As well as the collection and distribution of compromised keys, the pwnedkeys project also matches those pwned keys against issued SSL certificates. I m excited to announce that, as of the beginning of 2024, all matched certificates are now being published on the Fediverse, thanks to the botsin.space Mastodon server. Want to know which sites are susceptible to interception and interference, in (near-)real time? Do you have a burning desire to know who is issuing certificates to people that post their private keys in public? Now you can.

How It Works The process for publishing pwned certs is, roughly, as follows:

1. All the certificates in Certificate Transparency (CT) logs are hoovered up (using my scrape-ct-log tool, the fastest log scraper in the west!), and the fingerprint of the public key of each certificate is stored in an LMDB datafile.
2. As new private keys are identified as having been compromised, the fingerprint of that key is checked against all the LMDB files, which map key fingerprints to certificates (actually to CT log entry IDs, from which the certificates themselves are retrieved).
3. If one or more matches are found, then the certificates using the compromised key are forwarded to the tooter , which publishes them for the world to marvel at.

This makes it sound all very straightforward, and it is in theory. The trick comes in optimising the pipeline so that the five million or so new certificates every day can get indexed on the one slightly middle-aged server I ve got, without getting backlogged.

Why Don t You Just Have the Certificates Revoked? Funny story about that I used to notify CAs of certificates they d issued using compromised keys, which had the effect of requiring them to revoke the associated certificates. However, several CAs disliked having to revoke all those certificates, because it cost them staff time (and hence money) to do so. They went so far as to change their procedures from the standard way of accepting problem reports (emailing a generic attestation of compromise), and instead required CA-specific hoop-jumping to notify them of compromised keys. Since the effectiveness of revocation in the WebPKI is, shall we say, homeopathic at best, I decided I couldn t be bothered to play whack-a-mole with CAs that just wanted to be difficult, and I stopped sending compromised key notifications to CAs. Instead, now I m publishing the details of compromised certificates to everyone, so that users can protect themselves directly should they choose to.

Further Work The astute amongst you may have noticed, in the above How It Works description, a bit of a gap in my scanning coverage. CAs can (and do!) issue certificates for keys that are already compromised, including weak keys that have been known about for a decade or more (1, 2, 3). However, as currently implemented, the pwnedkeys certificate checker does not automatically find such certificates. My plan is to augment the CT scraping / cert processing pipeline to check all incoming certificates against the existing (2M+) set of pwned keys. Though, with over five million new certificates to check every day, it s not necessarily as simple as just hit the pwnedkeys API for every new cert . The poor old API server might not like that very much.

Support My Work If you d like to see this extra matching happen a bit quicker, I ve setup a ko-fi supporters page, where you can support my work on pwnedkeys and the other open source software and projects I work on by buying me a refreshing beverage. I would be very appreciative, and your support lets me know I should do more interesting things with the giant database of compromised keys I ve accumulated.

• Discussed the ongoing difficulties in supporting the Debian "marvell" kernel flavour. Reviewed the related merge request to fix armel build regression in Debian 12 "bookworm".
• Wrote and recorded a talk for DebConf on What's new in the Linux kernel. Apologies for the poor audio quality; I will use a different microphone if I do this again.
• Reviewed Bastian Blank's proposed changes to kernel package versioning and signing in Debian.
• Reported several bad backports to some Linux stable branches.
• Proposed a build fix for linux 6.5 on s390x.
• Updated the linux package for Debian 10 "buster" to 4.19.295, but didn't make an upload.

Last night I attended the first local Linux User Group talk since before the pandemic (possibly even long before the pandemic!) Topic: How and why Atomic Access runs Debian on a 100Gbps router Speaker: Joe Botha This is the first time CLUG used Woodstock Brewery as a venue. It s great, because now we can have snacks and beer during the talks :) Joe has worked in the internet space for quite some time, and co-founded companies like Teraco, Frogfoot, Amobia, Octotel and Atomic Access. Through all of these he s done interesting and noteworthy work, which I ve only seen some glimpses of before in the few moments we ve interacted at CLUG events. It was nice seeing a lot more detail of a project that I wouldn t even know about if he didn t give this talk. It doesn t seem that anyone else is running Debian on big switches for commercial ISPs. He goes through these great lengths to run Debian so that he can have a decent set of tools and familiar commands on the switch, as apposed to the (my word here) crappy tooling that you would get on the brand name switches. By total coincidence, David Plonka happened to be at the brewery too, he s a network expert who works at Akamai. He didn t know this talk was taking place, so this was a fun happenstance, he had some good inputs during the talk too. He also bought everyone a round of beer, thanks David! I asked Joe for his slides and I ll share them here when I get them. Unfortunately we don t have video for this talk, but I asked Joe to consider coming to DebConf23, I think this topic would be really interesting to the wider Debian crowd. By the way, both registration and the call for proposals are now officially open for DebConf23, it s taking place in September in Kochi, India this year. Updates (2023-06-07): Joe provided slides for his talk, you can get them here. He also provided some links:

• Youtube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CfgjbHivdQ8 Building a Better NOS with Linux and switchdev
• Switchdev wiki: https://github.com/Mellanox/mlxsw/wiki
• Switchdev repository: https://github.com/Marvell-switching/switchdev-prestera

Review: Night Watch, by Terry Pratchett

Series:	Discworld #29
Publisher:	Harper
Copyright:	November 2002
Printing:	August 2014
ISBN:	0-06-230740-1
Format:	Mass market
Pages:	451

Night Watch is the 29th Discworld novel and the sixth Watch novel. I would really like to tell people they could start here if they wanted to, for reasons that I will get into in a moment, but I think I would be doing you a disservice. The emotional heft added by having read the previous Watch novels and followed Vimes's character evolution is significant. It's the 25th of May. Vimes is about to become a father. He and several of the other members of the Watch are wearing sprigs of lilac for reasons that Sergeant Colon is quite vehemently uninterested in explaining. A serial killer named Carcer the Watch has been after for weeks has just murdered an off-duty sergeant. It's a tense and awkward sort of day and Vimes is feeling weird and wistful, remembering the days when he was a copper and not a manager who has to dress up in ceremonial armor and meet with committees. That may be part of why, when the message comes over the clacks that the Watch have Carcer cornered on the roof of the New Hall of the Unseen University, Vimes responds in person. He's grappling with Carcer on the roof of the University Library in the middle of a magical storm when lightning strikes. When he wakes up, he's in the past, shortly after he joined the Watch and shortly before the events of the 25th of May that the older Watch members so vividly remember and don't talk about. I have been saying recently in Discworld reviews that it felt like Pratchett was on the verge of a breakout book that's head and shoulders above Discworld prior to that point. This is it. This is that book. The setup here is masterful: the sprigs of lilac that slowly tell the reader something is going on, the refusal of any of the older Watch members to talk about it, the scene in the graveyard to establish the stakes, the disconcerting fact that Vetinari is wearing a sprig of lilac as well, and the feeling of building tension that matches the growing electrical storm. And Pratchett never gives into the temptation to explain everything and tip his hand prematurely. We know the 25th is coming and something is going to happen, and the reader can put together hints from Vimes's thoughts, but Pratchett lets us guess and sometimes be right and sometimes be wrong. Vimes is trying to change history, which adds another layer of uncertainty and enjoyment as the reader tries to piece together both the true history and the changes. This is a masterful job at a "what if?" story. And, beneath that, the commentary on policing and government and ethics is astonishingly good. In a review of an earlier Watch novel, I compared Pratchett to Dickens in the way that he focuses on a sort of common-sense morality rather than political theory. That is true here too, but oh that moral analysis is sharp enough to slide into you like a knife. This is not the Vimes that we first met in Guards! Guards!. He has has turned his cynical stubbornness into a working theory of policing, and it's subtle and complicated and full of nuance that he only barely knows how to explain. But he knows how to show it to people.

Keep the peace. That was the thing. People often failed to understand what that meant. You'd go to some life-threatening disturbance like a couple of neighbors scrapping in the street over who owned the hedge between their properties, and they'd both be bursting with aggrieved self-righteousness, both yelling, their wives would either be having a private scrap on the side or would have adjourned to a kitchen for a shared pot of tea and a chat, and they all expected you to sort it out. And they could never understand that it wasn't your job. Sorting it out was a job for a good surveyor and a couple of lawyers, maybe. Your job was to quell the impulse to bang their stupid fat heads together, to ignore the affronted speeches of dodgy self-justification, to get them to stop shouting and to get them off the street. Once that had been achieved, your job was over. You weren't some walking god, dispensing finely tuned natural justice. Your job was simply to bring back peace.

When Vimes is thrown back in time, he has to pick up the role of his own mentor, the person who taught him what policing should be like. His younger self is right there, watching everything he does, and he's desperately afraid he'll screw it up and set a worse example. Make history worse when he's trying to make it better. It's a beautifully well-done bit of tension that uses time travel as the hook to show both how difficult mentorship is and also how irritating one's earlier naive self would be.

He wondered if it was at all possible to give this idiot some lessons in basic politics. That was always the dream, wasn't it? "I wish I'd known then what I know now"? But when you got older you found out that you now wasn't you then. You then was a twerp. You then was what you had to be to start out on the rocky road of becoming you now, and one of the rocky patches on that road was being a twerp.

The backdrop of this story, as advertised by the map at the front of the book, is a revolution of sorts. And the revolution does matter, but not in the obvious way. It creates space and circumstance for some other things to happen that are all about the abuse of policing as a tool of politics rather than Vimes's principle of keeping the peace. I mentioned when reviewing Men at Arms that it was an awkward book to read in the United States in 2020. This book tackles the ethics of policing head-on, in exactly the way that book didn't. It's also a marvelous bit of competence porn. Somehow over the years, Vimes has become extremely good at what he does, and not just in the obvious cop-walking-a-beat sort of ways. He's become a leader. It's not something he thinks about, even when thrown back in time, but it's something Pratchett can show the reader directly, and have the other characters in the book comment on. There is so much more that I'd like to say, but so much would be spoilers, and I think Night Watch is more effective when you have the suspense of slowly puzzling out what's going to happen. Pratchett's pacing is exquisite. It's also one of the rare Discworld novels where Pratchett fully commits to a point of view and lets Vimes tell the story. There are a few interludes with other people, but the only other significant protagonist is, quite fittingly, Vetinari. I won't say anything more about that except to note that the relationship between Vimes and Vetinari is one of the best bits of fascinating subtlety in all of Discworld. I think it's also telling that nothing about Night Watch reads as parody. Sure, there is a nod to Back to the Future in the lightning storm, and it's impossible to write a book about police and street revolutions without making the reader think about Les Miserables, but nothing about this plot matches either of those stories. This is Pratchett telling his own story in his own world, unapologetically, and without trying to wedge it into parody shape, and it is so much the better book for it. The one quibble I have with the book is that the bits with the Time Monks don't really work. Lu-Tze is annoying and flippant given the emotional stakes of this story, the interludes with him are frustrating and out of step with the rest of the book, and the time travel hand-waving doesn't add much. I see structurally why Pratchett put this in: it gives Vimes (and the reader) a time frame and a deadline, it establishes some of the ground rules and stakes, and it provides a couple of important opportunities for exposition so that the reader doesn't get lost. But it's not good story. The rest of the book is so amazingly good, though, that it doesn't matter (and the framing stories for "what if?" explorations almost never make much sense). The other thing I have a bit of a quibble with is outside the book. Night Watch, as you may have guessed by now, is the origin of the May 25th Pratchett memes that you will be familiar with if you've spent much time around SFF fandom. But this book is dramatically different from what I was expecting based on the memes. You will, for example see a lot of people posting "Truth, Justice, Freedom, Reasonably Priced Love, And a Hard-Boiled Egg!", and before reading the book it sounds like a Pratchett-style humorous revolutionary slogan. And I guess it is, sort of, but, well... I have to quote the scene:

"You'd like Freedom, Truth, and Justice, wouldn't you, Comrade Sergeant?" said Reg encouragingly. "I'd like a hard-boiled egg," said Vimes, shaking the match out. There was some nervous laughter, but Reg looked offended. "In the circumstances, Sergeant, I think we should set our sights a little higher " "Well, yes, we could," said Vimes, coming down the steps. He glanced at the sheets of papers in front of Reg. The man cared. He really did. And he was serious. He really was. "But...well, Reg, tomorrow the sun will come up again, and I'm pretty sure that whatever happens we won't have found Freedom, and there won't be a whole lot of Justice, and I'm damn sure we won't have found Truth. But it's just possible that I might get a hard-boiled egg."

