Search Results: "ghe"

30 August 2024

Sahil Dhiman: Debconf24 Busan

DebConf24 was held in Busan, South Korea, from July 28th to August 4th 2024 and preceded by DebCamp from July 21st to July 27th. This was my second IRL DebConf (DC) and fourth one in total. I started in Debian with a DebConf, so its always an occasion when one happens. This year again, I worked in fundraising team, working to raise funds from International sponsors. We did manage to raise good enough funding, albeit less than budgeted. Though, the local Korean team was able to connect and gather many Governmental sponsors, which was quite surprising for me. I wasn t seriously considering attending DebConf until I discussed this with Nilesh. More or less, his efforts helped push me through the whole process. Thanks, Nilesh, for this. In March, I got my passport and started preparing documents for South Korean visa. It did require quite a lot of paper work but seeing South Korea s s fresh passport visa rejection rate, I had doubts about visa acceptance. The visa finally got approved, which could be attributed to great documentation and help from DebConf visa team. This was also my first trip outside India, and this being to DebConf made many things easy. Most stuff were documented on DebConf website and wiki. Asking some query got immediate responses from someone in the DebConf channels. We then booked a direct flight from Delhi, reaching Seoul in the morning. With good directions from Sourab TK who had reached Seoul a few hours earlier, we quickly got Korean Won, local SIM and T Money card (transportation card) and headed towards Seoul by AREX, airport metro. We spent the next two days exploring Seoul, which is huge. It probably has the highest number of skyscrapers I have ever seen. The city has a good mix of modern and ancient culture. We explored various places in Seoul including Gyeongbokgung Palace, Statue of King Sejong, Bukchon Hanok village, N Seoul Tower and various food markets which were amazing. A Street in Seoul
A Street in Seoul
Next, we headed to Busan for DebConf using KTX (Korean high speed rail). (Fun fact, slogan for City of Busan is Busan is Good .) South Korea has a good network of frequently running high speed trains. We had pre-booked our tickets because, despite the frequency, trains were sold out most of the time. KTX ride was quite smooth, despite travelling at 300 Kmph at times through Korean countryside and long mountain tunnels. View from Dorm Room
PKNU Entrance
The venue for DebConf was Pukyong National University (PKNU), Daeyeon Campus. PKNU had two campuses in the Busan and some folks ended up in wrong campus too. With good help and guidance from the front desk, we got our dormitory rooms assigned. Dorms here were quite different, ie: View from Dorm Room
View from Dorm Room
Settling in was easy. We started meeting familiar folks after almost a year. The long conversations started again. Everyone was excited for DebConf. Like everytime, the first day was full of action (and chaos). Meet and greet, volunteers check in, video team running around and fixing stuff and things working (or not). There were some interesting talks and sponsors stalls. After day one, things more or less settled down. I again volunteered for video team stuff and helped in camera operations and talk directions, which is always fun. As the tradition applies, saw few talks live on stream too sitting in the dorm room during the conf, which is always fun, when too tired to get ready and go out. From Talk Director's chair
From Talk Director's chair
DebConf takes care of food needs for vegan/vegetarianism folks well, of which I m one. I got to try different food items, which was quite an experience. Tried using chopsticks again which didn t work, which I later figured that handling metal ones were more difficult. We had late night ramens and wooden chopsticks worked perfectly. One of the days, we even went out to an Indian restaurant to have some desi aloo paratha, paneer dishes, samosas and chai (milk tea). I wasn t particularly craving desi food but wasn t able to get something according to my taste so went there. As usual Bits from DPL talk was packed
As usual Bits from DPL talk was packed
For day trip, I went to Ulsan. San means mountains in Korean. Ulsan is a port city with many industries including Hyundai car factory, petrochemical industry, paint industry, ship building etc. We saw bamboo forest, Ulsan tower (quite a view towards Ulsan port), whale village, Ulsan Onggi Museum and the sea (which was beautiful). The beautiful sea
The beautiful sea

View from Ulsan Bridge Observatory
View from Ulsan Bridge Observatory
Amongst the sponsors, I was most interested in our network sponsors, folks who were National research and education networks (NREN) here. We had two network sponsors, KOREN and KREONET, thanks to efforts by local team. Initially it was discussed that they ll provide 20G uplink each, so 40G in total, which was whopping but by the time the closing talk happened, we got to know we had 200G uplink to the Internet. This was a massive update to last year when we had 1G main and 100M backup link. 200G wasn t what is required, but it was massive capacity and IIRC from the talk, we peaked at around 500M in usage, but it s always fun to have astronomical amount of bandwidth for bragging rights ;) Various mascots in attendance
Various mascots in attendance

Video and Network stats. Screengrab from closing ceremony
Video and Network stats. Screengrab from closing ceremony
Now let s talk about things I found interesting about South Korea in general: Gyeongbokgung Palace Entrance Gyeongbokgung Palace Entrance Gyeongbokgung Palace Entrance
Grand Gyeongbokgung Palace, Seoul

Starfield Library
Starfield Library, Seoul
If one has to get the whole DebConf experience, it s better to attend DebCamp as well because that s when you can sit and interact with everyone better. As DebConf starts, everyone gets busy in various talks and events and things take a pace. DebConf days literally fly. This year, attending DebConf in person was a different experience. Attending DebConf without any organizational work/stress so was better, and I was able to understand working of different Debian team and workflows better while also identified a few where I would like to join and help. A general conclusion was that almost all Debian teams needs more folks to help out. So if someone want to join, they can probably reach out to the team, and would be able to onboard new folks. Though this would require some patience. Kudos to the Korean team who were able to pull off this event under this tight timeline and thanks for all the hospitality. DebConf24 Group Photo
DebConf24 Group Photo. Click to enlarge.
Credits - Aigars Mahinovs
This whole experience expanded my world view. There s so much to see and explore and understand. Looking forward to DebConf25 in Brest, France. PS - Shoutout to abbyck (aka hamCK)!

30 July 2024

Russell Coker: Links July 2024

Interesting Scientific American article about the way that language shapes thought processes and how it was demonstrated in eye tracking experiments with people who have Aboriginal languages as their first language [1]. David Brin wrote an interesting article Do We Really Want Immortality [2]. I disagree with his conclusions about the politics though. Better manufacturing technology should allow decreasing the retirement age while funding schools well. Scientific American has a surprising article about the differences between Chimp and Bonobo parenting [3]. I d never have expected Chimp moms to be protective. Sam Varghese wrote an insightful and informative article about the corruption in Indian politics and the attempts to silence Australian journalist Avani Dias [4]. WorksInProgress has an insightful article about the world s first around the world solo yacht race [5]. It has some interesting ideas about engineering. Htwo has an interesting video about adverts for fake games [6]. It s surprising how they apparently make money from advertising games that don t exist. Elena Hashman wrote an insightful blog post about Chronic Fatigue Syndrome [7]. I hope they make some progress on curing it soon. The fact that it seems similar to long Covid which is quite common suggests that a lot of research will be applied to that sort of thing. Bruce Schneier wrote an insightful blog post about the risks of MS Copilot [8]. Krebs has an interesting article about how Apple does Wifi AP based geo-location and how that can be abused for tracking APs in warzones etc. Bad Apple! [9]. Bruce Schneier wrote an insightful blog post on How AI Will Change Democracy [10]. Charles Stross wrote an amusing and insightful post about MS Recall titled Is Microsoft Trying to Commit Suicide [11]. Bruce Schneier wrote an insightful blog post about seeing the world as a data structure [12]. Luke Miani has an informative YouTube video about eBay scammers selling overprices MacBooks [13]. The Yorkshire Ranter has an insightful article about Ronald Coase and the problems with outsourcing big development contracts as an array of contracts without any overall control [14].

28 July 2024

Vincent Bernat: Crafting endless AS paths in BGP

Combining BGP confederations and AS override can potentially create a BGP routing loop, resulting in an indefinitely expanding AS path. BGP confederation is a technique used to reduce the number of iBGP sessions and improve scalability in large autonomous systems (AS). It divides an AS into sub-ASes. Most eBGP rules apply between sub-ASes, except that next-hop, MED, and local preferences remain unchanged. The AS path length ignores contributions from confederation sub-ASes. BGP confederation is rarely used and BGP route reflection is typically preferred for scaling. AS override is a feature that allows a router to replace the ASN of a neighbor in the AS path of outgoing BGP routes with its own. It s useful when two distinct autonomous systems share the same ASN. However, it interferes with BGP s loop prevention mechanism and should be used cautiously. A safer alternative is the allowas-in directive.1 In the example below, we have four routers in a single confederation, each in its own sub-AS. R0 originates the 2001:db8::1/128 prefix. R1, R2, and R3 forward this prefix to the next router in the loop.
BGP routing loop involving 4 routers: R0 originates a prefix, R1, R2, R3 make it loop using next-hop-self and as-override
BGP routing loop using a confederation
The router configurations are available in a Git repository. They are running Cisco IOS XR. R2 uses the following configuration for BGP:
router bgp 64502
 bgp confederation peers
  64500
  64501
  64503
 !
 bgp confederation identifier 64496
 bgp router-id 1.0.0.2
 address-family ipv6 unicast
 !
 neighbor 2001:db8::2:0
  remote-as 64501
  description R1
  address-family ipv6 unicast
  !
 !
 neighbor 2001:db8::3:1
  remote-as 64503
  advertisement-interval 0
  description R3
  address-family ipv6 unicast
   next-hop-self
   as-override
  !
 !
!
The session with R3 uses both as-override and next-hop-self directives. The latter is only necessary to make the announced prefix valid, as there is no IGP in this example.2 Here s the sequence of events leading to an infinite AS path:
  1. R0 sends the prefix to R1 with AS path (64500).3
  2. R1 selects it as the best path, forwarding it to R2 with AS path (64501 64500).
  3. R2 selects it as the best path, forwarding it to R3 with AS path (64500 64501 64502).
  4. R3 selects it as the best path. It would forward it to R1 with AS path (64503 64502 64501 64500), but due to AS override, it substitutes R1 s ASN with its own, forwarding it with AS path (64503 64502 64503 64500).
  5. R1 accepts the prefix, as its own ASN is not in the AS path. It compares this new prefix with the one from R0. Both (64500) and (64503 64502 64503 64500) have the same length because confederation sub-ASes don t contribute to AS path length. The first tie-breaker is the router ID. R0 s router ID (1.0.0.4) is higher than R3 s (1.0.0.3). The new prefix becomes the best path and is forwarded to R2 with AS path (64501 64503 64501 64503 64500).
  6. R2 receives the new prefix, replacing the old one. It selects it as the best path and forwards it to R3 with AS path (64502 64501 64502 64501 64502 64500).
  7. R3 receives the new prefix, replacing the old one. It selects it as the best path and forwards it to R0 with AS path (64503 64502 64503 64502 64503 64502 64500).
  8. R1 receives the new prefix, replacing the old one. Again, it competes with the prefix from R0, and again the new prefix wins due to the lower router ID. The prefix is forwarded to R2 with AS path (64501 64503 64501 64503 64501 64503 64501 64500).
A few iterations later, R1 views the looping prefix as follows:4
RP/0/RP0/CPU0:R1#show bgp ipv6 u 2001:db8::1/128 bestpath-compare
BGP routing table entry for 2001:db8::1/128
Last Modified: Jul 28 10:23:05.560 for 00:00:00
Paths: (2 available, best #2)
  Path #1: Received by speaker 0
  Not advertised to any peer
  (64500)
    2001:db8::1:0 from 2001:db8::1:0 (1.0.0.4), if-handle 0x00000000
      Origin IGP, metric 0, localpref 100, valid, confed-external
      Received Path ID 0, Local Path ID 0, version 0
      Higher router ID than best path (path #2)
  Path #2: Received by speaker 0
  Advertised IPv6 Unicast paths to peers (in unique update groups):
    2001:db8::2:1
  (64503 64502 64503 64502 64503 64502 64503 64502 64503 64502 64503 64502 64503 64502 64503 64502 64503 64502 64503 64502 64503 64502 64503 64502 64503 64502 64503 64502 64503 64502 64503 64502 64503 64502 64503 64502 64503 64502 64503 64502 64503 64502 64503 64502 64503 64502 64503 64502 64503 64502 64503 64502 64503 64502 64503 64502 64503 64502 64503 64502 64503 64502 64503 64502 64503 64502 64503 64502 64503 64502 64503 64502 64503 64502 64503 64502 64503 64502 64503 64502 64503 64502 64503 64502 64503 64502 64503 64502 64503 64502 64503 64502 64503 64502 64503 64502 64503 64502 64503 64502 64503 64502 64500)
    2001:db8::4:0 from 2001:db8::4:0 (1.0.0.3), if-handle 0x00000000
      Origin IGP, metric 0, localpref 100, valid, confed-external, best, group-best
      Received Path ID 0, Local Path ID 1, version 37
      best of AS 64503, Overall best
There s no upper bound for an AS path, but BGP messages have size limits (4096 bytes per RFC 4271 or 65535 bytes per RFC 8654). At some point, BGP updates can t be generated. On Cisco IOS XR, the BGP process crashes well before reaching this limit.5
The main lessons from this tale are:

  1. When using BGP confederations with Cisco IOS XR, use allowconfedas-in instead. It s available since IOS XR 7.11.
  2. Using BGP confederations is already inadvisable. If you don t use the same IGP for all sub-ASes, you re inviting trouble! However, the scenario described here is also possible with an IGP.
  3. When an AS path segment is composed of ASNs from a confederation, it is displayed between parentheses.
  4. By default, IOS XR paces eBGP updates. This is controlled by the advertisement-interval directive. Its default value is 30 seconds for eBGP peers (even in the same confederation). R1 and R2 set this value to 0, while R3 sets it to 2 seconds. This gives some time to watch the AS path grow.
  5. This is CSCwk15887. It only happens when using as-override on an AS path with a too long AS_CONFED_SEQUENCE. This should be fixed around 24.3.1.

