Search Results: "jim"

29 March 2024

Patryk Cisek: Sanoid on TrueNAS

syncoid to TrueNAS In my homelab, I have 2 NAS systems: Linux (Debian) TrueNAS Core (based on FreeBSD) On my Linux box, I use Jim Salter s sanoid to periodically take snapshots of my ZFS pool. I also want to have a proper backup of the whole pool, so I use syncoid to transfer those snapshots to another machine. Sanoid itself is responsible only for taking new snapshots and pruning old ones you no longer care about.

3 March 2024

Iustin Pop: New corydalis 2024.9.0 release!

Obligatory and misused quote: It s not dead, Jim! I ve kind of dropped by ball lately on organising my own photo collection, but February was a pretty good month and I managed to write some more code for Corydalis, ending up with the aforementioned new release. The release is not a big one, but I did manage to solve one thing that was annoying me greatly: that lack of ability to play videos inline in one of the two picture viewing modes (in my preferred mode, in fact). Now, whether you re browsing through pictures, or looking at pictures one-by-one, you can in both cases play videos easily, and to some extent, as it should be . No user docs for that, yet (I actually need to split the manual in user/admin/developer parts) I did some more internal cleanups, and I ve enabled building release zips (since that s how GitHub actions creates artifacts), which means it should be 10% easier to test this. The rest 90% is configuring it and pointing to picture folders and and and, so this is definitely not plug-and-play. The diff summary between 2023.44.0 and 2024.9.0 is: 56 files changed, 1412 insertions(+), 700 deletions(-). Which is not bad, but also not too much. The biggest churn was, as expected, in the viewer (due to the aforementioned video playing). The scary part is that the TypeScript code is not at 7.9% (and a tiny more JS, which I can t convert yet due to lack of type definitions upstream). I say scary in quotes, because I would actually like to know Typescript better, but no time. The new release can be seen in action on demo.corydalis.io, and as always, just after release I found two minor issues: Well, there will be future releases. For now, I ve made an open-source package release, which I didn t do in a while, so I m happy . See you!

21 November 2023

Mike Hommey: How I (kind of) killed Mercurial at Mozilla

Did you hear the news? Firefox development is moving from Mercurial to Git. While the decision is far from being mine, and I was barely involved in the small incremental changes that ultimately led to this decision, I feel I have to take at least some responsibility. And if you are one of those who would rather use Mercurial than Git, you may direct all your ire at me. But let's take a step back and review the past 25 years leading to this decision. You'll forgive me for skipping some details and any possible inaccuracies. This is already a long post, while I could have been more thorough, even I think that would have been too much. This is also not an official Mozilla position, only my personal perception and recollection as someone who was involved at times, but mostly an observer from a distance. From CVS to DVCS From its release in 1998, the Mozilla source code was kept in a CVS repository. If you're too young to know what CVS is, let's just say it's an old school version control system, with its set of problems. Back then, it was mostly ubiquitous in the Open Source world, as far as I remember. In the early 2000s, the Subversion version control system gained some traction, solving some of the problems that came with CVS. Incidentally, Subversion was created by Jim Blandy, who now works at Mozilla on completely unrelated matters. In the same period, the Linux kernel development moved from CVS to Bitkeeper, which was more suitable to the distributed nature of the Linux community. BitKeeper had its own problem, though: it was the opposite of Open Source, but for most pragmatic people, it wasn't a real concern because free access was provided. Until it became a problem: someone at OSDL developed an alternative client to BitKeeper, and licenses of BitKeeper were rescinded for OSDL members, including Linus Torvalds (they were even prohibited from purchasing one). Following this fiasco, in April 2005, two weeks from each other, both Git and Mercurial were born. The former was created by Linus Torvalds himself, while the latter was developed by Olivia Mackall, who was a Linux kernel developer back then. And because they both came out of the same community for the same needs, and the same shared experience with BitKeeper, they both were similar distributed version control systems. Interestingly enough, several other DVCSes existed: In this landscape, the major difference Git was making at the time was that it was blazing fast. Almost incredibly so, at least on Linux systems. That was less true on other platforms (especially Windows). It was a game-changer for handling large codebases in a smooth manner. Anyways, two years later, in 2007, Mozilla decided to move its source code not to Bzr, not to Git, not to Subversion (which, yes, was a contender), but to Mercurial. The decision "process" was laid down in two rather colorful blog posts. My memory is a bit fuzzy, but I don't recall that it was a particularly controversial choice. All of those DVCSes were still young, and there was no definite "winner" yet (GitHub hadn't even been founded). It made the most sense for Mozilla back then, mainly because the Git experience on Windows still wasn't there, and that mattered a lot for Mozilla, with its diverse platform support. As a contributor, I didn't think much of it, although to be fair, at the time, I was mostly consuming the source tarballs. Personal preferences Digging through my archives, I've unearthed a forgotten chapter: I did end up setting up both a Mercurial and a Git mirror of the Firefox source repository on alioth.debian.org. Alioth.debian.org was a FusionForge-based collaboration system for Debian developers, similar to SourceForge. It was the ancestor of salsa.debian.org. I used those mirrors for the Debian packaging of Firefox (cough cough Iceweasel). The Git mirror was created with hg-fast-export, and the Mercurial mirror was only a necessary step in the process. By that time, I had converted my Subversion repositories to Git, and switched off SVK. Incidentally, I started contributing to Git around that time as well. I apparently did this not too long after Mozilla switched to Mercurial. As a Linux user, I think I just wanted the speed that Mercurial was not providing. Not that Mercurial was that slow, but the difference between a couple seconds and a couple hundred milliseconds was a significant enough difference in user experience for me to prefer Git (and Firefox was not the only thing I was using version control for) Other people had also similarly created their own mirror, or with other tools. But none of them were "compatible": their commit hashes were different. Hg-git, used by the latter, was putting extra information in commit messages that would make the conversion differ, and hg-fast-export would just not be consistent with itself! My mirror is long gone, and those have not been updated in more than a decade. I did end up using Mercurial, when I got commit access to the Firefox source repository in April 2010. I still kept using Git for my Debian activities, but I now was also using Mercurial to push to the Mozilla servers. I joined Mozilla as a contractor a few months after that, and kept using Mercurial for a while, but as a, by then, long time Git user, it never really clicked for me. It turns out, the sentiment was shared by several at Mozilla. Git incursion In the early 2010s, GitHub was becoming ubiquitous, and the Git mindshare was getting large. Multiple projects at Mozilla were already entirely hosted on GitHub. As for the Firefox source code base, Mozilla back then was kind of a Wild West, and engineers being engineers, multiple people had been using Git, with their own inconvenient workflows involving a local Mercurial clone. The most popular set of scripts was moz-git-tools, to incorporate changes in a local Git repository into the local Mercurial copy, to then send to Mozilla servers. In terms of the number of people doing that, though, I don't think it was a lot of people, probably a few handfuls. On my end, I was still keeping up with Mercurial. I think at that time several engineers had their own unofficial Git mirrors on GitHub, and later on Ehsan Akhgari provided another mirror, with a twist: it also contained the full CVS history, which the canonical Mercurial repository didn't have. This was particularly interesting for engineers who needed to do some code archeology and couldn't get past the 2007 cutoff of the Mercurial repository. I think that mirror ultimately became the official-looking, but really unofficial, mozilla-central repository on GitHub. On a side note, a Mercurial repository containing the CVS history was also later set up, but that didn't lead to something officially supported on the Mercurial side. Some time around 2011~2012, I started to more seriously consider using Git for work myself, but wasn't satisfied with the workflows others had set up for themselves. I really didn't like the idea of wasting extra disk space keeping a Mercurial clone around while using a Git mirror. I wrote a Python script that would use Mercurial as a library to access a remote repository and produce a git-fast-import stream. That would allow the creation of a git repository without a local Mercurial clone. It worked quite well, but it was not able to incrementally update. Other, more complete tools existed already, some of which I mentioned above. But as time was passing and the size and depth of the Mercurial repository was growing, these tools were showing their limits and were too slow for my taste, especially for the initial clone. Boot to Git In the same time frame, Mozilla ventured in the Mobile OS sphere with Boot to Gecko, later known as Firefox OS. What does that have to do with version control? The needs of third party collaborators in the mobile space led to the creation of what is now the gecko-dev repository on GitHub. As I remember it, it was challenging to create, but once it was there, Git users could just clone it and have a working, up-to-date local copy of the Firefox source code and its history... which they could already have, but this was the first officially supported way of doing so. Coincidentally, Ehsan's unofficial mirror was having trouble (to the point of GitHub closing the repository) and was ultimately shut down in December 2013. You'll often find comments on the interwebs about how GitHub has become unreliable since the Microsoft acquisition. I can't really comment on that, but if you think GitHub is unreliable now, rest assured that it was worse in its beginning. And its sustainability as a platform also wasn't a given, being a rather new player. So on top of having this official mirror on GitHub, Mozilla also ventured in setting up its own Git server for greater control and reliability. But the canonical repository was still the Mercurial one, and while Git users now had a supported mirror to pull from, they still had to somehow interact with Mercurial repositories, most notably for the Try server. Git slowly creeping in Firefox build tooling Still in the same time frame, tooling around building Firefox was improving drastically. For obvious reasons, when version control integration was needed in the tooling, Mercurial support was always a no-brainer. The first explicit acknowledgement of a Git repository for the Firefox source code, other than the addition of the .gitignore file, was bug 774109. It added a script to install the prerequisites to build Firefox on macOS (still called OSX back then), and that would print a message inviting people to obtain a copy of the source code with either Mercurial or Git. That was a precursor to current bootstrap.py, from September 2012. Following that, as far as I can tell, the first real incursion of Git in the Firefox source tree tooling happened in bug 965120. A few days earlier, bug 952379 had added a mach clang-format command that would apply clang-format-diff to the output from hg diff. Obviously, running hg diff on a Git working tree didn't work, and bug 965120 was filed, and support for Git was added there. That was in January 2014. A year later, when the initial implementation of mach artifact was added (which ultimately led to artifact builds), Git users were an immediate thought. But while they were considered, it was not to support them, but to avoid actively breaking their workflows. Git support for mach artifact was eventually added 14 months later, in March 2016. From gecko-dev to git-cinnabar Let's step back a little here, back to the end of 2014. My user experience with Mercurial had reached a level of dissatisfaction that was enough for me to decide to take that script from a couple years prior and make it work for incremental updates. That meant finding a way to store enough information locally to be able to reconstruct whatever the incremental updates would be relying on (guess why other tools hid a local Mercurial clone under hood). I got something working rather quickly, and after talking to a few people about this side project at the Mozilla Portland All Hands and seeing their excitement, I published a git-remote-hg initial prototype on the last day of the All Hands. Within weeks, the prototype gained the ability to directly push to Mercurial repositories, and a couple months later, was renamed to git-cinnabar. At that point, as a Git user, instead of cloning the gecko-dev repository from GitHub and switching to a local Mercurial repository whenever you needed to push to a Mercurial repository (i.e. the aforementioned Try server, or, at the time, for reviews), you could just clone and push directly from/to Mercurial, all within Git. And it was fast too. You could get a full clone of mozilla-central in less than half an hour, when at the time, other similar tools would take more than 10 hours (needless to say, it's even worse now). Another couple months later (we're now at the end of April 2015), git-cinnabar became able to start off a local clone of the gecko-dev repository, rather than clone from scratch, which could be time consuming. But because git-cinnabar and the tool that was updating gecko-dev weren't producing the same commits, this setup was cumbersome and not really recommended. For instance, if you pushed something to mozilla-central with git-cinnabar from a gecko-dev clone, it would come back with a different commit hash in gecko-dev, and you'd have to deal with the divergence. Eventually, in April 2020, the scripts updating gecko-dev were switched to git-cinnabar, making the use of gecko-dev alongside git-cinnabar a more viable option. Ironically(?), the switch occurred to ease collaboration with KaiOS (you know, the mobile OS born from the ashes of Firefox OS). Well, okay, in all honesty, when the need of syncing in both directions between Git and Mercurial (we only had ever synced from Mercurial to Git) came up, I nudged Mozilla in the direction of git-cinnabar, which, in my (biased but still honest) opinion, was the more reliable option for two-way synchronization (we did have regular conversion problems with hg-git, nothing of the sort has happened since the switch). One Firefox repository to rule them all For reasons I don't know, Mozilla decided to use separate Mercurial repositories as "branches". With the switch to the rapid release process in 2011, that meant one repository for nightly (mozilla-central), one for aurora, one for beta, and one for release. And with the addition of Extended Support Releases in 2012, we now add a new ESR repository every year. Boot to Gecko also had its own branches, and so did Fennec (Firefox for Mobile, before Android). There are a lot of them. And then there are also integration branches, where developer's work lands before being merged in mozilla-central (or backed out if it breaks things), always leaving mozilla-central in a (hopefully) good state. Only one of them remains in use today, though. I can only suppose that the way Mercurial branches work was not deemed practical. It is worth noting, though, that Mercurial branches are used in some cases, to branch off a dot-release when the next major release process has already started, so it's not a matter of not knowing the feature exists or some such. In 2016, Gregory Szorc set up a new repository that would contain them all (or at least most of them), which eventually became what is now the mozilla-unified repository. This would e.g. simplify switching between branches when necessary. 7 years later, for some reason, the other "branches" still exist, but most developers are expected to be using mozilla-unified. Mozilla's CI also switched to using mozilla-unified as base repository. Honestly, I'm not sure why the separate repositories are still the main entry point for pushes, rather than going directly to mozilla-unified, but it probably comes down to switching being work, and not being a top priority. Also, it probably doesn't help that working with multiple heads in Mercurial, even (especially?) with bookmarks, can be a source of confusion. To give an example, if you aren't careful, and do a plain clone of the mozilla-unified repository, you may not end up on the latest mozilla-central changeset, but rather, e.g. one from beta, or some other branch, depending which one was last updated. Hosting is simple, right? Put your repository on a server, install hgweb or gitweb, and that's it? Maybe that works for... Mercurial itself, but that repository "only" has slightly over 50k changesets and less than 4k files. Mozilla-central has more than an order of magnitude more changesets (close to 700k) and two orders of magnitude more files (more than 700k if you count the deleted or moved files, 350k if you count the currently existing ones). And remember, there are a lot of "duplicates" of this repository. And I didn't even mention user repositories and project branches. Sure, it's a self-inflicted pain, and you'd think it could probably(?) be mitigated with shared repositories. But consider the simple case of two repositories: mozilla-central and autoland. You make autoland use mozilla-central as a shared repository. Now, you push something new to autoland, it's stored in the autoland datastore. Eventually, you merge to mozilla-central. Congratulations, it's now in both datastores, and you'd need to clean-up autoland if you wanted to avoid the duplication. Now, you'd think mozilla-unified would solve these issues, and it would... to some extent. Because that wouldn't cover user repositories and project branches briefly mentioned above, which in GitHub parlance would be considered as Forks. So you'd want a mega global datastore shared by all repositories, and repositories would need to only expose what they really contain. Does Mercurial support that? I don't think so (okay, I'll give you that: even if it doesn't, it could, but that's extra work). And since we're talking about a transition to Git, does Git support that? You may have read about how you can link to a commit from a fork and make-pretend that it comes from the main repository on GitHub? At least, it shows a warning, now. That's essentially the architectural reason why. So the actual answer is that Git doesn't support it out of the box, but GitHub has some backend magic to handle it somehow (and hopefully, other things like Gitea, Girocco, Gitlab, etc. have something similar). Now, to come back to the size of the repository. A repository is not a static file. It's a server with which you negotiate what you have against what it has that you want. Then the server bundles what you asked for based on what you said you have. Or in the opposite direction, you negotiate what you have that it doesn't, you send it, and the server incorporates what you sent it. Fortunately the latter is less frequent and requires authentication. But the former is more frequent and CPU intensive. Especially when pulling a large number of changesets, which, incidentally, cloning is. "But there is a solution for clones" you might say, which is true. That's clonebundles, which offload the CPU intensive part of cloning to a single job scheduled regularly. Guess who implemented it? Mozilla. But that only covers the cloning part. We actually had laid the ground to support offloading large incremental updates and split clones, but that never materialized. Even with all that, that still leaves you with a server that can display file contents, diffs, blames, provide zip archives of a revision, and more, all of which are CPU intensive in their own way. And these endpoints are regularly abused, and cause extra load to your servers, yes plural, because of course a single server won't handle the load for the number of users of your big repositories. And because your endpoints are abused, you have to close some of them. And I'm not mentioning the Try repository with its tens of thousands of heads, which brings its own sets of problems (and it would have even more heads if we didn't fake-merge them once in a while). Of course, all the above applies to Git (and it only gained support for something akin to clonebundles last year). So, when the Firefox OS project was stopped, there wasn't much motivation to continue supporting our own Git server, Mercurial still being the official point of entry, and git.mozilla.org was shut down in 2016. The growing difficulty of maintaining the status quo Slowly, but steadily in more recent years, as new tooling was added that needed some input from the source code manager, support for Git was more and more consistently added. But at the same time, as people left for other endeavors and weren't necessarily replaced, or more recently with layoffs, resources allocated to such tooling have been spread thin. Meanwhile, the repository growth didn't take a break, and the Try repository was becoming an increasing pain, with push times quite often exceeding 10 minutes. The ongoing work to move Try pushes to Lando will hide the problem under the rug, but the underlying problem will still exist (although the last version of Mercurial seems to have improved things). On the flip side, more and more people have been relying on Git for Firefox development, to my own surprise, as I didn't really push for that to happen. It just happened organically, by ways of git-cinnabar existing, providing a compelling experience to those who prefer Git, and, I guess, word of mouth. I was genuinely surprised when I recently heard the use of Git among moz-phab users had surpassed a third. I did, however, occasionally orient people who struggled with Mercurial and said they were more familiar with Git, towards git-cinnabar. I suspect there's a somewhat large number of people who never realized Git was a viable option. But that, on its own, can come with its own challenges: if you use git-cinnabar without being backed by gecko-dev, you'll have a hard time sharing your branches on GitHub, because you can't push to a fork of gecko-dev without pushing your entire local repository, as they have different commit histories. And switching to gecko-dev when you weren't already using it requires some extra work to rebase all your local branches from the old commit history to the new one. Clone times with git-cinnabar have also started to go a little out of hand in the past few years, but this was mitigated in a similar manner as with the Mercurial cloning problem: with static files that are refreshed regularly. Ironically, that made cloning with git-cinnabar faster than cloning with Mercurial. But generating those static files is increasingly time-consuming. As of writing, generating those for mozilla-unified takes close to 7 hours. I was predicting clone times over 10 hours "in 5 years" in a post from 4 years ago, I wasn't too far off. With exponential growth, it could still happen, although to be fair, CPUs have improved since. I will explore the performance aspect in a subsequent blog post, alongside the upcoming release of git-cinnabar 0.7.0-b1. I don't even want to check how long it now takes with hg-git or git-remote-hg (they were already taking more than a day when git-cinnabar was taking a couple hours). I suppose it's about time that I clarify that git-cinnabar has always been a side-project. It hasn't been part of my duties at Mozilla, and the extent to which Mozilla supports git-cinnabar is in the form of taskcluster workers on the community instance for both git-cinnabar CI and generating those clone bundles. Consequently, that makes the above git-cinnabar specific issues a Me problem, rather than a Mozilla problem. Taking the leap I can't talk for the people who made the proposal to move to Git, nor for the people who put a green light on it. But I can at least give my perspective. Developers have regularly asked why Mozilla was still using Mercurial, but I think it was the first time that a formal proposal was laid out. And it came from the Engineering Workflow team, responsible for issue tracking, code reviews, source control, build and more. It's easy to say "Mozilla should have chosen Git in the first place", but back in 2007, GitHub wasn't there, Bitbucket wasn't there, and all the available options were rather new (especially compared to the then 21 years-old CVS). I think Mozilla made the right choice, all things considered. Had they waited a couple years, the story might have been different. You might say that Mozilla stayed with Mercurial for so long because of the sunk cost fallacy. I don't think that's true either. But after the biggest Mercurial repository hosting service turned off Mercurial support, and the main contributor to Mercurial going their own way, it's hard to ignore that the landscape has evolved. And the problems that we regularly encounter with the Mercurial servers are not going to get any better as the repository continues to grow. As far as I know, all the Mercurial repositories bigger than Mozilla's are... not using Mercurial. Google has its own closed-source server, and Facebook has another of its own, and it's not really public either. With resources spread thin, I don't expect Mozilla to be able to continue supporting a Mercurial server indefinitely (although I guess Octobus could be contracted to give a hand, but is that sustainable?). Mozilla, being a champion of Open Source, also doesn't live in a silo. At some point, you have to meet your contributors where they are. And the Open Source world is now majoritarily using Git. I'm sure the vast majority of new hires at Mozilla in the past, say, 5 years, know Git and have had to learn Mercurial (although they arguably didn't need to). Even within Mozilla, with thousands(!) of repositories on GitHub, Firefox is now actually the exception rather than the norm. I should even actually say Desktop Firefox, because even Mobile Firefox lives on GitHub (although Fenix is moving back in together with Desktop Firefox, and the timing is such that that will probably happen before Firefox moves to Git). Heck, even Microsoft moved to Git! With a significant developer base already using Git thanks to git-cinnabar, and all the constraints and problems I mentioned previously, it actually seems natural that a transition (finally) happens. However, had git-cinnabar or something similarly viable not existed, I don't think Mozilla would be in a position to take this decision. On one hand, it probably wouldn't be in the current situation of having to support both Git and Mercurial in the tooling around Firefox, nor the resource constraints related to that. But on the other hand, it would be farther from supporting Git and being able to make the switch in order to address all the other problems. But... GitHub? I hope I made a compelling case that hosting is not as simple as it can seem, at the scale of the Firefox repository. It's also not Mozilla's main focus. Mozilla has enough on its plate with the migration of existing infrastructure that does rely on Mercurial to understandably not want to figure out the hosting part, especially with limited resources, and with the mixed experience hosting both Mercurial and git has been so far. After all, GitHub couldn't even display things like the contributors' graph on gecko-dev until recently, and hosting is literally their job! They still drop the ball on large blames (thankfully we have searchfox for those). Where does that leave us? Gitlab? For those criticizing GitHub for being proprietary, that's probably not open enough. Cloud Source Repositories? "But GitHub is Microsoft" is a complaint I've read a lot after the announcement. Do you think Google hosting would have appealed to these people? Bitbucket? I'm kind of surprised it wasn't in the list of providers that were considered, but I'm also kind of glad it wasn't (and I'll leave it at that). I think the only relatively big hosting provider that could have made the people criticizing the choice of GitHub happy is Codeberg, but I hadn't even heard of it before it was mentioned in response to Mozilla's announcement. But really, with literal thousands of Mozilla repositories already on GitHub, with literal tens of millions repositories on the platform overall, the pragmatic in me can't deny that it's an attractive option (and I can't stress enough that I wasn't remotely close to the room where the discussion about what choice to make happened). "But it's a slippery slope". I can see that being a real concern. LLVM also moved its repository to GitHub (from a (I think) self-hosted Subversion server), and ended up moving off Bugzilla and Phabricator to GitHub issues and PRs four years later. As an occasional contributor to LLVM, I hate this move. I hate the GitHub review UI with a passion. At least, right now, GitHub PRs are not a viable option for Mozilla, for their lack of support for security related PRs, and the more general shortcomings in the review UI. That doesn't mean things won't change in the future, but let's not get too far ahead of ourselves. The move to Git has just been announced, and the migration has not even begun yet. Just because Mozilla is moving the Firefox repository to GitHub doesn't mean it's locked in forever or that all the eggs are going to be thrown into one basket. If bridges need to be crossed in the future, we'll see then. So, what's next? The official announcement said we're not expecting the migration to really begin until six months from now. I'll swim against the current here, and say this: the earlier you can switch to git, the earlier you'll find out what works and what doesn't work for you, whether you already know Git or not. While there is not one unique workflow, here's what I would recommend anyone who wants to take the leap off Mercurial right now: As there is no one-size-fits-all workflow, I won't tell you how to organize yourself from there. I'll just say this: if you know the Mercurial sha1s of your previous local work, you can create branches for them with: 
$ git branch <branch_name> $(git cinnabar hg2git <hg_sha1>)
At this point, you should have everything available on the Git side, and you can remove the .hg directory. Or move it into some empty directory somewhere else, just in case. But don't leave it here, it will only confuse the tooling. Artifact builds WILL be confused, though, and you'll have to ./mach configure before being able to do anything. You may also hit bug 1865299 if your working tree is older than this post. If you have any problem or question, you can ping me on #git-cinnabar or #git on Matrix. I'll put the instructions above somewhere on wiki.mozilla.org, and we can collaboratively iterate on them. Now, what the announcement didn't say is that the Git repository WILL NOT be gecko-dev, doesn't exist yet, and WON'T BE COMPATIBLE (trust me, it'll be for the better). Why did I make you do all the above, you ask? Because that won't be a problem. I'll have you covered, I promise. The upcoming release of git-cinnabar 0.7.0-b1 will have a way to smoothly switch between gecko-dev and the future repository (incidentally, that will also allow to switch from a pure git-cinnabar clone to a gecko-dev one, for the git-cinnabar users who have kept reading this far). What about git-cinnabar? With Mercurial going the way of the dodo at Mozilla, my own need for git-cinnabar will vanish. Legitimately, this begs the question whether it will still be maintained. I can't answer for sure. I don't have a crystal ball. However, the needs of the transition itself will motivate me to finish some long-standing things (like finalizing the support for pushing merges, which is currently behind an experimental flag) or implement some missing features (support for creating Mercurial branches). Git-cinnabar started as a Python script, it grew a sidekick implemented in C, which then incorporated some Rust, which then cannibalized the Python script and took its place. It is now close to 90% Rust, and 10% C (if you don't count the code from Git that is statically linked to it), and has sort of become my Rust playground (it's also, I must admit, a mess, because of its history, but it's getting better). So the day to day use with Mercurial is not my sole motivation to keep developing it. If it were, it would stay stagnant, because all the features I need are there, and the speed is not all that bad, although I know it could be better. Arguably, though, git-cinnabar has been relatively stagnant feature-wise, because all the features I need are there. So, no, I don't expect git-cinnabar to die along Mercurial use at Mozilla, but I can't really promise anything either. Final words That was a long post. But there was a lot of ground to cover. And I still skipped over a bunch of things. I hope I didn't bore you to death. If I did and you're still reading... what's wrong with you? ;) So this is the end of Mercurial at Mozilla. So long, and thanks for all the fish. But this is also the beginning of a transition that is not easy, and that will not be without hiccups, I'm sure. So fasten your seatbelts (plural), and welcome the change. To circle back to the clickbait title, did I really kill Mercurial at Mozilla? Of course not. But it's like I stumbled upon a few sparks and tossed a can of gasoline on them. I didn't start the fire, but I sure made it into a proper bonfire... and now it has turned into a wildfire. And who knows? 15 years from now, someone else might be looking back at how Mozilla picked Git at the wrong time, and that, had we waited a little longer, we would have picked some yet to come new horse. But hey, that's the tech cycle for you.

