Search Results: "samu"

8 June 2025

Thorsten Alteholz: My Debian Activities in May 2025

Debian LTS This was my hundred-thirty-first month that I did some work for the Debian LTS initiative, started by Raphael Hertzog at Freexian. During my allocated time I uploaded or worked on: I also continued my to work on libxmltok and suricata. This month I also had to do some support on seger, for example to inject packages newly needed for builds. Debian ELTS This month was the eighty-second ELTS month. During my allocated time I uploaded or worked on: All packages I worked on have been on the list of longstanding packages. For example espeak-ng has been on this list for more than nine month. I now understood that there is a reason why packages are on this list. Some parts of the software have been almost completely reworked, so that the patches need a reverse rework. For some packages this is easy, but for others this rework needs quite some time. I also continued to work on libxmltok and suricata. Debian Printing Unfortunately I didn t found any time to work on this topic. Debian Astro This month I uploaded bugfix versions of: Debian Mobcom This month I uploaded bugfix versions of: misc This month I uploaded bugfix versions of: Thanks a lot to the Release Team who quickly handled all my unblock bugs! FTP master It is this time of the year when just a few packages arrive in NEW: it is Hard Freeze. So I enjoy this period and basically just take care of kernels or other important packages. As people seem to be more interested in discussions than in fixing RC bugs, my period of rest seems to continue for a while. So thanks for all this valuable discussions and really thanks to the few people who still take care of Trixie. This month I accepted 146 and rejected 10 packages. The overall number of packages that got accepted was 147.

29 May 2025

Arthur Diniz: Bringing Kubernetes Back to Debian

I ve been part of the Debian Project since 2019, when I attended DebConf held in Curitiba, Brazil. That event sparked my interest in the community, packaging, and how Debian works as a distribution. In the early years of my involvement, I contributed to various teams such as the Python, Golang and Cloud teams, packaging dependencies and maintaining various tools. However, I soon felt the need to focus on packaging software I truly enjoyed, tools I was passionate about using and maintaining. That s when I turned my attention to Kubernetes within Debian.

A Broken Ecosystem The Kubernetes packaging situation in Debian had been problematic for some time. Given its large codebase and complex dependency tree, the initial packaging approach involved vendorizing all dependencies. While this allowed a somewhat functional package to be published, it introduced several long-term issues, especially security concerns. Vendorized packages bundle third-party dependencies directly into the source tarball. When vulnerabilities arise in those dependencies, it becomes difficult for Debian s security team to patch and rebuild affected packages system-wide. This approach broke Debian s best practices, and it eventually led to the abandonment of the Kubernetes source package, which had stalled at version 1.20.5. Due to this abandonment, critical bugs emerged and the package was removed from Debian s testing channel, as we can see in the package tracker.

New Debian Kubernetes Team Around this time, I became a Debian Maintainer (DM), with permissions to upload certain packages. I saw an opportunity to both contribute more deeply to Debian and to fix Kubernetes packaging. In early 2024, just before DebConf Busan in South Korea, I founded the Debian Kubernetes Team. The mission of the team was to repackage Kubernetes in a maintainable, security-conscious, and Debian-compliant way. At DebConf, I shared our progress with the broader community and received great feedback and more visibility, along with people interested in contributing to the team. Our first tasks was to migrate existing Kubernetes-related tools such as kubectx, kubernetes-split-yaml and kubetail into a dedicated namespace on Salsa, Debian s GitLab instance. Many of these tools were stored across different teams (like the Go team), and consolidating them helped us organize development and focus our efforts.

De-vendorizing Kubernetes Our main goal was to un-vendorize Kubernetes and bring it up-to-date with upstream releases. This meant:
  • Removing the vendor directory and all embedded third-party code.
  • Trimming the build scope to focus solely on building kubectl, Kubernetes CLI.
  • Using Files-Excluded in debian/copyright to cleanly drop unneeded files during source imports.
  • Rebuilding the dependency tree, ensuring all Go modules were separately packaged in Debian.
We used uscan, a standard Debian packaging tool that fetches upstream tarballs and prepares them accordingly. The Files-Excluded directive in our debian/copyright file instructed uscan to automatically remove unnecessary files during the repackaging process:
$ uscan
Newest version of kubernetes on remote site is 1.32.3, specified download version is 1.32.3
Successfully repacked ../v1.32.3 as ../kubernetes_1.32.3+ds.orig.tar.gz, deleting 30616 files from it.
The results were dramatic. By comparing the original upstream tarball with our repackaged version, we can see that our approach reduced the tarball size by over 75%:
$ du -h upstream-v1.32.3.tar.gz kubernetes_1.32.3+ds.orig.tar.gz
14M	upstream-v1.32.3.tar.gz
3.2M	kubernetes_1.32.3+ds.orig.tar.gz
This significant reduction wasn t just about saving space. By removing over 30,000 files, we simplified the package, making it more maintainable. Each dependency could now be properly tracked, updated, and patched independently, resolving the security concerns that had plagued the previous packaging approach.

Dependency Graph To give you an idea of the complexity involved in packaging Kubernetes for Debian, the image below is a dependency graph generated with debtree, visualizing all the Go modules and other dependencies required to build the kubectl binary. kubectl-depgraph This web of nodes and edges represents every module and its relationship during the compilation process of kubectl. Each box is a Debian package, and the lines connecting them show how deeply intertwined the ecosystem is. What might look like a mess of blue spaghetti is actually a clear demonstration of the vast and interconnected upstream world that tools like kubectl rely on. But more importantly, this graph is a testament to the effort that went into making kubectl build entirely using Debian-packaged dependencies only, no vendoring, no downloading from the internet, no proprietary blobs.

Upstream Version 1.32.3 and Beyond After nearly two years of work, we successfully uploaded version 1.32.3+ds of kubectl to Debian unstable. kubernetes/-/merge_requests/1 The new package also includes:
  • Zsh, Fish, and Bash completions installed automatically
  • Man pages and metadata for improved discoverability
  • Full integration with kind and docker for testing purposes

Integration Testing with Autopkgtest To ensure the reliability of kubectl in real-world scenarios, we developed a new autopkgtest suite that runs integration tests using real Kubernetes clusters created via Kind. Autopkgtest is a Debian tool used to run automated tests on binary packages. These tests are executed after the package is built but before it s accepted into the Debian archive, helping catch regressions and integration issues early in the packaging pipeline. Our test workflow validates kubectl by performing the following steps:
  • Installing Kind and Docker as test dependencies.
  • Spinning up two local Kubernetes clusters.
  • Switching between cluster contexts to ensure multi-cluster support.
  • Deploying and scaling a sample nginx application using kubectl.
  • Cleaning up the entire test environment to avoid side effects.
  • debian/tests/kubectl.sh

Popcon: Measuring Adoption To measure real-world usage, we rely on data from Debian s popularity contest (popcon), which gives insight into how many users have each binary installed. popcon-graph popcon-table Here s what the data tells us:
  • kubectl (new binary): Already installed on 2,124 systems.
  • golang-k8s-kubectl-dev: This is the Go development package (a library), useful for other packages and developers who want to interact with Kubernetes programmatically.
  • kubernetes-client: The legacy package that kubectl is replacing. We expect this number to decrease in future releases as more systems transition to the new package.
Although the popcon data shows activity for kubectl before the official Debian upload date, it s important to note that those numbers represent users who had it installed from upstream source-lists, not from the Debian repositories. This distinction underscores a demand that existed even before the package was available in Debian proper, and it validates the importance of bringing it into the archive.
Also worth mentioning: this number is not the real total number of installations, since users can choose not to participate in the popularity contest. So the actual adoption is likely higher than what popcon reflects.

Community and Documentation The team also maintains a dedicated wiki page which documents:
  • Maintained tools and packages
  • Contribution guidelines
  • Our roadmap for the upcoming Debian releases
https://debian-kubernetes.org

Looking Ahead to Debian 13 (Trixie) The next stable release of Debian will ship with kubectl version 1.32.3, built from a clean, de-vendorized source. This version includes nearly all the latest upstream features, and will be the first time in years that Debian users can rely on an up-to-date, policy-compliant kubectl directly from the archive. By comparing with upstream, our Debian package even delivers more out of the box, including shell completions, which the upstream still requires users to generate manually. In 2025, the Debian Kubernetes team will continue expanding our packaging efforts for the Kubernetes ecosystem. Our roadmap includes:
  • kubelet: The primary node agent that runs on each node. This will enable Debian users to create fully functional Kubernetes nodes without relying on external packages.
  • kubeadm: A tool for creating Kubernetes clusters. With kubeadm in Debian, users will then be able to bootstrap minimum viable clusters directly from the official repositories.
  • helm: The package manager for Kubernetes that helps manage applications through Kubernetes YAML files defined as charts.
  • kompose: A conversion tool that helps users familiar with docker-compose move to Kubernetes by translating Docker Compose files into Kubernetes resources.

Final Thoughts This journey was only possible thanks to the amazing support of the debian-devel-br community and the collective effort of contributors who stepped up to package missing dependencies, fix bugs, and test new versions. Special thanks to:
  • Carlos Henrique Melara (@charles)
  • Guilherme Puida (@puida)
  • Jo o Pedro Nobrega (@jnpf)
  • Lucas Kanashiro (@kanashiro)
  • Matheus Polkorny (@polkorny)
  • Samuel Henrique (@samueloph)
  • Sergio Cipriano (@cipriano)
  • Sergio Durigan Junior (@sergiodj)
I look forward to continuing this work, bringing more Kubernetes tools into Debian and improving the developer experience for everyone.

Arthur Diniz: Bringing Kubernetes Back to Debian

I ve been part of the Debian Project since 2019, when I attended DebConf held in Curitiba, Brazil. That event sparked my interest in the community, packaging, and how Debian works as a distribution. In the early years of my involvement, I contributed to various teams such as the Python, Golang and Cloud teams, packaging dependencies and maintaining various tools. However, I soon felt the need to focus on packaging software I truly enjoyed, tools I was passionate about using and maintaining. That s when I turned my attention to Kubernetes within Debian.

A Broken Ecosystem The Kubernetes packaging situation in Debian had been problematic for some time. Given its large codebase and complex dependency tree, the initial packaging approach involved vendorizing all dependencies. While this allowed a somewhat functional package to be published, it introduced several long-term issues, especially security concerns. Vendorized packages bundle third-party dependencies directly into the source tarball. When vulnerabilities arise in those dependencies, it becomes difficult for Debian s security team to patch and rebuild affected packages system-wide. This approach broke Debian s best practices, and it eventually led to the abandonment of the Kubernetes source package, which had stalled at version 1.20.5. Due to this abandonment, critical bugs emerged and the package was removed from Debian s testing channel, as we can see in the package tracker.

