Search Results: "pdm"

26 January 2024

Bastian Venthur: Investigating popularity of Python build backends over time

Inspired by a Mastodon post by Fran oise Conil, who investigated the current popularity of build backends used in pyproject.toml files, I wanted to investigate how the popularity of build backends used in pyproject.toml files evolved over the years since the introduction of PEP-0517 in 2015. Getting the data Tom Forbes provides a huge dataset that contains information about every file within every release uploaded to PyPI. To get the current dataset, we can use:
curl -L --remote-name-all $(curl -L "https://github.com/pypi-data/data/raw/main/links/dataset.txt")
This will download approximately 30GB of parquet files, providing detailed information about each file included in a PyPI upload, including:
  1. project name, version and release date
  2. file path, size and line count
  3. hash of the file
The dataset does not contain the actual files themselves though, more on that in a moment. Querying the dataset using duckdb We can now use duckdb to query the parquet files directly. Let s look into the schema first:
describe select * from '*.parquet';
 
    column_name     column_type    null    
      varchar         varchar     varchar  
 
  project_name      VARCHAR       YES      
  project_version   VARCHAR       YES      
  project_release   VARCHAR       YES      
  uploaded_on       TIMESTAMP     YES      
  path              VARCHAR       YES      
  archive_path      VARCHAR       YES      
  size              UBIGINT       YES      
  hash              BLOB          YES      
  skip_reason       VARCHAR       YES      
  lines             UBIGINT       YES      
  repository        UINTEGER      YES      
 
  11 rows                       6 columns  
 
From all files mentioned in the dataset, we only care about pyproject.toml files that are in the project s root directory. Since we ll still have to download the actual files, we need to get the path and the repository to construct the corresponding URL to the mirror that contains all files in a bunch of huge git repositories. Some files are not available on the mirrors; to skip these, we only take files where the skip_reason is empty. We also care about the timestamp of the upload (uploaded_on) and the hash to avoid processing identical files twice:
select
    path,
    hash,
    uploaded_on,
    repository
from '*.parquet'
where
    skip_reason == '' and
    lower(string_split(path, '/')[-1]) == 'pyproject.toml' and
    len(string_split(path, '/')) == 5
order by uploaded_on desc
This query runs for a few minutes on my laptop and returns ~1.2M rows. Getting the actual files Using the repository and path, we can now construct an URL from which we can fetch the actual file for further processing:
url = f"https://raw.githubusercontent.com/pypi-data/pypi-mirror- repository /code/ path "
We can download the individual pyproject.toml files and parse them to read the build-backend into a dictionary mapping the file-hash to the build backend. Downloads on GitHub are rate-limited, so downloading 1.2M files will take a couple of days. By skipping files with a hash we ve already processed, we can avoid downloading the same file more than once, cutting the required downloads by circa 50%. Results Assuming the data is complete and my analysis is sound, these are the findings: There is a surprising amount of build backends in use, but the overall amount of uploads per build backend decreases quickly, with a long tail of single uploads:
>>> results.backend.value_counts()
backend
setuptools        701550
poetry            380830
hatchling          56917
flit               36223
pdm                11437
maturin             9796
jupyter             1707
mesonpy              625
scikit               556
                   ...
postry                 1
tree                   1
setuptoos              1
neuron                 1
avalon                 1
maturimaturinn         1
jsonpath               1
ha                     1
pyo3                   1
Name: count, Length: 73, dtype: int64
We pick only the top 4 build backends, and group the remaining ones (including PDM and Maturin) into other so they are accounted for as well. The following plot shows the relative distribution of build backends over time. Each bin represents a time span of 28 days. I chose 28 days to reduce visual clutter. Within each bin, the height of the bars corresponds to the relative proportion of uploads during that time interval: Relative distribution of build backends over time Looking at the right side of the plot, we see the current distribution. It confirms Fran oise s findings about the current popularity of build backends: Between 2018 and 2020 the graph exhibits significant fluctuations, due to the relatively low amount uploads utizing pyproject.toml files. During that early period, Flit started as the most popular build backend, but was eventually displaced by Setuptools and Poetry. Between 2020 and 2020, the overall usage of pyproject.toml files increased significantly. By the end of 2022, the share of Setuptools peaked at 70%. After 2020, other build backends experienced a gradual rise in popularity. Amongh these, Hatch emerged as a notable contender, steadily gaining traction and ultimately stabilizing at 10%. We can also look into the absolute distribution of build backends over time: Absolute distribution of build backends over time The plot shows that Setuptools has the strongest growth trajectory, surpassing all other build backends. Poetry and Hatch are growing at a comparable rate, but since Hatch started roughly 4 years after Poetry, it s lagging behind in popularity. Despite not being among the most widely used backends anymore, Flit maintains a steady and consistent growth pattern, indicating its enduring relevance in the Python packaging landscape. The script for downloading and analyzing the data can be found in my GitHub repository. It contains the results of the duckb query (so you don t have to download the full dataset) and the pickled dictionary, mapping the file hashes to the build backends, saving you days for downloading and analyzing the pyproject.toml files yourself.

14 May 2023

Holger Levsen: 20230514-fwupd

How-To use fwupd As one cannot use fwupd on Qubes OS to update firmwares this is a quick How-To for using fwupd on Grml for future me. (Qubes 4.2 will bring qubes-fwupd.)

13 March 2023

Antoine Beaupr : Framework 12th gen laptop review

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: 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

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: 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

3 October 2022

Marco d'Itri: Debian bookworm on a Lenovo T14s Gen3 AMD

I recently upgraded my laptop to a Lenovo T14s Gen3 AMD and I am happy to report that it works just fine with Debian/unstable using a 5.19 kernel. The only issue is that some firmware files are still missing and I had to install them manually. Updates are needed for the firmware-amd-graphics package (#1019847) for the Radeon 680M GPU (AMD Rembrandt) and for the firmware-atheros package (#1021157) for the Qualcomm NFA725A Wi-Fi card (which is actually reported as a NFA765). s2idle (AKA "modern suspend") works too, and a ~10 seconds delay on resume has been removed by setting iommu=pt on the kernel command line. For improved energy efficiency it is recommended to switch from the acpi_cpufreq CPU frequency scaling driver to amd_pstate. Please note that so far it is not loaded automatically. As expected, fwupdmgr can update the system BIOS and the firmware of the NVMe device. Everybody should do it immediately, because there are major suspend bugs with BIOS releases earlier than 1.25.

