science and Technology of the
South of Minas Gerais). The Institute, as many of its counterparts in Brazil,
specializes in professional and technological curricula to high school and
undergraduate levels. All public, free and quality education!
The event happened on the afternoon of August 16th at the Pouso Alegre campus.
Some 30 students from the High School Computer Technician class attended the
presentation about the Debian Project and the Free
Software movement in general. Everyone had a great time! And afterwards we
had some spare time to chat.
I would like to thank all people who helped us:
Leonardo and I are happy to
announce the release of a first follow-up release 0.1.1 of our dtts package
which got to [CRAN][cran] in its initial upload last year.
dtts
builds upon our nanotime
package as well as the beloved data.table to bring
high-performance and high-resolution indexing at the
nanosecond level to data frames. dtts aims to
bring the time-series indexing versatility of xts (and zoo) to the immense
power of data.table while
supporting highest nanosecond resolution.
This release fixes a bug flagged by valgrind and brings
several internal enhancements.
Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is also a diffstat report for the this release this release. Questions, comments, issue tickets can be brought to the GitHub repo. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can now sponsor me at GitHub.Changes in version 0.1.1 (2023-08-08)
- A simplifcation was applied to the C++ interface glue code (#9 fixing #8)
- The package no longer enforces the C++11 compilation standard (#10)
- An uninitialized memory read has been correct (#11)
- A new function
opshas been added (#12)- Function names no longer start with a dot (#13)
- Arbitrary index columns are now supported (#13)
This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.
But part of it has been neglect as well as this time article shares. What we have lost and continue to lose is just priceless. Every book has a grain of truth in it, some more, some less but equally enjoyable.
Most harmful is the neglect towards books and is more true today than any other time in history. Kids today have a wide variety of tools to keep themselves happy or occupied, from anime, VR, gaming the list goes on and on. In that scenario, how the humble books can compete. People think of Kindle but most e-readers like Kindle are nothing but obsolescence by design. I have tried out Kindle a few times but find it a bit on the flimsy side. Books are much better IMHO or call me old-school. While there are many advantages, one of the things that I like about books is that you can easily put yourself in either the protagonist or the antagonist or somewhere in the middle and think of the possible scenarios wherever you are in a particular book. I could go on but it will be a blog post or two in itself.
Till later. Happy Reading.
. Also not clear who is doing the condemning here. No word of support for the women, no offer of intervention, why is she the Minister of Child and Women Development (CDW) if she can t use harsh words or give support to the women who have gone and going through horrific things
Update : CM Biren Singh s Statement after the video surfaced
Update: CJI (Chief Justice of India) has taken suo-moto cognizance and has warned both the State and Centre to move quickly otherwise they will take the matter in their own hand.
Update: Opposition was told there would be a debate on Manipur. The whole day went by, no debate. That s the shamelessness of this Govt.
Update 20th July 19:25 Center may act or not act against the perpetrators but they will act against Twitter who showed the crime. Talk about shooting the messenger
but that is probably a story for another time. Just as a parting shot, even memory vendors are going highly automated factory lines.
Back to the topic though, I have been wearing glasses since the age of 5 year old. They weigh less than 10 grams and you still get a nose dent. And I know enough people, times etc. when people have got headaches and whatnot from glasses. Unless the VR headsets become that size and don t cost an arm and leg (or a kidney or a liver) it would have niche use. While 5G and 6G would certainly push more ppl to get it it probably would take a few more years before we have something that is simple and doesn t need too much to get it rolling.
The series I mentioned above is already over it s first season but would highly recommend it. I do hope the second season happens quickly and we do come to know why and how Nokia missed the Android train and their curious turn to get to Microsoft which sorta sealed their fate
Welcome to the May 2023 report from the Reproducible Builds project
In our reports, we outline the most important things that we have been up to over the past month. As always, if you are interested in contributing to the project, please visit our Contribute page on our website.
Holger Levsen gave a talk at the 2023 edition of the Debian Reunion Hamburg, a semi-informal meetup of Debian-related people in northern Germany. The slides are available online.
In April, Holger Levsen gave a talk at foss-north 2023 titled Reproducible Builds, the first ten years. Last month, however, Holger s talk was covered in a round-up of the conference on the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) blog.
Pronnoy Goswami, Saksham Gupta, Zhiyuan Li, Na Meng and Daphne Yao from Virginia Tech published a paper investigating the Reproducibility of NPM Packages. The abstract includes:
When using open-source NPM packages, most developers download prebuilt packages on npmjs.com instead of building those packages from available source, and implicitly trust the downloaded packages. However, it is unknown whether the blindly trusted prebuilt NPM packages are reproducible (i.e., whether there is always a verifiable path from source code to any published NPM package). [ ] We downloaded versions/releases of 226 most popularly used NPM packages and then built each version with the available source on GitHub. Next, we applied a differencing tool to compare the versions we built against versions downloaded from NPM, and further inspected any reported difference.The paper reports that among the 3,390 versions of the 226 packages, only 2,087 versions are reproducible, and furthermore that multiple factors contribute to the non-reproducibility including flexible versioning information in package.json file and the divergent behaviors between distinct versions of tools used in the build process. The paper concludes with insights for future verifiable build procedures. Unfortunately, a PDF is not available publically yet, but a Digital Object Identifier (DOI) is available on the paper s IEEE page.
Elsewhere in academia, Betul Gokkaya, Leonardo Aniello and Basel Halak of the School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton published a new paper containing a broad overview of attacks and comprehensive risk assessment for software supply chain security.
Their paper, titled Software supply chain: review of attacks, risk assessment strategies and security controls, analyses the most common software supply-chain attacks by providing the latest trend of analyzed attack, and identifies the security risks for open-source and third-party software supply chains. Furthermore, their study introduces unique security controls to mitigate analyzed cyber-attacks and risks by linking them with real-life security incidence and attacks . (arXiv.org, PDF)
NixOS is now tracking two new reports at reproducible.nixos.org. Aside from the collection of build-time dependencies of the minimal and Gnome installation ISOs, this page now also contains reports that are restricted to the artifacts that make it into the image. The minimal ISO is currently reproducible except for Python 3.10, which hopefully will be resolved with the coming update to Python version 3.11.
David A. Wheeler started a thread noting that the OSSGadget project s oss-reproducible tool was measuring something related to but not the same as reproducible builds. Initially they had adopted the term semantically reproducible build term for what it measured, which they defined as being if its build results can be either recreated exactly (a bit for bit reproducible build), or if the differences between the release package and a rebuilt package are not expected to produce functional differences in normal cases. This generated a significant number of replies, and several were concerned that people might confuse what they were measuring with reproducible builds . After discussion, the OSSGadget developers decided to switch to the term semantically equivalent for what they measured in order to reduce the risk of confusion.
Vagrant Cascadian (vagrantc) posted an update about GCC, binutils, and Debian s build-essential set with some progress, some hope, and I daresay, some fears .
Lastly, kpcyrd asked a question about building a reproducible Linux kernel package for Arch Linux (answered by Arnout Engelen). In the same, thread David A. Wheeler pointed out that the Linux Kernel documentation has a chapter about Reproducible kernel builds now as well.
In Debian this month, nine reviews of Debian packages were added, 20 were updated and 6 were removed this month, all adding to our knowledge about identified issues. In addition, Vagrant Cascadian added a link to the source code causing various ecbuild issues. [ ]
The F-Droid project updated its Inclusion How-To with a new section explaining why it considers reproducible builds to be best practice and hopes developers will support the team s efforts to make as many (new) apps reproducible as it reasonably can.
In diffoscope development this month, version 242 was uploaded to Debian unstable by Chris Lamb who also made the following changes:
binwalk is not available, ensure the user knows they may be missing more info. [ ]0.7.24 and 0.7.25 to Debian unstable which added support for Tox versions 3 and 4 with help from Vagrant Cascadian [ ][ ][ ]
mtools (forwarded upstream).lombok.lcov.lucene8.bnd.clc-intercal.proj.gcc-13.pygopherd.pytorch-audio.vcmi.proj.generateLocaleConfig in Android Gradle Plugin version 8.1.0 generates XML files using non-deterministic ordering, breaking reproducible builds. [ ]
The Reproducible Builds project operates a comprehensive testing framework (available at tests.reproducible-builds.org) in order to check packages and other artifacts for reproducibility. In May, a number of changes were made by Holger Levsen:
arm64 nodes only put required modules in the initrd to save space in the /boot partition. [ ]--fetch, --help, --no-future and --verbose options [ ][ ][ ][ ] as well as adding a suite of new actions, such as apt-upgrade, command, deploy-git, rmstamp, etc. [ ][ ][ ][ ] in addition a significant amount of refactoring [ ][ ][ ][ ].apt has updates to install. [ ]bind9-dnsutils on some Ubuntu 18.04 nodes. [ ][ ]apt upgrades are available. [ ]nocheck, nopgo and nolto when building gcc-* and binutils packages [ ] as well as performed some node maintenance [ ][ ]. In addition, Roland Clobus updated the openQA configuration to specify longer timeouts and access to the developer mode [ ] and updated the URL used for reproducible Debian Live images [ ].
#reproducible-builds on irc.oftc.net.
rb-general@lists.reproducible-builds.org
During the weekend of 19-23 May 2023 I attended the Wikimedia hackathon 2023 in Athens,
Greece. The event physically reunited folks interested in the more technological aspects of the Wikimedia movement in person for the
first time since 2019. The scope of the hacking projects include (but was not limited to)
tools, wikipedia bots, gadgets, server and network infrastructure, data and other technical systems.
My role in the event was two-fold: on one hand I was in the event because of my role as SRE in the Wikimedia Cloud Services team, where we provided
very valuable services to the community, and I was expected to support the technical contributors of the movement that were around. Additionally, and
because of that same role, I did some hacking myself too, which was specially augmented given I generally collaborate on a daily basis with some
community members that were present in the hacking room.