I think I'm feeling defensive of the heart of this book because it's such an emotional gut punch and says such complicated and nuanced things about politics and ethics (and such deeply cynical things about revolution). But I think if I were to try to represent this story in a meme, it would be the "angels rise up" song, with all the layers of meaning that it gains in this story. I'm still at the point where the lilac sprigs remind me of Sergeant Colon becoming quietly furious at the overstep of someone who wasn't there. There's one other thing I want to say about that scene: I'm not naturally on Vimes's side of this argument. I think it's important to note that Vimes's attitude throughout this book is profoundly, deeply conservative. The hard-boiled egg captures that perfectly: it's a bit of physical comfort, something you can buy or make, something that's part of the day-to-day wheels of the city that Vimes talks about elsewhere in Night Watch. It's a rejection of revolution, something that Vimes does elsewhere far more explicitly. Vimes is a cop. He is in some profound sense a defender of the status quo. He doesn't believe things are going to fundamentally change, and it's not clear he would want them to if they did. And yet. And yet, this is where Pratchett's Dickensian morality comes out. Vimes is a conservative at heart. He's grumpy and cynical and jaded and he doesn't like change. But if you put him in a situation where people are being hurt, he will break every rule and twist every principle to stop it.

He wanted to go home. He wanted it so much that he trembled at the thought. But if the price of that was selling good men to the night, if the price was filling those graves, if the price was not fighting with every trick he knew... then it was too high. It wasn't a decision that he was making, he knew. It was happening far below the areas of the brain that made decisions. It was something built in. There was no universe, anywhere, where a Sam Vimes would give in on this, because if he did then he wouldn't be Sam Vimes any more.

This is truly exceptional stuff. It is the best Discworld novel I have read, by far. I feel like this was the Watch novel that Pratchett was always trying to write, and he had to write five other novels first to figure out how to write it. And maybe to prepare Discworld readers to read it. There are a lot of Discworld novels that are great on their own merits, but also it is 100% worth reading all the Watch novels just so that you can read this book. Followed in publication order by The Wee Free Men and later, thematically, by Thud!. Rating: 10 out of 10

Pearls of Luthra Pearls of Luthra is the first book by Brian Jacques and I think I am going to be a fan of his work. This particular book you have to be wary of. While it is a beautiful book with quite a few illustrations, I have to warn that if you are somebody who feels hungry at the very mention of food, then you will be hungry throughout the book. There isn t a single page where food isn t mentioned and not just any kind of food, the kind of food that is geared towards sweet tooth. So if you fancy tarts or chocolates or anything sweet you will right at home. The book also touches upon various teas and wines and various liquors but food is where it shines in literally. The tale is very much like a Harry Potter adventure but isn t as dark as HP was. In fact, apart from one death and one ear missing rest of our heroes and heroines and there are quite a few. I don t want to give too much away as it s a book to be treasured.

Dahaad Dahaad (the roar) is Sonakshi Sinha s entry in OTT/Web Series. The stage is set somewhere in North India while the exploits are based on a real life person called Cyanide Mohan who killed 20 women between 2005-2009. In the web series however, the antagonist s crimes are done over a period of 12 years and has 29 women as his victims. Apart from that it s pretty much a copy of what was done by the person above. It s a melting pot of a series which quite a few stories enmeshed along with the main one. The main onus and plot of the movie is about women from lower economic and caste order whose families want them to be wed but cannot due to huge demands for dowry. Now in such a situation, if a person were to give them a bit of attention, promise marriage and ask them to steal a bit and come with him and whatever, they will do it. The same modus operandi was done by Cynaide Mohan. He had a car that was not actually is but used it show off that he s from a richer background, entice the women, have sex, promise marriage and in the morning after pill there will be cynaide which the women unwittingly will consume. This is also framed by the protagonist Sonakshi Sinha to her mother as her mother is also forcing her to get married as she is becoming older. She shows some of the photographs of the victims and says that while the perpetrator is guilty but so is the overall society that puts women in such vulnerable positions. AFAIK, that is still the state of things. In fact, there is a series called Indian Matchmaking that has all the snobbishness that you want. How many people could have a lifestyle like the ones shown in that, less than 2% of the population. It s actually shows like the above that make the whole thing even more precarious Apart from it, the show also shows prejudice about caste and background. I wouldn t go much into it as it s worth seeing and experiencing.

Tetris Tetris in many a ways is a story of greed. It s also a story of a lone inventor who had to wait almost 20 odd years to profit from his invention. Forbes does a marvelous job of giving some more background and foreground info. about Tetris, the inventor and the producer that went to strike it rich. It also does share about copyright misrepresentation happens but does nothing to address it. Could talk a whole lot but better to see the movie and draw your own conclusions. For me it was 4/5.

Discord Discord became Discord 2.0 and is a blank to me. A blank page. Can t do anything. First I thought it was a bug. Waited for a few days as sometimes webservices do fix themselves. But two weeks on and it still wasn t fixed then decided to look under. One of the tools in Firefox is Web Developer Tools ( CTRL+Shift+I) that tells you if an element of a page is not appearing or at least gives you a hint. To me it gave me the following
Content Security Policy: Ignoring 'unsafe-inline' within script-src or style-src: nonce-source or hash-source specified
Content Security Policy: The page s settings blocked the loading of a resource at data:text/css,%0A%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%2 ( style-src ). data:44:30
Content Security Policy: Ignoring 'unsafe-inline' within script-src or style-src: nonce-source or hash-source specified
TypeError: AudioContext is not a constructor 138875 https://discord.com/assets/cbf3a75da6e6b6a4202e.js:262 l https://discord.com/assets/f5f0b113e28d4d12ba16.js:1ed46a18578285e5c048b.js:241:118 What is being done is dom.webaudio.enabled being disabled in Firefox. Then on a hunch, searched on reddit and saw the following. Be careful while visiting the link as it s labelled NSFW although to my mind there wasn t anything remotely NSFW about it. They do mention using another tool AudioContext Fingerprint Defender which supposedly fakes or spoofs an id. As this add-on isn t tracked by Firefox privacy team it s hard for me to say anything positive or negative. So, in the end I stopped using discord as the alternative was being tracked by them Last but not the least, saw this about a week back. Sooner or later this had to happen as Elon tries to make money off Twitter.

Armadillo is a powerful and expressive C++ template library for linear algebra and scientific computing. It aims towards a good balance between speed and ease of use, has a syntax deliberately close to Matlab, and is useful for algorithm development directly in C++, or quick conversion of research code into production environments. RcppArmadillo integrates this library with the R environment and language and is widely used by (currently) 1074 other packages on CRAN, downloaded 29.3 million times (per the partial logs from the cloud mirrors of CRAN), and the CSDA paper (preprint / vignette) by Conrad and myself has been cited 535 times according to Google Scholar. This release brings a new upstream release 12.4.0 made by Conrad a day or so ago. I prepared the usual release candidate, tested on the over 1000 reverse depends (which sadly takes almost a day on old hardware), found no issues and sent it to CRAN. Where it got tested again and was once again auto-processed smoothly by CRAN within a few hours on a Friday night which is just marvelous. So this time I tweeted about it too. The releases actually has a relatively small set of changes as a second follow-up release in the 12.* series.

Changes in RcppArmadillo version 0.12.4.0.0 (2023-05-26)

• Upgraded to Armadillo release 12.4.0 (Cortisol Profusion Redux)
  • Added norm2est() for finding fast estimates of matrix 2-norm (spectral norm)
  • Added vecnorm() for obtaining the vector norm of each row or column of a matrix

Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is a diffstat report relative to previous release. More detailed information is on the RcppArmadillo page. Questions, comments etc should go to the rcpp-devel mailing list off the R-Forge page. If you like my open-source work, you may consider sponsoring me at GitHub.

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

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

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

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

1. consider buying 4 USB-C expansion cards, or at least a mix of 4 USB-A or USB-C cards, as they use less power than other cards and you do want to fill those expansion slots otherwise they snag around and feel insecure
2. you will likely need a dock or at least a USB hub if you want a two-monitor setup, otherwise you'll run out of ports
3. you have to do some serious tuning to get proper (10h+ idle, 10 days suspend) power savings
4. in particular, beware that the HDMI, DisplayPort and particularly the SSD and MicroSD cards take a significant amount power, even when sleeping, up to 2-6W for the latter two
5. beware that the MicroSD card is what it says: Micro, normal SD cards won't fit, and while there might be full sized one eventually, it's currently only at the prototyping stage
6. the Framework monitor has an unusual aspect ratio (3:2): I like it (and it matches classic and digital photography aspect ratio), but it might surprise you

Current status I have the framework! It's setup with a fresh new Debian bookworm installation. I've ran through a large number of tests and burn in. I have decided to use the Framework as my daily driver, and had to buy a USB-C dock to get my two monitors connected, which was own adventure. Update: Framework just (2023-03-23) just announced a whole bunch of new stuff:

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

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

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

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

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

Base configuration

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

Customization

• Keyboard: US English, included

Expansion Cards

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

Accessories

• Power Adapter - US/Canada $64.00

Total

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

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

Pros

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

Cons

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

Initial hardware setup A breeze.

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

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

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

... which Firefox immediately transforms in:

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

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

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

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

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

Hardware review

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

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

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

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

[Login]
HandlePowerKey=suspend
HandlePowerKeyLongPress=poweroff

You might have to create the directory first:

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

Then restart logind:

systemctl restart systemd-logind

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The magic:

autorandr -l horizontal

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

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

Kind of disruptive.

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

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

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

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

Multimedia and other devices Those things also work:

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

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

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

Performance tests

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Unable to find medium containing a live file system

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

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

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

/etc/ssh
/var/lib/puppet

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

! 1.5*96
Xft.dpi: 144

Apparently, some of this can also help:

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

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

Issues

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

... to this:

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

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

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

... after:

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

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

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

... after:

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

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

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

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

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

... after:

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

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

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

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

printf s2idle > /sys/power/mem_sleep

Here's another test:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusions:

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

A discussion of those results is in this forum post.