27 July 2024

Bits from Debian: DebConf24 welcomes its sponsors!

DebConf24 logo DebConf24, the 25th edition of the Debian conference is taking place in Pukyong National University at Busan, Republic of Korea. Thanks to the hard work of its organizers, it again will be an interesting and fruitful event for attendees. We would like to warmly welcome the sponsors of DebConf24, and introduce them to you. We have three Platinum sponsors. Our Gold sponsors are: Our Silver sponsors are: Bronze sponsors: And finally, our Supporter level sponsors: A special thanks to the Pukyong National University, our Venue Partner and our Network Partners KOREN and KREONET! Thanks to all our sponsors for their support! Their contributions make it possible for a large number of Debian contributors from all over the globe to work together, help and learn from each other in DebConf24.

23 July 2024

Russell Coker: More About Kogan 5120*2160 Monitor

On the 18th of May I blogged about my new 5120*2160 monitor [1]. One thing I noted was that one Netflix movie had run in an aspect ratio that used all space on the monitor. I still don t know if the movie in question was cropped in a letterbox manner but other Netflix shows in full screen mode don t extend to both edges. Also one movie I downloaded as in 3840*1608 resolution which is almost exactly the same aspect ratio as my monitor. I wonder if some company is using 5120*2160 screens for TVs, 4K and FullHD are rumoured to be cheaper than most other resolutions partly due to TV technology being used for monitors. There is the Anamorphic Format of between 2.35:1 and 2.40:1 [2] which is a close match for the 2.37:1 of my new monitor. I tried out the HDMI audio on a Dell laptop and my Thinkpad Yoga Gen3 and found it to be of poor quality, it seemed limited to 2560*1440, at this time I m not sure how much of the fault is due to the laptops and how much is due to the monitor. The monitor docs state that it needs HDMI version 2.1 which was released in 2017 and my Thinkpad Yoga Gen3 was released in 2018 so probably doesn t have that. The HDMI cable in question did 4K resolution on my previous monitor so it should all work at a minimum of 4K resolution. The switching between inputs is a problem. If I switch between DisplayPort for my PC and HDMI for a laptop the monitor will usually timeout before the laptop establishes a connection and then switch back to the DisplayPort input. So far I have had to physically disconnect the input source I don t want to use. The DisplayPort switch that I ve used doesn t seem designed to work with resolutions higher than 4K. I ve bought a new USB-C dock which is described as doing 8K which means that as my Thinkpad is described as supporting 5120 2880@60Hz over USB-C I should be able to get 5120*2160 without any problems, however for unknown reasons I only get 4K. For work I m using a Dell Latitude 7400 2in1 that s apparently only capable of 4096*2304 @24 Hz which is less pixels than 5120*2160 and it will also only do 4K resolution. But for both those cases it s still a significant improvement over 2560*1440. I tested with a Dell Latitude 7440 which gave the full 5120*2160 resolution, I was unable to find specs on what the maximum resolution of the 7440 is. I also have bought DisplayPort switch rated at 8K resolution. I got a switch that doesn t also do USB because the ones that do 8K resolution and USB are about $70. The only KVM switch I saw for 8K resolution at a reasonable price was one designed for switching between two laptops and there doesn t seem to be any adaptors to convert from regular DisplayPort to USB-C alternative mode so that wasn t viable. Currently I have the old KVM switch used for USB only (for keyboard and mouse) and the new switch which only does DisplayPort. So I have two buttons to push when switching between input sources which isn t too bad. It seems that for PCs resolutions with more pixels than 4K are as difficult and inconvenient now as 4K was 6 years ago when I started doing it. If you want higher than 4K resolution to just work at this time then you need Apple hardware. The monitor has a series of modes for different types of output, I ve found standard to be good for text and movie to be good for watching movies/TV and for playing RTS games. I previously wrote about how to use ddcutil to use a monitor as a KVM switch [3], unfortunately I can t do this with the new monitor as the time that the monitor waits for a good signal on a new input after changing is shorter than the time taken for Linux on the laptops I m using to enable HDMI output. I ve found the following commands to do the basics.
# get display mode
ddcutil getvcp DC
# set standard mode
ddcutil setvcp DC 0
# set movie mode
ddcutil setvcp DC 03
Now that I have that going the next thing I want to do is to have it switch between standard and movie modes when I switch keyboard focus.

19 July 2024

Dirk Eddelbuettel: dtts 0.1.3 on CRAN: More Maintenance

Leonardo and I are happy to announce the release of another maintenance release 0.1.3 of our dtts package which has been on CRAN for a good 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 contains two nice and focussed contributed pull requests. Tomas Kalibera, who as part of R Core looks after everything concerning R on Windows, and then some, needed an adjustment for pending / upcoming R on Windows changes for builds with LLVM which is what Arm-on-Windows uses. We happily obliged: neither Leonardo nor I see much of Windows these decades. (Easy thing to say on a day like today with its crowdstrike hammer falling!) Similarly, Michael Chirico supplied a PR updating one of our tests to an upcoming change at data.table which we are of course happy to support. The short list of changes follows.

Changes in version 0.1.3 (2024-07-18)
  • Windows builds use localtime_s with LLVM (Tomas Kalibera in #16)
  • Tests code has been adjusted for an upstream change in data.table tests for all.equal (Michael Chirico in #18 addressing #17)

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.

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

10 July 2024

Russell Coker: Computer Adavances in the Last Decade

I wrote a comment on a social media post where someone claimed that there s no computer advances in the last 12 years which got long so it s worth a blog post. In the last decade or so new laptops have become cheaper than new desktop PCs. USB-C has taken over for phones and for laptop charging so all recent laptops support USB-C docks and monitors with USB-C docks built in have become common. 4K monitors have become cheap and common and higher than 4K is cheap for some use cases such as ultra wide. 4K TVs are cheap and TVs with built-in Android computers for playing internet content are now standard. For most use cases spinning media hard drives are obsolete, SSDs large enough for all the content most people need to store are cheap. We have gone from gigabit Ethernet being expensive to 2.5 gigabit being cheap. 12 years ago smart phones were very limited and every couple of years there would be significant improvements. Since about 2018 phones have been capable of doing most things most people want. 5yo Android phones can run the latest apps and take high quality pics. Any phone that supports VoLTE will be good for another 5+ years if it has security support. Phones without security support still work and are quite usable apart from being insecure. Google and Samsung have significantly increased their minimum security support for their phones and the GKI project from Google makes it easier for smaller vendors to give longer security support. There are a variety of open Android projects like LineageOS which give longer security support on a variety of phones. If you deliberately choose a phone that is likely to be well supported by projects like LineageOS (which pretty much means just Pixel phones) then you can expect to be able to actually use it when it is 10 years old. Compare this to the Samsung Galaxy S3 released in 2012 which was a massive improvement over the original Galaxy S (the S2 felt closer to the S than the S3). The Samsung Galaxy S4 released in 2013 was one of the first phones to have FullHD resolution which is high enough that most people can t easily recognise the benefits of higher resolution. It wasn t until 2015 that phones with 4G of RAM became common which is enough that for most phone use it s adequate today. Now that 16G of RAM is affordable in laptops running more secure OSs like Qubes is viable for more people. Even without Qubes, OS security has been improving a lot with better compiler features, new languages like Rust, and changes to software design and testing. Containers are being used more but we still aren t getting all the benefits of that. TPM has become usable in the last few years and we are only starting to take advantage of what it can offer. In 2012 BTRFS was still at an early stage of development and not many people wanted to use it in production, I was using it in production then and while I didn t lose any data from bugs I did have some downtime because of BTRFS issues. Now BTRFS is quite solid for server use. DDR4 was released in 2014 and gave significant improvements over DDR3 for performance and capacity. My home workstation now has 256G of DDR4 which wasn t particularly expensive while the previous biggest system I owned had 96G of DDR3 RAM. Now DDR5 is available to again increase performance and size while also making DDR4 cheap on the second hand market. This isn t a comprehensive list of all advances in the computer industry over the last 12 years or so, it s just some things that seem particularly noteworthy to me. Please comment about what you think are the most noteworthy advances I didn t mention.

9 July 2024

Simon Josefsson: Towards Idempotent Rebuilds?

After rebuilding all added/modified packages in Trisquel, I have been circling around the elephant in the room: 99% of the binary packages in Trisquel comes from Ubuntu, which to a large extent are built from Debian source packages. Is it possible to rebuild the official binary packages identically? Does anyone make an effort to do so? Does anyone care about going through the differences between the official package and a rebuilt version? Reproducible-build.org s effort to track reproducibility bugs in Debian (and other systems) is amazing. However as far as I know, they do not confirm or deny that their rebuilds match the official packages. In fact, typically their rebuilds do not match the official packages, even when they say the package is reproducible, which had me surprised at first. To understand why that happens, compare the buildinfo file for the official coreutils 9.1-1 from Debian bookworm with the buildinfo file for reproducible-build.org s build and you will see that the SHA256 checksum does not match, but still they declare it as a reproducible package. As far as I can tell of the situation, the purpose of their rebuilds are not to say anything about the official binary build, instead the purpose is to offer a QA service to maintainers by performing two builds of a package and declaring success if both builds match. I have felt that something is lacking, and months have passed and I haven t found any project that address the problem I am interested in. During my earlier work I created a project called debdistreproduce which performs rebuilds of the difference between two distributions in a GitLab pipeline, and display diffoscope output for further analysis. A couple of days ago I had the idea of rewriting it to perform rebuilds of a single distribution. A new project debdistrebuild was born and today I m happy to bless it as version 1.0 and to announces the project! Debdistrebuild has rebuilt the top-50 popcon packages from Debian bullseye, bookworm and trixie, on amd64 and arm64, as well as Ubuntu jammy and noble on amd64, see the summary status page for links. This is intended as a proof of concept, to allow people experiment with the concept of doing GitLab-based package rebuilds and analysis. Compare how Guix has the guix challenge command. Or I should say debdistrebuild has attempted to rebuild those distributions. The number of identically built packages are fairly low, so I didn t want to waste resources building the rest of the archive until I understand if the differences are due to consequences of my build environment (plain apt-get build-dep followed by dpkg-buildpackage in a fresh container), or due to some real difference. Summarizing the results, debdistrebuild is able to rebuild 34% of Debian bullseye on amd64, 36% of bookworm on amd64, 32% of bookworm on arm64. The results for trixie and Ubuntu are disappointing, below 10%. So what causes my rebuilds to be different from the official rebuilds? Some are trivial like the classical problem of varying build paths, resulting in a different NT_GNU_BUILD_ID causing a mismatch. Some are a bit strange, like a subtle difference in one of perl s headers file. Some are due to embedded version numbers from a build dependency. Several of the build logs and diffoscope outputs doesn t make sense, likely due to bugs in my build scripts, especially for Ubuntu which appears to strip translations and do other build variations that I don t do. In general, the classes of reproducibility problems are the expected. Some are assembler differences for GnuPG s gpgv-static, likely triggered by upload of a new version of gcc after the original package was built. There are at least two ways to resolve that problem: either use the same version of build dependencies that were used to produce the original build, or demand that all packages that are affected by a change in another package are rebuilt centrally until there are no more differences. The current design of debdistrebuild uses the latest version of a build dependency that is available in the distribution. We call this a idempotent rebuild . This is usually not how the binary packages were built originally, they are often built against earlier versions of their build dependency. That is the situation for most binary distributions. Instead of using the latest build dependency version, higher reproducability may be achieved by rebuilding using the same version of the build dependencies that were used during the original build. This requires parsing buildinfo files to find the right version of the build dependency to install. We believe doing so will lead to a higher number of reproducibly built packages. However it begs the question: can we rebuild that earlier version of the build dependency? This circles back to really old versions and bootstrappable builds eventually. While rebuilding old versions would be interesting on its own, we believe that is less helpful for trusting the latest version and improving a binary distribution: it is challenging to publish a new version of some old package that would fix a reproducibility bug in another package when used as a build dependency, and then rebuild the later packages with the modified earlier version. Those earlier packages were already published, and are part of history. It may be that ultimately it will no longer be possible to rebuild some package, because proper source code is missing (for packages using build dependencies that were never part of a release); hardware to build a package could be missing; or that the source code is no longer publicly distributable. I argue that getting to 100% idempotent rebuilds is an interesting goal on its own, and to reach it we need to start measure idempotent rebuild status. One could conceivable imagine a way to rebuild modified versions of earlier packages, and then rebuild later packages using the modified earlier packages as build dependencies, for the purpose of achieving higher level of reproducible rebuilds of the last version, and to reach for bootstrappability. However, it may be still be that this is insufficient to achieve idempotent rebuilds of the last versions. Idempotent rebuilds are different from a reproducible build (where we try to reproduce the build using the same inputs), and also to bootstrappable builds (in which all binaries are ultimately built from source code). Consider a cycle where package X influence the content of package Y, which in turn influence the content of package X. These cycles may involve several packages, and it is conceivable that a cycle could be circular and infinite. It may be difficult to identify these chains, and even more difficult to break them up, but this effort help identify where to start looking for them. Rebuilding packages using the same build dependency versions as were used during the original build, or rebuilding packages using a bootsrappable build process, both seem orthogonal to the idempotent rebuild problem. Our notion of rebuildability appears thus to be complementary to reproducible-builds.org s definition and bootstrappable.org s definition. Each to their own devices, and Happy Hacking! Addendum about terminology: With idempotent rebuild I am talking about a rebuild of the entire operating system, applied to itself. Compare how you build the latest version of the GNU C Compiler: it first builds itself using whatever system compiler is available (often an earlier version of gcc) which we call step 1. Then step 2 is to build a copy of itself using the compiler built in step 1. The final step 3 is to build another copy of itself using the compiler from step 2. Debian, Ubuntu etc are at step 1 in this process right now. The output of step 2 and step 3 ought to be bit-by-bit identical, or something is wrong. The comparison between step 2 and 3 is what I refer to with an idempotent rebuild. Of course, most packages aren t a compiler that can compile itself. However entire operating systems such as Trisquel, PureOS, Ubuntu or Debian are (hopefully) a self-contained system that ought to be able to rebuild itself to an identical copy. Or something is amiss. The reproducible build and bootstrappable build projects are about improve the quality of step 1. The property I am interested is the identical rebuild and comparison in step 2 and 3. I feel the word idempotent describes the property I m interested in well, but I realize there may be better ways to describe this. Ideas welcome!

