Search Results: "pierre"

11 April 2024

Reproducible Builds: Reproducible Builds in March 2024

Welcome to the March 2024 report from the Reproducible Builds project! In our reports, we attempt to outline what we have been up to over the past month, as well as mentioning some of the important things happening more generally in software supply-chain security. As ever, if you are interested in contributing to the project, please visit our Contribute page on our website. Table of contents:
  1. Arch Linux minimal container userland now 100% reproducible
  2. Validating Debian s build infrastructure after the XZ backdoor
  3. Making Fedora Linux (more) reproducible
  4. Increasing Trust in the Open Source Supply Chain with Reproducible Builds and Functional Package Management
  5. Software and source code identification with GNU Guix and reproducible builds
  6. Two new Rust-based tools for post-processing determinism
  7. Distribution work
  8. Mailing list highlights
  9. Website updates
  10. Delta chat clients now reproducible
  11. diffoscope updates
  12. Upstream patches
  13. Reproducibility testing framework

Arch Linux minimal container userland now 100% reproducible In remarkable news, Reproducible builds developer kpcyrd reported that that the Arch Linux minimal container userland is now 100% reproducible after work by developers dvzv and Foxboron on the one remaining package. This represents a real world , widely-used Linux distribution being reproducible. Their post, which kpcyrd suffixed with the question now what? , continues on to outline some potential next steps, including validating whether the container image itself could be reproduced bit-for-bit. The post, which was itself a followup for an Arch Linux update earlier in the month, generated a significant number of replies.

Validating Debian s build infrastructure after the XZ backdoor From our mailing list this month, Vagrant Cascadian wrote about being asked about trying to perform concrete reproducibility checks for recent Debian security updates, in an attempt to gain some confidence about Debian s build infrastructure given that they performed builds in environments running the high-profile XZ vulnerability. Vagrant reports (with some caveats):
So far, I have not found any reproducibility issues; everything I tested I was able to get to build bit-for-bit identical with what is in the Debian archive.
That is to say, reproducibility testing permitted Vagrant and Debian to claim with some confidence that builds performed when this vulnerable version of XZ was installed were not interfered with.

Making Fedora Linux (more) reproducible In March, Davide Cavalca gave a talk at the 2024 Southern California Linux Expo (aka SCALE 21x) about the ongoing effort to make the Fedora Linux distribution reproducible. Documented in more detail on Fedora s website, the talk touched on topics such as the specifics of implementing reproducible builds in Fedora, the challenges encountered, the current status and what s coming next. (YouTube video)

Increasing Trust in the Open Source Supply Chain with Reproducible Builds and Functional Package Management Julien Malka published a brief but interesting paper in the HAL open archive on Increasing Trust in the Open Source Supply Chain with Reproducible Builds and Functional Package Management:
Functional package managers (FPMs) and reproducible builds (R-B) are technologies and methodologies that are conceptually very different from the traditional software deployment model, and that have promising properties for software supply chain security. This thesis aims to evaluate the impact of FPMs and R-B on the security of the software supply chain and propose improvements to the FPM model to further improve trust in the open source supply chain. PDF
Julien s paper poses a number of research questions on how the model of distributions such as GNU Guix and NixOS can be leveraged to further improve the safety of the software supply chain , etc.

Software and source code identification with GNU Guix and reproducible builds In a long line of commendably detailed blog posts, Ludovic Court s, Maxim Cournoyer, Jan Nieuwenhuizen and Simon Tournier have together published two interesting posts on the GNU Guix blog this month. In early March, Ludovic Court s, Maxim Cournoyer, Jan Nieuwenhuizen and Simon Tournier wrote about software and source code identification and how that might be performed using Guix, rhetorically posing the questions: What does it take to identify software ? How can we tell what software is running on a machine to determine, for example, what security vulnerabilities might affect it? Later in the month, Ludovic Court s wrote a solo post describing adventures on the quest for long-term reproducible deployment. Ludovic s post touches on GNU Guix s aim to support time travel , the ability to reliably (and reproducibly) revert to an earlier point in time, employing the iconic image of Harold Lloyd hanging off the clock in Safety Last! (1925) to poetically illustrate both the slapstick nature of current modern technology and the gymnastics required to navigate hazards of our own making.

Two new Rust-based tools for post-processing determinism Zbigniew J drzejewski-Szmek announced add-determinism, a work-in-progress reimplementation of the Reproducible Builds project s own strip-nondeterminism tool in the Rust programming language, intended to be used as a post-processor in RPM-based distributions such as Fedora In addition, Yossi Kreinin published a blog post titled refix: fast, debuggable, reproducible builds that describes a tool that post-processes binaries in such a way that they are still debuggable with gdb, etc.. Yossi post details the motivation and techniques behind the (fast) performance of the tool.

Distribution work In Debian this month, since the testing framework no longer varies the build path, James Addison performed a bulk downgrade of the bug severity for issues filed with a level of normal to a new level of wishlist. In addition, 28 reviews of Debian packages were added, 38 were updated and 23 were removed this month adding to ever-growing knowledge about identified issues. As part of this effort, a number of issue types were updated, including Chris Lamb adding a new ocaml_include_directories toolchain issue [ ] and James Addison adding a new filesystem_order_in_java_jar_manifest_mf_include_resource issue [ ] and updating the random_uuid_in_notebooks_generated_by_nbsphinx to reference a relevant discussion thread [ ]. In addition, Roland Clobus posted his 24th status update of reproducible Debian ISO images. Roland highlights that the images for Debian unstable often cannot be generated due to changes in that distribution related to the 64-bit time_t transition. Lastly, Bernhard M. Wiedemann posted another monthly update for his reproducibility work in openSUSE.

Mailing list highlights Elsewhere on our mailing list this month:

Website updates There were made a number of improvements to our website this month, including:
  • Pol Dellaiera noticed the frequent need to correctly cite the website itself in academic work. To facilitate easier citation across multiple formats, Pol contributed a Citation File Format (CIF) file. As a result, an export in BibTeX format is now available in the Academic Publications section. Pol encourages community contributions to further refine the CITATION.cff file. Pol also added an substantial new section to the buy in page documenting the role of Software Bill of Materials (SBOMs) and ephemeral development environments. [ ][ ]
  • Bernhard M. Wiedemann added a new commandments page to the documentation [ ][ ] and fixed some incorrect YAML elsewhere on the site [ ].
  • Chris Lamb add three recent academic papers to the publications page of the website. [ ]
  • Mattia Rizzolo and Holger Levsen collaborated to add Infomaniak as a sponsor of amd64 virtual machines. [ ][ ][ ]
  • Roland Clobus updated the stable outputs page, dropping version numbers from Python documentation pages [ ] and noting that Python s set data structure is also affected by the PYTHONHASHSEED functionality. [ ]

Delta chat clients now reproducible Delta Chat, an open source messaging application that can work over email, announced this month that the Rust-based core library underlying Delta chat application is now reproducible.

diffoscope diffoscope is our in-depth and content-aware diff utility that can locate and diagnose reproducibility issues. This month, Chris Lamb made a number of changes such as uploading versions 259, 260 and 261 to Debian and made the following additional changes:
  • New features:
    • Add support for the zipdetails tool from the Perl distribution. Thanks to Fay Stegerman and Larry Doolittle et al. for the pointer and thread about this tool. [ ]
  • Bug fixes:
    • Don t identify Redis database dumps as GNU R database files based simply on their filename. [ ]
    • Add a missing call to File.recognizes so we actually perform the filename check for GNU R data files. [ ]
    • Don t crash if we encounter an .rdb file without an equivalent .rdx file. (#1066991)
    • Correctly check for 7z being available and not lz4 when testing 7z. [ ]
    • Prevent a traceback when comparing a contentful .pyc file with an empty one. [ ]
  • Testsuite improvements:
    • Fix .epub tests after supporting the new zipdetails tool. [ ]
    • Don t use parenthesis within test skipping messages, as PyTest adds its own parenthesis. [ ]
    • Factor out Python version checking in test_zip.py. [ ]
    • Skip some Zip-related tests under Python 3.10.14, as a potential regression may have been backported to the 3.10.x series. [ ]
    • Actually test 7z support in the test_7z set of tests, not the lz4 functionality. (Closes: reproducible-builds/diffoscope#359). [ ]
In addition, Fay Stegerman updated diffoscope s monkey patch for supporting the unusual Mozilla ZIP file format after Python s zipfile module changed to detect potentially insecure overlapping entries within .zip files. (#362) Chris Lamb also updated the trydiffoscope command line client, dropping a build-dependency on the deprecated python3-distutils package to fix Debian bug #1065988 [ ], taking a moment to also refresh the packaging to the latest Debian standards [ ]. Finally, Vagrant Cascadian submitted an update for diffoscope version 260 in GNU Guix. [ ]

Upstream patches This month, we wrote a large number of patches, including: Bernhard M. Wiedemann used reproducibility-tooling to detect and fix packages that added changes in their %check section, thus failing when built with the --no-checks option. Only half of all openSUSE packages were tested so far, but a large number of bugs were filed, including ones against caddy, exiv2, gnome-disk-utility, grisbi, gsl, itinerary, kosmindoormap, libQuotient, med-tools, plasma6-disks, pspp, python-pypuppetdb, python-urlextract, rsync, vagrant-libvirt and xsimd. Similarly, Jean-Pierre De Jesus DIAZ employed reproducible builds techniques in order to test a proposed refactor of the ath9k-htc-firmware package. As the change produced bit-for-bit identical binaries to the previously shipped pre-built binaries:
I don t have the hardware to test this firmware, but the build produces the same hashes for the firmware so it s safe to say that the firmware should keep working.

Reproducibility testing framework The Reproducible Builds project operates a comprehensive testing framework running primarily at tests.reproducible-builds.org in order to check packages and other artifacts for reproducibility. In March, an enormous number of changes were made by Holger Levsen:
  • Debian-related changes:
    • Sleep less after a so-called 404 package state has occurred. [ ]
    • Schedule package builds more often. [ ][ ]
    • Regenerate all our HTML indexes every hour, but only every 12h for the released suites. [ ]
    • Create and update unstable and experimental base systems on armhf again. [ ][ ]
    • Don t reschedule so many depwait packages due to the current size of the i386 architecture queue. [ ]
    • Redefine our scheduling thresholds and amounts. [ ]
    • Schedule untested packages with a higher priority, otherwise slow architectures cannot keep up with the experimental distribution growing. [ ]
    • Only create the stats_buildinfo.png graph once per day. [ ][ ]
    • Reproducible Debian dashboard: refactoring, update several more static stats only every 12h. [ ]
    • Document how to use systemctl with new systemd-based services. [ ]
    • Temporarily disable armhf and i386 continuous integration tests in order to get some stability back. [ ]
    • Use the deb.debian.org CDN everywhere. [ ]
    • Remove the rsyslog logging facility on bookworm systems. [ ]
    • Add zst to the list of packages which are false-positive diskspace issues. [ ]
    • Detect failures to bootstrap Debian base systems. [ ]
  • Arch Linux-related changes:
    • Temporarily disable builds because the pacman package manager is broken. [ ][ ]
    • Split reproducible_html_live_status and split the scheduling timing . [ ][ ][ ]
    • Improve handling when database is locked. [ ][ ]
  • Misc changes:
    • Show failed services that require manual cleanup. [ ][ ]
    • Integrate two new Infomaniak nodes. [ ][ ][ ][ ]
    • Improve IRC notifications for artifacts. [ ]
    • Run diffoscope in different systemd slices. [ ]
    • Run the node health check more often, as it can now repair some issues. [ ][ ]
    • Also include the string Bot in the userAgent for Git. (Re: #929013). [ ]
    • Document increased tmpfs size on our OUSL nodes. [ ]
    • Disable memory account for the reproducible_build service. [ ][ ]
    • Allow 10 times as many open files for the Jenkins service. [ ]
    • Set OOMPolicy=continue and OOMScoreAdjust=-1000 for both the Jenkins and the reproducible_build service. [ ]
Mattia Rizzolo also made the following changes:
  • Debian-related changes:
    • Define a systemd slice to group all relevant services. [ ][ ]
    • Add a bunch of quotes in scripts to assuage the shellcheck tool. [ ]
    • Add stats on how many packages have been built today so far. [ ]
    • Instruct systemd-run to handle diffoscope s exit codes specially. [ ]
    • Prefer the pgrep tool over grepping the output of ps. [ ]
    • Re-enable a couple of i386 and armhf architecture builders. [ ][ ]
    • Fix some stylistic issues flagged by the Python flake8 tool. [ ]
    • Cease scheduling Debian unstable and experimental on the armhf architecture due to the time_t transition. [ ]
    • Start a few more i386 & armhf workers. [ ][ ][ ]
    • Temporarly skip pbuilder updates in the unstable distribution, but only on the armhf architecture. [ ]
  • Other changes:
    • Perform some large-scale refactoring on how the systemd service operates. [ ][ ]
    • Move the list of workers into a separate file so it s accessible to a number of scripts. [ ]
    • Refactor the powercycle_x86_nodes.py script to use the new IONOS API and its new Python bindings. [ ]
    • Also fix nph-logwatch after the worker changes. [ ]
    • Do not install the stunnel tool anymore, it shouldn t be needed by anything anymore. [ ]
    • Move temporary directories related to Arch Linux into a single directory for clarity. [ ]
    • Update the arm64 architecture host keys. [ ]
    • Use a common Postfix configuration. [ ]
The following changes were also made by:
  • Jan-Benedict Glaw:
    • Initial work to clean up a messy NetBSD-related script. [ ][ ]
  • Roland Clobus:
    • Show the installer log if the installer fails to build. [ ]
    • Avoid the minus character (i.e. -) in a variable in order to allow for tags in openQA. [ ]
    • Update the schedule of Debian live image builds. [ ]
  • Vagrant Cascadian:
    • Maintenance on the virt* nodes is completed so bring them back online. [ ]
    • Use the fully qualified domain name in configuration. [ ]
Node maintenance was also performed by Holger Levsen, Mattia Rizzolo [ ][ ] and Vagrant Cascadian [ ][ ][ ][ ]
If you are interested in contributing to the Reproducible Builds project, please visit our Contribute page on our website. However, you can get in touch with us via:

26 February 2024

Sergio Durigan Junior: Planning to orphan Pagure on Debian

I have been thinking more and more about orphaning the Pagure Debian package. I don t have the time to maintain it properly anymore, and I have also lost interest in doing so.

What s Pagure Pagure is a git forge written entirely in Python using pygit2. It was almost entirely developed by one person, Pierre-Yves Chibon. He is (was?) a Red Hat employee and started working on this new git forge almost 10 years ago because the company wanted to develop something in-house for Fedora. The software is amazing and I admire Pierre-Yves quite a lot for what he was able to achieve basically alone. Unfortunately, a few years ago Fedora decided to move to Gitlab and the Pagure development pretty much stalled.

Pagure in Debian Packaging Pagure for Debian was hard, but it was also very fun. I learned quite a bit about many things (packaging and non-packaging related), interacted with the upstream community, decided to dogfood my own work and run my Pagure instance for a while, and tried to get newcomers to help me with the package (without much success, unfortunately). I remember that when I had started to package Pagure, Debian was also moving away from Alioth and discussing options. For a brief moment Pagure was a contender, but in the end the community decided to self-host Gitlab, and that s why we have Salsa now. I feel like I could have tipped the scales in favour of Pagure had I finished packaging it for Debian before the decision was made, but then again, to the best of my knowledge Salsa doesn t use our Gitlab package anyway

Are you interested in maintaining it? If you re interested in maintaining the package, please get in touch with me. I will happily pass the torch to someone else who is still using the software and wants to keep it healthy in Debian. If there is nobody interested, then I will just orphan it.

31 January 2024

Bits from Debian: New Debian Developers and Maintainers (November and December 2023)

The following contributors got their Debian Developer accounts in the last two months: The following contributor was added as Debian Maintainer in the last two months: Congratulations!

6 April 2023

Reproducible Builds: Reproducible Builds in March 2023

Welcome to the March 2023 report from the Reproducible Builds project. In these reports we outline the most important things that we have been up to over the past month. As a quick recap, the motivation behind the reproducible builds effort is to ensure no malicious flaws have been introduced during compilation and distributing processes. It does this by ensuring identical results are always generated from a given source, thus allowing multiple third-parties to come to a consensus on whether a build was compromised. If you are interested in contributing to the project, please do visit our Contribute page on our website.

News There was progress towards making the Go programming language reproducible this month, with the overall goal remaining making the Go binaries distributed from Google and by Arch Linux (and others) to be bit-for-bit identical. These changes could become part of the upcoming version 1.21 release of Go. An issue in the Go issue tracker (#57120) is being used to follow and record progress on this.
Arnout Engelen updated our website to add and update reproducibility-related links for NixOS to reproducible.nixos.org. [ ]. In addition, Chris Lamb made some cosmetic changes to our presentations and resources page. [ ][ ]
Intel published a guide on how to reproducibly build their Trust Domain Extensions (TDX) firmware. TDX here refers to an Intel technology that combines their existing virtual machine and memory encryption technology with a new kind of virtual machine guest called a Trust Domain. This runs the CPU in a mode that protects the confidentiality of its memory contents and its state from any other software.
A reproducibility-related bug from early 2020 in the GNU GCC compiler as been fixed. The issues was that if GCC was invoked via the as frontend, the -ffile-prefix-map was being ignored. We were tracking this in Debian via the build_path_captured_in_assembly_objects issue. It has now been fixed and will be reflected in GCC version 13.
Holger Levsen will present at foss-north 2023 in April of this year in Gothenburg, Sweden on the topic of Reproducible Builds, the first ten years.
Anthony Andreoli, Anis Lounis, Mourad Debbabi and Aiman Hanna of the Security Research Centre at Concordia University, Montreal published a paper this month entitled On the prevalence of software supply chain attacks: Empirical study and investigative framework:
Software Supply Chain Attacks (SSCAs) typically compromise hosts through trusted but infected software. The intent of this paper is twofold: First, we present an empirical study of the most prominent software supply chain attacks and their characteristics. Second, we propose an investigative framework for identifying, expressing, and evaluating characteristic behaviours of newfound attacks for mitigation and future defense purposes. We hypothesize that these behaviours are statistically malicious, existed in the past, and thus could have been thwarted in modernity through their cementation x-years ago. [ ]

On our mailing list this month:
  • Mattia Rizzolo is asking everyone in the community to save the date for the 2023 s Reproducible Builds summit which will take place between October 31st and November 2nd at Dock Europe in Hamburg, Germany. Separate announcement(s) to follow. [ ]
  • ahojlm posted an message announcing a new project which is the first project offering bootstrappable and verifiable builds without any binary seeds. That is to say, a way of providing a verifiable path towards trusted software development platform without relying on pre-provided binary code in order to prevent against various forms of compiler backdoors. The project s homepage is hosted on Tor (mirror).

The minutes and logs from our March 2023 IRC meeting have been published. In case you missed this one, our next IRC meeting will take place on Tuesday 25th April at 15:00 UTC on #reproducible-builds on the OFTC network.
and as a Valentines Day present, Holger Levsen wrote on his blog on 14th February to express his thanks to OSUOSL for their continuous support of reproducible-builds.org. [ ]

Debian Vagrant Cascadian developed an easier setup for testing debian packages which uses sbuild s unshare mode along and reprotest, our tool for building the same source code twice in different environments and then checking the binaries produced by each build for any differences. [ ]
Over 30 reviews of Debian packages were added, 14 were updated and 7 were removed this month, all adding to our knowledge about identified issues. A number of issues were updated, including the Holger Levsen updating build_path_captured_in_assembly_objects to note that it has been fixed for GCC 13 [ ] and Vagrant Cascadian added new issues to mark packages where the build path is being captured via the Rust toolchain [ ] as well as new categorisation for where virtual packages have nondeterministic versioned dependencies [ ].

Upstream patches The Reproducible Builds project detects, dissects and attempts to fix as many currently-unreproducible packages as possible. We endeavour to send all of our patches upstream where appropriate. This month, we wrote a large number of such patches, including: In addition, Vagrant Cascadian filed a bug with a patch to ensure GNU Modula-2 supports the SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH environment variable.

Testing framework The Reproducible Builds project operates a comprehensive testing framework (available at tests.reproducible-builds.org) in order to check packages and other artifacts for reproducibility. In March, the following changes were made by Holger Levsen:
  • Arch Linux-related changes:
    • Build Arch packages in /tmp/archlinux-ci/$SRCPACKAGE instead of /tmp/$SRCPACKAGE. [ ]
    • Start 2/3 of the builds on the o1 node, the rest on o2. [ ]
    • Add graphs for Arch Linux (and OpenWrt) builds. [ ]
    • Toggle Arch-related builders to debug why a specific node overloaded. [ ][ ][ ][ ]
  • Node health checks:
    • Detect SetuptoolsDeprecationWarning tracebacks in Python builds. [ ]
    • Detect failures do perform chdist calls. [ ][ ]
  • OSUOSL node migration.
    • Install megacli packages that are needed for hardware RAID. [ ][ ]
    • Add health check and maintenance jobs for new nodes. [ ]
    • Add mail config for new nodes. [ ][ ]
    • Handle a node running in the future correctly. [ ][ ]
    • Migrate some nodes to Debian bookworm. [ ]
    • Fix nodes health overview for osuosl3. [ ]
    • Make sure the /srv/workspace directory is owned by by the jenkins user. [ ]
    • Use .debian.net names everywhere, except when communicating with the outside world. [ ]
    • Grant fpierret access to a new node. [ ]
    • Update documentation. [ ]
    • Misc migration changes. [ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ]
  • Misc changes:
    • Enable fail2ban everywhere and monitor it with munin [ ].
    • Gracefully deal with non-existing Alpine schroots. [ ]
In addition, Roland Clobus is continuing his work on reproducible Debian ISO images:
  • Add/update openQA configuration [ ], and use the actual timestamp for openQA builds [ ].
  • Moved adding the user to the docker group from the janitor_setup_worker script to the (more general) update_jdn.sh script. [ ]
  • Use the (short-term) reproducible source when generating live-build images. [ ]

diffoscope development diffoscope is our in-depth and content-aware diff utility. Not only can it locate and diagnose reproducibility issues, it can provide human-readable diffs from many kinds of binary formats as well. This month, Mattia Rizzolo released versions 238, and Chris Lamb released versions 239 and 240. Chris Lamb also made the following changes:
  • Fix compatibility with PyPDF 3.x, and correctly restore test data. [ ]
  • Rework PDF annotation handling into a separate method. [ ]
In addition, Holger Levsen performed a long-overdue overhaul of the Lintian overrides in the Debian packaging [ ][ ][ ][ ], and Mattia Rizzolo updated the packaging to silence an include_package_data=True [ ], fixed the build under Debian bullseye [ ], fixed tool name in a list of tools permitted to be absent during package build tests [ ] and as well as documented sending out an email upon [ ]. In addition, Vagrant Cascadian updated the version of GNU Guix to 238 [ and 239 [ ]. Vagrant also updated reprotest to version 0.7.23. [ ]

Other development work Bernhard M. Wiedemann published another monthly report about reproducibility within openSUSE

If you are interested in contributing to the Reproducible Builds project, please visit our Contribute page on our website. However, you can get in touch with us via:

28 December 2022

Chris Lamb: Favourite books of 2022: Classics

As a follow-up to yesterday's post detailing my favourite works of fiction from 2022, today I'll be listing my favourite fictional works that are typically filed under classics. Books that just missed the cut here include: E. M. Forster's A Room with a View (1908) and his later A Passage to India (1913), both gently nudged out by Forster's superb Howard's End (see below). Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa's The Leopard (1958) also just missed out on a write-up here, but I can definitely recommend it to anyone interested in reading a modern Italian classic.