New Debian Kubernetes Team Around this time, I became a Debian Maintainer (DM), with permissions to upload certain packages. I saw an opportunity to both contribute more deeply to Debian and to fix Kubernetes packaging. In early 2024, just before DebConf Busan in South Korea, I founded the Debian Kubernetes Team. The mission of the team was to repackage Kubernetes in a maintainable, security-conscious, and Debian-compliant way. At DebConf, I shared our progress with the broader community and received great feedback and more visibility, along with people interested in contributing to the team. Our first tasks was to migrate existing Kubernetes-related tools such as kubectx, kubernetes-split-yaml and kubetail into a dedicated namespace on Salsa, Debian s GitLab instance. Many of these tools were stored across different teams (like the Go team), and consolidating them helped us organize development and focus our efforts.

De-vendorizing Kubernetes Our main goal was to un-vendorize Kubernetes and bring it up-to-date with upstream releases. This meant:
  • Removing the vendor directory and all embedded third-party code.
  • Trimming the build scope to focus solely on building kubectl, Kubernetes CLI.
  • Using Files-Excluded in debian/copyright to cleanly drop unneeded files during source imports.
  • Rebuilding the dependency tree, ensuring all Go modules were separately packaged in Debian.
We used uscan, a standard Debian packaging tool that fetches upstream tarballs and prepares them accordingly. The Files-Excluded directive in our debian/copyright file instructed uscan to automatically remove unnecessary files during the repackaging process:
$ uscan
Newest version of kubernetes on remote site is 1.32.3, specified download version is 1.32.3
Successfully repacked ../v1.32.3 as ../kubernetes_1.32.3+ds.orig.tar.gz, deleting 30616 files from it.
The results were dramatic. By comparing the original upstream tarball with our repackaged version, we can see that our approach reduced the tarball size by over 75%:
$ du -h upstream-v1.32.3.tar.gz kubernetes_1.32.3+ds.orig.tar.gz
14M	upstream-v1.32.3.tar.gz
3.2M	kubernetes_1.32.3+ds.orig.tar.gz
This significant reduction wasn t just about saving space. By removing over 30,000 files, we simplified the package, making it more maintainable. Each dependency could now be properly tracked, updated, and patched independently, resolving the security concerns that had plagued the previous packaging approach.

Dependency Graph To give you an idea of the complexity involved in packaging Kubernetes for Debian, the image below is a dependency graph generated with debtree, visualizing all the Go modules and other dependencies required to build the kubectl binary. kubectl-depgraph This web of nodes and edges represents every module and its relationship during the compilation process of kubectl. Each box is a Debian package, and the lines connecting them show how deeply intertwined the ecosystem is. What might look like a mess of blue spaghetti is actually a clear demonstration of the vast and interconnected upstream world that tools like kubectl rely on. But more importantly, this graph is a testament to the effort that went into making kubectl build entirely using Debian-packaged dependencies only, no vendoring, no downloading from the internet, no proprietary blobs.

Upstream Version 1.32.3 and Beyond After nearly two years of work, we successfully uploaded version 1.32.3+ds of kubectl to Debian unstable. kubernetes/-/merge_requests/1 The new package also includes:
  • Zsh, Fish, and Bash completions installed automatically
  • Man pages and metadata for improved discoverability
  • Full integration with kind and docker for testing purposes

Integration Testing with Autopkgtest To ensure the reliability of kubectl in real-world scenarios, we developed a new autopkgtest suite that runs integration tests using real Kubernetes clusters created via Kind. Autopkgtest is a Debian tool used to run automated tests on binary packages. These tests are executed after the package is built but before it s accepted into the Debian archive, helping catch regressions and integration issues early in the packaging pipeline. Our test workflow validates kubectl by performing the following steps:
  • Installing Kind and Docker as test dependencies.
  • Spinning up two local Kubernetes clusters.
  • Switching between cluster contexts to ensure multi-cluster support.
  • Deploying and scaling a sample nginx application using kubectl.
  • Cleaning up the entire test environment to avoid side effects.
  • debian/tests/kubectl.sh

Popcon: Measuring Adoption To measure real-world usage, we rely on data from Debian s popularity contest (popcon), which gives insight into how many users have each binary installed. popcon-graph popcon-table Here s what the data tells us:
  • kubectl (new binary): Already installed on 2,124 systems.
  • golang-k8s-kubectl-dev: This is the Go development package (a library), useful for other packages and developers who want to interact with Kubernetes programmatically.
  • kubernetes-client: The legacy package that kubectl is replacing. We expect this number to decrease in future releases as more systems transition to the new package.
Although the popcon data shows activity for kubectl before the official Debian upload date, it s important to note that those numbers represent users who had it installed from upstream source-lists, not from the Debian repositories. This distinction underscores a demand that existed even before the package was available in Debian proper, and it validates the importance of bringing it into the archive.
Also worth mentioning: this number is not the real total number of installations, since users can choose not to participate in the popularity contest. So the actual adoption is likely higher than what popcon reflects.

Community and Documentation The team also maintains a dedicated wiki page which documents:
  • Maintained tools and packages
  • Contribution guidelines
  • Our roadmap for the upcoming Debian releases
https://debian-kubernetes.org

Looking Ahead to Debian 13 (Trixie) The next stable release of Debian will ship with kubectl version 1.32.3, built from a clean, de-vendorized source. This version includes nearly all the latest upstream features, and will be the first time in years that Debian users can rely on an up-to-date, policy-compliant kubectl directly from the archive. By comparing with upstream, our Debian package even delivers more out of the box, including shell completions, which the upstream still requires users to generate manually. In 2025, the Debian Kubernetes team will continue expanding our packaging efforts for the Kubernetes ecosystem. Our roadmap includes:
  • kubelet: The primary node agent that runs on each node. This will enable Debian users to create fully functional Kubernetes nodes without relying on external packages.
  • kubeadm: A tool for creating Kubernetes clusters. With kubeadm in Debian, users will then be able to bootstrap minimum viable clusters directly from the official repositories.
  • helm: The package manager for Kubernetes that helps manage applications through Kubernetes YAML files defined as charts.
  • kompose: A conversion tool that helps users familiar with docker-compose move to Kubernetes by translating Docker Compose files into Kubernetes resources.

Final Thoughts This journey was only possible thanks to the amazing support of the debian-devel-br community and the collective effort of contributors who stepped up to package missing dependencies, fix bugs, and test new versions. Special thanks to:
  • Carlos Henrique Melara (@charles)
  • Guilherme Puida (@puida)
  • Jo o Pedro Nobrega (@jnpf)
  • Lucas Kanashiro (@kanashiro)
  • Matheus Polkorny (@polkorny)
  • Samuel Henrique (@samueloph)
  • Sergio Cipriano (@cipriano)
  • Sergio Durigan Junior (@sergiodj)
I look forward to continuing this work, bringing more Kubernetes tools into Debian and improving the developer experience for everyone.

26 September 2024

Melissa Wen: Reflections on 2024 Linux Display Next Hackfest

Hey everyone! The 2024 Linux Display Next hackfest concluded in May, and its outcomes continue to shape the Linux Display stack. Igalia hosted this year s event in A Coru a, Spain, bringing together leading experts in the field. Samuel Iglesias and I organized this year s edition and this blog post summarizes the experience and its fruits. One of the highlights of this year s hackfest was the wide range of backgrounds represented by our 40 participants (both on-site and remotely). Developers and experts from various companies and open-source projects came together to advance the Linux Display ecosystem. You can find the list of participants here. The event covered a broad spectrum of topics affecting the development of Linux projects, user experiences, and the future of display technologies on Linux. From cutting-edge topics to long-term discussions, you can check the event agenda here.

Organization Highlights The hackfest was marked by in-depth discussions and knowledge sharing among Linux contributors, making everyone inspired, informed, and connected to the community. Building on feedback from the previous year, we refined the unconference format to enhance participant preparation and engagement. Structured Agenda and Timeboxes: Each session had a defined scope, time limit (1h20 or 2h10), and began with an introductory talk on the topic.
  • Participant-Led Discussions: We pre-selected in-person participants to lead discussions, allowing them to prepare introductions, resources, and scope.
  • Transparent Scheduling: The schedule was shared in advance as GitHub issues, encouraging participants to review and prepare for sessions of interest.
Engaging Sessions: The hackfest featured a variety of topics, including presentations and discussions on how participants were addressing specific subjects within their companies.
  • No Breakout Rooms, No Overlaps: All participants chose to attend all sessions, eliminating the need for separate breakout rooms. We also adapted run-time schedule to keep everybody involved in the same topics.
  • Real-time Updates: We provided notifications and updates through dedicated emails and the event matrix room.
Strengthening Community Connections: The hackfest offered ample opportunities for networking among attendees.
  • Social Events: Igalia sponsored coffee breaks, lunches, and a dinner at a local restaurant.
  • Museum Visit: Participants enjoyed a sponsored visit to the Museum of Estrela Galicia Beer (MEGA).

Fruitful Discussions and Follow-up The structured agenda and breaks allowed us to cover multiple topics during the hackfest. These discussions have led to new display feature development and improvements, as evidenced by patches, merge requests, and implementations in project repositories and mailing lists. With the KMS color management API taking shape, we discussed refinements and best approaches to cover the variety of color pipeline from different hardware-vendors. We are also investigating techniques for a performant SDR<->HDR content reproduction and reducing latency and power consumption when using the color blocks of the hardware.

Color Management/HDR Color Management and HDR continued to be the hottest topic of the hackfest. We had three sessions dedicated to discuss Color and HDR across Linux Display stack layers.

Color/HDR (Kernel-Level) Harry Wentland (AMD) led this session. Here, kernel Developers shared the Color Management pipeline of AMD, Intel and NVidia. We counted with diagrams and explanations from HW-vendors developers that discussed differences, constraints and paths to fit them into the KMS generic color management properties such as advertising modeset needs, IN\_FORMAT, segmented LUTs, interpolation types, etc. Developers from Qualcomm and ARM also added information regarding their hardware. Upstream work related to this session:

Color/HDR (Compositor-Level) Sebastian Wick (RedHat) led this session. It started with Sebastian s presentation covering Wayland color protocols and compositor implementation. Also, an explanation of APIs provided by Wayland and how they can be used to achieve better color management for applications and discussions around ICC profiles and color representation metadata. There was also an intensive Q&A about LittleCMS with Marti Maria. Upstream work related to this session:

Color/HDR (Use Cases and Testing) Christopher Cameron (Google) and Melissa Wen (Igalia) led this session. In contrast to the other sessions, here we focused less on implementation and more on brainstorming and reflections of real-world SDR and HDR transformations (use and validation) and gainmaps. Christopher gave a nice presentation explaining HDR gainmap images and how we should think of HDR. This presentation and Q&A were important to put participants at the same page of how to transition between SDR and HDR and somehow emulating HDR. We also discussed on the usage of a kernel background color property. Finally, we discussed a bit about Chamelium and the future of VKMS (future work and maintainership).

