Bits from Debian: New Debian Developers and Maintainers (September and October 2023)
- Fran ois Mazen (mzf)
- Andrew Ruthven (puck)
- Christopher Obbard (obbardc)
- Salvo Tomaselli (ltworf)
- Bo YU
- Athos Coimbra Ribeiro
- Marc Leeman
- Filip Str mb ck
hockeypuck[5295]: time="2023-03-24T00:00:28-06:00" level=error msg="recon with :0 failed" error="[ /srv/hockeypuck/packaging/src/gopkg.in/hockeypuck/conflux.v2/recon/gossip.go:109: dial tcp :0: connect: connection refused ]" label="gossip :11370"
hockeypuck[5295]: time="2023-03-24T00:00:28-06:00" level=info msg="waiting 27s for next gossip attempt" label="gossip :11370"
tcp :0: connect: connection refused
sounds fishy It
took me too long to find the reasons.
But, at least, along the way I decided to find my errors by debugging
the code, rather than by rebuilding the laboratory and random-stabbing
at the configuration.
And yes, finally I came to my senses, and found out my silly
mistake was to have my configuration read:
[hockeypuck.conflux.recon.partner.10.0.3.13]
httpAddr="10.0.3.13:11371"
reconAddr="10.0.3.13:11370"
[hockeypuck.conflux.recon.partner.10-0-3-13]
httpAddr="10.0.3.13:11371"
reconAddr="10.0.3.13:11370"
hockeypuck.conflux.recon.partner.10
(as the following period makes
the rest of the entry an entirely distinct one from what I thought I
specified).
Anyway, this made me at least:
+
) signs
escaped, like this:
https://guides.frame.work/Guide/Framework\+Laptop\+DIY\+Edition\+Quick\+Start\+Guide/57
... which Firefox immediately transforms in:
https://guides.frame.work/Guide/Framework/+Laptop/+DIY/+Edition/+Quick/+Start/+Guide/57
I'm puzzled as to why they would send the URL that way, the proper URL
is of course:
https://guides.frame.work/Guide/Framework+Laptop+DIY+Edition+Quick+Start+Guide/57
(They have also "let the team know about this for feedback and help
resolve the problem with the link" which is a support code word for
"ha-ha! nope! not my problem right now!" Trust me, I know, my own
code word is "can you please make a ticket?")
cat > /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/40-libinput.conf <<EOF
Section "InputClass"
Identifier "libinput touch pad catchall"
MatchIsTouchpad "on"
MatchDevicePath "/dev/input/event*"
Driver "libinput"
Option "Tapping" "on"
Option "TappingButtonMap" "lmr"
EndSection
EOF
But be aware that once you enable that tapping, you'll need to deal
with palm detection... So I have not actually enabled this in the end.
/etc/systemd/logind.conf.d/power-suspends.conf
:
[Login]
HandlePowerKey=suspend
HandlePowerKeyLongPress=poweroff
You might have to create the directory first:
mkdir /etc/systemd/logind.conf.d/
Then restart logind:
systemctl restart systemd-logind
And the power button will suspend! Long-press to power off doesn't
actually work as the laptop immediately suspends...
Note that there's probably half a dozen other ways of doing this,
see this, this, or that.
Key | Equivalent | Effect | Command |
---|---|---|---|
p | Pause | lock screen | xset s activate |
b | Break | ? | ? |
k | ScrLk | switch keyboard layout | N/A |
XF86AudioMedia
which, interestingly, does
absolutely nothing here. By default, on Windows, it opens your
browser to the Framework website and, on Linux, your "default
media player".
The keyboard backlight can be cycled with fn-space. The
dimmer version is dim enough, and the keybinding is easy to find in
the dark.
A skinny elephant would be performed with alt
PrtScr (above F11) KEY, so for
example alt fn F11 b
should do a hard reset. This comment suggests you need to hold
the fn only if "function lock" is on, but that's
actually the opposite of my experience.
Out of the box, some of the fn keys don't work. Mute,
volume up/down, brightness, monitor changes, and the airplane mode key
all do basically nothing. They don't send proper keysyms to Xorg at
all.
This is a known problem and it's related to the fact that the
laptop has light sensors to adjust the brightness
automatically. Somehow some of those keys (e.g. the brightness
controls) are supposed to show up as a different input device, but
don't seem to work correctly. It seems like the solution is for the
Framework team to write a driver specifically for this, but so far no
progress since July 2022.
In the meantime, the fancy functionality can be supposedly disabled with:
echo 'blacklist hid_sensor_hub' sudo tee /etc/modprobe.d/framework-als-blacklist.conf
... and a reboot. This solution is also documented in the upstream
guide.
Note that there's another solution flying around that fixes this by
changing permissions on the input device but I haven't tested
that or seen confirmation it works.
xbacklight
in i3, but out of the box I get
this error:
sep 29 22:09:14 angela i3[5661]: No outputs have backlight property
It just requires this blob in /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/backlight.conf
:
Section "Device"
Identifier "Card0"
Driver "intel"
Option "Backlight" "intel_backlight"
EndSection
This way I can control the actual backlight power with the brightness
keys, and they do significantly reduce power usage.
autorandr
setup doesn't work: I have tried saving a
profile and it doesn't get autodetected, so I also first need to do:
autorandr -l framework-external-dual-lg-acer
The magic:
autorandr -l horizontal
... also works well.
The worst problem with those monitors right now is that they have a
radically smaller resolution than the main screen on the laptop, which
means I need to reset the font scaling to normal every time I switch
back and forth between those monitors and the laptop, which means I
actually need to do this:
autorandr -l horizontal &&
eho Xft.dpi: 96 xrdb -merge &&
systemctl restart terminal xcolortaillog background-image emacs &&
i3-msg restart
Kind of disruptive.
5411.85user 673.33system 1:37:46elapsed 103%CPU (0avgtext+0avgdata 831700maxresident)k
10594704inputs+87448000outputs (9131major+410636783minor)pagefaults 0swaps
This was using 16 watts of power, with full screen brightness.
With all 16 cores (make -j16
), it takes less than 25 minutes:
19251.06user 2467.47system 24:13.07elapsed 1494%CPU (0avgtext+0avgdata 831676maxresident)k
8321856inputs+87427848outputs (30792major+409145263minor)pagefaults 0swaps
I had to plug the normal power supply after a few minutes because
battery would actually run out using my desk's power grommet (34
watts).
