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3 January 2024

John Goerzen: Live Migrating from Raspberry Pi OS bullseye to Debian bookworm

I ve been getting annoyed with Raspberry Pi OS (Raspbian) for years now. It s a fork of Debian, but manages to omit some of the most useful things. So I ve decided to migrate all of my Pis to run pure Debian. These are my reasons:
  1. Raspberry Pi OS has, for years now, specified that there is no upgrade path. That is, to get to a newer major release, it s a reinstall. While I have sometimes worked around this, for a device that is frequently installed in hard-to-reach locations, this is even more important than usual. It s common for me to upgrade machines for a decade or more across Debian releases and there s no reason that it should be so much more difficult with Raspbian.
  2. As I noted in Consider Security First, the security situation for Raspberry Pi OS isn t as good as it is with Debian.
  3. Raspbian lags behind Debian often times by 6 months or more for major releases, and days or weeks for bug fixes and security patches.
  4. Raspbian has no direct backports support, though Raspberry Pi 3 and above can use Debian s backports (per my instructions as Installing Debian Backports on Raspberry Pi)
  5. Raspbian uses a custom kernel without initramfs support
It turns out it is actually possible to do an in-place migration from Raspberry Pi OS bullseye to Debian bookworm. Here I will describe how. Even if you don t have a Raspberry Pi, this might still be instructive on how Raspbian and Debian packages work.

WARNINGS Before continuing, back up your system. This process isn t for the neophyte and it is entirely possible to mess up your boot device to the point that you have to do a fresh install to get your Pi to boot. This isn t a supported process at all.

Architecture Confusion Debian has three ARM-based architectures:
  • armel, for the lowest-end 32-bit ARM devices without hardware floating point support
  • armhf, for the higher-end 32-bit ARM devices with hardware float (hence hf )
  • arm64, for 64-bit ARM devices (which all have hardware float)
Although the Raspberry Pi 0 and 1 do support hardware float, they lack support for other CPU features that Debian s armhf architecture assumes. Therefore, the Raspberry Pi 0 and 1 could only run Debian s armel architecture. Raspberry Pi 3 and above are capable of running 64-bit, and can run both armhf and arm64. Prior to the release of the Raspberry Pi 5 / Raspbian bookworm, Raspbian only shipped the armhf architecture. Well, it was an architecture they called armhf, but it was different from Debian s armhf in that everything was recompiled to work with the more limited set of features on the earlier Raspberry Pi boards. It was really somewhere between Debian s armel and armhf archs. You could run Debian armel on those, but it would run more slowly, due to doing floating point calculations without hardware support. Debian s raspi FAQ goes into this a bit. What I am going to describe here is going from Raspbian armhf to Debian armhf with a 64-bit kernel. Therefore, it will only work with Raspberry Pi 3 and above. It may theoretically be possible to take a Raspberry Pi 2 to Debian armhf with a 32-bit kernel, but I haven t tried this and it may be more difficult. I have seen conflicting information on whether armhf really works on a Pi 2. (If you do try it on a Pi 2, ignore everything about arm64 and 64-bit kernels below, and just go with the linux-image-armmp-lpae kernel per the ARMMP page) There is another wrinkle: Debian doesn t support running 32-bit ARM kernels on 64-bit ARM CPUs, though it does support running a 32-bit userland on them. So we will wind up with a system with kernel packages from arm64 and everything else from armhf. This is a perfectly valid configuration as the arm64 like x86_64 is multiarch (that is, the CPU can natively execute both the 32-bit and 64-bit instructions). (It is theoretically possible to crossgrade a system from 32-bit to 64-bit userland, but that felt like a rather heavy lift for dubious benefit on a Pi; nevertheless, if you want to make this process even more complicated, refer to the CrossGrading page.)

Prerequisites and Limitations In addition to the need for a Raspberry Pi 3 or above in order for this to work, there are a few other things to mention. If you are using the GPIO features of the Pi, I don t know if those work with Debian. I think Raspberry Pi OS modified the desktop environment more than other components. All of my Pis are headless, so I don t know if this process will work if you use a desktop environment. I am assuming you are booting from a MicroSD card as is typical in the Raspberry Pi world. The Pi s firmware looks for a FAT partition (MBR type 0x0c) and looks within it for boot information. Depending on how long ago you first installed an OS on your Pi, your /boot may be too small for Debian. Use df -h /boot to see how big it is. I recommend 200MB at minimum. If your /boot is smaller than that, stop now (or use some other system to shrink your root filesystem and rearrange your partitions; I ve done this, but it s outside the scope of this article.) You need to have stable power. Once you begin this process, your pi will mostly be left in a non-bootable state until you finish. (You did make a backup, right?)

Basic idea The basic idea here is that since bookworm has almost entirely newer packages then bullseye, we can just switch over to it and let the Debian packages replace the Raspbian ones as they are upgraded. Well, it s not quite that easy, but that s the main idea.

Preparation First, make a backup. Even an image of your MicroSD card might be nice. OK, I think I ve said that enough now. It would be a good idea to have a HDMI cable (with the appropriate size of connector for your particular Pi board) and a HDMI display handy so you can troubleshoot any bootup issues with a console.

Preparation: access The Raspberry Pi OS by default sets up a user named pi that can use sudo to gain root without a password. I think this is an insecure practice, but assuming you haven t changed it, you will need to ensure it still works once you move to Debian. Raspberry Pi OS had a patch in their sudo package to enable it, and that will be removed when Debian s sudo package is installed. So, put this in /etc/sudoers.d/010_picompat: 
pi ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD: ALL
Also, there may be no password set for the root account. It would be a good idea to set one; it makes it easier to log in at the console. Use the passwd command as root to do so.

Preparation: bluetooth Debian doesn t correctly identify the Bluetooth hardware address. You can save it off to a file by running hcitool dev > /root/bluetooth-from-raspbian.txt. I don t use Bluetooth, but this should let you develop a script to bring it up properly.

Preparation: Debian archive keyring You will next need to install Debian s archive keyring so that apt can authenticate packages from Debian. Go to the bookworm download page for debian-archive-keyring and copy the URL for one of the files, then download it on the pi. For instance: 
wget http://http.us.debian.org/debian/pool/main/d/debian-archive-keyring/debian-archive-keyring_2023.3+deb12u1_all.deb
Use sha256sum to verify the checksum of the downloaded file, comparing it to the package page on the Debian site. Now, you ll install it with: 
dpkg -i debian-archive-keyring_2023.3+deb12u1_all.deb

Package first steps From here on, we are making modifications to the system that can leave it in a non-bootable state. Examine /etc/apt/sources.list and all the files in /etc/apt/sources.list.d. Most likely you will want to delete or comment out all lines in all files there. Replace them with something like: 
deb http://deb.debian.org/debian/ bookworm main non-free-firmware contrib non-free
deb http://security.debian.org/debian-security bookworm-security main non-free-firmware contrib non-free
deb https://deb.debian.org/debian bookworm-backports main non-free-firmware contrib non-free
(you might leave off contrib and non-free depending on your needs) Now, we re going to tell it that we ll support arm64 packages: 
dpkg --add-architecture arm64
And finally, download the bookworm package lists: 
apt-get update
If there are any errors from that command, fix them and don t proceed until you have a clean run of apt-get update.

Moving /boot to /boot/firmware The boot FAT partition I mentioned above is mounted at /boot by Raspberry Pi OS, but Debian s scripts assume it will be at /boot/firmware. We need to fix this. First: 
umount /boot
mkdir /boot/firmware
Now, edit fstab and change the reference to /boot to be to /boot/firmware. Now: 
mount -v /boot/firmware
cd /boot/firmware
mv -vi * ..
This mounts the filesystem at the new location, and moves all its contents back to where apt believes it should be. Debian s packages will populate /boot/firmware later.

Installing the first packages Now we start by installing the first of the needed packages. Eventually we will wind up with roughly the same set Debian uses. 
apt-get install linux-image-arm64
apt-get install firmware-brcm80211=20230210-5
apt-get install raspi-firmware
If you get errors relating to firmware-brcm80211 from any commands, run that install firmware-brcm80211 command and then proceed. There are a few packages that Raspbian marked as newer than the version in bookworm (whether or not they really are), and that s one of them.

Configuring the bootloader We need to configure a few things in /etc/default/raspi-firmware before proceeding. Edit that file. First, uncomment (or add) a line like this: 
KERNEL_ARCH="arm64"
Next, in /boot/cmdline.txt you can find your old Raspbian boot command line. It will say something like: 
root=PARTUUID=...
Save off the bit starting with PARTUUID. Back in /etc/default/raspi-firmware, set a line like this: 
ROOTPART=PARTUUID=abcdef00
(substituting your real value for abcdef00). This is necessary because the microSD card device name often changes from /dev/mmcblk0 to /dev/mmcblk1 when switching to Debian s kernel. raspi-firmware will encode the current device name in /boot/firmware/cmdline.txt by default, which will be wrong once you boot into Debian s kernel. The PARTUUID approach lets it work regardless of the device name.

Purging the Raspbian kernel Run: 
dpkg --purge raspberrypi-kernel

Upgrading the system At this point, we are going to run the procedure beginning at section 4.4.3 of the Debian release notes. Generally, you will do: 
apt-get -u upgrade
apt full-upgrade
Fix any errors at each step before proceeding to the next. Now, to remove some cruft, run: 
apt-get --purge autoremove
Inspect the list to make sure nothing important isn t going to be removed.

Removing Raspbian cruft You can list some of the cruft with: 
apt list '~o'
And remove it with: 
apt purge '~o'
I also don t run Bluetooth, and it seemed to sometimes hang on boot becuase I didn t bother to fix it, so I did: 
apt-get --purge remove bluez

Installing some packages This makes sure some basic Debian infrastructure is available: 
apt-get install wpasupplicant parted dosfstools wireless-tools iw alsa-tools
apt-get --purge autoremove

Installing firmware Now run: 
apt-get install firmware-linux

Resolving firmware package version issues If it gives an error about the installed version of a package, you may need to force it to the bookworm version. For me, this often happened with firmware-atheros, firmware-libertas, and firmware-realtek. Here s how to resolve it, with firmware-realtek as an example:
  1. Go to https://packages.debian.org/PACKAGENAME for instance, https://packages.debian.org/firmware-realtek. Note the version number in bookworm in this case, 20230210-5.
  2. Now, you will force the installation of that package at that version: 
    apt-get install firmware-realtek=20230210-5
  3. Repeat with every conflicting package until done.
  4. Rerun apt-get install firmware-linux and make sure it runs cleanly.
Also, in the end you should be able to: 
apt-get install firmware-atheros firmware-libertas firmware-realtek firmware-linux

Dealing with other Raspbian packages The Debian release notes discuss removing non-Debian packages. There will still be a few of those. Run: 
apt list '?narrow(?installed, ?not(?origin(Debian)))'
Deal with them; mostly you will need to force the installation of a bookworm version using the procedure in the section Resolving firmware package version issues above (even if it s not for a firmware package). For non-firmware packages, you might possibly want to add --mark-auto to your apt-get install command line to allow the package to be autoremoved later if the things depending on it go away. If you aren t going to use Bluetooth, I recommend apt-get --purge remove bluez as well. Sometimes it can hang at boot if you don t fix it up as described above.

Set up networking We ll be switching to the Debian method of networking, so we ll create some files in /etc/network/interfaces.d. First, eth0 should look like this: 
allow-hotplug eth0
iface eth0 inet dhcp
iface eth0 inet6 auto
And wlan0 should look like this: 
allow-hotplug wlan0
iface wlan0 inet dhcp
    wpa-conf /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf
Raspbian is inconsistent about using eth0/wlan0 or renamed interface. Run ifconfig or ip addr. If you see a long-named interface such as enx<something> or wlp<something>, copy the eth0 file to the one named after the enx interface, or the wlan0 file to the one named after the wlp interface, and edit the internal references to eth0/wlan0 in this new file to name the long interface name. If using wifi, verify that your SSIDs and passwords are in /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf. It should have lines like: 
network= 
   ssid="NetworkName"
   psk="passwordHere"
(This is where Raspberry Pi OS put them).

Deal with DHCP Raspberry Pi OS used dhcpcd, whereas bookworm normally uses isc-dhcp-client. Verify the system is in the correct state: 
apt-get install isc-dhcp-client
apt-get --purge remove dhcpcd dhcpcd-base dhcpcd5 dhcpcd-dbus

Set up LEDs To set up the LEDs to trigger on MicroSD activity as they did with Raspbian, follow the Debian instructions. Run apt-get install sysfsutils. Then put this in a file at /etc/sysfs.d/local-raspi-leds.conf: 
class/leds/ACT/brightness = 1
class/leds/ACT/trigger = mmc1

Prepare for boot To make sure all the /boot/firmware files are updated, run update-initramfs -u. Verify that root in /boot/firmware/cmdline.txt references the PARTUUID as appropriate. Verify that /boot/firmware/config.txt contains the lines arm_64bit=1 and upstream_kernel=1. If not, go back to the section on modifying /etc/default/raspi-firmware and fix it up.

The moment arrives Cross your fingers and try rebooting into your Debian system: 
reboot
For some reason, I found that the first boot into Debian seems to hang for 30-60 seconds during bootstrap. I m not sure why; don t panic if that happens. It may be necessary to power cycle the Pi for this boot.