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

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

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

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

sudo ectool fwchargelimit 80

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

USB_AUTOSUSPEND=0

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

USB_AUTOSUSPEND=1
USB_DENYLIST="0bda:8156"

and this on the kernel commandline:

usbcore.quirks=0bda:8156:k

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

300 frames in 5.0 seconds = 60.000 FPS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Other resources

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

Review: A Master of Djinn, by P. Dj l Clark

Series:	Dead Djinn Universe #1
Publisher:	Tordotcom
Copyright:	2021
ISBN:	1-250-26767-6
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	391

A Master of Djinn is the first novel in the Dead Djinn Universe, but (as you might guess from the series title) is a direct sequel to the novelette "A Dead Djinn in Cairo". The novelette is not as good as the novel, but I recommend reading it first for the character introductions and some plot elements that carry over. Reading The Haunting of Tram Car 015 first is entirely optional. In 1912 in a mansion in Giza, a secret society of (mostly) British men is meeting. The Hermetic Brotherhood of Al-Jahiz is devoted to unlocking the mysteries of the Soudanese mystic al-Jahiz. In our world, these men would likely be colonialist plunderers. In this world, they still aspire to that role, but they're playing catch-up. Al-Jahiz bored into the Kaf, releasing djinn and magic into the world and making Egypt a world power in its own right. Now, its cities are full of clockwork marvels, djinn walk the streets as citizens, and British rule has been ejected from India and Africa by local magic. This group of still-rich romantics and crackpots hopes to discover the knowledge lost when al-Jahiz disappeared. They have not had much success. This will not save their lives. Fatma el-Sha'arawi is a special investigator for the Ministry of Alchemy, Enchantments, and Supernatural Entities. Her job is sorting out the problems caused by this new magic, such as a couple of young thieves with a bottle full of sleeping djinn whose angry reaction to being unexpectedly woken has very little to do with wishes. She is one of the few female investigators in a ministry that is slowly modernizing with the rest of society (Egyptian women just got the vote). She's also the one called to investigate the murder of a secret society of British men and a couple of Cairenes by a black-robed man in a golden mask. The black-robed man claims to be al-Jahiz returned, and proves to be terrifyingly adept at manipulating crowds and sparking popular dissent. Fatma and the Ministry's first attempt to handle him is a poorly-judged confrontation stymied by hostile crowds, the man's duplicating bodyguard, and his own fighting ability. From there, it's a race between Fatma's pursuit of linear clues and the black-robed man's efforts to destabilize society. This, like the previous short stories, is a police procedural, but it has considerably more room to breathe at novel length. That serves it well, since as with "A Dead Djinn in Cairo" the procedural part is a linear, reactive vehicle for plot exposition. I was more invested in Fatma's relationships with the supporting characters. Since the previous story, she's struck up a romance with Siti, a highly competent follower of the old Egyptian gods (Hathor in particular) and my favorite character in the book. She's also been assigned a new partner, Hadia, a new graduate and another female agent. The slow defeat of Fatma's irritation at not being allowed to work alone by Hadia's cheerful competence and persistence (and willingness to do paperwork) adds a lot to the characterization. The setting felt a bit less atmospheric than The Haunting of Tram Car 015, but we get more details of international politics, and they're a delight. Clark takes obvious (and warranted) glee in showing how the reintroduction of magic has shifted the balance of power away from the colonial empires. Cairo is a bustling steampunk metropolis and capital of a world power, welcoming envoys from West African kingdoms alongside the (still racist and obnoxious but now much less powerful) British and other Europeans. European countries were forced to search their own mythology for possible sources of magic power, which leads to the hilarious scene of the German Kaiser carrying a sleepy goblin on his shoulder to monitor his diplomacy. The magic of the story was less successful for me, although still enjoyable. The angels from "A Dead Djinn in Cairo" make another appearance and again felt like the freshest bit of world-building, but we don't find out much more about them. I liked the djinn and their widely-varied types and magic, but apart from them and a few glimpses of Egypt's older gods, that was the extent of the underlying structure. There is a significant magical artifact, but the characters are essentially handed an instruction manual, use it according to its instructions, and it then does what it was documented to do. It was a bit unsatisfying. I'm the type of fantasy reader who always wants to read the sourcebook for the magic system, but this is not that sort of a book. Instead, it's the kind of book where the investigator steadily follows a linear trail of clues and leads until they reach the final confrontation. Here, the confrontation felt remarkably like cut scenes from a Japanese RPG: sudden vast changes in scale, clockwork constructs, massive monsters, villains standing on mobile platforms, and surprise combat reversals. I could almost hear the fight music and see the dialog boxes pop up. This isn't exactly a complaint I love Japanese RPGs but it did add to the feeling that the plot was on rails and didn't require many decisions from the protagonist. Clark also relies on an overused plot cliche in the climactic battle, which was a minor disappointment. A Master of Djinn won the Nebula for best 2021 novel, I suspect largely on the basis of its setting and refreshingly non-European magical system. I don't entirely agree; the writing is still a bit clunky, with unnecessary sentences and stock phrases showing up here and there, and I think it suffers from the typical deficiencies of SFF writers writing mysteries or police procedurals without the plot sophistication normally found in that genre. But this is good stuff for a first novel, with fun supporting characters (loved the librarian) and some great world-building. I would happily read more in this universe. Rating: 7 out of 10

Welcome to the 36th post of the really randomly reverberating R, or R⁴ for short, write-ups. Today s post is about using Redis, and especially RcppRedis, for live or (near) real-time monitoring with R. There is an saying that you can take the boy out of the valley, but you cannot the valley out of the boy so for those of us who spent a decade or two in finance and on trading floors, having some market price information available becomes second nature. And/or sometimes it is just good fun to program this. A good while back Josh posted a gist on a simple-yet-robust while loop. It (very cleverly) uses his quantmod package to access the SP500 in real-time . (I use quotes here because at the end of retail broadband one is not at the same market action as someone co-located in a New Jersey data center. It is however not delayed: as an index, it is not immediately tradeable as a stock, etf, or derivative may be all of which are only disseminated as delayed price information, usually by ten minutes.) I quite enjoyed the gist and used it and started tinkering with it. For example, it collects data but only saves (i.e. persists ) it after market close. If for whatever reason one needs to restart recent history is gone. In any event, I used his code and generalized it a little and published this about a year ago as function intradayMarketMonitor() in my dang package. (See this blog post announcing it.) The chart of the left shows this in action, the chart is a snapshot from a couple of days ago when the vignettes (more on them below) were written. As lovely as intradayMarketMonitor() is, it also limits itself to market hours. And sometimes you want to see, say, how the market opens on Sunday (futures usually restart at 17h Chicago time), or how news dissipates during the night, or where markets are pre-open, or . So I both wanted to complement this with futures, and also cache it locally so that, say, one machine might collect data and one (or several others) can visualize. For such tasks, Redis is unparalleled. (Yet I also always felt Redis could do with another, simple, short and sweet introduction stressing the key features of i) being multi-lingual: write in one language, consume in another and ii) loose coupling: no linking as one talks to Redis via standard tcp/ip networking. So I wrote a new intro vignette that is now in RcppRedis. I hope this comes in handy. Comments welcome!) Our RcppRedis package had long been used for such tasks, and it was easy to set it up. Standard use is to loop, fetch some data, push it to Redis, sleep, and start over. Clients do the same: fetch most recent data, plot or report it, sleep, start over. That works, but it has a dual delay as the client sleeping may miss the data update! The standard answer to this is called publish/pubscribe, or pub/sub. Libraries such as 0mq or zeromq specialise in this. But it turns out Redis already has it. I had some initial difficulty adding it to RcppRedis so for a trial I tested the marvellous rredis package by Bryan and simply instantiated two Redis clients. Now the data getter simply publishes a new data point in a given channel, by convention named after the security it tracks. Clients register with the Redis server which does all the actual work of keeping track of who listens to what. The clients now simply listen (which is a blocking operation) and as soon as data comes in receive it. This is quite mesmerizing when you just run two command-line clients (in a byobu session, say). As sone as the data is written (as shown on console log) it is consumed. No measruable overhead. Just lovely. Bryan and I then talked a litte as he may or may not retire rredis. Having implemented the pub/sub logic for both sides once, he took a good hard look at RcppRedis and just like that added it there. With some really clever wrinkles for (optional) per-symbol callback as closure attached to the instance. Truly amazeballs And once we had it in there, generalizing from publishing or subscribing to just one symbol easily generalizes to having one listener collect and publish for multiple symbols, and having one or more clients subscribe and listen one, more or even all symbol. All with ease thanks tp Redis. The second chart, also from a few days ago, shows four symbols for four (front-contract) futures for Bitcoin, Crude Oil, SP500, and Gold. As all this can get a little technical, I wrote a second vignette for RcppRedis on just this: market monitoring. Give this a read, if interested, feedback on this one is most welcome too! But all the code you need is included in the package just run a local Redis instance. Before closing, one sour note. I uploaded all this in a new and much improved updated RcppRedis 0.2.0 to CRAN on March 13 ten days ago. Not only is it still not there , but CRAN in their most delightful way also refuses to answer any emails of mine. Just lovely. The package exhibited just one compiler warning: a C++ compiler objected to the (embedded) C library hiredis (included as a fallback) for using a C language construct. Yes. A C++ compiler complaining about C. It s a non-issue. Yet it s been ten days and we still have nothing. So irritating and demotivating. Anyway, you can get the package off its GitHub repo. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can sponsor me at GitHub.

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

My syncmaildir (SMD) setup failed me one too many times (previously, previously). In an attempt to migrate to an alternative mail synchronization tool, I looked into using my IMAP server again, and found out my mail spool was in a pretty bad shape. I'm comparing mbsync and offlineimap in the next post but this post talks about how I recovered the mail spool so that tools like those could correctly synchronise the mail spool again.

The latest crash On Monday, SMD just started failing with this error:

nov 15 16:12:19 angela systemd[2305]: Starting pull emails with syncmaildir...
nov 15 16:12:22 angela systemd[2305]: smd-pull.service: Succeeded.
nov 15 16:12:22 angela systemd[2305]: Finished pull emails with syncmaildir.
nov 15 16:14:08 angela systemd[2305]: Starting pull emails with syncmaildir...
nov 15 16:14:11 angela systemd[2305]: smd-pull.service: Main process exited, code=exited, status=1/FAILURE
nov 15 16:14:11 angela systemd[2305]: smd-pull.service: Failed with result 'exit-code'.
nov 15 16:14:11 angela systemd[2305]: Failed to start pull emails with syncmaildir.
nov 15 16:16:14 angela systemd[2305]: Starting pull emails with syncmaildir...
nov 15 16:16:17 angela smd-pull[27178]: smd-client: ERROR: Network error.
nov 15 16:16:17 angela smd-pull[27178]: smd-client: ERROR: Unable to get any data from the other endpoint.
nov 15 16:16:17 angela smd-pull[27178]: smd-client: ERROR: This problem may be transient, please retry.
nov 15 16:16:17 angela smd-pull[27178]: smd-client: ERROR: Hint: did you correctly setup the SERVERNAME variable
nov 15 16:16:17 angela smd-pull[27178]: smd-client: ERROR: on your client? Did you add an entry for it in your ssh
nov 15 16:16:17 angela smd-pull[27178]: smd-client: ERROR: configuration file?
nov 15 16:16:17 angela smd-pull[27178]: smd-client: ERROR: Network error
nov 15 16:16:17 angela smd-pull[27188]: register: smd-client@localhost: TAGS: error::context(handshake) probable-cause(network) human-intervention(avoidable) suggested-actions(retry)
nov 15 16:16:17 angela systemd[2305]: smd-pull.service: Main process exited, code=exited, status=1/FAILURE
nov 15 16:16:17 angela systemd[2305]: smd-pull.service: Failed with result 'exit-code'.
nov 15 16:16:17 angela systemd[2305]: Failed to start pull emails with syncmaildir.

What is frustrating is that there's actually no network error here. Running the command by hand I did see a different message, but now I have lost it in my backlog. It had something to do with a filename being too long, and I gave up debugging after a while. This happened suddenly too, which added to the confusion. In a fit of rage I started this blog post and experimenting with alternatives, which led me down a lot of rabbit holes. Reviewing my previous mail crash documentation, it seems most solutions involve talking to an IMAP server, so I figured I would just do that. Wanting to try something new, i gave isync (AKA mbsync) a try. Oh dear, I did not expect how much trouble just talking to my IMAP server would be, which wasn't not isync's fault, for what that's worth. It was the primary tool I used to debug things, and served me well in that regard.