During compilation, fans were spinning really hard, quite noisy, but
not painfully so.
The laptop was sucking 55 watts of power, steadily:
Time User Nice Sys Idle IO Run Ctxt/s IRQ/s Fork Exec Exit Watts
-------- ----- ----- ----- ----- ----- ---- ------ ------ ---- ---- ---- ------
Average 87.9 0.0 10.7 1.4 0.1 17.8 6583.6 5054.3 233.0 223.9 233.1 55.96
GeoMean 87.9 0.0 10.6 1.2 0.0 17.6 6427.8 5048.1 227.6 218.7 227.7 55.96
StdDev 1.4 0.0 1.2 0.6 0.2 3.0 1436.8 255.5 50.0 47.5 49.7 0.20
-------- ----- ----- ----- ----- ----- ---- ------ ------ ---- ---- ---- ------
Minimum 85.0 0.0 7.8 0.5 0.0 13.0 3594.0 4638.0 117.0 111.0 120.0 55.52
Maximum 90.8 0.0 12.9 3.5 0.8 38.0 10174.0 5901.0 374.0 362.0 375.0 56.41
-------- ----- ----- ----- ----- ----- ---- ------ ------ ---- ---- ---- ------
Summary:
CPU: 55.96 Watts on average with standard deviation 0.20
Note: power read from RAPL domains: package-0, uncore, package-0, core, psys.
These readings do not cover all the hardware in this device.
Memtest86+ v6.00b3 12th Gen Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-1240P
CLK/Temp: 2112MHz 78/78 C Pass 2% #
L1 Cache: 48KB 414 GB/s Test 46% ##################
L2 Cache: 1.25MB 118 GB/s Test #3 [Moving inversions, 1s & 0s]
L3 Cache: 12MB 43 GB/s Testing: 16GB - 18GB [1GB of 15.7GB]
Memory : 15.7GB 14.9 GB/s Pattern:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
CPU: 4P+8E-Cores (16T) SMP: 8T (PAR)) Time: 0:27:23 Status: Pass \
RAM: 1600MHz (DDR4-3200) CAS 22-22-22-51 Pass: 1 Errors: 0
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Memory SPD Information
----------------------
- Slot 2: 16GB DDR-4-3200 - Crucial CT16G4SFRA32A.C16FP (2022-W23)
Framework FRANMACP04
<ESC> Exit <F1> Configuration <Space> Scroll Lock 6.00.unknown.x64
So about 30 minutes for a full 16GB memory test.
Unable to find medium containing a live file system
This, it turns out, was fixed in Debian lately, so a daily GRML
build will not have this problems. The upcoming 2022 release
(likely 2022.10 or 2022.11) will also get the fix.
I did manage to boot the development version of the Debian
installer which was a surprisingly good experience: it mounted the
encrypted drives and did everything pretty smoothly. It even offered
me to reinstall the boot loader, but that ultimately (and correctly, as
it turns out) failed because I didn't have a /boot/efi
partition.
At this point, I realized there was no easy way out of this, and I
just proceeded to completely reinstall Debian. I had a spare NVMe
drive lying around (backups FTW!) so I just swapped that in, rebooted
in the Debian installer, and did a clean install. I wanted to switch
to bookworm anyways, so I guess that's done too.
/etc/ssh
/var/lib/puppet
So that I would keep the previous machine's identity. That way I could
contact the Puppet server and install whatever was missing. I used my
Puppet optimization
trick to do a batch
install and then I had a good base setup, although not exactly as it
was before. 1700 packages were installed manually on angela
before
the reinstall, and not in Puppet.
I did not inspect each one individually, but I did go through /etc
and copied over more SSH keys, for backups and SMTP over SSH.
apt install fwupd-amd64-signed
fwupdmgr refresh
fwupdmgr get-updates
fwupdmgr update
Nice. The 12th gen BIOS updates, currently (January 2023) beta,
can be deployed through LVFS with:
fwupdmgr enable-remote lvfs-testing
echo 'DisableCapsuleUpdateOnDisk=true' >> /etc/fwupd/uefi_capsule.conf
fwupdmgr update
Those instructions come from the beta forum post. I performed the
BIOS update on 2023-01-16T16:00-0500.
cat >> /etc/default/console-setup <<EOF
FONTFACE="Terminus"
FONTSIZE=32x16
EOF
echo GRUB_GFXMODE=1024x768 >> /etc/default/grub
update-grub
.Xresources
will make everything look much bigger:
! 1.5*96
Xft.dpi: 144
Apparently, some of this can also help:
! These might also be useful depending on your monitor and personal preference:
Xft.autohint: 0
Xft.lcdfilter: lcddefault
Xft.hintstyle: hintfull
Xft.hinting: 1
Xft.antialias: 1
Xft.rgba: rgb
It my experience it also makes things look a little fuzzier, which is
frustrating because you have this awesome monitor but everything looks
out of focus. Just bumping Xft.dpi
by a 1.5 factor looks good to me.
The Debian Wiki has a page on HiDPI, but it's not as good as the
Arch Wiki, where the above blurb comes from. I am not using the
latter because I suspect it's causing some of the "fuzziness".
TODO: find the equivalent of this GNOME hack in i3? (gsettings set
org.gnome.mutter experimental-features
"['scale-monitor-framebuffer']"
), taken from this Framework
guide
Quick boot
and Quiet boot
in
the BIOS to diagnose the above boot issues. This, in turn, triggers a
bug where the BIOS boot manager (F12) would just hang
completely. It would also fail to boot from an external USB drive.
The current fix (as of BIOS 3.03) is to re-enable both Quick
boot
and Quiet boot
. Presumably this is something that will get
fixed in a future BIOS update.
Note that the following keybindings are active in the BIOS POST
check:
Key | Meaning |
---|---|
F2 | Enter BIOS setup menu |
F12 | Enter BIOS boot manager |
Delete | Enter BIOS setup menu |
ip
/iw
/wpa-supplicant
(yes, after repeatedly copying a bunch more packages over to get
those bootstrapped). (Next time I should probably try something like
this post.)