Troubleshooting If things don t work out, hook up the Pi to a HDMI display and see what s up. If I anticipated a particular problem, I would have documented it here (a lot of the things I documented here are because I ran into them!) So I can t give specific advice other than to watch boot messages on the console. If you don t even get kernel messages going, then there is some problem with your partition table or /boot/firmware FAT partition. Otherwise, you ve at least got the kernel going and can troubleshoot like usual from there.

6 December 2023

Reproducible Builds: Reproducible Builds in November 2023

Welcome to the November 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 rather rapid recap, whilst anyone may inspect the source code of free software for malicious flaws, almost all software is distributed to end users as pre-compiled binaries (more).

Reproducible Builds Summit 2023 Between October 31st and November 2nd, we held our seventh Reproducible Builds Summit in Hamburg, Germany! Amazingly, the agenda and all notes from all sessions are all online many thanks to everyone who wrote notes from the sessions. As a followup on one idea, started at the summit, Alexander Couzens and Holger Levsen started work on a cache (or tailored front-end) for the snapshot.debian.org service. The general idea is that, when rebuilding Debian, you do not actually need the whole ~140TB of data from snapshot.debian.org; rather, only a very small subset of the packages are ever used for for building. It turns out, for amd64, arm64, armhf, i386, ppc64el, riscv64 and s390 for Debian trixie, unstable and experimental, this is only around 500GB ie. less than 1%. Although the new service not yet ready for usage, it has already provided a promising outlook in this regard. More information is available on https://rebuilder-snapshot.debian.net and we hope that this service becomes usable in the coming weeks. The adjacent picture shows a sticky note authored by Jan-Benedict Glaw at the summit in Hamburg, confirming Holger Levsen s theory that rebuilding all Debian packages needs a very small subset of packages, the text states that 69,200 packages (in Debian sid) list 24,850 packages in their .buildinfo files, in 8,0200 variations. This little piece of paper was the beginning of rebuilder-snapshot and is a direct outcome of the summit! The Reproducible Builds team would like to thank our event sponsors who include Mullvad VPN, openSUSE, Debian, Software Freedom Conservancy, Allotropia and Aspiration Tech.

Beyond Trusting FOSS presentation at SeaGL On November 4th, Vagrant Cascadian presented Beyond Trusting FOSS at SeaGL in Seattle, WA in the United States. Founded in 2013, SeaGL is a free, grassroots technical summit dedicated to spreading awareness and knowledge about free source software, hardware and culture. The summary of Vagrant s talk mentions that it will:
[ ] introduce the concepts of Reproducible Builds, including best practices for developing and releasing software, the tools available to help diagnose issues, and touch on progress towards solving decades-old deeply pervasive fundamental security issues Learn how to verify and demonstrate trust, rather than simply hoping everything is OK!
Germane to the contents of the talk, the slides for Vagrant s talk can be built reproducibly, resulting in a PDF with a SHA1 of cfde2f8a0b7e6ec9b85377eeac0661d728b70f34 when built on Debian bookworm and c21fab273232c550ce822c4b0d9988e6c49aa2c3 on Debian sid at the time of writing.

Human Factors in Software Supply Chain Security Marcel Fourn , Dominik Wermke, Sascha Fahl and Yasemin Acar have published an article in a Special Issue of the IEEE s Security & Privacy magazine. Entitled A Viewpoint on Human Factors in Software Supply Chain Security: A Research Agenda, the paper justifies the need for reproducible builds to reach developers and end-users specifically, and furthermore points out some under-researched topics that we have seen mentioned in interviews. An author pre-print of the article is available in PDF form.

Community updates On our mailing list this month:

openSUSE updates Bernhard M. Wiedemann has created a wiki page outlining an proposal to create a general-purpose Linux distribution which consists of 100% bit-reproducible packages albeit minus the embedded signature within RPM files. It would be based on openSUSE Tumbleweed or, if available, its Slowroll-variant. In addition, Bernhard posted another monthly update for his work elsewhere in openSUSE.

Ubuntu Launchpad now supports .buildinfo files Back in 2017, Steve Langasek filed a bug against Ubuntu s Launchpad code hosting platform to report that .changes files (artifacts of building Ubuntu and Debian packages) reference .buildinfo files that aren t actually exposed by Launchpad itself. This was causing issues when attempting to process .changes files with tools such as Lintian. However, it was noticed last month that, in early August of this year, Simon Quigley had resolved this issue, and .buildinfo files are now available from the Launchpad system.

PHP reproducibility updates There have been two updates from the PHP programming language this month. Firstly, the widely-deployed PHPUnit framework for the PHP programming language have recently released version 10.5.0, which introduces the inclusion of a composer.lock file, ensuring total reproducibility of the shipped binary file. Further details and the discussion that went into their particular implementation can be found on the associated GitHub pull request. In addition, the presentation Leveraging Nix in the PHP ecosystem has been given in late October at the PHP International Conference in Munich by Pol Dellaiera. While the video replay is not yet available, the (reproducible) presentation slides and speaker notes are available.

diffoscope changes 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, including:
  • Improving DOS/MBR extraction by adding support for 7z. [ ]
  • Adding a missing RequiredToolNotFound import. [ ]
  • As a UI/UX improvement, try and avoid printing an extended traceback if diffoscope runs out of memory. [ ]
  • Mark diffoscope as stable on PyPI.org. [ ]
  • Uploading version 252 to Debian unstable. [ ]

Website updates A huge number of notes were added to our website that were taken at our recent Reproducible Builds Summit held between October 31st and November 2nd in Hamburg, Germany. In particular, a big thanks to Arnout Engelen, Bernhard M. Wiedemann, Daan De Meyer, Evangelos Ribeiro Tzaras, Holger Levsen and Orhun Parmaks z. In addition to this, a number of other changes were made, including:

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:

Reproducibility 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 October, a number of changes were made by Holger Levsen:
  • Debian-related changes:
    • Track packages marked as Priority: important in a new package set. [ ][ ]
    • Stop scheduling packages that fail to build from source in bookworm [ ] and bullseye. [ ].
    • Add old releases dashboard link in web navigation. [ ]
    • Permit re-run of the pool_buildinfos script to be re-run for a specific year. [ ]
    • Grant jbglaw access to the osuosl4 node [ ][ ] along with lynxis [ ].
    • Increase RAM on the amd64 Ionos builders from 48 GiB to 64 GiB; thanks IONOS! [ ]
    • Move buster to archived suites. [ ][ ]
    • Reduce the number of arm64 architecture workers from 24 to 16 in order to improve stability [ ], reduce the workers for amd64 from 32 to 28 and, for i386, reduce from 12 down to 8 [ ].
    • Show the entire build history of each Debian package. [ ]
    • Stop scheduling already tested package/version combinations in Debian bookworm. [ ]
  • Snapshot service for rebuilders
    • Add an HTTP-based API endpoint. [ ][ ]
    • Add a Gunicorn instance to serve the HTTP API. [ ]
    • Add an NGINX config [ ][ ][ ][ ]
  • System-health:
    • Detect failures due to HTTP 503 Service Unavailable errors. [ ]
    • Detect failures to update package sets. [ ]
    • Detect unmet dependencies. (This usually occurs with builds of Debian live-build.) [ ]
  • Misc-related changes:
    • do install systemd-ommd on jenkins. [ ]
    • fix harmless typo in squid.conf for codethink04. [ ]
    • fixup: reproducible Debian: add gunicorn service to serve /api for rebuilder-snapshot.d.o. [ ]
    • Increase codethink04 s Squid cache_dir size setting to 16 GiB. [ ]
    • Don t install systemd-oomd as it unfortunately kills sshd [ ]
    • Use debootstrap from backports when commisioning nodes. [ ]
    • Add the live_build_debian_stretch_gnome, debsums-tests_buster and debsums-tests_buster jobs to the zombie list. [ ][ ]
    • Run jekyll build with the --watch argument when building the Reproducible Builds website. [ ]
    • Misc node maintenance. [ ][ ][ ]
Other changes were made as well, however, including Mattia Rizzolo fixing rc.local s Bash syntax so it can actually run [ ], commenting away some file cleanup code that is (potentially) deleting too much [ ] and fixing the html_brekages page for Debian package builds [ ]. Finally, diagnosed and submitted a patch to add a AddEncoding gzip .gz line to the tests.reproducible-builds.org Apache configuration so that Gzip files aren t re-compressed as Gzip which some clients can t deal with (as well as being a waste of time). [ ]
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 October 2023

Iustin Pop: Raspberry PI OS: upgrading and cross-grading

One of the downsides of running Raspberry PI OS is the fact that - not having the resources of pure Debian - upgrades are not recommended, and cross-grades (migrating between armhf and arm64) is not even mentioned. Is this really true? It is, after all a Debian-based system, so it should in theory be doable. Let s try!

Upgrading The recently announced release based on Debian Bookworm here says:
We have always said that for a major version upgrade, you should re-image your SD card and start again with a clean image. In the past, we have suggested procedures for updating an existing image to the new version, but always with the caveat that we do not recommend it, and you do this at your own risk. This time, because the changes to the underlying architecture are so significant, we are not suggesting any procedure for upgrading a Bullseye image to Bookworm; any attempt to do this will almost certainly end up with a non-booting desktop and data loss. The only way to get Bookworm is either to create an SD card using Raspberry Pi Imager, or to download and flash a Bookworm image from here with your tool of choice.
Which means, it s time to actually try it turns out it s actually trivial, if you use RPIs as headless servers. I had only three issues:
  • if using an initrd, the new initrd-building scripts/hooks are looking for some binaries in /usr/bin, and not in /bin; solution: install manually the usrmerge package, and then re-run dpkg --configure -a;
  • also if using an initrd, the scripts are looking for the kernel config file in /boot/config-$(uname -r), and the raspberry pi kernel package doesn t provide this; workaround: modprobe configs && zcat /proc/config.gz > /boot/config-$(uname -r);
  • and finally, on normal RPI systems, that don t use manual configurations of interfaces in /etc/network/interface, migrating from the previous dhcpcd to NetworkManager will break network connectivity, and require you to log in locally and fix things.
I expect most people to hit only the 3rd, and almost no-one to use initrd on raspberry pi. But, overall, aside from these two issues and a couple of cosmetic ones (login.defs being rewritten from scratch and showing a baffling diff, for example), it was easy. Is it worth doing? Definitely. Had no data loss, and no non-booting system.

Cross-grading (32 bit to 64 bit userland) This one is actually painful. Internet searches go from it s possible, I think to it s definitely not worth trying . Examples: Aside from these, there are a gazillion other posts about switching the kernel to 64 bit. And that s worth doing on its own, but it s only half the way. So, armed with two different systems - a RPI4 4GB and a RPI Zero W2 - I tried to do this. And while it can be done, it takes many hours - first system was about 6 hours, second the same, and a third RPI4 probably took ~3 hours only since I knew the problematic issues. So, what are the steps? Basically:
  • install devscripts, since you will need dget
  • enable new architecture in dpkg: dpkg --add-architecture arm64
  • switch over apt sources to include the 64 bit repos, which are different than the 32 bit ones (Raspberry PI OS did a migration here; normally a single repository has all architectures, of course)
  • downgrade all custom rpi packages/libraries to the standard bookworm/bullseye version, since dpkg won t usually allow a single library package to have different versions (I think it s possible to override, but I didn t bother)
  • install libc for the arm64 arch (this takes some effort, it s actually a set of 3-4 packages)
  • once the above is done, install whiptail:amd64 and rejoice at running a 64-bit binary!
  • then painfully go through sets of packages and migrate the set to arm64:
    • sometimes this work via apt, sometimes you ll need to use dget and dpkg -i
    • make sure you download both the armhf and arm64 versions before doing dpkg -i, since you ll need to rollback some installs
  • at one point, you ll be able to switch over dpkg and apt to arm64, at which point the default architecture flips over; from here, if you ve done it at the right moment, it becomes very easy; you ll probably need an apt install --fix-broken, though, at first
  • and then, finish by replacing all packages with arm64 versions
  • and then, dpkg --remove-architecture armhf, reboot, and profit!
But it s tears and blood to get to that point

Pain point 1: RPI custom versions of packages Since the 32bit armhf architecture is a bit weird - having many variations - it turns out that raspberry pi OS has many packages that are very slightly tweaked to disable a compilation flag or work around build/test failures, or whatnot. Since we talk here about 64-bit capable processors, almost none of these are needed, but they do make life harder since the 64 bit version doesn t have those overrides. So what is needed would be to say downgrade all armhf packages to the version in debian upstream repo , but I couldn t find the right apt pinning incantation to do that. So what I did was to remove the 32bit repos, then use apt-show-versions to see which packages have versions that are no longer in any repo, then downgrade them. There s a further, minor, complication that there were about 3-4 packages with same version but different hash (!), which simply needed apt install --reinstall, I think.