War and Peace (1867) Leo Tolstoy It's strange to think that there is almost no point in reviewing this novel: who hasn't heard of War and Peace? What more could possibly be said about it now? Still, when I was growing up, War and Peace was always the stereotypical example of the 'impossible book', and even start it was, at best, a pointless task, and an act of hubris at worst. And so there surely exists a parallel universe in which I never have and will never will read the book... Nevertheless, let us try to set the scene. Book nine of the novel opens as follows:
On the twelfth of June, 1812, the forces of Western Europe crossed the Russian frontier and war began; that is, an event took place opposed to human reason and to human nature. Millions of men perpetrated against one another such innumerable crimes, frauds, treacheries, thefts, forgeries, issues of false money, burglaries, incendiarisms and murders as in whole centuries are not recorded in the annals of all the law courts of the world, but which those who committed them did not at the time regard as being crimes. What produced this extraordinary occurrence? What were its causes? [ ] The more we try to explain such events in history reasonably, the more unreasonable and incomprehensible they become to us.
Set against the backdrop of the Napoleonic Wars and Napoleon's invasion of Russia, War and Peace follows the lives and fates of three aristocratic families: The Rostovs, The Bolkonskys and the Bezukhov's. These characters find themselves situated athwart (or against) history, and all this time, Napoleon is marching ever closer to Moscow. Still, Napoleon himself is essentially just a kind of wallpaper for a diverse set of personal stories touching on love, jealousy, hatred, retribution, naivety, nationalism, stupidity and much much more. As Elif Batuman wrote earlier this year, "the whole premise of the book was that you couldn t explain war without recourse to domesticity and interpersonal relations." The result is that Tolstoy has woven an incredibly intricate web that connects the war, noble families and the everyday Russian people to a degree that is surprising for a book started in 1865. Tolstoy's characters are probably timeless (especially the picaresque adventures and constantly changing thoughts Pierre Bezukhov), and the reader who has any social experience will immediately recognise characters' thoughts and actions. Some of this is at a 'micro' interpersonal level: for instance, take this example from the elegant party that opens the novel:
Each visitor performed the ceremony of greeting this old aunt whom not one of them knew, not one of them wanted to know, and not one of them cared about. The aunt spoke to each of them in the same words, about their health and her own and the health of Her Majesty, who, thank God, was better today. And each visitor, though politeness prevented his showing impatience, left the old woman with a sense of relief at having performed a vexatious duty and did not return to her the whole evening.
But then, some of the focus of the observations are at the 'macro' level of the entire continent. This section about cities that feel themselves in danger might suffice as an example:
At the approach of danger, there are always two voices that speak with equal power in the human soul: one very reasonably tells a man to consider the nature of the danger and the means of escaping it; the other, still more reasonably, says that it is too depressing and painful to think of the danger, since it is not in man s power to foresee everything and avert the general course of events, and it is therefore better to disregard what is painful till it comes and to think about what is pleasant. In solitude, a man generally listens to the first voice, but in society to the second.
And finally, in his lengthy epilogues, Tolstoy offers us a dissertation on the behaviour of large organisations, much of it through engagingly witty analogies. These epilogues actually turn out to be an oblique and sarcastic commentary on the idiocy of governments and the madness of war in general. Indeed, the thorough dismantling of the 'great man' theory of history is a common theme throughout the book:
During the whole of that period [of 1812], Napoleon, who seems to us to have been the leader of all these movements as the figurehead of a ship may seem to a savage to guide the vessel acted like a child who, holding a couple of strings inside a carriage, thinks he is driving it. [ ] Why do [we] all speak of a military genius ? Is a man a genius who can order bread to be brought up at the right time and say who is to go to the right and who to the left? It is only because military men are invested with pomp and power and crowds of sychophants flatter power, attributing to it qualities of genius it does not possess.
Unlike some other readers, I especially enjoyed these diversions into the accounting and workings of history, as well as our narrow-minded way of trying to 'explain' things in a singular way:
When an apple has ripened and falls, why does it fall? Because of its attraction to the earth, because its stalk withers, because it is dried by the sun, because it grows heavier, because the wind shakes it, or because the boy standing below wants to eat it? Nothing is the cause. All this is only the coincidence of conditions in which all vital organic and elemental events occur. And the botanist who finds that the apple falls because the cellular tissue decays and so forth is equally right with the child who stands under the tree and says the apple fell because he wanted to eat it and prayed for it.
Given all of these serious asides, I was also not expecting this book to be quite so funny. At the risk of boring the reader with citations, take this sarcastic remark about the ineptness of medicine men:
After his liberation, [Pierre] fell ill and was laid up for three months. He had what the doctors termed 'bilious fever.' But despite the fact that the doctors treated him, bled him and gave him medicines to drink he recovered.
There is actually a multitude of remarks that are not entirely complimentary towards Russian medical practice, but they are usually deployed with an eye to the human element involved rather than simply to the detriment of a doctor's reputation "How would the count have borne his dearly loved daughter s illness had he not known that it was costing him a thousand rubles?" Other elements of note include some stunning set literary pieces, such as when Prince Andrei encounters a gnarly oak tree under two different circumstances in his life, and when Nat sha's 'Russian' soul is awakened by the strains of a folk song on the balalaika. Still, despite all of these micro- and macro-level happenings, for a long time I felt that something else was going on in War and Peace. It was difficult to put into words precisely what it was until I came across this passage by E. M. Forster:
After one has read War and Peace for a bit, great chords begin to sound, and we cannot say exactly what struck them. They do not arise from the story [and] they do not come from the episodes nor yet from the characters. They come from the immense area of Russia, over which episodes and characters have been scattered, from the sum-total of bridges and frozen rivers, forests, roads, gardens and fields, which accumulate grandeur and sonority after we have passed them. Many novelists have the feeling for place, [but] very few have the sense of space, and the possession of it ranks high in Tolstoy s divine equipment. Space is the lord of War and Peace, not time.
'Space' indeed. Yes, potential readers should note the novel's great length, but the 365 chapters are actually remarkably short, so the sensation of reading it is not in the least overwhelming. And more importantly, once you become familiar with its large cast of characters, it is really not a difficult book to follow, especially when compared to the other Russian classics. My only regret is that it has taken me so long to read this magnificent novel and that I might find it hard to find time to re-read it within the next few years.

Coming Up for Air (1939) George Orwell It wouldn't be a roundup of mine without at least one entry from George Orwell, and, this year, that place is occupied by a book I hadn't haven't read in almost two decades Still, the George Bowling of Coming Up for Air is a middle-aged insurance salesman who lives in a distinctly average English suburban row house with his nuclear family. One day, after winning some money on a bet, he goes back to the village where he grew up in order to fish in a pool he remembers from thirty years before. Less important than the plot, however, is both the well-observed remarks and scathing criticisms that Bowling has of the town he has returned to, combined with an ominous sense of foreboding before the Second World War breaks out. At several times throughout the book, George's placid thoughts about his beloved carp pool are replaced by racing, anxious thoughts that overwhelm his inner peace:
War is coming. In 1941, they say. And there'll be plenty of broken crockery, and little houses ripped open like packing-cases, and the guts of the chartered accountant's clerk plastered over the piano that he's buying on the never-never. But what does that kind of thing matter, anyway? I'll tell you what my stay in Lower Binfield had taught me, and it was this. IT'S ALL GOING TO HAPPEN. All the things you've got at the back of your mind, the things you're terrified of, the things that you tell yourself are just a nightmare or only happen in foreign countries. The bombs, the food-queues, the rubber truncheons, the barbed wire, the coloured shirts, the slogans, the enormous faces, the machine-guns squirting out of bedroom windows. It's all going to happen. I know it - at any rate, I knew it then. There's no escape. Fight against it if you like, or look the other way and pretend not to notice, or grab your spanner and rush out to do a bit of face-smashing along with the others. But there's no way out. It's just something that's got to happen.
Already we can hear psychological madness that underpinned the Second World War. Indeed, there is no great story in Coming Up For Air, no wonderfully empathetic characters and no revelations or catharsis, so it is impressive that I was held by the descriptions, observations and nostalgic remembrances about life in modern Lower Binfield, its residents, and how it has changed over the years. It turns out, of course, that George's beloved pool has been filled in with rubbish, and the village has been perverted by modernity beyond recognition. And to cap it off, the principal event of George's holiday in Lower Binfield is an accidental bombing by the British Royal Air Force. Orwell is always good at descriptions of awful food, and this book is no exception:
The frankfurter had a rubber skin, of course, and my temporary teeth weren't much of a fit. I had to do a kind of sawing movement before I could get my teeth through the skin. And then suddenly pop! The thing burst in my mouth like a rotten pear. A sort of horrible soft stuff was oozing all over my tongue. But the taste! For a moment I just couldn't believe it. Then I rolled my tongue around it again and had another try. It was fish! A sausage, a thing calling itself a frankfurter, filled with fish! I got up and walked straight out without touching my coffee. God knows what that might have tasted of.
Many other tell-tale elements of Orwell's fictional writing are in attendance in this book as well, albeit worked out somewhat less successfully than elsewhere in his oeuvre. For example, the idea of a physical ailment also serving as a metaphor is present in George's false teeth, embodying his constant preoccupation with his ageing. (Readers may recall Winston Smith's varicose ulcer representing his repressed humanity in Nineteen Eighty-Four). And, of course, we have a prematurely middle-aged protagonist who almost but not quite resembles Orwell himself. Given this and a few other niggles (such as almost all the women being of the typical Orwell 'nagging wife' type), it is not exactly Orwell's magnum opus. But it remains a fascinating historical snapshot of the feeling felt by a vast number of people just prior to the Second World War breaking out, as well as a captivating insight into how the process of nostalgia functions and operates.

Howards End (1910) E. M. Forster Howards End begins with the following sentence:
One may as well begin with Helen s letters to her sister.
In fact, "one may as well begin with" my own assumptions about this book instead. I was actually primed to consider Howards End a much more 'Victorian' book: I had just finished Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway and had found her 1925 book at once rather 'modern' but also very much constrained by its time. I must have then unconsciously surmised that a book written 15 years before would be even more inscrutable, and, with its Victorian social mores added on as well, Howards End would probably not undress itself so readily in front of the reader. No doubt there were also the usual expectations about 'the classics' as well. So imagine my surprise when I realised just how inordinately affable and witty Howards End turned out to be. It doesn't have that Wildean shine of humour, of course, but it's a couple of fields over in the English countryside, perhaps abutting the more mordant social satires of the earlier George Orwell novels (see Coming Up for Air above). But now let us return to the story itself. Howards End explores class warfare, conflict and the English character through a tale of three quite different families at the beginning of the twentieth century: the rich Wilcoxes; the gentle & idealistic Schlegels; and the lower-middle class Basts. As the Bloomsbury Group Schlegel sisters desperately try to help the Basts and educate the rich but close-minded Wilcoxes, the three families are drawn ever closer and closer together. Although the whole story does, I suppose, revolve around the house in the title (which is based on the Forster's own childhood home), Howards End is perhaps best described as a comedy of manners or a novel that shows up the hypocrisy of people and society. In fact, it is surprising how little of the story actually takes place in the eponymous house, with the overwhelming majority of the first half of the book taking place in London. But it is perhaps more illuminating to remark that the Howards End of the book is a house that the Wilcoxes who own it at the start of the novel do not really need or want. What I particularly liked about Howards End is how the main character's ideals alter as they age, and subsequently how they find their lives changing in different ways. Some of them find themselves better off at the end, others worse. And whilst it is also surprisingly funny, it still manages to trade in heavier social topics as well. This is apparent in the fact that, although the characters themselves are primarily in charge of their own destinies, their choices are still constrained by the changing world and shifting sense of morality around them. This shouldn't be too surprising: after all, Forster's novel was published just four years before the Great War, a distinctly uncertain time. Not for nothing did Virginia Woolf herself later observe that "on or about December 1910, human character changed" and that "all human relations have shifted: those between masters and servants, husbands and wives, parents and children." This process can undoubtedly be seen rehearsed throughout Forster's Howards End, and it's a credit to the author to be able to capture it so early on, if not even before it was widespread throughout Western Europe. I was also particularly taken by Forster's fertile use of simile. An extremely apposite example can be found in the description Tibby Schlegel gives of his fellow Cambridge undergraduates. Here, Timmy doesn't want to besmirch his lofty idealisation of them with any banal specificities, and wishes that the idea of them remain as ideal Platonic forms instead. Or, as Forster puts it, to Timmy it is if they are "pictures that must not walk out of their frames." Wilde, at his most weakest, is 'just' style, but Forster often deploys his flair for a deeper effect. Indeed, when you get to the end of this section mentioning picture frames, you realise Forster has actually just smuggled into the story a failed attempt on Tibby's part to engineer an anonymous homosexual encounter with another undergraduate. It is a credit to Forster's sleight-of-hand that you don't quite notice what has just happened underneath you and that the books' reticence to honestly describe what has happened is thus structually analogus Tibby's reluctance to admit his desires to himself. Another layer to the character of Tibby (and the novel as a whole) is thereby introduced without the imposition of clumsy literary scaffolding. In a similar vein, I felt very clever noticing the arch reference to Debussy's Pr lude l'apr s-midi d'un faune until I realised I just fell into the trap Forster set for the reader in that I had become even more like Tibby in his pseudo-scholarly views on classical music. Finally, I enjoyed that each chapter commences with an ironic and self-conscious bon mot about society which is only slightly overblown for effect. Particularly amusing are the ironic asides on "women" that run through the book, ventriloquising the narrow-minded views of people like the Wilcoxes. The omniscient and amiable narrator of the book also recalls those ironically distant voiceovers from various French New Wave films at times, yet Forster's narrator seems to have bigger concerns in his mordant asides: Forster seems to encourage some sympathy for all of the characters even the more contemptible ones at their worst moments. Highly recommended, as are Forster's A Room with a View (1908) and his slightly later A Passage to India (1913).

The Good Soldier (1915) Ford Madox Ford The Good Soldier starts off fairly simply as the narrator's account of his and his wife's relationship with some old friends, including the eponymous 'Good Soldier' of the book's title. It's an experience to read the beginning of this novel, as, like any account of endless praise of someone you've never met or care about, the pages of approving remarks about them appear to be intended to wash over you. Yet as the chapters of The Good Soldier go by, the account of the other characters in the book gets darker and darker. Although the author himself is uncritical of others' actions, your own critical faculties are slowgrly brought into play, and you gradully begin to question the narrator's retelling of events. Our narrator is an unreliable narrator in the strict sense of the term, but with the caveat that he is at least is telling us everything we need to know to come to our own conclusions. As the book unfolds further, the narrator's compromised credibility seems to infuse every element of the novel even the 'Good' of the book's title starts to seem like a minor dishonesty, perhaps serving as the inspiration for the irony embedded in the title of The 'Great' Gatsby. Much more effectively, however, the narrator's fixations, distractions and manner of speaking feel very much part of his dissimulation. It sometimes feels like he is unconsciously skirting over the crucial elements in his tale, exactly like one does in real life when recounting a story containing incriminating ingredients. Indeed, just how much the narrator is conscious of his own concealment is just one part of what makes this such an interesting book: Ford Madox Ford has gifted us with enough ambiguity that it is also possible that even the narrator cannot find it within himself to understand the events of the story he is narrating. It was initially hard to believe that such a carefully crafted analysis of a small group of characters could have been written so long ago, and despite being fairly easy to read, The Good Soldier is an almost infinitely subtle book even the jokes are of the subtle kind and will likely get a re-read within the next few years.

Anna Karenina (1878) Leo Tolstoy There are many similar themes running through War and Peace (reviewed above) and Anna Karenina. Unrequited love; a young man struggling to find a purpose in life; a loving family; an overwhelming love of nature and countless fascinating observations about the minuti of Russian society. Indeed, rather than primarily being about the eponymous Anna, Anna Karenina provides a vast panorama of contemporary life in Russia and of humanity in general. Nevertheless, our Anna is a sophisticated woman who abandons her empty existence as the wife of government official Alexei Karenin, a colourless man who has little personality of his own, and she turns to a certain Count Vronsky in order to fulfil her passionate nature. Needless to say, this results in tragic consequences as their (admittedly somewhat qualified) desire to live together crashes against the rocks of reality and Russian society. Parallel to Anna's narrative, though, Konstantin Levin serves as the novel's alter-protagonist. In contrast to Anna, Levin is a socially awkward individual who straddles many schools of thought within Russia at the time: he is neither a free-thinker (nor heavy-drinker) like his brother Nikolai, and neither is he a bookish intellectual like his half-brother Serge. In short, Levin is his own man, and it is generally agreed by commentators that he is Tolstoy's surrogate within the novel. Levin tends to come to his own version of an idea, and he would rather find his own way than adopt any prefabricated view, even if confusion and muddle is the eventual result. In a roughly isomorphic fashion then, he resembles Anna in this particular sense, whose story is a counterpart to Levin's in their respective searches for happiness and self-actualisation. Whilst many of the passionate and exciting passages are told on Anna's side of the story (I'm thinking horse race in particular, as thrilling as anything in cinema ), many of the broader political thoughts about the nature of the working classes are expressed on Levin's side instead. These are stirring and engaging in their own way, though, such as when he joins his peasants to mow the field and seems to enter the nineteenth-century version of 'flow':
The longer Levin mowed, the more often he felt those moments of oblivion during which it was no longer his arms that swung the scythe, but the scythe itself that lent motion to his whole body, full of life and conscious of itself, and, as if by magic, without a thought of it, the work got rightly and neatly done on its own. These were the most blissful moments.
Overall, Tolstoy poses no didactic moral message towards any of the characters in Anna Karenina, and merely invites us to watch rather than judge. (Still, there is a hilarious section that is scathing of contemporary classical music, presaging many of the ideas found in Tolstoy's 1897 What is Art?). In addition, just like the earlier War and Peace, the novel is run through with a number of uncannily accurate observations about daily life:
Anna smiled, as one smiles at the weaknesses of people one loves, and, putting her arm under his, accompanied him to the door of the study.
... as well as the usual sprinkling of Tolstoy's sardonic humour ("No one is pleased with his fortune, but everyone is pleased with his wit."). Fyodor Dostoyevsky, the other titan of Russian literature, once described Anna Karenina as a "flawless work of art," and if you re only going to read one Tolstoy novel in your life, it should probably be this one.

8 December 2022

Reproducible Builds: Reproducible Builds in November 2022

Welcome to yet another report from the Reproducible Builds project, this time for November 2022. In all of these reports (which we have been publishing regularly since May 2015) we attempt to outline the most important things that we have been up to over the past month. As always, if you interested in contributing to the project, please visit our Contribute page on our website.

Reproducible Builds Summit 2022 Following-up from last month s report about our recent summit in Venice, Italy, a comprehensive report from the meeting has not been finalised yet watch this space! As a very small preview, however, we can link to several issues that were filed about the website during the summit (#38, #39, #40, #41, #42, #43, etc.) and collectively learned about Software Bill of Materials (SBOM) s and how .buildinfo files can be seen/used as SBOMs. And, no less importantly, the Reproducible Builds t-shirt design has been updated

Reproducible Builds at European Cyber Week 2022 During the European Cyber Week 2022, a Capture The Flag (CTF) cybersecurity challenge was created by Fr d ric Pierret on the subject of Reproducible Builds. The challenge consisted in a pedagogical sense based on how to make a software release reproducible. To progress through the challenge issues that affect the reproducibility of build (such as build path, timestamps, file ordering, etc.) were to be fixed in steps in order to get the final flag in order to win the challenge. At the end of the competition, five people succeeded in solving the challenge, all of whom were awarded with a shirt. Fr d ric Pierret intends to create similar challenge in the form of a how to in the Reproducible Builds documentation, but two of the 2022 winners are shown here:

On business adoption and use of reproducible builds Simon Butler announced on the rb-general mailing list that the Software Quality Journal published an article called On business adoption and use of reproducible builds for open and closed source software. This article is an interview-based study which focuses on the adoption and uses of Reproducible Builds in industry, with a focus on investigating the reasons why organisations might not have adopted them:
[ ] industry application of R-Bs appears limited, and we seek to understand whether awareness is low or if significant technical and business reasons prevent wider adoption.
This is achieved through interviews with software practitioners and business managers, and touches on both the business and technical reasons supporting the adoption (or not) of Reproducible Builds. The article also begins with an excellent explanation and literature review, and even introduces a new helpful analogy for reproducible builds:
[Users are] able to perform a bitwise comparison of the two binaries to verify that they are identical and that the distributed binary is indeed built from the source code in the way the provider claims. Applied in this manner, R-Bs function as a canary, a mechanism that indicates when something might be wrong, and offer an improvement in security over running unverified binaries on computer systems.
The full paper is available to download on an open access basis. Elsewhere in academia, Beatriz Michelson Reichert and Rafael R. Obelheiro have published a paper proposing a systematic threat model for a generic software development pipeline identifying possible mitigations for each threat (PDF). Under the Tampering rubric of their paper, various attacks against Continuous Integration (CI) processes:
An attacker may insert a backdoor into a CI or build tool and thus introduce vulnerabilities into the software (resulting in an improper build). To avoid this threat, it is the developer s responsibility to take due care when making use of third-party build tools. Tampered compilers can be mitigated using diversity, as in the diverse double compiling (DDC) technique. Reproducible builds, a recent research topic, can also provide mitigation for this problem. (PDF)

Misc news
On our mailing list this month:

Debian & other Linux distributions Over 50 reviews of Debian packages were added this month, another 48 were updated and almost 30 were removed, all of which adds to our knowledge about identified issues. Two new issue types were added as well. [ ][ ]. Vagrant Cascadian announced on our mailing list another online sprint to help clear the huge backlog of reproducible builds patches submitted by performing NMUs (Non-Maintainer Uploads). The first such sprint took place on September 22nd, but others were held on October 6th and October 20th. There were two additional sprints that occurred in November, however, which resulted in the following progress: Lastly, Roland Clobus posted his latest update of the status of reproducible Debian ISO images on our mailing list. This reports that all major desktops build reproducibly with bullseye, bookworm and sid as well as that no custom patches needed to applied to Debian unstable for this result to occur. During November, however, Roland proposed some modifications to live-setup and the rebuild script has been adjusted to fix the failing Jenkins tests for Debian bullseye [ ][ ].
In other news, Miro Hron ok proposed a change to clamp build modification times to the value of SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH. This was initially suggested and discussed on a devel@ mailing list post but was later written up on the Fedora Wiki as well as being officially proposed to Fedora Engineering Steering Committee (FESCo).