2 July 2024

Bits from Debian: Bits from the DPL

Dear Debian community, Statement on Daniel Pocock The Debian project has successfully taken action to secure its trademarks and interests worldwide, as detailed in our press statement. I would like to personally thank everyone in the community who was involved in this process. I would have loved for you all to have spent your volunteer time on more fruitful things. Debian Boot team might need help I think I've identified the issue that finally motivated me to contact our teams: for a long time, I have had the impression that Debian is driven by several "one-person teams" (to varying extents of individual influence and susceptibility to burnout). As DPL, I see it as my task to find ways to address this issue and provide support. I received private responses from Debian Boot team members, which motivated me to kindly invite volunteers to some prominent and highly visible fields of work that you might find personally challenging. I recommend subscribing to the Debian Boot mailing list to see where you might be able to provide assistance. /usrmerge Helmut Grohne confirmed that the last remaining packages shipping aliased files inside the package set relevant to debootstrap were uploaded. Thanks a lot for Helmut and all contributors that helped to implement DEP17. Contacting more teams I'd like to repeat that I've registered a BoF for DebConf24 in Busan with the following description: This BoF is an attempt to gather as much as possible teams inside Debian to exchange experiences, discuss workflows inside teams, share their ways to attract newcomers etc. Each participant team should prepare a short description of their work and what team roles ( openings ) they have for new contributors. Even for delegated teams (membership is less fluid), it would be good to present the team, explain what it takes to be a team member, and what steps people usually go to end up being invited to participate. Some other teams can easily absorb contributions from salsa MRs, and at some point people get commit access. Anyway, the point is that we work on the idea that the pathway to become a team member becomes more clear from an outsider point-of-view. I'm lagging a bit behind my team contacting schedule and will not manage to contact every team before DebConf. As a (short) summary, I can draw some positive conclusions about my efforts to reach out to teams. I was able to identify some issues that were new to me and which I am now working on. Examples include limitations in Salsa and Salsa CI. I consider both essential parts of our infrastructure and will support both teams in enhancing their services. Some teams confirmed that they are basically using some common infrastructure (Salsa team space, mailing lists, IRC channels) but that the individual members of the team work on their own problems without sharing any common work. I have also not read about convincing strategies to attract newcomers to the team, as we have established, for instance, in the Debian Med team. DebConf attendance The amount of money needed to fly people to South Korea was higher than usual, so the DebConf bursary team had to make some difficult decisions about who could be reimbursed for travel expenses. I extended the budget for diversity and newcomers, which enabled us to invite some additional contributors. We hope that those who were not able to come this year can make it next year to Brest or to MiniDebConf Cambridge or Toulouse tag2upload On June 12, Sean Whitton requested comments on the debian-vote list regarding a General Resolution (GR) about tag2upload. The discussion began with technical details but unfortunately, as often happens in long threads, it drifted into abrasive language, prompting the community team to address the behavior of an opponent of the GR supporters. After 560 emails covering technical details, including a detailed security review by Russ Allbery, Sean finally proposed the GR on June 27, 2024 (two weeks after requesting comments). Firstly, I would like to thank the drivers of this GR and acknowledge the technical work behind it, including the security review. I am positively convinced that Debian can benefit from modernizing its infrastructure, particularly through stronger integration of Git into packaging workflows. Sam Hartman provided some historical context [1], [2], [3], [4], noting that this discussion originally took place five years ago with no results from several similarly lengthy threads. My favorite summary of the entire thread was given by Gregor Herrmann, which reflects the same gut feeling I have and highlights a structural problem within Debian that hinders technical changes. Addressing this issue is definitely a matter for the Debian Project Leader, and I will try to address it during my term. At the time of writing these bits, a proposal from ftpmaster, which is being continuously discussed, might lead to a solution. I was also asked to extend the GR discussion periods which I will do in separate mail. Talk: Debian GNU/Linux for Scientific Research I was invited to have a talk in the Systems-Facing Track of University of British Columbia (who is sponsoring rack space for several Debian servers). I admit it felt a bit strange to me after working more than 20 years for establishing Debian in scientific environments to be invited to such a talk "because I'm DPL". Kind regards Andreas.

1 July 2024

Russell Coker: VoLTE in Australia

Introduction In Australia the 3G mobile frequencies are to be reused so they are in the process of shutting down the 3G service. That means that everyone has to use VoLTE (Voice Over LTE) for phone calls (including emergency calls). The shutdown time varies by telco, Kogan Mobile (one of the better services which has good value for money and generally works well) shut down their 3G service in January. Aldi Mobile (another one of the good services which is slightly more expensive but has included free calls to most first-world countries and uses the largest phone network) will shut theirs down at the end of August. For background there s a Fosdem talk about OpenSIPS with VoLTE and VoNR [1], it s more complex than you want to know. Also VoNR (Voice over New Radio) is the standard for 5G voice and it s different from VoLTE and has a fallback to VoLTE. Another good lecture for background information is the Fosdem talk on VoLTE at the handset end [2]. The PinePhonePro In October 2023 I tried using my PinePhonePro as my main phone but that only lasted a few days due to problems with calls and poor battery life [3]. Since then I went back to the Huawei Mate 10 Pro that I bought refurbished in June 2019 for $389. So that has been my main phone for 5 years now, giving a cost of $1.50 per week. I had tried using a Huawei Nova 7i running Android without Google Play as an experiment but that had failed, I do many things that need Android apps [4]. I followed the PinePhone wiki to get my PinePhonePro working with VoLTE [5]. That worked fine for me, the only difference from the instructions is that I had to use device /dev/ttyUSB3 and that the modem kept resetting itself during the process and when that happened I had to kill minicom and start again. After changing the setting and saving it the PinePhonePro seemed to work well with VoLTE on a Kogan Mobile SIM (so definitely not using 3G). One issue I have found is that Plasma Mobile (my preferred FOSS phone GUI) appears to have a library issue that results in polling every 14ms even when the screen is locked [6]. If you have a few processes doing that (which means the most lightly used Plasma system) it really hurts battery use. The maintainer has quite reasonably deferred action on this bug report given the KDE 6 transition. Later on in the Trixie development cycle I hope to get this issue resolved, I don t expect it to suddenly make battery life good. But it might make battery life acceptable. I am now idly considering carrying around my PinePhonePro in a powered off state for situations where I might need to do high security operations (root logins to servers or online banking) but for which carrying a laptop isn t convenient. It will do well for the turn on, do 30 mins of work that needs security, and then turn off scenario. Huawei Mate 10 Pro and Redmi 9A The Huawei Mate 10 Pro has been my main phone for 5 years and it has worked well, so it would be ideal if it could do VoLTE as the PinePhonePro isn t ready yet. All the web pages I ve seen about the Mate 10 Pro say that it will either allow upgrading to a VoLTE configuration if run with the right SIM or only support it with the right SIM. I did a test with a Chinese SIM which gave an option of turning on VoLTE but didn t allow any firmware updates and the VoLTE option went away when I put an Australian SIM in. Some forum comments had led me to believe that it would either permanently enable VoLTE or allow upgrading the firmware to one that enables VoLTE if I used a Chinese SIM but that is not the case. I didn t expect a high probability of success but I had to give it a go as it s a nice phone. I did some tests on a Redmi 9A (a terrible phone that has really bad latency on the UI in spite of having reasonably good hardware). The one I tested on didn t have VoLTE enabled when I got it, to test that I used the code *#*#4636#*#* in the dialler to get the menu of SIM information and it showed that VoLTE was not provisioned. I then had to update to the latest release of Android for that phone and enter *#*#86583#*#* in the dialler to enable VoLTE, the message displayed after entering that magic number must end in DISABLE . I get the impression that the code in question makes the phone not check certain aspects of whether the carrier is good for VoLTE and just do it. So apparently Kogan Mobile somehow gives the Redmi 9A the impression that VoLTE isn t supported but if the phone just goes ahead and connects it will work. I don t plan to use a Redmi 9A myself as it s too slow, but I added it to my collection to offer to anyone else I know who needs a phone with VoLTE and doesn t use the phone seriously or to someone who needs a known good phone for testing things. Samsung Galaxy Note 9 I got some Samsung Galaxy Note 9 phones to run Droidian as an experiment [7]. But Droidian dropped support for the Note 9 and I couldn t figure out how to enable VoLTE via Droidian, which was very annoying after I had spent $109 on a test phone and $215 on a phone for real use (I have no plans to try Droidian again at this time). I tried installing LineageOS on one Note 9 [8] which was much easier than expected (especially after previously installing Droidian). But VoLTE wasn t an option. According to Reddit LineageOS doesn t support VoLTE on Samsung devices and you can use a magisk module or a VoLTE enabler module but those aren t supported by LineageOS either [9]. I downloaded an original image for the Note 9 from SamsMobile.com [10]. That image booted past the orange stage (where if you have problems then your phone is probably permanently useless) but didn t boot into the OS. A friend helped me out with that and it turned out that the Heimdal flash tool on Linux didn t do something it needed to do and that Odin on Windows was required. After using Odin everything was fine and I have a Note 9 with VoLTE running the latest Samsung firmware which is security patch level 1st July 2022!!! So I have a choice between using a Note 9 for data and SMS while running a current version of Lineage OS with all security fixes or running a Samsung image with no security updates for 2 years which supports phone calls. So based on this I have to recommend Pixel as the phone of choice, it has a decent level of support from Google and long term support from LineageOS. According to the LineageOS web site you can run the current version of Lineage on the original Pixel phone from 2016! Of course getting VoLTE to work on it might be another saga, but it would probably be easier to do with LineageOS on a Pixel than on a Samsung phone. Conclusion The operation of the Note 9 for me is decent now apart from the potential security issues. The same goes for selling one of the phones. The PinePhonePro still has potential to become my daily driver at some future time if I and others can optimise power use. Also a complicating factor is that I want to have both Jabber and Matrix be actually instant IM systems not IM with a 5 minute delay, so suspend mode isn t a good option. Pixel phones will be a much higher priority when looking at phones to buy in future. The older Pixel phones go for as little as $100 on eBay and can still run the latest LineageOS. VoLTE seems needlessly complicated.