18 December 2020

Russell Coker: Thinkpad Storage Problem

For a while I ve had a problem with my Thinkpad X1 Carbon Gen 1 [1] where storage pauses for 30 seconds, it s become more common recently and unfortunately everything seems to depend on storage (ideally a web browser playing a video from the Internet could keep doing so with no disk access, but that s not what happens).
echo 3 > /sys/block/sda/device/timeout
I ve put the above in /etc/rc.local which should make it only take 3 seconds to recover from storage problems instead of 30 seconds, the problem hasn t recurred since that change so I don t know if it works as desired. The Thinkpad is running BTRFS and no data is reported as being lost, so it s not a problem to use it at this time. The bottom of this post has an example of the errors I m getting. A friend said that his searches for such errors shows people claiming that it s a SATA controller or cable problem, which for a SATA device bolted directly to the motherboard means it s likely to be a motherboard problem (IE more expensive to fix than the $289 I paid for the laptop almost 3 years ago). A Lenovo forum discussion says that the X1 Carbon Gen1 uses an unusual connector that s not M.2 SATA and not mSATA [2]. This means that a replacement is going to be expensive, $100US for a replacement from eBay when a M.2 SATA or NVMe device would cost about $50AU from my local store. It also means that I can t use a replacement for anything else. If my laptop took a regular NVMe I d buy one and test it out, if it didn t solve the problem a spare NVMe device is always handy to have. But I m not interested in spending $100US for a part that may turn out to be useless. I bought the laptop expecting that there was nothing I could fix inside it. While it is theoretically possible to upgrade the CPU etc in a laptop most people find that the effort and expense makes it better to just replace the entire laptop. With the ultra light category of laptops the RAM is soldered on the motherboard and there are even less options for replacing things. So while it s annoying that Lenovo didn t use a standard interface for this device (they did so for other models in the range) it s not a situation that I hadn t expected. Now the question is what to do next. The Thinkpad has a SD socket and micro SD cards are getting large capacities nowadays. If it won t boot from a SD card I could boot from USB and then run from SD. So even if the internal SATA device fails entirely it should still be useful. I wonder if I could find a Thinkpad with a similar problem going cheap as I m pretty sure that a Windows user couldn t make any storage device usable the way I can with Linux. I ve looked at prices on auction sites but haven t seen a Thinkpad X1 Carbon going for anywhere near the price I got this one. The nearest I ve seen is around $350 for a laptop with significant damage. While I am a little unhappy at Lenovo s choice of interface, I ve definitely got a lot more than $289 of value out of this laptop. So I m not really complaining.
[315041.837612] ata1.00: status:   DRDY  
[315041.837613] ata1.00: failed command: WRITE FPDMA QUEUED
[315041.837616] ata1.00: cmd 61/20:48:28:1e:3e/00:00:00:00:00/40 tag 9 ncq dma 
16384 out
                         res 40/00:01:00:00:00/00:00:00:00:00/e0 Emask 0x4 
(timeout)                
[315041.837617] ata1.00: status:   DRDY  
[315041.837618] ata1.00: failed command: READ FPDMA QUEUED
[315041.837621] ata1.00: cmd 60/08:50:e0:26:84/00:00:00:00:00/40 tag 10 ncq 
dma 4096 in
                         res 40/00:01:00:00:00/00:00:00:00:00/e0 Emask 0x4 
(timeout)                
[315041.837622] ata1.00: status:   DRDY  
[315041.837625] ata1: hard resetting link
[315042.151781] ata1: SATA link up 6.0 Gbps (SStatus 133 SControl 300)
[315042.163368] ata1.00: ACPI cmd ef/02:00:00:00:00:a0 (SET FEATURES) 
succeeded
[315042.163370] ata1.00: ACPI cmd f5/00:00:00:00:00:a0 (SECURITY FREEZE LOCK) 
filtered out
[315042.163372] ata1.00: ACPI cmd ef/10:03:00:00:00:a0 (SET FEATURES) filtered 
out
[315042.183332] ata1.00: ACPI cmd ef/02:00:00:00:00:a0 (SET FEATURES) 
succeeded
[315042.183334] ata1.00: ACPI cmd f5/00:00:00:00:00:a0 (SECURITY FREEZE LOCK) 
filtered out
[315042.183336] ata1.00: ACPI cmd ef/10:03:00:00:00:a0 (SET FEATURES) filtered 
out
[315042.193332] ata1.00: configured for UDMA/133
[315042.193789] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] tag#10 FAILED Result: hostbyte=DID_OK 
driverbyte=DRIVER_SENSE
[315042.193791] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] tag#10 Sense Key : Illegal Request [current] 
[315042.193793] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] tag#10 Add. Sense: Unaligned write command
[315042.193795] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] tag#10 CDB: Read(10) 28 00 00 84 26 e0 00 00 
08 00
[315042.193797] print_req_error: I/O error, dev sda, sector 8660704
[315042.193810] ata1: EH complete

30 June 2020

Norbert Preining: TeX Live Debian update 20200629

More than a month has passed since the last update of TeX Live packages in Debian, so here is a new checkout!
All arch all packages have been updated to the tlnet state as of 2020-06-29, see the detailed update list below. Enjoy. New packages akshar, beamertheme-pure-minimalistic, biblatex-unified, biblatex-vancouver, bookshelf, commutative-diagrams, conditext, courierten, ektype-tanka, hvarabic, kpfonts-otf, marathi, menucard, namedef, pgf-pie, pwebmac, qrbill, semantex, shtthesis, tikz-lake-fig, tile-graphic, utf8add. Updated packages abnt, achemso, algolrevived, amiri, amscls, animate, antanilipsum, apa7, babel, bangtex, baskervillef, beamerappendixnote, beamerswitch, beamertheme-focus, bengali, bib2gls, biblatex-apa, biblatex-philosophy, biblatex-phys, biblatex-software, biblatex-swiss-legal, bibleref, bookshelf, bxjscls, caption, ccool, cellprops, changes, chemfig, circuitikz, cloze, cnltx, cochineal, commutative-diagrams, comprehensive, context, context-vim, cquthesis, crop, crossword, ctex, cweb, denisbdoc, dijkstra, doclicense, domitian, dps, draftwatermark, dvipdfmx, ebong, ellipsis, emoji, endofproofwd, eqexam, erewhon, erewhon-math, erw-l3, etbb, euflag, examplep, fancyvrb, fbb, fbox, fei, fira, fontools, fontsetup, fontsize, forest-quickstart, gbt7714, genealogytree, haranoaji, haranoaji-extra, hitszthesis, hvarabic, hyperxmp, icon-appr, kpfonts, kpfonts-otf, l3backend, l3build, l3experimental, l3kernel, latex-amsmath-dev, latexbangla, latex-base-dev, latexdemo, latexdiff, latex-graphics-dev, latexindent, latex-make, latexmp, latex-mr, latex-tools-dev, libertinus-fonts, libertinust1math, lion-msc, listings, logix, lshort-czech, lshort-german, lshort-polish, lshort-portuguese, lshort-russian, lshort-slovenian, lshort-thai, lshort-ukr, lshort-vietnamese, luamesh, lua-uca, luavlna, lwarp, marathi, memoir, mnras, moderntimeline, na-position, newcomputermodern, newpx, nicematrix, nodetree, ocgx2, oldstandard, optex, parskip, pdfcrop, pdfpc, pdftexcmds, pdfxup, pgf, pgfornament, pgf-pie, pgf-umlcd, pgf-umlsd, pict2e, plautopatch, poemscol, pst-circ, pst-eucl, pst-func, pstricks, pwebmac, pxjahyper, quran, rec-thy, reledmac, rest-api, sanskrit, sanskrit-t1, scholax, semantex, showexpl, shtthesis, suftesi, svg, tcolorbox, tex4ht, texinfo, thesis-ekf, thuthesis, tkz-doc, tlshell, toptesi, tuda-ci, tudscr, twemoji-colr, univie-ling, updmap-map, vancouver, velthuis, witharrows, wtref, xecjk, xepersian-hm, xetex-itrans, xfakebold, xindex, xindy, xltabular, yathesis, ydoc, yquant, zref.