The hackathon had some conference-style track and I ran a session with my coworker Bryan, called
Past, Present and Future of Wikimedia Cloud Services (Toolforge and friends)
(slides) which was very satisfying to deliver given the friendly space
that it was. I attended a bunch of other sessions, and all of them were interesting and well presented. The number of ML themes that were present in
the program schedule was exciting. I definitely learned a lot from attending those sessions, from how LLMs work, some
fascinating applications for them in the wikimedia space, to what were some industry trends for training and hosting ML models.
Despite the sessions, the main purpose of the hackathon was, well, hacking. While I was in the hacking space for more than 12 hours each day, my
ability to get things done was greatly reduced by the constant conversations, help requests, and other social interactions with the folks. Don t get
me wrong, I embraced that reality with joy, because the social bonding aspect of it is perhaps the main reason why we gathered in person instead of
virtually.
That being said, this is a rough list of what I did:
It wasn t the first Wikimedia Hackathon for me, and I felt the same as in previous iterations: it was a welcoming space, and I was surrounded by
friends and nice human beings. I ended the event with a profound feeling of being privileged, because I was part of the Wikimedia movement, and
because I was invited to participate in it.
This post serves as a report from my attendance to Kubecon and CloudNativeCon 2023 Europe that took place in
Amsterdam in April 2023. It was my second time physically attending this conference, the first one was in
Austin, Texas (USA) in 2017. I also attended once in a virtual fashion.
The content here is mostly generated for the sake of my own recollection and learnings, and is written from
the notes I took during the event.
The very first session was the opening keynote, which reunited the whole crowd to bootstrap the event and
share the excitement about the days ahead. Some astonishing numbers were announced: there were more than
10.000 people attending, and apparently it could confidently be said that it was the largest open source
technology conference taking place in Europe in recent times.
It was also communicated that the next couple iteration of the event will be run in China in September 2023
and Paris in March 2024.
More numbers, the CNCF was hosting about 159 projects, involving 1300 maintainers and about 200.000
contributors. The cloud-native community is ever-increasing, and there seems to be a strong trend in the
industry for cloud-native technology adoption and all-things related to PaaS and IaaS.
The event program had different tracks, and in each one there was an interesting mix of low-level and higher
level talks for a variety of audience. On many occasions I found that reading the talk title alone was not
enough to know in advance if a talk was a 101 kind of thing or for experienced engineers. But unlike in
previous editions, I didn t have the feeling that the purpose of the conference was to try selling me
anything. Obviously, speakers would make sure to mention, or highlight in a subtle way, the involvement of a
given company in a given solution or piece of the ecosystem. But it was non-invasive and fair enough for me.
On a different note, I found the breakout rooms to be often small. I think there were only a couple of rooms
that could accommodate more than 500 people, which is a fairly small allowance for 10k attendees. I realized
with frustration that the more interesting talks were immediately fully booked, with people waiting in line
some 45 minutes before the session time. Because of this, I missed a few important sessions that I ll
hopefully watch online later.
Finally, on a more technical side, I ve learned many things, that instead of grouping by session I ll group
by topic, given how some subjects were mentioned in several talks.
On gitops and CI/CD pipelines
Most of the mentions went to FluxCD and ArgoCD. At
that point there were no doubts that gitops was a mature approach and both flux and argoCD could do an
excellent job. ArgoCD seemed a bit more over-engineered to be a more general purpose CD pipeline, and flux
felt a bit more tailored for simpler gitops setups. I discovered that both have nice web user interfaces that
I wasn t previously familiar with.
However, in two different talks I got the impression that the initial setup of them was simple, but migrating
your current workflow to gitops could result in a bumpy ride. This is, the challenge is not deploying
flux/argo itself, but moving everything into a state that both humans and flux/argo can understand. I also
saw some curious mentions to the config drifts that can happen in some cases, even if the goal of gitops is
precisely for that to never happen. Such mentions were usually accompanied by some hints on how to operate
the situation by hand.
Worth mentioning, I missed any practical information about one of the key pieces to this whole gitops story:
building container images. Most of the showcased scenarios were using pre-built container images, so in that
sense they were simple. Building and pushing to an image registry is one of the two key points we would need
to solve in Toolforge Kubernetes if adopting gitops.
In general, even if gitops were already in our radar for
Toolforge Kubernetes,
I think it climbed a few steps in my priority list after the conference.
Another learning was this site: https://opengitops.dev/.
On etcd, performance and resource management
I attended a talk focused on etcd performance tuning that was very encouraging. They were basically talking
about the exact
same problems we
have had in Toolforge Kubernetes, like api-server and etcd failure modes, and how sensitive etcd is to disk
latency, IO pressure and network throughput. Even though
Toolforge Kubernetes scale is small compared to other Kubernetes deployments out there, I found it very
interesting to see other s approaches to the same set of challenges.
I learned how most Kubernetes components and apps can overload the api-server. Because even the api-server
talks to itself. Simple things like kubectl may have a completely different impact on the API depending on
usage, for example when listing the whole list of objects (very expensive) vs a single object.
The conclusion was to try avoiding hitting the api-server with LIST calls, and use ResourceVersion which
avoids full-dumps from etcd (which, by the way, is the default when using bare kubectl get calls). I
already knew some of this, and for example the jobs-framework-emailer was already making use of this
ResourceVersion functionality.
There have been a lot of improvements in the performance side of Kubernetes in recent times, or more
specifically, in how resources are managed and used by the system. I saw a review of resource management from
the perspective of the container runtime and kubelet, and plans to support fancy things like topology-aware
scheduling decisions and dynamic resource claims (changing the pod resource claims without
re-defining/re-starting the pods).
On cluster management, bootstrapping and multi-tenancy
I attended a couple of talks that mentioned kubeadm, and one in particular was from the maintainers
themselves. This was of interest to me because as of today we use it for
Toolforge. They shared all
the latest developments and improvements, and the plans and roadmap for the future, with a special mention to
something they called kubeadm operator , apparently capable of auto-upgrading the cluster, auto-renewing
certificates and such.
I also saw a comparison between the different cluster bootstrappers, which to me confirmed that kubeadm was
the best, from the point of view of being a well established and well-known workflow, plus having a very
active contributor base. The kubeadm developers invited the audience to submit feature requests,
so I did.
The different talks confirmed that the basic unit for multi-tenancy in kubernetes is the namespace. Any
serious multi-tenant usage should leverage this. There were some ongoing conversations, in official sessions
and in the hallway, about the right tool to implement K8s-whitin-K8s, and vcluster
was mentioned enough times for me to be convinced it was the right candidate. This was despite of my impression
that multiclusters / multicloud are regarded as hard topics in the general community. I definitely would like to play
with it sometime down the road.
On networking
I attended a couple of basic sessions that served really well to understand how Kubernetes instrumented the
network to achieve its goal. The conference program had sessions to cover topics ranging from network
debugging recommendations, CNI implementations, to IPv6 support. Also, one of the keynote sessions had a
reference to how kube-proxy is not able to perform NAT for SIP connections, which is interesting because I
believe Netfilter Conntrack could do it if properly configured. One of the conclusions on the CNI front was
that Calico has a massive community adoption (in Netfilter mode), which is reassuring, especially considering
it is the one we use for Toolforge Kubernetes.
On jobs
I attended a couple of talks that were related to HPC/grid-like usages of Kubernetes. I was truly impressed
by some folks out there who were using Kubernetes Jobs on massive scales, such as to train machine learning
models and other fancy AI projects.
It is acknowledged in the community that the early implementation of things like Jobs and CronJobs had some
limitations that are now gone, or at least greatly improved. Some new functionalities have been added as
well. Indexed Jobs, for example, enables each Job to have a number (index) and process a chunk of a larger
batch of data based on that index. It would allow for full grid-like features like sequential (or again,
indexed) processing, coordination between Job and more graceful Job restarts. My first reaction was: Is that
something we would like to enable in Toolforge Jobs Framework?
On policy and security
A surprisingly good amount of sessions covered interesting topics related to policy and security. It was nice
to learn two realities:
| Illustrator: | Paul Kidby |
| Series: | Discworld #27 |
| Publisher: | Harper |
| Copyright: | 2001, 2002 |
| ISBN: | 0-06-050777-2 |
| Format: | Graphic novel |
| Pages: | 176 |
(no site yet)
in October 2021. they generally seem to keep up with
shipping. update (august 2022): they rolled out a second line of
laptops (12th gen), first batch shipped, second batch shipped
late, September 2022 batch was generally on time, see this
spreadsheet for a crowdsourced effort to track those 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.
+) signs
escaped, like this:
https://guides.frame.work/Guide/Framework\+Laptop\+DIY\+Edition\+Quick\+Start\+Guide/57
https://guides.frame.work/Guide/Framework/+Laptop/+DIY/+Edition/+Quick/+Start/+Guide/57
https://guides.frame.work/Guide/Framework+Laptop+DIY+Edition+Quick+Start+Guide/57
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
/etc/systemd/logind.conf.d/power-suspends.conf:
[Login]
HandlePowerKey=suspend
HandlePowerKeyLongPress=poweroff
mkdir /etc/systemd/logind.conf.d/
systemctl restart systemd-logind
| Key | Equivalent | Effect | Command |
|---|---|---|---|
| p | Pause | lock screen | xset s activate |
| b | Break | ? | ? |
| k | ScrLk | switch keyboard layout | N/A |
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
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
/etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/backlight.conf:
Section "Device"
Identifier "Card0"
Driver "intel"
Option "Backlight" "intel_backlight"
EndSection
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
autorandr -l horizontal
autorandr -l horizontal &&
eho Xft.dpi: 96 xrdb -merge &&
systemctl restart terminal xcolortaillog background-image emacs &&
i3-msg restart
5411.85user 673.33system 1:37:46elapsed 103%CPU (0avgtext+0avgdata 831700maxresident)k
10594704inputs+87448000outputs (9131major+410636783minor)pagefaults 0swaps
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
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+ 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
Unable to find medium containing a live file system
/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.