Upstream patches The Reproducible Builds project detects, dissects and attempts to fix as many currently-unreproducible packages as possible. We endeavour to send all of our patches upstream where appropriate. This month, we wrote a large number of such patches, including:

diffoscope diffoscope is our in-depth and content-aware diff utility. Not only can it locate and diagnose reproducibility issues, it can provide human-readable diffs from many kinds of binary formats. This month, Chris Lamb prepared and uploaded versions 226 and 227 to Debian:
  • Support both python3-progressbar and python3-progressbar2, two modules providing the progressbar Python module. [ ]
  • Don t run Python decompiling tests on Python bytecode that file(1) cannot detect yet and Python 3.11 cannot unmarshal. (#1024335)
  • Don t attempt to attach text-only differences notice if there are no differences to begin with. (#1024171)
  • Make sure we recommend apksigcopier. [ ]
  • Tidy generation of os_list. [ ]
  • Make the code clearer around generating the Debian substvars . [ ]
  • Use our assert_diff helper in test_lzip.py. [ ]
  • Drop other copyright notices from lzip.py and test_lzip.py. [ ]
In addition to this, Christopher Baines added lzip support [ ], and FC Stegerman added an optimisation whereby we don t run apktool if no differences are detected before the signing block [ ].
A significant number of changes were made to the Reproducible Builds website and documentation this month, including Chris Lamb ensuring the openEuler logo is correctly visible with a white background [ ], FC Stegerman de-duplicated by email address to avoid listing some contributors twice [ ], Herv Boutemy added Apache Maven to the list of affiliated projects [ ] and boyska updated our Contribute page to remark that the Reproducible Builds presence on salsa.debian.org is not just the Git repository but is also for creating issues [ ][ ]. In addition to all this, however, Holger Levsen made the following changes:
  • Add a number of existing publications [ ][ ] and update metadata for some existing publications as well [ ].
  • Hide draft posts on the website homepage. [ ]
  • Add the Warpforge build tool as a participating project of the summit. [ ]
  • Clarify in the footer that we welcome patches to the website repository. [ ]

Testing framework The Reproducible Builds project operates a comprehensive testing framework at tests.reproducible-builds.org in order to check packages and other artifacts for reproducibility. In October, the following changes were made by Holger Levsen:
  • Improve the generation of meta package sets (used in grouping packages for reporting/statistical purposes) to treat Debian bookworm as equivalent to Debian unstable in this specific case [ ] and to parse the list of packages used in the Debian cloud images [ ][ ][ ].
  • Temporarily allow Frederic to ssh(1) into our snapshot server as the jenkins user. [ ]
  • Keep some reproducible jobs Jenkins logs much longer [ ] (later reverted).
  • Improve the node health checks to detect failures to update the Debian cloud image package set [ ][ ] and to improve prioritisation of some kernel warnings [ ].
  • Always echo any IRC output to Jenkins output as well. [ ]
  • Deal gracefully with problems related to processing the cloud image package set. [ ]
Finally, Roland Clobus continued his work on testing Live Debian images, including adding support for specifying the origin of the Debian installer [ ] and to warn when the image has unmet dependencies in the package list (e.g. due to a transition) [ ].
If you are interested in contributing to the Reproducible Builds project, please visit our Contribute page on our website. You can get in touch with us via:

8 September 2022

Antoine Beaupr : Complaint about Canada's phone cartel

I have just filed a complaint with the CRTC about my phone provider's outrageous fees. This is a copy of the complaint.
I am traveling to Europe, specifically to Ireland, for a 6 days for a work meeting. I thought I could use my phone there. So I looked at my phone provider's services in Europe, and found the "Fido roaming" services: https://www.fido.ca/mobility/roaming The fees, at the time of writing, at fifteen (15!) dollars PER DAY to get access to my regular phone service (not unlimited!!). If I do not use that "roaming" service, the fees are: That is absolutely outrageous. Any random phone plan in Europe will be cheaper than this, by at least one order of magnitude. Just to take any example: https://www.tescomobile.ie/sim-only-plans.aspx Those fine folks offer a one-time, prepaid plan for 15 for 28 days which includes: I think it's absolutely scandalous that telecommunications providers in Canada can charge so much money, especially since the most prohibitive fee (the "non-prepaid" plans) are automatically charged if I happen to forget to remove my sim card or put my phone in "airplane mode". As advised, I have called customer service at Fido for advice on how to handle this situation. They have confirmed those are the only plans available for travelers and could not accommodate me otherwise. I have notified them I was in the process of filing this complaint. I believe that Canada has become the technological dunce of the world, and I blame the CRTC for its lack of regulation in that matter. You should not allow those companies to grow into such a cartel that they can do such price-fixing as they wish. I haven't investigated Fido's competitors, but I will bet at least one of my hats that they do not offer better service. I attach a screenshot of the Fido page showing those outrageous fees.
I have no illusions about this having any effect. I thought of filing such a complain after the Rogers outage as well, but felt I had less of a standing there because I wasn't affected that much (e.g. I didn't have a life-threatening situation myself). This, however, was ridiculous and frustrating enough to trigger this outrage. We'll see how it goes...
"We will respond to you within 10 working days."

Response from CRTC They did respond within 10 days. Here is the full response:
Dear Antoine Beaupr : Thank you for contacting us about your mobile telephone international roaming service plan rates concern with Fido Solutions Inc. (Fido). In Canada, mobile telephone service is offered on a competitive basis. Therefore, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) is not involved in Fido's terms of service (including international roaming service plan rates), billing and marketing practices, quality of service issues and customer relations. If you haven't already done so, we encourage you to escalate your concern to a manager if you believe the answer you have received from Fido's customer service is not satisfactory. Based on the information that you have provided, this may also appear to be a Competition Bureau matter. The Competition Bureau is responsible for administering and enforcing the Competition Act, and deals with issues such as false or misleading representations, deceptive marketing practices and collusion. You can reach the Competition Bureau by calling 1-800-348-5358 (toll-free), by TTY (for deaf and hard of hearing people) by calling 1-866-694-8389 (toll-free). For more contact information, please visit http://www.competitionbureau.gc.ca/eic/site/cb-bc.nsf/eng/00157.html When consumers are not satisfied with the service they are offered, we encourage them to compare the products and services of other providers in their area and look for a company that can better match their needs. The following tool helps to show choices of providers in your area: https://crtc.gc.ca/eng/comm/fourprov.htm Thank you for sharing your concern with us.
In other words, complain with Fido, or change providers. Don't complain to us, we don't manage the telcos, they self-regulate. Great job, CRTC. This is going great. This is exactly why we're one of the most expensive countries on the planet for cell phone service.

Live chat with Fido Interestingly, the day after I received that response from the CRTC, I received this email from Fido, while traveling:
Date: Tue, 13 Sep 2022 10:10:00 -0400 From: Fido DONOTREPLY@fido.ca To: REDACTED Subject: Courriel d avis d itin rance Fido Roaming Welcome Confirmation Fido Date : 13 septembre 2022
Num ro de compte : [redacted] Bonjour
Antoine Beaupr ! Nous vous crivons pour vous indiquer qu au moins un utilisateur inscrit votre compte s est r cemment connect un r seau en itin rance.
Vous trouverez ci-dessous le message texte de bienvenue en itin rance envoy l utilisateur (ou aux utilisateurs), qui contenait les tarifs d itin rance
applicables. Message texte de bienvenue en itin rance Destinataire : REDACTED Date et heure : 2022-09-13 / 10:10:00
Allo, ici Fido : Bienvenue destination! Vous tes inscrit Fido Nomade alors utilisez vos donn es, parlez et textez comme vous le faites la
maison. Depuis le 1 mars 2022 le tarif cette destination pour 15 $/jour (+ taxes) et valide tous les jours jusqu' 23 h 59 HE, peu importe le fuseau
horaire dans lequel vous vous trouvez. Bon voyage! Des questions? Consultez fido.ca/m/itinerance ou composez +15149333436 (sans frais). Besoin d aide?
  • PLANIFIEZ UN VOYAGE AVEC Fido NomadeMC
    D couvrez nos options d itin rance et restez en contact l tranger sans vous soucier de votre
    facture.
D tails
  • G rez votre compte
    G rez vos produits et services Fido la maison ou sur la route gr ce Mon
    Compte.
D tails Ce courriel est produit automatiquement; veuillez ne pas y r pondre. Ce courriel (et toute pi ce jointe) est confidentiel. Si vous n tes pas le destinataire,
veuillez supprimer le pr sent message et en d truire toute copie. FIDO SOLUTIONS 800, RUE DE LA GAUCHETI RE OUEST
BUREAU 4000 MONTR AL (QU BEC) H5A 1K3
Fido
I found that message utterly confusing (and yes, I can read french). Basically, it says that some user (presumably me!) connected to the network with roaming. I did just disabled airplane mode on my phone to debug a Syncthing bug but had not enabled roaming. So this message seemed to say that I would be charged 15$ (per DAY!) for roaming from now on. Confused, I tried their live chat to try to clarify things, worried I would get charged even more for calling tech support on *611. This is a transcript of the chat:
F: Hi! What are we doing today? Type in your question or choose from the options below: * Track my Equipment Order * View Bill Online * Payment Options * iPhone 14 Pre-Order A: i received a message about roaming while abroad but i did not enable roaming on my phone, will i be charged anyways? F: I think I know what you re asking for. Select the topic that best matches your request or try rephrasing your question. A: no F: Thank you, this will help us to improve! Would you like to chat with a specialist? Chat with a specialist I'll get a specialist to help you with this. It appears that you're not signed in. Your session may have timed out. To save time and identify your account details, please sign in to My Account.
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Have any questions specific to your Fido account? To service you faster, please identify yourself by completing the form below. A: Personal info Form submitted F: Thank you! I'll connect you with the next available specialist. Your chat is being transferred to a Live Chat agent. Thanks for your patience. We are here to assist you and we kindly ask that our team members be treated with respect and dignity. Please note that abuse directed towards any Consumer Care Specialist will not be tolerated and will result in the termination of your conversation with us. All of our agents are with other customers at the moment. Your chat is in a priority sequence and someone will be with you as soon as possible. Thanks! Thanks for continuing to hold. An agent will be with you as soon as possible. Thank you for your continued patience. We re getting more Live Chat requests than usual so it s taking longer to answer. Your chat is still in a priority sequence and will be answered as soon as an agent becomes available. Thank you so much for your patience we're sorry for the wait. Your chat is still in a priority sequence and will be answered as soon as possible. Hi, I'm [REDACTED] from Fido in [REDACTED]. May I have your name please? A: hi i am antoine, nice to meet you sorry to use the live chat, but it's not clear to me i can safely use my phone to call support, because i am in ireland and i'm worried i'll get charged for the call F: Thank You Antoine , I see you waited to speak with me today, thank you for your patience.Apart from having to wait, how are you today? A: i am good thank you
[... delay ...]
A: should i restate my question? F: Yes please what is the concern you have? A: i have received an email from fido saying i someone used my phone for roaming it's in french (which is fine), but that's the gist of it i am traveling to ireland for a week i do not want to use fido's services here... i have set the phon eto airplane mode for most of my time here F: The SMS just says what will be the charges if you used any services. A: but today i have mistakenly turned that off and did not turn on roaming well it's not a SMS, it's an email F: Yes take out the sim and keep it safe.Turun off or On for roaming you cant do it as it is part of plan. A: wat F: if you used any service you will be charged if you not used any service you will not be charged. A: you are saying i need to physically take the SIM out of the phone? i guess i will have a fun conversation with your management once i return from this trip not that i can do that now, given that, you know, i nee dto take the sim out of this phone fun times F: Yes that is better as most of the customer end up using some kind of service and get charged for roaming. A: well that is completely outrageous roaming is off on the phone i shouldn't get charged for roaming, since roaming is off on the phone i also don't get why i cannot be clearly told whether i will be charged or not the message i have received says i will be charged if i use the service and you seem to say i could accidentally do that easily can you tell me if i have indeed used service sthat will incur an extra charge? are incoming text messages free? F: I understand but it is on you if you used some data SMS or voice mail you can get charged as you used some services.And we cant check anything for now you have to wait for next bill. and incoming SMS are free rest all service comes under roaming. That is the reason I suggested take out the sim from phone and keep it safe or always keep the phone or airplane mode. A: okay can you confirm whether or not i can call fido by voice for support? i mean for free F: So use your Fido sim and call on +1-514-925-4590 on this number it will be free from out side Canada from Fido sim. A: that is quite counter-intuitive, but i guess i will trust you on that thank you, i think that will be all F: Perfect, Again, my name is [REDACTED] and it s been my pleasure to help you today. Thank you for being a part of the Fido family and have a great day! A: you too
So, in other words:
  1. they can't tell me if I've actually been roaming
  2. they can't tell me how much it's going to cost me
  3. I should remove the SIM card from my phone (!?) or turn on airplane mode, but the former is safer
  4. I can call Fido support, but not on the usual *611, and instead on that long-distance-looking phone number, and yes, that means turning off airplane mode and putting the SIM card in, which contradicts step 3
Also notice how the phone number from the live chat (+1-514-925-4590) is different than the one provided in the email (15149333436). So who knows what would have happened if I would have called the latter. The former is mentioned in their contact page. I guess the next step is to call Fido over the phone and talk to a manager, which is what the CRTC told me to do in the first place... I ended up talking with a manager (another 1h phone call) and they confirmed there is no other package available at Fido for this. At best they can provide me with a credit if I mistakenly use the roaming by accident to refund me, but that's it. The manager also confirmed that I cannot know if I have actually used any data before reading the bill, which is issued on the 15th of every month, but only available... three days later, at which point I'll be back home anyways. Fantastic.

26 August 2022

Antoine Beaupr : How to nationalize the internet in Canada

Rogers had a catastrophic failure in July 2022. It affected emergency services (as in: people couldn't call 911, but also some 911 services themselves failed), hospitals (which couldn't access prescriptions), banks and payment systems (as payment terminals stopped working), and regular users as well. The outage lasted almost a full day, and Rogers took days to give any technical explanation on the outage, and even when they did, details were sparse. So far the only detailed account is from outside actors like Cloudflare which seem to point at an internal BGP failure. Its impact on the economy has yet to be measured, but it probably cost millions of dollars in wasted time and possibly lead to life-threatening situations. Apart from holding Rogers (criminally?) responsible for this, what should be done in the future to avoid such problems? It's not the first time something like this has happened: it happened to Bell Canada as well. The Rogers outage is also strangely similar to the Facebook outage last year, but, to its credit, Facebook did post a fairly detailed explanation only a day later. The internet is designed to be decentralised, and having large companies like Rogers hold so much power is a crucial mistake that should be reverted. The question is how. Some critics were quick to point out that we need more ISP diversity and competition, but I think that's missing the point. Others have suggested that the internet should be a public good or even straight out nationalized. I believe the solution to the problem of large, private, centralised telcos and ISPs is to replace them with smaller, public, decentralised service providers. The only way to ensure that works is to make sure that public money ends up creating infrastructure controlled by the public, which means treating ISPs as a public utility. This has been implemented elsewhere: it works, it's cheaper, and provides better service.

A modest proposal Global wireless services (like phone services) and home internet inevitably grow into monopolies. They are public utilities, just like water, power, railways, and roads. The question of how they should be managed is therefore inherently political, yet people don't seem to question the idea that only the market (i.e. "competition") can solve this problem. I disagree. 10 years ago (in french), I suggested we, in Qu bec, should nationalize large telcos and internet service providers. I no longer believe is a realistic approach: most of those companies have crap copper-based networks (at least for the last mile), yet are worth billions of dollars. It would be prohibitive, and a waste, to buy them out. Back then, I called this idea "R seau-Qu bec", a reference to the already nationalized power company, Hydro-Qu bec. (This idea, incidentally, made it into the plan of a political party.) Now, I think we should instead build our own, public internet. Start setting up municipal internet services, fiber to the home in all cities, progressively. Then interconnect cities with fiber, and build peering agreements with other providers. This also includes a bid on wireless spectrum to start competing with phone providers as well. And while that sounds really ambitious, I think it's possible to take this one step at a time.

Municipal broadband In many parts of the world, municipal broadband is an elegant solution to the problem, with solutions ranging from Stockholm's city-owned fiber network (dark fiber, layer 1) to Utah's UTOPIA network (fiber to the premises, layer 2) and municipal wireless networks like Guifi.net which connects about 40,000 nodes in Catalonia. A good first step would be for cities to start providing broadband services to its residents, directly. Cities normally own sewage and water systems that interconnect most residences and therefore have direct physical access everywhere. In Montr al, in particular, there is an ongoing project to replace a lot of old lead-based plumbing which would give an opportunity to lay down a wired fiber network across the city. This is a wild guess, but I suspect this would be much less expensive than one would think. Some people agree with me and quote this as low as 1000$ per household. There is about 800,000 households in the city of Montr al, so we're talking about a 800 million dollars investment here, to connect every household in Montr al with fiber and incidentally a quarter of the province's population. And this is not an up-front cost: this can be built progressively, with expenses amortized over many years. (We should not, however, connect Montr al first: it's used as an example here because it's a large number of households to connect.) Such a network should be built with a redundant topology. I leave it as an open question whether we should adopt Stockholm's more minimalist approach or provide direct IP connectivity. I would tend to favor the latter, because then you can immediately start to offer the service to households and generate revenues to compensate for the capital expenditures. Given the ridiculous profit margins telcos currently have 8 billion $CAD net income for BCE (2019), 2 billion $CAD for Rogers (2020) I also believe this would actually turn into a profitable revenue stream for the city, the same way Hydro-Qu bec is more and more considered as a revenue stream for the state. (I personally believe that's actually wrong and we should treat those resources as human rights and not money cows, but I digress. The point is: this is not a cost point, it's a revenue.) The other major challenge here is that the city will need competent engineers to drive this project forward. But this is not different from the way other public utilities run: we have electrical engineers at Hydro, sewer and water engineers at the city, this is just another profession. If anything, the computing science sector might be more at fault than the city here in its failure to provide competent and accountable engineers to society... Right now, most of the network in Canada is copper: we are hitting the limits of that technology with DSL, and while cable has some life left to it (DOCSIS 4.0 does 4Gbps), that is nowhere near the capacity of fiber. Take the town of Chattanooga, Tennessee: in 2010, the city-owned ISP EPB finished deploying a fiber network to the entire town and provided gigabit internet to everyone. Now, 12 years later, they are using this same network to provide the mind-boggling speed of 25 gigabit to the home. To give you an idea, Chattanooga is roughly the size and density of Sherbrooke.

Provincial public internet As part of building a municipal network, the question of getting access to "the internet" will immediately come up. Naturally, this will first be solved by using already existing commercial providers to hook up residents to the rest of the global network. But eventually, networks should inter-connect: Montr al should connect with Laval, and then Trois-Rivi res, then Qu bec City. This will require long haul fiber runs, but those links are not actually that expensive, and many of those already exist as a public resource at RISQ and CANARIE, which cross-connects universities and colleges across the province and the country. Those networks might not have the capacity to cover the needs of the entire province right now, but that is a router upgrade away, thanks to the amazing capacity of fiber. There are two crucial mistakes to avoid at this point. First, the network needs to remain decentralised. Long haul links should be IP links with BGP sessions, and each city (or MRC) should have its own independent network, to avoid Rogers-class catastrophic failures. Second, skill needs to remain in-house: RISQ has already made that mistake, to a certain extent, by selling its neutral datacenter. Tellingly, MetroOptic, probably the largest commercial dark fiber provider in the province, now operates the QIX, the second largest "public" internet exchange in Canada. Still, we have a lot of infrastructure we can leverage here. If RISQ or CANARIE cannot be up to the task, Hydro-Qu bec has power lines running into every house in the province, with high voltage power lines running hundreds of kilometers far north. The logistics of long distance maintenance are already solved by that institution. In fact, Hydro already has fiber all over the province, but it is a private network, separate from the internet for security reasons (and that should probably remain so). But this only shows they already have the expertise to lay down fiber: they would just need to lay down a parallel network to the existing one. In that architecture, Hydro would be a "dark fiber" provider.

International public internet None of the above solves the problem for the entire population of Qu bec, which is notoriously dispersed, with an area three times the size of France, but with only an eight of its population (8 million vs 67). More specifically, Canada was originally a french colony, a land violently stolen from native people who have lived here for thousands of years. Some of those people now live in reservations, sometimes far from urban centers (but definitely not always). So the idea of leveraging the Hydro-Qu bec infrastructure doesn't always work to solve this, because while Hydro will happily flood a traditional hunting territory for an electric dam, they don't bother running power lines to the village they forcibly moved, powering it instead with noisy and polluting diesel generators. So before giving me fiber to the home, we should give power (and potable water, for that matter), to those communities first. So we need to discuss international connectivity. (How else could we consider those communities than peer nations anyways?c) Qu bec has virtually zero international links. Even in Montr al, which likes to style itself a major player in gaming, AI, and technology, most peering goes through either Toronto or New York. That's a problem that we must fix, regardless of the other problems stated here. Looking at the submarine cable map, we see very few international links actually landing in Canada. There is the Greenland connect which connects Newfoundland to Iceland through Greenland. There's the EXA which lands in Ireland, the UK and the US, and Google has the Topaz link on the west coast. That's about it, and none of those land anywhere near any major urban center in Qu bec. We should have a cable running from France up to Saint-F licien. There should be a cable from Vancouver to China. Heck, there should be a fiber cable running all the way from the end of the great lakes through Qu bec, then up around the northern passage and back down to British Columbia. Those cables are expensive, and the idea might sound ludicrous, but Russia is actually planning such a project for 2026. The US has cables running all the way up (and around!) Alaska, neatly bypassing all of Canada in the process. We just look ridiculous on that map. (Addendum: I somehow forgot to talk about Teleglobe here was founded as publicly owned company in 1950, growing international phone and (later) data links all over the world. It was privatized by the conservatives in 1984, along with rails and other "crown corporations". So that's one major risk to any effort to make public utilities work properly: some government might be elected and promptly sell it out to its friends for peanuts.)

Wireless networks I know most people will have rolled their eyes so far back their heads have exploded. But I'm not done yet. I want wireless too. And by wireless, I don't mean a bunch of geeks setting up OpenWRT routers on rooftops. I tried that, and while it was fun and educational, it didn't scale. A public networking utility wouldn't be complete without providing cellular phone service. This involves bidding for frequencies at the federal level, and deploying a rather large amount of infrastructure, but it could be a later phase, when the engineers and politicians have proven their worth. At least part of the Rogers fiasco would have been averted if such a decentralized network backend existed. One might even want to argue that a separate institution should be setup to provide phone services, independently from the regular wired networking, if only for reliability. Because remember here: the problem we're trying to solve is not just technical, it's about political boundaries, centralisation, and automation. If everything is ran by this one organisation again, we will have failed. However, I must admit that phone services is where my ideas fall a little short. I can't help but think it's also an accessible goal maybe starting with a virtual operator but it seems slightly less so than the others, especially considering how closed the phone ecosystem is.