Power Savings vs Color/Latency Mario Limonciello (AMD) led this session. Mario gave an introductory presentation about AMD ABM (adaptive backlight management) that is similar to Intel DPST. After some discussions, we agreed on exposing a kernel property for power saving policy. This work was already merged on kernel and the userspace support is under development. Upstream work related to this session:

Strategy for video and gaming use-cases Leo Li (AMD) led this session. Miguel Casas (Google) started this session with a presentation of Overlays in Chrome/OS Video, explaining the main goal of power saving by switching off GPU for accelerated compositing and the challenges of different colorspace/HDR for video on Linux. Then Leo Li presented different strategies for video and gaming and we discussed the userspace need of more detailed feedback mechanisms to understand failures when offloading. Also, creating a debugFS interface came up as a tool for debugging and analysis.

Real-time scheduling and async KMS API Xaver Hugl (KDE/BlueSystems) led this session. Compositor developers have exposed some issues with doing real-time scheduling and async page flips. One is that the Kernel limits the lifetime of realtime threads and if a modeset takes too long, the thread will be killed and thus the compositor as well. Also, simple page flips take longer than expected and drivers should optimize them. Another issue is the lack of feedback to compositors about hardware programming time and commit deadlines (the lastest possible time to commit). This is difficult to predict from drivers, since it varies greatly with the type of properties. For example, color management updates take much longer. In this regard, we discusssed implementing a hw_done callback to timestamp when the hardware programming of the last atomic commit is complete. Also an API to pre-program color pipeline in a kind of A/B scheme. It may not be supported by all drivers, but might be useful in different ways.

VRR/Frame Limit, Display Mux, Display Control, and more and beer We also had sessions to discuss a new KMS API to mitigate headaches on VRR and Frame Limit as different brightness level at different refresh rates, abrupt changes of refresh rates, low frame rate compensation (LFC) and precise timing in VRR more. On Display Control we discussed features missing in the current KMS interface for HDR mode, atomic backlight settings, source-based tone mapping, etc. We also discussed the need of a place where compositor developers can post TODOs to be developed by KMS people. The Content-adaptive Scaling and Sharpening session focused on sharpening and scaling filters. In the Display Mux session, we discussed proposals to expose the capability of dynamic mux switching display signal between discrete and integrated GPUs. In the last session of the 2024 Display Next Hackfest, participants representing different compositors summarized current and future work and built a Linux Display wish list , which includes: improvements to VTTY and HDR switching, better dmabuf API for multi-GPU support, definition of tone mapping, blending and scaling sematics, and wayland protocols for advertising to clients which colorspaces are supported. We closed this session with a status update on feature development by compositors, including but not limited to: plane offloading (from libcamera to output) / HDR video offloading (dma-heaps) / plane-based scrolling for web pages, color management / HDR / ICC profiles support, addressing issues such as flickering when color primaries don t match, etc. After three days of intensive discussions, all in-person participants went to a guided tour at the Museum of Extrela Galicia beer (MEGA), pouring and tasting the most famous local beer.

Feedback and Future Directions Participants provided valuable feedback on the hackfest, including suggestions for future improvements.
  • Schedule and Break-time Setup: Having a pre-defined agenda and schedule provided a better balance between long discussions and mental refreshments, preventing the fatigue caused by endless discussions.
  • Action Points: Some participants recommended explicitly asking for action points at the end of each session and assigning people to follow-up tasks.
  • Remote Participation: Remote attendees appreciated the inclusive setup and opportunities to actively participate in discussions.
  • Technical Challenges: There were bandwidth and video streaming issues during some sessions due to the large number of participants.

Thank you for joining the 2024 Display Next Hackfest We can t help but thank the 40 participants, who engaged in-person or virtually on relevant discussions, for a collaborative evolution of the Linux display stack and for building an insightful agenda. A big thank you to the leaders and presenters of the nine sessions: Christopher Cameron (Google), Harry Wentland (AMD), Leo Li (AMD), Mario Limoncello (AMD), Sebastian Wick (RedHat) and Xaver Hugl (KDE/BlueSystems) for the effort in preparing the sessions, explaining the topic and guiding discussions. My acknowledge to the others in-person participants that made such an effort to travel to A Coru a: Alex Goins (NVIDIA), David Turner (Raspberry Pi), Georges Stavracas (Igalia), Joan Torres (SUSE), Liviu Dudau (Arm), Louis Chauvet (Bootlin), Robert Mader (Collabora), Tian Mengge (GravityXR), Victor Jaquez (Igalia) and Victoria Brekenfeld (System76). It was and awesome opportunity to meet you and chat face-to-face. Finally, thanks virtual participants who couldn t make it in person but organized their days to actively participate in each discussion, adding different perspectives and valuable inputs even remotely: Abhinav Kumar (Qualcomm), Chaitanya Borah (Intel), Christopher Braga (Qualcomm), Dor Askayo (Red Hat), Jiri Koten (RedHat), Jonas dahl (Red Hat), Leandro Ribeiro (Collabora), Marti Maria (Little CMS), Marijn Suijten, Mario Kleiner, Martin Stransky (Red Hat), Michel D nzer (Red Hat), Miguel Casas-Sanchez (Google), Mitulkumar Golani (Intel), Naveen Kumar (Intel), Niels De Graef (Red Hat), Pekka Paalanen (Collabora), Pichika Uday Kiran (AMD), Shashank Sharma (AMD), Sriharsha PV (AMD), Simon Ser, Uma Shankar (Intel) and Vikas Korjani (AMD). We look forward to another successful Display Next hackfest, continuing to drive innovation and improvement in the Linux display ecosystem!

25 September 2024

Melissa Wen: Reflections on 2024 Linux Display Next Hackfest

Hey everyone! The 2024 Linux Display Next hackfest concluded in May, and its outcomes continue to shape the Linux Display stack. Igalia hosted this year s event in A Coru a, Spain, bringing together leading experts in the field. Samuel Iglesias and I organized this year s edition and this blog post summarizes the experience and its fruits. One of the highlights of this year s hackfest was the wide range of backgrounds represented by our 40 participants (both on-site and remotely). Developers and experts from various companies and open-source projects came together to advance the Linux Display ecosystem. You can find the list of participants here. The event covered a broad spectrum of topics affecting the development of Linux projects, user experiences, and the future of display technologies on Linux. From cutting-edge topics to long-term discussions, you can check the event agenda here.

Organization Highlights The hackfest was marked by in-depth discussions and knowledge sharing among Linux contributors, making everyone inspired, informed, and connected to the community. Building on feedback from the previous year, we refined the unconference format to enhance participant preparation and engagement. Structured Agenda and Timeboxes: Each session had a defined scope, time limit (1h20 or 2h10), and began with an introductory talk on the topic.
  • Participant-Led Discussions: We pre-selected in-person participants to lead discussions, allowing them to prepare introductions, resources, and scope.
  • Transparent Scheduling: The schedule was shared in advance as GitHub issues, encouraging participants to review and prepare for sessions of interest.
Engaging Sessions: The hackfest featured a variety of topics, including presentations and discussions on how participants were addressing specific subjects within their companies.
  • No Breakout Rooms, No Overlaps: All participants chose to attend all sessions, eliminating the need for separate breakout rooms. We also adapted run-time schedule to keep everybody involved in the same topics.
  • Real-time Updates: We provided notifications and updates through dedicated emails and the event matrix room.
Strengthening Community Connections: The hackfest offered ample opportunities for networking among attendees.
  • Social Events: Igalia sponsored coffee breaks, lunches, and a dinner at a local restaurant.
  • Museum Visit: Participants enjoyed a sponsored visit to the Museum of Estrela Galicia Beer (MEGA).

Fruitful Discussions and Follow-up The structured agenda and breaks allowed us to cover multiple topics during the hackfest. These discussions have led to new display feature development and improvements, as evidenced by patches, merge requests, and implementations in project repositories and mailing lists. With the KMS color management API taking shape, we discussed refinements and best approaches to cover the variety of color pipeline from different hardware-vendors. We are also investigating techniques for a performant SDR<->HDR content reproduction and reducing latency and power consumption when using the color blocks of the hardware.

Color Management/HDR Color Management and HDR continued to be the hottest topic of the hackfest. We had three sessions dedicated to discuss Color and HDR across Linux Display stack layers.

Color/HDR (Kernel-Level) Harry Wentland (AMD) led this session. Here, kernel Developers shared the Color Management pipeline of AMD, Intel and NVidia. We counted with diagrams and explanations from HW-vendors developers that discussed differences, constraints and paths to fit them into the KMS generic color management properties such as advertising modeset needs, IN\_FORMAT, segmented LUTs, interpolation types, etc. Developers from Qualcomm and ARM also added information regarding their hardware. Upstream work related to this session:

Color/HDR (Compositor-Level) Sebastian Wick (RedHat) led this session. It started with Sebastian s presentation covering Wayland color protocols and compositor implementation. Also, an explanation of APIs provided by Wayland and how they can be used to achieve better color management for applications and discussions around ICC profiles and color representation metadata. There was also an intensive Q&A about LittleCMS with Marti Maria. Upstream work related to this session:

Color/HDR (Use Cases and Testing) Christopher Cameron (Google) and Melissa Wen (Igalia) led this session. In contrast to the other sessions, here we focused less on implementation and more on brainstorming and reflections of real-world SDR and HDR transformations (use and validation) and gainmaps. Christopher gave a nice presentation explaining HDR gainmap images and how we should think of HDR. This presentation and Q&A were important to put participants at the same page of how to transition between SDR and HDR and somehow emulating HDR. We also discussed on the usage of a kernel background color property. Finally, we discussed a bit about Chamelium and the future of VKMS (future work and maintainership).

Power Savings vs Color/Latency Mario Limonciello (AMD) led this session. Mario gave an introductory presentation about AMD ABM (adaptive backlight management) that is similar to Intel DPST. After some discussions, we agreed on exposing a kernel property for power saving policy. This work was already merged on kernel and the userspace support is under development. Upstream work related to this session:

Strategy for video and gaming use-cases Leo Li (AMD) led this session. Miguel Casas (Google) started this session with a presentation of Overlays in Chrome/OS Video, explaining the main goal of power saving by switching off GPU for accelerated compositing and the challenges of different colorspace/HDR for video on Linux. Then Leo Li presented different strategies for video and gaming and we discussed the userspace need of more detailed feedback mechanisms to understand failures when offloading. Also, creating a debugFS interface came up as a tool for debugging and analysis.