20 April 2023

Jamie McClelland: Electron doesn't like negative layout coordinates

I got a second external monitor. Overkill? Probably, but I like having a dedicated space to instant messaging (now left monitor) and also a dedicated space for a web browser (right monitor). But, when I moved signal-desktop to the left monitor, clicks stopped working. I moved it back to my laptop screen, clicks started working. Other apps (like gajim) worked fine. A real mystery. I spent a lot of time on the wrong thing. I turned this monitor into portrait mode. Maybe signal doesn t like portrait mode? Nope. Maybe signal doesn t think it has enough horizontal space? Nope. Maybe signal suddently doesn t like being on an external monitor? Nope. Maybe signal will output something useful if I start it via the terminal? Nope (but that was a real distraction). Then, I discovered that mattermost desktop behaves the same way. A clue! So, now I know it s an electron app limitation, not a signal limitation. Finally I hit on the problem: Via my sway desktop, I set my laptop screen to the x,y coordinates: 0,0 (since it s in the middle). I set the left monitor to negative coordinates so it would appear on the left. Well, electron does not like that, not sure why. Now, my left monitor occupies 0,0 and the rest are adjusted to that center. I originally used negative coordinates so when I unplugged my monitors, my laptop would still be 0,0 and display all desktops properly. Fortunately, sway magically figures that all out even when the center shifts by unplugging the monitors. Hooray for sway.

25 March 2023

Russ Allbery: Review: Thief of Time

Review: Thief of Time, by Terry Pratchett
Series: Discworld #26
Publisher: Harper
Copyright: May 2001
Printing: August 2014
ISBN: 0-06-230739-8
Format: Mass market
Pages: 420
Thief of Time is the 26th Discworld novel and the last Death novel, although he still appears in subsequent books. It's the third book starring Susan Sto Helit, so I don't recommend starting here. Mort is the best starting point for the Death subseries, and Reaper Man provides a useful introduction to the villains. Jeremy Clockson was an orphan raised by the Guild of Clockmakers. He is very good at making clocks. He's not very good at anything else, particularly people, but his clocks are the most accurate in Ankh-Morpork. He is therefore the logical choice to receive a commission by a mysterious noblewoman who wants him to make the most accurate possible clock: a clock that can measure the tick of the universe, one that a fairy tale says had been nearly made before. The commission is followed by a surprise delivery of an Igor, to help with the clock-making. People who live in places with lots of fields become farmers. People who live where there is lots of iron and coal become blacksmiths. And people who live in the mountains near the Hub, near the gods and full of magic, become monks. In the highest valley are the History Monks, founded by Wen the Eternally Surprised. Like most monks, they take apprentices with certain talents and train them in their discipline. But Lobsang Ludd, an orphan discovered in the Thieves Guild in Ankh-Morpork, is proving a challenge. The monks decide to apprentice him to Lu-Tze the sweeper; perhaps that will solve multiple problems at once. Since Hogfather, Susan has moved from being a governess to a schoolteacher. She brings to that job the same firm patience, total disregard for rules that apply to other people, and impressive talent for managing children. She is by far the most popular teacher among the kids, and not only because she transports her class all over the Disc so that they can see things in person. It is a job that she likes and understands, and one that she's quite irate to have interrupted by a summons from her grandfather. But the Auditors are up to something, and Susan may be able to act in ways that Death cannot. This was great. Susan has quickly become one of my favorite Discworld characters, and this time around there is no (or, well, not much) unbelievable romance or permanently queasy god to distract. The clock-making portions of the book quickly start to focus on Igor, who is a delightful perspective through whom to watch events unfold. And the History Monks! The metaphysics of what they are actually doing (which I won't spoil, since discovering it slowly is a delight) is perhaps my favorite bit of Discworld world building to date. I am a sucker for stories that focus on some process that everyone thinks happens automatically and investigate the hidden work behind it. I do want to add a caveat here that the monks are in part a parody of Himalayan Buddhist monasteries, Lu-Tze is rather obviously a parody of Laozi and Daoism in general, and Pratchett's parodies of non-western cultures are rather ham-handed. This is not quite the insulting mess that the Chinese parody in Interesting Times was, but it's heavy on the stereotypes. It does not, thankfully, rely on the stereotypes; the characters are great fun on their own terms, with the perfect (for me) balance of irreverence and thoughtfulness. Lu-Tze refusing to be anything other than a sweeper and being irritatingly casual about all the rules of the order is a classic bit that Pratchett does very well. But I also have the luxury of ignoring stereotypes of a culture that isn't mine, and I think Pratchett is on somewhat thin ice. As one specific example, having Lu-Tze's treasured sayings be a collection of banal aphorisms from a random Ankh-Morpork woman is both hilarious and also arguably rather condescending, and I'm not sure where I landed. It's a spot-on bit of parody of how a lot of people who get very into "eastern religions" sound, but it's also equating the Dao De Jing with advice from the Discworld equivalent of a English housewife. I think the generous reading is that Lu-Tze made the homilies profound by looking at them in an entirely different way than the woman saying them, and that's not completely unlike Daoism and works surprisingly well. But that's reading somewhat against the grain; Pratchett is clearly making fun of philosophical koans, and while anything is fair game for some friendly poking, it still feels a bit weird. That isn't the part of the History Monks that I loved, though. Their actual role in the story doesn't come out of the parody. It's something entirely native to Discworld, and it's an absolute delight. The scene with Lobsang and the procrastinators is perhaps my favorite Discworld set piece to date. Everything about the technology of the History Monks, even the Bond parody, is so good. I grew up reading the Marvel Comics universe, and Thief of Time reminds me of a classic John Byrne or Jim Starlin story, where the heroes are dumped into the middle of vast interdimensional conflicts involving barely-anthropomorphized cosmic powers and the universe is revealed to work in ever more intricate ways at vastly expanding scales. The Auditors are villains in exactly that tradition, and just like the best of those stories, the fulcrum of the plot is questions about what it means to be human, what it means to be alive, and the surprising alliances these non-human powers make with humans or semi-humans. I devoured this kind of story as a kid, and it turns out I still love it. The one complaint I have about the plot is that the best part of this book is the middle, and the end didn't entirely work for me. Ronnie Soak is at his best as a supporting character about three quarters of the way through the book, and I found the ending of his subplot much less interesting. The cosmic confrontation was oddly disappointing, and there's a whole extended sequence involving chocolate that I think was funnier in Pratchett's head than it was in mine. The ending isn't bad, but the middle of this book is my favorite bit of Discworld writing yet, and I wish the story had carried that momentum through to the end. I had so much fun with this book. The Discworld novels are clearly getting better. None of them have yet vaulted into the ranks of my all-time favorite books there's always some lingering quibble or sagging bit but it feels like they've gone from reliably good books to more reliably great books. The acid test is coming, though: the next book is a Rincewind book, which are usually the weak spots. Followed by The Last Hero in publication order. There is no direct thematic sequel. Rating: 8 out of 10

7 March 2023

Robert McQueen: Flathub in 2023

It s been quite a few months since the most recent updates about Flathub last year. We ve been busy behind the scenes, so I d like to share what we ve been up to at Flathub and why and what s coming up from us this year. I want to focus on: Today Flathub is going strong: we offer 2,000 apps from over 1,500 collaborators on GitHub. We re averaging 700,000 app downloads a day, with 898 million HTTP requests totalling 88.3 TB served by our CDN each day (thank you Fastly!). Flatpak has, in my opinion, solved the largest technical issue which has held back the mainstream growth and acceptance of Linux on the desktop (or other personal computing devices) for the past 25 years: namely, the difficulty for app developers to publish their work in a way that makes it easy for people to discover, download (or sideload, for people in challenging connectivity environments), install and use. Flathub builds on that to help users discover the work of app developers and helps that work reach users in a timely manner. Initial results of this disintermediation are promising: even with its modest size so far, Flathub has hundreds of apps that I have never, ever heard of before and that s even considering I ve been working in the Linux desktop space for nearly 20 years and spent many of those staring at the contents of dselect (showing my age a little) or GNOME Software, attending conferences, and reading blog posts, news articles, and forums. I am also heartened to see that many of our OS distributor partners have recognised that this model is hugely complementary and additive to the indispensable work they are doing to bring the Linux desktop to end users, and that having more apps available to your users is a value-add allowing you to focus on your core offering and not a zero-sum game that should motivate infighting. Ongoing Progress Getting Flathub into its current state has been a long ongoing process. Here s what we ve been up to behind the scenes: Development Last year, we concluded our first engagement with Codethink to build features into the Flathub web app to move from a build service to an app store. That includes accounts for users and developers, payment processing via Stripe, and the ability for developers to manage upload tokens for the apps they control. In parallel, James Westman has been working on app verification and the corresponding features in flat-manager to ensure app metadata accurately reflects verification and pricing, and to provide authentication for paying users for app downloads when the developer enables it. Only verified developers will be able to make direct uploads or access payment settings for their apps. Legal So far, the GNOME Foundation has acted as an incubator and legal host for Flathub even though it s not purely a GNOME product or initiative. Distributing software to end users along with processing and forwarding payments and donations also has a different legal profile in terms of risk exposure and nonprofit compliance than the current activities of the GNOME Foundation. Consequently, we plan to establish an independent legal entity to own and operate Flathub which reduces risk for the GNOME Foundation, better reflects the independent and cross-desktop interests of Flathub, and provides flexibility in the future should we need to change the structure. We re currently in the process of reviewing legal advice to ensure we have the right structure in place before moving forward. Governance As Flathub is something we want to set outside of the existing Linux desktop and distribution space and ensure we represent and serve the widest community of Linux users and developers we ve been working on a governance model that ensures that there is transparency and trust in who is making decisions, and why. We have set up a working group with myself and Mart n Abente Lahaye from GNOME, Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Neofytos Kolokotronis, and Timoth e Ravier from KDE, and Jorge Castro flying the flag for the Flathub community. Thanks also to Neil McGovern and Nick Richards who were also more involved in the process earlier on. We don t want to get held up here creating something complex with memberships and elections, so at first we re going to come up with a simple/balanced way to appoint people into a board that makes key decisions about Flathub and iterate from there. Funding We have received one grant for 2023 of $100K from Endless Network which will go towards the infrastructure, legal, and operations costs of running Flathub and setting up the structure described above. (Full disclosure: Endless Network is the umbrella organisation which also funds my employer, Endless OS Foundation.) I am hoping to grow the available funding to $250K for this year in order to cover the next round of development on the software, prepare for higher operations costs (e.g., accounting gets more complex), and bring in a second full-time staff member in addition to Bart omiej Piotrowski to handle enquiries, reviews, documentation, and partner outreach. We re currently in discussions with NLnet about funding further software development, but have been unfortunately turned down for a grant from the Plaintext Group for this year; this Schmidt Futures project around OSS sustainability is not currently issuing grants in 2023. However, we continue to work on other funding opportunities. Remaining Barriers My personal hypothesis is that our largest remaining barrier to Linux desktop scale and impact is economic. On competing platforms mobile or desktop a developer can offer their work for sale via an app store or direct download with payment or subscription within hours of making a release. While we have taken the time to first download time down from months to days with Flathub, as a community we continue to have a challenging relationship with money. Some creators are lucky enough to have a full-time job within the FLOSS space, while a few superstar developers are able to nurture some level of financial support by investing time in building a following through streaming, Patreon, Kickstarter, or similar. However, a large proportion of us have to make do with the main payback from our labours being a stream of bug reports on GitHub interspersed with occasional conciliatory beers at FOSDEM (other beverages and events are available). The first and most obvious consequence is that if there is no financial payback for participating in developing apps for the free and open source desktop, we will lose many people in the process despite the amazing achievements of those who have brought us to where we are today. As a result, we ll have far fewer developers and apps. If we can t offer access to a growing base of users or the opportunity to offer something of monetary value to them, the reward in terms of adoption and possible payment will be very small. Developers would be forgiven for taking their time and attention elsewhere. With fewer apps, our platform has less to entice and retain prospective users. The second consequence is that this also represents a significant hurdle for diverse and inclusive participation. We essentially require that somebody is in a position of privilege and comfort that they have internet, power, time, and income not to mention childcare, etc. to spare so that they can take part. If that s not the case for somebody, we are leaving them shut out from our community before they even have a chance to start. My belief is that free and open source software represents a better way for people to access computing, and there are billions of people in the world we should hope to reach with our work. But if the mechanism for participation ensures their voices and needs are never represented in our community of creators, we are significantly less likely to understand and meet those needs. While these are my thoughts, you ll notice a strong theme to this year will be leading a consultation process to ensure that we are including, understanding and reflecting the needs of our different communities app creators, OS distributors and Linux users as I don t believe that our initiative will be successful without ensuring mutual benefit and shared success. Ultimately, no matter how beautiful, performant, or featureful the latest versions of the Plasma or GNOME desktops are, or how slick the newly rewritten installer is from your favourite distribution, all of the projects making up the Linux desktop ecosystem are subdividing between ourselves an absolutely tiny market share of the global market of personal computers. To make a bigger mark on the world, as a community, we need to get out more. What s Next? After identifying our major barriers to overcome, we ve planned a number of focused initiatives and restructuring this year: Phased Deployment We re working on deploying the work we have been doing over the past year, starting first with launching the new Flathub web experience as well as the rebrand that Jakub has been talking about on his blog. This also will finally launch the verification features so we can distinguish those apps which are uploaded by their developers. In parallel, we ll also be able to turn on the Flatpak repo subsets that enable users to select only verified and/or FLOSS apps in the Flatpak CLI or their desktop s app center UI. Consultation We would like to make sure that the voices of app creators, OS distributors, and Linux users are reflected in our plans for 2023 and beyond. We will be launching this in the form of Flathub Focus Groups at the Linux App Summit in Brno in May 2023, followed up with surveys and other opportunities for online participation. We see our role as interconnecting communities and want to be sure that we remain transparent and accountable to those we are seeking to empower with our work. Whilst we are being bold and ambitious with what we are trying to create for the Linux desktop community, we also want to make sure we provide the right forums to listen to the FLOSS community and prioritise our work accordingly. Advisory Board As we build the Flathub organisation up in 2023, we re also planning to expand its governance by creating an Advisory Board. We will establish an ongoing forum with different stakeholders around Flathub: OS vendors, hardware integrators, app developers and user representatives to help us create the Flathub that supports and promotes our mutually shared interests in a strong and healthy Linux desktop community. Direct Uploads Direct app uploads are close to ready, and they enable exciting stuff like allowing Electron apps to be built outside of flatpak-builder, or driving automatic Flathub uploads from GitHub actions or GitLab CI flows; however, we need to think a little about how we encourage these to be used. Even with its frustrations, our current Buildbot ensures that the build logs and source versions of each app on Flathub are captured, and that the apps are built on all supported architectures. (Is 2023 when we add RISC-V? Reach out if you d like to help!). If we hand upload tokens out to any developer, even if the majority of apps are open source, we will go from this relatively structured situation to something a lot more unstructured and we fear many apps will be available on only 64-bit Intel/AMD machines. My sketch here is that we need to establish some best practices around how to integrate Flathub uploads into popular CI systems, encouraging best practices so that we promote the properties of transparency and reproducibility that we don t want to lose. If anyone is a CI wizard and would like to work with us as a thought partner about how we can achieve this make it more flexible where and how build tasks can be hosted, but not lose these cross-platform and inspectability properties we d love to hear from you. Donations and Payments Once the work around legal and governance reaches a decent point, we will be in the position to move ahead with our Stripe setup and switch on the third big new feature in the Flathub web app. At present, we have already implemented support for one-off payments either as donations or a required purchase. We would like to go further than that, in line with what we were describing earlier about helping developers sustainably work on apps for our ecosystem: we would also like to enable developers to offer subscriptions. This will allow us to create a relationship between users and creators that funds ongoing work rather than what we already have. Security For Flathub to succeed, we need to make sure that as we grow, we continue to be a platform that can give users confidence in the quality and security of the apps we offer. To that end, we are planning to set up infrastructure to help ensure developers are shipping the best products they possibly can to users. For example, we d like to set up automated linting and security scanning on the Flathub back-end to help developers avoid bad practices, unnecessary sandbox permissions, outdated dependencies, etc. and to keep users informed and as secure as possible. Sponsorship Fundraising is a forever task as is running such a big and growing service. We hope that one day, we can cover our costs through some modest fees built into our payments but until we reach that point, we re going to be seeking a combination of grant funding and sponsorship to keep our roadmap moving. Our hope is very much that we can encourage different organisations that buy into our vision and will benefit from Flathub to help us support it and ensure we can deliver on our goals. If you have any suggestions of who might like to support Flathub, we would be very appreciative if you could reach out and get us in touch. Finally, Thank You! Thanks to you all for reading this far and supporting the work of Flathub, and also to our major sponsors and donors without whom Flathub could not exist: GNOME Foundation, KDE e.V., Mythic Beasts, Endless Network, Fastly, and Equinix Metal via the CNCF Community Cluster. Thanks also to the tireless work of the Freedesktop SDK community to give us the runtime platform most Flatpaks depend on, particularly Seppo Yli-Olli, Codethink and others. I wanted to also give my personal thanks to a handful of dedicated people who keep Flathub working as a service and as a community: Bart omiej Piotrowski is keeping the infrastructure working essentially single-handedly (in his spare time from keeping everything running at GNOME); Kolja Lampe and Bart built the new web app and backend API for Flathub which all of the new functionality has been built on, and Filippe LeMarchand maintains the checker bot which helps keeps all of the Flatpaks up to date. And finally, all of the submissions to Flathub are reviewed to ensure quality, consistency and security by a small dedicated team of reviewers, with a huge amount of work from Hubert Figui re and Bart to keep the submissions flowing. Thanks to everyone named or unnamed for building this vision of the future of the Linux desktop together with us. (originally posted to Flathub Discourse, head there if you have any questions or comments)

1 March 2023

Debian XMPP Team: XMPP What's new in Debian 12 bookworm

On Tue 13 July 2021 there was a blog post of new XMPP related software releases which have been uploaded to Debian 11 (bullseye). Today, we will inform you about updates for the upcoming Debian release bookworm. A lot of new releases have been provided by the upstream projects. There were lot of changes to the XMPP clients like Dino, Gajim, Profanity, Poezio and others. Also the XMPP servers have been enhanced. Unfortunately, we can not provide a list of all the changes which have been done, but will try to highlight some of the changes and new features. BTW, feel free to join the Debian User Support on Jabber at xmpp:debian@conference.debian.org?join. You can find a list of 58 packages of the Debian XMPP team on the XMPP QA Page. Server Libs Others Happy chatting - keep in touch with your family and friends via Jabber / XMPP - XMPP is an open standard of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) for instant messaging.

16 November 2022

Antoine Beaupr : A ZFS migration

In my tubman setup, I started using ZFS on an old server I had lying around. The machine is really old though (2011!) and it "feels" pretty slow. I want to see how much of that is ZFS and how much is the machine. Synthetic benchmarks show that ZFS may be slower than mdadm in RAID-10 or RAID-6 configuration, so I want to confirm that on a live workload: my workstation. Plus, I want easy, regular, high performance backups (with send/receive snapshots) and there's no way I'm going to use BTRFS because I find it too confusing and unreliable. So off we go.