Counter points In debating these ideas while writing this article, the following objections came up.

I don't want the state to control my internet One legitimate concern I have about the idea of the state running the internet is the potential it would have to censor or control the content running over the wires. But I don't think there is necessarily a direct relationship between resource ownership and control of content. Sure, China has strong censorship in place, partly implemented through state-controlled businesses. But Russia also has strong censorship in place, based on regulatory tools: they force private service providers to install back-doors in their networks to control content and surveil their users. Besides, the USA have been doing warrantless wiretapping since at least 2003 (and yes, that's 10 years before the Snowden revelations) so a commercial internet is no assurance that we have a free internet. Quite the contrary in fact: if anything, the commercial internet goes hand in hand with the neo-colonial internet, just like businesses did in the "good old colonial days". Large media companies are the primary censors of content here. In Canada, the media cartel requested the first site-blocking order in 2018. The plaintiffs (including Qu becor, Rogers, and Bell Canada) are both content providers and internet service providers, an obvious conflict of interest. Nevertheless, there are some strong arguments against having a centralised, state-owned monopoly on internet service providers. FDN makes a good point on this. But this is not what I am suggesting: at the provincial level, the network would be purely physical, and regional entities (which could include private companies) would peer over that physical network, ensuring decentralization. Delegating the management of that infrastructure to an independent non-profit or cooperative (but owned by the state) would also ensure some level of independence.

Isn't the government incompetent and corrupt? Also known as "private enterprise is better skilled at handling this, the state can't do anything right" I don't think this is a "fait accomplit". If anything, I have found publicly ran utilities to be spectacularly reliable here. I rarely have trouble with sewage, water, or power, and keep in mind I live in a city where we receive about 2 meters of snow a year, which tend to create lots of trouble with power lines. Unless there's a major weather event, power just runs here. I think the same can happen with an internet service provider. But it would certainly need to have higher standards to what we're used to, because frankly Internet is kind of janky.

A single monopoly will be less reliable I actually agree with that, but that is not what I am proposing anyways. Current commercial or non-profit entities will be free to offer their services on top of the public network. And besides, the current "ha! diversity is great" approach is exactly what we have now, and it's not working. The pretense that we can have competition over a single network is what led the US into the ridiculous situation where they also pretend to have competition over the power utility market. This led to massive forest fires in California and major power outages in Texas. It doesn't work.

Wouldn't this create an isolated network? One theory is that this new network would be so hostile to incumbent telcos and ISPs that they would simply refuse to network with the public utility. And while it is true that the telcos currently do also act as a kind of "tier one" provider in some places, I strongly feel this is also a problem that needs to be solved, regardless of ownership of networking infrastructure. Right now, telcos often hold both ends of the stick: they are the gateway to users, the "last mile", but they also provide peering to the larger internet in some locations. In at least one datacenter in downtown Montr al, I've seen traffic go through Bell Canada that was not directly targeted at Bell customers. So in effect, they are in a position of charging twice for the same traffic, and that's not only ridiculous, it should just be plain illegal. And besides, this is not a big problem: there are other providers out there. As bad as the market is in Qu bec, there is still some diversity in Tier one providers that could allow for some exits to the wider network (e.g. yes, Cogent is here too).

What about Google and Facebook? Nationalization of other service providers like Google and Facebook is out of scope of this discussion. That said, I am not sure the state should get into the business of organising the web or providing content services however, but I will point out it already does do some of that through its own websites. It should probably keep itself to this, and also consider providing normal services for people who don't or can't access the internet. (And I would also be ready to argue that Google and Facebook already act as extensions of the state: certainly if Facebook didn't exist, the CIA or the NSA would like to create it at this point. And Google has lucrative business with the US department of defense.)

What does not work So we've seen one thing that could work. Maybe it's too expensive. Maybe the political will isn't there. Maybe it will fail. We don't know yet. But we know what does not work, and it's what we've been doing ever since the internet has gone commercial.

Subsidies The absurd price we pay for data does not actually mean everyone gets high speed internet at home. Large swathes of the Qu bec countryside don't get broadband at all, and it can be difficult or expensive, even in large urban centers like Montr al, to get high speed internet. That is despite having a series of subsidies that all avoided investing in our own infrastructure. We had the "fonds de l'autoroute de l'information", "information highway fund" (site dead since 2003, archive.org link) and "branchez les familles", "connecting families" (site dead since 2003, archive.org link) which subsidized the development of a copper network. In 2014, more of the same: the federal government poured hundreds of millions of dollars into a program called connecting Canadians to connect 280 000 households to "high speed internet". And now, the federal and provincial governments are proudly announcing that "everyone is now connected to high speed internet", after pouring more than 1.1 billion dollars to connect, guess what, another 380 000 homes, right in time for the provincial election. Of course, technically, the deadline won't actually be met until 2023. Qu bec is a big area to cover, and you can guess what happens next: the telcos threw up their hand and said some areas just can't be connected. (Or they connect their CEO but not the poor folks across the lake.) The story then takes the predictable twist of giving more money out to billionaires, subsidizing now Musk's Starlink system to connect those remote areas. To give a concrete example: a friend who lives about 1000km away from Montr al, 4km from a small, 2500 habitant village, has recently got symmetric 100 mbps fiber at home from Telus, thanks to those subsidies. But I can't get that service in Montr al at all, presumably because Telus and Bell colluded to split that market. Bell doesn't provide me with such a service either: they tell me they have "fiber to my neighborhood", and only offer me a 25/10 mbps ADSL service. (There is Vid otron offering 400mbps, but that's copper cable, again a dead technology, and asymmetric.)

Conclusion Remember Chattanooga? Back in 2010, they funded the development of a fiber network, and now they have deployed a network roughly a thousand times faster than what we have just funded with a billion dollars. In 2010, I was paying Bell Canada 60$/mth for 20mbps and a 125GB cap, and now, I'm still (indirectly) paying Bell for roughly the same speed (25mbps). Back then, Bell was throttling their competitors networks until 2009, when they were forced by the CRTC to stop throttling. Both Bell and Vid otron still explicitly forbid you from running your own servers at home, Vid otron charges prohibitive prices which make it near impossible for resellers to sell uncapped services. Those companies are not spurring innovation: they are blocking it. We have spent all this money for the private sector to build us a private internet, over decades, without any assurance of quality, equity or reliability. And while in some locations, ISPs did deploy fiber to the home, they certainly didn't upgrade their entire network to follow suit, and even less allowed resellers to compete on that network. In 10 years, when 100mbps will be laughable, I bet those service providers will again punt the ball in the public courtyard and tell us they don't have the money to upgrade everyone's equipment. We got screwed. It's time to try something new.

Updates There was a discussion about this article on Hacker News which was surprisingly productive. Trigger warning: Hacker News is kind of right-wing, in case you didn't know. Since this article was written, at least two more major acquisitions happened, just in Qu bec: In the latter case, vMedia was explicitly saying it couldn't grow because of "lack of access to capital". So basically, we have given those companies a billion dollars, and they are not using that very money to buy out their competition. At least we could have given that money to small players to even out the playing field. But this is not how that works at all. Also, in a bizarre twist, an "analyst" believes the acquisition is likely to help Rogers acquire Shaw. Also, since this article was written, the Washington Post published a review of a book bringing similar ideas: Internet for the People The Fight for Our Digital Future, by Ben Tarnoff, at Verso books. It's short, but even more ambitious than what I am suggesting in this article, arguing that all big tech companies should be broken up and better regulated:
He pulls from Ethan Zuckerman s idea of a web that is plural in purpose that just as pool halls, libraries and churches each have different norms, purposes and designs, so too should different places on the internet. To achieve this, Tarnoff wants governments to pass laws that would make the big platforms unprofitable and, in their place, fund small-scale, local experiments in social media design. Instead of having platforms ruled by engagement-maximizing algorithms, Tarnoff imagines public platforms run by local librarians that include content from public media.
(Links mine: the Washington Post obviously prefers to not link to the real web, and instead doesn't link to Zuckerman's site all and suggests Amazon for the book, in a cynical example.) And in another example of how the private sector has failed us, there was recently a fluke in the AMBER alert system where the entire province was warned about a loose shooter in Saint-Elz ar except the people in the town, because they have spotty cell phone coverage. In other words, millions of people received a strongly toned, "life-threatening", alert for a city sometimes hours away, except the people most vulnerable to the alert. Not missing a beat, the CAQ party is promising more of the same medicine again and giving more money to telcos to fix the problem, suggesting to spend three billion dollars in private infrastructure.

6 February 2022

Jonathan McDowell: Free Software Activities for 2021

About a month later than I probably should have posted it, here s a recap of my Free Software activities in 2021. For previous years see 2019 + 2020. Again, this year had fewer contributions than I d like thanks to continuing fatigue about the state of the world, and trying to work on separation between work and leisure while working from home. I ve made some effort to improve that balance but it s still a work in progress.

Conferences No surprise, I didn t attend any in-person conferences in 2021. I find virtual conferences don t do a lot for me (a combination of my not carving time out for them in the same way, because not being at the conference means other things will inevitably intrude, and the lack of the social side) but I did get to attend a few of the DebConf21 talks, which was nice. I m hoping to make it to DebConf22 this year in person.

Debian Most of my contributions to Free software continue to happen within Debian. As part of the Data Protection Team I responded to various inbound queries to that team. Some of this involved chasing up other project teams who had been slow to respond - folks, if you re running a service that stores personal data about people then you need to be responsive to requests about it. Some of this was dealing with what look like automated scraping tools which send no information about the person making the request, and in all the cases we ve seen so far there s been no indication of any data about that person on any systems we have access to. Further team time was wasted dealing with the Princeton-Radboud Study on Privacy Law Implementation (though Matthew did the majority of the work on this). The Debian Keyring was possibly my largest single point of contribution. We re in a roughly 3 month rotation of who handles the keyring updates, and I handled 2021.03.24, 2021.04.09, 2021.06.25, 2021.09.25 + 2021.12.24 For Debian New Members I m mostly inactive as an application manager - we generally seem to have enough available recently. If that changes I ll look at stepping in to help, but I don t see that happening. I continue to be involved in Front Desk, having various conversations throughout the year with the rest of the team, but there s no doubt Mattia and Pierre-Elliott are the real doers at present. I did take part in an NM Committee appeals process. In terms of package uploads I continued to work on gcc-xtensa-lx106, largely doing uploads to deal with updates to the GCC version or packaging (8 + 9). sigrok had a few minor updates, libsigkrok 0.5.2-3, pulseview 0.4.2-3 as well as a new upstream release of sigrok CLI 0.7.2-1. There was a last minute pre-release upload of libserialport 0.1.1-4 thanks to a kernel change in v5.10.37 which removed termiox support. Despite still not writing any VHDL these days I continue to keep an eye on ghdl, because I found it a useful tool in the past. Last year that was just a build fix for LLVM 11.1.0 - 1.0.0+dfsg+5. Andreas Bombe has largely taken over more proactive maintenance, which is nice to see. I uploaded OpenOCD 0.11.0~rc1-2, cleaning up some packaging / dependency issues. This was followed by 0.11.0~rc2-1 as a newer release candidate. Sadly 0.11.0 did not make it in time for bullseye, but rc2 was fairly close and I uploaded 0.11.0-1 once bullseye was released. Finally I did a drive-by upload for garmin-forerunner-tools 0.10repacked-12, cleaning up some packaging issues and uploading it to salsa. My Forerunner 305 has died (after 11 years of sterling service) and the Forerunner 45 I ve replaced it with uses a different set of tools, so I decided it didn t make sense to pick up longer term ownership of the package.

Linux My Linux contributions continued to revolve around pushing MikroTik RB3011 support upstream. There was a minor code change to Set FIFO sizes for ipq806x (which fixed up the allowed MTU for the internal switch + VLANs). The rest was DTS related - adding ADM DMA + NAND definitions now that the ADM driver was merged, adding tsens details, adding USB port info and adding the L2CC and RPM details for IPQ8064. Finally I was able to update the RB3011 DTS to enable NAND + USB. With all those in I m down to 4 local patches against a mainline kernel, all of which are hacks that aren t suitable for submission upstream. 2 are for patching in details of the root device and ethernet MAC addresses, one is dealing with the fact the IPQ8064 has some reserved memory that doesn t play well with AUTO_ZRELADDR (there keeps being efforts to add some support for this via devicetree, but unfortunately it gets shot down every time), and the final one is a hack to turn off the LCD backlight by treating it as an LED (actually supporting the LCD properly is on my TODO list).

Personal projects 2021 didn t see any releases of onak. It s not dead, just resting, but Sequoia PGP is probably where you should be looking for a modern OpenPGP implementation. I continued work on my Desk Viking project, which is an STM32F103 based debug tool inspired by the Bus Pirate. The main addtion was some CCLib support (forking it in the process to move to Python 3 and add some speed ups) to allow me to program my Zigbee dongles, but I also added some 1-Wire search logic and some support for Linux emulation mode with VCD output to allow for a faster development cycle. I really want to try and get OpenOCD JTAG mode supported at some point, and have vague plans for an STM32F4 based version that have suffered from a combination of a silicon shortage and a lack of time. That wraps up 2021. I d like to say I m hoping to make more Free Software contributions this year, but I don t have a concrete plan yet for how that might happen, so I ll have to wait and see.

5 February 2022

Reproducible Builds: Reproducible Builds in January 2022

Welcome to the January 2022 report from the Reproducible Builds project. In our reports, we try outline the most important things that have been happening in the past month. As ever, if you are interested in contributing to the project, please visit our Contribute page on our website.
An interesting blog post was published by Paragon Initiative Enterprises about Gossamer, a proposal for securing the PHP software supply-chain. Utilising code-signing and third-party attestations, Gossamer aims to mitigate the risks within the notorious PHP world via publishing attestations to a transparency log. Their post, titled Solving Open Source Supply Chain Security for the PHP Ecosystem goes into some detail regarding the design, scope and implementation of the system.
This month, the Linux Foundation announced SupplyChainSecurityCon, a conference focused on exploring the security threats affecting the software supply chain, sharing best practices and mitigation tactics. The conference is part of the Linux Foundation s Open Source Summit North America and will take place June 21st 24th 2022, both virtually and in Austin, Texas.

Debian There was a significant progress made in the Debian Linux distribution this month, including:

Other distributions kpcyrd reported on Twitter about the release of version 0.2.0 of pacman-bintrans, an experiment with binary transparency for the Arch Linux package manager, pacman. This new version is now able to query rebuilderd to check if a package was independently reproduced.
In the world of openSUSE, however, Bernhard M. Wiedemann posted his monthly reproducible builds status report.

diffoscope diffoscope is our in-depth and content-aware diff utility. Not only can it locate and diagnose reproducibility issues, it can provide human-readable diffs from many kinds of binary formats. This month, Chris Lamb prepared and uploaded versions 199, 200, 201 and 202 to Debian unstable (that were later backported to Debian bullseye-backports by Mattia Rizzolo), as well as made the following changes to the code itself:
  • New features:
    • First attempt at incremental output support with a timeout. Now passing, for example, --timeout=60 will mean that diffoscope will not recurse into any sub-archives after 60 seconds total execution time has elapsed. Note that this is not a fixed/strict timeout due to implementation issues. [ ][ ]
    • Support both variants of odt2txt, including the one provided by the unoconv package. [ ]
  • Bug fixes:
    • Do not return with a UNIX exit code of 0 if we encounter with a file whose human-readable metadata matches literal file contents. [ ]
    • Don t fail if comparing a nonexistent file with a .pyc file (and add test). [ ][ ]
    • If the debian.deb822 module raises any exception on import, re-raise it as an ImportError. This should fix diffoscope on some Fedora systems. [ ]
    • Even if a Sphinx .inv inventory file is labelled The remainder of this file is compressed using zlib, it might not actually be. In this case, don t traceback and simply return the original content. [ ]
  • Documentation:
    • Improve documentation for the new --timeout option due to a few misconceptions. [ ]
    • Drop reference in the manual page claiming the ability to compare non-existent files on the command-line. (This has not been possible since version 32 which was released in September 2015). [ ]
    • Update X has been modified after NT_GNU_BUILD_ID has been applied messages to, for example, not duplicating the full filename in the diffoscope output. [ ]
  • Codebase improvements:
    • Tidy some control flow. [ ]
    • Correct a recompile typo. [ ]
In addition, Alyssa Ross fixed the comparison of CBFS names that contain spaces [ ], Sergei Trofimovich fixed whitespace for compatibility with version 21.12 of the Black source code reformatter [ ] and Zbigniew J drzejewski-Szmek fixed JSON detection with a new version of file [ ].

Testing framework The Reproducible Builds project runs a significant testing framework at tests.reproducible-builds.org, to check packages and other artifacts for reproducibility. This month, the following changes were made:
  • Fr d ric Pierret (fepitre):
    • Add Debian bookworm to package set creation. [ ]
  • Holger Levsen:
    • Install the po4a package where appropriate, as it is needed for the Reproducible Builds website job [ ]. In addition, also run the i18n.sh and contributors.sh scripts [ ].
    • Correct some grammar in Debian live image build output. [ ]
    • Shell monitor improvements:
      • Only show the offline node section if there are offline nodes. [ ]
      • Colorise offline nodes. [ ]
      • Shrink screen usage. [ ][ ][ ]
    • Node health check improvements:
      • Detect if live package builds encounter incomplete snapshots. [ ][ ][ ]
      • Detect if a host is running with today s date (when it should be set artificially in the future). [ ]
    • Use the devscripts package from bullseye-backports on Debian nodes. [ ]
    • Use the Munin monitoring package bullseye-backports on Debian nodes too. [ ]
    • Update New Year handling, needed to be able to detect real and fake dates. [ ][ ]
    • Improve the error message of the script that powercycles the arm64 architecture nodes hosted by Codethink. [ ]
  • Mattia Rizzolo:
    • Use the new --timeout option added in diffoscope version 202. [ ]
  • Roland Clobus:
    • Update the build scripts now that the hooks for live builds are now maintained upstream in the live-build repository. [ ]
    • Show info lines in Jenkins when reproducible hooks have been active. [ ]
    • Use unique folders for the artifacts from each live Debian version. [ ]
  • Vagrant Cascadian:
    • Switch the Debian armhf architecture nodes to use new proxy. [ ]
    • Misc. node maintenance. [ ].

Upstream patches The Reproducible Builds project attempts to fix as many currently-unreproducible packages as possible. In January, we wrote a large number of such patches, including:

And finally If you are interested in contributing to the Reproducible Builds project, please visit our Contribute page on our website. However, you can get in touch with us via:

31 December 2021

Chris Lamb: Favourite books of 2021: Fiction

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

6 November 2021

Reproducible Builds: Reproducible Builds in October 2021

Welcome to the October 2021 report from the Reproducible Builds project!
This month Samanta Navarro posted to the oss-security security mailing on a novel category of exploit in the .tar archive format, where a single .tar file contains different contents depending on the tar utility being used. Naturally, this has consequences for reproducible builds as Samanta goes onto reply:

Arch Linux uses libarchive (bsdtar) in its build environment. The default tar program installed is GNU tar. It is possible to create a source distribution which leads to different files seen by the build environment than compared to a careful reviewer and other Linux distributions.
Samanta notes that addressing the tar utilities themselves will not be a sufficient fix:
I have submitted bug reports and patches to some projects but eventually I had to conclude that the problem itself cannot be fixed by these implementations alone. The best choice for these tools would be to only allow archives which are fully compatible to standards but this in turn would render a lot of archives broken.
Reproducible builds, with its twin ideas of reaching consensus on the build outputs as well as precisely recording and describing the build environment, would help address this problem at a higher level.
Codethink announced that they had achieved ISO-26262 ASIL D Tool Certification, a way of determining specific safety standards for software. Codethink used open source tooling to achieve this, but they also leverage:
Reproducibility, repeatability and traceability of builds, drawing heavily on best-practices championed by the Reproducible Builds project.

Elsewhere on the internet, according to a comment on Hacker News, Microsoft are now comparing NPM Javascript packages with their original source repositories:
I got a PR in my repository a few days ago leading back to a team trying to make it easier for packages to be reproducible from source.

Lastly, Martin Monperrus started an interesting thread on our mailing list about Github, specifically that their autogenerated release tarballs are not deterministic . The thread generated a significant number of replies that are worth reading.

Events and presentations

Community news On our mailing list this month:
There were quite a few changes to the Reproducible Builds website and documentation this month as well, including Feng Chai updating some links on our publications page [ ] and marco updated our project metadata around the Bitcoin Core building guide [ ].
Lastly, we ran another productive meeting on IRC during October. A full set of notes from the meeting is available to view.