Pain point 2: architecture independent packages There is one very big issue with dpkg in all this story, and the one that makes things very problematic: while you can have a library package installed multiple times for different architectures, as the files live in different paths, a non-library package can only be installed once (usually). For binary packages (arch:any), that is fine. But architecture-independent packages (arch:all) are problematic since usually they depend on a binary package, but they always depend on the default architecture version! Hrmm, and I just realise I don t have logs from this, so I m only ~80% confident. But basically:
  • vim-solarized (arch:all) depends on vim (arch:any)
  • if you replace vim armhf with vim arm64, this will break vim-solarized, until the default architecture becomes arm64
So you need to keep track of which packages apt will de-install, for later re-installation. It is possible that Multi-Arch: foreign solves this, per the debian wiki which says:
Note that even though Architecture: all and Multi-Arch: foreign may look like similar concepts, they are not. The former means that the same binary package can be installed on different architectures. Yet, after installation such packages are treated as if they were native architecture (by definition the architecture of the dpkg package) packages. Thus Architecture: all packages cannot satisfy dependencies from other architectures without being marked Multi-Arch foreign.
It also has warnings about how to properly use this. But, in general, not many packages have it, so it is a problem.

Pain point 3: remove + install vs overwrite It seems that depending on how the solver computes a solution, when migrating a package from 32 to 64 bit, it can choose either to:
  • overwrite in place the package (akin to dpkg -i)
  • remove + install later
The former is OK, the later is not. Or, actually, it might be that apt never can do this, for example (edited for brevity): 
# apt install systemd:arm64 --no-install-recommends
The following packages will be REMOVED:
  systemd
The following NEW packages will be installed:
  systemd:arm64
0 upgraded, 1 newly installed, 1 to remove and 35 not upgraded.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n] y
dpkg: systemd: dependency problems, but removing anyway as you requested:
 systemd-sysv depends on systemd.
Removing systemd (247.3-7+deb11u2) ...
systemd is the active init system, please switch to another before removing systemd.
dpkg: error processing package systemd (--remove):
 installed systemd package pre-removal script subprocess returned error exit status 1
dpkg: too many errors, stopping
Errors were encountered while processing:
 systemd
Processing was halted because there were too many errors.
But at the same time, overwrite in place is all good - via dpkg -i from /var/cache/apt/archives. In this case it manifested via a prerm script, in other cases is manifests via dependencies that are no longer satisfied for packages that can t be removed, etc. etc. So you will have to resort to dpkg -i a lot.

Pain point 4: lib- packages that are not lib During the whole process, it is very tempting to just go ahead and install the corresponding arm64 package for all armhf lib package, in one go, since these can coexist. Well, this simple plan is complicated by the fact that some packages are named libfoo-bar, but are actual holding (e.g.) the bar binary for the libfoo package. Examples:
  • libmagic-mgc contains /usr/lib/file/magic.mgc, which conflicts between the 32 and 64 bit versions; of course, it s the exact same file, so this should be an arch:all package, but
  • libpam-modules-bin and liblockfile-bin actually contain binaries (per the -bin suffix)
It s possible to work around all this, but it changes a 1 minute: 
# apt install $(dpkg -i   grep ^ii   awk ' print $2 ' grep :amrhf sed -e 's/:armhf/:arm64')
into a 10-20 minutes fight with packages (like most other steps).

Is it worth doing? Compared to the simple bullseye bookworm upgrade, I m not sure about this. The result? Yes, definitely, the system feels - weirdly - much more responsive, logged in over SSH. I guess the arm64 base architecture has some more efficient ops than the lowest denominator armhf , so to say (e.g. there was in the 32 bit version some rpi-custom package with string ops), and thus migrating to 64 bit makes more things faster , but this is subjective so it might be actually not true. But from the point of view of the effort? Unless you like to play with dpkg and apt, and understand how these work and break, I d rather say, migrate to ansible and automate the deployment. It s doable, sure, and by the third system, I got this nailed down pretty well, but it was a lot of time spent. The good aspect is that I did 3 migrations:
  • rpi zero w2: bullseye 32 bit to 64 bit, then bullseye to bookworm
  • rpi 4: bullseye to bookworm, then bookworm 32bit to 64 bit
  • same, again, for a more important system
And all three worked well and no data loss. But I m really glad I have this behind me, I probably wouldn t do a fourth system, even if forced And now, waiting for the RPI 5 to be available See you!

12 October 2023

Jonathan McDowell: Installing Debian on the BananaPi M2 Zero

My previously mentioned C.H.I.P. repurposing has been partly successful; I ve found a use for it (which I still need to write up), but unfortunately it s too useful and the fact it s still a bit flaky has become a problem. I spent a while trying to isolate exactly what the problem is (I m still seeing occasional hard hangs with no obvious debug output in the logs or on the serial console), then realised I should just buy one of the cheap ARM SBC boards currently available. The C.H.I.P. is based on an Allwinner R8, which is a single ARM v7 core (an A8). So it s fairly low power by today s standards and it seemed pretty much any board would probably do. I considered a Pi 2 Zero, but couldn t be bothered trying to find one in stock at a reasonable price (I ve had one on backorder from CPC since May 2022, and yes, I know other places have had them in stock since but I don t need one enough to chase and I m now mostly curious about whether it will ever ship). As the title of this post gives away, I settled on a Banana Pi BPI-M2 Zero, which is based on an Allwinner H3. That s a quad-core ARM v7 (an A7), so a bit more oompfh than the C.H.I.P. All in all it set me back 25, including a set of heatsinks that form a case around it. I started with the vendor provided Debian SD card image, which is based on Debian 9 (stretch) and so somewhat old. I was able to dist-upgrade my way through buster and bullseye, and end up on bookworm. I then discovered the bookworm 6.1 kernel worked just fine out of the box, and even included a suitable DTB. Which got me thinking about whether I could do a completely fresh Debian install with minimal tweaking. First thing, a boot loader. The Allwinner chips are nice in that they ll boot off SD, so I just needed a suitable u-boot image. Rather than go with the vendor image I had a look at mainline and discovered it had support! So let s build a clean image: 
noodles@buildhost:~$ mkdir ~/BPI
noodles@buildhost:~$ cd ~/BPI
noodles@buildhost:~/BPI$ ls
noodles@buildhost:~/BPI$ git clone https://source.denx.de/u-boot/u-boot.git
Cloning into 'u-boot'...
remote: Enumerating objects: 935825, done.
remote: Counting objects: 100% (5777/5777), done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (1967/1967), done.
remote: Total 935825 (delta 3799), reused 5716 (delta 3769), pack-reused 930048
Receiving objects: 100% (935825/935825), 186.15 MiB   2.21 MiB/s, done.
Resolving deltas: 100% (785671/785671), done.
noodles@buildhost:~/BPI$ mkdir u-boot-build
noodles@buildhost:~/BPI$ cd u-boot
noodles@buildhost:~/BPI/u-boot$ git checkout v2023.07.02
...
HEAD is now at 83cdab8b2c Prepare v2023.07.02
noodles@buildhost:~/BPI/u-boot$ make O=../u-boot-build bananapi_m2_zero_defconfig
  HOSTCC  scripts/basic/fixdep
  GEN     Makefile
  HOSTCC  scripts/kconfig/conf.o
  YACC    scripts/kconfig/zconf.tab.c
  LEX     scripts/kconfig/zconf.lex.c
  HOSTCC  scripts/kconfig/zconf.tab.o
  HOSTLD  scripts/kconfig/conf
#
# configuration written to .config
#
make[1]: Leaving directory '/home/noodles/BPI/u-boot-build'
noodles@buildhost:~/BPI/u-boot$ cd ../u-boot-build/
noodles@buildhost:~/BPI/u-boot-build$ make CROSS_COMPILE=arm-linux-gnueabihf-
  GEN     Makefile
scripts/kconfig/conf  --syncconfig Kconfig
...
  LD      spl/u-boot-spl
  OBJCOPY spl/u-boot-spl-nodtb.bin
  COPY    spl/u-boot-spl.bin
  SYM     spl/u-boot-spl.sym
  MKIMAGE spl/sunxi-spl.bin
  MKIMAGE u-boot.img
  COPY    u-boot.dtb
  MKIMAGE u-boot-dtb.img
  BINMAN  .binman_stamp
  OFCHK   .config
noodles@buildhost:~/BPI/u-boot-build$ ls -l u-boot-sunxi-with-spl.bin
-rw-r--r-- 1 noodles noodles 494900 Aug  8 08:06 u-boot-sunxi-with-spl.bin
I had the advantage here of already having a host setup to cross build armhf binaries, but this was all done on a Debian bookworm host with packages from main. I ve put my build up here in case it s useful to someone - everything else below can be done on a normal x86_64 host. Next I needed a Debian installer. I went for the netboot variant - although I was writing it to SD rather than TFTP booting I wanted as much as possible to come over the network. 
noodles@buildhost:~/BPI$ wget https://deb.debian.org/debian/dists/bookworm/main/installer-armhf/20230607%2Bdeb12u1/images/netboot/netboot.tar.gz
...
2023-08-08 10:15:03 (34.5 MB/s) -  netboot.tar.gz  saved [37851404/37851404]
noodles@buildhost:~/BPI$ tar -axf netboot.tar.gz
Then I took a suitable microSD card and set it up with a 500M primary VFAT partition, leaving the rest for Linux proper. I could have got away with a smaller VFAT partition but I d initially thought I might need to put some more installation files on it. 
noodles@buildhost:~/BPI$ sudo fdisk /dev/sdb
Welcome to fdisk (util-linux 2.38.1).
Changes will remain in memory only, until you decide to write them.
Be careful before using the write command.
Command (m for help): o
Created a new DOS (MBR) disklabel with disk identifier 0x793729b3.
Command (m for help): n
Partition type
   p   primary (0 primary, 0 extended, 4 free)
   e   extended (container for logical partitions)
Select (default p):
Using default response p.
Partition number (1-4, default 1):
First sector (2048-60440575, default 2048):
Last sector, +/-sectors or +/-size K,M,G,T,P  (2048-60440575, default 60440575): +500M
Created a new partition 1 of type 'Linux' and of size 500 MiB.
Command (m for help): t
Selected partition 1
Hex code or alias (type L to list all): c
Changed type of partition 'Linux' to 'W95 FAT32 (LBA)'.
Command (m for help): n
Partition type
   p   primary (1 primary, 0 extended, 3 free)
   e   extended (container for logical partitions)
Select (default p):
Using default response p.
Partition number (2-4, default 2):
First sector (1026048-60440575, default 1026048):
Last sector, +/-sectors or +/-size K,M,G,T,P  (534528-60440575, default 60440575):
Created a new partition 2 of type 'Linux' and of size 28.3 GiB.
Command (m for help): w
The partition table has been altered.
Calling ioctl() to re-read partition table.
Syncing disks.
$ sudo mkfs -t vfat -n BPI-UBOOT /dev/sdb1
mkfs.fat 4.2 (2021-01-31)
The bootloader image gets written 8k into the SD card (our first partition starts at sector 2048, i.e. 1M into the device, so there s plenty of space here): 
noodles@buildhost:~/BPI$ sudo dd if=u-boot-build/u-boot-sunxi-with-spl.bin of=/dev/sdb bs=1024 seek=8
483+1 records in
483+1 records out
494900 bytes (495 kB, 483 KiB) copied, 0.0282234 s, 17.5 MB/s
Copy the Debian installer files onto the VFAT partition: 
noodles@buildhost:~/BPI$ cp -r debian-installer/ /media/noodles/BPI-UBOOT/
Unmount the SD from the build host, pop it into the M2 Zero, boot it up while connected to the serial console, hit a key to stop autoboot and tell it to boot the installer: 
U-Boot SPL 2023.07.02 (Aug 08 2023 - 09:05:44 +0100)
DRAM: 512 MiB
Trying to boot from MMC1
U-Boot 2023.07.02 (Aug 08 2023 - 09:05:44 +0100) Allwinner Technology
CPU:   Allwinner H3 (SUN8I 1680)
Model: Banana Pi BPI-M2-Zero
DRAM:  512 MiB
Core:  60 devices, 17 uclasses, devicetree: separate
WDT:   Not starting watchdog@1c20ca0
MMC:   mmc@1c0f000: 0, mmc@1c10000: 1
Loading Environment from FAT... Unable to read "uboot.env" from mmc0:1...
In:    serial
Out:   serial
Err:   serial
Net:   No ethernet found.
Hit any key to stop autoboot:  0
=> setenv dibase /debian-installer/armhf
=> fatload mmc 0:1 $ kernel_addr_r  $ dibase /vmlinuz
5333504 bytes read in 225 ms (22.6 MiB/s)
=> setenv bootargs "console=ttyS0,115200n8"
=> fatload mmc 0:1 $ fdt_addr_r  $ dibase /dtbs/sun8i-h2-plus-bananapi-m2-zero.dtb
25254 bytes read in 7 ms (3.4 MiB/s)
=> fdt addr $ fdt_addr_r  0x40000
Working FDT set to 43000000
=> fatload mmc 0:1 $ ramdisk_addr_r  $ dibase /initrd.gz
31693887 bytes read in 1312 ms (23 MiB/s)
=> bootz $ kernel_addr_r  $ ramdisk_addr_r :$ filesize  $ fdt_addr_r 
Kernel image @ 0x42000000 [ 0x000000 - 0x516200 ]
## Flattened Device Tree blob at 43000000
   Booting using the fdt blob at 0x43000000
Working FDT set to 43000000
   Loading Ramdisk to 481c6000, end 49fffc3f ... OK
   Loading Device Tree to 48183000, end 481c5fff ... OK
Working FDT set to 48183000
Starting kernel ...
At this point the installer runs and you can do a normal install. Well, except the wifi wasn t detected, I think because the netinst images don t include firmware. I spent a bit of time trying to figure out how to include it but ultimately ended up installing over a USB ethernet dongle, which Just Worked and was less faff. Installing firmware-brcm80211 once installation completed allowed the built-in wifi to work fine. After install you need to configure u-boot to boot without intervention. At the u-boot prompt (i.e. after hitting a key to stop autoboot): 
=> setenv bootargs "console=ttyS0,115200n8 root=LABEL=BPI-ROOT ro"
=> setenv bootcmd 'ext4load mmc 0:2 $ fdt_addr_r  /boot/sun8i-h2-plus-bananapi-m2-zero.dtb ; fdt addr $ fdt_addr_r  0x40000 ; ext4load mmc 0:2 $ kernel_addr_r  /boot/vmlinuz ; ext4load mmc 0:2 $ ramdisk_addr_r  /boot/initrd.img ; bootz $ kernel_addr_r  $ ramdisk_addr_r :$ filesize  $ fdt_addr_r '
=> saveenv
Saving Environment to FAT... OK
=> reset
This is assuming you have /boot on partition 2 on the SD - I left the first partition as VFAT (that s where the u-boot environment will be saved) and just used all of the rest as a single ext4 partition. I did have to do an e2label /dev/sdb2 BPI-ROOT to label / appropriately; otherwise I occasionally saw the SD card appear as mmc1 for Linux (I m guessing due to asynchronous boot order with the wifi). You should now find the device boots without intervention.