Installation Since this is a conversion (and not a new install), our procedure is slightly different than the official documentation but otherwise it's pretty much in the same spirit: we're going to use ZFS for everything, including the root filesystem. So, install the required packages, on the current system: 
apt install --yes gdisk zfs-dkms zfs zfs-initramfs zfsutils-linux
We also tell DKMS that we need to rebuild the initrd when upgrading: 
echo REMAKE_INITRD=yes > /etc/dkms/zfs.conf

Partitioning This is going to partition /dev/sdc with:
  • 1MB MBR / BIOS legacy boot
  • 512MB EFI boot
  • 1GB bpool, unencrypted pool for /boot
  • rest of the disk for zpool, the rest of the data 
     sgdisk --zap-all /dev/sdc
 sgdisk -a1 -n1:24K:+1000K -t1:EF02 /dev/sdc
 sgdisk     -n2:1M:+512M   -t2:EF00 /dev/sdc
 sgdisk     -n3:0:+1G      -t3:BF01 /dev/sdc
 sgdisk     -n4:0:0        -t4:BF00 /dev/sdc
That will look something like this: 
    root@curie:/home/anarcat# sgdisk -p /dev/sdc
    Disk /dev/sdc: 1953525168 sectors, 931.5 GiB
    Model: ESD-S1C         
    Sector size (logical/physical): 512/512 bytes
    Disk identifier (GUID): [REDACTED]
    Partition table holds up to 128 entries
    Main partition table begins at sector 2 and ends at sector 33
    First usable sector is 34, last usable sector is 1953525134
    Partitions will be aligned on 16-sector boundaries
    Total free space is 14 sectors (7.0 KiB)
    Number  Start (sector)    End (sector)  Size       Code  Name
       1              48            2047   1000.0 KiB  EF02  
       2            2048         1050623   512.0 MiB   EF00  
       3         1050624         3147775   1024.0 MiB  BF01  
       4         3147776      1953525134   930.0 GiB   BF00
Unfortunately, we can't be sure of the sector size here, because the USB controller is probably lying to us about it. Normally, this smartctl command should tell us the sector size as well: 
root@curie:~# smartctl -i /dev/sdb -qnoserial
smartctl 7.2 2020-12-30 r5155 [x86_64-linux-5.10.0-14-amd64] (local build)
Copyright (C) 2002-20, Bruce Allen, Christian Franke, www.smartmontools.org
=== START OF INFORMATION SECTION ===
Model Family:     Western Digital Black Mobile
Device Model:     WDC WD10JPLX-00MBPT0
Firmware Version: 01.01H01
User Capacity:    1 000 204 886 016 bytes [1,00 TB]
Sector Sizes:     512 bytes logical, 4096 bytes physical
Rotation Rate:    7200 rpm
Form Factor:      2.5 inches
Device is:        In smartctl database [for details use: -P show]
ATA Version is:   ATA8-ACS T13/1699-D revision 6
SATA Version is:  SATA 3.0, 6.0 Gb/s (current: 6.0 Gb/s)
Local Time is:    Tue May 17 13:33:04 2022 EDT
SMART support is: Available - device has SMART capability.
SMART support is: Enabled
Above is the example of the builtin HDD drive. But the SSD device enclosed in that USB controller doesn't support SMART commands, so we can't trust that it really has 512 bytes sectors. This matters because we need to tweak the ashift value correctly. We're going to go ahead the SSD drive has the common 4KB settings, which means ashift=12. Note here that we are not creating a separate partition for swap. Swap on ZFS volumes (AKA "swap on ZVOL") can trigger lockups and that issue is still not fixed upstream. Ubuntu recommends using a separate partition for swap instead. But since this is "just" a workstation, we're betting that we will not suffer from this problem, after hearing a report from another Debian developer running this setup on their workstation successfully. We do not recommend this setup though. In fact, if I were to redo this partition scheme, I would probably use LUKS encryption and setup a dedicated swap partition, as I had problems with ZFS encryption as well.

Creating pools ZFS pools are somewhat like "volume groups" if you are familiar with LVM, except they obviously also do things like RAID-10. (Even though LVM can technically also do RAID, people typically use mdadm instead.) In any case, the guide suggests creating two different pools here: one, in cleartext, for boot, and a separate, encrypted one, for the rest. Technically, the boot partition is required because the Grub bootloader only supports readonly ZFS pools, from what I understand. But I'm a little out of my depth here and just following the guide.

Boot pool creation This creates the boot pool in readonly mode with features that grub supports: 
    zpool create \
        -o cachefile=/etc/zfs/zpool.cache \
        -o ashift=12 -d \
        -o feature@async_destroy=enabled \
        -o feature@bookmarks=enabled \
        -o feature@embedded_data=enabled \
        -o feature@empty_bpobj=enabled \
        -o feature@enabled_txg=enabled \
        -o feature@extensible_dataset=enabled \
        -o feature@filesystem_limits=enabled \
        -o feature@hole_birth=enabled \
        -o feature@large_blocks=enabled \
        -o feature@lz4_compress=enabled \
        -o feature@spacemap_histogram=enabled \
        -o feature@zpool_checkpoint=enabled \
        -O acltype=posixacl -O canmount=off \
        -O compression=lz4 \
        -O devices=off -O normalization=formD -O relatime=on -O xattr=sa \
        -O mountpoint=/boot -R /mnt \
        bpool /dev/sdc3
I haven't investigated all those settings and just trust the upstream guide on the above.

Main pool creation This is a more typical pool creation. 
    zpool create \
        -o ashift=12 \
        -O encryption=on -O keylocation=prompt -O keyformat=passphrase \
        -O acltype=posixacl -O xattr=sa -O dnodesize=auto \
        -O compression=zstd \
        -O relatime=on \
        -O canmount=off \
        -O mountpoint=/ -R /mnt \
        rpool /dev/sdc4
Breaking this down:
  • -o ashift=12: mentioned above, 4k sector size
  • -O encryption=on -O keylocation=prompt -O keyformat=passphrase: encryption, prompt for a password, default algorithm is aes-256-gcm, explicit in the guide, made implicit here
  • -O acltype=posixacl -O xattr=sa: enable ACLs, with better performance (not enabled by default)
  • -O dnodesize=auto: related to extended attributes, less compatibility with other implementations
  • -O compression=zstd: enable zstd compression, can be disabled/enabled by dataset to with zfs set compression=off rpool/example
  • -O relatime=on: classic atime optimisation, another that could be used on a busy server is atime=off
  • -O canmount=off: do not make the pool mount automatically with mount -a?
  • -O mountpoint=/ -R /mnt: mount pool on / in the future, but /mnt for now
Those settings are all available in zfsprops(8). Other flags are defined in zpool-create(8). The reasoning behind them is also explained in the upstream guide and some also in [the Debian wiki][]. Those flags were actually not used:
  • -O normalization=formD: normalize file names on comparisons (not storage), implies utf8only=on, which is a bad idea (and effectively meant my first sync failed to copy some files, including this folder from a supysonic checkout). and this cannot be changed after the filesystem is created. bad, bad, bad.
[the Debian wiki]: https://wiki.debian.org/ZFS#Advanced_Topics

Side note about single-disk pools Also note that we're living dangerously here: single-disk ZFS pools are rumoured to be more dangerous than not running ZFS at all. The choice quote from this article is:
[...] any error can be detected, but cannot be corrected. This sounds like an acceptable compromise, but its actually not. The reason its not is that ZFS' metadata cannot be allowed to be corrupted. If it is it is likely the zpool will be impossible to mount (and will probably crash the system once the corruption is found). So a couple of bad sectors in the right place will mean that all data on the zpool will be lost. Not some, all. Also there's no ZFS recovery tools, so you cannot recover any data on the drives.
Compared with (say) ext4, where a single disk error can recovered, this is pretty bad. But we are ready to live with this with the idea that we'll have hourly offline snapshots that we can easily recover from. It's trade-off. Also, we're running this on a NVMe/M.2 drive which typically just blinks out of existence completely, and doesn't "bit rot" the way a HDD would. Also, the FreeBSD handbook quick start doesn't have any warnings about their first example, which is with a single disk. So I am reassured at least.

Creating mount points Next we create the actual filesystems, known as "datasets" which are the things that get mounted on mountpoint and hold the actual files.
  • this creates two containers, for ROOT and BOOT 
     zfs create -o canmount=off -o mountpoint=none rpool/ROOT &&
 zfs create -o canmount=off -o mountpoint=none bpool/BOOT
    Note that it's unclear to me why those datasets are necessary, but they seem common practice, also used in this FreeBSD example. The OpenZFS guide mentions the Solaris upgrades and Ubuntu's zsys that use that container for upgrades and rollbacks. This blog post seems to explain a bit the layout behind the installer.
  • this creates the actual boot and root filesystems: 
     zfs create -o canmount=noauto -o mountpoint=/ rpool/ROOT/debian &&
 zfs mount rpool/ROOT/debian &&
 zfs create -o mountpoint=/boot bpool/BOOT/debian
    I guess the debian name here is because we could technically have multiple operating systems with the same underlying datasets.
  • then the main datasets: 
     zfs create                                 rpool/home &&
 zfs create -o mountpoint=/root             rpool/home/root &&
 chmod 700 /mnt/root &&
 zfs create                                 rpool/var
  • exclude temporary files from snapshots: 
     zfs create -o com.sun:auto-snapshot=false  rpool/var/cache &&
 zfs create -o com.sun:auto-snapshot=false  rpool/var/tmp &&
 chmod 1777 /mnt/var/tmp
  • and skip automatic snapshots in Docker: 
     zfs create -o canmount=off                 rpool/var/lib &&
 zfs create -o com.sun:auto-snapshot=false  rpool/var/lib/docker
    Notice here a peculiarity: we must create rpool/var/lib to create rpool/var/lib/docker otherwise we get this error: 
     cannot create 'rpool/var/lib/docker': parent does not exist
    ... and no, just creating /mnt/var/lib doesn't fix that problem. In fact, it makes things even more confusing because an existing directory shadows a mountpoint, which is the opposite of how things normally work. Also note that you will probably need to change storage driver in Docker, see the zfs-driver documentation for details but, basically, I did: 
    echo '  "storage-driver": "zfs"  ' > /etc/docker/daemon.json
    Note that podman has the same problem (and similar solution): 
    printf '[storage]\ndriver = "zfs"\n' > /etc/containers/storage.conf
  • make a tmpfs for /run: 
     mkdir /mnt/run &&
 mount -t tmpfs tmpfs /mnt/run &&
 mkdir /mnt/run/lock
We don't create a /srv, as that's the HDD stuff. Also mount the EFI partition: 
mkfs.fat -F 32 /dev/sdc2 &&
mount /dev/sdc2 /mnt/boot/efi/
At this point, everything should be mounted in /mnt. It should look like this: 
root@curie:~# LANG=C df -h -t zfs -t vfat
Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
rpool/ROOT/debian     899G  384K  899G   1% /mnt
bpool/BOOT/debian     832M  123M  709M  15% /mnt/boot
rpool/home            899G  256K  899G   1% /mnt/home
rpool/home/root       899G  256K  899G   1% /mnt/root
rpool/var             899G  384K  899G   1% /mnt/var
rpool/var/cache       899G  256K  899G   1% /mnt/var/cache
rpool/var/tmp         899G  256K  899G   1% /mnt/var/tmp
rpool/var/lib/docker  899G  256K  899G   1% /mnt/var/lib/docker
/dev/sdc2             511M  4.0K  511M   1% /mnt/boot/efi
Now that we have everything setup and mounted, let's copy all files over.

Copying files This is a list of all the mounted filesystems 
for fs in /boot/ /boot/efi/ / /home/; do
    echo "syncing $fs to /mnt$fs..." && 
    rsync -aSHAXx --info=progress2 --delete $fs /mnt$fs
done
You can check that the list is correct with: 
mount -l -t ext4,btrfs,vfat   awk ' print $3 '
Note that we skip /srv as it's on a different disk. On the first run, we had: 
root@curie:~# for fs in /boot/ /boot/efi/ / /home/; do
        echo "syncing $fs to /mnt$fs..." && 
        rsync -aSHAXx --info=progress2 $fs /mnt$fs
    done
syncing /boot/ to /mnt/boot/...
              0   0%    0.00kB/s    0:00:00 (xfr#0, to-chk=0/299)  
syncing /boot/efi/ to /mnt/boot/efi/...
     16,831,437 100%  184.14MB/s    0:00:00 (xfr#101, to-chk=0/110)
syncing / to /mnt/...
 28,019,293,280  94%   47.63MB/s    0:09:21 (xfr#703710, ir-chk=6748/839220)rsync: [generator] delete_file: rmdir(var/lib/docker) failed: Device or resource busy (16)
could not make way for new symlink: var/lib/docker
 34,081,267,990  98%   50.71MB/s    0:10:40 (xfr#736577, to-chk=0/867732)    
rsync error: some files/attrs were not transferred (see previous errors) (code 23) at main.c(1333) [sender=3.2.3]
syncing /home/ to /mnt/home/...
rsync: [sender] readlink_stat("/home/anarcat/.fuse") failed: Permission denied (13)
 24,456,268,098  98%   68.03MB/s    0:05:42 (xfr#159867, ir-chk=6875/172377) 
file has vanished: "/home/anarcat/.cache/mozilla/firefox/s2hwvqbu.quantum/cache2/entries/B3AB0CDA9C4454B3C1197E5A22669DF8EE849D90"
199,762,528,125  93%   74.82MB/s    0:42:26 (xfr#1437846, ir-chk=1018/1983979)rsync: [generator] recv_generator: mkdir "/mnt/home/anarcat/dist/supysonic/tests/assets/\#346" failed: Invalid or incomplete multibyte or wide character (84)
*** Skipping any contents from this failed directory ***
315,384,723,978  96%   76.82MB/s    1:05:15 (xfr#2256473, to-chk=0/2993950)    
rsync error: some files/attrs were not transferred (see previous errors) (code 23) at main.c(1333) [sender=3.2.3]
Note the failure to transfer that supysonic file? It turns out they had a weird filename in their source tree, since then removed, but still it showed how the utf8only feature might not be such a bad idea. At this point, the procedure was restarted all the way back to "Creating pools", after unmounting all ZFS filesystems (umount /mnt/run /mnt/boot/efi && umount -t zfs -a) and destroying the pool, which, surprisingly, doesn't require any confirmation (zpool destroy rpool). The second run was cleaner: 
root@curie:~# for fs in /boot/ /boot/efi/ / /home/; do
        echo "syncing $fs to /mnt$fs..." && 
        rsync -aSHAXx --info=progress2 --delete $fs /mnt$fs
    done
syncing /boot/ to /mnt/boot/...
              0   0%    0.00kB/s    0:00:00 (xfr#0, to-chk=0/299)  
syncing /boot/efi/ to /mnt/boot/efi/...
              0   0%    0.00kB/s    0:00:00 (xfr#0, to-chk=0/110)  
syncing / to /mnt/...
 28,019,033,070  97%   42.03MB/s    0:10:35 (xfr#703671, ir-chk=1093/833515)rsync: [generator] delete_file: rmdir(var/lib/docker) failed: Device or resource busy (16)
could not make way for new symlink: var/lib/docker
 34,081,807,102  98%   44.84MB/s    0:12:04 (xfr#736580, to-chk=0/867723)    
rsync error: some files/attrs were not transferred (see previous errors) (code 23) at main.c(1333) [sender=3.2.3]
syncing /home/ to /mnt/home/...
rsync: [sender] readlink_stat("/home/anarcat/.fuse") failed: Permission denied (13)
IO error encountered -- skipping file deletion
 24,043,086,450  96%   62.03MB/s    0:06:09 (xfr#151819, ir-chk=15117/172571)
file has vanished: "/home/anarcat/.cache/mozilla/firefox/s2hwvqbu.quantum/cache2/entries/4C1FDBFEA976FF924D062FB990B24B897A77B84B"
315,423,626,507  96%   67.09MB/s    1:14:43 (xfr#2256845, to-chk=0/2994364)    
rsync error: some files/attrs were not transferred (see previous errors) (code 23) at main.c(1333) [sender=3.2.3]
Also note the transfer speed: we seem capped at 76MB/s, or 608Mbit/s. This is not as fast as I was expecting: the USB connection seems to be at around 5Gbps: 
anarcat@curie:~$ lsusb -tv   head -4
/:  Bus 02.Port 1: Dev 1, Class=root_hub, Driver=xhci_hcd/6p, 5000M
    ID 1d6b:0003 Linux Foundation 3.0 root hub
     __ Port 1: Dev 4, If 0, Class=Mass Storage, Driver=uas, 5000M
        ID 0b05:1932 ASUSTek Computer, Inc.
So it shouldn't cap at that speed. It's possible the USB adapter is failing to give me the full speed though. It's not the M.2 SSD drive either, as that has a ~500MB/s bandwidth, acccording to its spec. At this point, we're about ready to do the final configuration. We drop to single user mode and do the rest of the procedure. That used to be shutdown now, but it seems like the systemd switch broke that, so now you can reboot into grub and pick the "recovery" option. Alternatively, you might try systemctl rescue, as I found out. I also wanted to copy the drive over to another new NVMe drive, but that failed: it looks like the USB controller I have doesn't work with older, non-NVME drives.

Boot configuration Now we need to enter the new system to rebuild the boot loader and initrd and so on. First, we bind mounts and chroot into the ZFS disk: 
mount --rbind /dev  /mnt/dev &&
mount --rbind /proc /mnt/proc &&
mount --rbind /sys  /mnt/sys &&
chroot /mnt /bin/bash
Next we add an extra service that imports the bpool on boot, to make sure it survives a zpool.cache destruction: 
cat > /etc/systemd/system/zfs-import-bpool.service <<EOF
[Unit]
DefaultDependencies=no
Before=zfs-import-scan.service
Before=zfs-import-cache.service
[Service]
Type=oneshot
RemainAfterExit=yes
ExecStart=/sbin/zpool import -N -o cachefile=none bpool
# Work-around to preserve zpool cache:
ExecStartPre=-/bin/mv /etc/zfs/zpool.cache /etc/zfs/preboot_zpool.cache
ExecStartPost=-/bin/mv /etc/zfs/preboot_zpool.cache /etc/zfs/zpool.cache
[Install]
WantedBy=zfs-import.target
EOF
Enable the service: 
systemctl enable zfs-import-bpool.service
I had to trim down /etc/fstab and /etc/crypttab to only contain references to the legacy filesystems (/srv is still BTRFS!). If we don't already have a tmpfs defined in /etc/fstab: 
ln -s /usr/share/systemd/tmp.mount /etc/systemd/system/ &&
systemctl enable tmp.mount
Rebuild boot loader with support for ZFS, but also to workaround GRUB's missing zpool-features support: 
grub-probe /boot   grep -q zfs &&
update-initramfs -c -k all &&
sed -i 's,GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX.*,GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="root=ZFS=rpool/ROOT/debian",' /etc/default/grub &&
update-grub
For good measure, make sure the right disk is configured here, for example you might want to tag both drives in a RAID array: 
dpkg-reconfigure grub-pc
Install grub to EFI while you're there: 
grub-install --target=x86_64-efi --efi-directory=/boot/efi --bootloader-id=debian --recheck --no-floppy
Filesystem mount ordering. The rationale here in the OpenZFS guide is a little strange, but I don't dare ignore that. 
mkdir /etc/zfs/zfs-list.cache
touch /etc/zfs/zfs-list.cache/bpool
touch /etc/zfs/zfs-list.cache/rpool
zed -F &
Verify that zed updated the cache by making sure these are not empty: 
cat /etc/zfs/zfs-list.cache/bpool
cat /etc/zfs/zfs-list.cache/rpool
Once the files have data, stop zed: 
fg
Press Ctrl-C.
Fix the paths to eliminate /mnt: 
sed -Ei "s /mnt/? / " /etc/zfs/zfs-list.cache/*
Snapshot initial install: 
zfs snapshot bpool/BOOT/debian@install
zfs snapshot rpool/ROOT/debian@install
Exit chroot: 
exit

Finalizing One last sync was done in rescue mode: 
for fs in /boot/ /boot/efi/ / /home/; do
    echo "syncing $fs to /mnt$fs..." && 
    rsync -aSHAXx --info=progress2 --delete $fs /mnt$fs
done
Then we unmount all filesystems: 
mount   grep -v zfs   tac   awk '/\/mnt/  print $3 '   xargs -i  umount -lf  
zpool export -a
Reboot, swap the drives, and boot in ZFS. Hurray!

Benchmarks This is a test that was ran in single-user mode using fio and the Ars Technica recommended tests, which are:
  • Single 4KiB random write process: 
     fio --name=randwrite4k1x --ioengine=posixaio --rw=randwrite --bs=4k --size=4g --numjobs=1 --iodepth=1 --runtime=60 --time_based --end_fsync=1
  • 16 parallel 64KiB random write processes: 
     fio --name=randwrite64k16x --ioengine=posixaio --rw=randwrite --bs=64k --size=256m --numjobs=16 --iodepth=16 --runtime=60 --time_based --end_fsync=1
  • Single 1MiB random write process: 
     fio --name=randwrite1m1x --ioengine=posixaio --rw=randwrite --bs=1m --size=16g --numjobs=1 --iodepth=1 --runtime=60 --time_based --end_fsync=1
Strangely, that's not exactly what the author, Jim Salter, did in his actual test bench used in the ZFS benchmarking article. The first thing is there's no read test at all, which is already pretty strange. But also it doesn't include stuff like dropping caches or repeating results. So here's my variation, which i called fio-ars-bench.sh for now. It just batches a bunch of fio tests, one by one, 60 seconds each. It should take about 12 minutes to run, as there are 3 pair of tests, read/write, with and without async. My bias, before building, running and analysing those results is that ZFS should outperform the traditional stack on writes, but possibly not on reads. It's also possible it outperforms it on both, because it's a newer drive. A new test might be possible with a new external USB drive as well, although I doubt I will find the time to do this.

Results All tests were done on WD blue SN550 drives, which claims to be able to push 2400MB/s read and 1750MB/s write. An extra drive was bought to move the LVM setup from a WDC WDS500G1B0B-00AS40 SSD, a WD blue M.2 2280 SSD that was at least 5 years old, spec'd at 560MB/s read, 530MB/s write. Benchmarks were done on the M.2 SSD drive but discarded so that the drive difference is not a factor in the test. In practice, I'm going to assume we'll never reach those numbers because we're not actually NVMe (this is an old workstation!) so the bottleneck isn't the disk itself. For our purposes, it might still give us useful results.

Rescue test, LUKS/LVM/ext4 Those tests were performed with everything shutdown, after either entering the system in rescue mode, or by reaching that target with: 
systemctl rescue
The network might have been started before or after the test as well: 
systemctl start systemd-networkd
So it should be fairly reliable as basically nothing else is running. Raw numbers, from the ?job-curie-lvm.log, converted to MiB/s and manually merged:
test read I/O read IOPS write I/O write IOPS
rand4k4g1x 39.27 10052 212.15 54310
rand4k4g1x--fsync=1 39.29 10057 2.73 699
rand64k256m16x 1297.00 20751 1068.57 17097
rand64k256m16x--fsync=1 1290.90 20654 353.82 5661
rand1m16g1x 315.15 315 563.77 563
rand1m16g1x--fsync=1 345.88 345 157.01 157
Peaks are at about 20k IOPS and ~1.3GiB/s read, 1GiB/s write in the 64KB blocks with 16 jobs. Slowest is the random 4k block sync write at an abysmal 3MB/s and 700 IOPS The 1MB read/write tests have lower IOPS, but that is expected.

Rescue test, ZFS This test was also performed in rescue mode. Raw numbers, from the ?job-curie-zfs.log, converted to MiB/s and manually merged:
test read I/O read IOPS write I/O write IOPS
rand4k4g1x 77.20 19763 27.13 6944
rand4k4g1x--fsync=1 76.16 19495 6.53 1673
rand64k256m16x 1882.40 30118 70.58 1129
rand64k256m16x--fsync=1 1865.13 29842 71.98 1151
rand1m16g1x 921.62 921 102.21 102
rand1m16g1x--fsync=1 908.37 908 64.30 64
Peaks are at 1.8GiB/s read, also in the 64k job like above, but much faster. The write is, as expected, much slower at 70MiB/s (compared to 1GiB/s!), but it should be noted the sync write doesn't degrade performance compared to async writes (although it's still below the LVM 300MB/s).