Real-time scheduling and async KMS API Xaver Hugl (KDE/BlueSystems) led this session. Compositor developers have exposed some issues with doing real-time scheduling and async page flips. One is that the Kernel limits the lifetime of realtime threads and if a modeset takes too long, the thread will be killed and thus the compositor as well. Also, simple page flips take longer than expected and drivers should optimize them. Another issue is the lack of feedback to compositors about hardware programming time and commit deadlines (the lastest possible time to commit). This is difficult to predict from drivers, since it varies greatly with the type of properties. For example, color management updates take much longer. In this regard, we discusssed implementing a hw_done callback to timestamp when the hardware programming of the last atomic commit is complete. Also an API to pre-program color pipeline in a kind of A/B scheme. It may not be supported by all drivers, but might be useful in different ways.

VRR/Frame Limit, Display Mux, Display Control, and more and beer We also had sessions to discuss a new KMS API to mitigate headaches on VRR and Frame Limit as different brightness level at different refresh rates, abrupt changes of refresh rates, low frame rate compensation (LFC) and precise timing in VRR more. On Display Control we discussed features missing in the current KMS interface for HDR mode, atomic backlight settings, source-based tone mapping, etc. We also discussed the need of a place where compositor developers can post TODOs to be developed by KMS people. The Content-adaptive Scaling and Sharpening session focused on sharpening and scaling filters. In the Display Mux session, we discussed proposals to expose the capability of dynamic mux switching display signal between discrete and integrated GPUs. In the last session of the 2024 Display Next Hackfest, participants representing different compositors summarized current and future work and built a Linux Display wish list , which includes: improvements to VTTY and HDR switching, better dmabuf API for multi-GPU support, definition of tone mapping, blending and scaling sematics, and wayland protocols for advertising to clients which colorspaces are supported. We closed this session with a status update on feature development by compositors, including but not limited to: plane offloading (from libcamera to output) / HDR video offloading (dma-heaps) / plane-based scrolling for web pages, color management / HDR / ICC profiles support, addressing issues such as flickering when color primaries don t match, etc. After three days of intensive discussions, all in-person participants went to a guided tour at the Museum of Extrela Galicia beer (MEGA), pouring and tasting the most famous local beer.

Feedback and Future Directions Participants provided valuable feedback on the hackfest, including suggestions for future improvements.
  • Schedule and Break-time Setup: Having a pre-defined agenda and schedule provided a better balance between long discussions and mental refreshments, preventing the fatigue caused by endless discussions.
  • Action Points: Some participants recommended explicitly asking for action points at the end of each session and assigning people to follow-up tasks.
  • Remote Participation: Remote attendees appreciated the inclusive setup and opportunities to actively participate in discussions.
  • Technical Challenges: There were bandwidth and video streaming issues during some sessions due to the large number of participants.

Thank you for joining the 2024 Display Next Hackfest We can t help but thank the 40 participants, who engaged in-person or virtually on relevant discussions, for a collaborative evolution of the Linux display stack and for building an insightful agenda. A big thank you to the leaders and presenters of the nine sessions: Christopher Cameron (Google), Harry Wentland (AMD), Leo Li (AMD), Mario Limoncello (AMD), Sebastian Wick (RedHat) and Xaver Hugl (KDE/BlueSystems) for the effort in preparing the sessions, explaining the topic and guiding discussions. My acknowledge to the others in-person participants that made such an effort to travel to A Coru a: Alex Goins (NVIDIA), David Turner (Raspberry Pi), Georges Stavracas (Igalia), Joan Torres (SUSE), Liviu Dudau (Arm), Louis Chauvet (Bootlin), Robert Mader (Collabora), Tian Mengge (GravityXR), Victor Jaquez (Igalia) and Victoria Brekenfeld (System76). It was and awesome opportunity to meet you and chat face-to-face. Finally, thanks virtual participants who couldn t make it in person but organized their days to actively participate in each discussion, adding different perspectives and valuable inputs even remotely: Abhinav Kumar (Qualcomm), Chaitanya Borah (Intel), Christopher Braga (Qualcomm), Dor Askayo, Jiri Koten (RedHat), Jonas dahl (Red Hat), Leandro Ribeiro (Collabora), Marti Maria (Little CMS), Marijn Suijten, Mario Kleiner, Martin Stransky (Red Hat), Michel D nzer (Red Hat), Miguel Casas-Sanchez (Google), Mitulkumar Golani (Intel), Naveen Kumar (Intel), Niels De Graef (Red Hat), Pekka Paalanen (Collabora), Pichika Uday Kiran (AMD), Shashank Sharma (AMD), Sriharsha PV (AMD), Simon Ser, Uma Shankar (Intel) and Vikas Korjani (AMD). We look forward to another successful Display Next hackfest, continuing to drive innovation and improvement in the Linux display ecosystem!

4 September 2024

Samuel Henrique: DebConf24 was fun!: Security, curl, wcurl, Debian's quality

A picture of a badger2040w with Samuel's badge and the curl manpage PCB on the side

tl;dr DebConf24 was fun! A playlist of all of my talks, with subtitles (en, pt-br) and chapters is available on YouTube.

Overview DebConf24 was held in Busan, South Korea, between Sunday July 28th to Sunday August 4th 2024. As usual for DebConfs, I had a great time meeting my friends, but also met new people and got to learn a bit about the interesting things they're working on. I ended up getting too excited during the talk submission stage of the conference and as a result I presented 5 different activities (3 talks, 1 BoF and 1 lightning talk). Since I was too busy with the presentations, I did not have a lot of time to actually hang out with folks, or even to go out in the city, I guess I've learned my lesson for next time. The main purpose of this post is to write about all of the things I presented at the conference. I did want to list some of the interesting talks I've watched, but that I would not be able to be fair as I'm sure I would miss some. You can get the schedule and the recordings of any talks from the conference's website: https://debconf24.debconf.org/schedule/

wcurl Lightning Talk The most fun of my presentations, during the second-to-last day of the conference, I've asked for help from Sergio Durigan Junior <sergiodj> to setup an URL containing a whitespace and redirecting that to wcurl's manpage. I then did a little demo to showcase why me (and a lot others) struggle with downloading things with curl, and how wcurl solves that. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eM8M5qa4pPM

Fixing CVEs on Debian: Everything you probably know already I've always felt like DebConf was missing security-related talks, so I decided to do something about it and presented a few of the things I've learned when fixing CVEs for Debian. This is an area where we don't get a lot of new contributors, I'm trying to change that, and this talk can be used to introduce newcomers to it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XzNVVILVyUM

The secret sauce of Debian Debian is not very vocal about all of the nice things it has regarding quality-assurance, testing, or CI, even though it's at the state-of-the-art for a lot of things. This talk is an initial step towards making people aware of the cool things happening behind the scenes. Ideally we should have it well-documented somewhere. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x_X2IBnpjic

"I use Debian BTW": fzf, tmux, zoxide and friends One of my earliest good memories of Debian was when it started coming with a colored PS1 by default, I still remember the feeling of relief whenever I jumped into a Debian server and didn't have to deal with a black and white PS1. There's still a lot of room for Debian to ship better defaults, and I think some of them can actually happen. This talk is a bit of a silly one where I'm just making people aware of the existence of a few Golang/Rust CLI tools, and also some dotfiles configurations that should probably be the default. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tfto3Seokn4

curl The curl project does such a great job with their security advisories that it will likely never receive the amount of praise it deserves, but I did my best at mentioning it throughout my CVEs talk. Maybe I will write more extensively about this someday, but in case I don't:
There's no other project which always consistently mentions the exact range of commits that are affected by a given CVE. Forget about whether the versions are EOL, curl doesn't have LTS releases, yet they do such a great job at clearly documenting their CVEs that I would take that over having LTS releases anytime (that's for curl at least, I acknowledge some types of projects have a different need for LTS releases). Not only that, but they are also always careful about explaining alternative mitigations such as configuration changes, build flags that defuse the exploitation, or parameters that you should not use.
Just like we tend to do every time we meet, me and the other Debian curl maintainers spent the first 2 or 3 days of the conference talking about how we wanted to eventually meet up to discuss the package. It was going to be informal, maybe during the Cheese and Wine party, but then I've realized we should make it part of the official schedule, which would also give us the recordings for later. And so the "curl maintainers BoF" happened, where we spoke about HTTP3, GnutTLS, wcurl and other things. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fL7hSypUTdM

wcurl Right after that BoF, Daniel Stenberg asked if we were interested in having wcurl adopted into curl, which we definitely were, so wcurl is now part of the curl project. Daniel was also kind enough to design a logo for the project, which makes me especially happy because I can stop with my own approach at a logo (which I had to redo every few days): A laptop with a curl and a GoHorse sticker, there's a 'w' handwritten with a marker on the right side of the curl sticker, making it 'wcurl' And here is the new logo: 'wcurl' written with the same font and colors as the curl logo, with the 'w' being green instead of blue, and a download icon at the end Much better, I would say :)

curl Swag DebConf24 was my chance at forwarding some curl swag items to the other curl maintainers, so both Sergio Durigan Junior <sergiodj> and Carlos Henrique Lima Melara <charles> got the curl-up t-shirt and the very cool curl PCB coaster, both gifted by Daniel Stenberg. Unfortunately I didn't have any of that for DebConf attendees, but I did drop loads of curl stickers at the stickers table, they were gone very quickly. A table full of different stickers, curl stickers can be seen over the whole table

For the future I used to think the most humbling experience you could have as someone who presented a talk was to have to watch it yourself, you notice a lot of mistakes and you instantly think about things that should be done differently. It turns out the most humbling thing to do is actually to write subtitles for your talks, I noticed every single mistake, often multiple times. So after spending more than 30 hours writing the subtitles for both English and Brazilian Portuguese for my talks, I feel like it's going to be much easier to avoid committing the same mistakes again. After some time you stop feeling shame about those mistakes and you're just left with feelings of annoyance, and at that point it becomes easier to consciously avoid them. I am collecting a list of things I wish I had done differently on all of those talks, so if I end up presenting any one of them again, it will be an improved version. A picture from the top of a group of conference attendees, there's about 150 people in the picture