/etc/ssh
/var/lib/puppet
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.
apt install fwupd-amd64-signed
fwupdmgr refresh
fwupdmgr get-updates
fwupdmgr update
fwupdmgr enable-remote lvfs-testing
echo 'DisableCapsuleUpdateOnDisk=true' >> /etc/fwupd/uefi_capsule.conf
fwupdmgr update
cat >> /etc/default/console-setup <<EOF
FONTFACE="Terminus"
FONTSIZE=32x16
EOF
echo GRUB_GFXMODE=1024x768 >> /etc/default/grub
update-grub
.Xresources will make everything look much bigger:
! 1.5*96
Xft.dpi: 144
! 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
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
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 |
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.
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
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?)
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.
enable_fbc=1powertop --auto-tuneapt install tlp && systemctl enable tlpnvme.noacpi=1 mem_sleep_default=deep on the kernel command line
may help with standby power usagetlp.conf: tlp.patch.
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...
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.
| 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 |
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.
| 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 |
sep 28 11:19:45 angela systemd-sleep[209379]: /sys/class/power_supply/BAT/charge_now = 6045 [mAh]
sep 28 11:29:47 angela systemd-sleep[209725]: /sys/class/power_supply/BAT/charge_now = 6037 [mAh]
sep 29 22:13:54 emma systemd-sleep[176315]: /sys/class/power_supply/BAT0/energy_now = 5070 [mWh]
sep 29 22:23:54 emma systemd-sleep[176486]: /sys/class/power_supply/BAT0/energy_now = 4980 [mWh]
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]
sep 29 22:37:08 angela systemd-sleep[4743]: /sys/class/power_supply/BAT1/charge_now = 2812 [mAh]
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]
sep 29 23:04:25 angela systemd-sleep[4039]: /sys/class/power_supply/BAT1/charge_now = 2542 [mAh]
# cat /sys/power/mem_sleep
s2idle [deep]
deep is selected. You can change it on the fly with:
printf s2idle > /sys/power/mem_sleep
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]
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]
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]
| 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 |
| 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 |
sudo ectool fwchargelimit 80
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 [%]
(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.
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'
echo 'auto' > '/sys/bus/usb/devices/4-2/power/control'
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
USB_AUTOSUSPEND=1
USB_DENYLIST="0bda:8156"
usbcore.quirks=0bda:8156:k
/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
[ 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
cd /lib/firmware && rm adlp_guc_70.1.1.bin adlp_guc_69.0.3.bin
update-initramfs -u
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
[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
compiz (core) - Warn: No XI2 extension
compiz (core) - Error: Couldn't load plugin 'ccp'
compiz (core) - Error: Couldn't load plugin 'ccp'
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
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.
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
300 frames in 5.0 seconds = 60.000 FPS
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);
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.
~/.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="$CHROMIUM_FLAGS --disable-gpu-compositing"
/usr/local/bin/signal-desktop to use this instead:
exec /usr/bin/flatpak run --branch=stable --arch=x86_64 org.signal.Signal --disable-gpu-compositing "$@"
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.
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
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
#framework on https://libera.chat/
As a follow-up to yesterday's post detailing my favourite works of fiction from 2022, today I'll be listing my favourite fictional works that are typically filed under classics.
Books that just missed the cut here include: E. M. Forster's A Room with a View (1908) and his later A Passage to India (1913), both gently nudged out by Forster's superb Howard's End (see below). Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa's The Leopard (1958) also just missed out on a write-up here, but I can definitely recommend it to anyone interested in reading a modern Italian classic.
War and Peace (1867) Leo Tolstoy It's strange to think that there is almost no point in reviewing this novel: who hasn't heard of War and Peace? What more could possibly be said about it now? Still, when I was growing up, War and Peace was always the stereotypical example of the 'impossible book', and even start it was, at best, a pointless task, and an act of hubris at worst. And so there surely exists a parallel universe in which I never have and will never will read the book... Nevertheless, let us try to set the scene. Book nine of the novel opens as follows:
On the twelfth of June, 1812, the forces of Western Europe crossed the Russian frontier and war began; that is, an event took place opposed to human reason and to human nature. Millions of men perpetrated against one another such innumerable crimes, frauds, treacheries, thefts, forgeries, issues of false money, burglaries, incendiarisms and murders as in whole centuries are not recorded in the annals of all the law courts of the world, but which those who committed them did not at the time regard as being crimes. What produced this extraordinary occurrence? What were its causes? [ ] The more we try to explain such events in history reasonably, the more unreasonable and incomprehensible they become to us.Set against the backdrop of the Napoleonic Wars and Napoleon's invasion of Russia, War and Peace follows the lives and fates of three aristocratic families: The Rostovs, The Bolkonskys and the Bezukhov's. These characters find themselves situated athwart (or against) history, and all this time, Napoleon is marching ever closer to Moscow. Still, Napoleon himself is essentially just a kind of wallpaper for a diverse set of personal stories touching on love, jealousy, hatred, retribution, naivety, nationalism, stupidity and much much more. As Elif Batuman wrote earlier this year, "the whole premise of the book was that you couldn t explain war without recourse to domesticity and interpersonal relations." The result is that Tolstoy has woven an incredibly intricate web that connects the war, noble families and the everyday Russian people to a degree that is surprising for a book started in 1865. Tolstoy's characters are probably timeless (especially the picaresque adventures and constantly changing thoughts Pierre Bezukhov), and the reader who has any social experience will immediately recognise characters' thoughts and actions. Some of this is at a 'micro' interpersonal level: for instance, take this example from the elegant party that opens the novel:
Each visitor performed the ceremony of greeting this old aunt whom not one of them knew, not one of them wanted to know, and not one of them cared about. The aunt spoke to each of them in the same words, about their health and her own and the health of Her Majesty, who, thank God, was better today. And each visitor, though politeness prevented his showing impatience, left the old woman with a sense of relief at having performed a vexatious duty and did not return to her the whole evening.But then, some of the focus of the observations are at the 'macro' level of the entire continent. This section about cities that feel themselves in danger might suffice as an example:
At the approach of danger, there are always two voices that speak with equal power in the human soul: one very reasonably tells a man to consider the nature of the danger and the means of escaping it; the other, still more reasonably, says that it is too depressing and painful to think of the danger, since it is not in man s power to foresee everything and avert the general course of events, and it is therefore better to disregard what is painful till it comes and to think about what is pleasant. In solitude, a man generally listens to the first voice, but in society to the second.And finally, in his lengthy epilogues, Tolstoy offers us a dissertation on the behaviour of large organisations, much of it through engagingly witty analogies. These epilogues actually turn out to be an oblique and sarcastic commentary on the idiocy of governments and the madness of war in general. Indeed, the thorough dismantling of the 'great man' theory of history is a common theme throughout the book:
During the whole of that period [of 1812], Napoleon, who seems to us to have been the leader of all these movements as the figurehead of a ship may seem to a savage to guide the vessel acted like a child who, holding a couple of strings inside a carriage, thinks he is driving it. [ ] Why do [we] all speak of a military genius ? Is a man a genius who can order bread to be brought up at the right time and say who is to go to the right and who to the left? It is only because military men are invested with pomp and power and crowds of sychophants flatter power, attributing to it qualities of genius it does not possess.Unlike some other readers, I especially enjoyed these diversions into the accounting and workings of history, as well as our narrow-minded way of trying to 'explain' things in a singular way:
When an apple has ripened and falls, why does it fall? Because of its attraction to the earth, because its stalk withers, because it is dried by the sun, because it grows heavier, because the wind shakes it, or because the boy standing below wants to eat it? Nothing is the cause. All this is only the coincidence of conditions in which all vital organic and elemental events occur. And the botanist who finds that the apple falls because the cellular tissue decays and so forth is equally right with the child who stands under the tree and says the apple fell because he wanted to eat it and prayed for it.Given all of these serious asides, I was also not expecting this book to be quite so funny. At the risk of boring the reader with citations, take this sarcastic remark about the ineptness of medicine men:
After his liberation, [Pierre] fell ill and was laid up for three months. He had what the doctors termed 'bilious fever.' But despite the fact that the doctors treated him, bled him and gave him medicines to drink he recovered.There is actually a multitude of remarks that are not entirely complimentary towards Russian medical practice, but they are usually deployed with an eye to the human element involved rather than simply to the detriment of a doctor's reputation "How would the count have borne his dearly loved daughter s illness had he not known that it was costing him a thousand rubles?" Other elements of note include some stunning set literary pieces, such as when Prince Andrei encounters a gnarly oak tree under two different circumstances in his life, and when Nat sha's 'Russian' soul is awakened by the strains of a folk song on the balalaika. Still, despite all of these micro- and macro-level happenings, for a long time I felt that something else was going on in War and Peace. It was difficult to put into words precisely what it was until I came across this passage by E. M. Forster:
After one has read War and Peace for a bit, great chords begin to sound, and we cannot say exactly what struck them. They do not arise from the story [and] they do not come from the episodes nor yet from the characters. They come from the immense area of Russia, over which episodes and characters have been scattered, from the sum-total of bridges and frozen rivers, forests, roads, gardens and fields, which accumulate grandeur and sonority after we have passed them. Many novelists have the feeling for place, [but] very few have the sense of space, and the possession of it ranks high in Tolstoy s divine equipment. Space is the lord of War and Peace, not time.'Space' indeed. Yes, potential readers should note the novel's great length, but the 365 chapters are actually remarkably short, so the sensation of reading it is not in the least overwhelming. And more importantly, once you become familiar with its large cast of characters, it is really not a difficult book to follow, especially when compared to the other Russian classics. My only regret is that it has taken me so long to read this magnificent novel and that I might find it hard to find time to re-read it within the next few years.