Distribution work Qubes was heavily featured in the latest edition of Linux Weekly News, and a significant section was dedicated to discussing reproducibility. For example, it was mentioned that the Qubes project has been working on incorporating reproducible builds into its continuous integration (CI) infrastructure . But the LWN article goes on to describe that:
The current goal is to be able to build the Qubes OS Debian templates solely from packages that can be built reproducibly. Templates in Qubes OS are VM images that can be used to start an application qube quickly based on the template. The qube will have read-only access to the root filesystem of the template, so that the same root filesystem can be shared with multiple application qubes. There are official templates for several variants of both Fedora and Debian, as well as community maintained templates for several other distributions.
You can view the whole article on LWN, and Fr d ric also published a lengthy summary about their work on reproducible builds in Qubes as well for those wishing to learn more.
In Debian this month, 133 reviews of Debian packages were added, 81 were updated and 24 were removed this month, adding to Debian s ever-growing knowledge about identified issues. A number of issues were categorised and added by Chris Lamb and Vagrant Cascadian too [ ][ ][ ]. In addition, work on alternative snapshot service has made progress by Fr d ric Pierret and Holger Levsen this month, including moving from the existing host (snapshot.notset.fr) to snapshot.reproducible-builds.org (more info) thanks to OSUOSL for the machine and hosting and Debian for the disks.
Finally, Bernhard M. Wiedemann posted his monthly reproducible builds status report.

diffoscope diffoscope is our in-depth and content-aware diff utility. Not only can it locate and diagnose reproducibility issues, it can provide human-readable diffs from many kinds of binary formats. This month, Chris Lamb made the following changes, including preparing and uploading versions 186, 187, 188 and 189 to Debian
  • New features:
    • Add support for Python Sphinx inventory files (usually named objects.inv on-disk). [ ]
    • Add support for comparing .pyc files. Thanks to Sergei Trofimovich for the inspiration. [ ]
    • Try some alternative suffixes (e.g. .py) to support distributions that strip or retain them. [ ][ ]
  • Bug fixes:
    • Fix Python decompilation tests under Python 3.10+ [ ] and for Python 3.7 [ ].
    • Don t raise a traceback if we cannot unmarshal Python bytecode. This is in order to support Python 3.7 failing to load .pyc files generated with newer versions of Python. [ ]
    • Skip Python bytecode testing where we do not have an expected diff. [ ]
  • Codebase improvements:
    • Use our file_version_is_lt utility instead of accepting both versions of uImage expected diff. [ ]
    • Split out a custom call to assert_diff for a .startswith equivalent. [ ]
    • Use skipif instead of manual conditionals in some tests. [ ]
In addition, Jelle van der Waa added external tool references for Arch Linux for ocamlobjinfo, openssl and ffmpeg [ ][ ][ ] and added Arch Linux as a Continuous Integration (CI) test target. [ ] and Vagrant Cascadian updated the testsuite to skip Python bytecode comparisons when file(1) is older than 5.39. [ ] as well as added external tool references for the Guix distribution for dumppdf and ppudump. [ ][ ]. Vagrant Cascadian also updated the diffoscope package in GNU Guix [ ][ ]. Lastly, Guangyuan Yang updated the FreeBSD package name on the website [ ], Mattia Rizzolo made a change to override a new Lintian warning due to the new test files [ ], Roland Clobus added support to detect and log if the GNU_BUILD_ID field in an ELF binary been modified [ ], Sandro J ckel updated a number of helpful links on the website [ ] and Sergei Trofimovich made the uImage test output support file() version 5.41 [ ].

reprotest reprotest is the Reproducible Build s project end-user tool to build same source code twice in widely differing environments, checking the binaries produced by the builds for any differences. This month, reprotest version 0.7.18 was uploaded to Debian unstable by Holger Levsen, which also included a change by Holger to clarify that Python 3.9 is used nowadays [ ], but it also included two changes by Vasyl Gello to implement realistic CPU architecture shuffling [ ] and to log the selected variations when the verbosity is configured at a sufficiently high level [ ]. Finally, Vagrant Cascadian updated reprotest to version 0.7.18 in GNU Guix.

Upstream patches The Reproducible Builds project detects, dissects and attempts to fix unreproducible packages. We try to send all of our patches upstream where appropriate. We authored a large number of such patches this month, including:

Testing framework The Reproducible Builds project runs a testing framework at tests.reproducible-builds.org, to check packages and other artifacts for reproducibility. This month, the following changes were made:
  • Holger Levsen:
    • Debian-related changes:
      • Incorporate a fix from bremner into builtin-pho related to binary-NMUs. [ ]
      • Keep bullseye environments around longer, in an attempt to fix a Jenkins issue. [ ]
      • Improve the documentation of buildinfos.debian.net. [ ]
      • Improve documentation for the builtin-pho setup. [ ][ ]
    • OpenWrt-related changes:
      • Also use -j1 for better debugging. [ ]
      • Document that that Python 3.x is now used. [ ]
      • Enable further debugging for the toolchain build. [ ]
    • New snapshot.reproducible-builds.org service:
      • Actually add new node. [ ][ ]
      • Install xfsprogs on snapshot.reproducible-builds.org. [ ]
      • Create account for fpierret on new node. [ ]
      • Run node_health_check job on new node too. [ ]
  • Mattia Rizzolo:
    • Debian-related changes:
      • Handle schroot errors when invoking diffoscope instead of masking them. [ ][ ]
      • Declare and define some variables separately to avoid masking the subshell return code. [ ]
      • Fix variable name. [ ]
      • Improve log reporting. [ ]
      • Execute apt-get update with the -q argument to get more decent logs. [ ]
      • Set the Debian HTTP mirror and proxy for snapshot.reproducible-builds.org. [ ]
      • Install the libarchive-tools package (instead of bsdtar) when updating Jenkins nodes. [ ]
    • Be stricter about errors when starting the node agent [ ] and don t overwrite NODE_NAME so that we can expect Jenkins to properly set for us [ ].
    • Explicitly warn if the NODE_NAME is not a fully-qualified domain name (FQDN). [ ]
    • Document whether a node runs in the future. [ ]
    • Disable postgresql_autodoc as it not available in bullseye. [ ]
    • Don t be so eager when deleting schroot internals, call to schroot -e to terminate the schroots instead. [ ]
    • Only consider schroot underlays for deletion that are over a month old. [ ][ ]
    • Only try to unmount /proc if it s actually mounted. [ ]
    • Move the db_backup task to its own Jenkins job. [ ]
Lastly, Vasyl Gello added usage information to the reproducible_build.sh script [ ].

Contributing If you are interested in contributing to the Reproducible Builds project, please visit our Contribute page on our website. However, you can get in touch with us via:

6 October 2021

Reproducible Builds: Reproducible Builds in September 2021

The goal behind reproducible builds is to ensure that no deliberate flaws have been introduced during compilation processes via promising or mandating that identical results are always generated from a given source. This allowing multiple third-parties to come to an agreement on whether a build was compromised or not by a system of distributed consensus. In these reports we outline the most important things that have been happening in the world of reproducible builds in the past month:
First mentioned in our March 2021 report, Martin Heinz published two blog posts on sigstore, a project that endeavours to offer software signing as a public good, [the] software-signing equivalent to Let s Encrypt . The two posts, the first entitled Sigstore: A Solution to Software Supply Chain Security outlines more about the project and justifies its existence:
Software signing is not a new problem, so there must be some solution already, right? Yes, but signing software and maintaining keys is very difficult especially for non-security folks and UX of existing tools such as PGP leave much to be desired. That s why we need something like sigstore - an easy to use software/toolset for signing software artifacts.
The second post (titled Signing Software The Easy Way with Sigstore and Cosign) goes into some technical details of getting started.
There was an interesting thread in the /r/Signal subreddit that started from the observation that Signal s apk doesn t match with the source code:
Some time ago I checked Signal s reproducibility and it failed. I asked others to test in case I did something wrong, but nobody made any reports. Since then I tried to test the Google Play Store version of the apk against one I compiled myself, and that doesn t match either.

BitcoinBinary.org was announced this month, which aims to be a repository of Reproducible Build Proofs for Bitcoin Projects :
Most users are not capable of building from source code themselves, but we can at least get them able enough to check signatures and shasums. When reputable people who can tell everyone they were able to reproduce the project s build, others at least have a secondary source of validation.

Distribution work Fr d ric Pierret announced a new testing service at beta.tests.reproducible-builds.org, showing actual rebuilds of binaries distributed by both the Debian and Qubes distributions. In Debian specifically, however, 51 reviews of Debian packages were added, 31 were updated and 31 were removed this month to our database of classified issues. As part of this, Chris Lamb refreshed a number of notes, including the build_path_in_record_file_generated_by_pybuild_flit_plugin issue. Elsewhere in Debian, Roland Clobus posted his Fourth status update about reproducible live-build ISO images in Jenkins to our mailing list, which mentions (amongst other things) that:
  • All major configurations are still built regularly using live-build and bullseye.
  • All major configurations are reproducible now; Jenkins is green.
    • I ve worked around the issue for the Cinnamon image.
    • The patch was accepted and released within a few hours.
  • My main focus for the last month was on the live-build tool itself.
Related to this, there was continuing discussion on how to embed/encode the build metadata for the Debian live images which were being worked on by Roland Clobus.
Ariadne Conill published another detailed blog post related to various security initiatives within the Alpine Linux distribution. After summarising some conventional security work being done (eg. with sudo and the release of OpenSSH version 3.0), Ariadne included another section on reproducible builds: The main blocker [was] determining what to do about storing the build metadata so that a build environment can be recreated precisely . Finally, Bernhard M. Wiedemann posted his monthly reproducible builds status report.

Community news On our website this month, Bernhard M. Wiedemann fixed some broken links [ ] and Holger Levsen made a number of changes to the Who is Involved? page [ ][ ][ ]. On our mailing list, Magnus Ihse Bursie started a thread with the subject Reproducible builds on Java, which begins as follows:
I m working for Oracle in the Build Group for OpenJDK which is primary responsible for creating a built artifact of the OpenJDK source code. [ ] For the last few years, we have worked on a low-effort, background-style project to make the build of OpenJDK itself building reproducible. We ve come far, but there are still issues I d like to address. [ ]

diffoscope diffoscope is our in-depth and content-aware diff utility. Not only can it locate and diagnose reproducibility issues, it can provide human-readable diffs from many kinds of binary formats. This month, Chris Lamb prepared and uploaded versions 183, 184 and 185 as well as performed significant triaging of merge requests and other issues in addition to making the following changes:
  • New features:
    • Support a newer format version of the R language s .rds files. [ ]
    • Update tests for OCaml 4.12. [ ]
    • Add a missing format_class import. [ ]
  • Bug fixes:
    • Don t call close_archive when garbage collecting Archive instances, unless open_archive definitely returned successfully. This prevents, for example, an AttributeError where PGPContainer s cleanup routines were rightfully assuming that its temporary directory had actually been created. [ ]
    • Fix (and test) the comparison of R language s .rdb files after refactoring temporary directory handling. [ ]
    • Ensure that RPM archives exists in the Debian package description, regardless of whether python3-rpm is installed or not at build time. [ ]
  • Codebase improvements:
    • Use our assert_diff routine in tests/comparators/test_rdata.py. [ ]
    • Move diffoscope.versions to diffoscope.tests.utils.versions. [ ]
    • Reformat a number of modules with Black. [ ][ ]
However, the following changes were also made:
  • Mattia Rizzolo:
    • Fix an autopkgtest caused by the androguard module not being in the (expected) python3-androguard Debian package. [ ]
    • Appease a shellcheck warning in debian/tests/control.sh. [ ]
    • Ignore a warning from h5py in our tests that doesn t concern us. [ ]
    • Drop a trailing .1 from the Standards-Version field as it s required. [ ]
  • Zbigniew J drzejewski-Szmek:
    • Stop using the deprecated distutils.spawn.find_executable utility. [ ][ ][ ][ ][ ]
    • Adjust an LLVM-related test for LLVM version 13. [ ]
    • Update invocations of llvm-objdump. [ ]
    • Adjust a test with a one-byte text file for file version 5.40. [ ]
And, finally, Benjamin Peterson added a --diff-context option to control unified diff context size [ ] and Jean-Romain Garnier fixed the Macho comparator for architectures other than x86-64 [ ].

Upstream patches The Reproducible Builds project detects, dissects and attempts to fix as many currently-unreproducible packages as possible. We endeavour to send all of our patches upstream where appropriate. This month, we wrote a large number of such patches, including:

Testing framework The Reproducible Builds project runs a testing framework at tests.reproducible-builds.org, to check packages and other artifacts for reproducibility. This month, the following changes were made:
  • Holger Levsen:
    • Drop my package rebuilder prototype as it s not useful anymore. [ ]
    • Schedule old packages in Debian bookworm. [ ]
    • Stop scheduling packages for Debian buster. [ ][ ]
    • Don t include PostgreSQL debug output in package lists. [ ]
    • Detect Python library mismatches during build in the node health check. [ ]
    • Update a note on updating the FreeBSD system. [ ]
  • Mattia Rizzolo:
    • Silence a warning from Git. [ ]
    • Update a setting to reflect that Debian bookworm is the new testing. [ ]
    • Upgrade the PostgreSQL database to version 13. [ ]
  • Roland Clobus (Debian live image generation):
    • Workaround non-reproducible config files in the libxml-sax-perl package. [ ]
    • Use the new DNS for the snapshot service. [ ]
  • Vagrant Cascadian:
    • Also note that the armhf architecture also systematically varies by the kernel. [ ]

Contributing If you are interested in contributing to the Reproducible Builds project, please visit our Contribute page on our website. However, you can get in touch with us via:

30 September 2021

Holger Levsen: 20210930-Debian-Reunion-Hamburg-2021

Debian Reunion Hamburg 2021 is almost over... The Debian Reunion Hamburg 2021 is almost over now, half the attendees have already left for Regensburg, while five remaining people are still busy here, though tonight there will be two concerts at the venue, plus some lovely food and more. Together with the day trip tomorrow (involving lots of water but hopefully not from above...) I don't expect much more work to be done, so that I feel comfortable publishing the following statistics now, even though I expect some more work will be done while travelling back or due to renewed energy from the event! So I might update these numbers later :-) Together we did: I think that's a pretty awesome and am very happy we did this event! Debian Reunion / MiniDebConf Hamburg 2022 - save the date, almost! Thus I think we should have another Debian event at Fux in 2022, and after checking suitable free dates with the venue I think what could work out is an event from Monday May 23rd until Sunday May 29th 2022. What do you think? For now these dates are preliminary. If you know any reasons why these dates could be less than optimal for such an event, please let me know. Assuming there's no feedback indicating this is a bad idea, the dates shall be finalized by November 1st 2021. Obviously assuming having physical events is still and again a thing! ;-)

5 September 2021

Reproducible Builds: Reproducible Builds in August 2021

Welcome to the latest report from the Reproducible Builds project. In this post, we round up the important things that happened in the world of reproducible builds in August 2021. As always, if you are interested in contributing to the project, please visit the Contribute page on our website.
There were a large number of talks related to reproducible builds at DebConf21 this year, the 21st annual conference of the Debian Linux distribution (full schedule):
PackagingCon (@PackagingCon) is new conference for developers of package management software as well as their related communities and stakeholders. The virtual event, which is scheduled to take place on the 9th and 10th November 2021, has a mission is to bring different ecosystems together: from Python s pip to Rust s cargo to Julia s Pkg, from Debian apt over Nix to conda and mamba, and from vcpkg to Spack we hope to have many different approaches to package management at the conference . A number of people from reproducible builds community are planning on attending this new conference, and some may even present. Tickets start at $20 USD.
As reported in our May report, the president of the United States signed an executive order outlining policies aimed to improve the cybersecurity in the US. The executive order comes after a number of highly-publicised security problems such as a ransomware attack that affected an oil pipeline between Texas and New York and the SolarWinds hack that affected a large number of US federal agencies. As a followup this month, however, a detailed fact sheet was released announcing a number large-scale initiatives and that will undoubtedly be related to software supply chain security and, as a result, reproducible builds.
Lastly, We ran another productive meeting on IRC in August (original announcement) which ran for just short of two hours. A full set of notes from the meeting is available.

Software development kpcyrd announced an interesting new project this month called I probably didn t backdoor this which is an attempt to be:
a practical attempt at shipping a program and having reasonably solid evidence there s probably no backdoor. All source code is annotated and there are instructions explaining how to use reproducible builds to rebuild the artifacts distributed in this repository from source. The idea is shifting the burden of proof from you need to prove there s a backdoor to we need to prove there s probably no backdoor . This repository is less about code (we re going to try to keep code at a minimum actually) and instead contains technical writing that explains why these controls are effective and how to verify them. You are very welcome to adopt the techniques used here in your projects. ( )
As the project s README goes on the mention: the techniques used to rebuild the binary artifacts are only possible because the builds for this project are reproducible . This was also announced on our mailing list this month in a thread titled i-probably-didnt-backdoor-this: Reproducible Builds for upstreams. kpcyrd also wrote a detailed blog post about the problems surrounding Linux distributions (such as Alpine and Arch Linux) that distribute compiled Python bytecode in the form of .pyc files generated during the build process.

diffoscope diffoscope is our in-depth and content-aware diff utility. Not only can it locate and diagnose reproducibility issues, it can provide human-readable diffs from many kinds of binary formats. This month, Chris Lamb made a number of changes, including releasing version 180), version 181) and version 182) as well as the following changes:
  • New features:
    • Add support for extracting the signing block from Android APKs. [ ]
    • If we specify a suffix for a temporary file or directory within the code, ensure it starts with an underscore (ie. _ ) to make the generated filenames more human-readable. [ ]
    • Don t include short GCC lines that differ on a single prefix byte either. These are distracting, not very useful and are simply the strings(1) command s idea of the build ID, which is displayed elsewhere in the diff. [ ][ ]
    • Don t include specific .debug-like lines in the ELF-related output, as it is invariably a duplicate of the debug ID that exists better in the readelf(1) differences for this file. [ ]
  • Bug fixes:
    • Add a special case to SquashFS image extraction to not fail if we aren t the superuser. [ ]
    • Only use java -jar /path/to/apksigner.jar if we have an apksigner.jar as newer versions of apksigner in Debian use a shell wrapper script which will be rejected if passed directly to the JVM. [ ]
    • Reduce the maximum line length for calculating Wagner-Fischer, improving the speed of output generation a lot. [ ]
    • Don t require apksigner in order to compare .apk files using apktool. [ ]
    • Update calls (and tests) for the new version of odt2txt. [ ]
  • Output improvements:
    • Mention in the output if the apksigner tool is missing. [ ]
    • Profile diffoscope.diff.linediff and specialize. [ ][ ]
  • Logging improvements:
    • Format debug-level messages related to ELF sections using the diffoscope.utils.format_class. [ ]
    • Print the size of generated reports in the logs (if possible). [ ]
    • Include profiling information in --debug output if --profile is not set. [ ]
  • Codebase improvements:
    • Clarify a comment about the HUGE_TOOLS Python dictionary. [ ]
    • We can pass -f to apktool to avoid creating a strangely-named subdirectory. [ ]
    • Drop an unused File import. [ ]
    • Update the supported & minimum version of Black. [ ]
    • We don t use the logging variable in a specific place, so alias it to an underscore (ie. _ ) instead. [ ]
    • Update some various copyright years. [ ]
    • Clarify a comment. [ ]
  • Test improvements:
    • Update a test to check specific contents of SquashFS listings, otherwise it fails depending on the test systems user ID to username passwd(5) mapping. [ ]
    • Assign seen and expected values to local variables to improve contextual information in failed tests. [ ]
    • Don t print an orphan newline when the source code formatting test passes. [ ]

In addition Santiago Torres Arias added support for Squashfs version 4.5 [ ] and Felix C. Stegerman suggested a number of small improvements to the output of the new APK signing block [ ]. Lastly, Chris Lamb uploaded python-libarchive-c version 3.1-1 to Debian experimental for the new 3.x branch python-libarchive-c is used by diffoscope.

Distribution work In Debian, 68 reviews of packages were added, 33 were updated and 10 were removed this month, adding to our knowledge about identified issues. Two new issue types have been identified too: nondeterministic_ordering_in_todo_items_collected_by_doxygen and kodi_package_captures_build_path_in_source_filename_hash. kpcyrd published another monthly report on their work on reproducible builds within the Alpine and Arch Linux distributions, specifically mentioning rebuilderd, one of the components powering reproducible.archlinux.org. The report also touches on binary transparency, an important component for supply chain security. The @GuixHPC account on Twitter posted an infographic on what fraction of GNU Guix packages are bit-for-bit reproducible: Finally, Bernhard M. Wiedemann posted his monthly reproducible builds status report for openSUSE.

Upstream patches The Reproducible Builds project detects, dissects and attempts to fix as many currently-unreproducible packages as possible. We endeavour to send all of our patches upstream where appropriate. This month, we wrote a large number of such patches, including: Elsewhere, it was discovered that when supporting various new language features and APIs for Android apps, the resulting APK files that are generated now vary wildly from build to build (example diffoscope output). Happily, it appears that a patch has been committed to the relevant source tree. This was also discussed on our mailing list this month in a thread titled Android desugaring and reproducible builds started by Marcus Hoffmann.

Website and documentation There were quite a few changes to the Reproducible Builds website and documentation this month, including:
  • Felix C. Stegerman:
    • Update the website self-build process to not use the buster-backports suite now that Debian Bullseye is the stable release. [ ]
  • Holger Levsen:
    • Add a new page documenting various package rebuilder solutions. [ ]
    • Add some historical talks and slides from DebConf20. [ ][ ]
    • Various improvements to the history page. [ ][ ][ ]
    • Rename the Comparison protocol documentation category to Verification . [ ]
    • Update links to F-Droid documentation. [ ]
  • Ian Muchina:
    • Increase the font size of titles and de-emphasize event details on the talk page. [ ]
    • Rename the README file to README.md to improve the user experience when browsing the Git repository in a web browser. [ ]
  • Mattia Rizzolo:
    • Drop a position:fixed CSS statement that is negatively affecting with some width settings. [ ]
    • Fix the sizing of the elements inside the side navigation bar. [ ]
    • Show gold level sponsors and above in the sidebar. [ ]
    • Updated the documentation within reprotest to mention how ldconfig conflicts with the kernel variation. [ ]
  • Roland Clobus:
    • Added a ticket number for the issue with the live Cinnamon image and diffoscope. [ ]

Testing framework The Reproducible Builds project runs a testing framework at tests.reproducible-builds.org, to check packages and other artifacts for reproducibility. This month, the following changes were made:
  • Holger Levsen:
    • Debian-related changes:
      • Make a large number of changes to support the new Debian bookworm release, including adding it to the dashboard [ ], start scheduling tests [ ], adding suitable Apache redirects [ ] etc. [ ][ ][ ][ ][ ]
      • Make the first build use LANG=C.UTF-8 to match the official Debian build servers. [ ]
      • Only test Debian Live images once a week. [ ]
      • Upgrade all nodes to use Debian Bullseye [ ] [ ]
      • Update README documentation for the Debian Bullseye release. [ ]
    • Other changes:
      • Only include rsync output if the $DEBUG variable is enabled. [ ]
      • Don t try to install mock, a tool used to build Fedora packages some time ago. [ ]
      • Drop an unused function. [ ]
      • Various documentation improvements. [ ][ ]
      • Improve the node health check to detect zombie jobs. [ ]
  • Jessica Clarke (FreeBSD-related changes):
    • Update the location and branch name for the main FreeBSD Git repository. [ ]
    • Correctly ignore the source tarball when comparing build results. [ ]
    • Drop an outdated version number from the documentation. [ ]
  • Mattia Rizzolo:
    • Block F-Droid jobs from running whilst the setup is running. [ ]
    • Enable debugging for the rsync job related to Debian Live images. [ ]
    • Pass BUILD_TAG and BUILD_URL environment for the Debian Live jobs. [ ]
    • Refactor the master_wrapper script to use a Bash array for the parameters. [ ]
    • Prefer YAML s safe_load() function over the unsafe variant. [ ]
    • Use the correct variable in the Apache config to match possible existing files on disk. [ ]
    • Stop issuing HTTP 301 redirects for things that not actually permanent. [ ]
  • Roland Clobus (Debian live image generation):
    • Increase the diffoscope timeout from 120 to 240 minutes; the Cinnamon image should now be able to finish. [ ]
    • Use the new snapshot service. [ ]
    • Make a number of improvements to artifact handling, such as moving the artifacts to the Jenkins host [ ] and correctly cleaning them up at the right time. [ ][ ][ ]
    • Where possible, link to the Jenkins build URL that created the artifacts. [ ][ ]
    • Only allow only one job to run at the same time. [ ]
  • Vagrant Cascadian:
    • Temporarily disable armhf nodes for DebConf21. [ ][ ]