31 October 2017

Norbert Preining: Debian/TeX Live 2017.20171031-1

Halloween is here, time to upload a new set of scary packages of TeX Live. About a month has passed, so there is the usual big stream up updates. There was actually an intermediate release to get out some urgent fixes, but I never reported the news here. So here are the accumulated changes and updates. My favorite this time is wallcalendar, a great class to design all kind of calendars, it looks really well done. I immediately will start putting one together. On the font side there is the new addition coelacanth. To quote from the README: Coelacanth is inspired by the classic Centaur type design of Bruce Rogers, described by some as the most beautiful typeface ever designed. It aims to be a professional quality type family for general book typesetting. And indeed it is beautiful! Other noteworthy addition is the Spark font that allows creating sparklines in the running text with LaTeX. Enjoy. New packages algobox, amscls-doc, beilstein, bib2gls, coelacanth, crossreftools, dejavu-otf, dijkstra, ducksay, dynkin-diagrams, eqnnumwarn, fetchcls, fixjfm, glossaries-finnish, hagenberg-thesis, hecthese, ifxptex, isopt, istgame, ku-template, limecv, mensa-tex, musicography, na-position, notestex, outlining, pdfreview, spark-otf, spark-otf-fonts, theatre, unitn-bimrep, upzhkinsoku, wallcalendar, xltabular. Updated packages acmart, amsmath, animate, arabluatex, arara, babel, babel-french, bangorexam, baskervillef, beebe, biblatex-philosophy, biblatex-source-division, bibletext, bidi, bxjaprnind, bxjscls, bxpapersize, bytefield, classicthesis, cochineal, complexity, cooking-units, curves, datetime2-german, dccpaper, doclicense, docsurvey, eledmac, epstopdf, eqparbox, esami, etoc, fbb, fei, fithesis, fmtcount, fnspe, fonts-tlwg, fontspec, genealogytree, glossaries, glossaries-extra, hecthese, hepthesis, hvfloat, ifplatform, ifptex, inconsolata, jfmutil, jsclasses, ketcindy, knowledge, koma-script, l3build, l3experimental, l3kernel, l3packages, langsci, latex2man, latexbug, lato, leadsheets, libertinust1math, listofitems, luatexja, luatexko, luatodonotes, lwarp, markdown, mcf2graph, media9, newtx, novel, numspell, ocgx2, overpic, philokalia, phonenumbers, platex, poemscol, pst-exa, pst-geometrictools, pst-ovl, pst-plot, pst-pulley, pst-tools, pst-vehicle, pst2pdf, pstool, pstricks, pstricks-add, pxchfon, pxjahyper, quran, randomlist, rec-thy, reledmac, robustindex, scratch, skrapport, spectralsequences, tcolorbox, tetex, tex4ht, texcount, texdoc, tikzducks, tikzsymbols, toptesi, translation-biblatex-de, unicode-math, updmap-map, uplatex, widetable, xcharter, xepersian, xetexko, xetexref, xsim, zhlipsum.

17 October 2017

Norbert Preining: Japanese TeX User Meeting 2017

Last saturday the Japanese TeX User Meeting took place in Fujisawa, Kanagawa. For those who have been at the TUG 2013 in Tokyo you will remember that the Japanese TeX community is quite big and vibrant. On Saturday about 50 users and developers gathered for a set of talks on a variety of topics. The first talk was by Keiichiro Shikano ( ) on using Markup text to generate (La)TeX and HTML. He presented a variety of markup formats, including his own tool xml2tex. The second talk was my Masamichi Hosoda ( ) on reducing the size of PDF files using PDFmark extraction. As a contributor to many projects including Texinfo and LilyPond, Masamichi Hosoda tells us horror stories about multiple font embedding in the manual of LilyPond, the permanent need for adaption to newer Ghostscript versions, and the very recent development in Ghostscript prohibiting the merge of font definitions in PDF files. Next up was Yusuke Terada ( ) on grading exams using TeX. Working through hundreds and hundreds of exams and do the grading is something many of us are used to and I think nobody really enjoys it. Yusuke Terada has combined various tools, including scans, pdf merging using pdfpages, to generate gradable PDF which were then checked on an iPad. On the way he did hit some limits in dvipdfmx on the number of images, but this was obviously only a small bump on the road. Now if that could be automatized as a nice application, it would be a big hit I guess! The forth talk was by Satoshi Yamashita ( ) on the preparation of slides using KETpic. KETpic is a long running project by Setsuo Takato ( ) for the generation of graphics, in particular using Cinderella. KETpic and KETcindy integrates with lots of algebraic and statistical programs (R, Maxima, SciLab, ) and has a long history of development. Currently there are activities to incorporate it into TeX Live. The fifth talk was by Takuto Asakura ( ) on programming TeX using expl3, the main building block of the LaTeX3 project and already adopted by many TeX developers. Takuto Asakura came to fame on this years TUG/BachoTeX 2017 when he won the W. J. Martin Prize for his presentation Implementing bioinformatics algorithms in TeX. I think we can expect great new developments from Takuto! The last talk was by myself on fmtutil and updmap, two of the main management programs in any TeX installation, presenting the changes introduced over the last year, including the most recent release of TeX Live. Details have been posted on my blog, and a lengthy article in TUGboat 38:2, 2017 is available on this topic, too. After the conference about half of the participants joined a social dinner in a nearby Izakaya, followed by a after-dinner beer tasting at a local craft beer place. Thanks to Tatsuyoshi Hamada for the organization. As usual, the Japanese TeX User Meetings are a great opportunity to discuss new features and make new friends. I am always grateful to be part of this very nice community! I am looking forward to the next year s meeting.