Thankfully, I had a little USB-C dongle with a RJ-45 jack lying
around. That also required a firmware blob, but it was a single
package to copy over, and with that loaded, I had network.
Eventually, I did managed to make WiFi work; the problem was more on
the side of "I forgot how to configure a WPA network by hand from the
commandline" than anything else. NetworkManager worked fine and got
WiFi working correctly.
Note that this is with Debian bookworm, which has the 5.19 Linux
kernel, and with the firmware-nonfree (firmware-iwlwifi
,
specifically) package.
Time User Nice Sys Idle IO Run Ctxt/s IRQ/s Fork Exec Exit Watts
-------- ----- ----- ----- ----- ----- ---- ------ ------ ---- ---- ---- ------
Average 1.7 0.0 0.5 97.6 0.2 1.2 4684.9 1985.2 126.6 39.1 128.0 7.57
GeoMean 1.4 0.0 0.4 97.6 0.1 1.2 4416.6 1734.5 111.6 27.9 113.3 7.54
StdDev 1.0 0.2 0.2 1.2 0.0 0.5 1584.7 1058.3 82.1 44.0 80.2 0.71
-------- ----- ----- ----- ----- ----- ---- ------ ------ ---- ---- ---- ------
Minimum 0.2 0.0 0.2 94.9 0.1 1.0 2242.0 698.2 82.0 17.0 82.0 6.36
Maximum 4.1 1.1 1.0 99.4 0.2 3.0 8687.4 4445.1 463.0 249.0 449.0 9.10
-------- ----- ----- ----- ----- ----- ---- ------ ------ ---- ---- ---- ------
Summary:
System: 7.57 Watts on average with standard deviation 0.71
Expansion cards matter a lot in the battery life (see below for a
thorough discussion), my normal setup is 2xUSB-C and 1xUSB-A (yes,
with an empty slot, and yes, to save power).
Interestingly, playing a video in a (720p) window in a window takes up
more power (10.5W) than in full screen (9.5W) but I blame that on my
desktop setup (i3 + compton)... Not sure if mpv
hits the
VA-API, maybe not in windowed mode. Similar results with 1080p,
interestingly, except the window struggles to keep up altogether. Full
screen playback takes a relatively comfortable 9.5W, which means a
solid 5h+ of playback, which is fine by me.
Fooling around the web, small edits, youtube-dl
, and I'm at around 80%
battery after about an hour, with an estimated 5h left, which is a
little disappointing. I had a 7h remaining estimate before I started
goofing around Discourse, so I suspect the website is a pretty
big battery drain, actually. I see about 10-12 W, while I was probably at
half that (6-8W) just playing music with mpv
in the background...
In other words, it looks like editing posts in Discourse with Firefox
takes a solid 4-6W of power. Amazing and gross.
(When writing about abusive power usage generates more power usage, is
that an heisenbug? Or schr dinbug?)
tlp-stat -b
and, unfortunately, the "ampere"
unit makes it quite hard to compare those, because voltage is not
necessarily the same between the two platforms.
enable_fbc=1
powertop --auto-tune
apt install tlp && systemctl enable tlp
nvme.noacpi=1 mem_sleep_default=deep
on the kernel command line
may help with standby power usagetlp.conf
: tlp.patch.
Specifically, the kernel's energy-aware scheduling heuristics don't work well on those CPUs. A number of features present there complicate the energy picture; these include SMT, Intel's "turbo boost" mode, and the CPU's internal power-management mechanisms. For many workloads, running on an ostensibly more power-hungry Pcore can be more efficient than using an Ecore. Time for discussion of the problem was lacking, though, and the session came to a close.All this to say that the 12gen Intel line shipped with this Framework series should have better power management thanks to its power-saving cores. And Linux has had the scheduler changes to make use of this (but maybe is still having trouble). In any case, this might not be the source of power management problems on my laptop, quite the opposite. Also note that the firmware updates for various chipsets are supposed to improve things eventually. On the other hand, The Verge simply declared the whole P-series a mistake...
powertop --auto-tune
and tlp
's
PCIE_ASPM_ON_BAT=powersupersave
basically did nothing: I was stuck
at 10W power usage in powertop (600+mA in tlp-stat
).
Apparently, I should be able to reach the C8
CPU power state (or
even C9
, C10
) in powertop, but I seem to be stock at
C7
. (Although I'm not sure how to read that tab in powertop: in the
Core(HW
) column there's only C3/C6/C7 states, and most cores are 85%
in C7 or maybe C6. But the next column over does show many CPUs in
C10 states...
As it turns out, the graphics card actually takes up a good chunk of
power unless proper power management is enabled (see below). After
tweaking this, I did manage to get down to around 7W power usage in
powertop.
Expansion cards actually do take up power, and so does the screen,
obviously. The fully-lit screen takes a solid 2-3W of power compared
to the fully dimmed screen. When removing all expansion cards and
making the laptop idle, I can spin it down to 4 watts power usage at
the moment, and an amazing 2 watts when the screen turned off.
Device | Minimum | Average | Max | Stdev | Note |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
Screen, 100% | 2.4W | 2.6W | 2.8W | N/A | |
Screen, 1% | 30mW | 140mW | 250mW | N/A | |
Backlight 1 | 290mW | ? | ? | ? | fairly small, all things considered |
Backlight 2 | 890mW | 1.2W | 3W? | 460mW? | geometric progression |
Backlight 3 | 1.69W | 1.5W | 1.8W? | 390mW? | significant power use |
Radios | 100mW | 250mW | N/A | N/A | |
USB-C | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | negligible power drain |
USB-A | 10mW | 10mW | ? | 10mW | almost negligible |
DisplayPort | 300mW | 390mW | 600mW | N/A | not passive |
HDMI | 380mW | 440mW | 1W? | 20mW | not passive |
1TB SSD | 1.65W | 1.79W | 2W | 12mW | significant, probably higher when busy |
MicroSD | 1.6W | 3W | 6W | 1.93W | highest power usage, possibly even higher when busy |
Ethernet | 1.69W | 1.64W | 1.76W | N/A | comparable to the SSD card |
It seems the USB A must have power going to it all the time, that the old USB 2 and 3 protocols, the USB C only provides power when there is a connection. Old versus new.Apparently, this is a problem specific to the USB-C to USB-A adapter that ships with the Framework. Some people have actually changed their orders to all USB-C because of this problem, but I'm not sure the problem is as serious as claimed in the forums. I couldn't reproduce the "one watt" power drains suggested elsewhere, at least not repeatedly. (A previous version of this post did show such a power drain, but it was in a less controlled test environment than the series of more rigorous tests above.) The worst offenders are the storage cards: the SSD drive takes at least one watt of power and the MicroSD card seems to want to take all the way up to 6 watts of power, both just sitting there doing nothing. This confirms claims of 1.4W for the SSD (but not 5W) power usage found elsewhere. The former post has instructions on how to disable the card in software. The MicroSD card has been reported as using 2 watts, but I've seen it as high as 6 watts, which is pretty damning. The Framework team has a beta update for the DisplayPort adapter but currently only for Windows (LVFS technically possible, "under investigation"). A USB-A firmware update is also under investigation. It is therefore likely at least some of those power management issues will eventually be fixed. Note that the upcoming Ethernet card has a reported 2-8W power usage, depending on traffic. I did my own power usage tests in powerstat-wayland and they seem lower than 2W. The upcoming 6.2 Linux kernel might also improve battery usage when idle, see this Phoronix article for details, likely in early 2023.