Conclusions Really, ZFS has trouble performing in all write conditions. The random 4k sync write test is the only place where ZFS outperforms LVM in writes, and barely (7MiB/s vs 3MiB/s). Everywhere else, writes are much slower, sometimes by an order of magnitude. And before some ZFS zealot jumps in talking about the SLOG or some other cache that could be added to improved performance, I'll remind you that those numbers are on a bare bones NVMe drive, pretty much as fast storage as you can find on this machine. Adding another NVMe drive as a cache probably will not improve write performance here. Still, those are very different results than the tests performed by Salter which shows ZFS beating traditional configurations in all categories but uncached 4k reads (not writes!). That said, those tests are very different from the tests I performed here, where I test writes on a single disk, not a RAID array, which might explain the discrepancy. Also, note that neither LVM or ZFS manage to reach the 2400MB/s read and 1750MB/s write performance specification. ZFS does manage to reach 82% of the read performance (1973MB/s) and LVM 64% of the write performance (1120MB/s). LVM hits 57% of the read performance and ZFS hits barely 6% of the write performance. Overall, I'm a bit disappointed in the ZFS write performance here, I must say. Maybe I need to tweak the record size or some other ZFS voodoo, but I'll note that I didn't have to do any such configuration on the other side to kick ZFS in the pants...

Real world experience This section document not synthetic backups, but actual real world workloads, comparing before and after I switched my workstation to ZFS.

Docker performance I had the feeling that running some git hook (which was firing a Docker container) was "slower" somehow. It seems that, at runtime, ZFS backends are significant slower than their overlayfs/ext4 equivalent: 
May 16 14:42:52 curie systemd[1]: home-docker-overlay2-17e4d24228decc2d2d493efc401dbfb7ac29739da0e46775e122078d9daf3e87\x2dinit-merged.mount: Succeeded.
May 16 14:42:52 curie systemd[5161]: home-docker-overlay2-17e4d24228decc2d2d493efc401dbfb7ac29739da0e46775e122078d9daf3e87\x2dinit-merged.mount: Succeeded.
May 16 14:42:52 curie systemd[1]: home-docker-overlay2-17e4d24228decc2d2d493efc401dbfb7ac29739da0e46775e122078d9daf3e87-merged.mount: Succeeded.
May 16 14:42:53 curie dockerd[1723]: time="2022-05-16T14:42:53.087219426-04:00" level=info msg="starting signal loop" namespace=moby path=/run/docker/containerd/daemon/io.containerd.runtime.v2.task/moby/af22586fba07014a4d10ab19da10cf280db7a43cad804d6c1e9f2682f12b5f10 pid=151170
May 16 14:42:53 curie systemd[1]: Started libcontainer container af22586fba07014a4d10ab19da10cf280db7a43cad804d6c1e9f2682f12b5f10.
May 16 14:42:54 curie systemd[1]: docker-af22586fba07014a4d10ab19da10cf280db7a43cad804d6c1e9f2682f12b5f10.scope: Succeeded.
May 16 14:42:54 curie dockerd[1723]: time="2022-05-16T14:42:54.047297800-04:00" level=info msg="shim disconnected" id=af22586fba07014a4d10ab19da10cf280db7a43cad804d6c1e9f2682f12b5f10
May 16 14:42:54 curie dockerd[998]: time="2022-05-16T14:42:54.051365015-04:00" level=info msg="ignoring event" container=af22586fba07014a4d10ab19da10cf280db7a43cad804d6c1e9f2682f12b5f10 module=libcontainerd namespace=moby topic=/tasks/delete type="*events.TaskDelete"
May 16 14:42:54 curie systemd[2444]: run-docker-netns-f5453c87c879.mount: Succeeded.
May 16 14:42:54 curie systemd[5161]: run-docker-netns-f5453c87c879.mount: Succeeded.
May 16 14:42:54 curie systemd[2444]: home-docker-overlay2-17e4d24228decc2d2d493efc401dbfb7ac29739da0e46775e122078d9daf3e87-merged.mount: Succeeded.
May 16 14:42:54 curie systemd[5161]: home-docker-overlay2-17e4d24228decc2d2d493efc401dbfb7ac29739da0e46775e122078d9daf3e87-merged.mount: Succeeded.
May 16 14:42:54 curie systemd[1]: run-docker-netns-f5453c87c879.mount: Succeeded.
May 16 14:42:54 curie systemd[1]: home-docker-overlay2-17e4d24228decc2d2d493efc401dbfb7ac29739da0e46775e122078d9daf3e87-merged.mount: Succeeded.
Translating this:
  • container setup: ~1 second
  • container runtime: ~1 second
  • container teardown: ~1 second
  • total runtime: 2-3 seconds
Obviously, those timestamps are not quite accurate enough to make precise measurements... After I switched to ZFS: 
mai 30 15:31:39 curie systemd[1]: var-lib-docker-zfs-graph-41ce08fb7a1d3a9c101694b82722f5621c0b4819bd1d9f070933fd1e00543cdf\x2dinit.mount: Succeeded. 
mai 30 15:31:39 curie systemd[5287]: var-lib-docker-zfs-graph-41ce08fb7a1d3a9c101694b82722f5621c0b4819bd1d9f070933fd1e00543cdf\x2dinit.mount: Succeeded. 
mai 30 15:31:40 curie systemd[1]: var-lib-docker-zfs-graph-41ce08fb7a1d3a9c101694b82722f5621c0b4819bd1d9f070933fd1e00543cdf.mount: Succeeded. 
mai 30 15:31:40 curie systemd[5287]: var-lib-docker-zfs-graph-41ce08fb7a1d3a9c101694b82722f5621c0b4819bd1d9f070933fd1e00543cdf.mount: Succeeded. 
mai 30 15:31:41 curie dockerd[3199]: time="2022-05-30T15:31:41.551403693-04:00" level=info msg="starting signal loop" namespace=moby path=/run/docker/containerd/daemon/io.containerd.runtime.v2.task/moby/42a1a1ed5912a7227148e997f442e7ab2e5cc3558aa3471548223c5888c9b142 pid=141080 
mai 30 15:31:41 curie systemd[1]: run-docker-runtime\x2drunc-moby-42a1a1ed5912a7227148e997f442e7ab2e5cc3558aa3471548223c5888c9b142-runc.ZVcjvl.mount: Succeeded. 
mai 30 15:31:41 curie systemd[5287]: run-docker-runtime\x2drunc-moby-42a1a1ed5912a7227148e997f442e7ab2e5cc3558aa3471548223c5888c9b142-runc.ZVcjvl.mount: Succeeded. 
mai 30 15:31:41 curie systemd[1]: Started libcontainer container 42a1a1ed5912a7227148e997f442e7ab2e5cc3558aa3471548223c5888c9b142. 
mai 30 15:31:45 curie systemd[1]: docker-42a1a1ed5912a7227148e997f442e7ab2e5cc3558aa3471548223c5888c9b142.scope: Succeeded. 
mai 30 15:31:45 curie dockerd[3199]: time="2022-05-30T15:31:45.883019128-04:00" level=info msg="shim disconnected" id=42a1a1ed5912a7227148e997f442e7ab2e5cc3558aa3471548223c5888c9b142 
mai 30 15:31:45 curie dockerd[1726]: time="2022-05-30T15:31:45.883064491-04:00" level=info msg="ignoring event" container=42a1a1ed5912a7227148e997f442e7ab2e5cc3558aa3471548223c5888c9b142 module=libcontainerd namespace=moby topic=/tasks/delete type="*events.TaskDelete" 
mai 30 15:31:45 curie systemd[1]: run-docker-netns-e45f5cf5f465.mount: Succeeded. 
mai 30 15:31:45 curie systemd[5287]: run-docker-netns-e45f5cf5f465.mount: Succeeded. 
mai 30 15:31:45 curie systemd[1]: var-lib-docker-zfs-graph-41ce08fb7a1d3a9c101694b82722f5621c0b4819bd1d9f070933fd1e00543cdf.mount: Succeeded. 
mai 30 15:31:45 curie systemd[5287]: var-lib-docker-zfs-graph-41ce08fb7a1d3a9c101694b82722f5621c0b4819bd1d9f070933fd1e00543cdf.mount: Succeeded.
That's double or triple the run time, from 2 seconds to 6 seconds. Most of the time is spent in run time, inside the container. Here's the breakdown:
  • container setup: ~2 seconds
  • container run: ~4 seconds
  • container teardown: ~1 second
  • total run time: about ~6-7 seconds
That's a two- to three-fold increase! Clearly something is going on here that I should tweak. It's possible that code path is less optimized in Docker. I also worry about podman, but apparently it also supports ZFS backends. Possibly it would perform better, but at this stage I wouldn't have a good comparison: maybe it would have performed better on non-ZFS as well...

Interactivity While doing the offsite backups (below), the system became somewhat "sluggish". I felt everything was slow, and I estimate it introduced ~50ms latency in any input device. Arguably, those are all USB and the external drive was connected through USB, but I suspect the ZFS drivers are not as well tuned with the scheduler as the regular filesystem drivers...

Recovery procedures For test purposes, I unmounted all systems during the procedure: 
umount /mnt/boot/efi /mnt/boot/run
umount -a -t zfs
zpool export -a
And disconnected the drive, to see how I would recover this system from another Linux system in case of a total motherboard failure. To import an existing pool, plug the device, then import the pool with an alternate root, so it doesn't mount over your existing filesystems, then you mount the root filesystem and all the others: 
zpool import -l -a -R /mnt &&
zfs mount rpool/ROOT/debian &&
zfs mount -a &&
mount /dev/sdc2 /mnt/boot/efi &&
mount -t tmpfs tmpfs /mnt/run &&
mkdir /mnt/run/lock

Offsite backup Part of the goal of using ZFS is to simplify and harden backups. I wanted to experiment with shorter recovery times specifically both point in time recovery objective and recovery time objective and faster incremental backups. This is, therefore, part of my backup services. This section documents how an external NVMe enclosure was setup in a pool to mirror the datasets from my workstation. The final setup should include syncoid copying datasets to the backup server regularly, but I haven't finished that configuration yet.

Partitioning The above partitioning procedure used sgdisk, but I couldn't figure out how to do this with sgdisk, so this uses sfdisk to dump the partition from the first disk to an external, identical drive: 
sfdisk -d /dev/nvme0n1   sfdisk --no-reread /dev/sda --force

Pool creation This is similar to the main pool creation, except we tweaked a few bits after changing the upstream procedure: 
zpool create \
        -o cachefile=/etc/zfs/zpool.cache \
        -o ashift=12 -d \
        -o feature@async_destroy=enabled \
        -o feature@bookmarks=enabled \
        -o feature@embedded_data=enabled \
        -o feature@empty_bpobj=enabled \
        -o feature@enabled_txg=enabled \
        -o feature@extensible_dataset=enabled \
        -o feature@filesystem_limits=enabled \
        -o feature@hole_birth=enabled \
        -o feature@large_blocks=enabled \
        -o feature@lz4_compress=enabled \
        -o feature@spacemap_histogram=enabled \
        -o feature@zpool_checkpoint=enabled \
        -O acltype=posixacl -O xattr=sa \
        -O compression=lz4 \
        -O devices=off \
        -O relatime=on \
        -O canmount=off \
        -O mountpoint=/boot -R /mnt \
        bpool-tubman /dev/sdb3
The change from the main boot pool are: Main pool creation is: 
zpool create \
        -o ashift=12 \
        -O encryption=on -O keylocation=prompt -O keyformat=passphrase \
        -O acltype=posixacl -O xattr=sa -O dnodesize=auto \
        -O compression=zstd \
        -O relatime=on \
        -O canmount=off \
        -O mountpoint=/ -R /mnt \
        rpool-tubman /dev/sdb4

First sync I used syncoid to copy all pools over to the external device. syncoid is a thing that's part of the sanoid project which is specifically designed to sync snapshots between pool, typically over SSH links but it can also operate locally. The sanoid command had a --readonly argument to simulate changes, but syncoid didn't so I tried to fix that with an upstream PR. It seems it would be better to do this by hand, but this was much easier. The full first sync was: 
root@curie:/home/anarcat# ./bin/syncoid -r  bpool bpool-tubman
CRITICAL ERROR: Target bpool-tubman exists but has no snapshots matching with bpool!
                Replication to target would require destroying existing
                target. Cowardly refusing to destroy your existing target.
          NOTE: Target bpool-tubman dataset is < 64MB used - did you mistakenly run
                 zfs create bpool-tubman  on the target? ZFS initial
                replication must be to a NON EXISTENT DATASET, which will
                then be CREATED BY the initial replication process.
INFO: Sending oldest full snapshot bpool/BOOT@test (~ 42 KB) to new target filesystem:
44.2KiB 0:00:00 [4.19MiB/s] [========================================================================================================================] 103%            
INFO: Updating new target filesystem with incremental bpool/BOOT@test ... syncoid_curie_2022-05-30:12:50:39 (~ 4 KB):
2.13KiB 0:00:00 [ 114KiB/s] [===============================================================>                                                         ] 53%            
INFO: Sending oldest full snapshot bpool/BOOT/debian@install (~ 126.0 MB) to new target filesystem:
 126MiB 0:00:00 [ 308MiB/s] [=======================================================================================================================>] 100%            
INFO: Updating new target filesystem with incremental bpool/BOOT/debian@install ... syncoid_curie_2022-05-30:12:50:39 (~ 113.4 MB):
 113MiB 0:00:00 [ 315MiB/s] [=======================================================================================================================>] 100%
root@curie:/home/anarcat# ./bin/syncoid -r  rpool rpool-tubman
CRITICAL ERROR: Target rpool-tubman exists but has no snapshots matching with rpool!
                Replication to target would require destroying existing
                target. Cowardly refusing to destroy your existing target.
          NOTE: Target rpool-tubman dataset is < 64MB used - did you mistakenly run
                 zfs create rpool-tubman  on the target? ZFS initial
                replication must be to a NON EXISTENT DATASET, which will
                then be CREATED BY the initial replication process.
INFO: Sending oldest full snapshot rpool/ROOT@syncoid_curie_2022-05-30:12:50:51 (~ 69 KB) to new target filesystem:
44.2KiB 0:00:00 [2.44MiB/s] [===========================================================================>                                             ] 63%            
INFO: Sending oldest full snapshot rpool/ROOT/debian@install (~ 25.9 GB) to new target filesystem:
25.9GiB 0:03:33 [ 124MiB/s] [=======================================================================================================================>] 100%            
INFO: Updating new target filesystem with incremental rpool/ROOT/debian@install ... syncoid_curie_2022-05-30:12:50:52 (~ 3.9 GB):
3.92GiB 0:00:33 [ 119MiB/s] [======================================================================================================================>  ] 99%            
INFO: Sending oldest full snapshot rpool/home@syncoid_curie_2022-05-30:12:55:04 (~ 276.8 GB) to new target filesystem:
 277GiB 0:27:13 [ 174MiB/s] [=======================================================================================================================>] 100%            
INFO: Sending oldest full snapshot rpool/home/root@syncoid_curie_2022-05-30:13:22:19 (~ 2.2 GB) to new target filesystem:
2.22GiB 0:00:25 [90.2MiB/s] [=======================================================================================================================>] 100%            
INFO: Sending oldest full snapshot rpool/var@syncoid_curie_2022-05-30:13:22:47 (~ 5.6 GB) to new target filesystem:
5.56GiB 0:00:32 [ 176MiB/s] [=======================================================================================================================>] 100%            
INFO: Sending oldest full snapshot rpool/var/cache@syncoid_curie_2022-05-30:13:23:22 (~ 627.3 MB) to new target filesystem:
 627MiB 0:00:03 [ 169MiB/s] [=======================================================================================================================>] 100%            
INFO: Sending oldest full snapshot rpool/var/lib@syncoid_curie_2022-05-30:13:23:28 (~ 69 KB) to new target filesystem:
44.2KiB 0:00:00 [1.40MiB/s] [===========================================================================>                                             ] 63%            
INFO: Sending oldest full snapshot rpool/var/lib/docker@syncoid_curie_2022-05-30:13:23:28 (~ 442.6 MB) to new target filesystem:
 443MiB 0:00:04 [ 103MiB/s] [=======================================================================================================================>] 100%            
INFO: Sending oldest full snapshot rpool/var/lib/docker/05c0de7fabbea60500eaa495d0d82038249f6faa63b12914737c4d71520e62c5@266253254 (~ 6.3 MB) to new target filesystem:
6.49MiB 0:00:00 [12.9MiB/s] [========================================================================================================================] 102%            
INFO: Updating new target filesystem with incremental rpool/var/lib/docker/05c0de7fabbea60500eaa495d0d82038249f6faa63b12914737c4d71520e62c5@266253254 ... syncoid_curie_2022-05-30:13:23:34 (~ 4 KB):
1.52KiB 0:00:00 [27.6KiB/s] [============================================>                                                                            ] 38%            
INFO: Sending oldest full snapshot rpool/var/lib/flatpak@syncoid_curie_2022-05-30:13:23:36 (~ 2.0 GB) to new target filesystem:
2.00GiB 0:00:17 [ 115MiB/s] [=======================================================================================================================>] 100%            
INFO: Sending oldest full snapshot rpool/var/tmp@syncoid_curie_2022-05-30:13:23:55 (~ 57.0 MB) to new target filesystem:
61.8MiB 0:00:01 [45.0MiB/s] [========================================================================================================================] 108%            
INFO: Clone is recreated on target rpool-tubman/var/lib/docker/ed71ddd563a779ba6fb37b3b1d0cc2c11eca9b594e77b4b234867ebcb162b205 based on rpool/var/lib/docker/05c0de7fabbea60500eaa495d0d82038249f6faa63b12914737c4d71520e62c5@266253254
INFO: Sending oldest full snapshot rpool/var/lib/docker/ed71ddd563a779ba6fb37b3b1d0cc2c11eca9b594e77b4b234867ebcb162b205@syncoid_curie_2022-05-30:13:23:58 (~ 218.6 MB) to new target filesystem:
 219MiB 0:00:01 [ 151MiB/s] [=======================================================================================================================>] 100%
Funny how the CRITICAL ERROR doesn't actually stop syncoid and it just carries on merrily doing when it's telling you it's "cowardly refusing to destroy your existing target"... Maybe that's because my pull request broke something though... During the transfer, the computer was very sluggish: everything feels like it has ~30-50ms latency extra: 
anarcat@curie:sanoid$ LANG=C top -b  -n 1   head -20
top - 13:07:05 up 6 days,  4:01,  1 user,  load average: 16.13, 16.55, 11.83
Tasks: 606 total,   6 running, 598 sleeping,   0 stopped,   2 zombie
%Cpu(s): 18.8 us, 72.5 sy,  1.2 ni,  5.0 id,  1.2 wa,  0.0 hi,  1.2 si,  0.0 st
MiB Mem :  15898.4 total,   1387.6 free,  13170.0 used,   1340.8 buff/cache
MiB Swap:      0.0 total,      0.0 free,      0.0 used.   1319.8 avail Mem 
    PID USER      PR  NI    VIRT    RES    SHR S  %CPU  %MEM     TIME+ COMMAND
     70 root      20   0       0      0      0 S  83.3   0.0   6:12.67 kswapd0
4024878 root      20   0  282644  96432  10288 S  44.4   0.6   0:11.43 puppet
3896136 root      20   0   35328  16528     48 S  22.2   0.1   2:08.04 mbuffer
3896135 root      20   0   10328    776    168 R  16.7   0.0   1:22.93 zfs
3896138 root      20   0   10588    788    156 R  16.7   0.0   1:49.30 zfs
    350 root       0 -20       0      0      0 R  11.1   0.0   1:03.53 z_rd_int
    351 root       0 -20       0      0      0 S  11.1   0.0   1:04.15 z_rd_int
3896137 root      20   0    4384    352    244 R  11.1   0.0   0:44.73 pv
4034094 anarcat   30  10   20028  13960   2428 S  11.1   0.1   0:00.70 mbsync
4036539 anarcat   20   0    9604   3464   2408 R  11.1   0.0   0:00.04 top
    352 root       0 -20       0      0      0 S   5.6   0.0   1:03.64 z_rd_int
    353 root       0 -20       0      0      0 S   5.6   0.0   1:03.64 z_rd_int
    354 root       0 -20       0      0      0 S   5.6   0.0   1:04.01 z_rd_int
I wonder how much of that is due to syncoid, particularly because I often saw mbuffer and pv in there which are not strictly necessary to do those kind of operations, as far as I understand. Once that's done, export the pools to disconnect the drive: 
zpool export bpool-tubman
zpool export rpool-tubman

Raw disk benchmark Copied the 512GB SSD/M.2 device to another 1024GB NVMe/M.2 device: 
anarcat@curie:~$ sudo dd if=/dev/sdb of=/dev/sdc bs=4M status=progress conv=fdatasync
499944259584 octets (500 GB, 466 GiB) copi s, 1713 s, 292 MB/s
119235+1 enregistrements lus
119235+1 enregistrements  crits
500107862016 octets (500 GB, 466 GiB) copi s, 1719,93 s, 291 MB/s
... while both over USB, whoohoo 300MB/s!