8 August 2024

Louis-Philippe V ronneau: A Selection of DebConf24 Talks

DebConf24 is now over! I'm very happy I was able to attend this year. If you haven't had time to look at the schedule yet, here is a selection of talks I liked.
What happens if I delete setup.py?: a live demo of upgrading to PEP-518 Python packaging A great talk by Weezel showcasing how easy it is to migrate to PEP-518 for existing Python projects. This is the kind of thing I've been doing a lot when packaging upstream projects that still use setup.py. I encourage you to send this kind of patch upstream, as it makes everyone's life much easier.
Debian on Chromebooks: What's New and What's Next? A talk by Alper Nebi Yasak, who has done great work on running Debian and the Debian Installer on Chromebooks. With Chromebooks being very popular machines in schools, it's nice to see people working on a path to liberate them.
Sequoia PGP, sq, gpg-from-sq, v6 OpenPGP, and Debian I had the chance to see Justus' talk on Sequoia an OpenPGP implementation in Rust at DebConf22 in Kosovo. Back then, the conclusion was that sq wasn't ready for production yet. Well it seems it now is! This in-depth talk goes through the history of the project and its goals. There is also a very good section on the current OpenPGP/LibrePGP schism.
Chameleon - the easy way to try out Sequoia - OpenPGP written in Rust A very short talk by Holger on Chameleon, a tool to make migration to Sequoia easier. TL;DW: apt install gpg-from-sq
Protecting OpenPGP keyservers from certificate flooding Although I used to enjoy signing people's OpenPGP keys, I completely gave up on this practice around 2019 when dkg's key was flooded with bogus certifications and have been refusing to do so since. In this talk, Gunnar talks about his PhD work on fixing this issue and making sure we can eventually restore this important function on keyservers.
Bits from the DPL Bits from the DPL! A DebConf classic.
Linux live patching in Debian Having to reboot servers after kernel upgrades is a hassle, especially with machines that have encrypted disk drives. Although kernel live patching in Debian is still a work in progress, it is encouraging to see people trying to fix this issue.
"I use Debian BTW": fzf, tmux, zoxide and friends A fun talk by Samuel Henrique on little changes and tricks one can make to their setup to make life easier.
Ideas to Move Debian Installer Forward Another in-depth talk by Alper, this time on the Debian Installer and his ideas to try to make it better. I learned a lot about the d-i internals!
Lightning Talks Lighting talks are always fun to watch! This year, the following talks happened:
  1. Customizing your Linux icons
  2. A Free Speech tracker by SFLC.IN
  3. Desktop computing is irrelevant
  4. An introduction to wcurl
  5. Aliasing in dpkg
  6. A DebConf art space
  7. Tiny Tapeout, Fomu, PiCI
  8. Data processing and visualisation in the shell

Is there a role for Debian in the post-open source era? As an economist, I've been interested in Copyright and business models in the Free Software ecosystem for a while. In this talk, Hatta-san and Bruce Perens discuss the idea of alternative licences that are not DFSG-free, like Post-Open.

4 July 2024

Samuel Henrique: Debian's curl now supports HTTP3

tl;dr Starting with curl 8.0.0-2, you can now use HTTP3.
curl --http3-only https://example.com
Or, if you would like to try it out in a container:
podman run debian:unstable apt install --update -y curl && curl --http3-only https://example.com
(in case you haven't noticed, apt now has the --update option for the upgrade and install commands, although not available on stable yet)

Availability
  • Debian unstable - Since 2024-07-02
  • Debian testing - Since 2024-07-18
  • Debian 12/bookworm backports - Expected by the end of August 2024.
  • Debian 12/bookworm - Due to the mechanisms we have in place to make sure Debian stable is in fact stable, we will never be able to ship this in the regular repository. Users can make use of the backports repositories instead.
  • Debian derivatives - Rolling releases will get it by the time it's on Debian testing (e.g.: Kali Linux). Stable derivatives only in their next major release.

The challenge HTTP3 is fresh new, well... not really, but at least fresh enough that I'm not aware of any other Linux distribution supporting it on curl, the reason is likely two-fold:
  1. OpenSSL is not there yet OpenSSL still doesn't have proper HTTP3 support, and given that OpenSSL is so widely used, almost every curl distributor/packager will build curl with it and thus changing the TLS backend to something else is risky. Unfortunately, proper support for the OpenSSL libcurl is unlikely to come anytime before the end of this year, the OpenSSL performance is not good enough yet as of version 3.3. Daniel Stenberg has written about the state of this multiple times, most recently at HTTP/3 in curl mid 2024, if you're interested, I suggest reading through his other posts as well. Some might have noticed that nginx does support HTTP3 through OpenSSL, although when you look closely, it's not exactly perfect:
    An SSL library that provides QUIC support is recommended to build nginx, such as BoringSSL, LibreSSL, or QuicTLS. Otherwise, the OpenSSL compatibility layer will be used that does not support early data.
    As you can see, they don't recommend using OpenSSL, and when doing so, you don't get complete support.

  2. HTTP3 support for GnuTLS/nghttp3/ngtcp2 is recent The non-experimental support arrived back in October 2023, and so that's when I started seriously planning for this. curl has been working on HTTP3 support for years, and so it did support other TLS backends before that, but out of them, the one most feasible for a distribution to ship would be GnuTLS, which gets HTTP3 support through ngctp2 and nghttp3.

How it was done The Debian curl package has historically shipped at least two variants of libcurl, an OpenSSL and a GnuTLS one. The OpenSSL libcurl can't support HTTP3 for the reasons explained above, but the GnuTLS libcurl can (with ngtcp2 and nghtp3). Debian packages can choose which version of libcurl to link against (without having to modify any upstream source code). Debian's "git" package being a famous example of a package that links against the GnuTLS libcurl. Enabling HTTP3 on curl was done in three steps:
  1. Make sure all required dependencies fulfill the minimum requirements.
  2. Enable HTTP3 for GnuTLS libcurl.
  3. Change the libcurl used by the curl CLI, from OpenSSL to GnuTLS.
curl's HTTP3 support requires a somewhat recent version of nghttp3 and updating that required a transition (due to the SONAME bump), while we've also had months of freeze for transitions due to the time_t transition. After the dependencies were in place, enabling HTTP3 for the GnuTLS libcurl was straightforward. Then, for the last part, we had to switch the TLS backend used by the curl CLI. Doing the swap is also quite easy on the packaging level, but we have to consider the chances of this change breaking our users' environments.

Ensuring there are no breakages The first thing to consider regarding breakages is that this change is not going to be pushed directly to the current Debian stable releases, it will be present in the next stable release (13/trixie) but the current one will stick to the version that's already shipped. Secondly, we have to consider the risk of losing the ability to use certain parameters from the curl CLI which could be limited to the OpenSSL backend. During curl-up 2024, the curl developers pointed out the existence of a page that lists the TLS related options and the backends they work with. Analysing that page, ignoring all of the options that are suffixed with "BLOB" (only pertinent to the library, not the CLI), the only one left which is attention worthy is CURLOPT_ECH.
This experimental feature requires a special build of OpenSSL, as ECH is not yet supported in OpenSSL releases. In contrast ECH is supported by the latest BoringSSL and wolfSSL releases.
As it turns out, Encrypted Client Hello is experimental and it's not supported by the vanilla OpenSSL. This was enough of an investigation for me to go ahead with the change. Noting that even in the worst case scenario (we find a horrible regression), we can rollback without having affected a single stable release. Now that the package is on Debian unstable, the CI tests (autopkgtest) of every package that depends on curl is currently running, the results are compared against the migration-reference (in this case, the curl CLI with OpenSSL, before the change). If everything goes right, curl with HTTP3 support will migrate to Debian testing in around 5 days. If we spot any issues, we'll have to solve them first and it's going to be hard to predict how long it takes, although it's fair to expect less than a month.

Feedback Feel free to join the Matrix room for the Debian curl maintainers:
https://matrix.to/#/#debian-curl-maintainers:matrix.org

Acknowledgements It took us a bit longer than expected to be able to enable HTTP3, nonetheless it's still early enough to be excited about. A lot of people were crucial to make this happen. I should recognize in the first place, obviously, the curl developers and the developers of the supporting libraries: GnuTLS, nghttp3, ngtcp2. Participating in the curl-up 2024 conference helped me get motivated to push this through, besides becoming aware of the right documentation to research for impact. On the Debian side, Sakirnth Nagarasa <sakirnth> was responsible for updating and taking care of the transition for nghttp3 and ngtcp2. Also on the Debian side, I've got loads of help and support from the co-maintainers of the curl package: Sergio Durigan Junior <sergiodj> and Carlos Henrique Lima Melara <charles>.

Changes since publication

2024-07-18
  • Update date of availability for Debian testing and expected date for bookworm backports.
  • We have historically spoken Portuguese in the room but we'll switch to English in case anyone joins.

3 July 2024

Samuel Henrique: Announcing wcurl: a curl wrapper to download files

tl;dr Whenever you need to download files through the terminal and don't feel like using wget:
wcurl example.com/filename.txt
Manpage:
https://manpages.debian.org/unstable/curl/wcurl.1.en.html

Availability (comes installed with the curl package):
  • Debian unstable - Since 2024-07-02
  • Debian testing - Since 2024-07-18
  • Debian 12/bookworm backports - Expected by the end of August 2024.
  • Debian 12/bookworm - Depends on whether Debian's release team will approve it, it could be available in the next point release.
  • Debian derivatives - Rolling releases will get it by the time it's on Debian testing (e.g.: Kali Linux). Stable derivatives only in their next major release.
If you don't want to wait for the package update to arrive, you can always copy the script and place it in your /usr/bin, the code is here:
https://github.com/Debian/wcurl/blob/main/wcurl
https://salsa.debian.org/debian/wcurl/-/blob/main/wcurl?ref_type=heads

Smoother CLI experience Starting with curl version 8.8.0-2, the Debian's curl package now ships a wcurl executable. wcurl is the solution for those who just need to download files without having to remember curl's parameters for things like automatically naming the files. Some people, myself included, would fall back to using wget whenever there was a need to download a file. Sometimes even installing wget just for that usecase. After all, it's easier to remember "apt install wget" rather than "curl -L -O -C - ...". wcurl consists of a simple shell script that provides sane defaults for the curl invocation, for when the use case is to just download files. By default, wcurl will:
  • Encode whitespaces in URLs;
  • Download multiple URLs in parallel if the installed curl's version is >= 7.66.0;
  • Follow redirects;
  • Automatically choose a filename as output;
  • Avoid overwriting files if the installed curl's version is >= 7.83.0 (--no-clobber);
  • Perform retries;
  • Set the downloaded file timestamp to the value provided by the server, if available;
  • Default to the protocol used as https if the URL doesn't contain any;
  • Disable curl's URL globbing parser so and [] characters in URLs are not treated specially.
Example to download a single file:
wcurl example.com/filename.txt
If you ever need to set a custom flag, you can make use of the --curl-options wcurl option, anything set there will be passed to the curl invocation. Just beware that if you need to set any custom flags, it's likely you will be better served by calling curl directly. The --curl-options option is there to allow for some flexibility in unforeseen circumstances.