Reproducible Builds: Reproducible Builds in September 2023

Welcome to the September 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, whilst anyone may inspect the source code of free software for malicious flaws, almost all software is distributed to end users as pre-compiled binaries.
Andreas Herrmann gave a talk at All Systems Go 2023 titled Fast, correct, reproducible builds with Nix and Bazel . Quoting from the talk description:

You will be introduced to Google s open source build system Bazel, and will learn how it provides fast builds, how correctness and reproducibility is relevant, and how Bazel tries to ensure correctness. But, we will also see where Bazel falls short in ensuring correctness and reproducibility. You will [also] learn about the purely functional package manager Nix and how it approaches correctness and build isolation. And we will see where Bazel has an advantage over Nix when it comes to providing fast feedback during development.
Andreas also shows how you can get the best of both worlds and combine Nix and Bazel, too. A video of the talk is available.
diffoscope is our in-depth and content-aware diff utility that can locate and diagnose reproducibility issues. This month, Chris Lamb fixed compatibility with file(1) version 5.45 [ ] and updated some documentation [ ]. In addition, Vagrant Cascadian extended support for GNU Guix [ ][ ] and updated the version in that distribution as well. [ ].
Yet another reminder that our upcoming Reproducible Builds Summit is set to take place from October 31st November 2nd 2023 in Hamburg, Germany. If you haven t been before, our summits are a unique gathering that brings together attendees from diverse projects, united by a shared vision of advancing the Reproducible Builds effort. During this enriching event, participants will have the opportunity to engage in discussions, establish connections and exchange ideas to drive progress in this vital field. If you re interested in joining us this year, please make sure to read the event page, the news item, or the invitation email that Mattia Rizzolo sent out recently, all of which have more details about the event and location. We are also still looking for sponsors to support the event, so please reach out to the organising team if you are able to help. Also note that PackagingCon 2023 is taking place in Berlin just before our summit.
On the Reproducible Builds website, Greg Chabala updated the JVM-related documentation to update a link to the BUILDSPEC.md file. [ ] And Fay Stegerman fixed the builds failing because of a YAML syntax error.

Distribution work In Debian, this month: September saw F-Droid add ten new reproducible apps, and one existing app switched to reproducible builds. In addition, two reproducible apps were archived and one was disabled for a current total of 199 apps published with Reproducible Builds and using the upstream developer s signature. [ ] In addition, an extensive blog post was posted on f-droid.org titled Reproducible builds, signing keys, and binary repos .

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 operates a comprehensive testing framework (available at tests.reproducible-builds.org) in order to check packages and other artifacts for reproducibility. In August, a number of changes were made by Holger Levsen:
  • Disable armhf and i386 builds due to Debian bug #1052257. [ ][ ][ ][ ]
  • Run diffoscope with a lower ionice priority. [ ]
  • Log every build in a simple text file [ ] and create persistent stamp files when running diffoscope to ease debugging [ ].
  • Run schedulers one hour after dinstall again. [ ]
  • Temporarily use diffoscope from the host, and not from a schroot running the tested suite. [ ][ ]
  • Fail the diffoscope distribution test if the diffoscope version cannot be determined. [ ]
  • Fix a spelling error in the email to IRC gateway. [ ]
  • Force (and document) the reconfiguration of all jobs, due to the recent rise of zombies. [ ][ ][ ][ ]
  • Deal with a rare condition when killing processes which should not be there. [ ]
  • Install the Debian backports kernel in an attempt to address Debian bug #1052257. [ ][ ]
In addition, Mattia Rizzolo fixed a call to diffoscope --version (as suggested by Fay Stegerman on our mailing list) [ ], worked on an openQA credential issue [ ] and also made some changes to the machine-readable reproducible metadata, reproducible-tracker.json [ ]. Lastly, Roland Clobus added instructions for manual configuration of the openQA secrets [ ].
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:

27 September 2023

Antoine Beaupr : How big is Debian?

Now this was quite a tease! For those who haven't seen it, I encourage you to check it out, it has a nice photo of a Debian t-shirt I did not know about, to quote the Fine Article:
Today, when going through a box of old T-shirts, I found the shirt I was looking for to bring to the occasion: [...] For the benefit of people who read this using a non-image-displaying browser or RSS client, they are respectively: 
   10 years
  100 countries
 1000 maintainers
10000 packages
and 
        1 project
       10 architectures
      100 countries
     1000 maintainers
    10000 packages
   100000 bugs fixed
  1000000 installations
 10000000 users
100000000 lines of code
20 years ago we celebrated eating grilled meat at J0rd1 s house. This year, we had vegan tostadas in the menu. And maybe we are no longer that young, but we are still very proud and happy of our project! Now How would numbers line up today for Debian, 20 years later? Have we managed to get the bugs fixed line increase by a factor of 10? Quite probably, the lines of code we also have, and I can only guess the number of users and installations, which was already just a wild guess back then, might have multiplied by over 10, at least if we count indirect users and installs as well
Now I don't know about you, but I really expected someone to come up with an answer to this, directly on Debian Planet! I have patiently waited for such an answer but enough is enough, I'm a Debian member, surely I can cull all of this together. So, low and behold, here are the actual numbers from 2023! So it doesn't line up as nicely, but it looks something like this: 
         1 project
        10 architectures
        30 years
       100 countries (actually 63, but we'd like to have yours!)
      1000 maintainers (yep, still there!)
     35000 packages
    211000 *binary* packages
   1000000 bugs fixed
1000000000 lines of code
 uncounted installations and users, we don't track you
So maybe the the more accurate, rounding to the nearest logarithm, would look something like: 
         1 project
        10 architectures
       100 countries (actually 63, but we'd like to have yours!)
      1000 maintainers (yep, still there!)
    100000 packages
   1000000 bugs fixed
1000000000 lines of code
 uncounted installations and users, we don't track you
I really like how the "packages" and "bugs fixed" still have an order of magnitude between them there, but that the "bugs fixed" vs "lines of code" have an extra order of magnitude, that is we have fixed ten times less bugs per line of code since we last did this count, 20 years ago. Also, I am tempted to put 100 years in there, but that would be rounding up too much. Let's give it another 30 years first. Hopefully, some real scientist is going to balk at this crude methodology and come up with some more interesting numbers for the next t-shirt. Otherwise I'm available for bar mitzvahs and children parties.

12 September 2023

Dirk Eddelbuettel: RcppInt64 0.0.2 on CRAN: Small Update

The still very new package RcppInt64 (announced a week ago in this post) arrived on CRAN earlier today in its first update, now at 0.0.2. RcppInt64 collects some of the previous conversions between 64-bit integer values in R and C++, and regroups them in a single package by providing a single header. It offers two interfaces: both a more standard as<>() converter from R values along with its companions wrap() to return to R, as well as more dedicated functions from and to . The package by now has its first user as we rearranged RcppFarmHash to use it. The change today makes bit64 a weak rather than strong dependency as we use it only for tests and illustrations. We also added two missing fields to DESCRIPTION and added badges to README.md. The brief NEWS entry follows:

Changes in version 0.0.2 (2023-09-12)
  • DESCRIPTION has been extended, badges have been added to README.md
  • Package bit64 is now a Suggests:

Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is a [diffstat report relative to previous release][this release]. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can sponsor me at GitHub.

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

9 September 2023

Dirk Eddelbuettel: RcppFarmHash 0.0.3 on CRAN: Small Update

A minor maintenance release of the RcppFarmHash package is now on CRAN as version 0.0.3. RcppFarmHash wraps the Google FarmHash family of hash functions (written by Geoff Pike and contributors) that are used for example by Google BigQuery for the FARM_FINGERPRINT digest. This releases farms out the conversion to the integer64 add-on type in R to the new package RcppInt64 released a few days ago and adds some minor maintenance on continuous integration and alike. The brief NEWS entry follows:

Changes in version 0.0.3 (2023-09-09)
  • Rely on new RcppInt64 package and its header for conversion
  • Minor updates to continuous integration and README.md

If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can sponsor me at GitHub.

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

8 September 2023

Reproducible Builds: Reproducible Builds in August 2023

Welcome to the August 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, whilst anyone may inspect the source code of free software for malicious flaws, almost all software is distributed to end users as pre-compiled binaries. The motivation behind the reproducible builds effort is to ensure no flaws have been introduced during this compilation process by promising 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 visit our Contribute page on our website.

Rust serialisation library moving to precompiled binaries Bleeping Computer reported that Serde, a popular Rust serialization framework, had decided to ship its serde_derive macro as a precompiled binary. As Ax Sharma writes:
The move has generated a fair amount of push back among developers who worry about its future legal and technical implications, along with a potential for supply chain attacks, should the maintainer account publishing these binaries be compromised.
After intensive discussions, use of the precompiled binary was phased out.

Reproducible builds, the first ten years On August 4th, Holger Levsen gave a talk at BornHack 2023 on the Danish island of Funen titled Reproducible Builds, the first ten years which promised to contain:
[ ] an overview about reproducible builds, the past, the presence and the future. How it started with a small [meeting] at DebConf13 (and before), how it grew from being a Debian effort to something many projects work on together, until in 2021 it was mentioned in an executive order of the president of the United States. (HTML slides)
Holger repeated the talk later in the month at Chaos Communication Camp 2023 in Zehdenick, Germany: A video of the talk is available online, as are the HTML slides.

Reproducible Builds Summit Just another reminder that our upcoming Reproducible Builds Summit is set to take place from October 31st November 2nd 2023 in Hamburg, Germany. Our summits are a unique gathering that brings together attendees from diverse projects, united by a shared vision of advancing the Reproducible Builds effort. During this enriching event, participants will have the opportunity to engage in discussions, establish connections and exchange ideas to drive progress in this vital field. If you re interested in joining us this year, please make sure to read the event page, the news item, or the invitation email that Mattia Rizzolo sent out, which have more details about the event and location. We are also still looking for sponsors to support the event, so do reach out to the organizing team if you are able to help. (Also of note that PackagingCon 2023 is taking place in Berlin just before our summit, and their schedule has just been published.)

Vagrant Cascadian on the Sustain podcast Vagrant Cascadian was interviewed on the SustainOSS podcast on reproducible builds:
Vagrant walks us through his role in the project where the aim is to ensure identical results in software builds across various machines and times, enhancing software security and creating a seamless developer experience. Discover how this mission, supported by the Software Freedom Conservancy and a broad community, is changing the face of Linux distros, Arch Linux, openSUSE, and F-Droid. They also explore the challenges of managing random elements in software, and Vagrant s vision to make reproducible builds a standard best practice that will ideally become automatic for users. Vagrant shares his work in progress and their commitment to the last mile problem.
The episode is available to listen (or download) from the Sustain podcast website. As it happens, the episode was recorded at FOSSY 2023, and the video of Vagrant s talk from this conference (Breaking the Chains of Trusting Trust is now available on Archive.org: It was also announced that Vagrant Cascadian will be presenting at the Open Source Firmware Conference in October on the topic of Reproducible Builds All The Way Down.

On our mailing list Carles Pina i Estany wrote to our mailing list during August with an interesting question concerning the practical steps to reproduce the hello-traditional package from Debian. The entire thread can be viewed from the archive page, as can Vagrant Cascadian s reply.

Website updates Rahul Bajaj updated our website to add a series of environment variations related to reproducible builds [ ], Russ Cox added the Go programming language to our projects page [ ] and Vagrant Cascadian fixed a number of broken links and typos around the website [ ][ ][ ].

Software development In diffoscope development this month, versions 247, 248 and 249 were uploaded to Debian unstable by Chris Lamb, who also added documentation for the new specialize_as method and expanding the documentation of the existing specialize as well [ ]. In addition, Fay Stegerman added specialize_as and used it to optimise .smali comparisons when decompiling Android .apk files [ ], Felix Yan and Mattia Rizzolo corrected some typos in code comments [ , ], Greg Chabala merged the RUN commands into single layer in the package s Dockerfile [ ] thus greatly reducing the final image size. Lastly, Roland Clobus updated tool descriptions to mark that the xb-tool has moved package within Debian [ ].
reprotest is our tool for building the same source code twice in different environments and then checking the binaries produced by each build for any differences. This month, Vagrant Cascadian updated the packaging to be compatible with Tox version 4. This was originally filed as Debian bug #1042918 and Holger Levsen uploaded this to change to Debian unstable as version 0.7.26 [ ].