Coming Up for Air (1939) George Orwell It wouldn't be a roundup of mine without at least one entry from George Orwell, and, this year, that place is occupied by a book I hadn't haven't read in almost two decades Still, the George Bowling of Coming Up for Air is a middle-aged insurance salesman who lives in a distinctly average English suburban row house with his nuclear family. One day, after winning some money on a bet, he goes back to the village where he grew up in order to fish in a pool he remembers from thirty years before. Less important than the plot, however, is both the well-observed remarks and scathing criticisms that Bowling has of the town he has returned to, combined with an ominous sense of foreboding before the Second World War breaks out. At several times throughout the book, George's placid thoughts about his beloved carp pool are replaced by racing, anxious thoughts that overwhelm his inner peace:
War is coming. In 1941, they say. And there'll be plenty of broken crockery, and little houses ripped open like packing-cases, and the guts of the chartered accountant's clerk plastered over the piano that he's buying on the never-never. But what does that kind of thing matter, anyway? I'll tell you what my stay in Lower Binfield had taught me, and it was this. IT'S ALL GOING TO HAPPEN. All the things you've got at the back of your mind, the things you're terrified of, the things that you tell yourself are just a nightmare or only happen in foreign countries. The bombs, the food-queues, the rubber truncheons, the barbed wire, the coloured shirts, the slogans, the enormous faces, the machine-guns squirting out of bedroom windows. It's all going to happen. I know it - at any rate, I knew it then. There's no escape. Fight against it if you like, or look the other way and pretend not to notice, or grab your spanner and rush out to do a bit of face-smashing along with the others. But there's no way out. It's just something that's got to happen.Already we can hear psychological madness that underpinned the Second World War. Indeed, there is no great story in Coming Up For Air, no wonderfully empathetic characters and no revelations or catharsis, so it is impressive that I was held by the descriptions, observations and nostalgic remembrances about life in modern Lower Binfield, its residents, and how it has changed over the years. It turns out, of course, that George's beloved pool has been filled in with rubbish, and the village has been perverted by modernity beyond recognition. And to cap it off, the principal event of George's holiday in Lower Binfield is an accidental bombing by the British Royal Air Force. Orwell is always good at descriptions of awful food, and this book is no exception:
The frankfurter had a rubber skin, of course, and my temporary teeth weren't much of a fit. I had to do a kind of sawing movement before I could get my teeth through the skin. And then suddenly pop! The thing burst in my mouth like a rotten pear. A sort of horrible soft stuff was oozing all over my tongue. But the taste! For a moment I just couldn't believe it. Then I rolled my tongue around it again and had another try. It was fish! A sausage, a thing calling itself a frankfurter, filled with fish! I got up and walked straight out without touching my coffee. God knows what that might have tasted of.Many other tell-tale elements of Orwell's fictional writing are in attendance in this book as well, albeit worked out somewhat less successfully than elsewhere in his oeuvre. For example, the idea of a physical ailment also serving as a metaphor is present in George's false teeth, embodying his constant preoccupation with his ageing. (Readers may recall Winston Smith's varicose ulcer representing his repressed humanity in Nineteen Eighty-Four). And, of course, we have a prematurely middle-aged protagonist who almost but not quite resembles Orwell himself. Given this and a few other niggles (such as almost all the women being of the typical Orwell 'nagging wife' type), it is not exactly Orwell's magnum opus. But it remains a fascinating historical snapshot of the feeling felt by a vast number of people just prior to the Second World War breaking out, as well as a captivating insight into how the process of nostalgia functions and operates.
Howards End (1910) E. M. Forster Howards End begins with the following sentence:
One may as well begin with Helen s letters to her sister.In fact, "one may as well begin with" my own assumptions about this book instead. I was actually primed to consider Howards End a much more 'Victorian' book: I had just finished Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway and had found her 1925 book at once rather 'modern' but also very much constrained by its time. I must have then unconsciously surmised that a book written 15 years before would be even more inscrutable, and, with its Victorian social mores added on as well, Howards End would probably not undress itself so readily in front of the reader. No doubt there were also the usual expectations about 'the classics' as well. So imagine my surprise when I realised just how inordinately affable and witty Howards End turned out to be. It doesn't have that Wildean shine of humour, of course, but it's a couple of fields over in the English countryside, perhaps abutting the more mordant social satires of the earlier George Orwell novels (see Coming Up for Air above). But now let us return to the story itself. Howards End explores class warfare, conflict and the English character through a tale of three quite different families at the beginning of the twentieth century: the rich Wilcoxes; the gentle & idealistic Schlegels; and the lower-middle class Basts. As the Bloomsbury Group Schlegel sisters desperately try to help the Basts and educate the rich but close-minded Wilcoxes, the three families are drawn ever closer and closer together. Although the whole story does, I suppose, revolve around the house in the title (which is based on the Forster's own childhood home), Howards End is perhaps best described as a comedy of manners or a novel that shows up the hypocrisy of people and society. In fact, it is surprising how little of the story actually takes place in the eponymous house, with the overwhelming majority of the first half of the book taking place in London. But it is perhaps more illuminating to remark that the Howards End of the book is a house that the Wilcoxes who own it at the start of the novel do not really need or want. What I particularly liked about Howards End is how the main character's ideals alter as they age, and subsequently how they find their lives changing in different ways. Some of them find themselves better off at the end, others worse. And whilst it is also surprisingly funny, it still manages to trade in heavier social topics as well. This is apparent in the fact that, although the characters themselves are primarily in charge of their own destinies, their choices are still constrained by the changing world and shifting sense of morality around them. This shouldn't be too surprising: after all, Forster's novel was published just four years before the Great War, a distinctly uncertain time. Not for nothing did Virginia Woolf herself later observe that "on or about December 1910, human character changed" and that "all human relations have shifted: those between masters and servants, husbands and wives, parents and children." This process can undoubtedly be seen rehearsed throughout Forster's Howards End, and it's a credit to the author to be able to capture it so early on, if not even before it was widespread throughout Western Europe. I was also particularly taken by Forster's fertile use of simile. An extremely apposite example can be found in the description Tibby Schlegel gives of his fellow Cambridge undergraduates. Here, Timmy doesn't want to besmirch his lofty idealisation of them with any banal specificities, and wishes that the idea of them remain as ideal Platonic forms instead. Or, as Forster puts it, to Timmy it is if they are "pictures that must not walk out of their frames." Wilde, at his most weakest, is 'just' style, but Forster often deploys his flair for a deeper effect. Indeed, when you get to the end of this section mentioning picture frames, you realise Forster has actually just smuggled into the story a failed attempt on Tibby's part to engineer an anonymous homosexual encounter with another undergraduate. It is a credit to Forster's sleight-of-hand that you don't quite notice what has just happened underneath you and that the books' reticence to honestly describe what has happened is thus structually analogus Tibby's reluctance to admit his desires to himself. Another layer to the character of Tibby (and the novel as a whole) is thereby introduced without the imposition of clumsy literary scaffolding. In a similar vein, I felt very clever noticing the arch reference to Debussy's Pr lude l'apr s-midi d'un faune until I realised I just fell into the trap Forster set for the reader in that I had become even more like Tibby in his pseudo-scholarly views on classical music. Finally, I enjoyed that each chapter commences with an ironic and self-conscious bon mot about society which is only slightly overblown for effect. Particularly amusing are the ironic asides on "women" that run through the book, ventriloquising the narrow-minded views of people like the Wilcoxes. The omniscient and amiable narrator of the book also recalls those ironically distant voiceovers from various French New Wave films at times, yet Forster's narrator seems to have bigger concerns in his mordant asides: Forster seems to encourage some sympathy for all of the characters even the more contemptible ones at their worst moments. Highly recommended, as are Forster's A Room with a View (1908) and his slightly later A Passage to India (1913).
The Good Soldier (1915) Ford Madox Ford The Good Soldier starts off fairly simply as the narrator's account of his and his wife's relationship with some old friends, including the eponymous 'Good Soldier' of the book's title. It's an experience to read the beginning of this novel, as, like any account of endless praise of someone you've never met or care about, the pages of approving remarks about them appear to be intended to wash over you. Yet as the chapters of The Good Soldier go by, the account of the other characters in the book gets darker and darker. Although the author himself is uncritical of others' actions, your own critical faculties are slowgrly brought into play, and you gradully begin to question the narrator's retelling of events. Our narrator is an unreliable narrator in the strict sense of the term, but with the caveat that he is at least is telling us everything we need to know to come to our own conclusions. As the book unfolds further, the narrator's compromised credibility seems to infuse every element of the novel even the 'Good' of the book's title starts to seem like a minor dishonesty, perhaps serving as the inspiration for the irony embedded in the title of The 'Great' Gatsby. Much more effectively, however, the narrator's fixations, distractions and manner of speaking feel very much part of his dissimulation. It sometimes feels like he is unconsciously skirting over the crucial elements in his tale, exactly like one does in real life when recounting a story containing incriminating ingredients. Indeed, just how much the narrator is conscious of his own concealment is just one part of what makes this such an interesting book: Ford Madox Ford has gifted us with enough ambiguity that it is also possible that even the narrator cannot find it within himself to understand the events of the story he is narrating. It was initially hard to believe that such a carefully crafted analysis of a small group of characters could have been written so long ago, and despite being fairly easy to read, The Good Soldier is an almost infinitely subtle book even the jokes are of the subtle kind and will likely get a re-read within the next few years.