The need for wcurl I've always felt a bit ashamed of not remembering curl's parameters for downloading a file and automatically naming it, having resorted to wget most of the times this was needed (even installing wget when it wasn't there, just for this). I've spoken to a few other experienced people I know and confirmed what could be obvious to others: a lot of people struggle with this. Recently, the curl project released the results of 2024's curl survey, which also showed this is as a much needed feature, just look at some of the answers:

Q: Which curl command line option do you think needs improvement and how?
-O, I really want wget like functionality where I don't have to specify the name
Downloading a file (like wget) could be improved - with automatic naming of the file
downloading files - wget is much cleaner
I wish the default behaviour when GETting a binary was to drop it on disk. That's the only reason 'wget foo.tgz" is still ingrained in my muscle memory .
Maybe have a way to download without specifying something in -o (the only reason i used wget still)
--remote-time should be default
--remote-name-all could really use a short flag

Q: If you miss support for something, tell us what!
"Write the data to the file named in the URL (or in redirects if I'm feeling daring), and timestamp the file to the last-modified-date". This is the main reason I'm still using wget.
I can finally feel less bad about falling back to wget due to not remembering the parameters I want.

Idealization vs. reality I don't believe curl will ever change its default behavior in such a way that would accommodate this need, as that would have a side-effect of breaking things which expect the current behavior (the blast radius is literally the solar system). This means a new executable needs to be shipped side-by-side with curl, an opportunity to start fresh and work with a more focused use case (to download files). Ideally, this new executable would be maintained by the curl project, make use of libcurl under-the-hood, and be available everywhere. Nobody wants to worry if their systems have the tool or not, it should always be there. Given I'm just a Debian Developer, with not as much free time as I wish, I've decided to write a simple shell script wrapper calling the curl CLI under-the-hood. wcurl will come installed with the curl package from now on, and I will check with the release team about shipping it on the current Debian stable as well. Shipping wcurl in other distros will be up to them (Debian-derivatives should pick it up automatically, though). We've tried to make it easy for anyone to ship this by using the curl license, keeping the script POSIX-compliant, and shipping a manpage. Maybe if there's enough interest across distributions, someone might sign up for implementing this in upstream curl and increase its reach. I would be happy with the curl project reusing the wcurl name when that happens. It's unlikely that wcurl would be shipped by curl upstream as it is, assuming they would prefer a solution that uses libcurl direclty (more similar to curl the CLI, to maintain). In the worst case, wcurl becomes a Debian-specific tool that only a few people are aware of, in the best case, it becomes the new go-to CLI tool for simply downloading files. I would be happy if at least someone other than me finds it useful.

Naming is hard When I started working on it, I was calling the new executable "curld" (stands for "curl download"), but then when discussing this in one of our weekly calls in the Debian Bras lia community, it was mentioned that this could be confused for a daemon. We then settled for the name "wcurl", suggested by Carlos Henrique Lima Melara <charles>. It doesn't really stand for anything, but it's very easy to remember. You know... "it's that wget alternative for when you want to use curl instead" :)

Feedback I'm hosting the code on Github and Debian's GitLab instance, feel free to open an issue to provide feedback.
https://salsa.debian.org/debian/wcurl
https://github.com/Debian/wcurl We also have a Matrix room for the Debian curl maintainers:
https://matrix.to/#/#debian-curl-maintainers:matrix.org

Acknowledgments The idea for wcurl came a few days before the curl-up conference 2024. I've been thinking a lot about developer productivity in the terminal lately, different tools and better defaults. Before curl-up, I was also thinking about packaging improvements for the curl package. I don't remember what exactly happened, but I likely had to download something and felt a bit ashamed of maintaining curl and not remembering the parameters to download files the way I wanted. I first discussed this idea in the conference, where I asked the participants about it and there were no concerns raised, and some people said I should give it a go. Participating in curl-up was a really great experience and I'm thankful for the interactions I've had there. On the Debian side, I've got reviews of the code and manpage by Sergio Durigan Junior <sergiodj>, Guilherme Puida Moreira <puida> and Carlos Henrique Lima Melara <charles>. Sergio ended up rewriting the tool to be POSIX-compliant (my version was written in bash), so he takes all the credit for the portability.

Changes since publication

2024-07-18
  • Update date of availability for Debian testing and expected date for bookworm backports.
  • Mention charles as the person who suggested "wcurl" as a name.
  • Update wcurl's -o/--opts options, it's now just --curl-options.
  • Remove mention of language spoken in the Matrix room, we are using English now.
  • Update list of features of wcurl.

1 July 2024

Sahil Dhiman: Personal ASNs From India

Internet and it s working are interesting and complex. We need an IP address to connect to the Internet. A group of IP addresses with common routing policy is known as an Autonomous System (AS). Each AS has a globally unique Autonomous System Number (ASN) and is maintained by a single entity or individual(s). Your ISP would have an ASN. IP addresses/prefixes are advertised (announced) by an AS through Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) to its peers (ASes which it connects to) to steer traffic in its direction or back. Take for example Google DNS service at 8.8.8.8 owned and operated by AS15169 Google LLC. AS15169 through BGP announcements, lets all its peers know that traffic for whole of 8.8.8.0/24 (including 8.8.8.8) prefix should be sent to them. See the following screenshot response of mtr -zt 8.8.8.8 from my system. From my Internet Service Provider (ISP), AS133982 Excitel Broadband, traffic travels to AS15169 to reach 8.8.8.8 (dns.google) and returns via the same path. This Inter-AS traffic makes the Internet tick. mtr from Excitel to Google ASes comes in different sizes and purposes. Like AS749 DoD Network Information Center which holds more than 200 million+ IPv4 addresses for historical reasons or AS23860 Alliance Broadband Services which has 68 thousand+ IPv4 address for purpose of providing consumer Internet. Similarly, some individuals also run their personal ASN including a bunch of Indians. Most of these Indian ASNs are IPv6 (primary or only) networks run for hobby and educational purposes. I was interested in this data, so complied a list of active ones (visible in the global routing table) from BGP.Tools: Let me know if I m missing someone.

18 April 2024

Samuel Henrique: Hello World

This is my very first post, just to make sure everything is working as expected. Made with Zola and the Abridge theme.

3 April 2024

Arnaud Rebillout: Firefox: Moving from the Debian package to the Flatpak app (long-term?)

First, thanks to Samuel Henrique for giving notice of recent Firefox CVEs in Debian testing/unstable. At the time I didn't want to upgrade my system (Debian Sid) due to the ongoing t64 transition transition, so I decided I could install the Firefox Flatpak app instead, and why not stick to it long-term? This blog post details all the steps, if ever others want to go the same road. Flatpak Installation Disclaimer: this section is hardly anything more than a copy/paste of the official documentation, and with time it will get outdated, so you'd better follow the official doc. First thing first, let's install Flatpak:
$ sudo apt update
$ sudo apt install flatpak
Then the next step is to add the Flathub remote repository, from where we'll get our Flatpak applications:
$ flatpak remote-add --if-not-exists flathub https://dl.flathub.org/repo/flathub.flatpakrepo
And that's all there is to it! Now come the optional steps. For GNOME and KDE users, you might want to install a plugin for the software manager specific to your desktop, so that it can support and manage Flatpak apps:
$ which -s gnome-software  && sudo apt install gnome-software-plugin-flatpak
$ which -s plasma-discover && sudo apt install plasma-discover-backend-flatpak
And here's an additional check you can do, as it's something that did bite me in the past: missing xdg-portal-* packages, that are required for Flatpak applications to communicate with the desktop environment. Just to be sure, you can check the output of apt search '^xdg-desktop-portal' to see what's available, and compare with the output of dpkg -l grep xdg-desktop-portal. As you can see, if you're a GNOME or KDE user, there's a portal backend for you, and it should be installed. For reference, this is what I have on my GNOME desktop at the moment:
$ dpkg -l   grep xdg-desktop-portal   awk ' print $2 '
xdg-desktop-portal
xdg-desktop-portal-gnome
xdg-desktop-portal-gtk
Install the Firefox Flatpak app This is trivial, but still, there's a question I've always asked myself: should I install applications system-wide (aka. flatpak --system, the default) or per-user (aka. flatpak --user)? Turns out, this questions is answered in the Flatpak documentation:
Flatpak commands are run system-wide by default. If you are installing applications for day-to-day usage, it is recommended to stick with this default behavior.
Armed with this new knowledge, let's install the Firefox app:
$ flatpak install flathub org.mozilla.firefox
And that's about it! We can give it a go already:
$ flatpak run org.mozilla.firefox
Data migration At this point, running Firefox via Flatpak gives me an "empty" Firefox. That's not what I want, instead I want my usual Firefox, with a gazillion of tabs already opened, a few extensions, bookmarks and so on. As it turns out, Mozilla provides a brief doc for data migration, and it's as simple as moving Firefox data directory around! To clarify, we'll be copying data: Make sure that all Firefox instances are closed, then proceed:
# BEWARE! Below I'm erasing data!
$ rm -fr ~/.var/app/org.mozilla.firefox/.mozilla/firefox/
$ cp -a ~/.mozilla/firefox/ ~/.var/app/org.mozilla.firefox/.mozilla/
To avoid confusing myself, it's also a good idea to rename the local data directory:
$ mv ~/.mozilla/firefox ~/.mozilla/firefox.old.$(date --iso-8601=date)
At this point, flatpak run org.mozilla.firefox takes me to my "usual" everyday Firefox, with all its tabs opened, pinned, bookmarked, etc. More integration? After following all the steps above, I must say that I'm 99% happy. So far, everything works as before, I didn't hit any issue, and I don't even notice that Firefox is running via Flatpak, it's completely transparent. So where's the 1% of unhappiness? The Run a Command dialog from GNOME, the one that shows up via the keyboard shortcut <Alt+F2>. This is how I start my GUI applications, and I usually run two Firefox instances in parallel (one for work, one for personal), using the firefox -p <profile> command. Given that I ran apt purge firefox before (to avoid confusing myself with two installations of Firefox), now the right (and only) way to start Firefox from a command-line is to type flatpak run org.mozilla.firefox -p <profile>. Typing that every time is way too cumbersome, so I need something quicker. Seems like the most straightforward is to create a wrapper script:
$ cat /usr/local/bin/firefox 
#!/bin/sh
exec flatpak run org.mozilla.firefox "$@"
And now I can just hit <Alt+F2> and type firefox -p <profile> to start Firefox with the profile I want, just as before. Neat! Looking forward: system updates I usually update my system manually every now and then, via the well-known pair of commands:
$ sudo apt update
$ sudo apt full-upgrade
The downside of introducing Flatpak, ie. introducing another package manager, is that I'll need to learn new commands to update the software that comes via this channel. Fortunately, there's really not much to learn. From flatpak-update(1):
flatpak update [OPTION...] [REF...] Updates applications and runtimes. [...] If no REF is given, everything is updated, as well as appstream info for all remotes.
Could it be that simple? Apparently yes, the Flatpak equivalent of the two apt commands above is just:
$ flatpak update
Going forward, my options are:
  1. Teach myself to run flatpak update additionally to apt update, manually, everytime I update my system.
  2. Go crazy: let something automatically update my Flatpak apps, in my back and without my consent.
I'm actually tempted to go for option 2 here, and I wonder if GNOME Software will do that for me, provided that I installed gnome-software-plugin-flatpak, and that I checked Software Updates -> Automatic in the Settings (which I did). However, I didn't find any documentation regarding what this setting really does, so I can't say if it will only download updates, or if it will also install it. I'd be happy if it automatically installs new version of Flatpak apps, but at the same time I'd be very unhappy if it automatically upgrades my Debian system... So we'll see. Enough for today, hope this blog post was useful!