Distribution work In Debian, 28 reviews of Debian packages were added, 14 were updated and 13 were removed this month adding to our knowledge about identified issues. A number of issue types were added, including Chris Lamb adding a new timestamp_in_documentation_using_sphinx_zzzeeksphinx_theme toolchain issue.
In August, F-Droid added 25 new reproducible apps and saw 2 existing apps switch to reproducible builds, making 191 apps in total that are published with Reproducible Builds and using the upstream developer s signature. [ ]
Bernhard M. Wiedemann published another monthly report about reproducibility within 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:

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 August, a number of changes were made by Holger Levsen:
  • Debian-related changes:
    • Disable Debian live image creation jobs until an OpenQA credential problem has been fixed. [ ]
    • Run our maintenance scripts every 3 hours instead of every 2. [ ]
    • Export data for unstable to the reproducible-tracker.json data file. [ ]
    • Stop varying the build path, we want reproducible builds. [ ]
    • Temporarily stop updating the pbuilder.tgz for Debian unstable due to #1050784. [ ][ ]
    • Correctly document that we are not variying usrmerge. [ ][ ]
    • Mark two armhf nodes (wbq0 and jtx1a) as down; investigation is needed. [ ]
  • Misc:
    • Force reconfiguration of all Jenkins jobs, due to the recent rise of zombie processes. [ ]
    • In the node health checks, also try to restart failed ntpsec, postfix and vnstat services. [ ][ ][ ]
  • System health checks:
    • Detect Debian live build failures due to missing credentials. [ ][ ]
    • Ignore specific types of known zombie processes. [ ][ ]
In addition, Vagrant Cascadian updated the scripts to use a predictable build path that is consistent with the one used on buildd.debian.org. [ ][ ]
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:

17 July 2023

Ben Hutchings: FOSS activity in June 2023

12 July 2023

Reproducible Builds: Reproducible Builds in June 2023

Welcome to the June 2023 report from the Reproducible Builds project In our reports, we outline the most important things that we have been up to over the past month. As always, if you are interested in contributing to the project, please visit our Contribute page on our website.

We are very happy to announce the upcoming Reproducible Builds Summit which set to take place from October 31st November 2nd 2023, in the vibrant city of Hamburg, Germany. Our summits are a unique gathering that brings together attendees from diverse projects, united by a shared vision of advancing the Reproducible Builds effort. During this enriching event, participants will have the opportunity to engage in discussions, establish connections and exchange ideas to drive progress in this vital field. Our aim is to create an inclusive space that fosters collaboration, innovation and problem-solving. We are thrilled to host the seventh edition of this exciting event, following the success of previous summits in various iconic locations around the world, including Venice, Marrakesh, Paris, Berlin and Athens. If you re interesting in joining us this year, please make sure to read the event page] which has more details about the event and location. (You may also be interested in attending PackagingCon 2023 held a few days before in Berlin.)
This month, Vagrant Cascadian will present at FOSSY 2023 on the topic of Breaking the Chains of Trusting Trust:
Corrupted build environments can deliver compromised cryptographically signed binaries. Several exploits in critical supply chains have been demonstrated in recent years, proving that this is not just theoretical. The most well secured build environments are still single points of failure when they fail. [ ] This talk will focus on the state of the art from several angles in related Free and Open Source Software projects, what works, current challenges and future plans for building trustworthy toolchains you do not need to trust.
Hosted by the Software Freedom Conservancy and taking place in Portland, Oregon, FOSSY aims to be a community-focused event: Whether you are a long time contributing member of a free software project, a recent graduate of a coding bootcamp or university, or just have an interest in the possibilities that free and open source software bring, FOSSY will have something for you . More information on the event is available on the FOSSY 2023 website, including the full programme schedule.
Marcel Fourn , Dominik Wermke, William Enck, Sascha Fahl and Yasemin Acar recently published an academic paper in the 44th IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy titled It s like flossing your teeth: On the Importance and Challenges of Reproducible Builds for Software Supply Chain Security . The abstract reads as follows:
The 2020 Solarwinds attack was a tipping point that caused a heightened awareness about the security of the software supply chain and in particular the large amount of trust placed in build systems. Reproducible Builds (R-Bs) provide a strong foundation to build defenses for arbitrary attacks against build systems by ensuring that given the same source code, build environment, and build instructions, bitwise-identical artifacts are created.
However, in contrast to other papers that touch on some theoretical aspect of reproducible builds, the authors paper takes a different approach. Starting with the observation that much of the software industry believes R-Bs are too far out of reach for most projects and conjoining that with a goal of to help identify a path for R-Bs to become a commonplace property , the paper has a different methodology:
We conducted a series of 24 semi-structured expert interviews with participants from the Reproducible-Builds.org project, and iterated on our questions with the reproducible builds community. We identified a range of motivations that can encourage open source developers to strive for R-Bs, including indicators of quality, security benefits, and more efficient caching of artifacts. We identify experiences that help and hinder adoption, which heavily include communication with upstream projects. We conclude with recommendations on how to better integrate R-Bs with the efforts of the open source and free software community.
A PDF of the paper is now available, as is an entry on the CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security website and an entry under the TeamUSEC Human-Centered Security research group.
On our mailing list this month:
The antagonist is David Schwartz, who correctly says There are dozens of complex reasons why what seems to be the same sequence of operations might produce different end results, but goes on to say I totally disagree with your general viewpoint that compilers must provide for reproducability [sic]. Dwight Tovey and I (Larry Doolittle) argue for reproducible builds. I assert Any program especially a mission-critical program like a compiler that cannot reproduce a result at will is broken. Also it s commonplace to take a binary from the net, and check to see if it was trojaned by attempting to recreate it from source.
Lastly, there were a few changes to our website this month too, including Bernhard M. Wiedemann adding a simplified Rust example to our documentation about the SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH environment variable [ ], Chris Lamb made it easier to parse our summit announcement at a glance [ ], Mattia Rizzolo added the summit announcement at a glance [ ] itself [ ][ ][ ] and Rahul Bajaj added a taxonomy of variations in build environments [ ].

Distribution work 27 reviews of Debian packages were added, 40 were updated and 8 were removed this month adding to our knowledge about identified issues. A new randomness_in_documentation_generated_by_mkdocs toolchain issue was added by Chris Lamb [ ], and the deterministic flag on the paths_vary_due_to_usrmerge issue as we are not currently testing usrmerge issues [ ] issues.
Roland Clobus posted his 18th update of the status of reproducible Debian ISO images on our mailing list. Roland reported that all major desktops build reproducibly with bullseye, bookworm, trixie and sid , but he also mentioned amongst many changes that not only are the non-free images being built (and are reproducible) but that the live images are generated officially by Debian itself. [ ]
Jan-Benedict Glaw noticed a problem when building NetBSD for the VAX architecture. Noting that Reproducible builds [are] probably not as reproducible as we thought , Jan-Benedict goes on to describe that when two builds from different source directories won t produce the same result and adds various notes about sub-optimal handling of the CFLAGS environment variable. [ ]
F-Droid added 21 new reproducible apps in June, resulting in a new record of 145 reproducible apps in total. [ ]. (This page now sports missing data for March May 2023.) F-Droid contributors also reported an issue with broken resources in APKs making some builds unreproducible. [ ]
Bernhard M. Wiedemann published another monthly report about reproducibility within openSUSE

Upstream patches

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 June, a number of changes were made by Holger Levsen, including:
  • Additions to a (relatively) new Documented Jenkins Maintenance (djm) script to automatically shrink a cache & save a backup of old data [ ], automatically split out previous months data from logfiles into specially-named files [ ], prevent concurrent remote logfile fetches by using a lock file [ ] and to add/remove various debugging statements [ ].
  • Updates to the automated system health checks to, for example, to correctly detect new kernel warnings due to a wording change [ ] and to explicitly observe which old/unused kernels should be removed [ ]. This was related to an improvement so that various kernel issues on Ubuntu-based nodes are automatically fixed. [ ]
Holger and Vagrant Cascadian updated all thirty-five hosts running Debian on the amd64, armhf, and i386 architectures to Debian bookworm, with the exception of the Jenkins host itself which will be upgraded after the release of Debian 12.1. In addition, Mattia Rizzolo updated the email configuration for the @reproducible-builds.org domain to correctly accept incoming mails from jenkins.debian.net [ ] as well as to set up DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) signing [ ]. And working together with Holger, Mattia also updated the Jenkins configuration to start testing Debian trixie which resulted in stopped testing Debian buster. And, finally, Jan-Benedict Glaw contributed patches for improved NetBSD testing.
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:

27 April 2023

Jonathan McDowell: Repurposing my C.H.I.P.

Way back at DebConf16 Gunnar managed to arrange for a number of Next Thing Co. C.H.I.P. boards to be distributed to those who were interested. I was lucky enough to be amongst those who received one, but I have to confess after some initial experimentation it ended up sitting in its box unused. The reasons for that were varied; partly about not being quite sure what best to do with it, partly due to a number of limitations it had, partly because NTC sadly went insolvent and there was less momentum around the hardware. I ve always meant to go back to it, poking it every now and then but never completing a project. I m finally almost there, and I figure I should write some of it up. TL;DR: My C.H.I.P. is currently running a mainline Linux 6.3 kernel with only a few DTS patches, an upstream u-boot v2022.1 with a couple of minor patches and an unmodified Debian bullseye armhf userspace.

Storage The main issue with the C.H.I.P. is that it uses MLC NAND, in particular mine has an 8MB H27QCG8T2E5R. That ended up unsupported in Linux, with the UBIFS folk disallowing operation on MLC devices. There s been subsequent work to enable an SLC emulation mode which makes the device more reliable at the cost of losing capacity by pairing up writes/reads in cells (AFAICT). Some of this hit for the H27UCG8T2ETR in 5.16 kernels, but I definitely did some experimentation with 5.17 without having much success. I should maybe go back and try again, but I ended up going a different route. It turned out that BytePorter had documented how to add a microSD slot to the NTC C.H.I.P., using just a microSD to full SD card adapter. Every microSD card I buy seems to come with one of these, so I had plenty lying around to test with. I started with ensuring the kernel could see it ok (by modifying the device tree), but once that was all confirmed I went further and built a more modern u-boot that talked to the SD card, and defaulted to booting off it. That meant no more relying on the internal NAND at all! I do see some flakiness with the SD card, which is possibly down to the dodgy way it s hooked up (I should probably do a basic PCB layout with JLCPCB instead). That s mostly been mitigated by forcing it into 1-bit mode instead of 4-bit mode (I tried lowering the frequency too, but that didn t make a difference). The problem manifests as: 
sunxi-mmc 1c11000.mmc: data error, sending stop command
and then all storage access freezing (existing logins still work, if the program you re trying to run is in cache). I can t find a conclusive software solution to this; I m pretty sure it s the hardware, but I don t understand why the recovery doesn t generally work.

Random power offs After I had storage working I d see random hangs or power offs. It wasn t quite clear what was going on. So I started trying to work out how to find out the CPU temperature, in case it was overheating. It turns out the temperature sensor on the R8 is part of the touchscreen driver, and I d taken my usual approach of turning off all the drivers I didn t think I d need. Enabling it (CONFIG_TOUCHSCREEN_SUN4I) gave temperature readings and seemed to help somewhat with stability, though not completely. Next I ended up looking at the AXP209 PMIC. There were various scripts still installed (I d started out with the NTC Debian install and slowly upgraded it to bullseye while stripping away the obvious pieces I didn t need) and a start-up script called enable-no-limit. This turned out to not be running (some sort of expectation of i2c-dev being loaded and another failing check), but looking at the script and the data sheet revealed the issue. The AXP209 can cope with 3 power sources; an external DC source, a Li-battery, and finally a USB port. I was powering my board via the USB port, using a charger rated for 2A. It turns out that the AXP209 defaults to limiting USB current to 900mA, and that with wifi active and the CPU busy the C.H.I.P. can rise above that. At which point the AXP shuts everything down. Armed with that info I was able to understand what the power scripts were doing and which bit I needed - i2cset -f -y 0 0x34 0x30 0x03 to set no limit and disable the auto-power off. Additionally I also discovered that the AXP209 had a built in temperature sensor as well, so I added support for that via iio-hwmon.

WiFi WiFi on the C.H.I.P. is provided by an RTL8723BS SDIO attached device. It s terrible (and not just here, I had an x86 based device with one where it also sucked). Thankfully there s a driver in staging in the kernel these days, but I ve still found it can fall out with my house setup, end up connecting to a further away AP which then results in lots of retries, dropped frames and CPU consumption. Nailing it to the AP on the other side of the wall from where it is helps. I haven t done any serious testing with the Bluetooth other than checking it s detected and can scan ok.