Device | Minimum | Average | Max | Stdev | Note |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
Baseline | 1.96W | 2.01W | 2.11W | 30mW | 1 USB-C, screen off, backlight off, no radios |
2 USB-C | 1.95W | 2.16W | 3.69W | 430mW | USB-C confirmed as mostly passive... |
3 USB-C | 1.95W | 2.16W | 3.69W | 430mW | ... although with extra stdev |
1TB SSD | 3.72W | 3.85W | 4.62W | 200mW | unchanged from before upgrade |
1 USB-A | 1.97W | 2.18W | 4.02W | 530mW | unchanged |
2 USB-A | 1.97W | 2.00W | 2.08W | 30mW | unchanged |
3 USB-A | 1.94W | 1.99W | 2.03W | 20mW | unchanged |
MicroSD w/o card | 3.54W | 3.58W | 3.71W | 40mW | significant improvement! 2-3W power saving! |
MicroSD w/ card | 3.53W | 3.72W | 5.23W | 370mW | new measurement! increased deviation |
DisplayPort | 2.28W | 2.31W | 2.37W | 20mW | unchanged |
1 HDMI | 2.43W | 2.69W | 4.53W | 460mW | unchanged |
2 HDMI | 2.53W | 2.59W | 2.67W | 30mW | unchanged |
External USB | 3.85W | 3.89W | 3.94W | 30mW | new result |
Ethernet | 3.60W | 3.70W | 4.91W | 230mW | unchanged |
sep 28 11:19:45 angela systemd-sleep[209379]: /sys/class/power_supply/BAT/charge_now = 6045 [mAh]
... to this:
sep 28 11:29:47 angela systemd-sleep[209725]: /sys/class/power_supply/BAT/charge_now = 6037 [mAh]
That's 8mAh per 10 minutes (and 2 seconds), or 48mA, or, with this
battery, about 127 hours or roughly 5 days of standby. Not bad!
In comparison, here is my really old x220, before:
sep 29 22:13:54 emma systemd-sleep[176315]: /sys/class/power_supply/BAT0/energy_now = 5070 [mWh]
... after:
sep 29 22:23:54 emma systemd-sleep[176486]: /sys/class/power_supply/BAT0/energy_now = 4980 [mWh]
... which is 90 mwH in 10 minutes, or a whopping 540mA, which was
possibly okay when this battery was new (62000 mAh, so about 100
hours, or about 5 days), but this battery is almost dead and has
only 5210 mAh when full, so only 10 hours standby.
And here is the Framework performing a similar test, before:
sep 29 22:27:04 angela systemd-sleep[4515]: /sys/class/power_supply/BAT1/charge_full = 3518 [mAh]
sep 29 22:27:04 angela systemd-sleep[4515]: /sys/class/power_supply/BAT1/charge_now = 2861 [mAh]
... after:
sep 29 22:37:08 angela systemd-sleep[4743]: /sys/class/power_supply/BAT1/charge_now = 2812 [mAh]
... which is 49mAh in a little over 10 minutes (and 4 seconds), or
292mA, much more than the Purism, but half of the X220. At this rate,
the battery would last on standby only 12 hours!! That is pretty
bad.
Note that this was done with the following expansion cards:
nvme.noacpi=1
but this
still gives me about 5mAh/min (or 300mA).
Adding mem_sleep_default=deep
to the kernel command line does make a
difference. Before:
sep 29 23:03:11 angela systemd-sleep[3699]: /sys/class/power_supply/BAT1/charge_now = 2544 [mAh]
... after:
sep 29 23:04:25 angela systemd-sleep[4039]: /sys/class/power_supply/BAT1/charge_now = 2542 [mAh]
... which is 2mAh in 74 seconds, which is 97mA, brings us to a more
reasonable 36 hours, or a day and a half. It's still above the x220
power usage, and more than an order of magnitude more than the Purism
laptop. It's also far from the 0.4% promised by upstream, which
would be 14mA for the 3500mAh battery.
It should also be noted that this "deep" sleep mode is a little more
disruptive than regular sleep. As you can see by the timing, it took
more than 10 seconds for the laptop to resume, which feels a little
alarming as your banging the keyboard to bring it back to life.
You can confirm the current sleep mode with:
# cat /sys/power/mem_sleep
s2idle [deep]
In the above, deep
is selected. You can change it on the fly with:
printf s2idle > /sys/power/mem_sleep
Here's another test:
sep 30 22:25:50 angela systemd-sleep[32207]: /sys/class/power_supply/BAT1/charge_now = 1619 [mAh]
sep 30 22:31:30 angela systemd-sleep[32516]: /sys/class/power_supply/BAT1/charge_now = 1613 [mAh]
... better! 6 mAh in about 6 minutes, works out to 63.5mA, so more
than two days standby.
A longer test:
oct 01 09:22:56 angela systemd-sleep[62978]: /sys/class/power_supply/BAT1/charge_now = 3327 [mAh]
oct 01 12:47:35 angela systemd-sleep[63219]: /sys/class/power_supply/BAT1/charge_now = 3147 [mAh]
That's 180mAh in about 3.5h, 52mA! Now at 66h, or almost 3 days.