Monitoring ZFS should be monitoring your pools regularly. Normally, the [[!debman zed]] daemon monitors all ZFS events. It is the thing that will report when a scrub failed, for example. See this configuration guide. Scrubs should be regularly scheduled to ensure consistency of the pool. This can be done in newer zfsutils-linux versions (bullseye-backports or bookworm) with one of those, depending on the desired frequency: 
systemctl enable zfs-scrub-weekly@rpool.timer --now
systemctl enable zfs-scrub-monthly@rpool.timer --now
When the scrub runs, if it finds anything it will send an event which will get picked up by the zed daemon which will then send a notification, see below for an example. TODO: deploy on curie, if possible (probably not because no RAID) TODO: this should be in Puppet

Scrub warning example So what happens when problems are found? Here's an example of how I dealt with an error I received. After setting up another server (tubman) with ZFS, I eventually ended up getting a warning from the ZFS toolchain. 
Date: Sun, 09 Oct 2022 00:58:08 -0400
From: root <root@anarc.at>
To: root@anarc.at
Subject: ZFS scrub_finish event for rpool on tubman
ZFS has finished a scrub:
   eid: 39536
 class: scrub_finish
  host: tubman
  time: 2022-10-09 00:58:07-0400
  pool: rpool
 state: ONLINE
status: One or more devices has experienced an unrecoverable error.  An
        attempt was made to correct the error.  Applications are unaffected.
action: Determine if the device needs to be replaced, and clear the errors
        using 'zpool clear' or replace the device with 'zpool replace'.
   see: https://openzfs.github.io/openzfs-docs/msg/ZFS-8000-9P
  scan: scrub repaired 0B in 00:33:57 with 0 errors on Sun Oct  9 00:58:07 2022
config:
        NAME        STATE     READ WRITE CKSUM
        rpool       ONLINE       0     0     0
          mirror-0  ONLINE       0     0     0
            sdb4    ONLINE       0     1     0
            sdc4    ONLINE       0     0     0
        cache
          sda3      ONLINE       0     0     0
errors: No known data errors
This, in itself, is a little worrisome. But it helpfully links to this more detailed documentation (and props up there: the link still works) which explains this is a "minor" problem (something that could be included in the report). In this case, this happened on a server setup on 2021-04-28, but the disks and server hardware are much older. The server itself (marcos v1) was built around 2011, over 10 years ago now. The hard drive in question is: 
root@tubman:~# smartctl -i -qnoserial /dev/sdb
smartctl 7.2 2020-12-30 r5155 [x86_64-linux-5.10.0-15-amd64] (local build)
Copyright (C) 2002-20, Bruce Allen, Christian Franke, www.smartmontools.org
=== START OF INFORMATION SECTION ===
Model Family:     Seagate BarraCuda 3.5
Device Model:     ST4000DM004-2CV104
Firmware Version: 0001
User Capacity:    4,000,787,030,016 bytes [4.00 TB]
Sector Sizes:     512 bytes logical, 4096 bytes physical
Rotation Rate:    5425 rpm
Form Factor:      3.5 inches
Device is:        In smartctl database [for details use: -P show]
ATA Version is:   ACS-3 T13/2161-D revision 5
SATA Version is:  SATA 3.1, 6.0 Gb/s (current: 3.0 Gb/s)
Local Time is:    Tue Oct 11 11:02:32 2022 EDT
SMART support is: Available - device has SMART capability.
SMART support is: Enabled
Some more SMART stats: 
root@tubman:~# smartctl -a -qnoserial /dev/sdb   grep -e  Head_Flying_Hours -e Power_On_Hours -e Total_LBA -e 'Sector Sizes'
Sector Sizes:     512 bytes logical, 4096 bytes physical
  9 Power_On_Hours          0x0032   086   086   000    Old_age   Always       -       12464 (206 202 0)
240 Head_Flying_Hours       0x0000   100   253   000    Old_age   Offline      -       10966h+55m+23.757s
241 Total_LBAs_Written      0x0000   100   253   000    Old_age   Offline      -       21107792664
242 Total_LBAs_Read         0x0000   100   253   000    Old_age   Offline      -       3201579750
That's over a year of power on, which shouldn't be so bad. It has written about 10TB of data (21107792664 LBAs * 512 byte/LBA), which is about two full writes. According to its specification, this device is supposed to support 55 TB/year of writes, so we're far below spec. Note that are still far from the "non-recoverable read error per bits" spec (1 per 10E15), as we've basically read 13E12 bits (3201579750 LBAs * 512 byte/LBA = 13E12 bits). It's likely this disk was made in 2018, so it is in its fourth year. Interestingly, /dev/sdc is also a Seagate drive, but of a different series: 
root@tubman:~# smartctl -qnoserial  -i /dev/sdb
smartctl 7.2 2020-12-30 r5155 [x86_64-linux-5.10.0-15-amd64] (local build)
Copyright (C) 2002-20, Bruce Allen, Christian Franke, www.smartmontools.org
=== START OF INFORMATION SECTION ===
Model Family:     Seagate BarraCuda 3.5
Device Model:     ST4000DM004-2CV104
Firmware Version: 0001
User Capacity:    4,000,787,030,016 bytes [4.00 TB]
Sector Sizes:     512 bytes logical, 4096 bytes physical
Rotation Rate:    5425 rpm
Form Factor:      3.5 inches
Device is:        In smartctl database [for details use: -P show]
ATA Version is:   ACS-3 T13/2161-D revision 5
SATA Version is:  SATA 3.1, 6.0 Gb/s (current: 3.0 Gb/s)
Local Time is:    Tue Oct 11 11:21:35 2022 EDT
SMART support is: Available - device has SMART capability.
SMART support is: Enabled
It has seen much more reads than the other disk which is also interesting: 
root@tubman:~# smartctl -a -qnoserial /dev/sdc   grep -e  Head_Flying_Hours -e Power_On_Hours -e Total_LBA -e 'Sector Sizes'
Sector Sizes:     512 bytes logical, 4096 bytes physical
  9 Power_On_Hours          0x0032   059   059   000    Old_age   Always       -       36240
240 Head_Flying_Hours       0x0000   100   253   000    Old_age   Offline      -       33994h+10m+52.118s
241 Total_LBAs_Written      0x0000   100   253   000    Old_age   Offline      -       30730174438
242 Total_LBAs_Read         0x0000   100   253   000    Old_age   Offline      -       51894566538
That's 4 years of Head_Flying_Hours, and over 4 years (4 years and 48 days) of Power_On_Hours. The copyright date on that drive's specs goes back to 2016, so it's a much older drive. SMART self-test succeeded.

Remaining issues
  • TODO: move send/receive backups to offsite host, see also zfs for alternatives to syncoid/sanoid there
  • TODO: setup backup cron job (or timer?)
  • TODO: swap still not setup on curie, see zfs
  • TODO: document this somewhere: bpool and rpool are both pools and datasets. that's pretty confusing, but also very useful because it allows for pool-wide recursive snapshots, which are used for the backup system

fio improvements I really want to improve my experience with fio. Right now, I'm just cargo-culting stuff from other folks and I don't really like it. stressant is a good example of my struggles, in the sense that it doesn't really work that well for disk tests. I would love to have just a single .fio job file that lists multiple jobs to run serially. For example, this file describes the above workload pretty well: 
[global]
# cargo-culting Salter
fallocate=none
ioengine=posixaio
runtime=60
time_based=1
end_fsync=1
stonewall=1
group_reporting=1
# no need to drop caches, done by default
# invalidate=1
# Single 4KiB random read/write process
[randread-4k-4g-1x]
rw=randread
bs=4k
size=4g
numjobs=1
iodepth=1
[randwrite-4k-4g-1x]
rw=randwrite
bs=4k
size=4g
numjobs=1
iodepth=1
# 16 parallel 64KiB random read/write processes:
[randread-64k-256m-16x]
rw=randread
bs=64k
size=256m
numjobs=16
iodepth=16
[randwrite-64k-256m-16x]
rw=randwrite
bs=64k
size=256m
numjobs=16
iodepth=16
# Single 1MiB random read/write process
[randread-1m-16g-1x]
rw=randread
bs=1m
size=16g
numjobs=1
iodepth=1
[randwrite-1m-16g-1x]
rw=randwrite
bs=1m
size=16g
numjobs=1
iodepth=1
... except the jobs are actually started in parallel, even though they are stonewall'd, as far as I can tell by the reports. I sent a mail to the fio mailing list for clarification. It looks like the jobs are started in parallel, but actual (correctly) run serially. It seems like this might just be a matter of reporting the right timestamps in the end, although it does feel like starting all the processes (even if not doing any work yet) could skew the results.

Hangs during procedure During the procedure, it happened a few times where any ZFS command would completely hang. It seems that using an external USB drive to sync stuff didn't work so well: sometimes it would reconnect under a different device (from sdc to sdd, for example), and this would greatly confuse ZFS. Here, for example, is sdd reappearing out of the blue: 
May 19 11:22:53 curie kernel: [  699.820301] scsi host4: uas
May 19 11:22:53 curie kernel: [  699.820544] usb 2-1: authorized to connect
May 19 11:22:53 curie kernel: [  699.922433] scsi 4:0:0:0: Direct-Access     ROG      ESD-S1C          0    PQ: 0 ANSI: 6
May 19 11:22:53 curie kernel: [  699.923235] sd 4:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg2 type 0
May 19 11:22:53 curie kernel: [  699.923676] sd 4:0:0:0: [sdd] 1953525168 512-byte logical blocks: (1.00 TB/932 GiB)
May 19 11:22:53 curie kernel: [  699.923788] sd 4:0:0:0: [sdd] Write Protect is off
May 19 11:22:53 curie kernel: [  699.923949] sd 4:0:0:0: [sdd] Write cache: enabled, read cache: enabled, doesn't support DPO or FUA
May 19 11:22:53 curie kernel: [  699.924149] sd 4:0:0:0: [sdd] Optimal transfer size 33553920 bytes
May 19 11:22:53 curie kernel: [  699.961602]  sdd: sdd1 sdd2 sdd3 sdd4
May 19 11:22:53 curie kernel: [  699.996083] sd 4:0:0:0: [sdd] Attached SCSI disk
Next time I run a ZFS command (say zpool list), the command completely hangs (D state) and this comes up in the logs: 
May 19 11:34:21 curie kernel: [ 1387.914843] zio pool=bpool vdev=/dev/sdc3 error=5 type=2 offset=71344128 size=4096 flags=184880
May 19 11:34:21 curie kernel: [ 1387.914859] zio pool=bpool vdev=/dev/sdc3 error=5 type=2 offset=205565952 size=4096 flags=184880
May 19 11:34:21 curie kernel: [ 1387.914874] zio pool=bpool vdev=/dev/sdc3 error=5 type=2 offset=272789504 size=4096 flags=184880
May 19 11:34:21 curie kernel: [ 1387.914906] zio pool=bpool vdev=/dev/sdc3 error=5 type=1 offset=270336 size=8192 flags=b08c1
May 19 11:34:21 curie kernel: [ 1387.914932] zio pool=bpool vdev=/dev/sdc3 error=5 type=1 offset=1073225728 size=8192 flags=b08c1
May 19 11:34:21 curie kernel: [ 1387.914948] zio pool=bpool vdev=/dev/sdc3 error=5 type=1 offset=1073487872 size=8192 flags=b08c1
May 19 11:34:21 curie kernel: [ 1387.915165] zio pool=bpool vdev=/dev/sdc3 error=5 type=2 offset=272793600 size=4096 flags=184880
May 19 11:34:21 curie kernel: [ 1387.915183] zio pool=bpool vdev=/dev/sdc3 error=5 type=2 offset=339853312 size=4096 flags=184880
May 19 11:34:21 curie kernel: [ 1387.915648] WARNING: Pool 'bpool' has encountered an uncorrectable I/O failure and has been suspended.
May 19 11:34:21 curie kernel: [ 1387.915648] 
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.558614] task:txg_sync        state:D stack:    0 pid:  997 ppid:     2 flags:0x00004000
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.558623] Call Trace:
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.558640]  __schedule+0x282/0x870
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.558650]  schedule+0x46/0xb0
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.558670]  schedule_timeout+0x8b/0x140
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.558675]  ? __next_timer_interrupt+0x110/0x110
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.558678]  io_schedule_timeout+0x4c/0x80
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.558689]  __cv_timedwait_common+0x12b/0x160 [spl]
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.558694]  ? add_wait_queue_exclusive+0x70/0x70
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.558702]  __cv_timedwait_io+0x15/0x20 [spl]
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.558816]  zio_wait+0x129/0x2b0 [zfs]
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.558929]  dsl_pool_sync+0x461/0x4f0 [zfs]
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.559032]  spa_sync+0x575/0xfa0 [zfs]
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.559138]  ? spa_txg_history_init_io+0x101/0x110 [zfs]
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.559245]  txg_sync_thread+0x2e0/0x4a0 [zfs]
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.559354]  ? txg_fini+0x240/0x240 [zfs]
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.559366]  thread_generic_wrapper+0x6f/0x80 [spl]
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.559376]  ? __thread_exit+0x20/0x20 [spl]
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.559379]  kthread+0x11b/0x140
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.559382]  ? __kthread_bind_mask+0x60/0x60
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.559386]  ret_from_fork+0x22/0x30
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.559401] task:zed             state:D stack:    0 pid: 1564 ppid:     1 flags:0x00000000
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.559404] Call Trace:
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.559409]  __schedule+0x282/0x870
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.559412]  ? __kmalloc_node+0x141/0x2b0
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.559417]  schedule+0x46/0xb0
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.559420]  schedule_preempt_disabled+0xa/0x10
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.559424]  __mutex_lock.constprop.0+0x133/0x460
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.559435]  ? nvlist_xalloc.part.0+0x68/0xc0 [znvpair]
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.559537]  spa_all_configs+0x41/0x120 [zfs]
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.559644]  zfs_ioc_pool_configs+0x17/0x70 [zfs]
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.559752]  zfsdev_ioctl_common+0x697/0x870 [zfs]
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.559758]  ? _copy_from_user+0x28/0x60
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.559860]  zfsdev_ioctl+0x53/0xe0 [zfs]
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.559866]  __x64_sys_ioctl+0x83/0xb0
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.559869]  do_syscall_64+0x33/0x80
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.559873]  entry_SYSCALL_64_after_hwframe+0x44/0xa9
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.559876] RIP: 0033:0x7fcf0ef32cc7
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.559878] RSP: 002b:00007fcf0e181618 EFLAGS: 00000246 ORIG_RAX: 0000000000000010
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.559881] RAX: ffffffffffffffda RBX: 000055b212f972a0 RCX: 00007fcf0ef32cc7
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.559883] RDX: 00007fcf0e181640 RSI: 0000000000005a04 RDI: 000000000000000b
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.559885] RBP: 00007fcf0e184c30 R08: 00007fcf08016810 R09: 00007fcf08000080
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.559886] R10: 0000000000080000 R11: 0000000000000246 R12: 000055b212f972a0
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.559888] R13: 0000000000000000 R14: 00007fcf0e181640 R15: 0000000000000000
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.559980] task:zpool           state:D stack:    0 pid:11815 ppid:  3816 flags:0x00004000
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.559983] Call Trace:
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.559988]  __schedule+0x282/0x870
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.559992]  schedule+0x46/0xb0
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.559995]  io_schedule+0x42/0x70
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.560004]  cv_wait_common+0xac/0x130 [spl]
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.560008]  ? add_wait_queue_exclusive+0x70/0x70
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.560118]  txg_wait_synced_impl+0xc9/0x110 [zfs]
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.560223]  txg_wait_synced+0xc/0x40 [zfs]
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.560325]  spa_export_common+0x4cd/0x590 [zfs]
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.560430]  ? zfs_log_history+0x9c/0xf0 [zfs]
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.560537]  zfsdev_ioctl_common+0x697/0x870 [zfs]
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.560543]  ? _copy_from_user+0x28/0x60
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.560644]  zfsdev_ioctl+0x53/0xe0 [zfs]
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.560649]  __x64_sys_ioctl+0x83/0xb0
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.560653]  do_syscall_64+0x33/0x80
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.560656]  entry_SYSCALL_64_after_hwframe+0x44/0xa9
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.560659] RIP: 0033:0x7fdc23be2cc7
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.560661] RSP: 002b:00007ffc8c792478 EFLAGS: 00000246 ORIG_RAX: 0000000000000010
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.560664] RAX: ffffffffffffffda RBX: 000055942ca49e20 RCX: 00007fdc23be2cc7
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.560666] RDX: 00007ffc8c792490 RSI: 0000000000005a03 RDI: 0000000000000003
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.560667] RBP: 00007ffc8c795e80 R08: 00000000ffffffff R09: 00007ffc8c792310
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.560669] R10: 000055942ca49e30 R11: 0000000000000246 R12: 00007ffc8c792490
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.560671] R13: 000055942ca49e30 R14: 000055942aed2c20 R15: 00007ffc8c795a40
Here's another example, where you see the USB controller bleeping out and back into existence: 
mai 19 11:38:39 curie kernel: usb 2-1: USB disconnect, device number 2
mai 19 11:38:39 curie kernel: sd 4:0:0:0: [sdd] Synchronizing SCSI cache
mai 19 11:38:39 curie kernel: sd 4:0:0:0: [sdd] Synchronize Cache(10) failed: Result: hostbyte=DID_ERROR driverbyte=DRIVER_OK
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel: INFO: task zed:1564 blocked for more than 241 seconds.
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel:       Tainted: P          IOE     5.10.0-14-amd64 #1 Debian 5.10.113-1
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel: "echo 0 > /proc/sys/kernel/hung_task_timeout_secs" disables this message.
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel: task:zed             state:D stack:    0 pid: 1564 ppid:     1 flags:0x00000000
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel: Call Trace:
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel:  __schedule+0x282/0x870
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel:  ? __kmalloc_node+0x141/0x2b0
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel:  schedule+0x46/0xb0
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel:  schedule_preempt_disabled+0xa/0x10
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel:  __mutex_lock.constprop.0+0x133/0x460
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel:  ? nvlist_xalloc.part.0+0x68/0xc0 [znvpair]
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel:  spa_all_configs+0x41/0x120 [zfs]
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel:  zfs_ioc_pool_configs+0x17/0x70 [zfs]
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel:  zfsdev_ioctl_common+0x697/0x870 [zfs]
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel:  ? _copy_from_user+0x28/0x60
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel:  zfsdev_ioctl+0x53/0xe0 [zfs]
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel:  __x64_sys_ioctl+0x83/0xb0
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel:  do_syscall_64+0x33/0x80
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel:  entry_SYSCALL_64_after_hwframe+0x44/0xa9
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel: RIP: 0033:0x7fcf0ef32cc7
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel: RSP: 002b:00007fcf0e181618 EFLAGS: 00000246 ORIG_RAX: 0000000000000010
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel: RAX: ffffffffffffffda RBX: 000055b212f972a0 RCX: 00007fcf0ef32cc7
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel: RDX: 00007fcf0e181640 RSI: 0000000000005a04 RDI: 000000000000000b
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel: RBP: 00007fcf0e184c30 R08: 00007fcf08016810 R09: 00007fcf08000080
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel: R10: 0000000000080000 R11: 0000000000000246 R12: 000055b212f972a0
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel: R13: 0000000000000000 R14: 00007fcf0e181640 R15: 0000000000000000
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel: INFO: task zpool:11815 blocked for more than 241 seconds.
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel:       Tainted: P          IOE     5.10.0-14-amd64 #1 Debian 5.10.113-1
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel: "echo 0 > /proc/sys/kernel/hung_task_timeout_secs" disables this message.
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel: task:zpool           state:D stack:    0 pid:11815 ppid:  2621 flags:0x00004004
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel: Call Trace:
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel:  __schedule+0x282/0x870
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel:  schedule+0x46/0xb0
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel:  io_schedule+0x42/0x70
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel:  cv_wait_common+0xac/0x130 [spl]
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel:  ? add_wait_queue_exclusive+0x70/0x70
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel:  txg_wait_synced_impl+0xc9/0x110 [zfs]
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel:  txg_wait_synced+0xc/0x40 [zfs]
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel:  spa_export_common+0x4cd/0x590 [zfs]
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel:  ? zfs_log_history+0x9c/0xf0 [zfs]
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel:  zfsdev_ioctl_common+0x697/0x870 [zfs]
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel:  ? _copy_from_user+0x28/0x60
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel:  zfsdev_ioctl+0x53/0xe0 [zfs]
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel:  __x64_sys_ioctl+0x83/0xb0
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel:  do_syscall_64+0x33/0x80
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel:  entry_SYSCALL_64_after_hwframe+0x44/0xa9
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel: RIP: 0033:0x7fdc23be2cc7
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel: RSP: 002b:00007ffc8c792478 EFLAGS: 00000246 ORIG_RAX: 0000000000000010
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel: RAX: ffffffffffffffda RBX: 000055942ca49e20 RCX: 00007fdc23be2cc7
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel: RDX: 00007ffc8c792490 RSI: 0000000000005a03 RDI: 0000000000000003
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel: RBP: 00007ffc8c795e80 R08: 00000000ffffffff R09: 00007ffc8c792310
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel: R10: 000055942ca49e30 R11: 0000000000000246 R12: 00007ffc8c792490
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel: R13: 000055942ca49e30 R14: 000055942aed2c20 R15: 00007ffc8c795a40
I understand those are rather extreme conditions: I would fully expect the pool to stop working if the underlying drives disappear. What doesn't seem acceptable is that a command would completely hang like this.

References See the zfs documentation for more information about ZFS, and tubman for another installation and migration procedure.

7 September 2022

Antoine Beaupr : Deleted GitLab forks from my account

I have just deleted two forks I had of the GitLab project in my gitlab.com account. I did this after receiving a warning that quotas would now start to be enforced. It didn't say that I was going over quota, so I actually had to go look in the usage quotas page, which stated I was using 5.6GB of storage. So far so good, I'm not going to get billed because I'm below the 10GB threshold. But still, I found that number puzzling. That's a lot of data! Maybe wallabako? I build images there in CI... Or the ISOs in stressant? Nope. The biggest disk users were... my forks of gitlab-ce and gitlab-ee (now respectively called gitlab-foss and gitlab-ee, but whatever). CE was taking up roughly 1GB and EE was taking up the rest. So I deleted both repos, which means that the next time I want to contribute a fix to their documentation which is as far as I managed to contribute to GitLab I will need to re-fork those humongous repositories. Maybe I'm reading this wrong. Maybe there's a bug in the quotas system. Or, if I'm reading this right, GitLab is actually double-billing people: once for the source repository, and once for the fork. Because surely repos are not duplicating all those blobs on disk... right? RIGHT? Either case, that's rather a bad move on their part, I feel like. With GitHub charging 4$/user/month, it feels like GitLab is going to have to trouble to compete by charging 20$/user/month as a challenger... (Update: as noted in the comments by Jim Sorenson, this is actually an issue with older versions of GitLab. Deleting and re-forking the repos will actually fix the issue so, in a way, I did exactly what I should. Another workaround is to run the housekeeping jobs on the repo, although I cannot confirm this works myself.) But maybe it's just me: I'm not an economist, surely there's some brilliant plan here I'm missing... In the meantime, free-ish alternatives include Quay.io (currently free for public repos) and sr.ht (2$/mth, but at least not open-core, unfortunately no plan for a container registry). And of course, you can painfully self-host GitLab, sr.ht, gitea, pagure, or whatever it is the current fancy gitweb.

31 December 2021

Chris Lamb: Favourite books of 2021: Fiction

In my two most recent posts, I listed the memoirs and biographies and followed this up with the non-fiction I enjoyed the most in 2021. I'll leave my roundup of 'classic' fiction until tomorrow, but today I'll be going over my favourite fiction. Books that just miss the cut here include Kingsley Amis' comic Lucky Jim, Cormac McCarthy's The Road (although see below for McCarthy's Blood Meridian) and the Complete Adventures of Tintin by Herg , the latter forming an inadvertently incisive portrait of the first half of the 20th century. Like ever, there were a handful of books that didn't live up to prior expectations. Despite all of the hype, Emily St. John Mandel's post-pandemic dystopia Station Eleven didn't match her superb The Glass Hotel (one of my favourite books of 2020). The same could be said of John le Carr 's The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, which felt significantly shallower compared to Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy again, a favourite of last year. The strangest book (and most difficult to classify at all) was undoubtedly Patrick S skind's Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, and the non-fiction book I disliked the most was almost-certainly Beartown by Fredrik Bachman. Two other mild disappointments were actually film adaptions. Specifically, the original source for Vertigo by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac didn't match Alfred Hitchock's 1958 masterpiece, as did James Sallis' Drive which was made into a superb 2011 neon-noir directed by Nicolas Winding Refn. These two films thus defy the usual trend and are 'better than the book', but that's a post for another day.

A Wizard of Earthsea (1971) Ursula K. Le Guin How did it come to be that Harry Potter is the publishing sensation of the century, yet Ursula K. Le Guin's Earthsea is only a popular cult novel? Indeed, the comparisons and unintentional intertextuality with Harry Potter are entirely unavoidable when reading this book, and, in almost every respect, Ursula K. Le Guin's universe comes out the victor. In particular, the wizarding world that Le Guin portrays feels a lot more generous and humble than the class-ridden world of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. Just to take one example from many, in Earthsea, magic turns out to be nurtured in a bottom-up manner within small village communities, in almost complete contrast to J. K. Rowling's concept of benevolent government departments and NGOs-like institutions, which now seems a far too New Labour for me. Indeed, imagine an entire world imbued with the kindly benevolence of Dumbledore, and you've got some of the moral palette of Earthsea. The gently moralising tone that runs through A Wizard of Earthsea may put some people off:
Vetch had been three years at the School and soon would be made Sorcerer; he thought no more of performing the lesser arts of magic than a bird thinks of flying. Yet a greater, unlearned skill he possessed, which was the art of kindness.
Still, these parables aimed directly at the reader are fairly rare, and, for me, remain on the right side of being mawkish or hectoring. I'm thus looking forward to reading the next two books in the series soon.