Mailbox corruption The first thing I found out is that certain messages in the IMAP spool were corrupted. mbsync would stop on a FETCH command and Dovecot would give me those errors on the server side.

"wrong W value"

nov 16 15:31:27 marcos dovecot[3621800]: imap(anarcat)<3630489><wAmSzO3QZtfAqAB1>: Error: Mailbox junk: Maildir filename has wrong W value, renamed the file from /home/anarcat/Maildir/.junk/cur/1454623938.M101164P22216.marcos,S=2495,W=2578:2,S to /home/anarcat/Maildir/.junk/cur/1454623938.M101164P22216.marcos,S=2495:2,S
nov 16 15:31:27 marcos dovecot[3621800]: imap(anarcat)<3630489><wAmSzO3QZtfAqAB1>: Error: Mailbox junk: Deleting corrupted cache record uid=1582: UID 1582: Broken virtual size in mailbox junk: read(/home/anarcat/Maildir/.junk/cur/1454623938.M101164P22216.marcos,S=2495,W=2578:2,S): FETCH BODY[] got too little data: 2540 vs 2578

At least this first error was automatically healed by Dovecot (by renaming the file without the W= flag). The problem is that the FETCH command fails and mbsync exits noisily. So you need to constantly restart mbsync with a silly command like:

while ! mbsync -a; do sleep 1; done

"cached message size larger than expected"

nov 16 13:53:08 marcos dovecot[3520770]: imap(anarcat)<3594402><M5JHb+zQ3NLAqAB1>: Error: Mailbox Sent: UID=19288: read(/home/anarcat/Maildir/.Sent/cur/1224790447.M898726P9811V000000000000FE06I00794FB1_0.marvin,S=2588:2,S) failed: Cached message size larger than expected (2588 > 2482, box=Sent, UID=19288) (read reason=mail stream)
nov 16 13:53:08 marcos dovecot[3520770]: imap(anarcat)<3594402><M5JHb+zQ3NLAqAB1>: Error: Mailbox Sent: Deleting corrupted cache record uid=19288: UID 19288: Broken physical size in mailbox Sent: read(/home/anarcat/Maildir/.Sent/cur/1224790447.M898726P9811V000000000000FE06I00794FB1_0.marvin,S=2588:2,S) failed: Cached message size larger than expected (2588 > 2482, box=Sent, UID=19288)
nov 16 13:53:08 marcos dovecot[3520770]: imap(anarcat)<3594402><M5JHb+zQ3NLAqAB1>: Error: Mailbox Sent: UID=19288: read(/home/anarcat/Maildir/.Sent/cur/1224790447.M898726P9811V000000000000FE06I00794FB1_0.marvin,S=2588:2,S) failed: Cached message size larger than expected (2588 > 2482, box=Sent, UID=19288) (read reason=)
nov 16 13:53:08 marcos dovecot[3520770]: imap-login: Panic: epoll_ctl(del, 7) failed: Bad file descriptor

This second problem is much harder to fix, because dovecot does not recover automatically. This is Dovecot complaining that the cached size (the S= field, but also present in Dovecot's metadata files) doesn't match the file size. I wonder if at least some of those messages were corrupted in the OfflineIMAP to syncmaildir migration because part of that procedure is to run the strip_header script to remove content from the emails. That could easily have broken things since the files do not also get renamed.

Workaround So I read a lot of the Dovecot documentation on the maildir format, and wrote an extensive fix script for those two errors. The script worked and mbsync was able to sync the entire mail spool. And no, rebuilding the index files didn't work. Also tried doveadm force-resync -u anarcat which didn't do anything. In the end I also had to do this, because the wrong cache values were also stored elsewhere.

service dovecot stop ; find -name 'dovecot*' -delete; service dovecot start

This would have totally broken any existing clients, but thankfully I'm starting from scratch (except maybe webmail, but I'm hoping it will self-heal as well, assuming it only has a cache and not a full replica of the mail spool).

Incoherence between Maildir and IMAP Unfortunately, the first mbsync was incomplete as it was missing about 15,000 mails:

anarcat@angela:~(main)$ find Maildir -type f -type f -a \! -name '.*'   wc -l 
384836
anarcat@angela:~(main)$ find Maildir-mbsync/ -type f -a \! -name '.*'   wc -l 
369221

As it turns out, mbsync was not at fault here either: this was yet more mail spool corruption. It's actually 26 folders (out of 205) with inconsistent sizes, which can be found with:

for folder in * .[^.]* ; do 
  printf "%s\t%d\n" $folder $(find "$folder" -type f -a \! -name '.*'   wc -l );
done

The special \! -name '.*' bit is to ignore the mbsync metadata, which creates .uidvalidity and .mbsyncstate in every folder. That ignores about 200 files but since they are spread around all folders, which was making it impossible to review where the problem was. Here is what the diff looks like:

--- Maildir-list    2021-11-17 20:42:36.504246752 -0500
+++ Maildir-mbsync-list 2021-11-17 20:18:07.731806601 -0500
@@ -6,16 +6,15 @@
[...]
 .Archives  1
 .Archives.2010 3553
-.Archives.2011 3583
-.Archives.2012 12593
+.Archives.2011 3582
+.Archives.2012 620
 .Archives.2013 8576
 .Archives.2014 11057
-.Archives.2015 8173
+.Archives.2015 8165
 .Archives.2016 54
 .band  34
 .bitbuck   1
@@ -38,13 +37,12 @@
 .couchsurfers  2
-cur    11285
+cur    11280
 .current   130
 .cv    2
 .debbug    262
-.debian    37544
-drafts 1
-.Drafts    4
+.debian    37533
+.Drafts    2
 .drone 241
 .drupal    188
 .drupal-devel  303
[...]

Misfiled messages It's a bit all over the place, but we can already notice some huge differences between mailboxes, for example in the Archives folders. As it turns out, at least 12,000 of those missing mails were actually misfiled: instead of being in the Maildir/.Archives.2012/cur/ folder, they were directly in Maildir/.Archives.2012/. This is something that doesn't matter for SMD (and possibly for notmuch? it does matter, notmuch suddenly found 12,000 new mails) but that definitely matters to Dovecot and therefore mbsync... After moving those files around, we still have 4,000 message missing:

anarcat@angela:~(main)$ find Maildir-mbsync/  -type f -a \! -name '.*'   wc -l 
381196
anarcat@angela:~(main)$ find Maildir/  -type f -a \! -name '.*'   wc -l 
385053

The problem is that those 4,000 missing mails are harder to track. Take, for example, .Archives.2011, which has a single message missing, out of 3,582. And the files are not identical: the checksums don't match after going through the IMAP transport, so we can't use a tool like hashdeep to compare the trees and find why any single file is missing.

"register" folder One big chunk of the 4,000, however, is a special folder called register in my spool, which I am syncing separately (see Securing registration email for details on that setup). That actually covers 3,700 of those messages, so I actually have a more modest 300 messages to figure out, after (easily!) configuring mbsync to sync that folder separately:

 @@ -30,9 +33,29 @@ Slave :anarcat-local:
  # Exclude everything under the internal [Gmail] folder, except the interesting folders
  #Patterns * ![Gmail]* "[Gmail]/Sent Mail" "[Gmail]/Starred" "[Gmail]/All Mail"
  # Or include everything
 -Patterns *
 +#Patterns *
 +Patterns * !register  !.register
  # Automatically create missing mailboxes, both locally and on the server
  #Create Both
  Create slave
  # Sync the movement of messages between folders and deletions, add after making sure the sync works
  #Expunge Both
 +
 +IMAPAccount anarcat-register
 +Host imap.anarc.at
 +User register
 +PassCmd "pass imap.anarc.at-register"
 +SSLType IMAPS
 +CertificateFile /etc/ssl/certs/ca-certificates.crt
 +
 +IMAPStore anarcat-register-remote
 +Account anarcat-register
 +
 +MaildirStore anarcat-register-local
 +SubFolders Maildir++
 +Inbox ~/Maildir-mbsync/.register/
 +
 +Channel anarcat-register
 +Master :anarcat-register-remote:
 +Slave :anarcat-register-local:
 +Create slave

"tmp" folders and empty messages After syncing the "register" messages, I end up with the measly little 160 emails out of sync:

anarcat@angela:~(main)$ find Maildir-mbsync/  -type f -a \! -name '.*'   wc -l 
384900
anarcat@angela:~(main)$ find Maildir/  -type f -a \! -name '.*'   wc -l 
385059

Argh. After more digging, I have found 131 mails in the tmp/ directories of the client's mail spool. Mysterious! On the server side, it's even more files, and not the same ones. Possible that those were mails that were left there during a failed delivery of some sort, during a power failure or some sort of crash? Who knows. It could be another race condition in SMD if it runs while mail is being delivered in tmp/... The first thing to do with those is to cleanup a bunch of empty files (21 on angela):

find .[^.]*/tmp -type f -empty -delete

As it turns out, they are all duplicates, in the sense that notmuch can easily find a copy of files with the same message ID in its database. In other words, this hairy command returns nothing

find .[^.]*/tmp -type f   while read path; do
  msgid=$(grep -m 1  -i ^message-id "$path"   sed 's/Message-ID: //i;s/[<>]//g');
  if notmuch count --exclude=false  "id:$msgid"   grep -q 0; then
    echo "$path <$msgid> not in notmuch" ;
  fi;
done

... which is good. Or, to put it another way, this is safe:

find .[^.]*/tmp -type f -delete

Poof! 314 mails cleaned on the server side. Interestingly, SMD doesn't pick up on those changes at all and still sees files in tmp/ directories on the client side, so we need to operate the same twisted logic there.

notmuch to the rescue again After cleaning that on the client, we get:

anarcat@angela:~(main)$ find Maildir/  -type f -a \! -name '.*'   wc -l 
384928
anarcat@angela:~(main)$ find Maildir-mbsync/  -type f -a \! -name '.*'   wc -l 
384901

Ha! 27 mails difference. Those are the really sticky, unclear ones. I was hoping a full sync might clear that up, but after deleting the entire directory and starting from scratch, I end up with:

anarcat@angela:~(main)$ find Maildir -type f -type f -a \! -name '.*'   wc -l 
385034
anarcat@angela:~(main)$ find Maildir-mbsync -type f -type f -a \! -name '.*'   wc -l 
384993

That is: even more messages missing (now 37). Sigh. Thankfully, this is something notmuch can help with: it can index all files by Message-ID (which I learned is case-insensitive, yay) and tell us which messages don't make it through. Considering the corruption I found in the mail spool, I wouldn't be the least surprised those messages are just skipped by the IMAP server. Unfortunately, there's nothing on the Dovecot server logs that would explain the discrepancy. Here again, notmuch comes to the rescue. We can list all message IDs to figure out that discrepancy:

notmuch search --exclude=false --output=messages '*'   pv -s 18M   sort > Maildir-msgids
notmuch --config=.notmuch-config-mbsync search --exclude=false --output=messages '*'   pv -s 18M   sort > Maildir-mbsync-msgids

And then we can see how many messages notmuch thinks are missing:

$ wc -l *msgids
372723 Maildir-mbsync-msgids
372752 Maildir-msgids

That's 29 messages. Oddly, it doesn't exactly match the find output:

anarcat@angela:~(main)$ find Maildir-mbsync -type f -type f -a \! -name '.*'   wc -l 
385204
anarcat@angela:~(main)$ find Maildir -type f -type f -a \! -name '.*'   wc -l 
385241

That is 10 more messages. Ugh. But actually, I know what those are: more misfiled messages (in a .folder/draft/ directory, bizarrely, so the totals actually match. In the notmuch output, there's a lot of stuff like this:

id:notmuch-sha1-fb880d673e24f5dae71b6b4d825d4a0d5d01cde4

Those are messages without a valid Message-ID. Notmuch (presumably) constructs one based on the file's checksum. Because the files differ between the IMAP server and the local mail spool (which is unfortunate, but possibly inevitable), those do not match. There are exactly the same number of those on both sides, so I'll go ahead and assume those are all accounted for. What remains is:

anarcat@angela:~(main)$ diff -u Maildir-mbsync-msgids Maildir-msgids    grep '^\-[^-]'   grep -v sha1   wc -l 
2
anarcat@angela:~(main)$ diff -u Maildir-mbsync-msgids Maildir-msgids    grep '^\+[^+]'   grep -v sha1   wc -l 
21
anarcat@angela:~(main)$ 

ie. 21 missing from mbsync, and, surprisingly, 2 missing from the original mail spool. Further inspection also showed they were all messages with some sort of "corruption": no body and only headers. I am not sure that is a legal email format in the first place. Since they were mostly spam or administrative emails ("You have been unsubscribed from mailing list..."), it seems fairly harmless to ignore those.