Patches I patched u-boot v2022.01 (which shows you how long ago I was trying this out) with the following to enable boot from external SD:
u-boot C.H.I.P. external SD patch 
diff --git a/arch/arm/dts/sun5i-r8-chip.dts b/arch/arm/dts/sun5i-r8-chip.dts
index 879a4b0f3b..1cb3a754d6 100644
--- a/arch/arm/dts/sun5i-r8-chip.dts
+++ b/arch/arm/dts/sun5i-r8-chip.dts
@@ -84,6 +84,13 @@
 		reset-gpios = <&pio 2 19 GPIO_ACTIVE_LOW>; /* PC19 */
 	 ;
 
+	mmc2_pins_e: mmc2@0  
+		pins = "PE4", "PE5", "PE6", "PE7", "PE8", "PE9";
+		function = "mmc2";
+		drive-strength = <30>;
+		bias-pull-up;
+	 ;
+
 	onewire  
 		compatible = "w1-gpio";
 		gpios = <&pio 3 2 GPIO_ACTIVE_HIGH>; /* PD2 */
@@ -175,6 +182,16 @@
 	status = "okay";
  ;
 
+&mmc2  
+	pinctrl-names = "default";
+	pinctrl-0 = <&mmc2_pins_e>;
+	vmmc-supply = <&reg_vcc3v3>;
+	vqmmc-supply = <&reg_vcc3v3>;
+	bus-width = <4>;
+	broken-cd;
+	status = "okay";
+ ;
+
 &ohci0  
 	status = "okay";
  ;
diff --git a/arch/arm/include/asm/arch-sunxi/gpio.h b/arch/arm/include/asm/arch-sunxi/gpio.h
index f3ab1aea0e..c0dfd85a6c 100644
--- a/arch/arm/include/asm/arch-sunxi/gpio.h
+++ b/arch/arm/include/asm/arch-sunxi/gpio.h
@@ -167,6 +167,7 @@ enum sunxi_gpio_number  
 
 #define SUN8I_GPE_TWI2		3
 #define SUN50I_GPE_TWI2		3
+#define SUNXI_GPE_SDC2		4
 
 #define SUNXI_GPF_SDC0		2
 #define SUNXI_GPF_UART0		4
diff --git a/board/sunxi/board.c b/board/sunxi/board.c
index fdbcd40269..f538cb7e20 100644
--- a/board/sunxi/board.c
+++ b/board/sunxi/board.c
@@ -433,9 +433,9 @@ static void mmc_pinmux_setup(int sdc)
 			sunxi_gpio_set_drv(pin, 2);
 		 
 #elif defined(CONFIG_MACH_SUN5I)
-		/* SDC2: PC6-PC15 */
-		for (pin = SUNXI_GPC(6); pin <= SUNXI_GPC(15); pin++)  
-			sunxi_gpio_set_cfgpin(pin, SUNXI_GPC_SDC2);
+		/* SDC2: PE4-PE9 */
+		for (pin = SUNXI_GPE(4); pin <= SUNXI_GPE(9); pin++)  
+			sunxi_gpio_set_cfgpin(pin, SUNXI_GPE_SDC2);
 			sunxi_gpio_set_pull(pin, SUNXI_GPIO_PULL_UP);
 			sunxi_gpio_set_drv(pin, 2);

I ve sent some patches for the kernel device tree upstream - there s an outstanding issue with the Bluetooth wake GPIO causing the serial port not to probe(!) that I need to resolve before sending a v2, but what s there works for me. The only remaining piece is patch to enable the external SD for Linux; I don t think it s appropriate to send upstream but it s fairly basic. This limits the bus to 1 bit rather than the 4 bits it s capable of, as mentioned above.
Linux C.H.I.P. external SD DTS patch diff diff --git a/arch/arm/boot/dts/sun5i-r8-chip.dts b/arch/arm/boot/dts/sun5i-r8-chip.dts index fd37bd1f3920..2b5aa4952620 100644 --- a/arch/arm/boot/dts/sun5i-r8-chip.dts +++ b/arch/arm/boot/dts/sun5i-r8-chip.dts @@ -163,6 +163,17 @@ &mmc0 status = "okay"; ; +&mmc2 + pinctrl-names = "default"; + pinctrl-0 = <&mmc2_4bit_pe_pins>; + vmmc-supply = <&reg_vcc3v3>; + vqmmc-supply = <&reg_vcc3v3>; + bus-width = <1>; + non-removable; + disable-wp; + status = "okay"; + ; + &ohci0 status = "okay"; ;

As for what I m doing with it, I think that ll have to be a separate post.

9 February 2023

Jonathan McDowell: Building a read-only Debian root setup: Part 2

This is the second part of how I build a read-only root setup for my router. You might want to read part 1 first, which covers the initial boot and general overview of how I tie the pieces together. This post will describe how I build the squashfs image that forms the main filesystem. Most of the build is driven from a script, make-router, which I ll dissect below. It s highly tailored to my needs, and this is a fairly lengthy post, but hopefully the steps I describe prove useful to anyone trying to do something similar.
Breakdown of make-router 
#!/bin/bash
# Either rb3011 (arm) or rb5009 (arm64)
#HOSTNAME="rb3011"
HOSTNAME="rb5009"
if [ "x$ HOSTNAME " == "xrb3011" ]; then
	ARCH=armhf
elif [ "x$ HOSTNAME " == "xrb5009" ]; then
	ARCH=arm64
else
	echo "Unknown host: $ HOSTNAME "
	exit 1
fi

It s a bash script, and I allow building for either my RB3011 or RB5009, which means a different architecture (32 vs 64 bit). I run this script on my Pi 4 which means I don t have to mess about with QemuUserEmulation. 
BASE_DIR=$(dirname $0)
IMAGE_FILE=$(mktemp --tmpdir router.$ ARCH .XXXXXXXXXX.img)
MOUNT_POINT=$(mktemp -p /mnt -d router.$ ARCH .XXXXXXXXXX)
# Build and mount an ext4 image file to put the root file system in
dd if=/dev/zero bs=1 count=0 seek=1G of=$ IMAGE_FILE 
mkfs -t ext4 $ IMAGE_FILE 
mount -o loop $ IMAGE_FILE  $ MOUNT_POINT

I build the image in a loopback ext4 file on tmpfs (my Pi4 is the 8G model), which makes things a bit faster. 
# Add dpkg excludes
mkdir -p $ MOUNT_POINT /etc/dpkg/dpkg.cfg.d/
cat <<EOF > $ MOUNT_POINT /etc/dpkg/dpkg.cfg.d/path-excludes
# Exclude docs
path-exclude=/usr/share/doc/*
# Only locale we want is English
path-exclude=/usr/share/locale/*
path-include=/usr/share/locale/en*/*
path-include=/usr/share/locale/locale.alias
# No man pages
path-exclude=/usr/share/man/*
EOF

Create a dpkg excludes config to drop docs, man pages and most locales before we even start the bootstrap. 
# Setup fstab + mtab
echo "# Empty fstab as root is pre-mounted" > $ MOUNT_POINT /etc/fstab
ln -s ../proc/self/mounts $ MOUNT_POINT /etc/mtab
# Setup hostname
echo $ HOSTNAME  > $ MOUNT_POINT /etc/hostname
# Add the root SSH keys
mkdir -p $ MOUNT_POINT /root/.ssh/
cat <<EOF > $ MOUNT_POINT /root/.ssh/authorized_keys
ssh-rsa AAAAB3NzaC1yc2EAAAABIwAAAQEAv8NkUeVdsVdegS+JT9qwFwiHEgcC9sBwnv6RjpH6I4d3im4LOaPOatzneMTZlH8Gird+H4nzluciBr63hxmcFjZVW7dl6mxlNX2t/wKvV0loxtEmHMoI7VMCnrWD0PyvwJ8qqNu9cANoYriZRhRCsBi27qPNvI741zEpXN8QQs7D3sfe4GSft9yQplfJkSldN+2qJHvd0AHKxRdD+XTxv1Ot26+ZoF3MJ9MqtK+FS+fD9/ESLxMlOpHD7ltvCRol3u7YoaUo2HJ+u31l0uwPZTqkPNS9fkmeCYEE0oXlwvUTLIbMnLbc7NKiLgniG8XaT0RYHtOnoc2l2UnTvH5qsQ== noodles@earth.li
ssh-rsa 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 noodles@yubikey
ssh-rsa AAAAB3NzaC1yc2EAAAADAQABAAABAQC0I8UHj4IpfqUcGE4cTvLB0d2xmATSUzqtxW6ZhGbZxvQDKJesVW6HunrJ4NFTQuQJYgOXY/o82qBpkEKqaJMEFHTCjcaj3M6DIaxpiRfQfs0nhtzDB6zPiZn9Suxb0s5Qr4sTWd6iI9da72z3hp9QHNAu4vpa4MSNE+al3UfUisUf4l8TaBYKwQcduCE0z2n2FTi3QzmlkOgH4MgyqBBEaqx1tq7Zcln0P0TYZXFtrxVyoqBBIoIEqYxmFIQP887W50wQka95dBGqjtV+d8IbrQ4pB55qTxMd91L+F8n8A6nhQe7DckjS0Xdla52b9RXNXoobhtvx9K2prisagsHT noodles@cup
ecdsa-sha2-nistp256 AAAAE2VjZHNhLXNoYTItbmlzdHAyNTYAAAAIbmlzdHAyNTYAAABBBK6iGog3WbNhrmrkglNjVO8/B6m7mN6q1tMm1sXjLxQa+F86ETTLiXNeFQVKCHYrk8f7hK0d2uxwgj6Ixy9k0Cw= noodles@sevai
EOF

Setup fstab, the hostname and SSH keys for root. 
# Bootstrap our install
debootstrap \
	--arch=$ ARCH  \
	--include=collectd-core,conntrack,dnsmasq,ethtool,iperf3,kexec-tools,mosquitto,mtd-utils,mtr-tiny,ppp,tcpdump,rng-tools5,ssh,watchdog,wget \
	--exclude=dmidecode,isc-dhcp-client,isc-dhcp-common,makedev,nano \
	bullseye $ MOUNT_POINT  https://deb.debian.org/debian/

Actually do the debootstrap step, including a bunch of extra packages that we want. 
# Install mqtt-arp
cp $ BASE_DIR /debs/mqtt-arp_1_$ ARCH .deb $ MOUNT_POINT /tmp
chroot $ MOUNT_POINT  dpkg -i /tmp/mqtt-arp_1_$ ARCH .deb
rm $ MOUNT_POINT /tmp/mqtt-arp_1_$ ARCH .deb
# Frob the mqtt-arp config so it starts after mosquitto
sed -i -e 's/After=.*/After=mosquitto.service/' $ MOUNT_POINT /lib/systemd/system/mqtt-arp.service

I haven t uploaded mqtt-arp to Debian, so I install a locally built package, and ensure it starts after mosquitto (the MQTT broker), given they re running on the same host. 
# Frob watchdog so it starts earlier than multi-user
sed -i -e 's/After=.*/After=basic.target/' $ MOUNT_POINT /lib/systemd/system/watchdog.service
# Make sure the watchdog is poking the device file
sed -i -e 's/^#watchdog-device/watchdog-device/' $ MOUNT_POINT /etc/watchdog.conf

watchdog timeouts were particularly an issue on the RB3011, where the default timeout didn t give enough time to reach multiuser mode before it would reset the router. Not helpful, so alter the config to start it earlier (and make sure it s configured to actually kick the device file). 
# Clean up docs + locales
rm -r $ MOUNT_POINT /usr/share/doc/*
rm -r $ MOUNT_POINT /usr/share/man/*
for dir in $ MOUNT_POINT /usr/share/locale/*/; do
	if [ "$ dir " != "$ MOUNT_POINT /usr/share/locale/en/" ]; then
		rm -r $ dir 
	fi
done

Clean up any docs etc that ended up installed. 
# Set root password to root
echo "root:root"   chroot $ MOUNT_POINT  chpasswd

The only login method is ssh key to the root account though I suppose this allows for someone to execute a privilege escalation from a daemon user so I should probably randomise this. Does need to be known though so it s possible to login via the serial console for debugging. 
# Add security to sources.list + update
echo "deb https://security.debian.org/debian-security bullseye-security main" >> $ MOUNT_POINT /etc/apt/sources.list
chroot $ MOUNT_POINT  apt update
chroot $ MOUNT_POINT  apt -y full-upgrade
chroot $ MOUNT_POINT  apt clean
# Cleanup the APT lists
rm $ MOUNT_POINT /var/lib/apt/lists/www.*
rm $ MOUNT_POINT /var/lib/apt/lists/security.*

Pull in any security updates, then clean out the APT lists rather than polluting the image with them. 
# Disable the daily APT timer
rm $ MOUNT_POINT /etc/systemd/system/timers.target.wants/apt-daily.timer
# Disable daily dpkg backup
cat <<EOF > $ MOUNT_POINT /etc/cron.daily/dpkg
#!/bin/sh
# Don't do the daily dpkg backup
exit 0
EOF
# We don't want a persistent systemd journal
rmdir $ MOUNT_POINT /var/log/journal

None of these make sense on a router. 
# Enable nftables
ln -s /lib/systemd/system/nftables.service \
	$ MOUNT_POINT /etc/systemd/system/sysinit.target.wants/nftables.service