22 December 2023

Gunnar Wolf: Pushing some reviews this way

Over roughly the last year and a half I have been participating as a reviewer in ACM s Computing Reviews, and have even been honored as a Featured Reviewer. Given I have long enjoyed reading friends reviews of their reading material (particularly, hats off to the very active Russ Allbery, who both beats all of my frequency expectations (I could never sustain the rythm he reads to!) and holds documented records for his >20 years as a book reader, with far more clarity and readability than I can aim for!), I decided to explicitly share my reviews via this blog, as the audience is somewhat congruent; I will also link here some reviews that were not approved for publication, clearly marking them so. I will probably work on wrangling my Jekyll site to display an (auto-)updated page and RSS feed for the reviews. In the meantime, the reviews I have published are:

10 December 2023

Freexian Collaborators: Debian Contributions: Python 3.12 preparations, debian-printing, merged-/usr tranisition updates, and more! (by Utkarsh Gupta)

Contributing to Debian is part of Freexian s mission. This article covers the latest achievements of Freexian and their collaborators. All of this is made possible by organizations subscribing to our Long Term Support contracts and consulting services.

Preparing for Python 3.12 by Stefano Rivera Stefano uploaded a few packages in preparation for Python 3.12, including pycxx and cython. Cython has a major new version (Cython 3), adding support for 3.12, but also bringing changes that many packages in Debian aren t ready to build with, yet. Stefano uploaded it to Debian experimental and did an archive rebuild of affected packages, and some analysis of the result. Matthias Klose has since filed bugs for all of these issues.

debian-printing, by Thorsten Alteholz This month Thorsten invested some of the previously obtained money to build his own printlab. At the moment it only consists of a dedicated computer with an USB printer attached. Due to its 64GB RAM and an SSD, building of debian-printing packages is much faster now. Over time other printers will be added and understanding bugs should be a lot easier now. Also Thorsten again adopted two packages, namely mink and ink, and moved them to the debian-printing team.

Merged-/usr transition by Helmut Grohne, et al The dumat analysis tool has been improved in quite some aspects. Beyond fixing false negative diagnostics, it now recognizes protective diversions used for mitigating Multi-Arch: same file loss. It was found that the proposed mitigation for ineffective diversions does not work as expected. Trying to fix it up resulted in more problems, some of which remain unsolved as of this writing. Initial work on moving shared libraries in the essential set has been done. Meanwhile, the wider Debian community worked on fixing all known Multi-Arch: same file loss scenarios. This work is now being driven by Christian Hofstaedler and during the Mini DebConf in Cambridge, Chris Boot, tienne Mollier, Miguel Landaeta, Samuel Henrique, and Utkarsh Gupta sent the other half of the necessary patches.

Miscellaneous contributions
  • Stefano merged patches to support loong64 and hurd-amd64 in re2.
  • For the Cambridge mini-conf, Stefano added a web player to the DebConf video streaming frontend, as the Cambridge miniconf didn t have its own website to host the player.
  • Rapha l helped the upstream developers of hamster-time-tracker to prepare a new upstream release (the first in multiple years) and packaged that new release in Debian unstable.
  • Enrico joined Hemut in brainstorming some /usr-merge solutions.
  • Thorsten took care of RM-bugs to remove no longer needed packages from the Debian archive and closed about 50 of them.
  • Helmut ported the feature of mounting a fuse connection via /dev/fd/N from fuse3 to fuse2.
  • Helmut sent a number of patches simplifying unprivileged use of piuparts.
  • Roberto worked with Helmut to prepare the Shorewall package for the ongoing /usr-move transition.
  • Utkarsh also helped with the ongoing /usr-merge work by preparing patches for gitlab, libnfc, and net-tools.
  • Utkarsh, along with Helmut, brainstormed on fixing #961138, as this affects the whole archive and all the suites and not just R packages. Utkarsh intends to follow up on the bug in December.
  • Santiago organized a MiniDebConf in Uruguay. In total, nine people attended, including most of DDs in the surrounding area. Here s a nicely written blog by Gunnar Wolf.
  • Santiago also worked on some issues on Salsa CI, fixed with some merge requests: #462, #463, and #466.

28 February 2023

Russell Coker: Links February 2023

Vox has an insightful interview with the author of Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century [1]. The main claim of that book is that The 140 years from 1870 to 2010 of the long twentieth century were, I strongly believe, the most consequential years of all humanity s centuries . A claim that seems well supported. PostMarketOS is an interesting OS for hardware designed for Android [2]. It is based on Alpine Linux, is small, and modular. If you want to change something just change that package not the entire image. Also an aim is to have as much commonality between devices as possible, all phones with the same CPU family can run the same packages apart from the kernel and maybe some utilities related to hardware. Abhijithpa blogged about getting started with pmOS, it seems easy to do [3]. Interesting article about gay samurai [4]. Regarding sex with men or women an elderly arbiter, after hearing the impassioned arguments of the two sides, counsels that the wisest course is to follow both paths in moderation, thereby helping to prevent overindulgence in either . Wow. The SCP project is an interesting collaborative SciFi/horror fiction project [5] based on an organisation that aims to Secure and Contain dangerous objects and beings and Protect the world from them. The series of stories about the Anti-Memetics Division [6] is a good place to start reading.

9 November 2022

Debian Brasil: Brasileiros(as) Mantenedores(as) e Desenvolvedores(as) Debian a partir de julho de 2015

Desde de setembro de 2015, o time de publicidade do Projeto Debian passou a publicar a cada dois meses listas com os nomes dos(as) novos(as) Desenvolvedores(as) Debian (DD - do ingl s Debian Developer) e Mantenedores(as) Debian (DM - do ingl s Debian Maintainer). Estamos aproveitando estas listas para publicar abaixo os nomes dos(as) brasileiros(as) que se tornaram Desenvolvedores(as) e Mantenedores(as) Debian a partir de julho de 2015. Desenvolvedores(as) Debian / Debian Developers / DDs: Marcos Talau Fabio Augusto De Muzio Tobich Gabriel F. T. Gomes Thiago Andrade Marques M rcio de Souza Oliveira Paulo Henrique de Lima Santana Samuel Henrique S rgio Durigan J nior Daniel Lenharo de Souza Giovani Augusto Ferreira Adriano Rafael Gomes Breno Leit o Lucas Kanashiro Herbert Parentes Fortes Neto Mantenedores(as) Debian / Debian Maintainers / DMs: Guilherme de Paula Xavier Segundo David da Silva Polverari Paulo Roberto Alves de Oliveira Sergio Almeida Cipriano Junior Francisco Vilmar Cardoso Ruviaro William Grzybowski Tiago Ilieve
Observa es:
  1. Esta lista ser atualizada quando o time de publicidade do Debian publicar novas listas com DMs e DDs e tiver brasileiros.
  2. Para ver a lista completa de Mantenedores(as) e Desenvolvedores(as) Debian, inclusive outros(as) brasileiros(as) antes de julho de 2015 acesse: https://nm.debian.org/public/people

Debian Brasil: Brasileiros(as) Mantenedores(as) e Desenvolvedores(as) Debian a partir de julho de 2015

Desde de setembro de 2015, o time de publicidade do Projeto Debian passou a publicar a cada dois meses listas com os nomes dos(as) novos(as) Desenvolvedores(as) Debian (DD - do ingl s Debian Developer) e Mantenedores(as) Debian (DM - do ingl s Debian Maintainer). Estamos aproveitando estas listas para publicar abaixo os nomes dos(as) brasileiros(as) que se tornaram Desenvolvedores(as) e Mantenedores(as) Debian a partir de julho de 2015. Desenvolvedores(as) Debian / Debian Developers / DDs: Marcos Talau Fabio Augusto De Muzio Tobich Gabriel F. T. Gomes Thiago Andrade Marques M rcio de Souza Oliveira Paulo Henrique de Lima Santana Samuel Henrique S rgio Durigan J nior Daniel Lenharo de Souza Giovani Augusto Ferreira Adriano Rafael Gomes Breno Leit o Lucas Kanashiro Herbert Parentes Fortes Neto Mantenedores(as) Debian / Debian Maintainers / DMs: Guilherme de Paula Xavier Segundo David da Silva Polverari Paulo Roberto Alves de Oliveira Sergio Almeida Cipriano Junior Francisco Vilmar Cardoso Ruviaro William Grzybowski Tiago Ilieve
Observa es:
  1. Esta lista ser atualizada quando o time de publicidade do Debian publicar novas listas com DMs e DDs e tiver brasileiros.
  2. Para ver a lista completa de Mantenedores(as) e Desenvolvedores(as) Debian, inclusive outros(as) brasileiros(as) antes de julho de 2015 acesse: https://nm.debian.org/public/people