Conclusion As we'll see in the next article, SMD has stellar performance. But that comes at a huge cost: it accesses the mail storage directly. This can (and has) created significant problems on the mail server. It's unclear exactly why those things happen, but Dovecot expects a particular storage format on its file, and it seems unwise to bypass that. In the future, I'll try to remember to avoid that, especially since mechanisms like SMD require special server access (SSH) which, in the long term, I am not sure I want to maintain or expect. In other words, just talking with an IMAP server opens up a lot more possibilities of hosting than setting up a custom synchronisation protocol over SSH. It's also safer and more reliable, as we have seen. Thankfully, I've been able to recover from all the errors I could find, but it could have gone differently and it would have been possible for SMD to permanently corrupt significant part of my mail archives. In the end, however, the last drop was just another weird bug which, ironically, SMD mysteriously recovered from on its own while I was writing this documentation and migrating away from it. In any case, I recommend SMD users start looking for alternatives. The project has been archived upstream, and the Debian package has been orphaned. I have seen significant mail box corruption, including entire mail spool destruction, mostly due to incorrect locking code. I have filed a release-critical bug in Debian to make sure it doesn't ship with Debian bookworm. Alternatives like mbsync provide fast and reliable transport, including over SSH. See the next article for further discussion of the alternatives.

Review: The Magician's Nephew, by C.S. Lewis

Illustrator:	Pauline Baynes
Series:	Chronicles of Narnia #6
Publisher:	Collier Books
Copyright:	1955
Printing:	1978
ISBN:	0-02-044230-0
Format:	Mass market
Pages:	186

The Magician's Nephew is the sixth book of the Chronicles of Narnia in the original publication order, but it's a prequel, set fifty years before The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. It's therefore put first in the new reading order. I have always loved world-building and continuities and, as a comics book reader (Marvel primarily), developed a deep enjoyment of filling in the pieces and reconstructing histories from later stories. It's no wonder that I love reading The Magician's Nephew after The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. The experience of fleshing out backstory with detail and specifics makes me happy. If that's also you, I recommend the order in which I'm reading these books. Reading this one first is defensible, though. One of the strongest arguments for doing so is that it's a much stronger, tighter, and better-told story than The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, and therefore might start the series off on a better foot for you. It stands alone well; you don't need to know any of the later events to enjoy this, although you will miss the significance of a few things like the lamp post and you don't get the full introduction to Aslan. The Magician's Nephew is the story of Polly Plummer, her new neighbor Digory Kirke, and his Uncle Andrew, who fancies himself a magician. At the start of the book, Digory's mother is bed-ridden and dying and Digory is miserable, which is the impetus for a friendship with Polly. The two decide to explore the crawl space of the row houses in which they live, seeing if they can get into the empty house past Digory's. They don't calculate the distances correctly and end up in Uncle Andrew's workroom, where Digory was forbidden to go. Uncle Andrew sees this as a golden opportunity to use them for an experiment in travel to other worlds. MAJOR SPOILERS BELOW. The Magician's Nephew, like the best of the Narnia books, does not drag its feet getting started. It takes a mere 30 pages to introduce all of the characters, establish a friendship, introduce us to a villain, and get both of the kids into another world. When Lewis is at his best, he has an economy of storytelling and a grasp of pacing that I wish was more common. It's also stuffed to the brim with ideas, one of the best of which is the Wood Between the Worlds. Uncle Andrew has crafted pairs of magic rings, yellow and green, and tricks Polly into touching one of the yellow ones, causing her to vanish from our world. He then uses her plight to coerce Digory into going after her, carrying two green rings that he thinks will bring people back into our world, and not incidentally also observing that world and returning to tell Uncle Andrew what it's like. But the world is more complicated than he thinks it is, and the place where the children find themselves is an eerie and incredibly peaceful wood, full of grass and trees but apparently no other living thing, and sprinkled with pools of water. This was my first encounter with the idea of a world that connects other worlds, and it remains the most memorable one for me. I love everything about the Wood: the simplicity of it, the calm that seems in part to be a defense against intrusion, the hidden danger that one might lose one's way and confuse the ponds for each other, and even the way that it tends to make one lose track of why one is there or what one is trying to accomplish. That quiet forest filled with pools is still an image I use for infinite creativity and potential. It's quiet and nonthreatening, but not entirely inviting either; it's magnificently neutral, letting each person bring what they wish to it. One of the minor plot points of this book is that Uncle Andrew is wrong about the rings because he's wrong about the worlds. There aren't just two worlds; there are an infinite number, with the Wood as a nexus, and our reality is neither the center nor one of an important pair. The rings are directional, but relative to the Wood, not our world. The kids, who are forced to experiment and who have open minds, figure this out quickly, but Uncle Andrew never shifts his perspective. This isn't important to the story, but I've always thought it was a nice touch of world-building. Where this story is heading, of course, is the creation of Narnia and the beginning of all of the stories told in the rest of the series. But before that, the kids's first trip out of the Wood is to one of the best worlds of children's fantasy: Charn. If the Wood is my mental image of a world nexus, Charn will forever be my image of a dying world: black sky, swollen red sun, and endless abandoned and crumbling buildings as far as the eye can see, full of tired silences and eerie noises. And, of course, the hall of statues, with one of the most memorable descriptions of history and empire I've ever read (if you ignore the racialized description):

All of the faces they could see were certainly nice. Both the men and women looked kind and wise, and they seemed to come of a handsome race. But after the children had gone a few steps down the room they came to faces that looked a little different. These were very solemn faces. You felt you would have to mind your P's and Q's, if you ever met living people who looked like that. When they had gone a little farther, they found themselves among faces they didn't like: this was about the middle of the room. The faces here looked very strong and proud and happy, but they looked cruel. A little further on, they looked crueller. Further on again, they were still cruel but they no longer looked happy. They were even despairing faces: as if the people they belonged to had done dreadful things and also suffered dreadful things.

The last statue is of a fierce, proud woman that Digory finds strikingly beautiful. (Lewis notes in an aside that Polly always said she never found anything specially beautiful about her. Here, as in The Silver Chair, the girl is the sensible one and things would have gone better if the boy had listened to her, a theme that I find immensely frustrating because Susan was the sensible one in the first two books of the series but then Lewis threw that away.) There is a bell in the middle of this hall, and the pillar that holds that bell has an inscription on it that I think every kid who grew up on Narnia knows by heart.

Make your choice, adventurous Stranger;
Strike the bell and bide the danger,
Or wonder, till it drives you mad,
What would have followed if you had.

Polly has no intention of striking the bell, but Digory fights her and does it anyway, waking Jadis from where she sat as the final statue in the hall and setting off one of the greatest reimaginings of a villain in children's literature. Jadis will, of course, become the White Witch who holds Narnia in endless winter some thousand Narnian years later. But the White Witch was a mediocre villain at best, the sort of obvious and cruel villain common in short fairy tales where the author isn't interested in doing much characterization. She exists to be evil, do bad things, and be defeated. She has a few good moments in conflict with Aslan, but that's about it. Jadis in this book is another matter entirely: proud, brilliant, dangerous, and creative. The death of everything on Charn was Jadis's doing: an intentional spell, used to claim a victory of sorts from the jaws of defeat by her sister in a civil war. (I find it fascinating that Lewis puts aside his normally sexist roles here.) Despite the best attempts of the kids to lose her both in Charn and in the Wood (which is inimical to her, in another nice bit of world-building), she manages to get back to England with them. The result is a remarkably good bit of villain characterization. Jadis is totally out of her element, used to a world-spanning empire run with magic and (from what hints we get) vaguely medieval technology. Her plan to take over their local country and eventually the world should be absurd and is played somewhat for laughs. Her magic, which is her great weapon, doesn't even work in England. But Jadis learns at a speed that the reader can watch. She's observant, she pays attention to things that don't fit her expectations, she changes plans, and she moves with predatory speed. Within a few hours in London she's stolen jewels and a horse and carriage, and the local police seem entirely overmatched. There's no way that one person without magic should be a real danger to England around the turn of the 20th century, but by the time the kids manage to pull her back into the Wood, you're not entirely sure England would have been safe. A chaotic confrontation, plus the ability of the rings to work their magic through transitive human contact, ends up with the kids, Uncle Andrew, Jadis, a taxicab driver and his horse all transported through the Wood to a new world. In this case, literally a new world: Narnia at the point of its creation. Here again, Lewis translates Christian myth, in this case the Genesis creation story, into a more vivid and in many ways more beautiful story than the original. Aslan singing the world into existence is an incredible image, as is the newly-created world so bursting with life that even things that normally could not grow will do so. (Which, of course, is why there is a lamp post burning in the middle of the western forest of Narnia for the Pevensie kids to find later.) I think my favorite part is the creation of the stars, but the whole sequence is great. There's also an insightful bit of human psychology. Uncle Andrew can't believe that a lion is singing, so he convinces himself that Aslan is not singing, and thus prevents himself from making any sense of the talking animals later.

Now the trouble about trying to make yourself stupider than you really are is that you very often succeed.