I wasn't sure why I was seeing such fluctuations in those tests, but
as it turns out, expansion card power tests show that they do
significantly affect power usage, especially the SSD drive, which can
take up to two full watts of power even when idle. I didn't control
for expansion cards in the above tests running them with whatever
card I had plugged in without paying attention so it's likely the
cause of the high power usage and fluctuations.
It might be possible to work around this problem by disabling USB
devices before suspend. TODO. See also this post.
In the meantime, I have been able to get much better suspend
performance by unplugging all modules. Then I get this result:
oct 04 11:15:38 angela systemd-sleep[257571]: /sys/class/power_supply/BAT1/charge_now = 3203 [mAh]
oct 04 15:09:32 angela systemd-sleep[257866]: /sys/class/power_supply/BAT1/charge_now = 3145 [mAh]
Which is 14.8mA! Almost exactly the number promised by Framework! With
a full battery, that means a 10 days suspend time. This is actually
pretty good, and far beyond what I was expecting when starting down
this journey.
So, once the expansion cards are unplugged, suspend power usage is
actually quite reasonable. More detailed standby tests are available
in the standby-tests page, with a summary below.
There is also some hope that the Chromebook edition
specifically designed with a specification of 14 days standby
time could bring some firmware improvements back down to the
normal line. Some of those issues were reported upstream in April
2022, but there doesn't seem to have been any progress there
since.
TODO: one final solution here is suspend-then-hibernate, which
Windows uses for this
TODO: consider implementing the S0ix sleep states , see also troubleshooting
TODO: consider https://github.com/intel/pm-graph
Device | Wattage | Amperage | Days | Note |
---|---|---|---|---|
baseline | 0.25W | 16mA | 9 | sleep=deep nvme.noacpi=1 |
s2idle | 0.29W | 18.9mA | ~7 | sleep=s2idle nvme.noacpi=1 |
normal nvme | 0.31W | 20mA | ~7 | sleep=s2idle without nvme.noacpi=1 |
1 USB-C | 0.23W | 15mA | ~10 | |
2 USB-C | 0.23W | 14.9mA | same as above | |
1 USB-A | 0.75W | 48.7mA | 3 | +500mW (!!) for the first USB-A card! |
2 USB-A | 1.11W | 72mA | 2 | +360mW |
3 USB-A | 1.48W | 96mA | <2 | +370mW |
1TB SSD | 0.49W | 32mA | <5 | +260mW |
MicroSD | 0.52W | 34mA | ~4 | +290mW |
DisplayPort | 0.85W | 55mA | <3 | +620mW (!!) |
1 HDMI | 0.58W | 38mA | ~4 | +250mW |
2 HDMI | 0.65W | 42mA | <4 | +70mW |
Device | Wattage | Amperage | Days | Note |
---|---|---|---|---|
baseline | 0.25W | 16mA | 9 | no cards, same as before upgrade |
1 USB-C | 0.25W | 16mA | 9 | same as before |
2 USB-C | 0.25W | 16mA | 9 | same |
1 USB-A | 0.80W | 62mA | 3 | +550mW!! worse than before |
2 USB-A | 1.12W | 73mA | <2 | +320mW, on top of the above, bad! |
Ethernet | 0.62W | 40mA | 3-4 | new result, decent |
1TB SSD | 0.52W | 34mA | 4 | a bit worse than before (+2mA) |
MicroSD | 0.51W | 22mA | 4 | same |
DisplayPort | 0.52W | 34mA | 4+ | upgrade improved by 300mW |
1 HDMI | ? | 38mA | ? | same |
2 HDMI | ? | 45mA | ? | a bit worse than before (+3mA) |
Normal | 1.08W | 70mA | ~2 | Ethernet, 2 USB-C, USB-A |
sudo ectool fwchargelimit 80
I looked at building this myself but failed to run it. I opened a
RFP in Debian so that we can ship this in Debian, and also documented
my work there.
Note that there is now a counter that tracks charge/discharge
cycles. It's visible in tlp-stat -b
, which is a nice
improvement:
root@angela:/home/anarcat# tlp-stat -b
--- TLP 1.5.0 --------------------------------------------
+++ Battery Care
Plugin: generic
Supported features: none available
+++ Battery Status: BAT1
/sys/class/power_supply/BAT1/manufacturer = NVT
/sys/class/power_supply/BAT1/model_name = Framewo
/sys/class/power_supply/BAT1/cycle_count = 3
/sys/class/power_supply/BAT1/charge_full_design = 3572 [mAh]
/sys/class/power_supply/BAT1/charge_full = 3541 [mAh]
/sys/class/power_supply/BAT1/charge_now = 1625 [mAh]
/sys/class/power_supply/BAT1/current_now = 178 [mA]
/sys/class/power_supply/BAT1/status = Discharging
/sys/class/power_supply/BAT1/charge_control_start_threshold = (not available)
/sys/class/power_supply/BAT1/charge_control_end_threshold = (not available)
Charge = 45.9 [%]
Capacity = 99.1 [%]
One thing that is still missing is the charge threshold data (the
(not available)
above). There's been some work to make that
accessible in August, stay tuned? This would also make it possible
implement hysteresis support.
powertop
service which I run at boot time to tweak some power saving
settings.