Niels Thykier: Debian packaging with style black

When I started working on the language server for debputy, one of several reasons was about automatic applying a formatting style. Such that you would not have to remember to manually reformat the file. One of the problems with supporting automatic formatting is that no one agrees on the "one true style". To make this concrete, Johannes Schauer Marin Rodrigues did the numbers of which wrap-and-sort option that are most common in https://bugs.debian.org/895570#46. Unsurprising, we end up with 14-15 different styles with various degrees of popularity. To make matters worse, wrap-and-sort does not provide a way to declare "this package uses options -sat". So that begged the question, how would debputy know which style it should use when it was going to reformat file. After a couple of false-starts, Christian Hofstaedtler mentioned that we could just have a field in debian/control for supporting a "per-package" setting in responds to my concern about adding a new "per-package" config file. At first, I was not happy with it, because how would you specify all of these options in a field (in a decent manner)? But then I realized that one I do not want all these styles and that I could start simpler. The Python code formatter black is quite successful despite not having a lot of personalized style options. In fact, black makes a statement out of not allowing a lot of different styles. Combing that, the result was X-Style: black (to be added to the Source stanza of debian/control), which every possible reference to the black tool for how styling would work. Namely, you outsource the style management to the tool (debputy) and then start using your focus on something else than discussing styles. As with black, this packaging formatting style is going to be opinionated and it will evolve over time. At the starting point, it is similar to wrap-and-sort -sat for the deb822 files (debputy does not reformat other files at the moment). But as mentioned, it will likely evolve and possible diverge from wrap-and-sort over time. The choice of the starting point was based on the numbers posted by Johannes #895570. It was not my personal favorite but it seemed to have a majority and is also close to the one suggested by salsa pipeline maintainers. The delta being -kb which I had originally but removed in 0.1.34 at request of Otto Kek l inen after reviewing the numbers from Johannes one more time. To facilitate this new change, I uploaded debputy/0.1.30 (a while back) to Debian unstable with the following changes:
  • Support for the X-Style: black header.
  • When a style is defined, the debputy lsp server command will now automatically reformat deb822 files on save (if the editor supports it) or on explicit "reformat file" request from the editor (usually indirectly from the user).
  • New subcommand debputy reformat command that will reformat the files, when a style is defined.
  • A new pre-commit hook repo to run debputy lint and debputy reformat. These hooks are available from https://salsa.debian.org/debian/debputy-pre-commit-hooks version v0.1 and can be used with the pre-commit tool (from the package of same name).
The obvious omission is a salsa-pipeline feature for this. Otto has put that on to his personal todo list and I am looking forward to that.
Beyond black Another thing I dislike about our existing style tooling is that if you run wrap-and-sort without any arguments, you have a higher probability of "trashing" the style of the current package than getting the desired result. Part of this is because wrap-and-sort's defaults are out of sync with the usage (which is basically what https://bugs.debian.org/895570 is about). But I see another problem. The wrap-and-sort tool explicitly defined options to tweak the style but provided maintainers no way to record their preference in any machine readable way. The net result is that we have tons of diverging styles and that you (as a user of wrap-and-sort) have to manually tell wrap-and-sort which style you want every time you run the tool. In my opinion that is not playing to the strengths of neither human nor machine. Rather, it is playing to the weaknesses of the human if anything at all. But the salsa-CI pipeline people also ran into this issue and decided to work around this deficiency. To use wrap-and-sort in the salsa-CI pipeline, you have to set a variable to activate the job and another variable with the actual options you want. The salsa-CI pipeline is quite machine readable and wrap-and-sort is widely used. I had debputy reformat also check for the salsa-CI variables as a fallback. This fallback also works for the editor mode (debputy lsp server), so you might not even have to run debputy reformat. :) This was a deliberate trade-off. While I do not want all us to have all these options, I also want Debian packaging to be less painful and have fewer paper cuts. Having debputy go extra lengths to meet wrap-and-sort users where they are came out as the better solution for me. A nice side-effect of this trade-off is that debputy reformat now a good tool for drive-by contributors. You can safely run debputy reformat on any package and either it will apply the styling or it will back out and inform you that no obvious style was detected. In the latter case, you would have to fallback to manually deducing the style and applying it.
Differences to wrap-and-sort The debputy reformat has some limitations or known differences to wrap-and-sort. Notably, debputy reformat (nor debputy lsp server) will not invoke wrap-and-sort. Instead, debputy has its own reformatting engine that provides similar features. One reason for not running wrap-and-sort is that I want debputy reformat to match the style that debputy lsp server will give you. That way, you get consistent style across all debputy commands. Another reason is that it is important to me that reformatting is safe and does not change semantics. This leads to two regrettable known differences to the wrap-and-sort behavior due to safety in addition to one scope limitation in debputy:
  1. debputy will ignore requests to sort the stanzas when the "keep first" option is disabled (-b --no-keep-first). This combination is unsafe reformatting. I feel it was a mistake for wrap-and-sort to ever allow this but at least it is no longer the default (-b is now -bk by default). This will be less of a problem in debhelper-compat 15, since the concept of "main package" will disappear and all multi-binary source packages will be required to use debian/package.install rather than debian/install.
  2. debputy will not reorder the contents of debhelper packaging files such as debian/install. This is also an (theoretical) unsafe thing to do. While the average package will not experience issues with this, there are rare corner cases where the re-ordering can affect the end result. I happen to know this, because I ran into issues when trying to optimize dh_install in a way that assumed the order did not matter. Stuff broke and there is now special-case code in dh_install to back out of that optimization when that happens.
  3. debputy has a limited list of wrap-and-sort options it understands. Some options may cause debputy to back out and disable reformatting entirely with a remark that it cannot apply that style. If you run into a case of this, feel free to file a feature request to support it. I will not promise to support everything, but if it is safe and trivially doable with the engine already, then I probably will.
As stated, where debputy cannot implement the wrap-and-sort styles fully, then it will currently implement a subset that is safe if that can be identified or back out entirely of the formatting when it cannot. In all cases, debputy will not break the formatting if it is correct. It may just fail at correcting one aspect of the wrap-and-sort style if you happen to get it wrong. It is also important to remember that the prerequisite for debputy applying any wrap-and-sort style is that you have set the salsa-CI pipeline variables to trigger wrap-and-sort with the salsa-CI pipeline. So there is still a CI check before the merge that will run the wrap-and-sort in its full glory that provides the final safety net for you.
Just give me a style In conclusion, if you, like me, are more interested in getting a consistent style rather than discussing what that style should be, now you can get that with X-Style: black. You can also have your custom wrap-and-sort style be picked up automatically for drive-by contributors.
$ apt satisfy 'dh-debputy (>= 0.1.30), python3-lsprotocol'
# Add  X-Style: black  to  debian/control  for "just give me a style"
#
# OR, if there is a specific  wrap-and-sort  style for you then set
# SALSA_CI_DISABLE_WRAP_AND_SORT=no plus set relevant options in
# SALSA_CI_WRAP_AND_SORT_ARGS in debian/salsa-ci.yml (or .gitlab-ci.yml)
$ debputy reformat
It is sadly not yet in the salsa-ci pipeline. Otto is looking into that and hopefully we will have it soon. :) And if you find yourself often doing archive-wide contributions and is tired of having to reverse engineer package formatting styles, consider using debputy reformat or debputy lsp server. If you use debputy in this way, please consider providing feedback on what would help you.

30 June 2024

Joachim Breitner: Do surprises get larger?

The setup Imagine you are living on a riverbank. Every now and then, the river swells and you have high water. The first few times this may come as a surprise, but soon you learn that such floods are a recurring occurrence at that river, and you make suitable preparation. Let s say you feel well-prepared against any flood that is no higher than the highest one observed so far. The more floods you have seen, the higher that mark is, and the better prepared you are. But of course, eventually a higher flood will occur that surprises you. Of course such new record floods are happening rarer and rarer as you have seen more of them. I was wondering though: By how much do the new records exceed the previous high mark? Does this excess decrease or increase over time? A priori both could be. When the high mark is already rather high, maybe new record floods will just barley pass that mark? Or maybe, simply because new records are so rare events, when they do occur, they can be surprisingly bad? This post is a leisurely mathematical investigating of this question, which of course isn t restricted to high waters; it could be anything that produces a measurement repeatedly and (mostly) independently weather events, sport results, dice rolls. The answer of course depends on the distribution of results: How likely is each possible results.

Dice are simple With dice rolls the answer is rather simple. Let our measurement be how often you can roll a die until it shows a 6. This simple game we can repeat many times, and keep track of our record. Let s say the record happens to be 7 rolls. If in the next run we roll the die 7 times, and it still does not show a 6, then we know that we have broken the record, and every further roll increases by how much we beat the old record. But note that how often we will now roll the die is completely independent of what happened before! So for this game the answer is: The excess with which the record is broken is always the same. Mathematically speaking this is because the distribution of rolls until the die shows a 6 is memoryless. Such distributions are rather special, its essentially just the example we gave (a geometric distribution), or its continuous analogue (the exponential distributions, for example the time until a radioactive particle decays).

Mathematical formulation With this out of the way, let us look at some other distributions, and for that, introduce some mathematical notations. Let X be a random variable with probability density function (x) and cumulative distribution function (x), and a be the previous record. We are interested in the behavior of Y(a) = X a X > x i.e. by how much X exceeds a under the condition that it did exceed a. How does Y change as a increases? In particular, how does the expected value of the excess e(a) = E(Y(a)) change?

Uniform distribution If X is uniformly distributed between, say, 0 and 1, then a new record will appear uniformly distributed between a and 1, and as that range gets smaller, the excess must get smaller as well. More precisely, e(a) = E(X a X > a) = E(X X > a) a = (1 a)/2 This not very interesting linear line is plotted in blue in this diagram:
The expected record surpass for the uniform distribution The expected record surpass for the uniform distribution
The orange line with the logarithmic scale on the right tries to convey how unlikely it is to surpass the record value a: it shows how many attempts we expect before the record is broken. This can be calculated by n(a) = 1/(1 (a)).

Normal distribution For the normal distribution (with median 0 and standard derivation 1, to keep things simple), we can look up the expected value of the one-sided truncated normal distribution and obtain e(a) = E(X X > a) a = (a)/(1 (a)) a Now is this growing or shrinking? We can plot this an have a quick look:
The expected record surpass for the normal distribution The expected record surpass for the normal distribution
Indeed it is, too, a decreasing function! (As a sanity check we can see that e(0) = (2/ ), which is the expected value of the half-normal distribution, as it should.)

Could it be any different? This settles my question: It seems that each new surprisingly high water will tend to be less surprising than the previously assuming high waters were uniformly or normally distributed, which is unlikely to be helpful. This does raise the question, though, if there are probability distributions for which e(a) is be increasing? I can try to construct one, and because it s a bit easier, I ll consider a discrete distribution on the positive natural numbers, and consider at g(0) = E(X) and g(1) = E(X 1 X > 1). What does it take for g(1) > g(0)? Using E(X) = p + (1 p)E(X X > 1) for p = P(X = 1) we find that in order to have g(1) > g(0), we need E(X) > 1/p. This is plausible because we get equality when E(X) = 1/p, as it precisely the case for the geometric distribution. And it is also plausible that it helps if p is large (so that the next first record is likely just 1) and if, nevertheless, E(X) is large (so that if we do get an outcome other than 1, it s much larger). Starting with the geometric distribution, where P(X > n X n) = pn = p (the probability of again not rolling a six) is constant, it seems that these pn is increasing, we get the desired behavior. So let p1 < p2 < pn < be an increasing sequence of probabilities, and define X so that P(X = n) = p1 pn 1 (1 pn) (imagine the die wears off and the more often you roll it, the less likely it shows a 6). Then for this variation of the game, every new record tends to exceed the previous more than previous records. As the p increase, we get a flatter long end in the probability distribution.

Gamma distribution To get a nice plot, I ll take the intuition from this and turn to continuous distributions. The Wikipedia page for the exponential distribution says it is a special case of the gamma distribution, which has an additional shape parameter , and it seems that it could influence the shape of the distribution to be and make the probability distribution have a longer end. Let s play around with = 2 and = 0.5, 1 and 1.5:
The expected record surpass for the gamma distribution The expected record surpass for the gamma distribution
  • For = 1 (dotted) this should just be the exponential distribution, and we see that e(a) is flat, as predicted earlier.
  • For larger (dashed) the graph does not look much different from the one for the normal distribution not a surprise, as for , the gamma distribution turns into the normal distribution.
  • For smaller (solid) we get the desired effect: e(a) is increasing. This means that new records tend to break records more impressively.
The orange line shows that this comes at a cost: for a given old record a, new records are harder to come by with smaller .