26 September 2017

Norbert Preining: Debian/TeX Live 2017.20170926-1

A full month or more has past since the last upload of TeX Live, so it was high time to prepare a new package. Nothing spectacular here I have to say, two small bugs fixed and the usual long list of updates and new packages. From the new packages I found fontloader-luaotfload and interesting project. Loading fonts via lua code in luatex is by now standard, and this package allows for experiments with newer/alternative font loaders. Another very interesting new-comer is pdfreview which lets you set pages of another PDF on a lined background and add notes to it, good for reviewing. Enjoy. New packages abnt, algobox, beilstein, bib2gls, cheatsheet, coelacanth, dijkstra, dynkin-diagrams, endofproofwd, fetchcls, fixjfm, fontloader-luaotfload, forms16be, hithesis, ifxptex, komacv-rg, ku-template, latex-refsheet, limecv, mensa-tex, multilang, na-box, notes-tex, octave, pdfreview, pst-poker, theatre, upzhkinsoku, witharrows. Updated packages 2up, acmart, acro, amsmath, animate, babel, babel-french, babel-hungarian, bangorcsthesis, beamer, beebe, biblatex-gost, biblatex-philosophy, biblatex-source-division, bibletext, bidi, bpchem, bxjaprnind, bxjscls, bytefield, checkcites, chemmacros, chet, chickenize, complexity, curves, cweb, datetime2-german, e-french, epstopdf, eqparbox, esami, etoc, fbb, fithesis, fmtcount, fnspe, fontspec, genealogytree, glossaries, glossaries-extra, hvfloat, ifptex, invoice2, jfmutil, jlreq, jsclasses, koma-script, l3build, l3experimental, l3kernel, l3packages, latexindent, libertinust1math, luatexja, lwarp, markdown, mcf2graph, media9, nddiss, newpx, newtx, novel, numspell, ocgx2, philokalia, phfqit, placeat, platex, poemscol, powerdot, pst-barcode, pst-cie, pst-exa, pst-fit, pst-func, pst-geometrictools, pst-ode, pst-plot, pst-pulley, pst-solarsystem, pst-solides3d, pst-tools, pst-vehicle, pst2pdf, pstricks, pstricks-add, ptex-base, ptex-fonts, pxchfon, quran, randomlist, reledmac, robustindex, scratch, skrapport, spectralsequences, tcolorbox, tetex, tex4ht, texcount, texdef, texinfo, texlive-docindex, texlive-scripts, tikzducks, tikzsymbols, tocloft, translations, updmap-map, uplatex, widetable, xepersian, xetexref, xint, xsim, zhlipsum.

20 June 2017

Norbert Preining: TeX Live 2017 hits Debian/unstable

Yesterday I uploaded the first packages of TeX Live 2017 to Debian/unstable, meaning that the new release cycle has started. Debian/stretch was released over the weekend, and this opened up unstable for new developments. The upload comprised the following packages: asymptote, cm-super, context, context-modules, texlive-base, texlive-bin, texlive-extra, texlive-extra, texlive-lang, texworks, xindy.
I mentioned already in a previous post the following changes: The last two changes are described together with other news (easy TEXMF tree management) in the TeX Live release post. These changes more or less sum up the new infra structure developments in TeX Live 2017. Since the last release to unstable (which happened in 2017-01-23) about half a year of package updates have accumulated, below is an approximate list of updates (not split into new/updated, though). Enjoy the brave new world of TeX Live 2017, and please report bugs to the BTS! Updated/new packages:
academicons, achemso, acmart, acro, actuarialangle, actuarialsymbol, adobemapping, alkalami, amiri, animate, aomart, apa6, apxproof, arabluatex, archaeologie, arsclassica, autoaligne, autobreak, autosp, axodraw2, babel, babel-azerbaijani, babel-english, babel-french, babel-indonesian, babel-japanese, babel-malay, babel-ukrainian, bangorexam, baskervaldx, baskervillef, bchart, beamer, beamerswitch, bgteubner, biblatex-abnt, biblatex-anonymous, biblatex-archaeology, biblatex-arthistory-bonn, biblatex-bookinother, biblatex-caspervector, biblatex-cheatsheet, biblatex-chem, biblatex-chicago, biblatex-claves, biblatex-enc, biblatex-fiwi, biblatex-gb7714-2015, biblatex-gost, biblatex-ieee, biblatex-iso690, biblatex-manuscripts-philology, biblatex-morenames, biblatex-nature, biblatex-opcit-booktitle, biblatex-oxref, biblatex-philosophy, biblatex-publist, biblatex-shortfields, biblatex-subseries, bibtexperllibs, bidi, biochemistry-colors, bookcover, boondox, bredzenie, breqn, bxbase, bxcalc, bxdvidriver, bxjalipsum, bxjaprnind, bxjscls, bxnewfont, bxorigcapt, bxpapersize, bxpdfver, cabin, callouts, chemfig, chemformula, chemmacros, chemschemex, childdoc, circuitikz, cje, cjhebrew, cjk-gs-integrate, cmpj, cochineal, combofont, context, conv-xkv, correctmathalign, covington, cquthesis, crimson, crossrefware, csbulletin, csplain, csquotes, css-colors, cstldoc, ctex, currency, cweb, datetime2-french, datetime2-german, datetime2-romanian, datetime2-ukrainian, dehyph-exptl, disser, docsurvey, dox, draftfigure, drawmatrix, dtk, dviinfox, easyformat, ebproof, elements, endheads, enotez, eqnalign, erewhon, eulerpx, expex, exsheets, factura, facture, fancyhdr, fbb, fei, fetamont, fibeamer, fithesis, fixme, fmtcount, fnspe, fontmfizz, fontools, fonts-churchslavonic, fontspec, footnotehyper, forest, gandhi, genealogytree, glossaries, glossaries-extra, gofonts, gotoh, graphics, graphics-def, graphics-pln, grayhints, gregoriotex, gtrlib-largetrees, gzt, halloweenmath, handout, hang, heuristica, hlist, hobby, hvfloat, hyperref, hyperxmp, ifptex, ijsra, japanese-otf-uptex, jlreq, jmlr, jsclasses, jslectureplanner, karnaugh-map, keyfloat, knowledge, komacv, koma-script, kotex-oblivoir, l3, l3build, ladder, langsci, latex, latex2e, latex2man, latex3, latexbug, latexindent, latexmk, latex-mr, leaflet, leipzig, libertine, libertinegc, libertinus, libertinust1math, lion-msc, lni, longdivision, lshort-chinese, ltb2bib, lualatex-math, lualibs, luamesh, luamplib, luaotfload, luapackageloader, luatexja, luatexko, lwarp, make4ht, marginnote, markdown, mathalfa, mathpunctspace, mathtools, mcexam, mcf2graph, media9, minidocument, modular, montserrat, morewrites, mpostinl, mptrees, mucproc, musixtex, mwcls, mweights, nameauth, newpx, newtx, newtxtt, nfssext-cfr, nlctdoc, novel, numspell, nwejm, oberdiek, ocgx2, oplotsymbl, optidef, oscola, overlays, pagecolor, pdflatexpicscale, pdfpages, pdfx, perfectcut, pgfplots, phonenumbers, phonrule, pkuthss, platex, platex-tools, polski, preview, program, proofread, prooftrees, pst-3dplot, pst-barcode, pst-eucl, pst-func, pst-ode, pst-pdf, pst-plot, pstricks, pstricks-add, pst-solides3d, pst-spinner, pst-tools, pst-tree, pst-vehicle, ptex2pdf, ptex-base, ptex-fontmaps, pxbase, pxchfon, pxrubrica, pythonhighlight, quran, ran_toks, reledmac, repere, resphilosophica, revquantum, rputover, rubik, rutitlepage, sansmathfonts, scratch, seealso, sesstime, siunitx, skdoc, songs, spectralsequences, stackengine, stage, sttools, studenthandouts, svg, tcolorbox, tex4ebook, tex4ht, texosquery, texproposal, thaienum, thalie, thesis-ekf, thuthesis, tikz-kalender, tikzmark, tikz-optics, tikz-palattice, tikzpeople, tikzsymbols, titlepic, tl17, tqft, tracklang, tudscr, tugboat-plain, turabian-formatting, txuprcal, typoaid, udesoftec, uhhassignment, ukrainian, ulthese, unamthesis, unfonts-core, unfonts-extra, unicode-math, uplatex, upmethodology, uptex-base, urcls, variablelm, varsfromjobname, visualtikz, xassoccnt, xcharter, xcntperchap, xecjk, xepersian, xetexko, xevlna, xgreek, xsavebox, xsim, ycbook.