It seems like this:
echo 'on' > '/sys/bus/usb/devices/4-2/power/control'
... is a good workaround to bring the card back online. You can even
return to power saving mode and the card will still work:
echo 'auto' > '/sys/bus/usb/devices/4-2/power/control'
Further research by Matt_Hartley from the Framework
Team found this issue in the tlp tracker that shows how the
USB_AUTOSUSPEND
setting enables the power saving even if the
driver doesn't support it, which, in retrospect, just sounds like a
bad idea. To quote that issue:
By default, USB power saving is active in the kernel, but not force-enabled for incompatible drivers. That is, devices that support suspension will suspend, drivers that do not, will not.So the fix is actually to uninstall
tlp
or disable that setting by
adding this to /etc/tlp.conf
:
USB_AUTOSUSPEND=0
... but that disables auto-suspend on all USB devices, which may
hurt other power usage performance. I have found that a a
combination of:
USB_AUTOSUSPEND=1
USB_DENYLIST="0bda:8156"
and this on the kernel commandline:
usbcore.quirks=0bda:8156:k
... actually does work correctly. I now have this in my
/etc/default/grub.d/framework-tweaks.cfg
file:
# net.ifnames=0: normal interface names ffs (e.g. eth0, wlan0, not wlp166
s0)
# nvme.noacpi=1: reduce SSD disk power usage (not working)
# mem_sleep_default=deep: reduce power usage during sleep (not working)
# usbcore.quirk is a workaround for the ethernet card suspend bug: https:
//guides.frame.work/Guide/Fedora+37+Installation+on+the+Framework+Laptop/
108?lang=en
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="net.ifnames=0 nvme.noacpi=1 mem_sleep_default=deep usbcore.quirks=0bda:8156:k"
# fix the resolution in grub for fonts to not be tiny
GRUB_GFXMODE=1024x768
Other than that, I haven't been able to max out the card because I
don't have other 2.5Gbit/s equipment at home, which is strangely
satisfying. But running against my Turris Omnia
router, I could pretty much max a gigabit fairly easily:
[ ID] Interval Transfer Bitrate Retr
[ 5] 0.00-10.00 sec 1.09 GBytes 937 Mbits/sec 238 sender
[ 5] 0.00-10.00 sec 1.09 GBytes 934 Mbits/sec receiver
The card doesn't require any proprietary firmware blobs which is
surprising. Other than the power saving issues, it just works.
In my power tests (see powerstat-wayland), the Ethernet card seems
to use about 1.6W of power idle, without link, in the above "quirky"
configuration where the card is functional but without autosuspend.
cd /lib/firmware && rm adlp_guc_70.1.1.bin adlp_guc_69.0.3.bin
update-initramfs -u
You will get the following warning during build, which is good as
it means the problematic firmware is disabled:
W: Possible missing firmware /lib/firmware/i915/adlp_guc_69.0.3.bin for module i915
W: Possible missing firmware /lib/firmware/i915/adlp_guc_70.1.1.bin for module i915
But then it also means that critical firmware isn't loaded, which
means, among other things, a higher battery drain. I was able to move
from 8.5-10W down to the 7W range after making the firmware work
properly. This is also after turning the backlight all the way down,
as that takes a solid 2-3W in full blast.
The proper fix is to use some compositing manager. I ended up using
compton with the following systemd unit:
[Unit]
Description=start compositing manager
PartOf=graphical-session.target
ConditionHost=angela
[Service]
Type=exec
ExecStart=compton --show-all-xerrors --backend glx --vsync opengl-swc
Restart=on-failure
[Install]
RequiredBy=graphical-session.target
compton
is orphaned however, so you might be tempted to use
picom instead, but in my experience the latter uses much
more power (1-2W extra, similar experience). I also tried
compiz
but it would just crash with:
anarcat@angela:~$ compiz --replace
compiz (core) - Warn: No XI2 extension
compiz (core) - Error: Another composite manager is already running on screen: 0
compiz (core) - Fatal: No manageable screens found on display :0
When running from the base session, I would get this instead:
compiz (core) - Warn: No XI2 extension
compiz (core) - Error: Couldn't load plugin 'ccp'
compiz (core) - Error: Couldn't load plugin 'ccp'
Thanks to EmanueleRocca for figuring all that out. See also this
discussion about power management on the Framework forum.
Note that Wayland environments do not require any special
configuration here and actually work better, see my Wayland migration
notes for details.
dmesg
:
[ 19.534429] Intel(R) Wireless WiFi driver for Linux
[ 19.534691] iwlwifi 0000:a6:00.0: enabling device (0000 -> 0002)
[ 19.541867] iwlwifi 0000:a6:00.0: firmware: failed to load iwlwifi-ty-a0-gf-a0-72.ucode (-2)
[ 19.541881] iwlwifi 0000:a6:00.0: firmware: failed to load iwlwifi-ty-a0-gf-a0-72.ucode (-2)
[ 19.541882] iwlwifi 0000:a6:00.0: Direct firmware load for iwlwifi-ty-a0-gf-a0-72.ucode failed with error -2
[ 19.541890] iwlwifi 0000:a6:00.0: firmware: failed to load iwlwifi-ty-a0-gf-a0-71.ucode (-2)
[ 19.541895] iwlwifi 0000:a6:00.0: firmware: failed to load iwlwifi-ty-a0-gf-a0-71.ucode (-2)
[ 19.541896] iwlwifi 0000:a6:00.0: Direct firmware load for iwlwifi-ty-a0-gf-a0-71.ucode failed with error -2
[ 19.541903] iwlwifi 0000:a6:00.0: firmware: failed to load iwlwifi-ty-a0-gf-a0-70.ucode (-2)
[ 19.541907] iwlwifi 0000:a6:00.0: firmware: failed to load iwlwifi-ty-a0-gf-a0-70.ucode (-2)
[ 19.541908] iwlwifi 0000:a6:00.0: Direct firmware load for iwlwifi-ty-a0-gf-a0-70.ucode failed with error -2
[ 19.541913] iwlwifi 0000:a6:00.0: firmware: failed to load iwlwifi-ty-a0-gf-a0-69.ucode (-2)
[ 19.541916] iwlwifi 0000:a6:00.0: firmware: failed to load iwlwifi-ty-a0-gf-a0-69.ucode (-2)
[ 19.541917] iwlwifi 0000:a6:00.0: Direct firmware load for iwlwifi-ty-a0-gf-a0-69.ucode failed with error -2
[ 19.541922] iwlwifi 0000:a6:00.0: firmware: failed to load iwlwifi-ty-a0-gf-a0-68.ucode (-2)
[ 19.541926] iwlwifi 0000:a6:00.0: firmware: failed to load iwlwifi-ty-a0-gf-a0-68.ucode (-2)
[ 19.541927] iwlwifi 0000:a6:00.0: Direct firmware load for iwlwifi-ty-a0-gf-a0-68.ucode failed with error -2
[ 19.541933] iwlwifi 0000:a6:00.0: firmware: failed to load iwlwifi-ty-a0-gf-a0-67.ucode (-2)
[ 19.541937] iwlwifi 0000:a6:00.0: firmware: failed to load iwlwifi-ty-a0-gf-a0-67.ucode (-2)
[ 19.541937] iwlwifi 0000:a6:00.0: Direct firmware load for iwlwifi-ty-a0-gf-a0-67.ucode failed with error -2
[ 19.544244] iwlwifi 0000:a6:00.0: firmware: direct-loading firmware iwlwifi-ty-a0-gf-a0-66.ucode
[ 19.544257] iwlwifi 0000:a6:00.0: api flags index 2 larger than supported by driver
[ 19.544270] iwlwifi 0000:a6:00.0: TLV_FW_FSEQ_VERSION: FSEQ Version: 0.63.2.1
[ 19.544523] iwlwifi 0000:a6:00.0: firmware: failed to load iwl-debug-yoyo.bin (-2)
[ 19.544528] iwlwifi 0000:a6:00.0: firmware: failed to load iwl-debug-yoyo.bin (-2)
[ 19.544530] iwlwifi 0000:a6:00.0: loaded firmware version 66.55c64978.0 ty-a0-gf-a0-66.ucode op_mode iwlmvm
Some of those are available in the latest upstream firmware package
(iwlwifi-ty-a0-gf-a0-71.ucode
, -68
, and -67
), but not all
(e.g. iwlwifi-ty-a0-gf-a0-72.ucode
is missing) . It's unclear what
those do or don't, as the WiFi seems to work well without them.