As with a lot in Lewis, he probably meant this as a statement about faith, but it generalizes well beyond the religious context. What disappointed me about the creation story, though, is the animals. I didn't notice this as a kid, but this re-read has sensitized me to how Lewis consistently treats the talking animals as less than humans even though he celebrates them. That happens here too: the newly-created, newly-awakened animals are curious and excited but kind of dim. Some of this is an attempt to show that they're young and are just starting to learn, but it also seems to be an excuse for Aslan to set up a human king and queen over them instead of teaching them directly how to deal with the threat of Jadis who the children inadvertently introduced into the world. The other thing I dislike about The Magician's Nephew is that the climax is unnecessarily cruel. Once Digory realizes the properties of the newly-created world, he hopes to find a way to use that to heal his mother. Aslan points out that he is responsible for Jadis entering the world and instead sends him on a mission to obtain a fruit that, when planted, will ward Narnia against her for many years. The same fruit would heal his mother, and he has to choose Narnia over her. (It's a fairly explicit parallel to the Garden of Eden, except in this case Digory passes.) Aslan, in the end, gives Digory the fruit of the tree that grows, which is still sufficient to heal his mother, but this sequence made me angry when re-reading it. Aslan knew all along that what Digory is doing will let him heal his mother as well, but hides this from him to make it more of a test. It's cruel and mean; Aslan could have promised to heal Digory's mother and then seen if he would help Narnia without getting anything in return other than atoning for his error, but I suppose that was too transactional for Lewis's theology or something. Meh. But, despite that, the only reason why this is not the best Narnia book is because The Voyage of the Dawn Treader is the only Narnia book that also nails the ending. The Magician's Nephew, up through Charn, Jadis's rampage through London, and the initial creation of Narnia, is fully as good, perhaps better. It sags a bit at the end, partly because it tries to hard to make the Narnian animals humorous and partly because of the unnecessary emotional torture of Digory. But this still holds up as the second-best Narnia book, and one I thoroughly enjoyed re-reading. If anything, Jadis and Charn are even better than I remembered. Followed by the last book of the series, the somewhat notorious The Last Battle. Rating: 9 out of 10

Free speech and censorship are critically important issues. And, using them to defend Richard Stallman's return to the Free Software Foundation (FSF) board is just plain wrong. Richard Stallman resigned from the Board in 2019 after he sent an email in defense of Marvin Minsky (Minsky is accused of raping one of Jeffreys Epstein's victims). Stallman's fateful email, however, is just one piece of the reason for why he should not be on the board. The full story is about his history of abuse toward women and is extensive. On March 21st, 2021, Stallman announced he is back on the board. There are profound reasons why any movement interested in equitable and open participation would want to publicly distance themselves from Stallman. However, the long form defenses of Stallman, including a note from Nadine Strossen, the former executive director of the ACLU, quoted in this defense, persist. Many of the arguments defending Richard Stallman (including the one from Strossen) are grounded in a belief that Stallman is being punished for his unpopular political views, which deserve to be defended on the grounds of freedom of expression. That's wrong. Stallman should be kicked off the board because he has a long history of abusing his position to hit on women, which, when combined with his public opinions on under-age sex and his defense of Minsky, send a strong signal that the FSF does not care about the participation of women. Being on a board of directors is a privilege, not a right. Being removed from a board is not a punnishment. And being criticized and removed from a board because your behavior and public statements are an obstacle to building an inclusive and equitable movement is what every board should strive to do. If we are going to make this an issue about free expression, it should be about all the political expression lost to the free software movement because Stallman's unequal behavior toward women excluded an enormous number of talented individuals.

Despite having worked on a number of ARM platforms I ve never actually had an ARM based development box at home. I have a Raspberry Pi B Classic (the original 256MB rev 0002 variant) a coworker gave me some years ago, but it s not what you d choose for a build machine and generally gets used as a self contained TFTP/console server for hooking up to devices under test. Mostly I ve been able to do kernel development with the cross compilers already built as part of Debian, and either use pre-built images or Debian directly when I need userland pieces. At a previous job I had a Marvell MACCHIATObin available to me, which works out as a nice platform - quad core A72 @ 2GHz with 16GB RAM, proper SATA and a PCIe slot. However they re still a bit pricey for a casual home machine. I really like the look of the HoneyComb LX2 - 16 A72 cores, up to 64GB RAM - but it s even more expensive. So when I saw the existence of the 8GB Raspberry Pi 4 I was interested. Firstly, the Pi 4 is a proper 64 bit device (my existing Pi B is ARMv6 which means it needs to run Raspbian instead of native Debian armhf), capable of running an upstream kernel and unmodified Debian userspace. Secondly the Pi 4 has a USB 3 controller sitting on a PCIe bus rather than just the limited SoC USB 2 controller. It s not SATA, but it s still a fairly decent method of attaching some storage that s faster/more reliable than an SD card. Finally 8GB RAM is starting to get to a decent amount - for a headless build box 4GB is probably generally enough, but I wanted some headroom. The Pi comes as a bare board, so I needed a case. Ideally I wanted something self contained that could take the Pi, provide a USB/SATA adaptor and take the drive too. I came across the pre-order for the DeskPi Pro, decided it was the sort of thing I was after, and ordered one towards the end of September. It finally arrived at the start of December, at which point I got round to ordering a Pi 4 from CPC. Total cost ~ 120 for the case + Pi.

The Bad First, let s get the bad parts out of the way. I managed to break a USB port on the Desk Pi. It has a pair of forward facing ports, I plugged my wireless keyboard dongle into it and when trying to remove it the solid spacer bit in the socket broke off. I ve never had this happen to me before and I ve been using USB devices for 20 years, so I m putting the blame on a shoddy socket. The first drive I tried was an old Crucial M500 mSATA device. I have an adaptor that makes it look like a normal 2.5 drive so I used that. Unfortunately it resulted in a boot loop; the Pi would boot its initial firmware, try to talk to the drive and then reboot before even loading Linux. The DeskPi Pro comes with an m2 adaptor and I had a spare m2 drive, so I tried that and it all worked fine. This might just be power issues, but it was an unfortunate experience especially after the USB port had broken off. (Given I ended up using an M.2 drive another case option would have been the Argon ONE M.2, which is a bit more compact.)

The Annoying The case is a little snug; I was worried I was going to damage things as I slid it in. Additionally the construction process is a little involved. There s a good set of instructions, but there are a lot of pieces and screws involved. This includes a couple of FFC cables to join things up. I think this is because they ve attempted to make a compact case rather than allowing a little extra room, and it does have the advantage that once assembled it feels robust without anything loose in it. I hate the need for an external USB3 dongle to bridge from the Pi to the USB/SATA adaptor. All the cases I ve seen with an internal drive bay have to do this, because the USB3 isn t brought out internally by the Pi, but it just looks ugly to me. It s hidden at the back, but meh. Fan control is via a USB/serial device, which is fine, but it attaches to the USB C power port which defaults to being a USB peripheral. Raspbian based kernels support device tree overlays which allows easy reconfiguration to host mode, but for a Debian based system I ended up rolling my own dtb file. I changed

#include "bcm283x-rpi-usb-peripheral.dtsi"

to

#include "bcm283x-rpi-usb-host.dtsi"

in arch/arm/boot/dts/bcm2711-rpi-4-b.dts and then I did:

cpp -nostdinc -I include -I arch -undef -x assembler-with-cpp \
    arch/arm/boot/dts/bcm2711-rpi-4-b.dts > rpi4.preprocessed
dtc -I dts -O dtb rpi4.preprocessed -o bcm2711-rpi-4-b.dtb

and the resulting bcm2711-rpi-4-b.dtb file replaced the one in /boot/firmware. This isn t a necessary step if you don t want to use the cooling fan in the case, or the front USB ports, and it s not really anyone s fault, but it was an annoying extra step to have to figure out. The DeskPi came with a microSD card that was supposed to have RaspiOS already on it. It didn t, it was blank. In my case that was fine, because I wanted to use Debian, but it was a minor niggle.

The Good I used Gunnar s pre-built Pi Debian image and it Just Worked; I dd d it to the microSD as instructed and the Pi 4 came up with working wifi, video and USB enabling me to get it configured for my network. I did an apt upgrade and got updated to the Buster 10.7 release, as well as the latest 5.9 backport kernel, and everything came back without effort after a reboot. It s lovely to be able to run Debian on this device without having to futz around with self-compiled kernels. The DeskPi makes a lot of effort to route things externally. The SD slot is brought out to the front, making it easy to fiddle with the card contents without having to open the case to replace it. All the important ports are brought out to the back either through orientation of the Pi, or extenders in the case. That means the built in Pi USB ports, the HDMI sockets (conveniently converted to full size internally), an audio jack and a USB-C power port. The aforementioned USB3 dongle for the bridge to the drive is the only external thing that s annoying. Thermally things seem good too. I haven t done a full torture test yet, but with the fan off the system is sitting at about 40 C while fairly idle. Some loops in bash that push load up to above 2 get the temperature up to 46 C or so, and turning the fan on brings it down to 40 C again. It s audible, but quieter than my laptop and not annoying. I liked the way the case came with everything I needed other than the Pi 4 and a suitable disk drive. There was an included PSU (a proper USB-C PD device, UK plug), the heatsink/fan is there, the USB/SATA converter is there and even an SD card is provided (though that s just because I had a pre-order). Speaking of the SD, I only needed it for initial setup. Recent Pi 4 bootloaders are capable of booting directly from USB mass storage devices. So I upgraded using the RPi EEPROM Recovery image (which just needs extracted to the SD FAT partition, no need for anything complicated - boot with it and the screen goes all green and you know it s ok), then created a FAT partition at the start of the drive for the kernel / bootloader config and a regular EXT4 partition for root. Copies everything over, updated paths, took out the SD and it all just works happily.

Summary My main complaint is the broken USB port, which feels like the result of a cheap connector. For a front facing port expected to see more use than the rear ports I think there s a reasonable expectation of robustness. However I m an early adopter and maybe future runs will be better. Other than that I m pretty happy. The case is exactly the sort of thing I wanted; I was looking for something that would turn the Pi into a box that can sit on my desk on the network and that I don t have to worry about knocking wires out of or lots of cables hooking bits up. Everything being included made it very convenient to get up and running. I still haven t poked the Pi that hard, but first impressions are looking good for it being a trouble free ARM64 dev box in the corner, until I can justify a HoneyComb.

Although I still read a lot, during my college sophomore years my reading habits shifted from novels to more academic works. Indeed, reading dry textbooks and economic papers for classes often kept me from reading anything else substantial. Nowadays, I tend to binge read novels: I won't touch a book for months on end, and suddenly, I'll read 10 novels back to back¹. At the start of a novel binge, I always follow the same ritual: I take out my e-reader from its storage box, marvel at the fact the battery is still pretty full, turn on the WiFi and check if there are OS updates. And I have to admit, Kobo Inc. (now Rakuten Kobo) has done a stellar job of keeping my e-reader up to date. I've owned this model (a Kobo Aura 1^st generation) for 7 years now and I'm still running the latest version of Kobo's Linux-based OS. Having recently had trouble updating my Nexus 5 (also manufactured 7 years ago) to Android 10², I asked myself:

Why is my e-reader still getting regular OS updates, while Google stopped issuing security patches for my smartphone four years ago?

To try to answer this, let us turn to economic incentives theory. Although not the be-all and end-all some think it is³, incentives theory is not a bad tool to analyse this particular problem. Executives at Google most likely followed a very business-centric logic when they decided to drop support for the Nexus 5. Likewise, Rakuten Kobo's decision to continue updating older devices certainly had very little to do with ethics or loyalty to their user base. So, what are the incentives that keep Kobo updating devices and why are they different than smartphone manufacturers'? A portrait of the current long-term software support offerings for smartphones and e-readers Before delving deeper in economic theory, let's talk data. I'll be focusing on 2 brands of e-readers, Amazon's Kindle and Rakuten's Kobo. Although the e-reader market is highly segmented and differs a lot based on geography, Amazon was in 2015 the clear worldwide leader with 53% of the worldwide e-reader sales, followed by Rakuten Kobo at 13%⁴. On the smartphone side, I'll be differentiating between Apple's iPhones and Android devices, taking Google as the barometer for that ecosystem. As mentioned below, Google is sadly the leader in long-term Android software support. Rakuten Kobo According to their website and to this Wikipedia table, the only e-readers Kobo has deprecated are the original Kobo eReader and the Kobo WiFi N289, both released in 2010. This makes their oldest still supported device the Kobo Touch, released in 2011. In my book, that's a pretty good track record. Long-term software support does not seem to be advertised or to be a clear selling point in their marketing. Amazon According to their website, Amazon has dropped support for all 8 devices produced before the Kindle Paperwhite 2^nd generation, first sold in 2013. To put things in perspective, the first Kindle came out in 2007, 3 years before Kobo started selling devices. Like Rakuten Kobo, Amazon does not make promises of long-term software support as part of their marketing. Apple Apple has a very clear software support policy for all their devices:

Owners of iPhone, iPad, iPod or Mac products may obtain a service and parts from Apple or Apple service providers for five years after the product is no longer sold or longer, where required by law.