Blood Meridian (1985) Cormac McCarthy Blood Meridian follows a band of American bounty hunters who are roaming the Mexican-American borderlands in the late 1840s. Far from being remotely swashbuckling, though, the group are collecting scalps for money and killing anyone who crosses their path. It is the most unsparing treatment of American genocide and moral depravity I have ever come across, an anti-Western that flouts every convention of the genre. Blood Meridian thus has a family resemblance to that other great anti-Western, Once Upon a Time in the West: after making a number of gun-toting films that venerate the American West (ie. his Dollars Trilogy), Sergio Leone turned his cynical eye to the western. Yet my previous paragraph actually euphemises just how violent Blood Meridian is. Indeed, I would need to be a much better writer (indeed, perhaps McCarthy himself) to adequately 0utline the tone of this book. In a certain sense, it's less than you read this book in a conventional sense, but rather that you are forced to witness successive chapters of grotesque violence... all occurring for no obvious reason. It is often said that books 'subvert' a genre and, indeed, I implied as such above. But the term subvert implies a kind of Puck-like mischievousness, or brings to mind court jesters licensed to poke fun at the courtiers. By contrast, however, Blood Meridian isn't funny in the slightest. There isn't animal cruelty per se, but rather wanton negligence of another kind entirely. In fact, recalling a particular passage involving an injured horse makes me feel physically ill. McCarthy's prose is at once both baroque in its language and thrifty in its presentation. As Philip Connors wrote back in 2007, McCarthy has spent forty years writing as if he were trying to expand the Old Testament, and learning that McCarthy grew up around the Church therefore came as no real surprise. As an example of his textual frugality, I often looked for greater precision in the text, finding myself asking whether who a particular 'he' is, or to which side of a fight some two men belonged to. Yet we must always remember that there is no precision to found in a gunfight, so this infidelity is turned into a virtue. It's not that these are fair fights anyway, or even 'murder': Blood Meridian is just slaughter; pure butchery. Murder is a gross understatement for what this book is, and at many points we are grateful that McCarthy spares us precision. At others, however, we can be thankful for his exactitude. There is no ambiguity regarding the morality of the puppy-drowning Judge, for example: a Colonel Kurtz who has been given free license over the entire American south. There is, thank God, no danger of Hollywood mythologising him into a badass hero. Indeed, we must all be thankful that it is impossible to film this ultra-violent book... Indeed, the broader idea of 'adapting' anything to this world is, beyond sick. An absolutely brutal read; I cannot recommend it highly enough.

Bodies of Light (2014) Sarah Moss Bodies of Light is a 2014 book by Glasgow-born Sarah Moss on the stirrings of women's suffrage within an arty clique in nineteenth-century England. Set in the intellectually smoggy cities of Manchester and London, this poignant book follows the studiously intelligent Alethia 'Ally' Moberly who is struggling to gain the acceptance of herself, her mother and the General Medical Council. You can read my full review from July.

House of Leaves (2000) Mark Z. Danielewski House of Leaves is a remarkably difficult book to explain. Although the plot refers to a fictional documentary about a family whose house is somehow larger on the inside than the outside, this quotidian horror premise doesn't explain the complex meta-commentary that Danielewski adds on top. For instance, the book contains a large number of pseudo-academic footnotes (many of which contain footnotes themselves), with references to scholarly papers, books, films and other articles. Most of these references are obviously fictional, but it's the kind of book where the joke is that some of them are not. The format, structure and typography of the book is highly unconventional too, with extremely unusual page layouts and styles. It's the sort of book and idea that should be a tired gimmick but somehow isn't. This is particularly so when you realise it seems specifically designed to create a fandom around it and to manufacturer its own 'cult' status, something that should be extremely tedious. But not only does this not happen, House of Leaves seems to have survived through two exhausting decades of found footage: The Blair Witch Project and Paranormal Activity are, to an admittedly lesser degree, doing much of the same thing as House of Leaves. House of Leaves might have its origins in Nabokov's Pale Fire or even Derrida's Glas, but it seems to have more in common with the claustrophobic horror of Cube (1997). And like all of these works, House of Leaves book has an extremely strange effect on the reader or viewer, something quite unlike reading a conventional book. It wasn't so much what I got out of the book itself, but how it added a glow to everything else I read, watched or saw at the time. An experience.

Milkman (2018) Anna Burns This quietly dazzling novel from Irish author Anna Burns is full of intellectual whimsy and oddball incident. Incongruously set in 1970s Belfast during The Irish Troubles, Milkman's 18-year-old narrator (known only as middle sister ), is the kind of dreamer who walks down the street with a Victorian-era novel in her hand. It's usually an error for a book that specifically mention other books, if only because inviting comparisons to great novels is grossly ill-advised. But it is a credit to Burns' writing that the references here actually add to the text and don't feel like they are a kind of literary paint by numbers. Our humble narrator has a boyfriend of sorts, but the figure who looms the largest in her life is a creepy milkman an older, married man who's deeply integrated in the paramilitary tribalism. And when gossip about the narrator and the milkman surfaces, the milkman beings to invade her life to a suffocating degree. Yet this milkman is not even a milkman at all. Indeed, it's precisely this kind of oblique irony that runs through this daring but darkly compelling book.

The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August (2014) Claire North Harry August is born, lives a relatively unremarkable life and finally dies a relatively unremarkable death. Not worth writing a novel about, I suppose. But then Harry finds himself born again in the very same circumstances, and as he grows from infancy into childhood again, he starts to remember his previous lives. This loop naturally drives Harry insane at first, but after finding that suicide doesn't stop the quasi-reincarnation, he becomes somewhat acclimatised to his fate. He prospers much better at school the next time around and is ultimately able to make better decisions about his life, especially when he just happens to know how to stay out of trouble during the Second World War. Yet what caught my attention in this 'soft' sci-fi book was not necessarily the book's core idea but rather the way its connotations were so intelligently thought through. Just like in a musical theme and varations, the success of any concept-driven book is far more a product of how the implications of the key idea are played out than how clever the central idea was to begin with. Otherwise, you just have another neat Borges short story: satisfying, to be sure, but in a narrower way. From her relatively simple premise, for example, North has divined that if there was a community of people who could remember their past lives, this would actually allow messages and knowledge to be passed backwards and forwards in time. Ah, of course! Indeed, this very mechanism drives the plot: news comes back from the future that the progress of history is being interfered with, and, because of this, the end of the world is slowly coming. Through the lives that follow, Harry sets out to find out who is passing on technology before its time, and work out how to stop them. With its gently-moralising romp through the salient historical touchpoints of the twentieth century, I sometimes got a whiff of Forrest Gump. But it must be stressed that this book is far less certain of its 'right-on' liberal credentials than Robert Zemeckis' badly-aged film. And whilst we're on the topic of other media, if you liked the underlying conceit behind Stuart Turton's The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle yet didn't enjoy the 'variations' of that particular tale, then I'd definitely give The First Fifteen Lives a try. At the very least, 15 is bigger than 7. More seriously, though, The First Fifteen Lives appears to reflect anxieties about technology, particularly around modern technological accelerationism. At no point does it seriously suggest that if we could somehow possess the technology from a decade in the future then our lives would be improved in any meaningful way. Indeed, precisely the opposite is invariably implied. To me, at least, homo sapiens often seems to be merely marking time until we can blow each other up and destroying the climate whilst sleepwalking into some crisis that might precipitate a thermonuclear genocide sometimes seems to be built into our DNA. In an era of cli-fi fiction and our non-fiction newspaper headlines, to label North's insight as 'prescience' might perhaps be overstating it, but perhaps that is the point: this destructive and negative streak is universal to all periods of our violent, insecure species.

The Goldfinch (2013) Donna Tartt After Breaking Bad, the second biggest runaway success of 2014 was probably Donna Tartt's doorstop of a novel, The Goldfinch. Yet upon its release and popular reception, it got a significant number of bad reviews in the literary press with, of course, an equal number of predictable think pieces claiming this was sour grapes on the part of the cognoscenti. Ah, to be in 2014 again, when our arguments were so much more trivial. For the uninitiated, The Goldfinch is a sprawling bildungsroman that centres on Theo Decker, a 13-year-old whose world is turned upside down when a terrorist bomb goes off whilst visiting the Metropolitan Museum of Art, killing his mother among other bystanders. Perhaps more importantly, he makes off with a painting in order to fulfil a promise to a dying old man: Carel Fabritius' 1654 masterpiece The Goldfinch. For the next 14 years (and almost 800 pages), the painting becomes the only connection to his lost mother as he's flung, almost entirely rudderless, around the Western world, encountering an array of eccentric characters. Whatever the critics claimed, Tartt's near-perfect evocation of scenes, from the everyday to the unimaginable, is difficult to summarise. I wouldn't label it 'cinematic' due to her evocation of the interiority of the characters. Take, for example: Even the suggestion that my father had close friends conveyed a misunderstanding of his personality that I didn't know how to respond it's precisely this kind of relatable inner subjectivity that cannot be easily conveyed by film, likely is one of the main reasons why the 2019 film adaptation was such a damp squib. Tartt's writing is definitely not 'impressionistic' either: there are many near-perfect evocations of scenes, even ones we hope we cannot recognise from real life. In particular, some of the drug-taking scenes feel so credibly authentic that I sometimes worried about the author herself. Almost eight months on from first reading this novel, what I remember most was what a joy this was to read. I do worry that it won't stand up to a more critical re-reading (the character named Xandra even sounds like the pharmaceuticals she is taking), but I think I'll always treasure the first days I spent with this often-beautiful novel.

Beyond Black (2005) Hilary Mantel Published about five years before the hyperfamous Wolf Hall (2004), Hilary Mantel's Beyond Black is a deeply disturbing book about spiritualism and the nature of Hell, somewhat incongruously set in modern-day England. Alison Harte is a middle-aged physic medium who works in the various towns of the London orbital motorway. She is accompanied by her stuffy assistant, Colette, and her spirit guide, Morris, who is invisible to everyone but Alison. However, this is no gentle and musk-smelling world of the clairvoyant and mystic, for Alison is plagued by spirits from her past who infiltrate her physical world, becoming stronger and nastier every day. Alison's smiling and rotund persona thus conceals a truly desperate woman: she knows beyond doubt the terrors of the next life, yet must studiously conceal them from her credulous clients. Beyond Black would be worth reading for its dark atmosphere alone, but it offers much more than a chilling and creepy tale. Indeed, it is extraordinarily observant as well as unsettlingly funny about a particular tranche of British middle-class life. Still, the book's unnerving nature that sticks in the mind, and reading it noticeably changed my mood for days afterwards, and not necessarily for the best.

The Wall (2019) John Lanchester The Wall tells the story of a young man called Kavanagh, one of the thousands of Defenders standing guard around a solid fortress that envelopes the British Isles. A national service of sorts, it is Kavanagh's job to stop the so-called Others getting in. Lanchester is frank about what his wall provides to those who stand guard: the Defenders of the Wall are conscripted for two years on the Wall, with no exceptions, giving everyone in society a life plan and a story. But whilst The Wall is ostensibly about a physical wall, it works even better as a story about the walls in our mind. In fact, the book blends together of some of the most important issues of our time: climate change, increasing isolation, Brexit and other widening societal divisions. If you liked P. D. James' The Children of Men you'll undoubtedly recognise much of the same intellectual atmosphere, although the sterility of John Lanchester's dystopia is definitely figurative and textual rather than literal. Despite the final chapters perhaps not living up to the world-building of the opening, The Wall features a taut and engrossing narrative, and it undoubtedly warrants even the most cursory glance at its symbolism. I've yet to read something by Lanchester I haven't enjoyed (even his short essay on cheating in sports, for example) and will be definitely reading more from him in 2022.

The Only Story (2018) Julian Barnes The Only Story is the story of Paul, a 19-year-old boy who falls in love with 42-year-old Susan, a married woman with two daughters who are about Paul's age. The book begins with how Paul meets Susan in happy (albeit complicated) circumstances, but as the story unfolds, the novel becomes significantly more tragic and moving. Whilst the story begins from the first-person perspective, midway through the book it shifts into the second person, and, later, into the third as well. Both of these narrative changes suggested to me an attempt on the part of Paul the narrator (if not Barnes himself), to distance himself emotionally from the events taking place. This effect is a lot more subtle than it sounds, however: far more prominent and devastating is the underlying and deeply moving story about the relationship ends up. Throughout this touching book, Barnes uses his mastery of language and observation to avoid the saccharine and the maudlin, and ends up with a heart-wrenching and emotive narrative. Without a doubt, this is the saddest book I read this year.

19 August 2021

Jonathan Dowland: Budgeting tools

YNAB On the advice of many friends, I tried to use You Need A Budget. I gave it a seriously long, proper evaluation: over a year. But I just couldn't get it to work for me. I don't want to try and explain why. To be honest, those same friends who advocated for it fairly strongly, also gave me a pretty hard time for giving up on it! Despite it not clicking for me, there are a few concepts from YNAB that I quite like: GNUCash Jimmy Kaplowitz suggested back in 2012 that I should take a look at GNUCash. It took me a few more years before I did. The eventual trigger point for me was organising an event where I paid for a load of things on behalf of others and needed to track who had paid me back. It excelled for that. I've continued to use GNUCash to manage my personal money that is, my "play money" and anything I've accumulated but I haven't committed to it for my family finances. Practically speaking that would lock my wife out of them, which wouldn't be fair. But also because GNUCash's shortcomings (and despite its strengths, it certainly has some) mean that I don't expect I will be using it into the indefinite future, even for my personal stuff. The most significant drawback, in my opinion, is GNUCash's support for scripting. Sometimes, there's a laborious but easily-mechanisable (in theory) task I need to perform that would be ideal to script. GNUCash has built-in scripting support using Guile the GNU lisp/scheme dialect but this is limited to Reports only, I don't think it can be used for a task such as "match a series of transactions using one or more filters or regular expressions, and apply a transformation to them, such as change the account to which they are posted", etc. It also has a C library and auto-generated bindings for other languages. This has a horrible API, which is carried over into the language bindings. Documentation for the whole lot is basically non-existent too. Plain-text accounting For that reason I set out to find some better tools. There's a lot of interest and activity in plain-text accounting (PTA), including tools such as beancount, ledger or the Haskell re-implementation hledger. In a future post I'll write about PTA and hledger.

13 July 2021

Debian XMPP Team: XMPP Novelties in Debian 11 Bullseye

This is not only the Year of the Ox, but also the year of Debian 11, code-named bullseye. The release lies ahead, full freeze starts this week. A good opportunity to take a look at what is new in bullseye. In this post new programs and new software versions related to XMPP, also known as Jabber are presented. XMPP exists since 1999, and has a diverse and active developers community. It is a universal communication protocol, used for instant messaging, IoT, WebRTC, and social applications. You probably will encounter some oxen in this post. That's all for now. Enjoy Debian 11 bullseye and Happy Chatting!

12 July 2021

Chris Lamb: Saint Alethia? On Bodies of Light by Sarah Moss

How are you meant to write about an unfinished emancipation? Bodies of Light is a 2014 book by Glasgow-born Sarah Moss on the stirrings of women's suffrage in an arty clique in nineteenth-century England. Set in the intellectually smoggy cities of Manchester and London, we follow the studious and intelligent Alethia 'Ally' Moberly, who is struggling to gain the acceptance of herself, her mother and the General Medical Council. 'Alethia' may be the Greek goddess of truth, but our Ally is really searching for wisdom. Her strengths are her patience and bookish learning, and she acquires Latin as soon as she learns male doctors will use it to keep women away from the operating theatre. In fact, Ally's acquisition of language becomes a recurring leitmotif: replaying a suggestive dream involving a love interest, for instance, Ally thinks of 'dark, tumbling dreams for which she has a perfectly adequate vocabulary'. There are very few moments of sensuality in the book, and pairing it with Ally's understated wit achieves a wonderful effect. The amount we learn about a character is adapted for effect as well. There are few psychological insights about Ally's sister, for example, and she thus becomes a fey, mysterious and almost Pre-Raphaelite figure below the surface of a lake to match the artistic movement being portrayed. By contrast, we get almost the complete origin story of Ally's mother, Elizabeth, who also constitutes of those rare birds in literature: an entirely plausible Christian religious zealot. Nothing Ally does is ever enough for her, but unlike most modern portrayals of this dynamic, neither of them are aware of what is going, and it is conveyed in a way that is chillingly... benevolent. This was brought home in the annual 'birthday letters' that Elizabeth writes to her daughter:
Last year's letter said that Ally was nervous, emotional and easily swayed, and that she should not allow her behaviour to be guided by feeling but remember always to assert her reason. Mamma would help her with early hours, plain food and plenty of exercise. Ally looks at the letter, plump in its cream envelope. She hopes Mamma wrote it before scolding her yesterday.
The book makes the implicit argument that it is a far more robust argument against pervasive oppression to portray a character in, say, 'a comfortable house, a kind husband and a healthy child', yet they are nonetheless still deeply miserable, for reasons they can't quite put their finger on. And when we see Elizabeth perpetuating some generational trauma with her own children, it is telling that is pattern is not short-circuited by an improvement in their material conditions. Rather, it is arrested only by a kind of political consciousness in Ally's case, the education in a school. In fact, if there is a real hero in Bodies of Light, it is the very concept of female education. There's genuine shading to the book's ideological villains, despite finding their apotheosis in the jibes about 'plump Tories'. These remarks first stuck out to me as cheap thrills by the author; easy and inexpensive potshots that are unbecoming of the pages around them. But they soon prove themselves to be moments of much-needed humour. Indeed, when passages like this are read in their proper context, the proclamations made by sundry Victorian worthies start to serve as deadpan satire:
We have much evidence that the great majority of your male colleagues regard you as an aberration against nature, a disgusting, unsexed creature and a danger to the public.
Funny as these remarks might be, however, these moments have a subtler and more profound purpose as well. Historical biography always has the risk of allowing readers to believe that the 'issue' has already been solved hence, perhaps, the enduring appeal of science fiction. But Moss providing these snippets from newspapers 150 years ago should make a clear connection to a near-identical moral panic today. On the other hand, setting your morality tale in the past has the advantage that you can show that progress is possible. And it can also demonstrate how that progress might come about as well. This book makes the argument for collective action and generally repudiates individualisation through ever-fallible martyrs. Ally always needs 'allies' not only does she rarely work alone, but she is helped in some way by almost everyone around her. This even includes her rather problematic mother, forestalling any simplistic proportioning of blame. (It might be ironic that Bodies of Light came out in 2014, the very same year that Sophia Amoruso popularised the term 'girl boss'.) Early on, Ally's schoolteacher is coded as the primary positive influence on her, but Ally's aunt later inherits this decisive role, continuing Ally's education on cultural issues and what appears to be the Victorian version of 'self-care'. Both the aunt and the schoolteacher are, of course, surrogate mother figures. After Ally arrives in the cut-throat capital, you often get the impression you are being shown discussions where each of the characters embodies a different school of thought within first-wave feminism. This can often be a fairly tedious device in fiction, the sort of thing you would find in a Sally Rooney novel, Pilgrim's Progress or some other ponderously polemical tract. Yet when Ally appears to 'win' an argument, it is only in the sense that the narrator continues to follow her, implicitly and lightly endorsing her point. Perhaps if I knew my history better, I might be able to associate names with the book's positions, but perhaps it is better (at least for the fiction-reading experience...) that I don't, as the baggage of real-world personalities can often get in the way. I'm reminded here of Regina King's One Night in Miami... (2020), where caricatures of Malcolm X, Muhammad Ali, Jim Brown and Sam Cooke awkwardly replay various arguments within an analogous emancipatory struggle. Yet none of the above will be the first thing a reader will notice. Each chapter begins with a description of an imaginary painting, providing a title and a date alongside a brief critical exegesis. The artworks serve a different purpose in each chapter: a puzzle to be unlocked, a fear to be confirmed, an unsolved enigma. The inclusion of (artificial) provenances is interesting as well, not simply because they add colour and detail to the chapter to come, but because their very inclusion feels reflective of how we see art today.
Orphelia (1852) by Sir John Everett Millais.
To continue the question this piece began, how should an author conclude a story about an as-yet-unfinished struggle for emancipation? How can they? Moss' approach dares you to believe the ending is saccharine or formulaic, but what else was she meant to turn in yet another tale of struggle and suffering? After all, Thomas Hardy has already written Tess of the d'Urbervilles. All the same, it still feels slightly unsatisfying to end merely with Ally's muted, uncelebrated success. Nevertheless, I suspect many readers will dislike the introduction of a husband in the final pages, taking it as a betrayal of the preceding chapters. Yet Moss denies us from seeing the resolution as a Disney-style happy ending. True, Ally's husband turns out to be a rather dashing lighthouse builder, but isn't it Ally herself who is lighting the way in their relationship, warning other women away from running aground on the rocks of mental illness? And Tom feels more of a reflection of Ally's newly acquired self-acceptance instead of that missing piece she needed all along. We learn at one point that Tom's 'importance to her is frightening' this is hardly something a Disney princess would say. In fact, it is easy to argue that a heroic ending for Ally might have been an even more egregious betrayal. The evil of saints is that you can never live up to them, for the concept of a 'saint' embodies an unreachable ideal that no human can begin to copy. By being taken as unimpeachable and uncorrectable as well, saints preclude novel political action, and are therefore undoubtedly agents of reaction. Appreciating historical figures as the (flawed) people that they really were is the first step if you wish to continue or adapt their political ideas. I had acquired Bodies of Light after enjoying Moss' Summerwater (2020), which had the dubious honour of being touted as the 'first lockdown novel', despite it being finished before Covid-19. There are countless ways one might contrast the two, so I will limit myself to the sole observation that the strengths of one are perhaps the weaknesses of the other. It's not that Bodies of Light ends with a whimper, of course, as it quietly succeeds in concert with Ally. But by contrast, the tighter arc of Summerwater (which is set during a single day, switches protagonist between chapters, features a closed-off community, etc.) can reach a higher high with its handful of narrative artifices. Summerwater is perhaps like Phil Collins' solo career: 'more satisfying, in a narrower way.'