I still copied them in from the latest linux-firmware package in the
hope they would help with power management, but I did not notice a
change after loading them.
There are also multiple knobs on the iwlwifi
and iwlmvm
drivers. The latter has a power_schmeme
setting which defaults to
2
(balanced
), setting it to 3
(low power
) could improve
battery usage as well, in theory. The iwlwifi
driver also has
power_save
(defaults to disabled) and power_level
(1-5, defaults
to 1
) settings. See also the output of modinfo iwlwifi
and
modinfo iwlmvm
for other driver options.
compton
, above), I tested the classic
glxgears
.
Running in a window gives me odd results, as the gears basically grind
to a halt:
Running synchronized to the vertical refresh. The framerate should be
approximately the same as the monitor refresh rate.
137 frames in 5.1 seconds = 26.984 FPS
27 frames in 5.4 seconds = 5.022 FPS
Ouch. 5FPS!
But interestingly, once the window is in full screen, it does hit the
monitor refresh rate:
300 frames in 5.0 seconds = 60.000 FPS
I'm not really a gamer and I'm not normally using any of that fancy
graphics acceleration stuff (except maybe my browser does?).
I installed intel-gpu-tools for the intel_gpu_top
command to confirm the GPU was engaged when doing those simulations. A
nice find. Other useful diagnostic tools include glxgears
and
glxinfo
(in mesa-utils) and (vainfo
in vainfo).
Following to this post, I also made sure to have those settings
in my about:config
in Firefox, or, in user.js
:
user_pref("media.ffmpeg.vaapi.enabled", true);
Note that the guide suggests many other settings to tweak, but those
might actually be overkill, see this comment and its parents. I
did try forcing hardware acceleration by setting gfx.webrender.all
to true
, but everything became choppy and weird.
The guide also mentions installing the intel-media-driver
package,
but I could not find that in Debian.
The Arch wiki has, as usual, an excellent reference on hardware
acceleration in Firefox.
~/.config/chromium-flags.conf
but that doesn't actually work in
Debian. I had to put the flag in
/etc/chromium.d/disable-compositing
, like this:
export CHROMIUM_FLAGS="$CHROMIUM_FLAGS --disable-gpu-compositing"
It's possible another one of the hundreds of flags might fix this
issue better, but I don't really have time to go through this entire,
incomplete, and unofficial list (!?!).
Signal Desktop is a similar problem, and doesn't reuse those flags
(because of course it doesn't). Instead I had to rewrite the wrapper
script in /usr/local/bin/signal-desktop
to use this instead:
exec /usr/bin/flatpak run --branch=stable --arch=x86_64 org.signal.Signal --disable-gpu-compositing "$@"
This was mostly done in this Puppet commit.
I haven't figured out the root of this problem. I did try using
picom
and xcompmgr
; they both suffer from the same issue. Another
Debian testing user on Wayland told me they haven't seen this problem,
so hopefully this can be fixed by switching to
wayland.
Jan 20 12:49:10 angela kernel: Asynchronous wait on fence 0000:00:02.0:sway[104431]:cb0ae timed out (hint:intel_atomic_commit_ready [i915])
Jan 20 12:49:15 angela kernel: i915 0000:00:02.0: [drm] GPU HANG: ecode 12:0:00000000
Jan 20 12:49:15 angela kernel: i915 0000:00:02.0: [drm] Resetting chip for stopped heartbeat on rcs0
Jan 20 12:49:15 angela kernel: i915 0000:00:02.0: [drm] GuC firmware i915/adlp_guc_70.1.1.bin version 70.1
Jan 20 12:49:15 angela kernel: i915 0000:00:02.0: [drm] HuC firmware i915/tgl_huc_7.9.3.bin version 7.9
Jan 20 12:49:15 angela kernel: i915 0000:00:02.0: [drm] HuC authenticated
Jan 20 12:49:15 angela kernel: i915 0000:00:02.0: [drm] GuC submission enabled
Jan 20 12:49:15 angela kernel: i915 0000:00:02.0: [drm] GuC SLPC enabled
It's a solid 30 seconds graphical hang. Maybe the keyboard and
everything else keeps working. The latter bug report is quite long,
with many comments, but this one from January 2023 seems to say
that Sway 1.8 fixed the problem. There's also an earlier patch to
add an extra kernel parameter that supposedly fixes that too. There's
all sorts of other workarounds in there, for example this:
echo "options i915 enable_dc=1 enable_guc_loading=1 enable_guc_submission=1 edp_vswing=0 enable_guc=2 enable_fbc=1 enable_psr=1 disable_power_well=0" sudo tee /etc/modprobe.d/i915.conf
from this comment... So that one is unsolved, as far as the
upstream drivers are concerned, but maybe could be fixed through Sway.