Anna Karenina (1878) Leo Tolstoy There are many similar themes running through War and Peace (reviewed above) and Anna Karenina. Unrequited love; a young man struggling to find a purpose in life; a loving family; an overwhelming love of nature and countless fascinating observations about the minuti of Russian society. Indeed, rather than primarily being about the eponymous Anna, Anna Karenina provides a vast panorama of contemporary life in Russia and of humanity in general. Nevertheless, our Anna is a sophisticated woman who abandons her empty existence as the wife of government official Alexei Karenin, a colourless man who has little personality of his own, and she turns to a certain Count Vronsky in order to fulfil her passionate nature. Needless to say, this results in tragic consequences as their (admittedly somewhat qualified) desire to live together crashes against the rocks of reality and Russian society. Parallel to Anna's narrative, though, Konstantin Levin serves as the novel's alter-protagonist. In contrast to Anna, Levin is a socially awkward individual who straddles many schools of thought within Russia at the time: he is neither a free-thinker (nor heavy-drinker) like his brother Nikolai, and neither is he a bookish intellectual like his half-brother Serge. In short, Levin is his own man, and it is generally agreed by commentators that he is Tolstoy's surrogate within the novel. Levin tends to come to his own version of an idea, and he would rather find his own way than adopt any prefabricated view, even if confusion and muddle is the eventual result. In a roughly isomorphic fashion then, he resembles Anna in this particular sense, whose story is a counterpart to Levin's in their respective searches for happiness and self-actualisation. Whilst many of the passionate and exciting passages are told on Anna's side of the story (I'm thinking horse race in particular, as thrilling as anything in cinema ), many of the broader political thoughts about the nature of the working classes are expressed on Levin's side instead. These are stirring and engaging in their own way, though, such as when he joins his peasants to mow the field and seems to enter the nineteenth-century version of 'flow':
The longer Levin mowed, the more often he felt those moments of oblivion during which it was no longer his arms that swung the scythe, but the scythe itself that lent motion to his whole body, full of life and conscious of itself, and, as if by magic, without a thought of it, the work got rightly and neatly done on its own. These were the most blissful moments.Overall, Tolstoy poses no didactic moral message towards any of the characters in Anna Karenina, and merely invites us to watch rather than judge. (Still, there is a hilarious section that is scathing of contemporary classical music, presaging many of the ideas found in Tolstoy's 1897 What is Art?). In addition, just like the earlier War and Peace, the novel is run through with a number of uncannily accurate observations about daily life:
Anna smiled, as one smiles at the weaknesses of people one loves, and, putting her arm under his, accompanied him to the door of the study.... as well as the usual sprinkling of Tolstoy's sardonic humour ("No one is pleased with his fortune, but everyone is pleased with his wit."). Fyodor Dostoyevsky, the other titan of Russian literature, once described Anna Karenina as a "flawless work of art," and if you re only going to read one Tolstoy novel in your life, it should probably be this one.
This post marks the beginning my yearly roundups of the favourite books and movies that I read and watched in 2022 that I plan to publish over the next few days.
Just as I did for 2020 and 2021, I won't reveal precisely how many books I read in the last year. I didn't get through as many books as I did in 2021, though, but that's partly due to reading a significant number of long nineteenth-century novels in particular, a fair number of those books that American writer Henry James once referred to as "large, loose, baggy monsters."
However, in today's post I'll be looking at my favourite books that are typically filed under fiction, with 'classic' fiction following tomorrow.
Works that just missed the cut here include John O'Brien's Leaving Las Vegas, Colson Whitehead's Sag Harbor and possibly The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco, or Elif Batuman's The Idiot. I also feel obliged to mention (or is that show off?) that I also read the 1,079-page Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace, but I can't say it was a favourite, let alone recommend others unless they are in the market for a good-quality under-monitor stand.
Mona (2021) Pola Oloixarac Mona is the story of a young woman who has just been nominated for the 'most important literary award in Europe'. Mona sees the nomination as a chance to escape her substance abuse on a Californian campus and so speedily decamps to the small village in the depths of Sweden where the nominees must convene for a week before the overall winner is announced. Mona didn't disappear merely to avoid pharmacological misadventures, though, but also to avoid the growing realisation that she is being treated as something of an anthropological curiosity at her university: a female writer of colour treasured for her flourish of exotic diversity that reflects well upon her department. But Mona is now stuck in the company of her literary competitors who all have now gathered from around the world in order to do what writers do: harbour private resentments, exchange empty flattery, embody the selfsame racialised stereotypes that Mona left the United States to avoid, stab rivals in the back, drink too much, and, of course, go to bed together. But as I read Mona, I slowly started to realise that something else is going on. Why does Mona keep finding traces of violence on her body, the origins of which she cannot or refuses to remember? There is something eerily defensive about her behaviour and sardonic demeanour in general as well. A genre-bending and mind-expanding novel unfolded itself, and, without getting into spoiler territory, Mona concludes with such a surprising ending that, according to Adam Thirlwell:
Perhaps we need to rethink what is meant by a gimmick. If a gimmick is anything that we want to reject as extra or excessive or ill-fitting, then it may be important to ask what inhibitions or arbitrary conventions have made it seem like excess, and to revel in the exorbitant fictional constructions it produces. [...]Mona is a savage satire of the literary world, but it's also a very disturbing exploration of trauma and violence. The success of the book comes in equal measure from the author's commitment to both ideas, but also from the way the psychological damage component creeps up on you. And, as implied above, the last ten pages are quite literally out of this world.
My Brilliant Friend (2011)
The Story of a New Name (2012)
Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay (2013)
The Story of the Lost Child (2014)
Elena Ferrante
Elena Ferrante's Neopolitan Quartet follows two girls, both brilliant in their own way. Our protagonist-narrator is Elena, a studious girl from the lower rungs of the middle class of Naples who is inspired to be more by her childhood friend, Lila. Lila is, in turn, far more restricted by her poverty and class, but can transcend it at times through her fiery nature, which also brands her as somewhat unique within their inward-looking community. The four books follow the two girls from the perspective of Elena as they grow up together in post-war Italy, where they drift in-and-out of each other's lives due to the vicissitudes of change and the consequences of choice. All the time this is unfolding, however, the narrative is very always slightly charged by the background knowledge revealed on the very first page that Lila will, many years later, disappear from Elena's life.
Whilst the quartet has the formal properties of a bildungsroman, its subject and conception are almost entirely different. In particular, the books are driven far more by character and incident than spectacular adventures in picturesque Italy. In fact, quite the opposite takes place: these are four books where ordinary-seeming occurrences take on an unexpected radiance against a background of poverty, ignorance, violence and other threats, often bringing to mind the films of the Italian neorealism movement. Brilliantly rendered from beginning to end, Ferrante has a seemingly studious eye for interpreting interactions and the psychology of adolescence and friendship. Some utterances indeed, perhaps even some glances are dissected at length over multiple pages, something that Vittorio De Sica's classic Bicycle Thieves (1948) could never do.
Potential readers should not take any notice of the saccharine cover illustrations on most editions of the books. The quartet could even win an award for the most misleading artwork, potentially rivalling even Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita. I wouldn't be at all surprised if it is revealed that the drippy illustrations and syrupy blurbs ("a rich, intense and generous-hearted story ") turn out to be part of a larger metatextual game that Ferrante is playing with her readers. This idiosyncratic view of mine is partially supported by the fact that each of the four books has been given a misleading title, the true ambiguity of which often only becomes clear as each of the four books comes into sharper focus.
Readers of the quartet often fall into debating which is the best of the four. I've heard from more than one reader that one has 'too much Italian politics' and another doesn't have enough 'classic' Lina moments. The first book then possesses the twin advantages of both establishing the environs and finishing with a breathtaking ending that is both satisfying and a cliffhanger as well but does this make it 'the best'? I prefer to liken the quartet more like the different seasons of The Wire (2002-2008) where, personal favourites and preferences aside, although each season is undoubtedly unique, it would take a certain kind of narrow-minded view of art to make the claim that, say, series one of The Wire is 'the best' or that the season that focuses on the Baltimore docks 'is boring'. Not to sound like a neo-Wagnerian, but each of them adds to final result in its own. That is to say, both The Wire and the Neopolitan Quartet achieve the rare feat of making the magisterial simultaneously intimate.
Out There: Stories (2022) Kate Folk Out There is a riveting collection of disturbing short stories by first-time author Kate Fork. The title story first appeared in the New Yorker in early 2020 imagines a near-future setting where a group of uncannily handsome artificial men called 'blots' have arrived on the San Francisco dating scene with the secret mission of sleeping with women, before stealing their personal data from their laptops and phones and then (quite literally) evaporating into thin air. Folk's satirical style is not at all didactic, so it rarely feels like she is making her points in a pedantic manner. But it's clear that the narrator of Out There is recounting her frustration with online dating. in a way that will resonate with anyone who s spent time with dating apps or indeed the contemporary hyper-centralised platform-based internet in general. Part social satire, part ghost story and part comic tales, the blurring of the lines between these factors is only one of the things that makes these stories so compelling. But whilst Folk constructs crazy scenarios and intentionally strange worlds, she also manages to also populate them with characters that feel real and genuinely sympathetic. Indeed, I challenge you not to feel some empathy for the 'blot' in the companion story Big Sur which concludes the collection, and it complicates any primary-coloured view of the dating world of consisting entirely of predatory men. And all of this is leavened with a few stories that are just plain surreal. I don't know what the deal is with Dating a Somnambulist (available online on Hobart Pulp), but I know that I like it.