28 February 2021

Jamie McClelland: From openbox to sway

I've been running the Openbox window manager since 2005. That's longer then I've lived in any one apartment in my entire life! However, over the years I've been bracing for a change. It seems clear the Wayland is the future, although when that future is supposed to begin is much more hazy. Really, I've felt a bit like a ping pong ball, from panicking over whether Xorg is abandoned (with a follow up from a X server maintainer) to anxiously wondering if literally everything will break the moment I switch to Wayland. In fact, I started this blog post over a year ago when I first decided to switch from the Openbox to Sway. This is my third major attempt to make the change and I think it will finally stick this time. In retrospect, it would have been more sensible to first switch from openbox to i3 (which is a huge transition) and then from i3 to sway, but I decided to dive into the deep end with both changes. So... I'm on debian bullseye so I installed sway and friends (from sid). Then I copied /etc/sway/config to ~/.config/sway/config. I start openbox after logging in with exec startx so after rebooting, I ran exec sway and to my astonishment sway started. Hooray! However, I found that ssh-agent wasn't running so I couldn't ssh into any servers. That's kinda a problem. Launching ssh-agent under openbox was buried deep in /etc/X11/Xsession.d/90x11-common_ssh-agent and clearly was not going to happen via wayland. Since programs using ssh-agent depend on the environment variables SSH_AUTH_SOCK and SSH_AGENT_PID being globally available I thought I could simply run $(eval ssh-agent) via my tty terminal before running exec sway. And, that would have worked. Except... I like to add my keys via ssh-add -c so that everytime my key is being used I get a ssh-askpass prompt to confirm the use. It seems that since ssh-add is started before a window manager is running, it can't run the prompt. Ok, we can fix this. After searching the web, I came upon a solution of running ssh-agent via systemctl --user: 
# This service myst be started manually after sway
# starts.
[Unit]
Description=OpenSSH private key agent
IgnoreOnIsolate=true
[Service]
Type=forking
Environment=SSH_AUTH_SOCK=%t/ssh-agent.socket
ExecStart=/usr/bin/ssh-agent -a $SSH_AUTH_SOCK
Then, in my ~/.bashrc file I have: 
if [ -n WAYLAND_DISPLAY ]; then
  export SSH_AUTH_SOCK=/run/user/1000/ssh-agent.socket
fi
I think $SSH_AGENT_PID is only used by ssh-agent to kill itself. Now that is running via systemd - killing it should be do-able without a global environment variable. Done? Hardly. I've been using impass (nee assword) happily for years but alas it is tightly integrated with xdo and xclip. So... I've switched to keepassxc which works out of the box with wayland. My next challenge was the status bar. Farewell faithful tint2. One of the reasons I failed on my first two attempts to switch to Sway was the difficulty of getting the swaybar to work how I wanted, particularly with nm-applet. Two things allowed me to move forward: Next up: the waybar clock module doesn't work, but that is easy enough to work around. Replacing my uses of xclip with wl-clipboard was a little tedious but really not that difficult. Getting my screen shot and screen recorder functionality was a bit harder. I did a lot of searching before I finally found and compiled both swappy, screen shot and wf-recorder. In the course of all my adventures, I came across the following helpful tips:
Updates
  1. I've installed libreoffice-gtk3 to ensure libre office runs under wayland
  2. I've installed the latest Gimp via flatpak to get proper wayland support
  3. I've exported MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND to ensure firefox works properly.
  4. I've found that passing -c to my ssh-add command to ensure I am prompted for each use of my key seems to cause sway to crash intermittently.
  5. I am working on a questionable work around to get screen sharing to work in zoom. I haven't actually tried it on a real zoom call yet.
  6. Speaking of screen sharing - when using Firefox, I can only share Xwayland screens. Firefox is running under wayland so I can't share it. Chromium is running under xwayland, so I have to use Chromium when screen sharing.
  7. Wait, scratch that about screen sharing in Firefox. I've installed xdg-desktop-portal-wlr, added export XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP=sway and export XDG_SESSION_TYPE=wayland to my .bashrc, and after hours of frustration, realize that I needed to configured firejail to allow it so that I can share my entire screen in Firefox. It doesn't yet support sharing a specific window, so I still have to keep chromium around for that (and Chromium can only share xwayland windows). Sigh. Oh, one more thing about Firefox: the option to choose what to share doesn't have "Entire Screen" as an option, you are just supposed to know that you should choose "Use operating system settings".
  8. I still am getting weekly crashes. Some of them I've fixed by switching to wayland friendly versions (e.g. Libre Office and Gimp) but others I haven't yet tracked down.
  9. My keyboard does not have an altgr key, so even though I have selected the "English (US) - English (intl., with AltGr dead keys)" I can't get accent marks. I went down a rabbit hole of trying to re-map the Alt key to the right of my space bar but it all seemed too complicated. So - I found a way easier approach. In my ~/.config/sway/config file I have: bindsym Mod4+e exec wtype " ". I have repeated that line for the main accent marks I need.
  10. Due to a Firefox Bug, when I share my desktop or mic or camera, the sharing indicator expands like a normal tiling window instead of remaining a tiny little box on each desktop reminding me that I'm sharing something. I'd prefer to have it be a tiny little box, but since I can't figure that out, I've disabled it by typing about:config in the Firefox location window, searching for privacy.webrtc.legacyGlobalIndicator and setting it to False. The reddit thread also suggested finding privacy.webrtc.hideGlobalIndicator and setting it to True, but that setting doesn't seem to be available and setting the first one alone seems to do the trick.
  11. Oh, one more environment variable to set: GDK_BACKEND=wayland,x11. First I just set it to wayland to get gtk3 apps to use wayland (like gajim). But that broke electron apps (like signal) which notice that variable but don't have a way to display via wayland (at least not yet). Setting it to "wayland,x11" shows the priority. Thank you ubuntu community.
  12. I've also finally consolidated where my environment variables go. I've added them all to ~/.config/sway/env. That seems like an official sway place to put them, but sway doesn't pay any attention to them. So I start sway via my own bash script which sources that file via [ -f "$HOME/.config/sway/env" ] && . "$HOME/.config/sway/env" before exec'ing sway.

7 February 2021

Chris Lamb: Favourite books of 2020

I won't reveal precisely how many books I read in 2020, but it was definitely an improvement on 74 in 2019, 53 in 2018 and 50 in 2017. But not only did I read more in a quantitative sense, the quality seemed higher as well. There were certainly fewer disappointments: given its cultural resonance, I was nonplussed by Nick Hornby's Fever Pitch and whilst Ian Fleming's The Man with the Golden Gun was a little thin (again, given the obvious influence of the Bond franchise) the booked lacked 'thinness' in a way that made it interesting to critique. The weakest novel I read this year was probably J. M. Berger's Optimal, but even this hybrid of Ready Player One late-period Black Mirror wasn't that cringeworthy, all things considered. Alas, graphic novels continue to not quite be my thing, I'm afraid. I perhaps experienced more disappointments in the non-fiction section. Paul Bloom's Against Empathy was frustrating, particularly in that it expended unnecessary energy battling its misleading title and accepted terminology, and it could so easily have been an 20-minute video essay instead). (Elsewhere in the social sciences, David and Goliath will likely be the last Malcolm Gladwell book I voluntarily read.) After so many positive citations, I was also more than a little underwhelmed by Shoshana Zuboff's The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, and after Ryan Holiday's many engaging reboots of Stoic philosophy, his Conspiracy (on Peter Thiel and Hulk Hogan taking on Gawker) was slightly wide of the mark for me. Anyway, here follows a selection of my favourites from 2020, in no particular order:

Fiction Wolf Hall & Bring Up the Bodies & The Mirror and the Light Hilary Mantel During the early weeks of 2020, I re-read the first two parts of Hilary Mantel's Thomas Cromwell trilogy in time for the March release of The Mirror and the Light. I had actually spent the last few years eagerly following any news of the final instalment, feigning outrage whenever Mantel appeared to be spending time on other projects. Wolf Hall turned out to be an even better book than I remembered, and when The Mirror and the Light finally landed at midnight on 5th March, I began in earnest the next morning. Note that date carefully; this was early 2020, and the book swiftly became something of a heavy-handed allegory about the world at the time. That is to say and without claiming that I am Monsieur Cromuel in any meaningful sense it was an uneasy experience to be reading about a man whose confident grasp on his world, friends and life was slipping beyond his control, and at least in Cromwell's case, was heading inexorably towards its denouement. The final instalment in Mantel's trilogy is not perfect, and despite my love of her writing I would concur with the judges who decided against awarding her a third Booker Prize. For instance, there is something of the longueur that readers dislike in the second novel, although this might not be entirely Mantel's fault after all, the rise of the "ugly" Anne of Cleves and laborious trade negotiations for an uninspiring mineral (this is no Herbertian 'spice') will never match the court intrigues of Anne Boleyn, Jane Seymour and that man for all seasons, Thomas More. Still, I am already looking forward to returning to the verbal sparring between King Henry and Cromwell when I read the entire trilogy once again, tentatively planned for 2022.

The Fault in Our Stars John Green I came across John Green's The Fault in Our Stars via a fantastic video by Lindsay Ellis discussing Roland Barthes famous 1967 essay on authorial intent. However, I might have eventually come across The Fault in Our Stars regardless, not because of Green's status as an internet celebrity of sorts but because I'm a complete sucker for this kind of emotionally-manipulative bildungsroman, likely due to reading Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials a few too many times in my teens. Although its title is taken from Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, The Fault in Our Stars is actually more Romeo & Juliet. Hazel, a 16-year-old cancer patient falls in love with Gus, an equally ill teen from her cancer support group. Hazel and Gus share the same acerbic (and distinctly unteenage) wit and a love of books, centred around Hazel's obsession of An Imperial Affliction, a novel by the meta-fictional author Peter Van Houten. Through a kind of American version of Jim'll Fix It, Gus and Hazel go and visit Van Houten in Amsterdam. I'm afraid it's even cheesier than I'm describing it. Yet just as there is a time and a place for Michelin stars and Haribo Starmix, there's surely a place for this kind of well-constructed but altogether maudlin literature. One test for emotionally manipulative works like this is how well it can mask its internal contradictions while Green's story focuses on the universalities of love, fate and the shortness of life (as do almost all of his works, it seems), The Fault in Our Stars manages to hide, for example, that this is an exceedingly favourable treatment of terminal illness that is only possible for the better off. The 2014 film adaptation does somewhat worse in peddling this fantasy (and has a much weaker treatment of the relationship between the teens' parents too, an underappreciated subtlety of the book). The novel, however, is pretty slick stuff, and it is difficult to fault it for what it is. For some comparison, I later read Green's Looking for Alaska and Paper Towns which, as I mention, tug at many of the same strings, but they don't come together nearly as well as The Fault in Our Stars. James Joyce claimed that "sentimentality is unearned emotion", and in this respect, The Fault in Our Stars really does earn it.

The Plague Albert Camus P. D. James' The Children of Men, George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon ... dystopian fiction was already a theme of my reading in 2020, so given world events it was an inevitability that I would end up with Camus's novel about a plague that swept through the Algerian city of Oran. Is The Plague an allegory about the Nazi occupation of France during World War Two? Where are all the female characters? Where are the Arab ones? Since its original publication in 1947, there's been so much written about The Plague that it's hard to say anything new today. Nevertheless, I was taken aback by how well it captured so much of the nuance of 2020. Whilst we were saying just how 'unprecedented' these times were, it was eerie how a novel written in the 1940s could accurately how many of us were feeling well over seventy years on later: the attitudes of the people; the confident declarations from the institutions; the misaligned conversations that led to accidental misunderstandings. The disconnected lovers. The only thing that perhaps did not work for me in The Plague was the 'character' of the church. Although I could appreciate most of the allusion and metaphor, it was difficult for me to relate to the significance of Father Paneloux, particularly regarding his change of view on the doctrinal implications of the virus, and spoiler alert that he finally died of a "doubtful case" of the disease, beyond the idea that Paneloux's beliefs are in themselves "doubtful". Answers on a postcard, perhaps. The Plague even seemed to predict how we, at least speaking of the UK, would react when the waves of the virus waxed and waned as well:
The disease stiffened and carried off three or four patients who were expected to recover. These were the unfortunates of the plague, those whom it killed when hope was high
It somehow captured the nostalgic yearning for high-definition videos of cities and public transport; one character even visits the completely deserted railway station in Oman simply to read the timetables on the wall.

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy John le Carr There's absolutely none of the Mad Men glamour of James Bond in John le Carr 's icy world of Cold War spies:
Small, podgy, and at best middle-aged, Smiley was by appearance one of London's meek who do not inherit the earth. His legs were short, his gait anything but agile, his dress costly, ill-fitting, and extremely wet.
Almost a direct rebuttal to Ian Fleming's 007, Tinker, Tailor has broken-down cars, bad clothes, women with their own internal and external lives (!), pathetically primitive gadgets, and (contra Mad Men) hangovers that significantly longer than ten minutes. In fact, the main aspect that the mostly excellent 2011 film adaption doesn't really capture is the smoggy and run-down nature of 1970s London this is not your proto-Cool Britannia of Austin Powers or GTA:1969, the city is truly 'gritty' in the sense there is a thin film of dirt and grime on every surface imaginable. Another angle that the film cannot capture well is just how purposefully the novel does not mention the United States. Despite the US obviously being the dominant power, the British vacillate between pretending it doesn't exist or implying its irrelevance to the matter at hand. This is no mistake on Le Carr 's part, as careful readers are rewarded by finding this denial of US hegemony in metaphor throughout --pace Ian Fleming, there is no obvious Felix Leiter to loudly throw money at the problem or a Sheriff Pepper to serve as cartoon racist for the Brits to feel superior about. By contrast, I recall that a clever allusion to "dusty teabags" is subtly mirrored a few paragraphs later with a reference to the installation of a coffee machine in the office, likely symbolic of the omnipresent and unavoidable influence of America. (The officer class convince themselves that coffee is a European import.) Indeed, Le Carr communicates a feeling of being surrounded on all sides by the peeling wallpaper of Empire. Oftentimes, the writing style matches the graceless and inelegance of the world it depicts. The sentences are dense and you find your brain performing a fair amount of mid-flight sentence reconstruction, reparsing clauses, commas and conjunctions to interpret Le Carr 's intended meaning. In fact, in his eulogy-cum-analysis of Le Carr 's writing style, William Boyd, himself a ventrioquilist of Ian Fleming, named this intentional technique 'staccato'. Like the musical term, I suspect the effect of this literary staccato is as much about the impact it makes on a sentence as the imperceptible space it generates after it. Lastly, the large cast in this sprawling novel is completely believable, all the way from the Russian spymaster Karla to minor schoolboy Roach the latter possibly a stand-in for Le Carr himself. I got through the 500-odd pages in just a few days, somehow managing to hold the almost-absurdly complicated plot in my head. This is one of those classic books of the genre that made me wonder why I had not got around to it before.

The Nickel Boys Colson Whitehead According to the judges who awarded it the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, The Nickel Boys is "a devastating exploration of abuse at a reform school in Jim Crow-era Florida" that serves as a "powerful tale of human perseverance, dignity and redemption". But whilst there is plenty of this perseverance and dignity on display, I found little redemption in this deeply cynical novel. It could almost be read as a follow-up book to Whitehead's popular The Underground Railroad, which itself won the Pulitzer Prize in 2017. Indeed, each book focuses on a young protagonist who might be euphemistically referred to as 'downtrodden'. But The Nickel Boys is not only far darker in tone, it feels much closer and more connected to us today. Perhaps this is unsurprising, given that it is based on the story of the Dozier School in northern Florida which operated for over a century before its long history of institutional abuse and racism was exposed a 2012 investigation. Nevertheless, if you liked the social commentary in The Underground Railroad, then there is much more of that in The Nickel Boys:
Perhaps his life might have veered elsewhere if the US government had opened the country to colored advancement like they opened the army. But it was one thing to allow someone to kill for you and another to let him live next door.
Sardonic aper us of this kind are pretty relentless throughout the book, but it never tips its hand too far into on nihilism, especially when some of the visual metaphors are often first-rate: "An American flag sighed on a pole" is one I can easily recall from memory. In general though, The Nickel Boys is not only more world-weary in tenor than his previous novel, the United States it describes seems almost too beaten down to have the energy conjure up the Swiftian magical realism that prevented The Underground Railroad from being overly lachrymose. Indeed, even we Whitehead transports us a present-day New York City, we can't indulge in another kind of fantasy, the one where America has solved its problems:
The Daily News review described the [Manhattan restaurant] as nouveau Southern, "down-home plates with a twist." What was the twist that it was soul food made by white people?
It might be overly reductionist to connect Whitehead's tonal downshift with the racial justice movements of the past few years, but whatever the reason, we've ended up with a hard-hitting, crushing and frankly excellent book.

True Grit & No Country for Old Men Charles Portis & Cormac McCarthy It's one of the most tedious cliches to claim the book is better than the film, but these two books are of such high quality that even the Coen Brothers at their best cannot transcend them. I'm grouping these books together here though, not because their respective adaptations will exemplify some of the best cinema of the 21st century, but because of their superb treatment of language. Take the use of dialogue. Cormac McCarthy famously does not use any punctuation "I believe in periods, in capitals, in the occasional comma, and that's it" but the conversations in No Country for Old Men together feel familiar and commonplace, despite being relayed through this unconventional technique. In lesser hands, McCarthy's written-out Texan drawl would be the novelistic equivalent of white rap or Jar Jar Binks, but not only is the effect entirely gripping, it helps you to believe you are physically present in the many intimate and domestic conversations that hold this book together. Perhaps the cinematic familiarity helps, as you can almost hear Tommy Lee Jones' voice as Sheriff Bell from the opening page to the last. Charles Portis' True Grit excels in its dialogue too, but in this book it is not so much in how it flows (although that is delightful in its own way) but in how forthright and sardonic Maddie Ross is:
"Earlier tonight I gave some thought to stealing a kiss from you, though you are very young, and sick and unattractive to boot, but now I am of a mind to give you five or six good licks with my belt." "One would be as unpleasant as the other."
Perhaps this should be unsurprising. Maddie, a fourteen-year-old girl from Yell County, Arkansas, can barely fire her father's heavy pistol, so she can only has words to wield as her weapon. Anyway, it's not just me who treasures this book. In her encomium that presages most modern editions, Donna Tartt of The Secret History fame traces the novels origins through Huckleberry Finn, praising its elegance and economy: "The plot of True Grit is uncomplicated and as pure in its way as one of the Canterbury Tales". I've read any Chaucer, but I am inclined to agree. Tartt also recalls that True Grit vanished almost entirely from the public eye after the release of John Wayne's flimsy cinematic vehicle in 1969 this earlier film was, Tartt believes, "good enough, but doesn't do the book justice". As it happens, reading a book with its big screen adaptation as a chaser has been a minor theme of my 2020, including P. D. James' The Children of Men, Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go, Patricia Highsmith's Strangers on a Train, James Ellroy's The Black Dahlia, John Green's The Fault in Our Stars, John le Carr 's Tinker, Tailor Soldier, Spy and even a staged production of Charles Dicken's A Christmas Carol streamed from The Old Vic. For an autodidact with no academic background in literature or cinema, I've been finding this an effective and enjoyable means of getting closer to these fine books and films it is precisely where they deviate (or perhaps where they are deficient) that offers a means by which one can see how they were constructed. I've also found that adaptations can also tell you a lot about the culture in which they were made: take the 'straightwashing' in the film version of Strangers on a Train (1951) compared to the original novel, for example. It is certainly true that adaptions rarely (as Tartt put it) "do the book justice", but she might be also right to alight on a legal metaphor, for as the saying goes, to judge a movie in comparison to the book is to do both a disservice.

The Glass Hotel Emily St. John Mandel In The Glass Hotel, Mandel somehow pulls off the impossible; writing a loose roman- -clef on Bernie Madoff, a Ponzi scheme and the ephemeral nature of finance capital that is tranquil and shimmeringly beautiful. Indeed, don't get the wrong idea about the subject matter; this is no over over-caffeinated The Big Short, as The Glass Hotel is less about a Madoff or coked-up financebros but the fragile unreality of the late 2010s, a time which was, as we indeed discovered in 2020, one event away from almost shattering completely. Mandel's prose has that translucent, phantom quality to it where the chapters slip through your fingers when you try to grasp at them, and the plot is like a ghost ship that that slips silently, like the Mary Celeste, onto the Canadian water next to which the eponymous 'Glass Hotel' resides. Indeed, not unlike The Overlook Hotel, the novel so overflows with symbolism so that even the title needs to evoke the idea of impermanence permanently living in a hotel might serve as a house, but it won't provide a home. It's risky to generalise about such things post-2016, but the whole story sits in that the infinitesimally small distance between perception and reality, a self-constructed culture that is not so much 'post truth' but between them. There's something to consider in almost every character too. Take the stand-in for Bernie Madoff: no caricature of Wall Street out of a 1920s political cartoon or Brechtian satire, Jonathan Alkaitis has none of the oleaginous sleaze of a Dominic Strauss-Kahn, the cold sociopathy of a Marcus Halberstam nor the well-exercised sinuses of, say, Jordan Belford. Alkaitis is dare I say it? eminently likeable, and the book is all the better for it. Even the C-level characters have something to say: Enrico, trivially escaping from the regulators (who are pathetically late to the fraud without Mandel ever telling us explicitly), is daydreaming about the girlfriend he abandoned in New York: "He wished he'd realised he loved her before he left". What was in his previous life that prevented him from doing so? Perhaps he was never in love at all, or is love itself just as transient as the imaginary money in all those bank accounts? Maybe he fell in love just as he crossed safely into Mexico? When, precisely, do we fall in love anyway? I went on to read Mandel's Last Night in Montreal, an early work where you can feel her reaching for that other-worldly quality that she so masterfully achieves in The Glass Hotel. Her f ted Station Eleven is on my must-read list for 2021. "What is truth?" asked Pontius Pilate. Not even Mandel cannot give us the answer, but this will certainly do for now.

Running the Light Sam Tallent Although it trades in all of the clich s and stereotypes of the stand-up comedian (the triumvirate of drink, drugs and divorce), Sam Tallent's debut novel depicts an extremely convincing fictional account of a touring road comic. The comedian Doug Stanhope (who himself released a fairly decent No Encore for the Donkey memoir in 2020) hyped Sam's book relentlessly on his podcast during lockdown... and justifiably so. I ripped through Running the Light in a few short hours, the only disappointment being that I can't seem to find videos online of Sam that come anywhere close to match up to his writing style. If you liked the rollercoaster energy of Paul Beatty's The Sellout, the cynicism of George Carlin and the car-crash invertibility of final season Breaking Bad, check this great book out.

Non-fiction Inside Story Martin Amis This was my first introduction to Martin Amis's work after hearing that his "novelised autobiography" contained a fair amount about Christopher Hitchens, an author with whom I had a one of those rather clich d parasocial relationship with in the early days of YouTube. (Hey, it could have been much worse.) Amis calls his book a "novelised autobiography", and just as much has been made of its quasi-fictional nature as the many diversions into didactic writing advice that betwixt each chapter: "Not content with being a novel, this book also wants to tell you how to write novels", complained Tim Adams in The Guardian. I suspect that reviewers who grew up with Martin since his debut book in 1973 rolled their eyes at yet another demonstration of his manifest cleverness, but as my first exposure to Amis's gift of observation, I confess that I was thought it was actually kinda clever. Try, for example, "it remains a maddening truth that both sexual success and sexual failure are steeply self-perpetuating" or "a hospital gym is a contradiction like a young Conservative", etc. Then again, perhaps I was experiencing a form of nostalgia for a pre-Gamergate YouTube, when everything in the world was a lot simpler... or at least things could be solved by articulate gentlemen who honed their art of rhetoric at the Oxford Union. I went on to read Martin's first novel, The Rachel Papers (is it 'arrogance' if you are, indeed, that confident?), as well as his 1997 Night Train. I plan to read more of him in the future.

The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters: Volume 1 & Volume 2 & Volume 3 & Volume 4 George Orwell These deceptively bulky four volumes contain all of George Orwell's essays, reviews and correspondence, from his teenage letters sent to local newspapers to notes to his literary executor on his deathbed in 1950. Reading this was part of a larger, multi-year project of mine to cover the entirety of his output. By including this here, however, I'm not recommending that you read everything that came out of Orwell's typewriter. The letters to friends and publishers will only be interesting to biographers or hardcore fans (although I would recommend Dorian Lynskey's The Ministry of Truth: A Biography of George Orwell's 1984 first). Furthermore, many of his book reviews will be of little interest today. Still, some insights can be gleaned; if there is any inconsistency in this huge corpus is that his best work is almost 'too' good and too impactful, making his merely-average writing appear like hackwork. There are some gems that don't make the usual essay collections too, and some of Orwell's most astute social commentary came out of series of articles he wrote for the left-leaning newspaper Tribune, related in many ways to the US Jacobin. You can also see some of his most famous ideas start to take shape years if not decades before they appear in his novels in these prototype blog posts. I also read Dennis Glover's novelised account of the writing of Nineteen-Eighty Four called The Last Man in Europe, and I plan to re-read some of Orwell's earlier novels during 2021 too, including A Clergyman's Daughter and his 'antebellum' Coming Up for Air that he wrote just before the Second World War; his most under-rated novel in my estimation. As it happens, and with the exception of the US and Spain, copyright in the works published in his lifetime ends on 1st January 2021. Make of that what you will.