Conclusion As usual, it all depends on the distribution. Otherwise, not much, it s late.

19 June 2024

Sahil Dhiman: First Iteration of My Free Software Mirror

As I m gearing towards setting up a Free Software download mirror in India, it occurred to me that I haven t chronicled the work and motivation behind setting up the original mirror in the first place. Also, seems like it would be good to document stuff here for observing the progression, as the mirror is going multi-country now. Right now, my existing mirror i.e., mirrors.de.sahilister.net (was mirrors.sahilister.in), is hosted in Germany and serves traffic for Termux, NomadBSD, Blender, BlendOS and GIMP. For a while in between, it hosted OSMC project mirror as well. To explain what is a Free Software download mirror thing is first, I ll quote myself from work blog -
As most Free Software doesn t have commercial backing and require heavy downloads, the concept of software download mirrors helps take the traffic load off of the primary server, leading to geographical redundancy, higher availability and faster download in general.
So whenever someone wants to download a particular (mirrored) software and click download, upstream redirects the download to one of the mirror server which is geographical (or in other parameters) nearby to the user, leading to faster downloads and load sharing amongst all mirrors. Since the time I got into Linux and servers, I always wanted to help the community somehow, and mirroring seemed to be the most obvious thing. India seems to be a country which has traditionally seen less number of public download mirrors. IITB, TiFR, and some of the public institutions used to host them for popular Linux and Free Softwares, but they seem to be diminishing these days. In the last months of 2021, I started using Termux and saw that it had only a few mirrors (back then). I tried getting a high capacity, high bandwidth node in budget but it was hard in India in 2021-22. So after much deliberation, I decided to go where it s available and chose a German hosting provider with the thought of adding India node when conditions are favorable (thankfully that happened, and India node is live too now.). Termux required only 29 GB of storage, so went ahead and started mirroring it. I raised this issue in Termux s GitHub repository in January 2022. This blog post chronicles the start of the mirror. Termux has high request counts from a mirror point of view. Each Termux client, usually checks every mirror in selected group for availability before randomly selecting one for download (only other case is when client has explicitly selected a single mirror using termux-repo-change). The mirror started getting thousands of requests daily due to this but only a small percentage would actually get my mirror in selection, so download traffic was lower. Similar thing happened with OSMC too (which I started mirroring later). With this start, I started exploring various project that would be benefit from additional mirrors. Public information from Academic Computer Club in Ume s mirror and Freedif s mirror stats helped to figure out storage and bandwidth requirements for potential projects. Fun fact, Academic Computer Club in Ume (which is one of the prominent Debian, Ubuntu etc.) mirror, now has 200 Gbits/s uplink to the internet through SUNET. Later, I migrated to a different provider for better speeds and added LibreSpeed test on the mirror server. Those were fun times. Between OSMC, Termux and LibreSpeed, I was getting almost 1.2 millions hits/day on the server at its peak, crossing for the first time a TB/day traffic number. Next came Blender, which took the longest time to set up of around 9 10 months. Blender had a push-trigger requirement for rsync from upstream that took quite some back and forth. It now contributes the most amount of traffic on the mirror. On release days, mirror does more than 3 TB/day and normal days, it hovers around 2 TB/day. Gimp project is the latest addition. At one time, the mirror traffic touched 4.97 TB/day traffic number. That s when I decided on dropping LibreSpeed server to solely focus on mirroring for now, keeping the bandwidth allotment for serving downloads only. The mirror projects selection grew organically. I used to reach out many projects discussing the need of for additional mirrors. Some projects outright denied mirroring request as Germany already has a good academic mirrors boosting 20-25 Gbits/s speeds from FTP era, which seems fair. Finding the niche was essential to only add softwares, which would truly benefit from additional capacity. There were months when nothing much would happen with the mirror, rsync would continue to update the mirror while nginx would keep on serving the traffic. Nowadays, the mirror pushes around 70 TB/month. I occasionally check logs, vnstat, add new security stuff here and there and pay the bills. It now saturates the Gigabit link sometimes and goes beyond that, peaking around 1.42 Gbits/s (the hosting provider seems to be upping their game). The plan is to upgrade the link to better speeds. vnstat yearly
Yearly traffic stats (through vnstat -y )
On the way, learned quite a few things like - GeoIP Map of Clients from Yesterday Access Logs
GeoIP Map of Clients from Yesterday's Access Logs. Click to enlarge
Generated from IPinfo.io
In hindsight, the statistics look amazing, hundreds of TBs of traffic served from the mirror, month after month. That does show that there s still an appetite for public mirrors in time of commercially donated CDNs and GitHub. The world could have done with one less mirror, but it saved some time, lessened the burden for others, while providing redundancy and traffic localization with one additional mirror. And it s fun for someone like me who s into infrastructure that powers the Internet. Now, I ll try focusing and expanding the India mirror, which in itself started pushing almost half a TB/day. Long live Free Software and public download mirrors.

26 May 2024

Russell Coker: USB-A vs USB-C

USB-A is the original socket for USB at the PC end. There are 2 variants of it, the first is for USB 1.1 to USB 2 and the second is for USB 3 which adds extra pins in a plug and socket compatible manner you can plug a USB-A device into a USB-A socket without worrying about the speeds of each end as long as you don t need USB 3 speeds. The differences between USB-A and USB-C are:
  1. USB-C has the same form factor as Thunderbolt and the Thunderbolt protocol can run over it if both ends support it.
  2. USB-C generally supports higher power modes for charging (like 130W for Dell laptops, monitors, and plugpacks) but there s no technical reason why USB-A couldn t do it. You can buy chargers that do 60W over USB-A which could power one of our laptops via a USB-A to USB-C cable. So high power USB-A is theoretically possible but generally you won t see it.
  3. USB-C has DisplayPort alternate mode which means using some of the wires for DisplayPort.
  4. USB-C is more likely to support the highest speeds than USB-A sockets for super speed etc. This is not a difference in the standards just a choice made by manufacturers.
While USB-C tends to support higher power delivery modes in actual implementations for connecting to a PC the PC end seems to only support lower power modes regardless of port. I think it would be really good if workstations could connect to monitors via USB-C and provide power, DisplayPort, and keyboard, mouse, etc over the same connection. But unfortunately the PC and monitor ends don t appear to support such things. If you don t need any of those benefits in the list above (IE you are using USB for almost anything we do other than connecting a laptop to a dock/monitor/charger) then USB-A will do the job just as well as USB-C. The choice of which type to use should be based on price and which ports are available, EG My laptop has 2*USB-C ports and 2*USB-A so given that one USB-C port is almost always used for the monitor or for charging I don t really want to use USB-C for anything else to avoid running out of ports. When buying USB devices you can t always predict which systems you will need to connect them to. Currently there are a lot of systems without USB-C that are working well and have no need to be replaced. I haven t yet seen a system where the majority of ports are USB-C but that will probably happen in the next few years. Maybe in 2027 there will be PCs on sale with only two USB-A sockets forcing people who don t want to use a USB hub to save both of them for keyboard and mouse. Currently USB-C keyboards and mice are available on AliExpress but they are expensive and I haven t seen them in Australian stores. Most computer users don t wear out keyboards or mice so a lot of USB-A keyboard and mice will be in service for a long time. As an aside there are still many PCs with PS/2 keyboard and mouse ports in service so these things don t go away for a long time. There is one corner case where USB-C is convenient which is when you want to connect a mass storage device for system recovery or emergency backup, want a high speed, and don t want to spend time figuring out which of the ports are super speed (which can be difficult at the back of a PC with poor lighting). With USB-C you can expect a speed of at least 5Gbit/s and don t have to worry about accidentally connecting to a USB 2 port as is the situation with USB-A. For my own use the only times that I prefer USB-C over USB-A are for devices to connect to phones. Eventually I ll get a laptop that only has USB-C ports and this will change, but even then adaptors are possible. For someone who doesn t know the details of how things works it s not unreasonable to just buy the newest stuff and assume it s better as it usually is. But hopefully blog posts like this can help people make more informed decisions.

20 May 2024

Russell Coker: Respect and Children

I attended the school Yarra Valley Grammer (then Yarra Valley Anglican School which I will refer to as YV ) and completed year 12 in 1990. The school is currently in the news for a spreadsheet some boys made rating girls where unrapeable was one of the ratings. The school s PR team are now making claims like Respect for each other is in the DNA of this school . I d like to know when this DNA change allegedly occurred because respect definitely wasn t in the school DNA in 1990! Before I go any further I have to note that if the school threatens legal action against me for this post it will be clear evidence that they don t believe in respect. The actions of that school have wronged me, several of my friends, many people who aren t friends but who I wish they hadn t had to suffer and I hadn t had to witness it, and presumably countless others that I didn t witness. If they have any decency they would not consider legal action but I have learned that as an institution they have no decency so I have to note that they should read the Wikipedia page about the Streisand Effect [1] and keep it in mind before deciding on a course of action. I think it is possible to create a school where most kids enjoy being there and enjoy learning, where hardly any students find it a negative experience and almost no-one finds it traumatic. But it is not possible to do that with the way schools tend to be run. When I was at high school there was a general culture that minor sex crimes committed by boys against boys weren t a problem, this probably applied to all high schools. Things like ripping a boy s pants off (known as dakking ) were considered a big joke. If you accept that ripping the pants off an unwilling boy is a good thing (as was the case when I was at school) then that leads to thinking that describing girls as unrapeable is acceptable. The Wikipedia page for Pantsing [2] has a reference for this issue being raised as a serious problem by the British Secretary of State for Education and Skills Alan Johnson in 2007. So this has continued to be a widespread problem around the world. Has YV become better than other schools in dealing with it or is Dakking and Wedgies as well accepted now as it was when I attended? There is talk about schools preparing kids for the workforce, but grabbing someone s underpants without consent will result in instant dismissal from almost all employment. There should be more tolerance for making mistakes at school than at work, but they shouldn t tolerate what would be serious crimes in other contexts. For work environments there have been significant changes to what is accepted, so it doesn t seem unreasonable to expect that schools can have a similar change in culture. One would hope that spending 6 years wondering who s going to grab your underpants next would teach boys the importance of consent and some sympathy for victims of other forms of sexual assault. But that doesn t seem to happen, apparently it s often the opposite. When I was young Autism wasn t diagnosed for anyone who was capable of having a normal life. Teachers noticed that I wasn t like other kids, some were nice, but some encouraged other boys to attack me as a form of corporal punishment by proxy not a punishment for doing anything wrong (detentions were adequate for that) but for being different. The lesson kids will take from that sort of thing is that if you are in a position of power you can mistreat other people and get away with it. There was a girl in my year level at YV who would probably be diagnosed as Autistic by today s standards, the way I witnessed her being treated was considerably worse than what was described in the recent news reports but it is quite likely that worse things have been done recently which haven t made the news yet. If this issue is declared to be over after 4 boys were expelled then I ll count that as evidence of a cover-up. These things don t happen in a vacuum, there s a culture that permits and encourages it. The word respect has different meanings, it can mean treat a superior as the master or treat someone as a human being . The phrase if you treat me with respect I ll treat you with respect usually means if you treat me as the boss then I ll treat you as a human being . The distinction is very important when discussing respect in schools. If teachers are considered the ultimate bosses whose behaviour can never be questioned then many boys won t need much help from Andrew Tate in developing the belief that they should be the boss of girls in the same way. Do any schools have a process for having students review teachers? Does YV have an ombudsman to take reports of misbehaving teachers in the way that corporations typically have an ombudsman to take reports about bad managers? Any time you have people whose behaviour is beyond scrutiny or oversight you will inevitably have bad people apply for jobs, then bad things will happen and it will create a culture of bad behaviour. If teachers can treat kids badly then kids will treat other kids badly, and this generally ends with girls being treated badly by boys. My experience at YV was that kids barely had the status of people. It seemed that the school operated more as a caretaker of the property of parents than as an organisation that cares for people. The current YV website has a Whistleblower policy [3] that has only one occurrence of the word student and that is about issues that endanger the health or safety of students. Students are the people most vulnerable to reprisal for complaining and not being listed as an eligible whistleblower shows their status. The web site also has a flowchart for complaints and grievances [4] which doesn t describe any policy for a complaint to be initiated by a student. One would hope that parents would advocate for their children but that often isn t the case. When discussing the possibility of boys being bullied at school with parents I ve had them say things like my son wouldn t be so weak that he would be bullied , no boy will tell his parents about being bullied if that s their attitude! I imagine that there are similar but different issues of parents victim-blaming when their daughter is bullied (presumably substituting immoral for weak) but don t have direct knowledge of the topic. The experience of many kids is being disrespected by their parents, the school system, and often siblings too. A school can t solve all the world s problems but can ideally be a refuge for kids who have problems at home. When I was at school the culture in the country and the school was homophobic. One teacher when discussing issues such as how students could tell him if they had psychological problems and no-one else to talk to said some things like the Village People make really good music which was the only time any teacher said anything like It s OK to be gay (the Village People were the gayest pop group at the time). A lot of the bullying at school had a sexual component to it. In addition to the wedgies and dakking (which while not happening often was something you had to constantly be aware of) I routinely avoided PE classes where a shower was necessary because of a thug who hung around by the showers and looked hungrily at my penis, I don t know if he had a particular liking to mine or if he stared at everyone that way. Flashing and perving was quite common in change rooms. Presumably as such boy-boy sexual misbehaviour was so accepted that led to boys mistreating girls. I currently work for a company that is active in telling it s employees about the possibility of free psychological assistance. Any employee can phone a psychologist to discuss problems (whether or not they are work related) free of charge and without their manager or colleagues knowing. The company is billed and is only given a breakdown of the number of people who used the service and roughly what the issue was (work stress, family, friends, grief, etc). When something noteworthy happens employees are given reminders about this such as if you need help after seeing a homeless man try to steal a laptop from the office then feel free to call the assistance program . Do schools offer something similar? With the school fees paid to a school like YV they should be able to afford plenty of psychologist time. Every day I was at YV I saw something considerably worse than laptop theft, most days something was done to me. The problems with schools are part of larger problems with society. About half of the adults in Australia still support the Liberal party in spite of their support of Christian Porter, Cardinal Pell, and Bruce Lehrmann. It s not logical to expect such parents to discourage their sons from mistreating girls or to encourage their daughters to complain when they are mistreated. The Anglican church has recently changed it s policy to suggesting that victims of sexual abuse can contact the police instead of or in addition to the church, previously they had encouraged victims to only contact the church which facilitated cover-ups. One would hope that schools associated with the Anglican church have also changed their practices towards such things. I approve of the respect is in our DNA concept, it s like Google s former slogan of Don t be evil which is something that they can be bound to. Here s a list of questions that could be asked of schools (not just YV but all schools) by journalists when reporting on such things:
  1. Do you have a policy of not trying to silence past students who have been treated badly?
  2. Do you take all sexual assaults seriously including wedgies and dakking?
  3. Do you take all violence at school seriously? Even if there s no blood? Even if the victim says they don t want to make an issue of it?
  4. What are your procedures to deal with misbehaviour from teachers? Do the students all know how to file complaints? Do they know that they can file a complaint if they aren t the victim?
  5. Does the school have policies against homophobia and transphobia and are they enforced?
  6. Does the school offer free psychological assistance to students and staff who need it? NB This only applies to private schools like YV that have huge amounts of money, public schools can t afford that.
  7. Are serious incidents investigated by people who are independent of the school and who don t have a vested interest in keeping things quiet?
  8. Do you encourage students to seek external help from organisations like the ones on the resources list of the Grace Tame Foundation [5]? Having your own list of recommended external organisations would be good too.
Counter Arguments I ve had practice debating such things, here s some responses to common counter arguments. Conclusion I don t think that YV is necessarily worse than other schools, although I m sure that representatives of other private schools are now working to assure parents of students and prospective students that they are. I don t think that all the people who were employed as teachers there when I attended were bad people, some of them were nice people who were competent teachers. But a few good people can t turn around a bad system. I will note that when I attended all the sports teachers were decent people, it was the only department I could say such things about. But sports involves situations that can lead to a bad result, issues started at other times and places can lead to violence or harassment in PE classes regardless of how good the teachers are. Teachers who know that there are problems need to be able to raise issues with the administration. When a teacher quits teaching to join the clergy and another teacher describes it as a loss for the clergy but a gain for YV it raises the question of why the bad teacher in question couldn t have been encouraged to leave earlier. A significant portion of the population will do whatever is permitted. If you say no teacher would ever bully a student so we don t need to look out for that then some teacher will do exactly that. I hope that this will lead to changes both in YV and in other schools. But if they declare this issue as resolved after expelling 4 students then something similar or worse will happen again. At least now students know that when this sort of thing happens they can send evidence to journalists to get some action.