Solaris (1961) Stanislaw Lem When Kelvin arrives at the planet Solaris to study the strange ocean that covers its surface, instead of finding an entirely physical scientific phenomenon, he soon discovers a previously unconscious memory embodied in the physical manifestation of a long-dead lover. The other scientists on the space station slowly reveal that they are also plagued with their own repressed corporeal memories. Many theories are put forward as to why all this is occuring, including the idea that Solaris is a massive brain that creates these incarnate memories. Yet if that is the case, the planet's purpose in doing so is entirely unknown, forcing the scientists to shift focus and wonder whether they can truly understand the universe without first understanding what lies within their own minds and in their desires. This would be an interesting outline for any good science fiction book, but one of the great strengths of Solaris is not only that it withholds from the reader why the planet is doing anything it does, but the book is so forcefully didactic in its dislike of the hubris, destructiveness and colonial thinking that can accompany scientific exploration. In one of its most vitriolic passages, Lem's own anger might be reaching out to the reader:
We are humanitarian and chivalrous; we don t want to enslave other races, we simply want to bequeath them our values and take over their heritage in exchange. We think of ourselves as the Knights of the Holy Contact. This is another lie. We are only seeking Man. We have no need of other worlds. We need mirrors. We don t know what to do with other worlds. A single world, our own, suffices us; but we can t accept it for what it is. We are searching for an ideal image of our own world: we go in quest of a planet, of a civilisation superior to our own, but developed on the basis of a prototype of our primaeval past. At the same time, there is something inside us that we don t like to face up to, from which we try to protect ourselves, but which nevertheless remains since we don t leave Earth in a state of primal innocence. We arrive here as we are in reality, and when the page is turned, and that reality is revealed to us that part of our reality that we would prefer to pass over in silence then we don t like it anymore.An overwhelming preoccupation with this idea infuses Solaris, and it turns out to be a common theme in a lot of Lem's work of this period, such as in his 1959 'anti-police procedural' The Investigation. Perhaps it not a dislike of exploration in general or the modern scientific method in particular, but rather a savage critique of the arrogance and self-assuredness that accompanies most forms of scientific positivism, or at least pursuits that cloak themselves under the guise of being a laudatory 'scientific' pursuit:
Man has gone out to explore other worlds and other civilizations without having explored his own labyrinth of dark passages and secret chambers and without finding what lies behind doorways that he himself has sealed.I doubt I need to cite specific instances of contemporary scientific pursuits that might meet Lem's punishing eye today, and the fact that his critique works both in 2022 and 1961 perhaps tells us more about the human condition than we'd care to know. Another striking thing about Solaris isn't just the specific Star Trek and Stargate SG-1 episodes that I retrospectively realised were purloined from the book, but that almost the entire register of Star Trek: The Next Generation in particular seems to be rehearsed here. That is to say, TNG presents itself as hard and fact-based 'sci-fi' on the surface, but, at its core, there are often human, existential and sometimes quite enormously emotionally devastating human themes being discussed such as memory, loss and grief. To take one example from many, the painful memories that the planet Solaris physically materialises in effect asks us to seriously consider what it actually is taking place when we 'love' another person: is it merely another 'mirror' of ourselves? (And, if that is the case, is that... bad?) It would be ahistorical to claim that all popular science fiction today can be found rehearsed in Solaris, but perhaps it isn't too much of a stretch:
[Solaris] renders unnecessary any more alien stories. Nothing further can be said on this topic ...] Possibly, it can be said that when one feels the urge for such a thing, one should simply reread Solaris and learn its lessons again. Kim Stanley Robinson [...]I could go on praising this book for quite some time; perhaps by discussing the extreme framing devices used within the book at one point, the book diverges into a lengthy bibliography of fictional books-within-the-book, each encapsulating a different theory about what the mechanics and/or function of Solaris is, thereby demonstrating that 'Solaris studies' as it is called within the world of the book has been going on for years with no tangible results, which actually leads to extreme embarrassment and then a deliberate and willful blindness to the 'Solaris problem' on the part of the book's scientific community. But I'll leave it all here before this review gets too long... Highly recommended, and a likely reread in 2023.
Brokeback Mountain (1997) Annie Proulx Brokeback Mountain began as a short story by American author Annie Proulx which appeared in the New Yorker in 1997, although it is now more famous for the 2005 film adaptation directed by Taiwanese filmmaker Ang Lee. Both versions follow two young men who are hired for the summer to look after sheep at a range under the 'Brokeback' mountain in Wyoming. Unexpectedly, however, they form an intense emotional and sexual attachment, yet life intervenes and demands they part ways at the end of the summer. Over the next twenty years, though, as their individual lives play out with marriages, children and jobs, they continue reuniting for brief albeit secret liaisons on camping trips in remote settings. There's no feigned shyness or self-importance in Brokeback Mountain, just a close, compassionate and brutally honest observation of a doomed relationship and a bone-deep feeling for the hardscrabble life in the post-War West. To my mind, very few books have captured so acutely the desolation of a frustrated and repressed passion, as well as the particular flavour of undirected anger that can accompany this kind of yearning. That the original novella does all this in such a beautiful way (and without the crutch of the Wyoming landscape to look at ) is a tribute to Proulx's skills as a writer. Indeed, even without the devasting emotional undertones, Proulx's descriptions of the mountains and scree of the West is likely worth the read alone.
Luster (2020) Raven Leilani Edie is a young Black woman living in New York whose life seems to be spiralling out of control. She isn't good at making friends, her career is going nowhere, and she has no close family to speak of as well. She is, thus, your typical NYC millennial today, albeit seen through a lens of Blackness that complicates any reductive view of her privilege or minority status. A representative paragraph might communicate the simmering tone:
Before I start work, I browse through some photos of friends who are doing better than me, then an article on a black teenager who was killed on 115th for holding a weapon later identified as a showerhead, then an article on a black woman who was killed on the Grand Concourse for holding a weapon later identified as a cell phone, then I drown myself in the comments section and do some online shopping, by which I mean I put four dresses in my cart as a strictly theoretical exercise and then let the page expire.She starts a sort-of affair with an older white man who has an affluent lifestyle in nearby New Jersey. Eric or so he claims has agreed upon an 'open relationship' with his wife, but Edie is far too inappropriate and disinhibited to respect any boundaries that Eric sets for her, and so Edie soon becomes deeply entangled in Eric's family life. It soon turns out that Eric and his wife have a twelve-year-old adopted daughter, Akila, who is also wait for it Black. Akila has been with Eric's family for two years now and they aren t exactly coping well together. They don t even know how to help her to manage her own hair, let alone deal with structural racism. Yet despite how dark the book's general demeanour is, there are faint glimmers of redemption here and there. Realistic almost to the end, Edie might finally realise what s important in her life, but it would be a stretch to say that she achieves them by the final page. Although the book is full of acerbic remarks on almost any topic (Dogs: "We made them needy and physically unfit. They used to be wolves, now they are pugs with asthma."), it is the comments on contemporary race relations that are most critically insightful. Indeed, unsentimental, incisive and funny, Luster had much of what I like in Colson Whitehead's books at times, but I can't remember a book so frantically fast-paced as this since the Booker-prize winning The Sellout by Paul Beatty or Sam Tallent's Running the Light.
jas@kaka ~$ sudo -i
...
root@kaka ~# guix pull
...
root@kaka ~# guix system reconfigure /etc/config.scm
guix system: fel: aborting reconfiguration because commit 8e2f32cee982d42a79e53fc1e9aa7b8ff0514714 of channel 'guix' is not a descendant of 989a3916dc8967bcb7275f10452f89bc6c3389cc
tips: Use --allow-downgrades' to force this downgrade.
root@kaka ~# sudo -i before writing the commands above. If I stick to the suggested guix pull (as user) followed by sudo guix system reconfigure /etc/config.scm everything works. I ll leave this in case someone else runs into this problem.
I m using the Evolution mail/calendar/contacts application, and it was not installed via GNOME so I had to manually install it using guix package -i evolution . Following the guided setup worked remarkable well (it auto-detects all my email settings after giving it my email address), although at the end I get a surprising error message:
Puzzling error message from Evolutionguix package -i evolution-data-server . It works directly, no need to even restart Evolution or go through the configuration dialog again. After this, I m happily using email against my Dovecot server and contacts/calendars against my Nextcloud server via GNOME s builtin Nextcloud connector which was straight-forward to setup.
i3
configuration to Sway, and adapt my systemd startup sequence to the
new environment. Screen sharing only works with Pipewire, so I also
did that migration, which basically requires an upgrade to Debian
bookworm to get a nice enough Pipewire release.
I'm testing Wayland on my laptop, but I'm not using it as a daily
driver because I first need to upgrade to Debian bookworm on my main
workstation.
Most irritants have been solved one way or the other. My main problem
with Wayland right now is that I spent a frigging week doing the
conversion: it's exciting and new, but it basically sucked the life
out of all my other projects and it's distracting, and I want it to
stop.
The rest of this page documents why I made the switch, how it
happened, and what's left to do. Hopefully it will keep you from
spending as much time as I did in fixing this.
TL;DR: Wayland is mostly ready. Main blockers you might find are
that you need to do manual configurations, DisplayLink (multiple
monitors on a single cable) doesn't work in Sway, HDR and color
management are still in development.
I had to install the following packages:
apt install \
brightnessctl \
foot \
gammastep \
gdm3 \
grim slurp \
pipewire-pulse \
sway \
swayidle \
swaylock \
wdisplays \
wev \
wireplumber \
wlr-randr \
xdg-desktop-portal-wlr
$HOME, mostly dealing with my esoteric
systemd startup sequence, which you won't have to deal with if you are
not a fan.
It s amazing. I have never experienced gaming on Linux that looked this smooth in my life.... I'm not a gamer, but I do care about latency. The longer version is worth a read as well. The point here is not to bash one side or the other, or even do a thorough comparison. I start with the premise that Xorg is likely going away in the future and that I will need to adapt some day. In fact, the last major Xorg release (21.1, October 2021) is rumored to be the last ("just like the previous release...", that said, minor releases are still coming out, e.g. 21.1.4). Indeed, it seems even core Xorg people have moved on to developing Wayland, or at least Xwayland, which was spun off it its own source tree. X, or at least Xorg, in in maintenance mode and has been for years. Granted, the X Window System is getting close to forty years old at this point: it got us amazingly far for something that was designed around the time the first graphical interface. Since Mac and (especially?) Windows released theirs, they have rebuilt their graphical backends numerous times, but UNIX derivatives have stuck on Xorg this entire time, which is a testament to the design and reliability of X. (Or our incapacity at developing meaningful architectural change across the entire ecosystem, take your pick I guess.) What pushed me over the edge is that I had some pretty bad driver crashes with Xorg while screen sharing under Firefox, in Debian bookworm (around November 2022). The symptom would be that the UI would completely crash, reverting to a text-only console, while Firefox would keep running, audio and everything still working. People could still see my screen, but I couldn't, of course, let alone interact with it. All processes still running, including Xorg. (And no, sorry, I haven't reported that bug, maybe I should have, and it's actually possible it comes up again in Wayland, of course. But at first, screen sharing didn't work of course, so it's coming a much further way. After making screen sharing work, though, the bug didn't occur again, so I consider this a Xorg-specific problem until further notice.) There were also frustrating glitches in the UI, in general. I actually had to setup a compositor alongside i3 to make things bearable at all. Video playback in a window was laggy, sluggish, and out of sync. Wayland fixed all of this.
man -k sway to find what they need. I don't think we need that kind
of elitism in our communities, to put this bluntly.