Lastly, if you are interested in contributing to the Reproducible Builds project, please visit the Contribute page on our website. You can get in touch with us via:

16 May 2021

Carl Chenet: How to save up to 500 /year switching from Mailchimp to Open Source Mailtrain and AWS SES

My newsletter Le Courrier du hacker (3,800 subscribers, 176 issues) is 3 years old and Mailchimp costs were becoming unbearable for a small project ($50 a month, $600 a year), with still limited revenues nowadays. Switching to the Open Source Mailtrain plugged to the AWS Simple Email Service (SES) will dramatically reduce the associated costs. First things first, thanks a lot to Pierre-Gilles Leymarie for his own article about switching to Mailtrain/SES. I owe him (and soon you too) so much. This article will be a step-by-step about how to set up Mailtrain/SES on a dedicated server running Linux. What s the purpose of this article? Mailchimp is more and more expensive following the growth of your newsletter subscribers and you need to leave it. You can use Mailtrain, a web app running on your own server and use the AWS SES service to send emails in an efficient way, avoiding to be flagged as a spammer by the other SMTP servers (very very common, you can try but you have been warned against Prerequisites You will need the following prerequisites : Steps This is a fairly straightforward setup if you know what you re doing. In the other case, you may need the help of a professional sysadmin. You will need to complete the following steps in order to complete your setup: Configure AWS SES Verify your domain You need to configure the DKIM to certify that the emails sent are indeed from your own domain. DKIM is mandatory, it s the de-facto standard in the mail industry. Ask to verify your domain
Ask AWS SES to verify a domain
Generate the DKIM settings
Generate the DKIM settings
Use the DKIM settings
Now you have your DKIM settings and Amazon AWS is waiting for finding the TXT field in your DNS zone. Configure your DNS zone to include DKIM settings I can t be too specific for this section because it varies A LOT depending on your DNS provider. The keys is: as indicated by the previous image you have to create one TXT record and two CNAME records in your DNS zone. The names, the types and the values are indicated by AWS SES. If you don t understand what s going here, there is a high probabiliy you ll need a system administrator to apply these modifications and the next ones in this article. Am I okay for AWS SES ? As long as the word verified does not appear for your domain, as shown in the image below, something is wrong. Don t wait too long, you have a misconfiguration somewhere.
AWS SES pending verification
When your domain is verified, you ll also receive an email to inform you about the successful verification. SMTP settings The last step is generating your credentials to use the AWS SES SMTP server. IT is really straightforward, providing the STMP address to use, the port, and a pair of username/password credentials.
AWS SES SMTP settings and credentials
Just click on Create My SMTP Credentials and follow the instructions. Write the SMTP server address somewhere and store the file with credentials on your computer, we ll need them below. Configure your server As we said before, we need a baremetal server or a virtual machine running a recent Linux. Configure your MySQL/MariaDB database We create a user mailtrain having all rights on a new database mailtrain. 
MariaDB [(none)]> create database mailtrain;
Query OK, 1 row affected (0.00 sec)
MariaDB [(none)]> CREATE USER 'mailtrain' IDENTIFIED BY 'V3rYD1fF1cUlTP4sSW0rd!';
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.01 sec)
MariaDB [(none)]> GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON mailtrain.* TO 'mailtrain'@localhost IDENTIFIED BY 'V3rYD1fF1cUlTP4sSW0rd!';
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.00 sec)
MariaDB [(none)]> FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.00 sec)
MariaDB [(none)]> show databases;
+--------------------+
  Database            
+--------------------+
  information_schema  
  mailtrain           
  mysql               
  performance_schema  
+--------------------+
6 rows in set (0.00 sec)
MariaDB [(none)]> Bye
Configure your web server I use Nginx and I ll give you the complete setup for it, including generating Let s Encrypt. Configure Let s Encrypt You need to stop Nginx as root: systemctl stop nginx Then get the certificate only, I ll give the Nginx Vhost configuration: certbot certonly -d mailtrain.toto.com Install Mailtrain On your server create the following directory: mkdir -p /var/www/
cd /var/www
wget https://github.com/Mailtrain-org/mailtrain/archive/refs/tags/v1.24.1.tar.gz
tar zxvf v1.24.1.tar.gz Modify the file /var/www/mailtrain/config/production.toml to use the MySQL settings: 
[mysql]
host="localhost"
user="mailtrain"
password="V3rYD1ff1culT!"
database="mailtrain"
Now launch the Mailtrain process in a screen: 
screen
NODE_ENV=production npm start
Now Mailtrain is launched and should be running. Yeah I know it s ugly to launch like this (root process in a screen, etc) you can improve security with the following commands: 
groupadd mailtrain
useradd -g mailtrain
chown -R mailtrain:mailtrain /var/www/mailtrain
Now create the following file in /etc/systemd/system/mailtrain.service 
[Unit]
 Description=mailtrain
 After=network.target
[Service]
 Type=simple
 User=mailtrain
 WorkingDirectory=/var/www/mailtrain/
 Environment="NODE_ENV=production"
 Environment="PORT=3000"
 ExecStart=/usr/bin/npm run start
 TimeoutSec=15
 Restart=always
[Install]
 WantedBy=multi-user.target
To register the following systemd unit and to launch the new Mailtrain daemon, use the following commands (do not forget to kill your screen session if you used it before): 
systemctl daemon-reload
systemctl start mailtrain.service
Now Mailtrain is running under the classic user mailtrain of the mailtrain system group. Configure the Nginx Vhost configuration for your domain Here is my configuration for the Mailtrain Nginx Vhost: 
map $http_upgrade $connection_upgrade  
  default upgrade;
  ''      close;
 
server  
  listen 80; 
  listen [::]:80;
  server_name mailtrain.toto.com;
  return 301 https://$host$request_uri;
 
server  
  listen 443 ssl;
  listen [::]:443 ssl;
  server_name mailtrain.toto.com;
  access_log /var/log/nginx/mailtrain.toto.com.access.log;
  error_log /var/log/nginx/mailtrain.toto.com.error.log;
  ssl_protocols TLSv1.2;
  ssl_ciphers EECDH+AESGCM:EECDH+AES;
  ssl_ecdh_curve prime256v1;
  ssl_prefer_server_ciphers on; 
  ssl_session_cache shared:SSL:10m;
  ssl_certificate     /etc/letsencrypt/live/mailtrain.toto.com/fullchain.pem;
  ssl_certificate_key /etc/letsencrypt/live/mailtrain.toto.com/privkey.pem;
  keepalive_timeout    70; 
  sendfile             on;
  client_max_body_size 0;
  root /var/www/mailtrain;
  location ~ /\.well-known\/acme-challenge  
    allow all;
   
  gzip on; 
  gzip_disable "msie6";
  gzip_vary on; 
  gzip_proxied any;
  gzip_comp_level 6;
  gzip_buffers 16 8k; 
  gzip_http_version 1.1;
  gzip_types text/plain text/css application/json application/javascript text/xml application/xml application/xml+rss text/javascript;
  add_header Strict-Transport-Security "max-age=31536000";
  location /   
    try_files $uri @proxy;
   
  location @proxy  
    proxy_set_header Host $host;
    proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
    proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
    proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Proto https;
    proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:3000;
Now Nginx is ready. Just start it: 
systemctl start nginx
This Nginx vhost will redirect all http requests coming to the Mailtrain process running on the 3000 port. Now it s time to setup Mailtrain! Setup Mailtrain You should be able to access your Mailtrain at https://mailtrain.toto.com Mailtrain is quite simple to configure, Here is my mailer setup. Mailtrain just forwards emails to AWS SES. We only have to plug Mailtrain to AWS SES.
Mailtrain mailer setup
The hostname is provided by AWS SES in the STMP Settings section. Use the 465 port and USE TLS option. Next is providing your AWS SES username and password you generated above and stored somewhere on your computer. One of the issues I encountered is the AWS SES rate limit. Send too many emails too fast will get you flagged as a spammer. So I had to throttle Mailtrain. Because I m a lazy man, I asked Pierre-Gilles Leymarie his setup. Quite easier than determining myself the good one. Here is my setup. Works fine for my soon-to-be 4k subscribers. The idea is: if your AWS SES lets you know you send too fast then just slow down.
Mailtrain to throttle sending emails to AWS SES
Conclusion That s it! You re ready! Almost. You need an HTML template for your newsletter and a list of subscribers. Buf if you re not new in the newsletter field, fleeing Mailchimp because of their expensive prices, you should have them both already. After sending almost ten issues with this setup, I m really happy with it. Open/click rates are the same. When leaving Mailchimp, do not leave any list of subscribers because they ll charge you $8 for a 0 to 500 contacts, that s crazy expensive! About the author The post How to save up to 500 /year switching from Mailchimp to Open Source Mailtrain and AWS SES appeared first on Carl Chenet's Blog.

23 March 2021

Bits from Debian: New Debian Developers and Maintainers (January and February 2021)

The following contributors got their Debian Developer accounts in the last two months: The following contributors were added as Debian Maintainers in the last two months: Congratulations!