Capitalist Realism & Chavs: The Demonisation of the Working Class Mark Fisher & Owen Jones These two books are not natural companions to one another and there is likely much that Jones and Fisher would vehemently disagree on, but I am pairing these books together here because they represent the best of the 'political' books I read in 2020. Mark Fisher was a dedicated leftist whose first book, Capitalist Realism, marked an important contribution to political philosophy in the UK. However, since his suicide in early 2017, the currency of his writing has markedly risen, and Fisher is now frequently referenced due to his belief that the prevalence of mental health conditions in modern life is a side-effect of various material conditions, rather than a natural or unalterable fact "like weather". (Of course, our 'weather' is being increasingly determined by a combination of politics, economics and petrochemistry than pure randomness.) Still, Fisher wrote on all manner of topics, from the 2012 London Olympics and "weird and eerie" electronic music that yearns for a lost future that will never arrive, possibly prefiguring or influencing the Fallout video game series. Saying that, I suspect Fisher will resonate better with a UK audience more than one across the Atlantic, not necessarily because he was minded to write about the parochial politics and culture of Britain, but because his writing often carries some exasperation at the suppression of class in favour of identity-oriented politics, a viewpoint not entirely prevalent in the United States outside of, say, Tour F. Reed or the late Michael Brooks. (Indeed, Fisher is likely best known in the US as the author of his controversial 2013 essay, Exiting the Vampire Castle, but that does not figure greatly in this book). Regardless, Capitalist Realism is an insightful, damning and deeply unoptimistic book, best enjoyed in the warm sunshine I found it an ironic compliment that I had quoted so many paragraphs that my Kindle's copy protection routines prevented me from clipping any further. Owen Jones needs no introduction to anyone who regularly reads a British newspaper, especially since 2015 where he unofficially served as a proxy and punching bag for expressing frustrations with the then-Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn. However, as the subtitle of Jones' 2012 book suggests, Chavs attempts to reveal the "demonisation of the working class" in post-financial crisis Britain. Indeed, the timing of the book is central to Jones' analysis, specifically that the stereotype of the "chav" is used by government and the media as a convenient figleaf to avoid meaningful engagement with economic and social problems on an austerity ridden island. (I'm not quite sure what the US equivalent to 'chav' might be. Perhaps Florida Man without the implications of mental health.) Anyway, Jones certainly has a point. From Vicky Pollard to the attacks on Jade Goody, there is an ignorance and prejudice at the heart of the 'chav' backlash, and that would be bad enough even if it was not being co-opted or criminalised for ideological ends. Elsewhere in political science, I also caught Michael Brooks' Against the Web and David Graeber's Bullshit Jobs, although they are not quite methodical enough to recommend here. However, Graeber's award-winning Debt: The First 5000 Years will be read in 2021. Matt Taibbi's Hate Inc: Why Today's Media Makes Us Despise One Another is worth a brief mention here though, but its sprawling nature felt very much like I was reading a set of Substack articles loosely edited together. And, indeed, I was.

The Golden Thread: The Story of Writing Ewan Clayton A recommendation from a dear friend, Ewan Clayton's The Golden Thread is a journey through the long history of the writing from the Dawn of Man to present day. Whether you are a linguist, a graphic designer, a visual artist, a typographer, an archaeologist or 'just' a reader, there is probably something in here for you. I was already dipping my quill into calligraphy this year so I suspect I would have liked this book in any case, but highlights would definitely include the changing role of writing due to the influence of textual forms in the workplace as well as digression on ergonomic desks employed by monks and scribes in the Middle Ages. A lot of books by otherwise-sensible authors overstretch themselves when they write about computers or other technology from the Information Age, at best resulting in bizarre non-sequiturs and dangerously Panglossian viewpoints at worst. But Clayton surprised me by writing extremely cogently and accurate on the role of text in this new and unpredictable era. After finishing it I realised why for a number of years, Clayton was a consultant for the legendary Xerox PARC where he worked in a group focusing on documents and contemporary communications whilst his colleagues were busy inventing the graphical user interface, laser printing, text editors and the computer mouse.

New Dark Age & Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life James Bridle & Adam Greenfield I struggled to describe these two books to friends, so I doubt I will suddenly do a better job here. Allow me to quote from Will Self's review of James Bridle's New Dark Age in the Guardian:
We're accustomed to worrying about AI systems being built that will either "go rogue" and attack us, or succeed us in a bizarre evolution of, um, evolution what we didn't reckon on is the sheer inscrutability of these manufactured minds. And minds is not a misnomer. How else should we think about the neural network Google has built so its translator can model the interrelation of all words in all languages, in a kind of three-dimensional "semantic space"?
New Dark Age also turns its attention to the weird, algorithmically-derived products offered for sale on Amazon as well as the disturbing and abusive videos that are automatically uploaded by bots to YouTube. It should, by rights, be a mess of disparate ideas and concerns, but Bridle has a flair for introducing topics which reveals he comes to computer science from another discipline altogether; indeed, on a four-part series he made for Radio 4, he's primarily referred to as "an artist". Whilst New Dark Age has rather abstract section topics, Adam Greenfield's Radical Technologies is a rather different book altogether. Each chapter dissects one of the so-called 'radical' technologies that condition the choices available to us, asking how do they work, what challenges do they present to us and who ultimately benefits from their adoption. Greenfield takes his scalpel to smartphones, machine learning, cryptocurrencies, artificial intelligence, etc., and I don't think it would be unfair to say that starts and ends with a cynical point of view. He is no reactionary Luddite, though, and this is both informed and extremely well-explained, and it also lacks the lazy, affected and Private Eye-like cynicism of, say, Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain. The books aren't a natural pair, for Bridle's writing contains quite a bit of air in places, ironically mimics the very 'clouds' he inveighs against. Greenfield's book, by contrast, as little air and much lower pH value. Still, it was more than refreshing to read two technology books that do not limit themselves to platitudinal booleans, be those dangerously naive (e.g. Kevin Kelly's The Inevitable) or relentlessly nihilistic (Shoshana Zuboff's The Age of Surveillance Capitalism). Sure, they are both anti-technology screeds, but they tend to make arguments about systems of power rather than specific companies and avoid being too anti-'Big Tech' through a narrower, Silicon Valley obsessed lens for that (dipping into some other 2020 reading of mine) I might suggest Wendy Liu's Abolish Silicon Valley or Scott Galloway's The Four. Still, both books are superlatively written. In fact, Adam Greenfield has some of the best non-fiction writing around, both in terms of how he can explain complicated concepts (particularly the smart contract mechanism of the Ethereum cryptocurrency) as well as in the extremely finely-crafted sentences I often felt that the writing style almost had no need to be that poetic, and I particularly enjoyed his fictional scenarios at the end of the book.

The Algebra of Happiness & Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life Scott Galloway & Nir Eyal A cocktail of insight, informality and abrasiveness makes NYU Professor Scott Galloway uncannily appealing to guys around my age. Although Galloway definitely has his own wisdom and experience, similar to Joe Rogan I suspect that a crucial part of Galloway's appeal is that you feel you are learning right alongside him. Thankfully, 'Prof G' is far less err problematic than Rogan (Galloway is more of a well-meaning, spirited centrist), although he, too, has some pretty awful takes at time. This is a shame, because removed from the whirlwind of social media he can be really quite considered, such as in this long-form interview with Stephanie Ruhle. In fact, it is this kind of sentiment that he captured in his 2019 Algebra of Happiness. When I look over my highlighted sections, it's clear that it's rather schmaltzy out of context ("Things you hate become just inconveniences in the presence of people you love..."), but his one-two punch of cynicism and saccharine ("Ask somebody who purchased a home in 2007 if their 'American Dream' came true...") is weirdly effective, especially when he uses his own family experiences as part of his story:
A better proxy for your life isn't your first home, but your last. Where you draw your last breath is more meaningful, as it's a reflection of your success and, more important, the number of people who care about your well-being. Your first house signals the meaningful your future and possibility. Your last home signals the profound the people who love you. Where you die, and who is around you at the end, is a strong signal of your success or failure in life.
Nir Eyal's Indistractable, however, is a totally different kind of 'self-help' book. The important background story is that Eyal was the author of the widely-read Hooked which turned into a secular Bible of so-called 'addictive design'. (If you've ever been cornered by a techbro wielding a Wikipedia-thin knowledge of B. F. Skinner's behaviourist psychology and how it can get you to click 'Like' more often, it ultimately came from Hooked.) However, Eyal's latest effort is actually an extended mea culpa for his previous sin and he offers both high and low-level palliative advice on how to avoid falling for the tricks he so studiously espoused before. I suppose we should be thankful to capitalism for selling both cause and cure. Speaking of markets, there appears to be a growing appetite for books in this 'anti-distraction' category, and whilst I cannot claim to have done an exhausting study of this nascent field, Indistractable argues its points well without relying on accurate-but-dry "studies show..." or, worse, Gladwellian gotchas. My main criticism, however, would be that Eyal doesn't acknowledge the limits of a self-help approach to this problem; it seems that many of the issues he outlines are an inescapable part of the alienation in modern Western society, and the only way one can really avoid distraction is to move up the income ladder or move out to a 500-acre ranch.

8 November 2020

Russell Coker: Links November 2020

KDE has a long term problem of excessive CPU time used by the screen locker [1]. Part of it is due to software GL emulation, and part of it is due to the screen locker doing things like flashing the cursor when nothing else is happening. One of my systems has an NVidia card and enabling GL would cause it to crash. So now I have kscreenlocker using 30% of a CPU core even when the screen is powered down. Informative NYT article about the latest security features for iPhones [2]. Android needs new features like this! Russ Allbery wrote an interesting review of the book Hand to Mouth by Linda Tirado [3], it s about poverty in the US and related things. Linda first became Internet famous for her essay Why I Make Terrible Decisions or Poverty Thoughts which is very insightful and well written, this is the latest iteration of that essay [4]. This YouTube video by Ruby Payne gives great insights to class based attitudes towards time and money [5]. News Week has an interesting article about chicken sashimi, apparently you can safely eat raw chicken if it s prepared well [6]. Vanity Fair has an informative article about how Qanon and Trumpism have infected the Catholic Church [7]. Some of Mel Gibson s mental illness is affecting a significant portion of the Catholic Church in the US and some parts in the rest of the world. Noema has an interesting article on toxic Internet culture, Japan s 2chan, 4chan, 8chan/8kun, and the conspiracy theories they spawned [8]. Benjamin Corey is an ex-Fundie who wrote an amusing analysis of the Biblical statements about the anti-Christ [9]. NYMag has an interesting article The Final Gasp of Donald Trump s Presidency [10]. Mother Jones has an informative article about the fact that Jim Watkins (the main person behind QAnon) has a history of hosting child porn on sites he runs [11], but we all knew QAnon was never about protecting kids. Eand has an insightful article America s Problem is That White People Want It to Be a Failed State [12].
Related posts:
  1. Links March 2020 Rolling Stone has an insightful article about why the Christian...
  2. Links September 2020 MD5 cracker, find plain text that matches MD5 hash [1]....
  3. Links June 2020 Bruce Schneier wrote an informative post about Zoom security problems...

5 August 2020

Holger Levsen: 20200804-debconf6

DebConf6 This tshirt is 14 years old and from DebConf6. DebConf6 was my 4th DebConf and took place in Oaxtepec, Mexico. I'm a bit exhausted right now which is probably quite fitting to write something about DebConf6... many things in life are a question of perception, so I will mention the waterfall and the big swirl and the band playing with the fireworks during the conference dinner, the joy that we finally could use the local fiber network (after asking for months) just after discovering that the 6h shopping tour forgot to bring the essential pig tail connectors to connect the wireless antennas to the cards, which we needed to provide network to the rooms where the talks would take place. DebConf6 was the first DebConf with live streaming using dvswitch (written by Ben Hutchings and removed from unstable in 2015 as the world had moved to voctomix, which is yet another story to be told eventually). The first years (so DebConf6 and some) the videoteam focussed on getting the post processing done and the videos released, and streaming was optional, even though it was an exciting new feature and we still managed to stream mostly all we recorded and sometimes more... ;) Setting up the network uplink also was very challenging and took, I don't remember exactly, until day 4 or 5 of DebCamp (which lasted 7 days), so there were group of geeks in need of network, and mostly unable to fix it, because for fixing it we needed to communicate and IRC was down. (There was no mobile phone data at that time, the first iphone wasn't sold yet, it were the dark ages.) I remember literally standing on a roof to catch the wifi signal and excitingly shouting "I got one ping back! ... one ping back ...", less excitingly. I'll spare you the details now (and me writing them down) but I'll say that the solution involved Neil McGovern climbing an antenna and attaching a wifi antenna up high, probably 15m or 20m or some such. Finally we had uplink. I don't recall if that pig tail connector incident happened before of after, but in the end the network setup worked nicely on the wide area we occupied. Even though in some dorms the cleaning people daily removed one of our APs to be able to watch TV while cleaning ;) (Which kind of was ok, but still... they could have plugged it back in.) I also joyfully remember a certain vegetarian table, a most memorable bus ride (I'll just say 5 or rather cinco, and, unrelated except on the same bus ride, "Jesus" (and "Maria" for sure..)!) and talking with Jim Gettys and thus learning about the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) project. As for any DebConf, there's sooo much more to be told, but I'll end here and just thank Gunnar Wolf (as he masterminded much of this DebConf) and go to bed now :-)

21 July 2020

Enrico Zini: Screen ghosts

I noticed an odd effect, that reminds me of screen ghosting on old CRT monitors, when my laptop screen is locked: Those faint white vertical lines one can see, are actually window borders, and the lock screen is leaking contents of my unlocked desktop! Here is the same screen, unlocked: However, moving the windows around does not reflect on the ghost image on top of the lock screen: reshuffling windows then locking, produces always the same ghost image. The white border reflects where the window has been at some time in the past. The lock screen does not seem to be responsible, either: dragging a solid colored window on the laptop screen has the same effect: But taking a screenshot of it does not show the time traveling ghost windows: This is happening on two different laptops, an HP EliteBook x360 G1, and a Lenovo ThinkPad X240, one that I've been using since 3 years, one that I've been using since a week, and whose only thing in common is a 1920x1080 IPS screen and an Intel GPU. I have no idea where to start debugging this. Please reach out to me at enrico@debian.org if any of this makes sense to you. Update: Jim Paris pointed me to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image_persistence which looks pretty much like what is happening here. Jim Paris also pointed out that a black background doesn't show the ghosting. I changed the lock screen background by editing /etc/lightdm/lightdm-gtk-greeter.conf and adding background=#000000 to the [greeter] section, to limit information leakage through ghosting in the lock screen.

9 July 2020

Enrico Zini: Laptop migration

This laptop used to be extra-flat My laptop battery started to explode in slow motion. HP requires 10 business days to repair my laptop under warranty, and I cannot afford that length of downtime. Alternatively, HP quoted me 375 + VAT for on-site repairs, which I tought was very funny. For 376.55 + VAT, which is pretty much exactly the same amount, I bought instead a refurbished ThinkPad X240 with a dual-core I5, 8G of RAM, 250G SSD, and a 1920x1080 IPS display, to use as a spare while my laptop is being repaired. I'd like to thank HP for giving me the opportunity to own a ThinkPad. Since I'm migrating all my system to the spare and then (hopefully) back, I'm documenting what I need to be fully productive on new hardware. Install Debian A basic Debian netinst with no tasks selected is good enough to get going. Note that if wifi worked in Debian Installer, it doesn't mean that it will work in the minimal system it installed. See here for instructions on quickly bringing up wifi on a newly installed minimal system. Copy /home A simple tar of /home is all I needed to copy my data over. A neat way to do it was connecting the two laptops with an ethernet cable, and using netcat: 
# On the source
tar -C / -zcf - home   nc -l -p 12345 -N
# On the target
nc 10.0.0.1 12345   tar -C / -zxf -
Since the data travel unencrypted in this way, don't do it over wifi. Install packages I maintain a few simple local metapackages that depend on the packages I usually used. I could just install those and let apt bring in their dependencies. For the build dependencies of the programs I develop, I use mk-build-deps from the devscripts package to create metapackages that make sure they are installed. Here's an extract from debian/control of the metapackage: 
Source: enrico
Section: admin
Priority: optional
Maintainer: Enrico Zini <enrico@debian.org>
Build-Depends: debhelper (>= 11)
Standards-Version: 3.7.2.1
Package: enrico
Section: admin
Architecture: all
Depends:
  mc, mmv, moreutils, powertop, syncmaildir, notmuch,
  ncdu, vcsh, ddate, jq, git-annex, eatmydata,
  vdirsyncer, khal, etckeeper, moc, pwgen
Description: Enrico's working environment
Package: enrico-devel
Section: devel
Architecture: all
Depends:
  git, python3-git, git-svn, gitk, ansible, fabric,
  valgrind, kcachegrind, zeal, meld, d-feet, flake8, mypy, ipython3,
  strace, ltrace
Description: Enrico's development environment
Package: enrico-gui
Section: x11
Architecture: all
Depends:
  xclip, gnome-terminal, qalculate-gtk, liferea, gajim,
  mumble, sm, syncthing, virt-manager
Recommends: k3b
Description: Enrico's GUI environment
Package: enrico-sanity
Section: admin
Architecture: all
Conflicts: libapache2-mod-php, libapache2-mod-php5, php5, php5-cgi, php5-fpm, libapache2-mod-php7.0, php7.0, libphp7.0-embed, libphp-embed, libphp5-embed
Description: Enrico's sanity
 Metapackage with a list of packages that I do not want anywhere near my
 system.
System-wide customizations I tend to avoid changing system-wide configuration as much as possible, so copying over /home and installing packages takes care of 99% of my needs. There are a few system-wide tweaks I cannot do without: For postfix, I have a little ansible playbook that takes care of it. Network Manager system connections need to be copied manually: a plain copy and a systemctl restart network-manager are enough. Note that Network Manager will ignore the files unless their owner and permissions are what it expects. Fine tuning Comparing the output of dpkg --get-selections between the old and the new system might highlight packages manually installed in a hurry and not added to the metapackages. Finally, what remains is fixing the sad state of mimetype associations, which seem to associate opening file depending on whatever application was installed last, phases of the moon, and what option is the most annoying. Currently on my system, PDFs are opened in inkscape by xdg-open and in calibre by run-mailcap. Let's see how long it takes to figure this one out.

9 June 2020

Ingo Juergensmann: Jabber vs. XMPP

XMPP is widely - and mabye better - known as Jabber. This was more or less the same until Cisco bought Jabber Inc and the trademark. You can read more about the story on the XMPP.org website. But is there still a Jabber around? Yes, it is! But Cisco Jabber is a whole infrastructure environment: you can't use Cisco Jabber client on its own without the other required Cisco infrastructure as Cisco CUCM and CIsco IM&P servers. So you can't just setup Prosody or ejabberd on your Debian server and connect Cisco Jabber to it. But what are the differences of Cisco Jabber to "standard" XMPP clients? Cisco Jabber The above screenshot from the official Cisco Jabber product webpage shows the new, single view layout of the Cisco Webex Teams client, but you can configure the client to have the old, classic split view layout of Contact List and Chat Window. But as you can already see from above screenshot audio & video calls is one of the core functions of Cisco Jabber whereas this feature has been added only lately to the well-known Conversations XMPP client on Android. Conversations is using Jingle extension to XMPP whereas Jabber uses SIP for voice/video calls. You can even use Cisco Jabber to control your deskphone via CTI, which is a quite common setup for Jabber. In fact you can configure Jabber to be just a CTI client to you phone or a fully featured UC client. When you don't want to have Ciscos full set of on-premise servers, you can also use Cisco Jabber in conjunction with Cisco Webex as Cisco Webex Messenger. Or in conjunction with Webex Teams in Teams Messaging Mode. Last month Cisco announced general availability of XMPP federation for Webex Teams/Jabber in Teams Messaging Mode. With that you have basic functionality in Webex Teams. And when I say "basic" I really mean basic: you can have 1:1 chat only, no group chats (MUC) and no Presence status will be possible. Hopefully this is just the beginning and not the end of XMPP support in Webex Teams. XMPP Clients Well, I'm sure many of you know "normal" XMPP clients such as Gajim or Dino on Linux, Conversations on Android or Siskin/Monal/ChatSecure on Apple IOS. There are plenty of other clients of course and maybe you used an XMPP client in the past without knowing it. For example Jitsi Meet is based on XMPP and you can still download the Jitsi Desktop client and use it as a full-featured multi-protocol client, e.g. for XMPP and SIP. In fact Jitsi Desktop is maybe the client that comes closest to Cisco Jabber as a chat/voice/video client. In fact I already connected Jitsi Desktop to Cisco CUCM/IM&P infrastructure, but of course you won't be able to use all those Cisco proprietary extensions, but you can see the benefit of open, standardized protocols such as XMPP and SIP: you are free to use any standard compliant client that you want. So, while Jitsi supported voice/video calls for a long time, even before they focussed on Jitsi Meet as a WebRTC based conference service, Conversations added this feature last month, as already stated. This had a huge effect to the whole XMPP federation, because you need an XMPP server that supports XEP-0215 to make these audio/video calls work. The well-known Compliance Tester listed the STUN/TURN features first as "Informational Tests", but quickly made this a mandatory test to pass tests and gain 100% on the Compliance Tester. But you cannot place SIP calls to other sides, because that's a different thing. As many of you are familiar with standard XMPP clients, I'll focus now on some similarity and differences between Cisco Jabber and standard XMPP... Similarities & Differences First, you can federate with Cisco Jabber users. Cisco IM&P can use standard XMPP federation with all other XMPP standard compliant servers. This is really a big benefit and way better than other solutions that usually results in vendor lock-in. Depending on the setup, you can even join from your own XMPP client in MUCs (Multi User Chats), which Cisco calls "Persistent Chat Room". The other way is not that simple: basically it is possible to join with Cisco Jabber in a MUC on a random server, but it is not as easy as you might thing. Cisco Jabber simply lacks a way to enter a room JID (as you can find them on https://search.jabber.network/. Instead you need to be added as participant by a moderator or an admin in that 3rd party MUC. Managed File Transfers is another issue. Cisco Jabber supports Peer-to-Peer file transfers and Managed File Transfers, where the uploaded file get transferred to an SFTP server as storage backend and where the IM&P server is handling the transfer via HTTPS. You can find a schematic drawing in the Configuration Guides. Although it appears similar to HTTP Upload as defined in XEP-0363, it is not very likely that it will work. I haven't tested it yet, because in my test scenario there is a gatekeeper in the path: Cisco Expressway doesn't support (yet) Managed File Transfer, but you can upvote the idea in the ideas management of Cisco or other ideas such as OMEMO support. OMEMO support? Yes, there is no end-to-end encryption (E2EE) currently planned for Cisco Jabber, while it is common nowadays for most modern XMPP clients. I think it would be good for Cisco Jabber to also (optionally) support OMEMO or its successor. Messaging clients without E2EE are not state of the art anymore. Whereas Conversations is the de-facto standard on Android, Apple IOS devices are still lacking a similar well-working client. See my blog post "XMPP - Fun with Clients" for a summary. In that regard Cisco Jabber might be the best XMPP client for IOS to some degree: you have working messaging, voice/video calls, Push Notifications and integration into Apples Call Kit. There are most likely many, many more differences and issues between Cisco Jabber and standard compliant XMPP servers and clients. But basically Cisco Jabber is still based on XMPP and extends that by proprietary extensions. Summary While I have the impression that the free clients and servers are well doing and increased development in the past years (thanks to Conversations and the Compliance Tester), the situation of Cisco Jabber is a little different. As a customer you can sometimes get the impression that Cisco has lost interest in developing Cisco Jabber. It got better in the last years, but when Cisco Spark was introduced some years ago, the impression was that Cisco is heavily focussed on Spark (now: Webex Teams). It's not like Cisco is not listening to customers or the development has been stopped on Jabber, but my impression is that most customers don't give feedback or tell Cisco as the vendor what they want. You can either submit ideas via the Colaboration Customer Ideas Tool or provide feedback via your Cisco and partner channels. I think it is important for the XMPP community to also have a large enterprise level vendor like Cisco. Otherwise the Internet will become more and more an Internet of closed silos like MS Teams, Slack, Facebook, etc. Of course there are other companies like ProcessOne (ejabberd) or Tigase, but I think you agree that Cisco is another level.
Kategorie:
Debian
Tags:
Debian
Jabber
XMPP

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