But let's put that aside: Sway is still a no-brainer. It's the easiest
thing to migrate to, because it's mostly compatible with i3. I had
to immediately fix those resources to get a minimal session going:
| i3 | Sway | note |
|---|---|---|
set_from_resources |
set |
no support for X resources, naturally |
new_window pixel 1 |
default_border pixel 1 |
actually supported in i3 as well |
brightnessctl instead of
xbacklight to change the backlight levels.
See a copy of my full sway/config for details.
Other options include:
nm-applet work. Based on this
nm-applet.service, I found that you need to pass --indicator for
it to show up at all.
In theory, tray icon support was merged in 1.5, but in practice
there are still several limitations, like icons not
clickable. Also, on startup, nm-applet --indicator triggers this
error in the Sway logs:
nov 11 22:34:12 angela sway[298938]: 00:49:42.325 [INFO] [swaybar/tray/host.c:24] Registering Status Notifier Item ':1.47/org/ayatana/NotificationItem/nm_applet'
nov 11 22:34:12 angela sway[298938]: 00:49:42.327 [ERROR] [swaybar/tray/item.c:127] :1.47/org/ayatana/NotificationItem/nm_applet IconPixmap: No such property IconPixmap
nov 11 22:34:12 angela sway[298938]: 00:49:42.327 [ERROR] [swaybar/tray/item.c:127] :1.47/org/ayatana/NotificationItem/nm_applet AttentionIconPixmap: No such property AttentionIconPixmap
nov 11 22:34:12 angela sway[298938]: 00:49:42.327 [ERROR] [swaybar/tray/item.c:127] :1.47/org/ayatana/NotificationItem/nm_applet ItemIsMenu: No such property ItemIsMenu
nov 11 22:36:10 angela sway[313419]: info: fcft.c:838: /usr/share/fonts/truetype/dejavu/DejaVuSans.ttf: size=24.00pt/32px, dpi=96.00
bar.tray_output property in the
Sway config, try: tray_output *.
The non-working tray was the biggest irritant in my migration. I have
used nmtui to connect to new Wifi hotspots or change connection
settings, but that doesn't support actions like "turn off WiFi".
I eventually fixed this by switching from py3status to
waybar, which was another yak horde shaving session, but
ultimately, it worked.
echo MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1 >> ~/.config/environment.d/firefox.conf && apt install xdg-desktop-portal-wlr
MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1 firefox
if [ "$XDG_SESSION_TYPE" == "wayland" ]; then
export MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1
fi
XDG_SESSION_TYPE is not actually set when starting Sway from gdm3
which I find really confusing, and I'm not the only one. So
the above trick doesn't actually work, even if the environment
(XDG_SESSION_TYPE) is set correctly, because we don't have
conditionals in environment.d(5).
(Note that systemd.environment-generator(7) do support running
arbitrary commands to generate environment, but for some some do not
support user-specific configuration files... Even then it may be a
solution to have a conditional MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND environment, but
I'm not sure it would work because ordering between those two isn't
clear: maybe the XDG_SESSION_TYPE wouldn't be set just yet...)
At first, I made this ridiculous script to workaround those
issues. Really, it seems to me Firefox should just parse the
XDG_SESSION_TYPE variable here... but then I realized that Firefox
works fine in Xorg when the MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND is set.
So now I just set that variable in environment.d and It Just Works :
MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1
chromium -enable-features=UseOzonePlatform -ozone-platform=wayland
Use system title bar and
borders setting.
It can do some screensharing. Sharing a window and a tab seems to
work, but sharing a full screen doesn't: it's all black. Maybe not
ready for prime time.
And since Firefox can do what I need under Wayland now, I will not
need to fight with Chromium to work under Wayland:
apt purge chromium
--enable-features=WaylandWindowDecorations --ozone-platform-hint=auto
$PATH in /etc! and certain things are simply not
working in my setup. For example, this hook never gets ran on startup:
(add-hook 'after-init-hook 'server-start t)
redshift -m drm -PO 3000
gammastep with a simple gammastep.service file
associated with the sway-session.target.
nov 16 16:41:43 angela sway[843121]: 00:00:00.002 [ERROR] [wlr] [libseat] [common/terminal.c:162] Could not open target tty: Permission denied
foot-terminfo package
on the remote host, which is available in Debian stable.
This should eventually resolve itself, as Debian bookworm has a newer
version. Note that some corrections were also shipped in the
20211113 release, but that is also shipped in Debian bookworm.
That said, I am almost certain I will have to revert back to xterm
under Xwayland at some point in the future. Back when I was using
GNOME Terminal, it would mostly work for everything until I had to use
the serial console on a (HP ProCurve) network switch, which have a
fancy TUI that was basically unusable there. I fully expect such
problems with foot, or any other terminal than xterm, for that matter.
The foot wiki has good troubleshooting instructions as well.
Update: I did find one tiny thing to improve with foot, and it's the
default logging level which I found pretty verbose. After discussing
it with the maintainer on IRC, I submitted this patch to tweak
it, which I described like this on Mastodon:
today's reason why i will go to hell when i die (TRWIWGTHWID?): a 600-word, 63 lines commit log for a one line change: https://codeberg.org/dnkl/foot/pulls/1215It's Friday.
| Tool | In Debian | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| alfred | yes | general launcher/assistant tool |
| bemenu | yes, bookworm+ | inspired by dmenu |
| cerebro | no | Javascript ... uh... thing |
| dmenu-wl | no | fork of dmenu, straight port to Wayland |
| Fuzzel | ITP 982140 | dmenu/drun replacement, app icon overlay |
| gmenu | no | drun replacement, with app icons |
| kickoff | no | dmenu/run replacement, fuzzy search, "snappy", history, copy-paste, Rust |
| krunner | yes | KDE's runner |
| mauncher | no | dmenu/drun replacement, math |
| nwg-launchers | no | dmenu/drun replacement, JSON config, app icons, nwg-shell project |
| Onagre | no | rofi/alfred inspired, multiple plugins, Rust |
| menu | no | dmenu/drun rewrite |
| Rofi (lbonn's fork) | no | see above |
| sirula | no | .desktop based app launcher |
| Ulauncher | ITP 949358 | generic launcher like Onagre/rofi/alfred, might be overkill |
| tofi | yes, bookworm+ | dmenu/drun replacement, C |
| wmenu | no | fork of dmenu-wl, but mostly a rewrite |
| Wofi | yes | dmenu/drun replacement, not actively maintained |
| yofi | no | dmenu/drun replacement, Rust |
input-method-unstable-v2 protocol (sample
emoji picker, but is not packaged in Debian.
As it turns out, wtype just works as expected, and fixing this was
basically a two-line patch. Another alternative, not in Debian, is
wofi-pass.
The other problem is that I actually heavily modified rofi. I use
"modis" which are not actually implemented in wofi or tofi, so I'm
left with reinventing those wheels from scratch or using the rofi +
wayland fork... It's really too bad that fork isn't being
reintegrated...
For now, I'm actually still using rofi under Xwayland. The main
downside is that fonts are fuzzy, but it otherwise just works.
Note that wlogout could be a partial replacement (just for the
"power menu").
mpv seems to work fine under Wayland,
better than Xorg on my new laptop (as mentioned in the introduction),
and that before the version which improves Wayland support
significantly, by bringing native Pipewire support and DMA-BUF
support.
gmpc is more of a problem, mainly because it is abandoned. See
2022-08-22-gmpc-alternatives for the full discussion, one of
the alternatives there will likely support Wayland.
Finally, I might just switch to sublime-music instead... In any
case, not many changes here, thankfully.
swayidle with a configuration based on
the systemd integration wiki page but with additional tweaks from
this service, see the resulting swayidle.service file.
Interestingly, damjan also has a service for swaylock itself,
although it's not clear to me what its purpose is...
--audio, duh). It's also
packaged in Debian.
One has to wonder how this works while keeping the "between app
security" that Wayland promises, however... Would installing such a
program make my system less secure?
Many other options are available, see the awesome Wayland
screencasting list.
.Xresources - just say goodbye to that old resource system, it
was used, in my case, only for rofi, xterm, and ... Xboard!? swaymsg input 0:0:X11_keyboard xkb_layout de
input *
xkb_layout "ca,us"
xkb_options "grp:sclk_toggle"
nm-applet work. based on
this nm-applet.service, I found that you need to pass --indicator. In
theory, tray icon support was merged in 1.5, but in practice
there are still several limitations, like icons not
clickable. On startup, nm-applet --indicator triggers this
error in the Sway logs:
nov 11 22:34:12 angela sway[298938]: 00:49:42.325 [INFO] [swaybar/tray/host.c:24] Registering Status Notifier Item ':1.47/org/ayatana/NotificationItem/nm_applet'
nov 11 22:34:12 angela sway[298938]: 00:49:42.327 [ERROR] [swaybar/tray/item.c:127] :1.47/org/ayatana/NotificationItem/nm_applet IconPixmap: No such property IconPixmap
nov 11 22:34:12 angela sway[298938]: 00:49:42.327 [ERROR] [swaybar/tray/item.c:127] :1.47/org/ayatana/NotificationItem/nm_applet AttentionIconPixmap: No such property AttentionIconPixmap
nov 11 22:34:12 angela sway[298938]: 00:49:42.327 [ERROR] [swaybar/tray/item.c:127] :1.47/org/ayatana/NotificationItem/nm_applet ItemIsMenu: No such property ItemIsMenu
nov 11 22:36:10 angela sway[313419]: info: fcft.c:838: /usr/share/fonts/truetype/dejavu/DejaVuSans.ttf: size=24.00pt/32px, dpi=96.00
bar.tray_output property in the Sway config, try: tray_output *.