Ensure we have firewalling enabled automatically. 
# Add systemd-coredump + systemd-timesync user / group
echo "systemd-timesync:x:998:" >> $ MOUNT_POINT /etc/group
echo "systemd-coredump:x:999:" >> $ MOUNT_POINT /etc/group
echo "systemd-timesync:!*::" >> $ MOUNT_POINT /etc/gshadow
echo "systemd-coredump:!*::" >> $ MOUNT_POINT /etc/gshadow
echo "systemd-timesync:x:998:998:systemd Time Synchronization:/:/usr/sbin/nologin" >> $ MOUNT_POINT /etc/passwd
echo "systemd-coredump:x:999:999:systemd Core Dumper:/:/usr/sbin/nologin" >> $ MOUNT_POINT /etc/passwd
echo "systemd-timesync:!*:47358::::::" >> $ MOUNT_POINT /etc/shadow
echo "systemd-coredump:!*:47358::::::" >> $ MOUNT_POINT /etc/shadow
# Create /etc/.pwd.lock, otherwise it'll end up in the overlay
touch $ MOUNT_POINT /etc/.pwd.lock
chmod 600 $ MOUNT_POINT /etc/.pwd.lock

Create a number of users that will otherwise get created at boot, and a lock file that will otherwise get created anyway. 
# Copy config files
cp --recursive --preserve=mode,timestamps $ BASE_DIR /etc/* $ MOUNT_POINT /etc/
cp --recursive --preserve=mode,timestamps $ BASE_DIR /etc-$ ARCH /* $ MOUNT_POINT /etc/
chroot $ MOUNT_POINT  chown mosquitto /etc/mosquitto/mosquitto.users
chroot $ MOUNT_POINT  chown mosquitto /etc/ssl/mqtt.home.key

There are config files that are easier to replace wholesale, some of which are specific to the hardware (e.g. related to network interfaces). See below for some more details. 
# Build symlinks into flash for boot / modules
ln -s /mnt/flash/lib/modules $ MOUNT_POINT /lib/modules
rmdir $ MOUNT_POINT /boot
ln -s /mnt/flash/boot $ MOUNT_POINT /boot

The kernel + its modules live outside the squashfs image, on the USB flash drive that the image lives on. That makes for easier kernel upgrades. 
# Put our git revision into os-release
echo -n "GIT_VERSION=" >> $ MOUNT_POINT /etc/os-release
(cd $ BASE_DIR  ; git describe --tags) >> $ MOUNT_POINT /etc/os-release

Always helpful to be able to check the image itself for what it was built from. 
# Add some stuff to root's .bashrc
cat << EOF >> $ MOUNT_POINT /root/.bashrc
alias ls='ls -F --color=auto'
eval "\$(dircolors)"
case "\$TERM" in
xterm* rxvt*)
	PS1="\\[\\e]0;\\u@\\h: \\w\a\\]\$PS1"
	;;
*)
	;;
esac
EOF

Just some niceties for when I do end up logging in. 
# Build the squashfs
mksquashfs $ MOUNT_POINT  /tmp/router.$ ARCH .squashfs \
	-comp xz

Actually build the squashfs image. 
# Save the installed package list off
chroot $ MOUNT_POINT  dpkg --get-selections > /tmp/wip-installed-packages

Save off the installed package list. This was particularly useful when trying to replicate the existing router setup and making sure I had all the important packages installed. It doesn t really serve a purpose now.
In terms of the config files I copy into /etc, shared across both routers are the following:
Breakdown of shared config
  • apt config (disable recommends, periodic updates):
    • apt/apt.conf.d/10periodic, apt/apt.conf.d/local-recommends
  • Adding a default, empty, locale:
    • default/locale
  • DNS/DHCP:
    • dnsmasq.conf, dnsmasq.d/dhcp-ranges, dnsmasq.d/static-ips
    • hosts, resolv.conf
  • Enabling IP forwarding:
    • sysctl.conf
  • Logs related:
    • logrotate.conf, rsyslog.conf
  • MQTT related:
    • mosquitto/mosquitto.users, mosquitto/conf.d/ssl.conf, mosquitto/conf.d/users.conf, mosquitto/mosquitto.acl, mosquitto/mosquitto.conf
    • mqtt-arp.conf
    • ssl/lets-encrypt-r3.crt, ssl/mqtt.home.key, ssl/mqtt.home.crt
  • PPP configuration:
    • ppp/ip-up.d/0000usepeerdns, ppp/ipv6-up.d/defaultroute, ppp/pap-secrets, ppp/chap-secrets
    • network/interfaces.d/pppoe-wan
The router specific config is mostly related to networking:
Breakdown of router specific config
  • Firewalling:
    • nftables.conf
  • Interfaces:
    • dnsmasq.d/interfaces
    • network/interfaces.d/eth0, network/interfaces.d/p1, network/interfaces.d/p2, network/interfaces.d/p7, network/interfaces.d/p8
  • PPP config (network interface piece):
    • ppp/peers/aquiss
  • SSH keys:
    • ssh/ssh_host_ecdsa_key, ssh/ssh_host_ed25519_key, ssh/ssh_host_rsa_key, ssh/ssh_host_ecdsa_key.pub, ssh/ssh_host_ed25519_key.pub, ssh/ssh_host_rsa_key.pub
  • Monitoring:
    • collectd/collectd.conf, collectd/collectd.conf.d/network.conf

2 February 2023

Valhalla's Things: How To Verify Debian's ARM Installer Images

Posted on February 2, 2023
Thanks to Vagrant on the debian-arm mailing list I ve found that there is a chain of verifiability for the images usually used to install Debian on ARM devices. It s not trivial, so I m writing it down for future reference when I ll need it again.
  1. Download the images from https://ftp.debian.org/debian/dists/bullseye/main/installer-armhf/current/images/ (choose either hd-media or netboot, then SD-card-images and download the firmware.* file for your board as well as partition.img.gz).
  2. Download the checksums file https://ftp.debian.org/debian/dists/bullseye/main/installer-armhf/current/images/SHA256SUMS
  3. Download the Release file from https://ftp.debian.org/debian/dists/bullseye/ ; for convenience the InRelease
  4. Verify the Release file: 
    gpg --no-default-keyring \
    --keyring /usr/share/keyrings/debian-archive-bullseye-stable.gpg \
    --verify InRelease
  5. Verify the checksums file: 
    awk '/installer-armhf\/current\/images\/SHA256SUMS/  print $1 "
SHA256SUMS" ' InRelease   tail -n 1   sha256sum -c
    (I know, I probably can use awk instead of that tail, but it s getting late and I want to publish this).
  6. Verify the actual files, for hd-media: 
    grep hd-media SHA256SUMS \
  sed 's#hd-media/SD-card-images/##' \
  sha256sum -c \
  grep -v "No such file or directory" \
  grep -v "FAILED open or read" 2> /dev/null
    and for netboot: 
    grep netboot SHA256SUMS \
  sed 's#netboot/SD-card-images/##' \
  sha256sum -c \
  grep -v "No such file or directory" \
  grep -v "FAILED open or read" 2> /dev/null
    and check that all of the files you wanted are there with an OK; of course change hd-media with netboot as needed.
And I fully agree that fewer steps would be nice, but this is definitely better than nothing!

24 January 2023

Kentaro Hayashi: Porterboxes and alternatives

As you know, Debian projects and sponsor provides so-called "porterbox", but it does not cover all architectures. There are some alternatives to fix architecture-specific bugs. For the record, let's pick it up them. [1][2][3]
porterbox deb-o-matic qemu
amd64 adayevskaya.d.o debomatic-amd64.d.n DQIB ready
arm64 amdahl.d.o debomatic-arm64.d.n DQIB ready
armel amdahl.d.o abel.d.o debomatic-armel.d.n NG
armhf amdahl.d.o abel.d.o harris.d.o debomatic-armhf.d.n DQIB ready
i386 exodar.d.n debomatic-i386.d.n DQIB ready
mips64el eller.d.o debomatic-mips64el.d.n DQIB ready
mipsel eller.d.o debomatic-mipsel.d.n DQIB ready
ppc64el platti.d.o debomatic-ppc64el.d.n DQIB ready
s390x zelenka.d.o debomatic-s390x.d.n DQIB ready
alpha N/A N/A NG
arc N/A N/A N/A
hppa panama.d.n N/A N/A
ia64 yttrium.d.n N/A N/A
kfreebsd-amd64 lemon.d.n N/A N/A
kfreebsd-i386 lemon.d.n N/A N/A
m68k mitchy.d.n N/A NG
powerpc perotto.d.n debomatic-powerpc.d.n DQIB ready
ppc64 perotto.d.n N/A DQIB ready
riscv64 debian-riscv64-porterbox-01.d.n N/A DQIB ready
sh4 N/A N/A NG
sparc64 kyoto.d.n N/A N/A
x32 N/A N/A N/A
Thus, no alternatives for alpha, arc, sh4 and x32.

12 January 2023

Jonathan McDowell: Building a read-only Debian root setup: Part 1

I mentioned in the post about upgrading my home internet that part of the work I did was creating a read-only Debian root with a squashfs image. This post covers the details of how I boot with that image; a later post will cover how I build the squashfs image. First, David Reader kindly pointed me at his rodebian setup, which was helpful in making me think about the whole problem but ultimately not the direction I went. Primarily because on the old router (an RB3011) I am space constrained, with only 120M of usable flash, and so ideally I wanted as much as possible of the system in a well compressed filesystem. squashfs seemed like the best option for that, and ultimately I ended up with a 39M image. I ve then used overlayfs to mount a tmpfs, so I get what looks like a writeable system without having to do too many tweaks to the actual install. On the plus side I can then see exactly what is getting written where and decide whether I need to update something in the squashfs. I don t boot with an initrd - for initial testing I booted directly off a USB stick. I ve actually ended up continuing to do this in production, because I ve had no pressing reason to move it all to booting off internal flash (I ve ended up with a Sandisk SDCZ430-032G-G46 which is tiny). However nothing I m going to describe is dependent on that - this would work perfectly well for a initial UBIFS rootfs on internal NAND. So the basic overview is I boot off a minimal rootfs, mount a squashfs, create an appropriate tmpfs, mount an overlayfs that combines the two, then pivotroot into the overlayfs and exec its init so it becomes the rootfs. For the minimal rootfs I started with busybox, in particular I used the armhf busybox-static package from Debian. My RB5009 is an ARM64, but I wanted to be able to test on the RB3011 as well, which is ARMv7. Picking an armhf binary for the minimal rootfs lets me use the same image for both. Using the static build helps reduce the number of pieces involved in putting it all together. The busybox binary goes in /bin. I was able to cheat and chroot into the empty rootfs and call busybox --install -s to create symlinks for all the tools it provides, but I could have done this manually. There s only a handful that are actually needed, but it s amazing how much is crammed into a 1.2M binary. /sbin/init is a shell script:
Contents 
#!/bin/ash
# Make sure we have a sane date
if [ -e /data/saved-date ]; then
        CURRENT_DATE=$(date -Iseconds)
        if [ "$ CURRENT_DATE:0:4 " -lt "2022" -o \
                        "$ CURRENT_DATE:0:4 " -gt "2030" ]; then
                echo Setting initial date
                date -s "$(cat /data/saved-date)"
        fi
fi
# Work out what platform we're on
ARCH=$(uname -m)
if [ "$ ARCH " == "aarch64" ]; then
        ARCH=arm64
else
        ARCH=armhf
fi
# Mount a tmpfs to store the changes
mount -t tmpfs root-rw /mnt/overlay/rw
# Make the directories we need in the tmpfs
mkdir /mnt/overlay/rw/upper
mkdir /mnt/overlay/rw/work
# Mount the squashfs and build an overlay root filesystem of it + the tmpfs
mount -t squashfs -o loop /data/router.$ ARCH .squashfs /mnt/overlay/lower
mount -t overlay \
        -o lowerdir=/mnt/overlay/lower,upperdir=/mnt/overlay/rw/upper,workdir=/mnt/overlay/rw/work \
        overlayfs-root /mnt/root
# Build the directories we need within the new root
mkdir /mnt/root/mnt/flash
mkdir /mnt/root/mnt/overlay
mkdir /mnt/root/mnt/overlay/lower
mkdir /mnt/root/mnt/overlay/rw
# Copy any stored state
if [ -e /data/state.$ ARCH .tar ]; then
        echo Restoring stored state
        cd /mnt/root
        tar xf /data/state.$ ARCH .tar
fi
cd /mnt/root
pivot_root . mnt/flash
echo Switching into root filesystem
exec chroot . sh -c "$(cat <<END
mount --move /mnt/flash/mnt/overlay/lower /mnt/overlay/lower
mount --move /mnt/flash/mnt/overlay/rw /mnt/overlay/rw
exec /sbin/init
END
)"
Most of what the script is doing is sorting out the squashfs + tmpfs backed overlayfs that becomes the full root filesystems, but there are a few other bits to note. First, we pick up a saved date from /data/saved-date - the router has no RTC and while it ll sort itself out with NTP once it gets networking up it s useful to make sure we don t end up comically far in the past or future. Second, the script looks at what architecture we re running and picks up an appropriate squashfs image from /data based on that. This let me use the same USB stick for testing on both the RB3011 and the RB5011. Finally we allow for a /data/state.$ ARCH .tar file to let us pick up changes to the rootfs at boot time - this prevents having to rebuild the squashfs image every time there s a persistent change. The other piece that doesn t show up in the script is that the kernel and its modules are all installed into this initial rootfs (and then symlinked from the squashfs). This lets me build a mostly modular kernel, as long as all the necessary drivers to mount the USB stick are built in. Once the system is fully booted the initial rootfs is available at /mnt/flash, by default mounted read-only (to avoid inadvertent writes), but able to be remounted to update the squashfs image, install a new kernel, or update the state tarball. /mnt/overlay/rw/upper/ is where updates to the overlayfs are written, which provides an easy way to see what files are changing, initially to determine what might need tweaked in the squashfs creation process and subsequently to be able to see what needs updated in the state tarball.