14 May 2024

Julian Andres Klode: The new APT 3.0 solver

APT 2.9.3 introduces the first iteration of the new solver codenamed solver3, and now available with the solver 3.0 option. The new solver works fundamentally different from the old one.

How does it work? Solver3 is a fully backtracking dependency solving algorithm that defers choices to as late as possible. It starts with an empty set of packages, then adds the manually installed packages, and then installs packages automatically as necessary to satisfy the dependencies. Deferring the choices is implemented multiple ways: First, all install requests recursively mark dependencies with a single solution for install, and any packages that are being rejected due to conflicts or user requests will cause their reverse dependencies to be transitively marked as rejected, provided their or group cannot be solved by a different package. Second, any dependency with more than one choice is pushed to a priority queue that is ordered by the number of possible solutions, such that we resolve a b before a b c. Not just by the number of solutions, though. One important point to note is that optional dependencies, that is, Recommends, are always sorting after mandatory dependencies. Do note on that: Recommended packages do not nest in backtracking - dependencies of a Recommended package themselves are not optional, so they will have to be resolved before the next Recommended package is seen in the queue. Another important step in deferring choices is extracting the common dependencies of a package across its version and then installing them before we even decide which of its versions we want to install - one of the dependencies might cycle back to a specific version after all. Decisions about package levels are recorded at a certain decision level, if we reach a conflict we backtrack to the previous decision level, mark the decision we made (install X) in the inverse (DO NOT INSTALL X), reset all the state all decisions made at the higher level, and restore any dependencies that are no longer resolved to the work queue.

Comparison to SAT solver design. If you have studied SAT solver design, you ll find that essentially this is a DPLL solver without pure literal elimination. A pure literal eliminitation phase would not work for a package manager: First negative pure literals (packages that everything conflicts with) do not exist, and positive pure literals (packages nothing conflicts with) we do not want to mark for install - we want to install as little as possible (well subject, to policy). As part of the solving phase, we also construct an implication graph, albeit a partial one: The first package installing another package is marked as the reason (A -> B), the same thing for conflicts (not A -> not B). Once we have added the ability to have multiple parents in the implication graph, it stands to reason that we can also implement the much more advanced method of conflict-driven clause learning; where we do not jump back to the previous decision level but exactly to the decision level that caused the conflict. This would massively speed up backtracking.

What changes can you expect in behavior? The most striking difference to the classic APT solver is that solver3 always keeps manually installed packages around, it never offers to remove them. We will relax that in a future iteration so that it can replace packages with new ones, that is, if your package is no longer available in the repository (obsolete), but there is one that Conflicts+Replaces+Provides it, solver3 will be allowed to install that and remove the other. Implementing that policy is rather trivial: We just need to queue obsolete replacement as a dependency to solve, rather than mark the obsolete package for install. Another critical difference is the change in the autoremove behavior: The new solver currently only knows the strongest dependency chain to each package, and hence it will not keep around any packages that are only reachable via weaker chains. A common example is when gcc-<version> packages accumulate on your system over the years. They all have Provides: c-compiler and the libtool Depends: gcc c-compiler is enough to keep them around.

New features The new option --no-strict-pinning instructs the solver to consider all versions of a package and not just the candidate version. For example, you could use apt install foo=2.0 --no-strict-pinning to install version 2.0 of foo and upgrade - or downgrade - packages as needed to satisfy foo=2.0 dependencies. This mostly comes in handy in use cases involving Debian experimental or the Ubuntu proposed pockets, where you want to install a package from there, but try to satisfy from the normal release as much as possible. The implication graph building allows us to implement an apt why command, that while not as nicely detailed as aptitude, at least tells you the exact reason why a package is installed. It will only show the strongest dependency chain at first of course, since that is what we record.

What is left to do? At the moment, error information is not stored across backtracking in any way, but we generally will want to show you the first conflict we reach as it is the most natural one; or all conflicts. Currently you get the last conflict which may not be particularly useful. Likewise, errors currently are just rendered as implication graphs of the form [not] A -> [not] B -> ..., and we need to put in some work to present those nicely. The test suite is not passing yet, I haven t really started working on it. A challenge is that most packages in the test suite are manually installed as they are mocked, and the solver now doesn t remove those. We plan to implement the replacement logic such that foo can be replaced by foo2 Conflicts/Replaces/Provides foo without needing to be automatically installed. Improving the backtracking to be non-chronological conflict-driven clause learning would vastly enhance our backtracking performance. Not that it seems to be an issue right now in my limited testing (mostly noble 64-bit-time_t upgrades). A lot of that complexity you have normally is not there because the manually installed packages and resulting unit propagation (single-solution Depends/Reverse-Depends for Conflicts) already ground us fairly far in what changes we can actually make. Once all the stuff has landed, we need to start rolling it out and gather feedback. On Ubuntu I d like automated feedback on regressions (running solver3 in parallel, checking if result is worse and then submitting an error to the error tracker), on Debian this could just be a role email address to send solver dumps to. At the same time, we can also incrementally start rolling this out. Like phased updates in Ubuntu, we can also roll out the new solver as the default to 10%, 20%, 50% of users before going to the full 100%. This will allow us to capture regressions early and fix them.

Freexian Collaborators: Monthly report about Debian Long Term Support, April 2024 (by Roberto C. S nchez)

Like each month, have a look at the work funded by Freexian s Debian LTS offering.

Debian LTS contributors In April, 19 contributors have been paid to work on Debian LTS, their reports are available:
  • Abhijith PA did 0.5h (out of 0.0h assigned and 14.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 13.5h to the next month.
  • Adrian Bunk did 35.75h (out of 17.25h assigned and 40.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 22.0h to the next month.
  • Bastien Roucari s did 25.0h (out of 25.0h assigned).
  • Ben Hutchings did 24.0h (out of 9.0h assigned and 15.0h from previous period).
  • Chris Lamb did 18.0h (out of 18.0h assigned).
  • Daniel Leidert did 10.0h (out of 10.0h assigned).
  • Emilio Pozuelo Monfort did 46.0h (out of 12.0h assigned and 34.0h from previous period).
  • Guilhem Moulin did 14.75h (out of 20.0h assigned), thus carrying over 5.25h to the next month.
  • Lee Garrett did 51.25h (out of 0.0h assigned and 60.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 8.75h to the next month.
  • Markus Koschany did 40.0h (out of 40.0h assigned).
  • Ola Lundqvist did 22.5h (out of 19.5h assigned and 4.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 1.5h to the next month.
  • Roberto C. S nchez did 11.0h (out of 9.25h assigned and 2.75h from previous period), thus carrying over 1.0h to the next month.
  • Santiago Ruano Rinc n did 20.0h (out of 20.0h assigned).
  • Sean Whitton did 9.5h (out of 4.5h assigned and 5.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 0.5h to the next month.
  • Stefano Rivera did 1.5h (out of 0.0h assigned and 10.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 8.5h to the next month.
  • Sylvain Beucler did 12.5h (out of 22.75h assigned and 35.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 45.25h to the next month.
  • Thorsten Alteholz did 14.0h (out of 14.0h assigned).
  • Tobias Frost did 10.0h (out of 12.0h assigned), thus carrying over 2.0h to the next month.
  • Utkarsh Gupta did 3.25h (out of 28.5h assigned and 29.25h from previous period), thus carrying over 54.5h to the next month.

Evolution of the situation In April, we have released 28 DLAs. During the month of April, there was one particularly notable security update made in LTS. Guilhem Moulin prepared DLA-3782-1 for util-linux (part of the set of base packages and containing a number of important system utilities) in order to address a possible information disclosure vulnerability. Additionally, several contributors prepared updates for oldstable (bullseye), stable (bookworm), and unstable (sid), including:
  • ruby-rack: prepared for oldstable, stable, and unstable by Adrian Bunk
  • wpa: prepared for oldstable, stable, and unstable by Bastien Roucari s
  • zookeeper: prepared for stable by Bastien Roucari s
  • libjson-smart: prepared for unstable by Bastien Roucari s
  • ansible: prepared for stable and unstable, including autopkgtest fixes to increase future supportability, by Lee Garrett
  • wordpress: prepared for oldstable and stable by Markus Koschany
  • emacs and org-mode: prepared for oldstable and stable by Sean Whitton
  • qtbase-opensource-src: prepared for oldstable and stable by Thorsten Alteholz
  • libjwt: prepared for oldstable by Thorsten Alteholz
  • libmicrohttpd: prepared for oldstable by Thorsten Alteholz
These fixes were in addition to corresponding updates in LTS. Another item to highlight in this month s report is an update to the distro-info-data database by Stefano Rivera. This update ensures that Debian buster systems have the latest available information concerning the end-of-life dates and other related information for all releases of Debian and Ubuntu. As announced on the debian-lts-announce mailing list, it is worth to point out that we are getting close to the end of support of Debian 10 as LTS. After June 30th, no new security updates will be made available on security.debian.org. However, Freexian and its team of paid Debian contributors will continue to maintain Debian 10 going forward for the customers of the Extended LTS offer. If you still have Debian 10 servers to keep secure, it s time to subscribe!