18 February 2021

Jonathan McDowell: Hacking and Bricking the EE Opsrey 2 Mini

I ve mentioned in the past my twisted EE network setup from when I moved in to my current house. The 4GEE WiFi Mini (also known as the EE Osprey 2 Mini or the EE40VB, and actually a rebadged Alcatel Y853VB) has been sitting unused since then, so I figured I d see about trying to get a shell on it. TL;DR: Of course it s running Linux, there s a couple of test points internally which bring out the serial console, but after finding those and logging in I discovered it s running ADB on port 5555 quite happily available without authentication both via wifi and the USB port. So if you have physical or local network access, instant root shell. Well done, folks. And then I bricked it before I could do anything more interesting. There s a lack of information about this device out there - most of the links I can find are around removing the SIM lock - so I thought I d document the pieces I found just in case anyone else is trying to figure it out. It s based around a Qualcomm MDM9607 SoC, paired with 64M RAM and 256M NAND flash. Wifi is via an RTL8192ES. Kernel is 3.18.20. Busybox is v1.23.1. It s running dnsmasq but I didn t grab the version. Of course there s no source or offer of source provided. Taking it apart is fairly easy. There s a single screw to remove, just beside the SIM slot. The coloured rim can then be carefully pried away from the back, revealing the battery. There are then 4 screws in the corners which need removed in order to be able to lift out the actual PCB and gain access to the serial console test points. EE40VB PCB serial console test points My mistake was going poking around trying to figure out where the updates are downloaded from - I know I m running a slightly older release than what s current, and the device can do an automatic download + update. Top tip; don t run Jrdrecovery. It ll error on finding /cache/update.zip and wipe the main partition anyway. That ll leave you in a boot loop where the device boots the recovery partition which tries to install /cache/update.zip which of course still doesn t exist. So. Where next? First, I need to get the device into a state where I can actually do something other than watch it boot into recovery, fail to flash and reboot. Best guess at present is to try and get it to enter the Qualcomm EDL (Emergency Download) mode. That might be possible with a custom USB cable that grounds D+ on boot. Alternatively I need to probe some of the other test points on the PCB and see if grounding any of those helps enter EDL mode. I then need a suitable firehose OEM-signed programmer image. And then I need to actually get hold of a proper EE40VB firmware image, either via one of the OTA update files or possibly via an Alcatel ADSU image (though no idea how to get hold of one, other than by posting to a random GSM device forum and hoping for the kindness of strangers). More updates if/when I make progress
Qualcomm bootloader log 
Format: Log Type - Time(microsec) - Message - Optional Info
Log Type: B - Since Boot(Power On Reset),  D - Delta,  S - Statistic
S - QC_IMAGE_VERSION_STRING=BOOT.BF.3.1.2-00053
S - IMAGE_VARIANT_STRING=LAATANAZA
S - OEM_IMAGE_VERSION_STRING=linux3
S - Boot Config, 0x000002e1
B -    105194 - SBL1, Start
D -     61885 - QSEE Image Loaded, Delta - (451964 Bytes)
D -     30286 - RPM Image Loaded, Delta - (151152 Bytes)
B -    459330 - Roger:boot_jrd_oem_main
B -    461526 - Welcome to key_check_poweron!!!
B -    466436 - REG0x00, rc=47
B -    469120 - REG0x01, rc=1f
B -    472018 - REG0x02, rc=1c
B -    474885 - REG0x03, rc=47
B -    477782 - REG0x04, rc=b2
B -    480558 - REG0x05, rc=
B -    483272 - REG0x06, rc=9e
B -    486139 - REG0x07, rc=
B -    488854 - REG0x08, rc=a4
B -    491721 - REG0x09, rc=80
B -    494130 - bq24295_probe: vflt/vsys/vprechg=0mV/0mV/0mV, tprechg/tfastchg=0Min/0Min, [0C, 0C]
B -    511546 - come to calculate vol and temperature!!
B -    511637 - ##############battery_core_convert_vntc: NTC_voltage=1785690
B -    517280 - battery_core_convert_vntc: <-44C, 1785690uV>, present=0
B -    529358 - bq24295_set_current_limit: setting=0mA, mode=-1, input/fastchg/prechg/termchg=-1mA/0mA/0mA/0mA
B -    534360 - bq24295_set_charge_current, rc=0,reg_val=0,i=0
B -    539636 - bq24295_enable_charge: setting=0, chg_enable=-1, otg_enable=0
B -    546072 - bq24295_enable_charging: enable_charging=0
B -    552172 - bq24295_set_current_limit: setting=0mA, mode=-1, input/fastchg/prechg/termchg=-1mA/0mA/0mA/0mA
B -    561566 - bq24295_set_charge_current, rc=0,reg_val=0,i=0
B -    567056 - bq24295_enable_charge: setting=0, chg_enable=0, otg_enable=0
B -    579286 - come to calculate vol and temperature!!
B -    579378 - ##############battery_core_convert_vntc: NTC_voltage=1785777
B -    585539 - battery_core_convert_vntc: <-44C, 1785777uV>, present=0
B -    597617 - charge_main: battery is plugout!!
B -    597678 - Welcome to pca955x_probe!!!
B -    601063 - pca955x_probe: PCA955X probed successfully!
D -     27511 - APPSBL Image Loaded, Delta - (179348 Bytes)
B -    633271 - QSEE Execution, Start
D -       213 - QSEE Execution, Delta
B -    638944 - >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>Start writting JRD RECOVERY BOOT
B -    650107 - >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>Start writting  RECOVERY BOOT
B -    653218 - >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>read_buf[0] == 0
B -    659044 - SBL1, End
D -    556137 - SBL1, Delta
S - Throughput, 2000 KB/s  (782884 Bytes,  278155 us)
S - DDR Frequency, 240 MHz
littlekernel aboot log 
Android Bootloader - UART_DM Initialized!!!
[0] welcome to lk
[0] SCM call: 0x2000601 failed with :fffffffc
[0] Failed to initialize SCM
[10] platform_init()
[10] target_init()
[10] smem ptable found: ver: 4 len: 17
[10] ERROR: No devinfo partition found
[10] Neither 'config' nor 'frp' partition found
[30] voltage of NTC  is 1789872!
[30] voltage of BAT  is 3179553!
[30] usb present is 1!
[30] Loading (boot) image (4171776): start
[530] Loading (boot) image (4171776): done
[540] DTB Total entry: 25, DTB version: 3
[540] Using DTB entry 0x00000129/00010000/0x00000008/0 for device 0x00000129/00010000/0x00010008/0
[560] JRD_CHG_OFF_FEATURE!
[560] come to jrd_target_pause_for_battery_charge!
[570] power_on_status.hard_reset = 0x0
[570] power_on_status.smpl = 0x0
[570] power_on_status.rtc = 0x0
[580] power_on_status.dc_chg = 0x0
[580] power_on_status.usb_chg = 0x0
[580] power_on_status.pon1 = 0x1
[590] power_on_status.cblpwr = 0x0
[590] power_on_status.kpdpwr = 0x0
[590] power_on_status.bugflag = 0x0
[590] cmdline: noinitrd  rw console=ttyHSL0,115200,n8 androidboot.hardware=qcom ehci-hcd.park=3 msm_rtb.filter=0x37 lpm_levels.sleep_disabled=1  earlycon=msm_hsl_uart,0x78b3000  androidboot.serialno=7e6ba58c androidboot.baseband=msm rootfstype=ubifs rootflags=b
[620] Updating device tree: start
[720] Updating device tree: done
[720] booting linux @ 0x80008000, ramdisk @ 0x80008000 (0), tags/device tree @ 0x81e00000
Linux kernel console boot log 
[    0.000000] Booting Linux on physical CPU 0x0
[    0.000000] Linux version 3.18.20 (linux3@linux3) (gcc version 4.9.2 (GCC) ) #1 PREEMPT Thu Aug 10 11:57:07 CST 2017
[    0.000000] CPU: ARMv7 Processor [410fc075] revision 5 (ARMv7), cr=10c53c7d
[    0.000000] CPU: PIPT / VIPT nonaliasing data cache, VIPT aliasing instruction cache
[    0.000000] Machine model: Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. MDM 9607 MTP
[    0.000000] Early serial console at I/O port 0x0 (options '')
[    0.000000] bootconsole [uart0] enabled
[    0.000000] Reserved memory: reserved region for node 'modem_adsp_region@0': base 0x82a00000, size 56 MiB
[    0.000000] Reserved memory: reserved region for node 'external_image_region@0': base 0x87c00000, size 4 MiB
[    0.000000] Removed memory: created DMA memory pool at 0x82a00000, size 56 MiB
[    0.000000] Reserved memory: initialized node modem_adsp_region@0, compatible id removed-dma-pool
[    0.000000] Removed memory: created DMA memory pool at 0x87c00000, size 4 MiB
[    0.000000] Reserved memory: initialized node external_image_region@0, compatible id removed-dma-pool
[    0.000000] cma: Reserved 4 MiB at 0x87800000
[    0.000000] Memory policy: Data cache writeback
[    0.000000] CPU: All CPU(s) started in SVC mode.
[    0.000000] Built 1 zonelists in Zone order, mobility grouping on.  Total pages: 17152
[    0.000000] Kernel command line: noinitrd  rw console=ttyHSL0,115200,n8 androidboot.hardware=qcom ehci-hcd.park=3 msm_rtb.filter=0x37 lpm_levels.sleep_disabled=1  earlycon=msm_hsl_uart,0x78b3000  androidboot.serialno=7e6ba58c androidboot.baseband=msm rootfstype=ubifs rootflags=bulk_read root=ubi0:rootfs ubi.mtd=16
[    0.000000] PID hash table entries: 512 (order: -1, 2048 bytes)
[    0.000000] Dentry cache hash table entries: 16384 (order: 4, 65536 bytes)
[    0.000000] Inode-cache hash table entries: 8192 (order: 3, 32768 bytes)
[    0.000000] Memory: 54792K/69632K available (5830K kernel code, 399K rwdata, 2228K rodata, 276K init, 830K bss, 14840K reserved)
[    0.000000] Virtual kernel memory layout:
[    0.000000]     vector  : 0xffff0000 - 0xffff1000   (   4 kB)
[    0.000000]     fixmap  : 0xffc00000 - 0xfff00000   (3072 kB)
[    0.000000]     vmalloc : 0xc8800000 - 0xff000000   ( 872 MB)
[    0.000000]     lowmem  : 0xc0000000 - 0xc8000000   ( 128 MB)
[    0.000000]     modules : 0xbf000000 - 0xc0000000   (  16 MB)
[    0.000000]       .text : 0xc0008000 - 0xc07e6c38   (8060 kB)
[    0.000000]       .init : 0xc07e7000 - 0xc082c000   ( 276 kB)
[    0.000000]       .data : 0xc082c000 - 0xc088fdc0   ( 400 kB)
[    0.000000]        .bss : 0xc088fe84 - 0xc095f798   ( 831 kB)
[    0.000000] SLUB: HWalign=64, Order=0-3, MinObjects=0, CPUs=1, Nodes=1
[    0.000000] Preemptible hierarchical RCU implementation.
[    0.000000] NR_IRQS:16 nr_irqs:16 16
[    0.000000] GIC CPU mask not found - kernel will fail to boot.
[    0.000000] GIC CPU mask not found - kernel will fail to boot.
[    0.000000] mpm_init_irq_domain(): Cannot find irq controller for qcom,gpio-parent
[    0.000000] MPM 1 irq mapping errored -517
[    0.000000] Architected mmio timer(s) running at 19.20MHz (virt).
[    0.000011] sched_clock: 56 bits at 19MHz, resolution 52ns, wraps every 3579139424256ns
[    0.007975] Switching to timer-based delay loop, resolution 52ns
[    0.013969] Switched to clocksource arch_mem_counter
[    0.019687] Console: colour dummy device 80x30
[    0.023344] Calibrating delay loop (skipped), value calculated using timer frequency.. 38.40 BogoMIPS (lpj=192000)
[    0.033666] pid_max: default: 32768 minimum: 301
[    0.038411] Mount-cache hash table entries: 1024 (order: 0, 4096 bytes)
[    0.044902] Mountpoint-cache hash table entries: 1024 (order: 0, 4096 bytes)
[    0.052445] CPU: Testing write buffer coherency: ok
[    0.057057] Setting up static identity map for 0x8058aac8 - 0x8058ab20
[    0.064242]
[    0.064242] **********************************************************
[    0.071251] **   NOTICE NOTICE NOTICE NOTICE NOTICE NOTICE NOTICE   **
[    0.077817] **                                                      **
[    0.084302] ** trace_printk() being used. Allocating extra memory.  **
[    0.090781] **                                                      **
[    0.097320] ** This means that this is a DEBUG kernel and it is     **
[    0.103802] ** unsafe for produciton use.                           **
[    0.110339] **                                                      **
[    0.116850] ** If you see this message and you are not debugging    **
[    0.123333] ** the kernel, report this immediately to your vendor!  **
[    0.129870] **                                                      **
[    0.136380] **   NOTICE NOTICE NOTICE NOTICE NOTICE NOTICE NOTICE   **
[    0.142865] **********************************************************
[    0.150225] MSM Memory Dump base table set up
[    0.153739] MSM Memory Dump apps data table set up
[    0.168125] VFP support v0.3: implementor 41 architecture 2 part 30 variant 7 rev 5
[    0.176332] pinctrl core: initialized pinctrl subsystem
[    0.180930] regulator-dummy: no parameters
[    0.215338] NET: Registered protocol family 16
[    0.220475] DMA: preallocated 256 KiB pool for atomic coherent allocations
[    0.284034] cpuidle: using governor ladder
[    0.314026] cpuidle: using governor menu
[    0.344024] cpuidle: using governor qcom
[    0.355452] msm_watchdog b017000.qcom,wdt: wdog absent resource not present
[    0.361656] msm_watchdog b017000.qcom,wdt: MSM Watchdog Initialized
[    0.371373] irq: no irq domain found for /soc/pinctrl@1000000 !
[    0.381268] spmi_pmic_arb 200f000.qcom,spmi: PMIC Arb Version-2 0x20010000
[    0.389733] platform 4080000.qcom,mss: assigned reserved memory node modem_adsp_region@0
[    0.397409] mem_acc_corner: 0 <--> 0 mV
[    0.401937] hw-breakpoint: found 5 (+1 reserved) breakpoint and 4 watchpoint registers.
[    0.408966] hw-breakpoint: maximum watchpoint size is 8 bytes.
[    0.416287] __of_mpm_init(): MPM driver mapping exists
[    0.420940] msm_rpm_glink_dt_parse: qcom,rpm-glink compatible not matches
[    0.427235] msm_rpm_dev_probe: APSS-RPM communication over SMD
[    0.432977] smd_open() before smd_init()
[    0.437544] msm_mpm_dev_probe(): Cannot get clk resource for XO: -517
[    0.445730] smd_channel_probe_now: allocation table not initialized
[    0.453100] mdm9607_s1: 1050 <--> 1350 mV at 1225 mV normal idle
[    0.458566] spm_regulator_probe: name=mdm9607_s1, range=LV, voltage=1225000 uV, mode=AUTO, step rate=4800 uV/us
[    0.468817] cpr_efuse_init: apc_corner: efuse_addr = 0x000a4000 (len=0x1000)
[    0.475353] cpr_read_fuse_revision: apc_corner: fuse revision = 2
[    0.481345] cpr_parse_speed_bin_fuse: apc_corner: [row: 37]: 0x79e8bd327e6ba58c, speed_bits = 4
[    0.490124] cpr_pvs_init: apc_corner: pvs voltage: [1050000 1100000 1275000] uV
[    0.497342] cpr_pvs_init: apc_corner: ceiling voltage: [1050000 1225000 1350000] uV
[    0.504979] cpr_pvs_init: apc_corner: floor voltage: [1050000 1050000 1150000] uV
[    0.513125] i2c-msm-v2 78b8000.i2c: probing driver i2c-msm-v2
[    0.518335] i2c-msm-v2 78b8000.i2c: error on clk_get(core_clk):-517
[    0.524478] i2c-msm-v2 78b8000.i2c: error probe() failed with err:-517
[    0.531111] i2c-msm-v2 78b7000.i2c: probing driver i2c-msm-v2
[    0.536788] i2c-msm-v2 78b7000.i2c: error on clk_get(core_clk):-517
[    0.542886] i2c-msm-v2 78b7000.i2c: error probe() failed with err:-517
[    0.549618] i2c-msm-v2 78b9000.i2c: probing driver i2c-msm-v2
[    0.555202] i2c-msm-v2 78b9000.i2c: error on clk_get(core_clk):-517
[    0.561374] i2c-msm-v2 78b9000.i2c: error probe() failed with err:-517
[    0.570613] msm-thermal soc:qcom,msm-thermal: msm_thermal:Failed reading node=/soc/qcom,msm-thermal, key=qcom,core-limit-temp. err=-22. KTM continues
[    0.583049] msm-thermal soc:qcom,msm-thermal: probe_therm_reset:Failed reading node=/soc/qcom,msm-thermal, key=qcom,therm-reset-temp err=-22. KTM continues
[    0.596926] msm_thermal:msm_thermal_dev_probe Failed reading node=/soc/qcom,msm-thermal, key=qcom,online-hotplug-core. err:-517
[    0.609370] sps:sps is ready.
[    0.613137] msm_rpm_glink_dt_parse: qcom,rpm-glink compatible not matches
[    0.619020] msm_rpm_dev_probe: APSS-RPM communication over SMD
[    0.625773] mdm9607_s2: 750 <--> 1275 mV at 750 mV normal idle
[    0.631584] mdm9607_s3_level: 0 <--> 0 mV at 0 mV normal idle
[    0.637085] mdm9607_s3_level_ao: 0 <--> 0 mV at 0 mV normal idle
[    0.643092] mdm9607_s3_floor_level: 0 <--> 0 mV at 0 mV normal idle
[    0.649512] mdm9607_s3_level_so: 0 <--> 0 mV at 0 mV normal idle
[    0.655750] mdm9607_s4: 1800 <--> 1950 mV at 1800 mV normal idle
[    0.661791] mdm9607_l1: 1250 mV normal idle
[    0.666090] mdm9607_l2: 1800 mV normal idle
[    0.670276] mdm9607_l3: 1800 mV normal idle
[    0.674541] mdm9607_l4: 3075 mV normal idle
[    0.678743] mdm9607_l5: 1700 <--> 3050 mV at 1700 mV normal idle
[    0.684904] mdm9607_l6: 1700 <--> 3050 mV at 1700 mV normal idle
[    0.690892] mdm9607_l7: 1700 <--> 1900 mV at 1700 mV normal idle
[    0.697036] mdm9607_l8: 1800 mV normal idle
[    0.701238] mdm9607_l9: 1200 <--> 1250 mV at 1200 mV normal idle
[    0.707367] mdm9607_l10: 1050 mV normal idle
[    0.711662] mdm9607_l11: 1800 mV normal idle
[    0.716089] mdm9607_l12_level: 0 <--> 0 mV at 0 mV normal idle
[    0.721717] mdm9607_l12_level_ao: 0 <--> 0 mV at 0 mV normal idle
[    0.727946] mdm9607_l12_level_so: 0 <--> 0 mV at 0 mV normal idle
[    0.734099] mdm9607_l12_floor_lebel: 0 <--> 0 mV at 0 mV normal idle
[    0.740706] mdm9607_l13: 1800 <--> 2850 mV at 2850 mV normal idle
[    0.746883] mdm9607_l14: 2650 <--> 3000 mV at 2650 mV normal idle
[    0.752515] msm_mpm_dev_probe(): Cannot get clk resource for XO: -517
[    0.759036] cpr_efuse_init: apc_corner: efuse_addr = 0x000a4000 (len=0x1000)
[    0.765807] cpr_read_fuse_revision: apc_corner: fuse revision = 2
[    0.771809] cpr_parse_speed_bin_fuse: apc_corner: [row: 37]: 0x79e8bd327e6ba58c, speed_bits = 4
[    0.780586] cpr_pvs_init: apc_corner: pvs voltage: [1050000 1100000 1275000] uV
[    0.787808] cpr_pvs_init: apc_corner: ceiling voltage: [1050000 1225000 1350000] uV
[    0.795443] cpr_pvs_init: apc_corner: floor voltage: [1050000 1050000 1150000] uV
[    0.803094] cpr_init_cpr_parameters: apc_corner: up threshold = 2, down threshold = 3
[    0.810752] cpr_init_cpr_parameters: apc_corner: CPR is enabled by default.
[    0.817687] cpr_init_cpr_efuse: apc_corner: [row:65] = 0x15000277277383
[    0.824272] cpr_init_cpr_efuse: apc_corner: CPR disable fuse = 0
[    0.830225] cpr_init_cpr_efuse: apc_corner: Corner[1]: ro_sel = 0, target quot = 631
[    0.837976] cpr_init_cpr_efuse: apc_corner: Corner[2]: ro_sel = 0, target quot = 631
[    0.845703] cpr_init_cpr_efuse: apc_corner: Corner[3]: ro_sel = 0, target quot = 899
[    0.853592] cpr_config: apc_corner: Timer count: 0x17700 (for 5000 us)
[    0.860426] apc_corner: 0 <--> 0 mV
[    0.864044] i2c-msm-v2 78b8000.i2c: probing driver i2c-msm-v2
[    0.869261] i2c-msm-v2 78b8000.i2c: error on clk_get(core_clk):-517
[    0.875492] i2c-msm-v2 78b8000.i2c: error probe() failed with err:-517
[    0.882225] i2c-msm-v2 78b7000.i2c: probing driver i2c-msm-v2
[    0.887775] i2c-msm-v2 78b7000.i2c: error on clk_get(core_clk):-517
[    0.893941] i2c-msm-v2 78b7000.i2c: error probe() failed with err:-517
[    0.900719] i2c-msm-v2 78b9000.i2c: probing driver i2c-msm-v2
[    0.906256] i2c-msm-v2 78b9000.i2c: error on clk_get(core_clk):-517
[    0.912430] i2c-msm-v2 78b9000.i2c: error probe() failed with err:-517
[    0.919472] msm-thermal soc:qcom,msm-thermal: msm_thermal:Failed reading node=/soc/qcom,msm-thermal, key=qcom,core-limit-temp. err=-22. KTM continues
[    0.932372] msm-thermal soc:qcom,msm-thermal: probe_therm_reset:Failed reading node=/soc/qcom,msm-thermal,
key=qcom,therm-reset-temp err=-22. KTM continues
[    0.946361] msm_thermal:get_kernel_cluster_info CPU0 topology not initialized.
[    0.953824] cpu cpu0: dev_pm_opp_get_opp_count: device OPP not found (-19)
[    0.960300] msm_thermal:get_cpu_freq_plan_len Error reading CPU0 freq table len. error:-19
[    0.968533] msm_thermal:vdd_restriction_reg_init Defer vdd rstr freq init.
[    0.975846] cpu cpu0: dev_pm_opp_get_opp_count: device OPP not found (-19)
[    0.982219] msm_thermal:get_cpu_freq_plan_len Error reading CPU0 freq table len. error:-19
[    0.991378] cpu cpu0: dev_pm_opp_get_opp_count: device OPP not found (-19)
[    0.997544] msm_thermal:get_cpu_freq_plan_len Error reading CPU0 freq table len. error:-19
[    1.013642] qcom,gcc-mdm9607 1800000.qcom,gcc: Registered GCC clocks
[    1.019451] clock-a7 b010008.qcom,clock-a7: Speed bin: 4 PVS Version: 0
[    1.025693] a7ssmux: set OPP pair(400000000 Hz: 1 uV) on cpu0
[    1.031314] a7ssmux: set OPP pair(1305600000 Hz: 7 uV) on cpu0
[    1.038805] i2c-msm-v2 78b8000.i2c: probing driver i2c-msm-v2
[    1.043587] AXI: msm_bus_scale_register_client(): msm_bus_scale_register_client: Bus driver not ready.
[    1.052935] i2c-msm-v2 78b8000.i2c: msm_bus_scale_register_client(mstr-id:86):0 (not a problem)
[    1.062006] irq: no irq domain found for /soc/wcd9xxx-irq !
[    1.069884] i2c-msm-v2 78b7000.i2c: probing driver i2c-msm-v2
[    1.074814] AXI: msm_bus_scale_register_client(): msm_bus_scale_register_client: Bus driver not ready.
[    1.083716] i2c-msm-v2 78b7000.i2c: msm_bus_scale_register_client(mstr-id:86):0 (not a problem)
[    1.093850] i2c-msm-v2 78b9000.i2c: probing driver i2c-msm-v2
[    1.098889] AXI: msm_bus_scale_register_client(): msm_bus_scale_register_client: Bus driver not ready.
[    1.107779] i2c-msm-v2 78b9000.i2c: msm_bus_scale_register_client(mstr-id:86):0 (not a problem)
[    1.167871] KPI: Bootloader start count = 24097
[    1.171364] KPI: Bootloader end count = 48481
[    1.175855] KPI: Bootloader display count = 3884474147
[    1.180825] KPI: Bootloader load kernel count = 16420
[    1.185905] KPI: Kernel MPM timestamp = 105728
[    1.190286] KPI: Kernel MPM Clock frequency = 32768
[    1.195209] socinfo_print: v0.10, id=297, ver=1.0, raw_id=72, raw_ver=0, hw_plat=8, hw_plat_ver=65536
[    1.195209]  accessory_chip=0, hw_plat_subtype=0, pmic_model=65539, pmic_die_revision=131074 foundry_id=0 serial_number=2120983948
[    1.216731] sdcard_ext_vreg: no parameters
[    1.220555] rome_vreg: no parameters
[    1.224133] emac_lan_vreg: no parameters
[    1.228177] usbcore: registered new interface driver usbfs
[    1.233156] usbcore: registered new interface driver hub
[    1.238578] usbcore: registered new device driver usb
[    1.244507] cpufreq: driver msm up and running
[    1.248425] ION heap system created
[    1.251895] msm_bus_fabric_init_driver
[    1.262563] qcom,qpnp-power-on qpnp-power-on-c7303800: PMIC@SID0 Power-on reason: Triggered from PON1 (secondary PMIC) and 'cold' boot
[    1.273747] qcom,qpnp-power-on qpnp-power-on-c7303800: PMIC@SID0: Power-off reason: Triggered from UVLO (Under Voltage Lock Out)
[    1.285430] input: qpnp_pon as /devices/virtual/input/input0
[    1.291246] PMIC@SID0: PM8019 v2.2 options: 3, 2, 2, 2
[    1.296706] Advanced Linux Sound Architecture Driver Initialized.
[    1.302493] Add group failed
[    1.305291] cfg80211: Calling CRDA to update world regulatory domain
[    1.311216] cfg80211: World regulatory domain updated:
[    1.317109] Switched to clocksource arch_mem_counter
[    1.334091] cfg80211:  DFS Master region: unset
[    1.337418] cfg80211:   (start_freq - end_freq @ bandwidth), (max_antenna_gain, max_eirp), (dfs_cac_time)
[    1.354087] cfg80211:   (2402000 KHz - 2472000 KHz @ 40000 KHz), (N/A, 2000 mBm), (N/A)
[    1.361055] cfg80211:   (2457000 KHz - 2482000 KHz @ 40000 KHz), (N/A, 2000 mBm), (N/A)
[    1.370545] NET: Registered protocol family 2
[    1.374082] cfg80211:   (2474000 KHz - 2494000 KHz @ 20000 KHz), (N/A, 2000 mBm), (N/A)
[    1.381851] cfg80211:   (5170000 KHz - 5250000 KHz @ 80000 KHz), (N/A, 2000 mBm), (N/A)
[    1.389876] cfg80211:   (5250000 KHz - 5330000 KHz @ 80000 KHz), (N/A, 2000 mBm), (N/A)
[    1.397857] cfg80211:   (5490000 KHz - 5710000 KHz @ 80000 KHz), (N/A, 2000 mBm), (N/A)
[    1.405841] cfg80211:   (5735000 KHz - 5835000 KHz @ 80000 KHz), (N/A, 2000 mBm), (N/A)
[    1.413795] cfg80211:   (57240000 KHz - 63720000 KHz @ 2160000 KHz), (N/A, 0 mBm), (N/A)
[    1.422355] TCP established hash table entries: 1024 (order: 0, 4096 bytes)
[    1.428921] TCP bind hash table entries: 1024 (order: 0, 4096 bytes)
[    1.435192] TCP: Hash tables configured (established 1024 bind 1024)
[    1.441528] TCP: reno registered
[    1.444738] UDP hash table entries: 256 (order: 0, 4096 bytes)
[    1.450521] UDP-Lite hash table entries: 256 (order: 0, 4096 bytes)
[    1.456950] NET: Registered protocol family 1
[    1.462779] futex hash table entries: 256 (order: -1, 3072 bytes)
[    1.474555] msgmni has been set to 115
[    1.478551] Block layer SCSI generic (bsg) driver version 0.4 loaded (major 251)
[    1.485041] io scheduler noop registered
[    1.488818] io scheduler deadline registered
[    1.493200] io scheduler cfq registered (default)
[    1.502142] msm_rpm_log_probe: OK
[    1.506717] msm_serial_hs module loaded
[    1.509803] msm_serial_hsl_probe: detected port #0 (ttyHSL0)
[    1.515324] AXI: get_pdata(): Error: Client name not found
[    1.520626] AXI: msm_bus_cl_get_pdata(): client has to provide missing entry for successful registration
[    1.530171] msm_serial_hsl_probe: Bus scaling is disabled                      [    1.074814] AXI: msm_bus_scale_register_client(): msm_bus_scale_register_client: Bus driver not ready.
[    1.083716] i2c-msm-v2 78b7000.i2c: msm_bus_scale_register_client(mstr-id:86):0 (not a problem)
[    1.093850] i2c-msm-v2 78b9000.i2c: probing driver i2c-msm-v2
[    1.098889] AXI: msm_bus_scale_register_client(): msm_bus_scale_register_client: Bus driver not ready.
[    1.107779] i2c-msm-v2 78b9000.i2c: msm_bus_scale_register_client(mstr-id:86):0 (not a problem)
[    1.167871] KPI: Bootloader start count = 24097
[    1.171364] KPI: Bootloader end count = 48481
[    1.175855] KPI: Bootloader display count = 3884474147
[    1.180825] KPI: Bootloader load kernel count = 16420
[    1.185905] KPI: Kernel MPM timestamp = 105728
[    1.190286] KPI: Kernel MPM Clock frequency = 32768
[    1.195209] socinfo_print: v0.10, id=297, ver=1.0, raw_id=72, raw_ver=0, hw_plat=8, hw_plat_ver=65536
[    1.195209]  accessory_chip=0, hw_plat_subtype=0, pmic_model=65539, pmic_die_revision=131074 foundry_id=0 serial_number=2120983948
[    1.216731] sdcard_ext_vreg: no parameters
[    1.220555] rome_vreg: no parameters
[    1.224133] emac_lan_vreg: no parameters
[    1.228177] usbcore: registered new interface driver usbfs
[    1.233156] usbcore: registered new interface driver hub
[    1.238578] usbcore: registered new device driver usb
[    1.244507] cpufreq: driver msm up and running
[    1.248425] ION heap system created
[    1.251895] msm_bus_fabric_init_driver
[    1.262563] qcom,qpnp-power-on qpnp-power-on-c7303800: PMIC@SID0 Power-on reason: Triggered from PON1 (secondary PMIC) and 'cold' boot
[    1.273747] qcom,qpnp-power-on qpnp-power-on-c7303800: PMIC@SID0: Power-off reason: Triggered from UVLO (Under Voltage Lock Out)
[    1.285430] input: qpnp_pon as /devices/virtual/input/input0
[    1.291246] PMIC@SID0: PM8019 v2.2 options: 3, 2, 2, 2
[    1.296706] Advanced Linux Sound Architecture Driver Initialized.
[    1.302493] Add group failed
[    1.305291] cfg80211: Calling CRDA to update world regulatory domain
[    1.311216] cfg80211: World regulatory domain updated:
[    1.317109] Switched to clocksource arch_mem_counter
[    1.334091] cfg80211:  DFS Master region: unset
[    1.337418] cfg80211:   (start_freq - end_freq @ bandwidth), (max_antenna_gain, max_eirp), (dfs_cac_time)
[    1.354087] cfg80211:   (2402000 KHz - 2472000 KHz @ 40000 KHz), (N/A, 2000 mBm), (N/A)
[    1.361055] cfg80211:   (2457000 KHz - 2482000 KHz @ 40000 KHz), (N/A, 2000 mBm), (N/A)
[    1.370545] NET: Registered protocol family 2
[    1.374082] cfg80211:   (2474000 KHz - 2494000 KHz @ 20000 KHz), (N/A, 2000 mBm), (N/A)
[    1.381851] cfg80211:   (5170000 KHz - 5250000 KHz @ 80000 KHz), (N/A, 2000 mBm), (N/A)
[    1.389876] cfg80211:   (5250000 KHz - 5330000 KHz @ 80000 KHz), (N/A, 2000 mBm), (N/A)
[    1.397857] cfg80211:   (5490000 KHz - 5710000 KHz @ 80000 KHz), (N/A, 2000 mBm), (N/A)
[    1.405841] cfg80211:   (5735000 KHz - 5835000 KHz @ 80000 KHz), (N/A, 2000 mBm), (N/A)
[    1.413795] cfg80211:   (57240000 KHz - 63720000 KHz @ 2160000 KHz), (N/A, 0 mBm), (N/A)
[    1.422355] TCP established hash table entries: 1024 (order: 0, 4096 bytes)
[    1.428921] TCP bind hash table entries: 1024 (order: 0, 4096 bytes)
[    1.435192] TCP: Hash tables configured (established 1024 bind 1024)
[    1.441528] TCP: reno registered
[    1.444738] UDP hash table entries: 256 (order: 0, 4096 bytes)
[    1.450521] UDP-Lite hash table entries: 256 (order: 0, 4096 bytes)
[    1.456950] NET: Registered protocol family 1
[    1.462779] futex hash table entries: 256 (order: -1, 3072 bytes)
[    1.474555] msgmni has been set to 115
[    1.478551] Block layer SCSI generic (bsg) driver version 0.4 loaded (major 251)
[    1.485041] io scheduler noop registered
[    1.488818] io scheduler deadline registered
[    1.493200] io scheduler cfq registered (default)
[    1.502142] msm_rpm_log_probe: OK
[    1.506717] msm_serial_hs module loaded
[    1.509803] msm_serial_hsl_probe: detected port #0 (ttyHSL0)
[    1.515324] AXI: get_pdata(): Error: Client name not found
[    1.520626] AXI: msm_bus_cl_get_pdata(): client has to provide missing entry for successful registration
[    1.530171] msm_serial_hsl_probe: Bus scaling is disabled
[    1.535696] 78b3000.serial: ttyHSL0 at MMIO 0x78b3000 (irq = 153, base_baud = 460800 [    1.544155] msm_hsl_console_setup: console setup on port #0
[    1.548727] console [ttyHSL0] enabled
[    1.548727] console [ttyHSL0] enabled
[    1.556014] bootconsole [uart0] disabled
[    1.556014] bootconsole [uart0] disabled
[    1.564212] msm_serial_hsl_init: driver initialized
[    1.578450] brd: module loaded
[    1.582920] loop: module loaded
[    1.589183] sps: BAM device 0x07984000 is not registered yet.
[    1.594234] sps:BAM 0x07984000 is registered.
[    1.598072] msm_nand_bam_init: msm_nand_bam_init: BAM device registered: bam_handle 0xc69f6400
[    1.607103] sps:BAM 0x07984000 (va:0xc89a0000) enabled: ver:0x18, number of pipes:7
[    1.616588] msm_nand_parse_smem_ptable: Parsing partition table info from SMEM
[    1.622805] msm_nand_parse_smem_ptable: SMEM partition table found: ver: 4 len: 17
[    1.630391] msm_nand_version_check: nand_major:1, nand_minor:5, qpic_major:1, qpic_minor:5
[    1.638642] msm_nand_scan: NAND Id: 0x1590aa98 Buswidth: 8Bits Density: 256 MByte
[    1.646069] msm_nand_scan: pagesize: 2048 Erasesize: 131072 oobsize: 128 (in Bytes)
[    1.653676] msm_nand_scan: BCH ECC: 8 Bit
[    1.657710] msm_nand_scan: CFG0: 0x290408c0,           CFG1: 0x0804715c
[    1.657710]             RAWCFG0: 0x2b8400c0,        RAWCFG1: 0x0005055d
[    1.657710]           ECCBUFCFG: 0x00000203,      ECCBCHCFG: 0x42040d10
[    1.657710]           RAWECCCFG: 0x42000d11, BAD BLOCK BYTE: 0x000001c5
[    1.684101] Creating 17 MTD partitions on "7980000.nand":
[    1.689447] 0x000000000000-0x000000140000 : "sbl"
[    1.694867] 0x000000140000-0x000000280000 : "mibib"
[    1.699560] 0x000000280000-0x000000e80000 : "efs2"
[    1.704408] 0x000000e80000-0x000000f40000 : "tz"
[    1.708934] 0x000000f40000-0x000000fa0000 : "rpm"
[    1.713625] 0x000000fa0000-0x000001000000 : "aboot"
[    1.718582] 0x000001000000-0x0000017e0000 : "boot"
[    1.723281] 0x0000017e0000-0x000002820000 : "scrub"
[    1.728174] 0x000002820000-0x000005020000 : "modem"
[    1.732968] 0x000005020000-0x000005420000 : "rfbackup"
[    1.738156] 0x000005420000-0x000005820000 : "oem"
[    1.742770] 0x000005820000-0x000005f00000 : "recovery"
[    1.747972] 0x000005f00000-0x000009100000 : "cache"
[    1.752787] 0x000009100000-0x000009a40000 : "recoveryfs"
[    1.758389] 0x000009a40000-0x00000aa40000 : "cdrom"
[    1.762967] 0x00000aa40000-0x00000ba40000 : "jrdresource"
[    1.768407] 0x00000ba40000-0x000010000000 : "system"
[    1.773239] msm_nand_probe: NANDc phys addr 0x7980000, BAM phys addr 0x7984000, BAM IRQ 164
[    1.781074] msm_nand_probe: Allocated DMA buffer at virt_addr 0xc7840000, phys_addr 0x87840000
[    1.791872] PPP generic driver version 2.4.2
[    1.801126] cnss_sdio 87a00000.qcom,cnss-sdio: CNSS SDIO Driver registered
[    1.807554] msm_otg 78d9000.usb: msm_otg probe
[    1.813333] msm_otg 78d9000.usb: OTG regs = c88f8000
[    1.820702] gbridge_init: gbridge_init successs.
[    1.826344] msm_otg 78d9000.usb: phy_reset: success
[    1.830294] qcom,qpnp-rtc qpnp-rtc-c7307000: rtc core: registered qpnp_rtc as rtc0
[    1.838474] i2c /dev entries driver
[    1.842459] unable to find DT imem DLOAD mode node
[    1.846588] unable to find DT imem EDLOAD mode node
[    1.851332] unable to find DT imem dload-type node
[    1.856921] bq24295-charger 4-006b: bq24295 probe enter
[    1.861161] qcom,iterm-ma = 128
[    1.864476] bq24295_otg_vreg: no parameters
[    1.868502] charger_core_register: Charger Core Version 5.0.0(Built at 20151202-21:36)!
[    1.877007] i2c-msm-v2 78b8000.i2c: msm_bus_scale_register_client(mstr-id:86):0x3 (ok)
[    1.885559] bq24295-charger 4-006b: bq24295_set_bhot_mode 3
[    1.890150] bq24295-charger 4-006b: power_good is 1,vbus_stat is 2
[    1.896588] bq24295-charger 4-006b: bq24295_set_thermal_threshold 100
[    1.902952] bq24295-charger 4-006b: bq24295_set_sys_min 3700
[    1.908639] bq24295-charger 4-006b: bq24295_set_max_target_voltage 4150
[    1.915223] bq24295-charger 4-006b: bq24295_set_recharge_threshold 300
[    1.922119] bq24295-charger 4-006b: bq24295_set_terminal_current_limit iterm_disabled=0, iterm_ma=128
[    1.930917] bq24295-charger 4-006b: bq24295_set_precharge_current_limit bdi->prech_cur=128
[    1.940038] bq24295-charger 4-006b: bq24295_set_safty_timer 0
[    1.945088] bq24295-charger 4-006b: bq24295_set_input_voltage_limit 4520
[    1.972949] sdhci: Secure Digital Host Controller Interface driver
[    1.978151] sdhci: Copyright(c) Pierre Ossman
[    1.982441] sdhci-pltfm: SDHCI platform and OF driver helper
[    1.989092] sdhci_msm 7824900.sdhci: sdhci_msm_probe: ICE device is not enabled
[    1.995473] sdhci_msm 7824900.sdhci: No vreg data found for vdd
[    2.001530] sdhci_msm 7824900.sdhci: sdhci_msm_pm_qos_parse_irq: error -22 reading irq cpu
[    2.009809] sdhci_msm 7824900.sdhci: sdhci_msm_pm_qos_parse: PM QoS voting for IRQ will be disabled
[    2.018600] sdhci_msm 7824900.sdhci: sdhci_msm_pm_qos_parse: PM QoS voting for cpu group will be disabled
[    2.030541] sdhci_msm 7824900.sdhci: sdhci_msm_probe: sdiowakeup_irq = 353
[    2.036867] sdhci_msm 7824900.sdhci: No vmmc regulator found
[    2.042027] sdhci_msm 7824900.sdhci: No vqmmc regulator found
[    2.048266] mmc0: SDHCI controller on 7824900.sdhci [7824900.sdhci] using 32-bit ADMA in legacy mode
[    2.080401] Welcome to pca955x_probe!!
[    2.084362] leds-pca955x 3-0020: leds-pca955x: Using pca9555 16-bit LED driver at slave address 0x20
[    2.095400] sdhci_msm 7824900.sdhci: card claims to support voltages below defined range
[    2.103125] i2c-msm-v2 78b7000.i2c: msm_bus_scale_register_client(mstr-id:86):0x5 (ok)
[    2.114183] msm_otg 78d9000.usb: Avail curr from USB = 1500
[    2.120251] come to USB_SDP_CHARGER!
[    2.123215] Welcome to sn3199_probe!
[    2.126718] leds-sn3199 5-0064: leds-sn3199: Using sn3199 9-bit LED driver at slave address 0x64
[    2.136511] sn3199->led_en_gpio=21
[    2.139143] i2c-msm-v2 78b9000.i2c: msm_bus_scale_register_client(mstr-id:86):0x6 (ok)
[    2.150207] usbcore: registered new interface driver usbhid
[    2.154864] usbhid: USB HID core driver
[    2.159825] sps:BAM 0x078c4000 is registered.
[    2.163573] bimc-bwmon 408000.qcom,cpu-bwmon: BW HWmon governor registered.
[    2.171080] devfreq soc:qcom,cpubw: Couldn't update frequency transition information.
[    2.178513] coresight-fuse a601c.fuse: QPDI fuse not specified
[    2.184242] coresight-fuse a601c.fuse: Fuse initialized
[    2.192407] coresight-csr 6001000.csr: CSR initialized
[    2.197263] coresight-tmc 6026000.tmc: Byte Counter feature enabled
[    2.203204] sps:BAM 0x06084000 is registered.
[    2.207301] coresight-tmc 6026000.tmc: TMC initialized
[    2.212681] coresight-tmc 6025000.tmc: TMC initialized
[    2.220071] nidnt boot config: 0
[    2.224563] mmc0: new ultra high speed SDR50 SDIO card at address 0001
[    2.231120] coresight-tpiu 6020000.tpiu: NIDnT on SDCARD only mode
[    2.236440] coresight-tpiu 6020000.tpiu: TPIU initialized
[    2.242808] coresight-replicator 6024000.replicator: REPLICATOR initialized
[    2.249372] coresight-stm 6002000.stm: STM initialized
[    2.255034] coresight-hwevent 606c000.hwevent: Hardware Event driver initialized
[    2.262312] Netfilter messages via NETLINK v0.30.
[    2.266306] nf_conntrack version 0.5.0 (920 buckets, 3680 max)
[    2.272312] ctnetlink v0.93: registering with nfnetlink.
[    2.277565] ip_set: protocol 6
[    2.280568] ip_tables: (C) 2000-2006 Netfilter Core Team
[    2.285723] arp_tables: (C) 2002 David S. Miller
[    2.290146] TCP: cubic registered
[    2.293915] NET: Registered protocol family 10
[    2.298740] ip6_tables: (C) 2000-2006 Netfilter Core Team
[    2.303407] sit: IPv6 over IPv4 tunneling driver
[    2.308481] NET: Registered protocol family 17
[    2.312340] bridge: automatic filtering via arp/ip/ip6tables has been deprecated. Update your scripts to load br_netfilter if you need this.
[    2.325094] Bridge firewalling registered
[    2.328930] Ebtables v2.0 registered
[    2.333260] NET: Registered protocol family 27
[    2.341362] battery_core_register: Battery Core Version 5.0.0(Built at 20151202-21:36)!
[    2.348466] pmu_battery_probe: vbat_channel=21, tbat_channel=17
[    2.420236] ubi0: attaching mtd16
[    2.723941] ubi0: scanning is finished
[    2.732997] ubi0: attached mtd16 (name "system", size 69 MiB)
[    2.737783] ubi0: PEB size: 131072 bytes (128 KiB), LEB size: 126976 bytes
[    2.744601] ubi0: min./max. I/O unit sizes: 2048/2048, sub-page size 2048
[    2.751333] ubi0: VID header offset: 2048 (aligned 2048), data offset: 4096
[    2.758540] ubi0: good PEBs: 556, bad PEBs: 2, corrupted PEBs: 0
[    2.764305] ubi0: user volume: 3, internal volumes: 1, max. volumes count: 128
[    2.771476] ubi0: max/mean erase counter: 192/64, WL threshold: 4096, image sequence number: 35657280
[    2.780708] ubi0: available PEBs: 0, total reserved PEBs: 556, PEBs reserved for bad PEB handling: 38
[    2.789921] ubi0: background thread "ubi_bgt0d" started, PID 96
[    2.796395] android_bind cdev: 0xC6583E80, name: ci13xxx_msm
[    2.801508] file system registered
[    2.804974] mbim_init: initialize 1 instances
[    2.809228] mbim_init: Initialized 1 ports
[    2.815074] rndis_qc_init: initialize rndis QC instance
[    2.819713] jrd device_desc.bcdDevice: [0x0242]
[    2.823779] android_bind scheduled usb start work: name: ci13xxx_msm
[    2.830230] android_usb gadget: android_usb ready
[    2.834845] msm_hsusb msm_hsusb: [ci13xxx_start] hw_ep_max = 32
[    2.840741] msm_hsusb msm_hsusb: CI13XXX_CONTROLLER_RESET_EVENT received
[    2.847433] msm_hsusb msm_hsusb: CI13XXX_CONTROLLER_UDC_STARTED_EVENT received
[    2.855851] input: gpio-keys as /devices/soc:gpio_keys/input/input1
[    2.861452] qcom,qpnp-rtc qpnp-rtc-c7307000: setting system clock to 1970-01-01 06:36:41 UTC (23801)
[    2.870315] open file error /usb_conf/usb_config.ini
[    2.876412] jrd_usb_start_work open file erro /usb_conf/usb_config.ini, retry_count:0
[    2.884324] parse_legacy_cluster_params(): Ignoring cluster params
[    2.889468] ------------[ cut here ]------------
[    2.894186] WARNING: CPU: 0 PID: 1 at /home/linux3/jrd/yanping.an/ee40/0810/MDM9607.LE.1.0-00130/apps_proc/oe-core/build/tmp-glibc/work-shared/mdm9607/kernel-source/drivers/cpuidle/lpm-levels-of.c:739 parse_cluster+0xb50/0xcb4()
[    2.914366] Modules linked in:
[    2.917339] CPU: 0 PID: 1 Comm: swapper Not tainted 3.18.20 #1
[    2.923171] [<c00132ac>] (unwind_backtrace) from [<c0011460>] (show_stack+0x10/0x14)
[    2.931092] [<c0011460>] (show_stack) from [<c001c6ac>] (warn_slowpath_common+0x68/0x88)
[    2.939175] [<c001c6ac>] (warn_slowpath_common) from [<c001c75c>] (warn_slowpath_null+0x18/0x20)
[    2.947895] [<c001c75c>] (warn_slowpath_null) from [<c034e180>] (parse_cluster+0xb50/0xcb4)
[    2.956189] [<c034e180>] (parse_cluster) from [<c034b6b4>] (lpm_probe+0xc/0x1d4)
[    2.963527] [<c034b6b4>] (lpm_probe) from [<c024857c>] (platform_drv_probe+0x30/0x7c)
[    2.971380] [<c024857c>] (platform_drv_probe) from [<c0246d54>] (driver_probe_device+0xb8/0x1e8)
[    2.980118] [<c0246d54>] (driver_probe_device) from [<c0246f30>] (__driver_attach+0x68/0x8c)
[    2.988467] [<c0246f30>] (__driver_attach) from [<c02455d0>] (bus_for_each_dev+0x6c/0x90)
[    2.996626] [<c02455d0>] (bus_for_each_dev) from [<c02465a4>] (bus_add_driver+0xe0/0x1c8)
[    3.004786] [<c02465a4>] (bus_add_driver) from [<c02477bc>] (driver_register+0x9c/0xe0)
[    3.012739] [<c02477bc>] (driver_register) from [<c080c3d8>] (lpm_levels_module_init+0x14/0x38)
[    3.021459] [<c080c3d8>] (lpm_levels_module_init) from [<c0008980>] (do_one_initcall+0xf8/0x1a0)
[    3.030217] [<c0008980>] (do_one_initcall) from [<c07e7d4c>] (kernel_init_freeable+0xf0/0x1b0)
[    3.038818] [<c07e7d4c>] (kernel_init_freeable) from [<c0582d48>] (kernel_init+0x8/0xe4)
[    3.046888] [<c0582d48>] (kernel_init) from [<c000dda0>] (ret_from_fork+0x14/0x34)
[    3.054432] ---[ end trace e9ec50b1ec4c8f73 ]---
[    3.059012] ------------[ cut here ]------------
[    3.063604] WARNING: CPU: 0 PID: 1 at /home/linux3/jrd/yanping.an/ee40/0810/MDM9607.LE.1.0-00130/apps_proc/oe-core/build/tmp-glibc/work-shared/mdm9607/kernel-source/drivers/cpuidle/lpm-levels-of.c:739 parse_cluster+0xb50/0xcb4()
[    3.083858] Modules linked in:
[    3.086870] CPU: 0 PID: 1 Comm: swapper Tainted: G        W      3.18.20 #1
[    3.093814] [<c00132ac>] (unwind_backtrace) from [<c0011460>] (show_stack+0x10/0x14)
[    3.101575] [<c0011460>] (show_stack) from [<c001c6ac>] (warn_slowpath_common+0x68/0x88)
[    3.109641] [<c001c6ac>] (warn_slowpath_common) from [<c001c75c>] (warn_slowpath_null+0x18/0x20)
[    3.118412] [<c001c75c>] (warn_slowpath_null) from [<c034e180>] (parse_cluster+0xb50/0xcb4)
[    3.126745] [<c034e180>] (parse_cluster) from [<c034b6b4>] (lpm_probe+0xc/0x1d4)
[    3.134126] [<c034b6b4>] (lpm_probe) from [<c024857c>] (platform_drv_probe+0x30/0x7c)
[    3.141906] [<c024857c>] (platform_drv_probe) from [<c0246d54>] (driver_probe_device+0xb8/0x1e8)
[    3.150702] [<c0246d54>] (driver_probe_device) from [<c0246f30>] (__driver_attach+0x68/0x8c)
[    3.159120] [<c0246f30>] (__driver_attach) from [<c02455d0>] (bus_for_each_dev+0x6c/0x90)
[    3.167285] [<c02455d0>] (bus_for_each_dev) from [<c02465a4>] (bus_add_driver+0xe0/0x1c8)
[    3.175444] [<c02465a4>] (bus_add_driver) from [<c02477bc>] (driver_register+0x9c/0xe0)
[    3.183398] [<c02477bc>] (driver_register) from [<c080c3d8>] (lpm_levels_module_init+0x14/0x38)
[    3.192107] [<c080c3d8>] (lpm_levels_module_init) from [<c0008980>] (do_one_initcall+0xf8/0x1a0)
[    3.200877] [<c0008980>] (do_one_initcall) from [<c07e7d4c>] (kernel_init_freeable+0xf0/0x1b0)
[    3.209475] [<c07e7d4c>] (kernel_init_freeable) from [<c0582d48>] (kernel_init+0x8/0xe4)
[    3.217542] [<c0582d48>] (kernel_init) from [<c000dda0>] (ret_from_fork+0x14/0x34)
[    3.225090] ---[ end trace e9ec50b1ec4c8f74 ]---
[    3.229667] /soc/qcom,lpm-levels/qcom,pm-cluster@0: No CPU phandle, assuming single cluster
[    3.239954] qcom,cc-debug-mdm9607 1800000.qcom,debug: Registered Debug Mux successfully
[    3.247619] emac_lan_vreg: disabling
[    3.250507] mem_acc_corner: disabling
[    3.254196] clock_late_init: Removing enables held for handed-off clocks
[    3.262690] ALSA device list:
[    3.264732]   No soundcard [    3.274083] UBIFS (ubi0:0): background thread "ubifs_bgt0_0" started, PID 102
[    3.305224] UBIFS (ubi0:0): recovery needed
[    3.466156] UBIFS (ubi0:0): recovery completed
[    3.469627] UBIFS (ubi0:0): UBIFS: mounted UBI device 0, volume 0, name "rootfs"
[    3.476987] UBIFS (ubi0:0): LEB size: 126976 bytes (124 KiB), min./max. I/O unit sizes: 2048 bytes/2048 bytes
[    3.486876] UBIFS (ubi0:0): FS size: 45838336 bytes (43 MiB, 361 LEBs), journal size 9023488 bytes (8 MiB, 72 LEBs)
[    3.497417] UBIFS (ubi0:0): reserved for root: 0 bytes (0 KiB)
[    3.503078] UBIFS (ubi0:0): media format: w4/r0 (latest is w4/r0), UUID 4DBB2F12-34EB-43B6-839B-3BA930765BAE, small LPT model
[    3.515582] VFS: Mounted root (ubifs filesystem) on device 0:12.
[    3.520940] Freeing unused kernel memory: 276K (c07e7000 - c082c000)
INIT: version 2.88 booting