3 June 2017

Norbert Preining: TeX Live 2017 released

TeX Live 2017 has been released! CTAN mirrors are busy updating. Get out bottles of good wine, and enjoy a good long download
Besides the huge amount of package updates due to the 2 month testing hiatus, I want to pick a few changes before copying the complete changelog entry: Additional TEXMF trees tlmgr got a new functionality to easily add and remove additional TEXMF trees to the search path. MikTeX had this features since long, and it was often requested. As it turned out, it is a rather trivial thing to achieve by some texmf.cnf lines. The rest is just front end in tlmgr. Here a few invocations (not very intelligent usage, though):
$ tlmgr conf auxtrees show
tlmgr: no auxiliary texmf trees defined.
$ tlmgr conf auxtrees add /projects/book-abc
$ tlmgr conf auxtrees
List of auxiliary texmf trees:
  /projects/book-abc
$ tlmgr conf auxtrees remove /projects/book-abc
$ tlmgr conf auxtrees show
tlmgr: no auxiliary texmf trees defined.
TeX Live Manager interactive shell tlmgr also got an interactive shell now, that can also be used for scripting. Available commands are all the usual command line actions, plus a few more (see documentation). Again, here a simple session:
$ tlmgr shell
protocol 1
tlmgr> load local
OK
tlmgr> load remote
tlmgr: package repositories
	main = /home/norbert/public_html/tlnet (verified)
	koma = http://www.komascript.de/repository/texlive/2017 (verified)
OK
tlmgr> update --list
tlmgr: package repositories
	main = /home/norbert/public_html/tlnet (verified)
	koma = http://www.komascript.de/repository/texlive/2017 (verified)
tlmgr: saving backups to /home/norbert/tl/2017/tlpkg/backups
tlmgr: no updates available
OK
tlmgr> byebye
$
User versus System mode for updmap and fmtutil I have reported on this during BachoTeX/TUG 2017, here are the slides, that the two central configuration programs updmap and fmtutil will change their operation mode slightly by disallowing invocations without mde specification. That is, one either needs to call updmap -sys (or updmap-sys, nothing changed here from previous years) or updmap -user (or updmap-user, new in TeX Live 2017). We hope by this and the accompanying web page of recommendations to help users not to shoot themselves to often by calling updmap without knowing the consequences. The upcoming proceedings of the BachoTeX will also comtain an article fully documenting both updmap and fmtutil including the most recent changes.
These were only a few changes where I had my fingers in the development. For the full list, read on below. Now get ready for partying, and also for the end of the peace, because daily package updates will restart in the next days. Enjoy Changes since TeX Live 2016 The following list of changes is directly from the TeX Live documentation.

1 June 2017

Paul Wise: FLOSS Activities May 2017

Changes

Issues

Review

Administration
  • Debian: discuss mail bounces with a hoster, check perms of LE results, add 1 user to a group, re-sent some TLS cert expiry mail, clean up mail bounce flood, approve some debian.net TLS certs, do the samhain dance thrice, end 1 samhain mail flood, diagnose/fix LDAP update issue, relay DebConf cert expiry mails, reboot 2 non-responsive VM, merged patches for debian.org-sources.debian.org meta-package,
  • Debian mentors: lintian/security updates & reboot
  • Debian wiki: delete stray tmp file, whitelist 14 email addresses, disable 1 accounts with bouncing email, ping 3 persons with bouncing email
  • Debian website: update/push index/CD/distrib
  • Debian QA: deploy my changes, disable some removed suites in qadb
  • Debian PTS: strip whitespace from existing pages, invalidate sigs so pages get a rebuild
  • Debian derivatives census: deploy changes
  • Openmoko: security updates & reboots.