Thanks to our sponsors Sponsors that joined recently are in bold.

28 April 2024

Russell Coker: USB PSUs

I just bought a new USB PSU from AliExpress [1]. I got this to reduce the clutter in my bedroom, I charge my laptop, PineTime, and a few phones at the same time and a single PSU with lots of ports makes it easier. Also I bought a couple of really short USB-C cables as it s been proven by both real life tests and mathematical modelling that shorter cables get tangled less. This power supply is based on Gallium Nitride (GaN) [2] technology which makes it efficient and cool. One thing I only learned about after that purchase is the new USB PPS standard (see the USB Wikipedia page for details [3]). The PPS (Programmable Power Supply) standard allows (quoting Wikipedia) allowing a voltage range of 3.3 to 21 V in 20 mV steps, and a current specified in 50 mA steps, to facilitate constant-voltage and constant-current charging . What this means in practice (when phones support it which for me will probably be 2029 or something) is that the phone could receive power exactly matching the voltage needed for the battery and not have any voltage conversion inside the phone. Phones are designed to stop charging at a certain temperature, this probably doesn t concern people in places like Northern Europe but in Australia it can be an issue. Removing the heat dissipation from inefficiencies in voltage change circuitry means the phone will be cooler when charging and can charge at a higher rate. There is a Certified USB Fast Charger logo for chargers which do this, but it seems that at the moment they just include PPS in the feature list. So I highly recommend that GaN and PPS be on your feature list for your next USB PSU, but failing that the 240W PSU I bought for $36 was a good deal.

18 April 2024

Jonathan McDowell: Sorting out backup internet #2: 5G modem

Having setup recursive DNS it was time to actually sort out a backup internet connection. I live in a Virgin Media area, but I still haven t forgiven them for my terrible Virgin experiences when moving here. Plus it involves a bigger contractual commitment. There are no altnets locally (though I m watching youfibre who have already rolled out in a few Belfast exchanges), so I decided to go for a 5G modem. That gives some flexibility, and is a bit easier to get up and running. I started by purchasing a ZTE MC7010. This had the advantage of being reasonably cheap off eBay, not having any wifi functionality I would just have to disable (it s going to plug it into the same router the FTTP connection terminates on), being outdoor mountable should I decide to go that way, and, finally, being powered via PoE. For now this device sits on the window sill in my study, which is at the top of the house. I printed a table stand for it which mostly does the job (though not as well with a normal, rather than flat, network cable). The router lives downstairs, so I ve extended a dedicated VLAN through the study switch, down to the core switch and out to the router. The PoE study switch can only do GigE, not 2.5Gb/s, but at present that s far from the limiting factor on the speed of the connection. The device is 3 branded, and, as it happens, I ve ended up with a 3 SIM in it. Up until recently my personal phone was with them, but they ve kicked me off Go Roam, so I ve moved. Going with 3 for the backup connection provides some slight extra measure of resiliency; we now have devices on all 4 major UK networks in the house. The SIM is a preloaded data only SIM good for a year; I don t expect to use all of the data allowance, but I didn t want to have to worry about unexpected excess charges. Performance turns out to be disappointing; I end up locking the device to 4G as the 5G signal is marginal - leaving it enabled results in constantly switching between 4G + 5G and a significant extra latency. The smokeping graph below shows a brief period where I removed the 4G lock and allowed 5G: Smokeping 4G vs 5G graph (There s a handy zte.js script to allow doing this from the device web interface.) I get about 10Mb/s sustained downloads out of it. EE/Vodafone did not lead to significantly better results, so for now I m accepting it is what it is. I tried relocating the device to another part of the house (a little tricky while still providing switch-based PoE, but I have an injector), without much improvement. Equally pinning the 4G to certain bands provided a short term improvement (I got up to 40-50Mb/s sustained), but not reliably so. speedtest.net results This is disappointing, but if it turns out to be a problem I can look at mounting it externally. I also assume as 5G is gradually rolled out further things will naturally improve, but that might be wishful thinking on my part. Rather than wait until my main link had a problem I decided to try a day working over the 5G connection. I spend a lot of my time either in browser based apps or accessing remote systems via SSH, so I m reasonably sensitive to a jittery or otherwise flaky connection. I picked a day that I did not have any meetings planned, but as it happened I ended up with an adhoc video call arranged. I m pleased to say that it all worked just fine; definitely noticeable as slower than the FTTP connection (to be expected), but all workable and even the video call was fine (at least from my end). Looking at the traffic graph shows the expected ~ 10Mb/s peak (actually a little higher, and looking at the FTTP stats for previous days not out of keeping with what we see there), and you can just about see the ~ 3Mb/s symmetric use by the video call at 2pm: 4G traffic during the work day The test run also helped iron out the fact that the content filter was still enabled on the SIM, but that was easily resolved. Up next, vaguely automatic failover.

13 April 2024

Paul Tagliamonte: Domo Arigato, Mr. debugfs

Years ago, at what I think I remember was DebConf 15, I hacked for a while on debhelper to write build-ids to debian binary control files, so that the build-id (more specifically, the ELF note .note.gnu.build-id) wound up in the Debian apt archive metadata. I ve always thought this was super cool, and seeing as how Michael Stapelberg blogged some great pointers around the ecosystem, including the fancy new debuginfod service, and the find-dbgsym-packages helper, which uses these same headers, I don t think I m the only one. At work I ve been using a lot of rust, specifically, async rust using tokio. To try and work on my style, and to dig deeper into the how and why of the decisions made in these frameworks, I ve decided to hack up a project that I ve wanted to do ever since 2015 write a debug filesystem. Let s get to it.

Back to the Future Time to admit something. I really love Plan 9. It s just so good. So many ideas from Plan 9 are just so prescient, and everything just feels right. Not just right like, feels good like, correct. The bit that I ve always liked the most is 9p, the network protocol for serving a filesystem over a network. This leads to all sorts of fun programs, like the Plan 9 ftp client being a 9p server you mount the ftp server and access files like any other files. It s kinda like if fuse were more fully a part of how the operating system worked, but fuse is all running client-side. With 9p there s a single client, and different servers that you can connect to, which may be backed by a hard drive, remote resources over something like SFTP, FTP, HTTP or even purely synthetic. The interesting (maybe sad?) part here is that 9p wound up outliving Plan 9 in terms of adoption 9p is in all sorts of places folks don t usually expect. For instance, the Windows Subsystem for Linux uses the 9p protocol to share files between Windows and Linux. ChromeOS uses it to share files with Crostini, and qemu uses 9p (virtio-p9) to share files between guest and host. If you re noticing a pattern here, you d be right; for some reason 9p is the go-to protocol to exchange files between hypervisor and guest. Why? I have no idea, except maybe due to being designed well, simple to implement, and it s a lot easier to validate the data being shared and validate security boundaries. Simplicity has its value. As a result, there s a lot of lingering 9p support kicking around. Turns out Linux can even handle mounting 9p filesystems out of the box. This means that I can deploy a filesystem to my LAN or my localhost by running a process on top of a computer that needs nothing special, and mount it over the network on an unmodified machine unlike fuse, where you d need client-specific software to run in order to mount the directory. For instance, let s mount a 9p filesystem running on my localhost machine, serving requests on 127.0.0.1:564 (tcp) that goes by the name mountpointname to /mnt.
$ mount -t 9p \
-o trans=tcp,port=564,version=9p2000.u,aname=mountpointname \
127.0.0.1 \
/mnt
Linux will mount away, and attach to the filesystem as the root user, and by default, attach to that mountpoint again for each local user that attempts to use it. Nifty, right? I think so. The server is able to keep track of per-user access and authorization along with the host OS.

WHEREIN I STYX WITH IT Since I wanted to push myself a bit more with rust and tokio specifically, I opted to implement the whole stack myself, without third party libraries on the critical path where I could avoid it. The 9p protocol (sometimes called Styx, the original name for it) is incredibly simple. It s a series of client to server requests, which receive a server to client response. These are, respectively, T messages, which transmit a request to the server, which trigger an R message in response (Reply messages). These messages are TLV payload with a very straight forward structure so straight forward, in fact, that I was able to implement a working server off nothing more than a handful of man pages. Later on after the basics worked, I found a more complete spec page that contains more information about the unix specific variant that I opted to use (9P2000.u rather than 9P2000) due to the level of Linux specific support for the 9P2000.u variant over the 9P2000 protocol.

MR ROBOTO The backend stack over at zoo is rust and tokio running i/o for an HTTP and WebRTC server. I figured I d pick something fairly similar to write my filesystem with, since 9P can be implemented on basically anything with I/O. That means tokio tcp server bits, which construct and use a 9p server, which has an idiomatic Rusty API that partially abstracts the raw R and T messages, but not so much as to cause issues with hiding implementation possibilities. At each abstraction level, there s an escape hatch allowing someone to implement any of the layers if required. I called this framework arigato which can be found over on docs.rs and crates.io.
/// Simplified version of the arigato File trait; this isn't actually
/// the same trait; there's some small cosmetic differences. The
/// actual trait can be found at:
///
/// https://docs.rs/arigato/latest/arigato/server/trait.File.html
trait File  
/// OpenFile is the type returned by this File via an Open call.
 type OpenFile: OpenFile;
/// Return the 9p Qid for this file. A file is the same if the Qid is
 /// the same. A Qid contains information about the mode of the file,
 /// version of the file, and a unique 64 bit identifier.
 fn qid(&self) -> Qid;
/// Construct the 9p Stat struct with metadata about a file.
 async fn stat(&self) -> FileResult<Stat>;
/// Attempt to update the file metadata.
 async fn wstat(&mut self, s: &Stat) -> FileResult<()>;
/// Traverse the filesystem tree.
 async fn walk(&self, path: &[&str]) -> FileResult<(Option<Self>, Vec<Self>)>;
/// Request that a file's reference be removed from the file tree.
 async fn unlink(&mut self) -> FileResult<()>;
/// Create a file at a specific location in the file tree.
 async fn create(
&mut self,
name: &str,
perm: u16,
ty: FileType,
mode: OpenMode,
extension: &str,
) -> FileResult<Self>;
/// Open the File, returning a handle to the open file, which handles
 /// file i/o. This is split into a second type since it is genuinely
 /// unrelated -- and the fact that a file is Open or Closed can be
 /// handled by the  arigato  server for us.
 async fn open(&mut self, mode: OpenMode) -> FileResult<Self::OpenFile>;
 
/// Simplified version of the arigato OpenFile trait; this isn't actually
/// the same trait; there's some small cosmetic differences. The
/// actual trait can be found at:
///
/// https://docs.rs/arigato/latest/arigato/server/trait.OpenFile.html
trait OpenFile  
/// iounit to report for this file. The iounit reported is used for Read
 /// or Write operations to signal, if non-zero, the maximum size that is
 /// guaranteed to be transferred atomically.
 fn iounit(&self) -> u32;
/// Read some number of bytes up to  buf.len()  from the provided
 ///  offset  of the underlying file. The number of bytes read is
 /// returned.
 async fn read_at(
&mut self,
buf: &mut [u8],
offset: u64,
) -> FileResult<u32>;
/// Write some number of bytes up to  buf.len()  from the provided
 ///  offset  of the underlying file. The number of bytes written
 /// is returned.
 fn write_at(
&mut self,
buf: &mut [u8],
offset: u64,
) -> FileResult<u32>;
 

Thanks, decade ago paultag! Let s do it! Let s use arigato to implement a 9p filesystem we ll call debugfs that will serve all the debug files shipped according to the Packages metadata from the apt archive. We ll fetch the Packages file and construct a filesystem based on the reported Build-Id entries. For those who don t know much about how an apt repo works, here s the 2-second crash course on what we re doing. The first is to fetch the Packages file, which is specific to a binary architecture (such as amd64, arm64 or riscv64). That architecture is specific to a component (such as main, contrib or non-free). That component is specific to a suite, such as stable, unstable or any of its aliases (bullseye, bookworm, etc). Let s take a look at the Packages.xz file for the unstable-debug suite, main component, for all amd64 binaries.
$ curl \
https://deb.debian.org/debian-debug/dists/unstable-debug/main/binary-amd64/Packages.xz \
  unxz
This will return the Debian-style rfc2822-like headers, which is an export of the metadata contained inside each .deb file which apt (or other tools that can use the apt repo format) use to fetch information about debs. Let s take a look at the debug headers for the netlabel-tools package in unstable which is a package named netlabel-tools-dbgsym in unstable-debug.
Package: netlabel-tools-dbgsym
Source: netlabel-tools (0.30.0-1)
Version: 0.30.0-1+b1
Installed-Size: 79
Maintainer: Paul Tagliamonte <paultag@debian.org>
Architecture: amd64
Depends: netlabel-tools (= 0.30.0-1+b1)
Description: debug symbols for netlabel-tools
Auto-Built-Package: debug-symbols
Build-Ids: e59f81f6573dadd5d95a6e4474d9388ab2777e2a
Description-md5: a0e587a0cf730c88a4010f78562e6db7
Section: debug
Priority: optional
Filename: pool/main/n/netlabel-tools/netlabel-tools-dbgsym_0.30.0-1+b1_amd64.deb
Size: 62776
SHA256: 0e9bdb087617f0350995a84fb9aa84541bc4df45c6cd717f2157aa83711d0c60
So here, we can parse the package headers in the Packages.xz file, and store, for each Build-Id, the Filename where we can fetch the .deb at. Each .deb contains a number of files but we re only really interested in the files inside the .deb located at or under /usr/lib/debug/.build-id/, which you can find in debugfs under rfc822.rs. It s crude, and very single-purpose, but I m feeling a bit lazy.