9 January 2023

Russ Allbery: Review: Black Stars

Review: Black Stars, edited by Nisi Shawl & Latoya Peterson
Publisher: Amazon Original Stories
Copyright: August 2021
ISBN: 1-5420-3272-5
ISBN: 1-5420-3270-9
ISBN: 1-5420-3271-7
ISBN: 1-5420-3273-3
ISBN: 1-5420-3268-7
ISBN: 1-5420-3269-5
Format: Kindle
Pages: 168
This is a bit of an odd duck from a metadata standpoint. Black Stars is a series of short stories (maybe one creeps into novelette range) published by Amazon for Kindle and audiobook. Each one can be purchased separately (or "borrowed" with Amazon Prime), and they have separate ISBNs, so my normal practice would be to give each its own review. They're much too short for that, though, so I'm reviewing the whole group as an anthology. The cover in the sidebar is for the first story of the series. The other covers have similar designs. I think the one for "We Travel the Spaceways" was my favorite. Each story is by a Black author and most of them are science fiction. ("The Black Pages" is fantasy.) I would classify them as afrofuturism, although I don't have a firm grasp on its definition. This anthology included several authors I've been meaning to read and was conveniently available, so I gave it a try, even though I'm not much of a short fiction reader. That will be apparent in the forthcoming grumbling. "The Visit" by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: This is a me problem rather than a story problem, and I suspect it's partly because the story is not for me, but I am very done with gender-swapped sexism. I get the point of telling stories of our own society with enough alienation to force the reader to approach them from a fresh angle, but the problem with a story where women are sexist and condescending to men is that you're still reading a story of condescending sexism. That's particularly true when the analogies to our world are more obvious than the internal logic of the story world, as they are here. "The Visit" tells the story of a reunion between two college friends, one of whom is now a stay-at-home husband and the other of whom has stayed single. There's not much story beyond that, just obvious political metaphor (the Male Masturbatory Act to ensure no potential child is wasted, blatant harrassment of the two men by female cops) and depressing character studies. Everyone in this story is an ass except maybe Obinna's single friend Eze, which means there's nothing to focus on except the sexism. The writing is competent and effective, but I didn't care in the slightest about any of these people or anything that was happening in their awful, dreary world. (4) "The Black Pages" by Nnedi Okorafor: Issaka has been living in Chicago, but the story opens with him returning to Timbouctou where he grew up. His parents know he's coming for a visit, but he's a week early as a surprise. Unfortunately, he's arriving at the same time as an al-Qaeda attack on the library. They set it on fire, but most of the books they were trying to destroy were already saved by his father and are now in Issaka's childhood bedroom. Unbeknownst to al-Qaeda, one of the books they did burn was imprisoning a djinn. A djinn who is now free and resident in Issaka's iPad. This was a great first chapter of a novel. The combination of a modern setting and a djinn trapped in books with an instant affinity with technology was great. Issaka is an interesting character who is well-placed to introduce the reader to the setting, and I was fully invested in Issaka and Faro negotiating their relationship. Then the story just stopped. I didn't understand the ending, which was probably me being dim, but the real problem was that I was not at all ready for an ending. I would read the novel this was setting up, though. (6) "2043... (A Merman I Should Turn to Be)" by Nisi Shawl: This is another story that felt like the setup for a novel, although not as good of a novel. The premise is that the United States has developed biological engineering that allows humans to live underwater for extended periods (although they still have to surface occasionally for air, like whales). The use to which that technology is being put is a rerun of Liberia with less colonialism: Blacks are given the option to be modified into merpeople and live under the sea off the US coast as a solution. White supremacists are not happy, of course, and try to stop them from claiming their patch of ocean floor. This was fine, as far as it went, but I wasn't fond of the lead character and there wasn't much plot. There was some sort of semi-secret plan that the protagonist stumbles across and that never made much sense to me. The best parts of the story were the underwater setting and the semi-realistic details about the merman transformation. (6) "These Alien Skies" by C.T. Rwizi: In the far future, humans are expanding across the galaxy via automatically-constructed wormhole gates. Msizi's job is to be the first ship through a new wormhole to survey the system previously reached only by the AI construction ship. The wormhole is not supposed to explode shortly after he goes through, leaving him stranded in an alien system with only his companion Tariro, who is not who she seems to be. This was a classic SF plot, but I still hadn't guessed where it was going, or the relevance of some undiscussed bits of Tariro's past. Once the plot happens, it's a bit predictable, but I enjoyed it despite the depressed protagonist. (6) "Clap Back" by Nalo Hopkinson: Apart from "The Visit," this was the most directly political of the stories. It opens with Wenda, a protest artist, whose final class project uses nanotech to put racist tchotchkes to an unexpected use. This is intercut with news clippings about a (white and much richer) designer who has found a way to embed memories into clothing and is using this to spread quotes of rather pointed "forgiveness" from a Malawi quilt. This was one of the few entries in this anthology that fit the short story shape for me. Wenda's project and Burri's clothing interact fifty years later in a surprising way. This was the second-best story of the group. (7) "We Travel the Spaceways" by Victor LaValle: Grimace (so named because he wears a huge purple coat) is a homeless man in New York who talks to cans. Most of his life is about finding food, but the cans occasionally give him missions and provide minor assistance. Apart from his cans, he's very much alone, but when he comforts a woman in McDonalds (after getting caught thinking about stealing her cheeseburger), he hopes he may have found a partner. If, that is, she still likes him when she discovers the nature of the cans' missions. This was the best-written story of the six. Grimace is the first-person narrator, and LaValle's handling of characterization and voice is excellent. Grimace makes perfect sense from inside his head, but the reader can also see how unsettling he is to those around him. This could have been a disturbing, realistic story about a schitzophrenic man. As one may have guessed from the theme of the anthology, that's not what it is. I admired the craft of this story, but I found Grimace's missions too horrific to truly like it. There is an in-story justification for them; suffice it to say that I didn't find it believable. An expansion with considerably more detail and history might have bridged that gap, but alas, short fiction. (6) Rating: 6 out of 10

30 December 2022

Utkarsh Gupta: FOSS Activites in December 2022

Here s my (thirty-ninth) monthly but brief update about the activities I ve done in the F/L/OSS world.

Debian
This was my 48th month of actively contributing to Debian. I became a DM in late March 2019 and a DD on Christmas 19! \o/ There s a bunch of things I do, both, technical and non-technical. Here are the things I did this month:
  • Some DebConf work.
  • Sponsoring stuff for non-DDs.
  • Mentoring for newcomers.
  • Moderation of -project mailing list.

Ubuntu
This was my 23rd month of actively contributing to Ubuntu. Now that I joined Canonical to work on Ubuntu full-time, there s a bunch of things I do! \o/ I mostly worked on different things, I guess. I was too lazy to maintain a list of things I worked on so there s no concrete list atm. Maybe I ll get back to this section later or will start to list stuff from the fall, as I was doing before. :D

Debian (E)LTS
Debian Long Term Support (LTS) is a project to extend the lifetime of all Debian stable releases to (at least) 5 years. Debian LTS is not handled by the Debian security team, but by a separate group of volunteers and companies interested in making it a success. And Debian Extended LTS (ELTS) is its sister project, extending support to the stretch and jessie release (+2 years after LTS support). This was my thirty-ninth month as a Debian LTS and thirtieth month as a Debian ELTS paid contributor.
I worked for 51.50 hours for LTS and 22.50 hours for ELTS.

LTS CVE Fixes and Announcements:

ELTS CVE Fixes and Announcements:
  • Issued ELA 752-1, fixing CVE-2021-41182, CVE-2021-41183, CVE-2021-41184, and CVE-2022-31160, for jqueryui.
    For Debian 9 stretch, these problems have been fixed in version 1.12.1+dfsg-4+deb9u1.
  • Helped facilitate Erlang s and RabbitMQ s update; cf: ELA 754-1.
  • Looked through python3.4 s FTBFS on armhf. Even diff d with Ubuntu. No luck. Inspected the traces, doesn t give a lot of hint either. Will continue to look later next month or so but it s a rabbit hole. (:
  • Inspected joblib s security update upon Helmut s investigation and see what went wrong there.
  • Started to look at other set of packages: dropbear, tiff, et al.

Other (E)LTS Work:
Until next time.
:wq for today.

30 November 2022

Utkarsh Gupta: FOSS Activites in November 2022

Here s my (thirty-eighth) monthly but brief update about the activities I ve done in the F/L/OSS world.

Debian
This was my 47th month of actively contributing to Debian. I became a DM in late March 2019 and a DD on Christmas 19! \o/ There s a bunch of things I do, both, technical and non-technical. Here are the things I did this month:

Debian Uploads

Other $things:
  • Sponsoring stuff for non-DDs.
  • Mentoring for newcomers.
  • Moderation of -project mailing list.

Ubuntu
This was my 22nd month of actively contributing to Ubuntu. Now that I joined Canonical to work on Ubuntu full-time, there s a bunch of things I do! \o/ I mostly worked on different things, I guess. I was too lazy to maintain a list of things I worked on so there s no concrete list atm. Maybe I ll get back to this section later or will start to list stuff from the fall, as I was doing before. :D

Debian (E)LTS
Debian Long Term Support (LTS) is a project to extend the lifetime of all Debian stable releases to (at least) 5 years. Debian LTS is not handled by the Debian security team, but by a separate group of volunteers and companies interested in making it a success. And Debian Extended LTS (ELTS) is its sister project, extending support to the stretch and jessie release (+2 years after LTS support). This was my thirty-eighth month as a Debian LTS and twenty-nine month as a Debian ELTS paid contributor.
I worked for 41.00 hours for LTS and 30.25 hours for ELTS.

LTS CVE Fixes and Announcements:

ELTS CVE Fixes and Announcements:
  • Issued ELA 731-1, fixing CVE-2022-39377, for sysstat.
    For Debian 9 stretch, these problems have been fixed in version 11.4.3-2+deb9u1.
    For Debian 8 jessie, these problems have been fixed in version 11.0.1-1+deb8u1.
  • Issued ELA 749-1, fixing CVE-2022-41325, for vlc.
    For Debian 9 stretch, these problems have been fixed in version 3.0.17.4-0+deb9u2.
  • Issued ELA 750-1 for a new upstream version update of clamav.
    For Debian 9 stretch, the package has been updated to version 0.103.7+dfsg-0+deb9u1. For Debian 8 jessie, the package has been updated to version 0.103.7+dfsg-0+deb8u1.
  • Started to look at other set of packages.

Other (E)LTS Work:
  • Front desk duty from 21-11 until 27-11 for both, LTS and ELTS.
  • Triaged jqueryui, open-vm-tools, systemd, ffmpeg, lava, pngcheck, snapd, vlc, g810-led, libpgjava, dropbear, python3.5, python3.4, clamav, systat, postgresql-11, and mariadb-10.1.
  • Marked CVE-2009-1143/open-vm-tools as postponed for buster, stretch and jessie.
  • Marked CVE-2022-45873/systemd as not-affected in stretch and jessie.
  • Marked CVE-2022-396 4,5 /ffmpeg as postponed for buster and stretch.
  • Marked CVE-2022-45061/python3. 4,5 as postponed for stretch and jessie.
  • Marked CVE-2022-31160/jqueryui as not-affected for jessie instead.
  • Noted CVE-2022-45061/python3.4 to be marked as postponed; only things to fix is the armhf FTBFS.
  • Auto EOL d linux, libpgjava, nvidia-graphics-drivers, maradns, chromium, and glance for ELTS.
  • Helped and assisted new contributors joining Freexian (LTS/ELTS/internally).
  • Answered questions (& discussions) on IRC (#debian-lts and #debian-elts) and Matrix.
  • Participated and helped fellow members with their queries via private mail and chat.
  • General and other discussions on LTS private and public mailing list.
  • Attended the monthly meeting held on IRC on November 24th.
Until next time.
:wq for today.

3 November 2022

Arturo Borrero Gonz lez: New OpenPGP key and new email

Post logo I m trying to replace my old OpenPGP key with a new one. The old key wasn t compromised or lost or anything bad. Is still valid, but I plan to get rid of it soon. It was created in 2013. The new key id fingerprint is: AA66280D4EF0BFCC6BFC2104DA5ECB231C8F04C4 I plan to use the new key for things like encrypted emails, uploads to the Debian archive, and more. Also, the new key includes an identity with a newer personal email address I plan to use soon: arturo.bg@arturo.bg The new key has been uploaded to some public keyservers. If you would like to sign the new key, please follow the steps in the Debian wiki. 
-----BEGIN PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----
mQINBGNjvX4BEADE4w5x0SQmxWLAI1R17RCC98ngTkD/FMyos0GF5xmv0VJeLYhw
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=UABf
-----END PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----
If you are curious about what that long code block contains, check this https://cirw.in/gpg-decoder/ For the record, the old key fingerprint is: DD9861AB23DC3333892E07A968E713981D1515F8 Cheers!

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