Communication
  • Invite Purism (on IRC), XBian (also on IRC), DuZeru to the Debian derivatives census
  • Respond to the shutdown of Parsix
  • Report BlankOn fileserver and Huayra webserver issues
  • Organise a transition of Ubuntu/Endless Debian derivatives census maintainers
  • Advocate against Debian having a monopoly on hardware certification
  • Advocate working with existing merchandise vendors
  • Start a discussion about Debian membership in other organisations
  • Advocate for HPE to join the LVFS & support fwupd

Sponsors All work was done on a volunteer basis.

29 May 2017

Norbert Preining: Debian/TeX Live 2017 is ready

TeX Live 2017 is expected to be released next week, and the Debian packages for it are already uploaded to the Debian servers. Time to prepare for release parties and stack up prosecco!

I have uploaded all the packages matching with the planned release of TeX Live 2017 to Debian/experimental, and most of them should be already available there. texlive-extra has to go through NEW processing, though. There are too many changes and updates to mention since the last release, but a few things might be worth mentioning: Other changes can be found in the svn repository. Until the processing of the NEW queue is finished, the package are available at (binaries only for amd64, for other archs please use experimental):
deb http://www.preining.info/debian/ tl2017 main
deb-src http://www.preining.info/debian/ tl2017 main
The packages are signed with my usual Debian GPG key. Enjoy, and let me know if there are any problems!

11 May 2017

Norbert Preining: BachoTeX 2017

A week of typesetting, typography, bookbinding, bibliophily, not to forget long chats with good friends and loads of beer. That is BachoTeX, the best series of conferences I have ever been. This year BachoTeX was held for the 25th time, and was merged with the TUG Meeting for a firework of excellent presentations and long hours of brain storming, hacking, music making, dancing, and simply enjoying life!
Symphony of Green
And while it was a bit less relaxing for me than in the last years, mostly due to the presence of my little daughter who requested presence quite often, it is still the place to be during the Golden Week! Of course I also gave a talk at BachoTeX about our latest changes in the upcoming TeX Live 2017 release: fmtutil and updmap past & future changes (or: cleaning up the mess). Big thanks to my company Accelia Inc. for allowing me to attend the conference. We arrived after a long trip, first via train and plane to Vienna, then two days break (including research with a colleague), followed by a night train ride to Warsaw and another train ride to Torun and a taxi ride to Bachotek. All in all far too long to be done with a 14 month old girl. Finally arrived we went directly to our hut and found it freezing. Fortunately we could organize a heater so that the rest of the week we didn t have to live in 5-10 degrees
Our log house in Bachotek
The second day brought already the traditional bonfire. After a small (for Polish standard) dinner we ignored the rain and met at the fireplace for BBQ, beer, and lots of live music.
Bonfire on the second evening
The rain stopped during the bonfire, probably due to my horrible singing, and the following days we were blessed with sunshine and warmer temperatures. The forest sparked in all kinds of greens.
Sunny days in Bachotek
For our daughter the trip was a great experience lots of wild play grounds, many other kids, and a lake she really wanted to go swimming in. Normally I go swimming there, but this year I had a bad cold so I refrained from it, and with me also our daughter, to her great disappointment.
Ready to go swimming
Another day has passed, and the sunset lights up the beautiful lake Bachotek. I cannot imagine a better place for concentrated work paired with great relaxation!
Sunset along the lake
During the days the temperatures were really nice, but the mornings were cold, and our morning walk to the breakfast place was quite chilly.
Enjoying a fresh morning on the lake
Ample coffee breaks and lunch breaks left us enough time to discuss new developments. But the single most important thing that brought people to talk a lot was the horrible internet connection, a big plus in BachoTeX (but as far as rumors go it might have been the last time with that advantage!).
Beautiful and peaceful lake Bachotek
The last evening we had a banquet honoring 25 years of BachoTeX, one of the oldest TeX conference. Live music and dancing, lots of good food and drinks, and outside the perfect evening atmosphere.
Sunset around the lake
Too fast the time has passed and we had to return to Vienna, retracing the long trip. How far it may be, taking the burden to come from Japan is worth every drop of sweat, the time at BachoTeX is probably one of the most productive, and at the same time most relaxing for me. Big thanks to all our Polish friends for organizing the event.
BachoTeX conference photo

(photo by Frans Goddijn)


20 April 2017

Norbert Preining: TeX Live 2017 pretest started

Preparations for the release of TeX Live 2017 have started a few days ago with the freeze of updates in TeX Live 2016 and the announcement of the official start of the pretest period. That means that we invite people to test the new release and help fixing bugs. Notable changes are listed on the pretest page, I only want to report about the changes in the core infrastructure: changes in the user/sys mode of fmtutil and updmap, and introduction of the tlmgr shell. User/sys mode of fmtutil and updmap We (both at TeX Live and Debian) regularly got error reports about fonts not being found or formats not updated etc. The reason for all this was unmistakably the same: The user has called updmap or fmtutil without the -sys option, thus creating a copy of set of configuration files under his home directory, shadowing all later updates on the system side. Reason for this behavior is the wide-spread misinformation (outdated information) on the internet suggesting to call updmap. To counteract this, we have changed the behavior so that both updmap and fmtutil now accept a new argument -user (in addition to the already present -sys), and rejects to run when called without either of it given, giving a warning and linking to an explanation page. This page provides more detailed documentation, and best practice examples. tlmgr shell The TeX Live Manager got a new shell mode, invoked by tlmgr shell. Details need to be flashed out, but in principle it is possible to use get and set to query and set some of the options normally passed via command lines, and use all the actions as defined in the documentation. The advantage of this is that it is not necessary to load the tlpdb for each invocation. Here a short example:
[~] tlmgr shell
protocol 1
tlmgr> load local
OK
tlmgr> load remote
tlmgr: package repository /home/norbert/public_html/tlpretest (verified)
OK
tlmgr> update --list
tlmgr: saving backups to /home/norbert/tl/2017/tlpkg/backups
update:   bchart             [147k]: local:    27496, source:    43928
...
update:   xindy              [535k]: local:    43873, source:    43934
OK
tlmgr> update --all
tlmgr: saving backups to /home/norbert/tl/2017/tlpkg/backups
[ 1/22, ??:??/??:??] update: bchart [147k] (27496 -> 43928) ... done
[ 2/22, 00:00/00:00] update: biber [1041k] (43873 -> 43910) ... done
...
[22/22, 00:50/00:50] update: xindy [535k] (43873 -> 43934) ... done
running mktexlsr ...
done running mktexlsr.
...
OK
tlmgr> quit
tlmgr: package log updated: /home/norbert/tl/2017/texmf-var/web2c/tlmgr.log 
[~] 
Please test and report bugs to our mailing list. Thanks