9 January 2021

Jonathan McDowell: Free Software Activities for 2020

As a reader of Planet Debian I see a bunch of updates at the start of each month about what people are up to in terms of their Free Software activities. I m not generally active enough in the Free Software world to justify a monthly report, but I did a report of my Free Software Activities for 2019 and thought I d do another for 2020. I ended up not doing as much as last year; I put a lot of that down to fatigue about the state of the world and generally not wanting to spend time on the computer at the end of the working day.

Conferences 2020 was unsurprisingly not a great year for conference attendance. I was fortunate enough to make it to FOSDEM and CopyleftConf 2020 - I didn t speak at either, but had plenty of interesting hallway track conversations as well as seeing some good talks. I hadn t been planning to attend DebConf20 due to time constraints, but its move to an entirely online conference meant I was able to attend a few talks at least. I have to say I don t like virtual conferences as much as the real thing; it s not as easy to have the casual chats at them, and it s also harder to carve out the exclusive time when you re at home. That said I spoke at NIDevConf this year, which was also fully virtual. It s not a Free Software focussed conference, but there s a lot of crossover in terms of technologies and I spoke on my experiences with Go, some of which are influenced by my packaging experiences within Debian.

Debian Most of my contributions to Free software happen within Debian. As part of the Data Protection Team I responded to various inbound queries to that team. Some of this involved chasing up other project teams who had been slow to respond - folks, if you re running a service that stores personal data about people then you need to be responsive to requests about it. The Debian Keyring was possibly my largest single point of contribution. We re in a roughly 3 month rotation of who handles the keyring updates, and I handled 2020.02.02, 2020.03.24, 2020.06.24, 2020.09.24 + 2020.12.24 For Debian New Members I m mostly inactive as an application manager - we generally seem to have enough available recently. If that changes I ll look at stepping in to help, but I don t see that happening. I continue to be involved in Front Desk, having various conversations throughout the year with the rest of the team, but there s no doubt Mattia and Pierre-Elliott are the real doers at present. In terms of package uploads I continued to work on gcc-xtensa-lx106, largely doing uploads to deal with updates to the GCC version or packaging (5, 6 + 7). sigrok had a few minor updates, libsigkrok 0.5.2-2, libsigrokdecode 0.5.3-2 as well as a new upstream release of Pulseview 0.4.2-1 and a fix to cope with change to QT 0.4.2-2. Due to the sigrok-firmware requirement on sdcc I also continued to help out there, updating to 4.0.0+dfsg-1 and doing some fixups in 4.0.0+dfsg-2. Despite still not writing an VHDL these days I continue to try and make sure ghdl is ok, because I found it a useful tool in the past. In 2020 that meant a new upstream release, 0.37+dfsg-1 along with a couple of more minor updates (0.37+dfsg-2 + 0.37+dfsg-3. libcli had a new upstream release, 1.10.4-1, and I did a long overdue update to sendip to the latest upstream release, 2.6-1 having been poked about an outstanding bug by the Reproducible Builds folk. OpenOCD is coming up to 4 years since its last stable release, but I did a snapshot upload to Debian experimental (0.10.0+g20200530-1) and a subsequent one to unstable (0.10.0+g20200819-1). There are also moves to produce a 0.11.0 release and I uploaded 0.11.0~rc1-1 as a result. libjaylink got a bump as a result (0.2.0-1) after some discussion with upstream.

OpenOCD On the subject of OpenOCD I ve tried to be a bit more involved upstream. I m not familiar enough with the intricacies of JTAG/SWD/the various architectures supported to contribute to the core, but I pushed the config for my HIE JTAG adapter upstream and try and review patches that don t require in depth hardware knowledge.

Linux I ve been contributing to the Linux kernel for a number of years now, mostly just minor bits here and there for issues I hit. This year I spent a lot of time getting support for the MikoTik RB3011 router upstreamed. That included the basic DTS addition, fixing up QCA8K to support SGMII CPU connections, adding proper 802.1q VLAN support to QCA8K and cleaning up an existing QCOM ADM driver that s required for the NAND. There were a number of associated bugfixes/minor changes found along the way too. It can be a little frustrating at times going round the review loop with submitting things upstream, but I do find it quite satisfying when it all comes together and I have no interest in weird vendor trees that just bitrot over time.

Software in the Public Interest I haven t sat on the board of SPI since 2015 but I was still acting as the primary maintainer of the membership website (with Martin Michlmayr as the other active contributor) and hosting it on my own machine. I managed to finally extricate myself from this role in August. I remain a contributing member.

Personal projects 2020 finally saw another release (0.6.0, followed swiftly by 0.6.1 to allow the upload of 0.6.1-1 to Debian) of onak. This release finally adds various improvements to deal with the hostility shown to the OpenPGP keyserver network in recent years, including full signature verification as an option. I fixed an oversight in my Digoo/1-wire temperature decoder and a bug that turned up on ARM but not MIPS in my mqtt-arp code. I should probably package it for Debian (even if I don t upload it), as I m running it on my RB3011 now.

16 November 2020

Bits from Debian: New Debian Developers and Maintainers (September and October 2020)

The following contributors got their Debian Developer accounts in the last two months: The following contributors were added as Debian Maintainers in the last two months: Congratulations!

Next.