#framework
on https://libera.chat/self-sigs-only
on gpg 2.2.27 and it looks like Debian Bookworm will get gpg 2.2.40. This would add import-clean
but Daniel Kahn Gillmor patched it out. He argues correctly that this new default could delete data from good locally store pubkeys.
This all ends in you getting some random combination of self-sigs-only
and / or import-clean
depending on which Linux distribution and version you happen to use.
Better be explicit. I recommend to add:
~/.gnupg/gpg.conf
to make sure you can manage signatures yourself and receive them from keyservers or local imports as intended.
In case you care: See info gnupg --index-search=keyserver-options
for the fine documentation. Of course apt install info
first to be able to read info pages. 'cause who still used them in 2023? Oh, wait...
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.
keys
to store the keys and in there the column
doc
stores the OpenPGP keys in JSON format (always with a data field
containing the original unparsed data).
For the thesis I split the analysis in three parts, first looking at the Public
Key packets, then analysing the User ID packets and finally studying the
Signature Packets. To analyse the respective packets I used SQL to export the
data to CSV files and then used the pandas read_csv
method
to create a dataframe of the values. In a couple of cases I did some parsing
before converting to a DataFrame to make the analysis step faster. The parsing
was done using the pgpdump python
library.
Together with my advisor I decided to submit the thesis for a journal, so we
revised and compressed the whole paper and the outcome was now
PUBLISHED
in the Journal of
Wireless Mobile Networks, Ubiquitous Computing, and Dependable Applications
(JoWUA).
I think the work gives some valuable insight in the development of the use of
OpenPGP in the last 30 years. Looking at the public key packets we were able to
compare the different public key algorithms and for example visualize how DSA
was the most used algorithm until around 2010 when it was replaced by RSA.
When looking at the less used algorithms a trend towards ECC based crytography is
visible.
What we also noticed was an increase of RSA keys with algorithm ID 3 (RSA Sign-Only),
which are deprecated. When
we took a deeper look at those keys we realized that most of those keys used a
specific User ID string in the User ID packets which allowed us to attribute
those keys to two software projects both using the Bouncy Castle Java
Cryptographic API (resp. the Spongy
Castle version for Android). We also stumbled over a tutorial on how to create
RSA keys with
Bouncycastle
which also describes how to create RSA keys with code that produces RSA
Sign-Only keys. In one of those projects, this was then
fixed.
By looking at the User ID packets we did some statistics about the most used
email providers used by OpenPGP users. One domain stood out, because it is not
the domain of an email provider: tellfinder.com
is a domain used in around
45,000 keys. Tellfinder is a
Big Data analysis software and the UID of all but two of those keys is
TellFinder Page Archiver- Signing Key <support@tellfinder.com>
.
We also looked at the comments used in OpenPGP User ID fields. In 2013 Daniel
Kahn Gillmor published a blog post titled OpenPGP User ID Comments considered
harmful in which he
pointed out that most of the comments in the User ID field of OpenPGP keys are
duplicating information that is already present somewhere in the User ID or the
key itself. In our dataset 3,133 comments were exactly the same as the name,
3,346 were the same as the domain and 18,246 comments were similar to the local
part of the email address
Last but not least we looked at the signature subpackets and the development of
some of the preferences (Preferred Symmetric
Algorithm, Preferred
Hash Algorithm) that are
being published using signature packets.
Analysing this huge dataset of cryptographic keys of the last 20 to 30 years
was very interesting and I learned a lot about the history of PGP resp.
OpenPGP and the evolution of cryptography overall. I think it
would be interesting to look at even more properties of OpenPGP keys and I also
think it would be valuable for the OpenPGP ecosystem if these kinds analysis
could be done regularly. An approach like Tor
Metrics could lead to interesting findings and
could also help to back decisions regarding future developments of the OpenPGP
standard.
The sayingActually, that quote says it all, even though I try to use this drag to help people get my gender on a more regularly basis these days.you're born naked and the rest is dragcouldn't be more true.
Wie kann man nur hassen, dass Menschen sich lieben."How is it possible to hate that people love each other" - is there anything to add to this? I don't think so.
debian/changelog
entry when generating documentation.debian/changelog
entry to Sphinx.sed
instead of grep+mv
to keep correct file permissions.PERL_HASH_SEED=0
during configure to make the generated .c
and .h
files stable.--disable-build-date
to ./configure
.debian/changelog
entry as build date.debian/chanelog
entry as build date.reproducible.debian.net
how it goes for pathological cases.
It's now possible to specify both --html
and --text
output. When neither of
them is specified, the default will be to print a text report on the standard
output (thanks to Paul Wise for the suggestion).
Documentation update
Nicolas Boulenguez investigated Ada
libraries.
Package reviews
451 obsolete
reviews have
been removed and 156 added this week.
New identified issues: running kernel version getting captured, random filenames in GHC debug symbols, and timestamps in headers generated by qdbusxml2cpp.
Misc.
Holger Levsen went to re:publica and talked about
reproducible builds to developers and users there.
Holger also had a chance to meet FreeBSD developers and discuss the status of
FreeBSD. Investigations have
started on how it could be made part of our current test
system.
Laurent Guerby gave Lunar access to systems in the GCC Compile
Farm. Hopefully access to these powerful
machines will help to fix packages for GCC, Iceweasel, and similar packages
requiring long build times.
Software engineering has its own political axis, ranging from conservative to liberal.
Jeroen van Wifflepuck | There are compromising pictures of this guy in carnal embrace with windmills. These could be very embarrassing if leaked to the press. We can't have a DPL that will embarrass us. We just can't. |
R.E. Jacks In Pollack | This guy is beholden to marmots. Lots and lots of marmots. Do you really want to empower a marmot rampage? |
Uncle Steve | Charging money for T-shirts? What happened to the gift economy? All clothing should be FREE! Where's the love? |
Tony Bob Towns | This guy can't decide whether or not his last name is Town or Town'S. Can you really trust someone who changes his name so casually? I don't think so. |
Andreas Schuldei | He and Ari are part of the same marmot cabal. If you can't trust one, can you trust the other? |
Yonah ( ) Walth re | Quite, simply, this, guy, is, employed, by, canonical.org, to, make, us, all, look, silly. Vive le Rock. P.S., I think the syphilis is worsening. |
Bill Allombert | Did the Debian menu in ion3 become less fun to use? I blame this guy for some reason. |