18 January 2017

Norbert Preining: Debian/TeX Live January 2017

As the freeze of the next release is closing in, I have updated a bunch of packages around TeX: All of the TeX Live packages (binaries and arch independent ones) and tex-common. I might see whether I get some updates of ConTeXt out, too.
texlive2016-debian The changes in the binaries are mostly cosmetic: one removal of a non-free (unclear-free) file, and several upstream patches got cherrypicked (dvips, tltexjp contact email, upmendex, dvipdfmx). I played around with including LuaTeX v1.0, but that breaks horribly with the current packages in TeX Live, so I refrained from it. The infrastructure package tex-common got a bugfix for updates from previous releases, and for the other packages there is the usual bunch of updates and new packages. Enjoy! New packages arimo, arphic-ttf, babel-japanese, conv-xkv, css-colors, dtxdescribe, fgruler, footmisx, halloweenmath, keyfloat, luahyphenrules, math-into-latex-4, mendex-doc, missaali, mpostinl, padauk, platexcheat, pstring, pst-shell, ptex-fontmaps, scsnowman, stanli, tinos, undergradmath, yaletter. Updated packages acmart, animate, apxproof, arabluatex, arsclassica, babel-french, babel-russian, baskervillef, beamer, beebe, biber, biber.x86_64-linux, biblatex, biblatex-apa, biblatex-chem, biblatex-dw, biblatex-gb7714-2015, biblatex-ieee, biblatex-philosophy, biblatex-sbl, bidi, calxxxx-yyyy, chemgreek, churchslavonic, cochineal, comicneue, cquthesis, csquotes, ctanify, ctex, cweb, dataref, denisbdoc, diagbox, dozenal, dtk, dvipdfmx, dvipng, elocalloc, epstopdf, erewhon, etoolbox, exam-n, fbb, fei, fithesis, forest, glossaries, glossaries-extra, glossaries-french, gost, gzt, historische-zeitschrift, inconsolata, japanese-otf, japanese-otf-uptex, jsclasses, latex-bin, latex-make, latexmk, lt3graph, luatexja, markdown, mathspec, mcf2graph, media9, mendex-doc, metafont, mhchem, mweights, nameauth, noto, nwejm, old-arrows, omegaware, onlyamsmath, optidef, pdfpages, pdftools, perception, phonrule, platex-tools, polynom, preview, prooftrees, pst-geo, pstricks, pst-solides3d, ptex, ptex2pdf, ptex-fonts, qcircuit, quran, raleway, reledmac, resphilosophica, sanskrit, scalerel, scanpages, showexpl, siunitx, skdoc, skmath, skrapport, smartdiagram, sourcesanspro, sparklines, tabstackengine, tetex, tex, tex4ht, texlive-scripts, tikzsymbols, tocdata, uantwerpendocs, updmap-map, uplatex, uptex, uptex-fonts, withargs, wtref, xcharter, xcntperchap, xecjk, xellipsis, xepersian, xint, xlop, yathesis.

5 December 2016

Norbert Preining: Debian/TeX Live 2016.20161130-1

As we are moving closer to the Debian release freeze, I am shipping out a new set of packages. Nothing spectacular here, just the regular updates and a security fix that was only reported internally. Add sugar and a few minor bug fixes.
texlive2016-debian I have been silent for quite some time, busy at my new job, busy with my little monster, writing papers, caring for visitors, living. I have quite a lot of things I want to write, but not enough time, so very short only this one. Enjoy. New packages awesomebox, baskervillef, forest-quickstart, gofonts, iscram, karnaugh-map, tikz-optics, tikzpeople, unicode-bidi. Updated packages acmart, algorithms, aomart, apa, apa6, appendix, apxproof, arabluatex, asymptote, background, bangorexam, beamer, beebe, biblatex-gb7714-2015, biblatex-mla, biblatex-morenames, bibtexperllibs, bidi, bookcover, bxjalipsum, bxjscls, c90, cals, cell, cm, cmap, cmextra, context, cooking-units, ctex, cyrillic, dirtree, ekaia, enotez, errata, euler, exercises, fira, fonts-churchslavonic, formation-latex-ul, german, glossaries, graphics, handout, hustthesis, hyphen-base, ipaex, japanese, jfontmaps, kpathsea, l3build, l3experimental, l3kernel, l3packages, latex2e-help-texinfo-fr, layouts, listofitems, lshort-german, manfnt, mathastext, mcf2graph, media9, mflogo, ms, multirow, newpx, newtx, nlctdoc, notes, patch, pdfscreen, phonenumbers, platex, ptex, quran, readarray, reledmac, shapes, showexpl, siunitx, talk, tcolorbox, tetex, tex4ht, texlive-en, texlive-scripts, texworks, tikz-dependency, toptesi, tpslifonts, tracklang, tugboat, tugboat-plain, units, updmap-map, uplatex, uspace, wadalab, xecjk, xellipsis, xepersian, xint.

3 November 2016

Norbert Preining: Debian/TeX Live 2016.20161103-1

This month s update falls onto a national holiday in Japan. My recent start as a normal company employee in Japan doesn t leave me enough time during normal days to work on Debian, so things have to wait for holidays. There have been a few notable changes in the current packages, and above all I wanted to fix an RC bug and on the way fixed also several other (sometimes rather old) bugs.
texlive2016-debian From the list of new packages I want to pick apxproof: I have written something myself for one of my rather long papers (with proofs about 60pp), where at times I had to factor out the proofs into an appendix. I did this my own way, but I would have preferred to have a nice package! Another interesting change is the upstream merge of collection-mathextra (which translated to the Debian package texlive-math-extra) and collection-science (Debian: texlive-science) into a new collection collection-mathscience. Since introducing new packages and phasing out old ones is generally a pain in Debian, I decided to digress from the upstream naming convention and use texlive-science for the new collection-mathscience. In the end Mathematics is the most important science of all  Finally also a word about removals: Several ConTeXt packages have been removed due to the fact that they are outdated. These removals will find their way in an update of the Debian ConTeXt package in near future. The TeX Live packages lost voss-mathmode, which was retracted by the author due to various reasons. He is working on an updated version that will hopeful reappear in both TeX Live and Debian in near future. Well, that s it for now. Here now the full list with links. Enjoy. New packages apxproof, bangorexam, biblatex-gb7714-2015, biblatex-lni, biblatex-sbl, context-cmscbf, context-cmttbf, context-inifile, context-layout, delimset, latex2nemeth, latexbangla, latex-papersize, ling-macros, notex-bst, platex-tools, testidx, uppunctlm, wtref, xcolor-material. Removed packages voss-mathmode. Updated packages apa6, autoaligne, babel-german, biblatex-abnt, biblatex-anonymous, biblatex-apa, biblatex-manuscripts-philology, biblatex-nature, biblatex-realauthor, bibtex, bidi, boondox, bxcjkjatype, chickenize, churchslavonic, cjk-gs-integrate, context-filter, cooking-units, ctex, denisbdoc, dvips, europasscv, fixme, glossaries, gzt, handout, imakeidx, ipaex-type1, jsclasses, jslectureplanner, kpathsea, l3build, l3experimental, l3kernel, l3packages, latexindent, latexmk, listofitems, luatexja, marginnote, mcf2graph, minted, multirow, nameauth, newpx, newtx, noto, nucleardata, optidef, overlays, pdflatexpicscale, pst-eucl, reledmac, repere, scanpages, semantic-markup, tableaux, tcolorbox, tetex, texlive-scripts, ticket, todonotes, tracklang, tudscr, turabian-formatting, updmap-map, uspace, visualtikz, xassoccnt, xecjk, yathesis.