Who needs dpkg?! For folks who haven t seen it yet, a .deb file is a special type of .ar file, that contains (usually) three files inside debian-binary, control.tar.xz and data.tar.xz. The core of an .ar file is a fixed size (60 byte) entry header, followed by the specified size number of bytes.
[8 byte .ar file magic]
[60 byte entry header]
[N bytes of data]
[60 byte entry header]
[N bytes of data]
[60 byte entry header]
[N bytes of data]
...
First up was to implement a basic ar parser in ar.rs. Before we get into using it to parse a deb, as a quick diversion, let s break apart a .deb file by hand something that is a bit of a rite of passage (or at least it used to be? I m getting old) during the Debian nm (new member) process, to take a look at where exactly the .debug file lives inside the .deb file.
$ ar x netlabel-tools-dbgsym_0.30.0-1+b1_amd64.deb
$ ls
control.tar.xz debian-binary
data.tar.xz netlabel-tools-dbgsym_0.30.0-1+b1_amd64.deb
$ tar --list -f data.tar.xz   grep '.debug$'
./usr/lib/debug/.build-id/e5/9f81f6573dadd5d95a6e4474d9388ab2777e2a.debug
Since we know quite a bit about the structure of a .deb file, and I had to implement support from scratch anyway, I opted to implement a (very!) basic debfile parser using HTTP Range requests. HTTP Range requests, if supported by the server (denoted by a accept-ranges: bytes HTTP header in response to an HTTP HEAD request to that file) means that we can add a header such as range: bytes=8-68 to specifically request that the returned GET body be the byte range provided (in the above case, the bytes starting from byte offset 8 until byte offset 68). This means we can fetch just the ar file entry from the .deb file until we get to the file inside the .deb we are interested in (in our case, the data.tar.xz file) at which point we can request the body of that file with a final range request. I wound up writing a struct to handle a read_at-style API surface in hrange.rs, which we can pair with ar.rs above and start to find our data in the .deb remotely without downloading and unpacking the .deb at all. After we have the body of the data.tar.xz coming back through the HTTP response, we get to pipe it through an xz decompressor (this kinda sucked in Rust, since a tokio AsyncRead is not the same as an http Body response is not the same as std::io::Read, is not the same as an async (or sync) Iterator is not the same as what the xz2 crate expects; leading me to read blocks of data to a buffer and stuff them through the decoder by looping over the buffer for each lzma2 packet in a loop), and tarfile parser (similarly troublesome). From there we get to iterate over all entries in the tarfile, stopping when we reach our file of interest. Since we can t seek, but gdb needs to, we ll pull it out of the stream into a Cursor<Vec<u8>> in-memory and pass a handle to it back to the user. From here on out its a matter of gluing together a File traited struct in debugfs, and serving the filesystem over TCP using arigato. Done deal!

A quick diversion about compression I was originally hoping to avoid transferring the whole tar file over the network (and therefore also reading the whole debug file into ram, which objectively sucks), but quickly hit issues with figuring out a way around seeking around an xz file. What s interesting is xz has a great primitive to solve this specific problem (specifically, use a block size that allows you to seek to the block as close to your desired seek position just before it, only discarding at most block size - 1 bytes), but data.tar.xz files generated by dpkg appear to have a single mega-huge block for the whole file. I don t know why I would have expected any different, in retrospect. That means that this now devolves into the base case of How do I seek around an lzma2 compressed data stream ; which is a lot more complex of a question. Thankfully, notoriously brilliant tianon was nice enough to introduce me to Jon Johnson who did something super similar adapted a technique to seek inside a compressed gzip file, which lets his service oci.dag.dev seek through Docker container images super fast based on some prior work such as soci-snapshotter, gztool, and zran.c. He also pulled this party trick off for apk based distros over at apk.dag.dev, which seems apropos. Jon was nice enough to publish a lot of his work on this specifically in a central place under the name targz on his GitHub, which has been a ton of fun to read through. The gist is that, by dumping the decompressor s state (window of previous bytes, in-memory data derived from the last N-1 bytes) at specific checkpoints along with the compressed data stream offset in bytes and decompressed offset in bytes, one can seek to that checkpoint in the compressed stream and pick up where you left off creating a similar block mechanism against the wishes of gzip. It means you d need to do an O(n) run over the file, but every request after that will be sped up according to the number of checkpoints you ve taken. Given the complexity of xz and lzma2, I don t think this is possible for me at the moment especially given most of the files I ll be requesting will not be loaded from again especially when I can just cache the debug header by Build-Id. I want to implement this (because I m generally curious and Jon has a way of getting someone excited about compression schemes, which is not a sentence I thought I d ever say out loud), but for now I m going to move on without this optimization. Such a shame, since it kills a lot of the work that went into seeking around the .deb file in the first place, given the debian-binary and control.tar.gz members are so small.

The Good First, the good news right? It works! That s pretty cool. I m positive my younger self would be amused and happy to see this working; as is current day paultag. Let s take debugfs out for a spin! First, we need to mount the filesystem. It even works on an entirely unmodified, stock Debian box on my LAN, which is huge. Let s take it for a spin:
$ mount \
-t 9p \
-o trans=tcp,version=9p2000.u,aname=unstable-debug \
192.168.0.2 \
/usr/lib/debug/.build-id/
And, let s prove to ourselves that this actually mounted before we go trying to use it:
$ mount   grep build-id
192.168.0.2 on /usr/lib/debug/.build-id type 9p (rw,relatime,aname=unstable-debug,access=user,trans=tcp,version=9p2000.u,port=564)
Slick. We ve got an open connection to the server, where our host will keep a connection alive as root, attached to the filesystem provided in aname. Let s take a look at it.
$ ls /usr/lib/debug/.build-id/
00 0d 1a 27 34 41 4e 5b 68 75 82 8E 9b a8 b5 c2 CE db e7 f3
01 0e 1b 28 35 42 4f 5c 69 76 83 8f 9c a9 b6 c3 cf dc E7 f4
02 0f 1c 29 36 43 50 5d 6a 77 84 90 9d aa b7 c4 d0 dd e8 f5
03 10 1d 2a 37 44 51 5e 6b 78 85 91 9e ab b8 c5 d1 de e9 f6
04 11 1e 2b 38 45 52 5f 6c 79 86 92 9f ac b9 c6 d2 df ea f7
05 12 1f 2c 39 46 53 60 6d 7a 87 93 a0 ad ba c7 d3 e0 eb f8
06 13 20 2d 3a 47 54 61 6e 7b 88 94 a1 ae bb c8 d4 e1 ec f9
07 14 21 2e 3b 48 55 62 6f 7c 89 95 a2 af bc c9 d5 e2 ed fa
08 15 22 2f 3c 49 56 63 70 7d 8a 96 a3 b0 bd ca d6 e3 ee fb
09 16 23 30 3d 4a 57 64 71 7e 8b 97 a4 b1 be cb d7 e4 ef fc
0a 17 24 31 3e 4b 58 65 72 7f 8c 98 a5 b2 bf cc d8 E4 f0 fd
0b 18 25 32 3f 4c 59 66 73 80 8d 99 a6 b3 c0 cd d9 e5 f1 fe
0c 19 26 33 40 4d 5a 67 74 81 8e 9a a7 b4 c1 ce da e6 f2 ff
Outstanding. Let s try using gdb to debug a binary that was provided by the Debian archive, and see if it ll load the ELF by build-id from the right .deb in the unstable-debug suite:
$ gdb -q /usr/sbin/netlabelctl
Reading symbols from /usr/sbin/netlabelctl...
Reading symbols from /usr/lib/debug/.build-id/e5/9f81f6573dadd5d95a6e4474d9388ab2777e2a.debug...
(gdb)
Yes! Yes it will!
$ file /usr/lib/debug/.build-id/e5/9f81f6573dadd5d95a6e4474d9388ab2777e2a.debug
/usr/lib/debug/.build-id/e5/9f81f6573dadd5d95a6e4474d9388ab2777e2a.debug: ELF 64-bit LSB shared object, x86-64, version 1 (SYSV), dynamically linked, interpreter *empty*, BuildID[sha1]=e59f81f6573dadd5d95a6e4474d9388ab2777e2a, for GNU/Linux 3.2.0, with debug_info, not stripped

The Bad Linux s support for 9p is mainline, which is great, but it s not robust. Network issues or server restarts will wedge the mountpoint (Linux can t reconnect when the tcp connection breaks), and things that work fine on local filesystems get translated in a way that causes a lot of network chatter for instance, just due to the way the syscalls are translated, doing an ls, will result in a stat call for each file in the directory, even though linux had just got a stat entry for every file while it was resolving directory names. On top of that, Linux will serialize all I/O with the server, so there s no concurrent requests for file information, writes, or reads pending at the same time to the server; and read and write throughput will degrade as latency increases due to increasing round-trip time, even though there are offsets included in the read and write calls. It works well enough, but is frustrating to run up against, since there s not a lot you can do server-side to help with this beyond implementing the 9P2000.L variant (which, maybe is worth it).

The Ugly Unfortunately, we don t know the file size(s) until we ve actually opened the underlying tar file and found the correct member, so for most files, we don t know the real size to report when getting a stat. We can t parse the tarfiles for every stat call, since that d make ls even slower (bummer). Only hiccup is that when I report a filesize of zero, gdb throws a bit of a fit; let s try with a size of 0 to start:
$ ls -lah /usr/lib/debug/.build-id/e5/9f81f6573dadd5d95a6e4474d9388ab2777e2a.debug
-r--r--r-- 1 root root 0 Dec 31 1969 /usr/lib/debug/.build-id/e5/9f81f6573dadd5d95a6e4474d9388ab2777e2a.debug
$ gdb -q /usr/sbin/netlabelctl
Reading symbols from /usr/sbin/netlabelctl...
Reading symbols from /usr/lib/debug/.build-id/e5/9f81f6573dadd5d95a6e4474d9388ab2777e2a.debug...
warning: Discarding section .note.gnu.build-id which has a section size (24) larger than the file size [in module /usr/lib/debug/.build-id/e5/9f81f6573dadd5d95a6e4474d9388ab2777e2a.debug]
[...]
This obviously won t work since gdb will throw away all our hard work because of stat s output, and neither will loading the real size of the underlying file. That only leaves us with hardcoding a file size and hope nothing else breaks significantly as a result. Let s try it again:
$ ls -lah /usr/lib/debug/.build-id/e5/9f81f6573dadd5d95a6e4474d9388ab2777e2a.debug
-r--r--r-- 1 root root 954M Dec 31 1969 /usr/lib/debug/.build-id/e5/9f81f6573dadd5d95a6e4474d9388ab2777e2a.debug
$ gdb -q /usr/sbin/netlabelctl
Reading symbols from /usr/sbin/netlabelctl...
Reading symbols from /usr/lib/debug/.build-id/e5/9f81f6573dadd5d95a6e4474d9388ab2777e2a.debug...
(gdb)
Much better. I mean, terrible but better. Better for now, anyway.

Kilroy was here Do I think this is a particularly good idea? I mean; kinda. I m probably going to make some fun 9p arigato-based filesystems for use around my LAN, but I don t think I ll be moving to use debugfs until I can figure out how to ensure the connection is more resilient to changing networks, server restarts and fixes on i/o performance. I think it was a useful exercise and is a pretty great hack, but I don t think this ll be shipping anywhere anytime soon. Along with me publishing this post, I ve pushed up all my repos; so you should be able to play along at home! There s a lot more work to be done on arigato; but it does handshake and successfully export a working 9P2000.u filesystem. Check it out on on my github at arigato, debugfs and also on crates.io and docs.rs. At least I can say I was here and I got it working after all these years.

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