This means in the worst-case scenario of buying an iPhone model just as it is discontinued, one would get a minimum of 5 years of software support. Android Google's policy for their Android devices is to provide software support for 3 years after the launch date. If you buy a Pixel device just before the new one launches, you could theoretically only get 2 years of support. In 2018, Google decided OEMs would have to provide security updates for at least 2 years after launch, threatening not to license Google Apps and the Play Store if they didn't comply. A question of cost structure From the previous section, we can conclude that in general, e-readers seem to be supported longer than smartphones, and that Apple does a better job than Android OEMs, providing support for about twice as long. Even Fairphone, who's entire business is to build phones designed to last and to be repaired was not able to keep the Fairphone 1 (2013) updated for more than a couple years and seems to be struggling to keep the Fairphone 2 (2015) running an up to date version of Android. Anyone who has ever worked in IT will tell you: maintaining software over time is hard work and hard work by specialised workers is expensive. Most commercial electronic devices are sold and developed by for-profit enterprises and software support all comes down to a question of cost structure. If companies like Google or Fairphone are to be expected to provide long-term support for the devices they manufacture, they have to be able to fund their work somehow. In a perfect world, people would be paying for the cost of said long-term support, as it would likely be cheaper then buying new devices every few years and would certainly be better for the planet. Problem is, manufacturers aren't making them pay for it. Economists call this type of problem externalities: things that should be part of the cost of a good, but aren't for one a reason or another. A classic example of an externality is pollution. Clearly pollution is bad and leads to horrendous consequences, like climate change. Sane people agree we should drastically cut our greenhouse gas emissions, and yet, we aren't. Neo-classical economic theory argues the way to fix externalities like pollution is to internalise these costs, in other words, to make people pay for the "real price" of the goods they buy. In the case of climate change and pollution, neo-classical economic theory is plain wrong (spoiler alert: it often is), but this is where band-aids like the carbon tax comes from. Still, coming back to long-term software support, let's see what would happen if we were to try to internalise software maintenance costs. We can do this multiple ways. 1 - Include the price of software maintenance in the cost of the device This is the choice Fairphone makes. This might somewhat work out for them since they are a very small company, but it cannot scale for the following reasons:

1. This strategy relies on you giving your money to an enterprise now, and trusting them to "Do the right thing" years later. As the years go by, they will eventually look at their books, see how much ongoing maintenance is costing them, drop support for the device, apologise and move on. That is to say, enterprises have a clear economic incentive to promise long-term support and not deliver. One could argue a company's reputation would suffer from this kind of behaviour. Maybe sometime it does, but most often people forget. Political promises are a great example of this.
2. Enterprises go bankrupt all the time. Even if company X promises 15 years of software support for their devices, if they cease to exist, your device will stop getting updates. The internet is full of stories of IoT devices getting bricked when the parent company goes bankrupt and their servers disappear. This is related to point number 1: to some degree, you have a disincentive to pay for long-term support in advance, as the future is uncertain and there are chances you won't get the support you paid for.
3. Selling your devices at a higher price to cover maintenance costs does not necessarily mean you will make more money overall raising more money to fund maintenance costs being the goal here. To a certain point, smartphone models are substitute goods and prices higher than market prices will tend to drive consumers to buy cheaper ones. There is thus a disincentive to include the price of software maintenance in the cost of the device.
4. People tend to be bad at rationalising the total cost of ownership over a long period of time. Economists call this phenomenon hyperbolic discounting. In our case, it means people are far more likely to buy a 500$ phone each 3 years than a 1000$ phone each 10 years. Again, this means OEMs have a clear disincentive to include the price of long-term software maintenance in their devices.

Clearly, life is more complex than how I portrayed it: enterprises are not perfect rational agents, altruism exists, not all enterprises aim solely for profit maximisation, etc. Still, in a capitalist economy, enterprises wanting to charge for software maintenance upfront have to overcome these hurdles one way or another if they want to avoid failing. 2 - The subscription model Another way companies can try to internalise support costs is to rely on a subscription-based revenue model. This has multiple advantages over the previous option, mainly:

1. It does not affect the initial purchase price of the device, making it easier to sell them at a competitive price.
2. It provides a stable source of income, something that is very valuable to enterprises, as it reduces overall risks. This in return creates an incentive to continue providing software support as long as people are paying.

If this model is so interesting from an economic incentives point of view, why isn't any smartphone manufacturer offering that kind of program? The answer is, they are, but not explicitly⁵. Apple and Google can fund part of their smartphone software support via the 30% cut they take out of their respective app stores. A report from Sensor Tower shows that in 2019, Apple made an estimated US$ 16 billion from the App Store, while Google raked in US$ 9 billion from the Google Play Store. Although the Fortune 500 ranking tells us this respectively is "only" 5.6% and 6.5% of their gross annual revenue for 2019, the profit margins in this category are certainly higher than any of their other products. This means Google and Apple have an important incentive to keep your device updated for some time: if your device works well and is updated, you are more likely to keep buying apps from their store. When software support for a device stops, there is a risk paying customers will buy a competitor device and leave their ecosystem. This also explains why OEMs who don't own app stores tend not to provide software support for very long periods of time. Most of them only make money when you buy a new phone. Providing long-term software support thus becomes a disincentive, as it directly reduces their sale revenues. Same goes for Kindles and Kobos: the longer your device works, the more money they make with their electronic book stores. In my opinion, it's likely Amazon and Rakuten Kobo produce quarterly cost-benefit reports to decide when to drop support for older devices, based on ongoing support costs and the recurring revenues these devices bring in. Rakuten Kobo is also in a more precarious situation than Amazon is: considering Amazon's very important market share, if your device stops getting new updates, there is a greater chance people will replace their old Kobo with a Kindle. Again, they have an important economic incentive to keep devices running as long as they are profitable. Can Free Software fix this? Yes and no. Free Software certainly isn't a magic wand one can wave to make everything better, but does provide major advantages in terms of security, user freedom and sometimes costs. The last piece of the puzzle explaining why Rakuten Kobo's software support is better than Google's is technological choices. Smartphones are incredibly complex devices and have become the main computing platform of many. Similar to the web, there is a race for features and complexity that tends to create bloat and make older devices slow and painful to use. On the other hand, e-readers are simpler devices built for a single task: display electronic books. Control over the platform is also a key aspect of the cost structure of providing software updates. Whereas Apple controls both the software and hardware side of iPhones, Android is a sad mess of drivers and SoCs, all providing different levels of support over time⁶. If you take a look at the platforms the Kindle and Kobo are built on, you'll quickly see they both use Freescale I.MX SoCs. These processors are well known for their excellent upstream support in the Linux kernel and their relative longevity, chips being produced for either 10 or 15 years. This in turn makes updates much easier and less expensive to provide. So clearly, open architectures, free drivers and open hardware helps tremendously, but aren't enough on their own. One of the lessons we must learn from the (amazing) LineageOS project is how lack of funding hurts everyone. If there is no one to do the volunteer work required to maintain a version of LOS for your device, it won't be supported. Worse, when purchasing a new device, users cannot know in advance how many years of LOS support they will get. This makes buying new devices a frustrating hit-and-miss experience. If you are lucky, you will get many years of support. Otherwise, you risk your device becoming an expensive insecure paperweight. So how do we fix this? Anyone with a brain understands throwing away perfectly good devices each 2 years is not sustainable. Government regulations enforcing a minimum support life would be a step in the right direction, but at the end of the day, Capitalism is to blame. Like the aforementioned carbon tax, band-aid solutions can make things somewhat better, but won't fix our current economic system's underlying problems. For now though, I'll leave fixing the problem of Capitalism to someone else.

After we gave our talk at DebConf 20, Doing things together, there were 5 minutes left for the live Q&A. Pollo asked a question that I think is interesting and deserves a longer answer: How can we still have a good code review process without making it a "you need to be perfect" scenario? I often find picky code reviews help me write better code. I find it useful to first disentangle what code reviews are good for, how we do them, why we do them that way, and how we can potentially improve processes. What are code reviews good for? Code review and peer review are great methods for cooperation aiming at:

• Ensuring that the code works as intended
• Ensuring that the task was fully accomplished and no detail left out
• Ensuring that no security issues have been introduced
• Making sure the code fits the practices of the team and is understandable and maintainable by others
• Sharing insights, transferring knowledge between code author and code reviewer
• Helping the code author to learn to write better code

Looking at this list, the last point seems to be more like a nice side effect of all the other points. :) How do code reviews happen in our communities? It seems to be a common assumption that code reviews are and have to be picky and perfectionist. To me, this does not actually seem to be a necessity to accomplish the above mentioned goals. We might want to work with precision a quality which is different from perfection. Perfection can hardly be a goal: perfection does not exist. Perfectionist dynamics can lead to failing to call something "good enough" or "done". Sometimes, a disproportionate amount of time is invested in writing (several) code reviews for minor issues. In some cases, strong perfectionist dynamics of a reviewer can create a feeling of never being good enough along with a loss of self esteem for otherwise skilled code authors. When do we cross the line? When going from cooperation, precision, and learning to write better code, to nitpicking, we are crossing a line: nitpicking means to pedantically search for others' faults. For example, I once got one of my Git commits at work criticized merely for its commit message that was said to be "ugly" because I "use[d] the same word twice" in it. When we are nitpicking, we might not give feedback in an appreciative, cooperative way, we become fault finders instead. From there it's a short way to operating on the level of blame. Are you nitpicking to help or are you nitpicking to prove something? Motivations matter. How can we improve code reviewing? When we did something wrong, we can do better next time. When we are told that we are wrong, the underlying assumption is that we cannot change (See Bren Brown, The difference between blame and shame). We can learn to go beyond blame. Negative feedback rarely leads to improvement if the environment in which it happens lacks general appreciation and confirmation. We can learn to give helpful feedback. It might be harder to create an appreciative environment in which negative feedback is a possibility for growth. One can think of it like of a relationship: in a healthy relationship we can tell each other when something does not work and work it out because we regularly experience that we respect, value, and support each other. To be able to work precisely, we need guidelines, tools, and time. It's not possible to work with precision if we are in a hurry, burnt out, or working under a permanent state of exception. The same is true for receiving picky feedback. On DebConf's IRC channel, after our talk, marvil07 said: On picky code reviews, something that I find useful is automation on code reviews; i.e. when a bot is stating a list of indentation/style errors it feels less personal, and also saves time to humans to provide more insightful changes. Indeed, we can set up routines that do automatic fault checking (linting). We can set up coding guidelines. We can define what we call "done" or "good enough". We can negotiate with each other how we would like code to be reviewed. For example, one could agree that a particularly perfectionist reviewer should point out only functional faults. They can spare their time and refrain from writing lengthy reviews about minor esthetic issues that have never made it into a guideline. If necessary, author and reviewer can talk about what can be improved on the long term during a retrospective. Or, on the contrary, one could explicitly ask for a particularly detailed review including all sorts of esthetic issues to learn the best practices of a team applied to one's own code. In summary: let's not lose sight of what code reviews are good for, let's have a clear definition of "done", let's not confuse precision with perfection, let's create appreciative work environments, and negotiate with each other how reviews are made. I'm sure you will come up with more ideas. Please do not hesitate to share them!