8 October 2016

Norbert Preining: Debian/TeX update October 2016: all of TeX Live and Biber 2.6

Finally a new update of many TeX related packages: all the texlive-* including the binary packages, and biber have been updated to the latest release. This upload was delayed by my travels around the world, as well as the necessity to package a new Perl module (libdatetime-calendar-julian-perl) as required by new Biber. Also, my new job leaves me only the weekends for packaging. Anyway, the packages are now uploaded and should appear soon on your friendly local server. texlive2016-debian There are several highlights: The binaries have been patched with several upstream fixes (tex4ht and XeTeX compatibility, as well as various Japanese TeX engine fixes), updated biber and biblatex, and as usual loads of new and updated packages. Last but not least I want to thank one particular author: His package was removed from TeX Live due to the addition of a rather unusual clause in the license. Instead of simply uploading new packages to Debian with the rather important removed, I contacted the author and asked for clarification. And to my great pleasure he immediately answered with an update of the package with fixed license. All of us user of these many packages should be grateful to the authors of the packages who invest loads of their free time into supporting our community. Thanks! Enough now, here as usual the list of new and updated packages with links to their respective CTAN pages. Enjoy. New packages addfont, apalike-german, autoaligne, baekmuk, beamerswitch, beamertheme-cuerna, beuron, biblatex-claves, biolett-bst, cooking-units, cstypo, emf, eulerpx, filecontentsdef, frederika2016, grant, latexgit, listofitems, overlays, phonenumbers, pst-arrow, quicktype, revquantum, richtext, semantic-markup, spalign, texproposal, tikz-page, unfonts-core, unfonts-extra, uspace. Updated packages achemso, acmart, acro, adobemapping, alegreya, allrunes, animate, arabluatex, archaeologie, asymptote, attachfile, babel-greek, bangorcsthesis, beebe, biblatex, biblatex-anonymous, biblatex-apa, biblatex-bookinother, biblatex-chem, biblatex-fiwi, biblatex-gost, biblatex-ieee, biblatex-manuscripts-philology, biblatex-morenames, biblatex-nature, biblatex-opcit-booktitle, biblatex-phys, biblatex-realauthor, biblatex-science, biblatex-true-citepages-omit, bibleref, bidi, chemformula, circuitikz, cochineal, colorspace, comment, covington, cquthesis, ctex, drawmatrix, ejpecp, erewhon, etoc, exsheets, fancyhdr, fei, fithesis, footnotehyper, fvextra, geschichtsfrkl, gnuplottex, gost, gregoriotex, hausarbeit-jura, ijsra, ipaex, jfontmaps, jsclasses, jslectureplanner, latexdiff, leadsheets, libertinust1math, luatexja, markdown, mcf2graph, minutes, multirow, mynsfc, nameauth, newpx, newtxsf, notespages, optidef, pas-cours, platex, prftree, pst-bezier, pst-circ, pst-eucl, pst-optic, pstricks, pstricks-add, refenums, reledmac, rsc, shdoc, siunitx, stackengine, tabstackengine, tagpair, tetex, texlive-es, texlive-scripts, ticket, translation-biblatex-de, tudscr, turabian-formatting, updmap-map, uplatex, xebaposter, xecjk, xepersian, xpinyin. Enjoy.

6 August 2016

Norbert Preining: Debian/TeX Live 2016.20160805-1

TUG 2016 is over, and I have returned from a wonderful trip to Toronto and Maine. High time to release a new checkout of the TeX Live packages. After that I will probably need some time for another checkout, as there are a lot of plans on the table: upstream created a new collection, which means new package in Debian, which needs to go through NEW, and I am also planning to integrate tex4ht to give it an update. Help greatly appreciated here. texlive2016-debian This package also sees the (third) revision of how config files for pdftex and luatex are structured, since then we have settled down. Hopefully this will close some of the issues that have appeared. New packages biblatex-ijsra, biblatex-nottsclassic, binarytree, diffcoeff, ecgdraw, fvextra, gitfile-info, graphics-def, ijsra, mgltex, milog, navydocs, nodetree, oldstandardt1, pdflatexpicscale, randomlist, texosquery Updated packages 2up, acmart, acro, amsmath, animate, apa6, arabluatex, archaeologie, autobreak, beebe, biblatex-abnt, biblatex-gost, biblatex-ieee, biblatex-mla, biblatex-source-division, biblatex-trad, binarytree, bxjscls, changes, cloze, covington, cs, csplain, csquotes, csvsimple, datatool, datetime2, disser, dvipdfmx, dvips, emisa, epstopdf, esami, etex-pkg, factura, fancytabs, forest, genealogytree, ghsystem, glyphlist, gost, graphics, hyperref, hyperxmp, imakeidx, jadetex, japanese-otf, kpathsea, latex, lstbayes, luatexja, mandi, mcf2graph, mfirstuc, minted, oldstandard, optidef, parnotes, philosophersimprint, platex, protex, pst-pdf, ptex, pythontex, readarray, reledmac, sepfootnotes, sf298, skmath, skrapport, stackengine, sttools, tcolorbox, tetex, texinfo, texlive-docindex, texlive-es, texlive-scripts, thesis-ekf, tools, toptesi, tudscr, turabian-formatting, updmap-map, uplatex, uptex, velthuis, xassoccnt, ycbook. Enjoy.

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