Note that there is currently (November 2022) a pull request to
hook up a "Tray D-Bus Menu" which, according to Reddit might
fix this, or at least be somewhat relevant.
This was the biggest irritant in my migration. I have used nmtui
to connect to new Wifi hotspots or change connection settings, but
that doesn't support actions like "turn off WiFi".
I eventually fixed this by switching from py3status to
waybar.i3 I was using this bespoke i3-focus
script, which doesn't work under Sway, swayr an option, not in
Debian. So I put together this other bespoke hack from
multiple sources, which works.| X11 | Wayland | In Debian |
|---|---|---|
arandr |
wdisplays | yes |
autorandr |
kanshi | yes |
xdotool |
wtype | yes |
xev |
wev | yes |
xlsclients |
swaymsg -t get_tree |
yes |
xrandr |
wlr-randr | yes |
xlsclients but is not
packaged in Debian.
See also:
.xsession like
this:
#!/bin/sh
. ~/.shenv
systemctl --user import-environment
exec systemctl --user start --wait xsession.target
xsession.target is not started by the Sway
session. It seems to just start a default.target, which is really
not what we want because we want to associate the services directly
with the graphical-session.target, so that they don't start when
logging in over (say) SSH.
damjan on #debian-systemd showed me his sway-setup which
features systemd integration. It involves starting a different session
in a completely new .desktop file. That work was submitted
upstream but refused on the grounds that "I'd rather not give a
preference to any particular init system." Another PR was
abandoned because "restarting sway does not makes sense: that
kills everything".
The work was therefore moved to the wiki.
So. Not a great situation. The upstream wiki systemd
integration suggests starting the systemd target from within
Sway, which has all sorts of problems:
$PATH and environment.
So I went down that rabbit hole and managed to correctly configure
Sway to be started from the systemd --user session.
I have partly followed the wiki but also picked ideas from damjan's
sway-setup and xdbob's sway-services. Another option is
uwsm (not in Debian).
This is the config I have in .config/systemd/user/:
I have also configured those services, but that's somewhat optional:
You will also need at least part of my sway/config, which
sends the systemd notification (because, no, Sway doesn't support any
sort of readiness notification, that would be too easy). And you might
like to see my swayidle-config while you're there.
Finally, you need to hook this up somehow to the login manager. This
is typically done with a desktop file, so drop
sway-session.desktop in /usr/share/wayland-sessions and
sway-user-service somewhere in your $PATH (typically
/usr/bin/sway-user-service).
The session then looks something like this:
$ systemd-cgls head -101
Control group /:
-.slice
user.slice (#472)
user.invocation_id: bc405c6341de4e93a545bde6d7abbeec
trusted.invocation_id: bc405c6341de4e93a545bde6d7abbeec
user-1000.slice (#10072)
user.invocation_id: 08f40f5c4bcd4fd6adfd27bec24e4827
trusted.invocation_id: 08f40f5c4bcd4fd6adfd27bec24e4827
user@1000.service (#10156)
user.delegate: 1
trusted.delegate: 1
user.invocation_id: 76bed72a1ffb41dca9bfda7bb174ef6b
trusted.invocation_id: 76bed72a1ffb41dca9bfda7bb174ef6b
session.slice (#10282)
xdg-document-portal.service (#12248)
9533 /usr/libexec/xdg-document-portal
9542 fusermount3 -o rw,nosuid,nodev,fsname=portal,auto_unmount,subt
xdg-desktop-portal.service (#12211)
9529 /usr/libexec/xdg-desktop-portal
pipewire-pulse.service (#10778)
6002 /usr/bin/pipewire-pulse
wireplumber.service (#10519)
5944 /usr/bin/wireplumber
gvfs-daemon.service (#10667)
5960 /usr/libexec/gvfsd
gvfs-udisks2-volume-monitor.service (#10852)
6021 /usr/libexec/gvfs-udisks2-volume-monitor
at-spi-dbus-bus.service (#11481)
6210 /usr/libexec/at-spi-bus-launcher
6216 /usr/bin/dbus-daemon --config-file=/usr/share/defaults/at-spi2
6450 /usr/libexec/at-spi2-registryd --use-gnome-session
pipewire.service (#10403)
5940 /usr/bin/pipewire
dbus.service (#10593)
5946 /usr/bin/dbus-daemon --session --address=systemd: --nofork --n
background.slice (#10324)
tracker-miner-fs-3.service (#10741)
6001 /usr/libexec/tracker-miner-fs-3
app.slice (#10240)
xdg-permission-store.service (#12285)
9536 /usr/libexec/xdg-permission-store
gammastep.service (#11370)
6197 gammastep
dunst.service (#11958)
7460 /usr/bin/dunst
wterminal.service (#13980)
69100 foot --title pop-up
69101 /bin/bash
77660 sudo systemd-cgls
77661 head -101
77662 wl-copy
77663 sudo systemd-cgls
77664 systemd-cgls
syncthing.service (#11995)
7529 /usr/bin/syncthing -no-browser -no-restart -logflags=0 --verbo
7537 /usr/bin/syncthing -no-browser -no-restart -logflags=0 --verbo
dconf.service (#10704)
5967 /usr/libexec/dconf-service
gnome-keyring-daemon.service (#10630)
5951 /usr/bin/gnome-keyring-daemon --foreground --components=pkcs11
gcr-ssh-agent.service (#10963)
6035 /usr/libexec/gcr-ssh-agent /run/user/1000/gcr
swayidle.service (#11444)
6199 /usr/bin/swayidle -w
nm-applet.service (#11407)
6198 /usr/bin/nm-applet --indicator
wcolortaillog.service (#11518)
6226 foot colortaillog
6228 /bin/sh /home/anarcat/bin/colortaillog
6230 sudo journalctl -f
6233 ccze -m ansi
6235 sudo journalctl -f
6236 journalctl -f
afuse.service (#10889)
6051 /usr/bin/afuse -o mount_template=sshfs -o transform_symlinks -
gpg-agent.service (#13547)
51662 /usr/bin/gpg-agent --supervised
51719 scdaemon --multi-server
emacs.service (#10926)
6034 /usr/bin/emacs --fg-daemon
33203 /usr/bin/aspell -a -m -d en --encoding=utf-8
xdg-desktop-portal-gtk.service (#12322)
9546 /usr/libexec/xdg-desktop-portal-gtk
xdg-desktop-portal-wlr.service (#12359)
9555 /usr/libexec/xdg-desktop-portal-wlr
sway.service (#11037)
6037 /usr/bin/sway
6181 swaybar -b bar-0
6209 py3status
6309 /usr/bin/i3status -c /tmp/py3status_oy4ntfnq
6969 Xwayland :0 -rootless -terminate -core -listen 29 -listen 30 -
init.scope (#10198)
5909 /lib/systemd/systemd --user
5911 (sd-pam)
session-7.scope (#10440)
5895 gdm-session-worker [pam/gdm-password]
6028 /usr/libexec/gdm-wayland-session --register-session sway-user-serv
[...]
$PATH, which
broke a lot of my workflow. It's hard to tell exactly how Wayland
gets started or where to inject environment. This discussion
suggests a few alternatives and this Debian bug report discusses
this issue as well.
I eventually picked environment.d(5) since I already manage my user
session with systemd, and it fixes a bunch of other problems. I used
to have a .shenv that I had to manually source everywhere. The only
problem with that approach is that it doesn't support conditionals,
but that's something that's rarely needed.
apt install pipewire pipewire-audio-client-libraries pipewire-pulse wireplumber
systemctl --user daemon-reload
systemctl --user --now disable pulseaudio.service pulseaudio.socket
systemctl --user --now enable pipewire pipewire-pulse
systemctl --user mask pulseaudio
~/.config/pipewire/pipewire-pulse.conf.d/autoconnect.conf:
context.exec = [
path = "pactl" args = "load-module module-always-sink"
path = "pactl" args = "load-module module-switch-on-connect"
# path = "/usr/bin/sh" args = "~/.config/pipewire/default.pw"
]
~/.config/pipewire/pipewire.conf (or
pipewire-pulse.conf, maybe) directly, as that will break your
setup. If you want to add to that file, first copy the template from
/usr/share/pipewire/pipewire-pulse.conf first.
So far I'm happy with Pipewire in bookworm, but I've heard mixed
reports from it. I have high hopes it will become the standard media
server for Linux in the coming months or years, which is great because
I've been (rather boldly, I admit) on the record saying I don't like
PulseAudio.
Rereading this now, I feel it might have been a little unfair, as
"over-engineered and tries to do too many things at once" applies
probably even more to Pipewire than PulseAudio (since it also handles
video dispatching).
That said, I think Pipewire took the right approach by implementing
existing interfaces like Pulseaudio and JACK. That way we're not
adding a third (or fourth?) way of doing audio in Linux; we're just
making the server better.
d c 06 10:36:31 curie sway[343384]: 23:32:14.034 [ERROR] [wlr] [libinput] event5 - SONiX USB Keyboard: client bug: event processing lagging behind by 37ms, your system is too slow
notmuch new).
The proposed fix for this in Sway is to gain real time privileges
and add the CAP_SYS_NICE capability to the binary. We'll see how
that goes in Debian once 1.8 gets released and shipped.
xeyes (in the x11-apps package) will run in Wayland, and can
actually be used to easily see if a given window is also in
Wayland. If the "eyes" follow the cursor, the app is actually running
in xwayland, so not natively in Wayland.
Another way to see what is using Wayland in Sway is with the command:
swaymsg -t get_tree
chooser installed, see
xdg-desktop-portal-wrl(5))Next.