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

Changes

• git-imerge: use python3 by default
• youtube-dl: add RTRFM radio station extractor
• ifenslave: cleanup, fix infinite recursion, fix missing variables
• check-all-the-things: update URLs, add many sources of and ideas for new checks
• how-can-i-help: ignore debhelper cruft, build manual page from source, prevent printing autorm header unless needed
• apt-listchanges: cleanups (1 2 3 4), remove hardcoding, add latest option, syslog/log frontends and title disable option, configuration directory
• lintian: use UTF-8 aware spelling sorting, fix wording (1 2)
• spelling dictionaries: codespell (1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8), lintian (1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9)
• Debian usertags QA: drop hardcoding, ignore cruft, refactor, add rename/transfer/copy functions, debug mode (1 2)
• Debian package uploads: ifenslave (1 2), lxml
• Debian wiki pages: AutomatedInstallation, Cloud/AmazonEC2Image, DebianAlternatives, DebianEvents/internet/2020/MiniDebConfOnline, DebianInstaller/Bugs, DebianMentors (Faq), DebianNetDomains, DebianTesting, Derivatives/Census (EmmabuntusDE, Template), DeveloperNews, Firmware/Open, GetInvolved-Beta, HelpDebian, InstallingDebianOn (Dell, Lemote/Loongson2K1000, Marvell, Router, Turris, TUXEDO (NOTEBOOKS/InfinityBookS14v5)), IRC, Keysigning/Offers, LTS, MemberBenefits, MIPS/LoongsonPi, Mobile, Multiarch/Tuples, PanfrostLima, PinePhone, Ports/ia64, PortTemplate, ProgrammingLanguage, Schroot, snd-emu10k1, SponsoredMaintainer, SystemBuildTools, Teams (3D-printer, Cloud, Debbugs/ArchitectureTags, DPL/OfficialImages)
• FOSSjobs wiki pages: resources

Issues

• Crashes in nouveau libraries (reported on IRC), webkit2gtk
• Move conserver from Debian non-free to main
• File conflict in brz
• Outdated description in hub
• Strange dpkg-parsechangelog use in fritzing, fritzing-parts
• Patch merging needed in apt-listchanges
• Missing link in password-manager-resources
• Conffile removal needed in bsdmainutils
• Features in lintian
• Missing quoting in wifi-qr

Review

• Spam: reported 174 Debian mailing list posts
• Debian wiki: RecentChanges for the month
• Debian screenshots:
  • approved bashtop buildbot buildstream deepin-movie deepin-terminal ding drawing dte firefox-locale-gu font-manager fonts-hermit fonts-proggy fonts-terminus gimp-gutenprint gnome-builder gnome-shell-extension-arc-menu gztool kdevelop lilypond lxhotkey-gtk mkdocs-nature ncdu nvidia-legacy-340xx-driver obs-studio opencubicplayer openshot-qt packetsender partitionmanager plakativ poezio pulseeffects pyzo roundcube scalpel scrcpy tesseract-ocr thunar tilde tracetuner verbiste-gtk zytrax
  • rejected packetsender (help output), pyzo/sasm/gztool/herculesstudio/posterazor (not Debian), minetest-mod-character-creator (not minetest)
  • rejected deletion of partimage/flashrom/apache2 (spam)

Administration

• Debian BTS: usertags QA
• Debian IRC channels: fixed a channel mode lock
• Debian wiki: unblock IP addresses, approve accounts, ping folks with bouncing email

Communication

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

Sponsors The ifenslave and apt-listchanges work was sponsored by my employer. All other work was done on a volunteer basis.

As a member of the Norwegian Unix User Group, I have the pleasure of receiving the USENIX magazine ;login: several times a year. I rarely have time to read all the articles, but try to at least skim through them all as there is a lot of nice knowledge passed on there. I even carry the latest issue with me most of the time to try to get through all the articles when I have a few spare minutes. The other day I came across a nice article titled "The Secure Socket API: TLS as an Operating System Service" with a marvellous idea I hope can make it all the way into the POSIX standard. The idea is as simple as it is powerful. By introducing a new socket() option IPPROTO_TLS to use TLS, and a system wide service to handle setting up TLS connections, one both make it trivial to add TLS support to any program currently using the POSIX socket API, and gain system wide control over certificates, TLS versions and encryption systems used. Instead of doing this:

int socket = socket(PF_INET, SOCK_STREAM, IPPROTO_TCP);

the program code would be doing this:

int socket = socket(PF_INET, SOCK_STREAM, IPPROTO_TLS);

According to the ;login: article, converting a C program to use TLS would normally modify only 5-10 lines in the code, which is amazing when compared to using for example the OpenSSL API. The project has set up the https://securesocketapi.org/ web site to spread the idea, and the code for a kernel module and the associated system daemon is available from two github repositories: ssa and ssa-daemon. Unfortunately there is no explicit license information with the code, so its copyright status is unclear. A request to solve this about it has been unsolved since 2018-08-17. I love the idea of extending socket() to gain TLS support, and understand why it is an advantage to implement this as a kernel module and system wide service daemon, but can not help to think that it would be a lot easier to get projects to move to this way of setting up TLS if it was done with a user space approach where programs wanting to use this API approach could just link with a wrapper library. I recommend you check out this simple and powerful approach to more secure network connections. :) As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address 15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b.

Review: The Ten Thousand Doors of January, by Alix E. Harrow

Publisher:	Redhook
Copyright:	September 2019
ISBN:	0-316-42198-7
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	373

In 1901, at the age of seven, January found a Door. It was barely more than a frame in a ruined house in a field in Kentucky, but she wrote a story about opening it, and then did.

Once there was a brave and temeraryous (sp?) girl who found a Door. It was a magic Door that's why it has a capital D. She opened the Door.

The Door led to a bluff over the sea and above a city, a place very far from Kentucky, and she almost stayed, but she came back through the Door when her guardian, Mr. Locke, called. The adventure cost her a diary, several lectures, days of being locked in her room, and the remnants of her strained relationship with her father. When she went back, the frame of the Door was burned to the ground. That was the end of Doors for January for some time, and the continuation of a difficult childhood. She was cared for by her father's employer as a sort of exotic pet, dutifully attempting to obey, grateful for Mr. Locke's protection, and convinced that he was occasionally sneaking her presents through a box in the Pharaoh Room out of some hidden kindness. Her father appeared rarely, said little, and refused to take her with him. Three things helped: the grocery boy who smuggled her stories, an intimidating black woman sent by her father to replace her nurse, and her dog.

Once upon a time there was a good girl who met a bad dog, and they became the very best of friends. She and her dog were inseparable from that day forward.

I will give you a minor spoiler that I would have preferred to have had, since it would have saved me some unwarranted worry and some mental yelling at the author: The above story strains but holds. January's adventure truly starts the day before her seventeenth birthday, when she finds a book titled The Ten Thousand Doors in the box in the Pharaoh Room. As you may have guessed from the title, The Ten Thousand Doors of January is a portal fantasy, but it's the sort of portal fantasy that is more concerned with the portal itself than the world on the other side of it. (Hello to all of you out there who, like me, have vivid memories of the Wood between the Worlds.) It's a book about traveling and restlessness and the possibility of escape, about the ability to return home again, and about the sort of people who want to close those doors because the possibility of change created by people moving around freely threatens the world they have carefully constructed. Structurally, the central part of the book is told by interleaving chapters of January's tale with chapters from The Ten Thousand Doors. That book within a book starts with the framing of a scholarly treatment but quickly becomes a biography of a woman: Adelaide Lee Larson, a half-wild farm girl who met her true love at the threshold of a Door and then spent much of her life looking for him. I am not a very observant reader for plot details, particularly for books that I'm enjoying. I read books primarily for the emotional beats and the story structure, and often miss rather obvious story clues. (I'm hopeless at guessing the outcomes of mysteries.) Therefore, when I say that there are many things January is unaware of that are obvious to the reader, that's saying a lot. Even more clues were apparent when I skimmed the first chapter again, and a more observant reader would probably have seen them on the first read. Right down to Mr. Locke's name, Harrow is not very subtle about the moral shape of this world. That can make the early chapters of the book frustrating. January is being emotionally (and later physically) abused by the people who have power in her life, but she's very deeply trapped by false loyalty and lack of external context. Winning free of that is much of the story of the book, and at times it has the unpleasantness of watching someone make excuses for her abuser. At other times it has the unpleasantness of watching someone be abused. But this is the place where I thought the nested story structure worked marvelously. January escapes into the story of The Ten Thousand Doors at the worst moments of her life, and the reader escapes with her. Harrow uses the desire to switch scenes back to the more adventurous and positive story to construct and reinforce the emotional structure of the book. For me, it worked extremely well. It helps that the ending is glorious. The payoff is worth all the discomfort and tension-building in the first half of the book. Both The Ten Thousand Doors and the surrounding narrative reach deeply satisfying conclusions, ones that are entangled but separate in just the ways that they need to be. January's abilities, actions, and decisions at the end of the book were just the outcome that I needed but didn't entirely guess in advance. I could barely put down the last quarter of this story and loved every moment of the conclusion. This is the sort of book that can be hard to describe in a review because its merits don't rest on an original twist or easily-summarized idea. The elements here are all elements found in other books: portal fantasy, the importance of story-telling, coming of age, found family, irrepressible and indomitable characters, and the battle of the primal freedom of travel and discovery and belief against the structural forces that keep rulers in place. The merits of this book are in the small details: the way that January's stories are sparse and rare and sometimes breathtaking, the handling of tattoos, the construction of other worlds with a few deft strokes, and the way Harrow embraces the emotional divergence between January's life and Adelaide's to help the reader synchronize the emotional structure of their reading experience with January's.

She writes a door of blood and silver. The door opens just for her.

The Ten Thousand Doors of January is up against a very strong slate for both the Nebula and the Hugo this year, and I suspect it may be edged out by other books, although I wouldn't be unhappy if it won. (It probably has a better shot at the Nebula than the Hugo.) But I will be stunned if Harrow doesn't walk away with the Mythopoeic Award. This seems like exactly the type of book that award was created for. This is an excellent book, one of the best I've read so far this year. Highly recommended. Rating: 9 out of 10

Sealioning - Wikipedia

Sealioning (also spelled sea-lioning and sea lioning) is a type of trolling or harassment which consists of pursuing people with persistent requests for evidence or repeated questions, while maintaining a pretense of civility and sincerity.[1][2][3][4] It may take the form of "incessant, bad-faith invitations to engage in debate".[5]

Tone policing (also tone trolling, tone argument, and tone fallacy) is an ad hominem (personal attack) and antidebate tactic based on criticizing a person for expressing emotion. Tone policing detracts from the validity of a statement by attacking the tone in which it was presented rather than the message itself.

"A brawler who tattoos a message onto his knuckles does not throw every punch with the weight of First Amendment protection behind him," the brief stated. "Conduct like this does not constitute speech, nor should it. A deliberate attempt to cause physical injury to someone does not come close to the expression which the First Amendment is designed to protect."

It s no secret that times are changing. It used to be that men were men, jokes were jokes, and all facts came from one white guy in a suit who you trusted because he looked like your dad. Now I know I could get in a lot of trouble for just saying this, but I don t care because someone has to tell the truth: These days, you can t say anything racist at all without being called a racist.

Russia's neighbor has developed a plan for countering misinformation. Can it be exported to the rest of the world?

So, I wrote my BIFF Response but Marvin wrote me another angry email. Actually, he wrote 6 more this week, so what s up with that? Why didn t he stop after my first email?

The BIFF Response Method will teach you how to respond to angry emails, texts, or social media posts while maintaining your dignity and personal power.