1 November 2022

Russ Allbery: Review: What Makes This Book So Great

Review: What Makes This Book So Great, by Jo Walton
Publisher: Tor
Copyright: January 2014
ISBN: 0-7653-3193-4
Format: Hardcover
Pages: 447
Jo Walton, in addition to being an excellent science fiction and fantasy writer, is a prodigious reader and frequent participant in on-line SFF book discussion going back to the Usenet days. This book is a collection of short essays previously published on Tor.com between July 2008 and February 2011. The unifying theme is that Walton regularly re-reads her favorite books, and each essay (apart from some general essays on related topics) is about why this specific book is one that she re-reads, and (as the title says) what makes it so great. Searching for the title of one of the essays turns it up on Tor.com still, so this is one of those collections that you don't have to buy since you can read its contents on-line for free. That said, it looks like these essays were from before Tor.com started classifying posts into series, so it's going to be challenging to track them down in the huge number of other articles Walton has written for the site. (That said, you can't go far wrong by reading any of her essays at random.) I read these essays as they were originally published, so this was also a re-read for me, but it had been a while. I'm happy to report that they were just as much fun the second time. In the introduction and in the final essay of this collection, Walton draws a distinction between what she's doing, criticism, and reviewing. As someone else who writes about books (in a far more amateur fashion), I liked this distinction. The way I'd characterize it is that criticism is primarily about the work: taking it apart to see what makes it tick, looking for symbolism and hidden meanings, and comparing and contrasting other works that are tackling similar themes. I've often finished a work of criticism and still had no idea if the author enjoyed reading the work being criticized or not, since that isn't the point. Reviewing is assistance to consumers and focuses more on the reader: would you enjoy this book? Is it enjoyable to read? Does it say something new? What genre and style is it in, so that you can match that to your tastes? Talking about books is neither of those things, although it's a bit closer to reviewing. But the emphasis is on one's personal enjoyment instead of attempting to review a product for others. When I talk about books with friends, I talk primarily about what bits I liked, what bits I didn't like, where the emotional beats were for me, and what interesting things the book did that surprised me or caught my attention. One can find a review in there, and sometimes even criticism, but the focus and the formality is different. (And, to be honest, my reviews are more on the "talking about the book" side than fully proper reviews.) These essays are indeed talking about books. They're all re-reads; in some cases the first re-read, but more frequently the latest of many re-reads. There are lots of spoilers, which makes for bad reviews (the target audience of a review hasn't read the book yet) but good fodder for conversations about books. (The spoilers are mostly marked, but if you're particularly averse to spoilers, you'll need to read carefully.) Most of the essays are about a single book, but there are a few on more general topics, such as Walton's bafflement that anyone would skim a novel. Since these are re-reads, and the essays collected here are more than a decade old, the focus is on older books. Some of them are famous: Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky, early Le Guin, Samuel Delaney's SF novels, Salmon Rushdie's Midnight's Children. Some of them are more obscure. C.J. Cherryh, for example, is a writer who never seems to get much on-line attention, but who is one of Walton's favorites. Most of the essays stand alone or come in small clusters about a writer, often sprinkled through the book instead of clumped together. (The book publishes the essays in the same order they originally appeared on Tor.com.) The two largest groups of essays are re-readings of every book in Steven Brust's Vlad Taltos universe (including Brokedown Palace and the Paarfi books) up to Jhegaala, and every book in Lois McMaster Bujold's Miles Vorkosigan series up to Diplomatic Immunity. This is fitting: those are two of the great series of science fiction, but don't seem to be written about nearly as much as I would expect. There are over 130 essays in a 447 page book, so there's a lot of material here and none of them outlive their welcome. Walton has a comfortable, approachable style that bubbles with delight and appreciation for books. I think it's impossible to read this collection without wanting to read more, and without adding several more books to the ever-teetering to-read pile. This is perhaps not the best source of reading recommendations if you dislike spoilers, although it can be used for that if you read carefully. But if you love listening to conversations about the genre and talking about how books bounce off each other, and particularly if you have read most of these books already or don't mind spoilers, this collection is a delight. If you're the type of SFF reader who likes reading the reviews in Locus or is already reading Tor.com, highly recommended. Rating: 8 out of 10

17 April 2022

Matthew Garrett: The Freedom Phone is not great at privacy

The Freedom Phone advertises itself as a "Free speech and privacy first focused phone". As documented on the features page, it runs ClearOS, an Android-based OS produced by Clear United (or maybe one of the bewildering array of associated companies, we'll come back to that later). It's advertised as including Signal, but what's shipped is not the version available from the Signal website or any official app store - instead it's this fork called "ClearSignal".

The first thing to note about ClearSignal is that the privacy policy link from that page 404s, which is not a great start. The second thing is that it has a version number of 5.8.14, which is strange because upstream went from 5.8.10 to 5.9.0. The third is that, despite Signal being GPL 3, there's no source code available. So, I grabbed jadx and started looking for differences between ClearSignal and the upstream 5.8.10 release. The results were, uh, surprising.

First up is that they seem to have integrated ACRA, a crash reporting framework. This feels a little odd - in the absence of a privacy policy, it's unclear what information this gathers or how it'll be stored. Having a piece of privacy software automatically uploading information about what you were doing in the event of a crash with no notification other than a toast that appears saying "Crash Report" feels a little dubious.

Next is that Signal (for fairly obvious reasons) warns you if your version is out of date and eventually refuses to work unless you upgrade. ClearSignal has dealt with this problem by, uh, simply removing that code. The MacOS version of the desktop app they provide for download seems to be derived from a release from last September, which for an Electron-based app feels like a pretty terrible idea. Weirdly, for Windows they link to an official binary release from February 2021, and for Linux they tell you how to use the upstream repo properly. I have no idea what's going on here.

They've also added support for network backups of your Signal data. This involves the backups being pushed to an S3 bucket using credentials that are statically available in the app. It's ok, though, each upload has some sort of nominally unique identifier associated with it, so it's not trivial to just download other people's backups. But, uh, where does this identifier come from? It turns out that Clear Center, another of the Clear family of companies, employs a bunch of people to work on a ClearID[1], some sort of decentralised something or other that seems to be based on KERI. There's an overview slide deck here which didn't really answer any of my questions and as far as I can tell this is entirely lacking any sort of peer review, but hey it's only the one thing that stops anyone on the internet being able to grab your Signal backups so how important can it be.

The final thing, though? They've extended Signal's invitation support to encourage users to get others to sign up for Clear United. There's an exposed API endpoint called "get_user_email_by_mobile_number" which does exactly what you'd expect - if you give it a registered phone number, it gives you back the associated email address. This requires no authentication. But it gets better! The API to generate a referral link to send to others sends the name and phone number of everyone in your phone's contact list. There does not appear to be any indication that this is going to happen.

So, from a privacy perspective, going to go with things being some distance from ideal. But what's going on with all these Clear companies anyway? They all seem to be related to Michael Proper, who founded the Clear Foundation in 2009. They are, perhaps unsurprisingly, heavily invested in blockchain stuff, while Clear United also appears to be some sort of multi-level marketing scheme which has a membership agreement that includes the somewhat astonishing claim that:

Specifically, the initial focus of the Association will provide members with supplements and technologies for:

9a. Frequency Evaluation, Scans, Reports;

9b. Remote Frequency Health Tuning through Quantum Entanglement;

9c. General and Customized Frequency Optimizations;


- there's more discussion of this and other weirdness here. Clear Center, meanwhile, has a Chief Physics Officer? I have a lot of questions.

Anyway. We have a company that seems to be combining blockchain and MLM, has some opinions about Quantum Entanglement, bases the security of its platform on a set of novel cryptographic primitives that seem to have had no external review, has implemented an API that just hands out personal information without any authentication and an app that appears more than happy to upload all your contact details without telling you first, has failed to update this app to keep up with upstream security updates, and is violating the upstream license. If this is their idea of "privacy first", I really hate to think what their code looks like when privacy comes further down the list.

[1] Pointed out to me here

comment count unavailable comments

29 December 2021

Chris Lamb: Favourite books of 2021: Memoir/biography

Just as I did for 2020, I won't publically disclose exactly how many books I read in 2021, but they evidently provoked enough thoughts that felt it worth splitting my yearly writeup into separate posts. I will reveal, however, that I got through more books than the previous year, and, like before, I enjoyed the books I read this year even more in comparison as well. How much of this is due to refining my own preferences over time, and how much can be ascribed to feeling less pressure to read particular books? It s impossible to say, and the question is complicated further by the fact I found many of the classics I read well worth of their entry into the dreaded canon. But enough of the throat-clearing. In today's post I'll be looking at my favourite books filed under memoir and biography, in no particular order. Books that just missed the cut here include: Bernard Crick's celebrated 1980 biography of George Orwell, if nothing else because it was a pleasure to read; Hilary Mantel's exhilaratingly bitter early memoir, Giving up the Ghost (2003); and Patricia Lockwood's hilarious Priestdaddy (2017). I also had a soft spot for Tim Kreider's We Learn Nothing (2012) as well, despite not knowing anything about the author in advance, likely a sign of good writing. The strangest book in this category I read was definitely Michelle Zauner's Crying in H Mart. Based on a highly-recommended 2018 essay in the New Yorker, its rich broth of genuine yearning for a departed mother made my eyebrows raise numerous times when I encountered inadvertent extra details about Zauner's relationships.

Beethoven: A Life in Nine Pieces (2020) Laura Tunbridge Whilst it might immediately present itself as a clickbait conceit, organising an overarching narrative around just nine compositions by Beethoven turns out to be an elegant way of saying something fresh about this grizzled old bear. Some of Beethoven's most famous compositions are naturally included in the nine (eg. the Eroica and the Hammerklavier piano sonata), but the book raises itself above conventional Beethoven fare when it highlights, for instance, his Septet, Op. 20, an early work that is virtually nobody's favourite Beethoven piece today. The insight here is that it was widely popular in its time, played again and again around Vienna for the rest of his life. No doubt many contemporary authors can relate to this inability to escape being artistically haunted by an earlier runaway success. The easiest way to say something interesting about Beethoven in the twenty-first century is to talk about the myth of Beethoven instead. Or, as Tunbridge implies, perhaps that should really be 'Beethoven' in leaden quotation marks, given so much about what we think we know about the man is a quasi-fictional construction. Take Anton Schindler, Beethoven's first biographer and occasional amanuensis, who destroyed and fabricated details about Beethoven's life, casting himself in a favourable light and exaggerating his influence with the composer. Only a few decades later, the idea of a 'heroic' German was to be politically useful as well; the Anglosphere often need reminding that Germany did not exist as a nation-state prior to 1871, so it should be unsurprising to us that the late nineteenth-century saw a determined attempt to create a uniquely 'German' culture ex nihilo. (And the less we say about Immortal Beloved the better, even though I treasure that film.) Nevertheless, Tunbridge cuts through Beethoven's substantial legacy using surgical precision that not only avoids feeling like it is settling a score, but it also does so in a way that is unlikely to completely alienate anyone emotionally dedicated to some already-established idea of the man to bring forth the tediously predictable sentiment that Beethoven has 'gone woke'. With Alex Ross on the cult of Wagner, it seems that books about the 'myth of X' are somewhat in vogue right now. And this pattern within classical music might fit into some broader trend of deconstruction in popular non-fiction too, especially when we consider the numerous contemporary books on the long hangover of the Civil Rights era (Robin DiAngelo's White Fragility, etc.), the multifarious ghosts of Empire (Akala's Natives, Sathnam Sanghera's Empireland, etc.) or even the 'transmogrification' of George Orwell into myth. But regardless of its place in some wider canon, A Life in Nine Pieces is beautifully printed in hardback form (worth acquiring for that very reason alone), and it is one of the rare good books about classical music that can be recommended to both the connoisseur and the layperson alike.

Sea State (2021) Tabitha Lasley In her mid-30s and jerking herself out of a terrible relationship, Tabitha Lasley left London and put all her savings into a six-month lease on a flat within a questionable neighbourhood in Aberdeen, Scotland. She left to make good on a lukewarm idea for a book about oil rigs and the kinds of men who work on them: I wanted to see what men were like with no women around, she claims. The result is Sea State, a forthright examination of the life of North Sea oil riggers, and an unsparing portrayal of loneliness, masculinity, female desire and the decline of industry in Britain. (It might almost be said that Sea State is an update of a sort to George Orwell's visit to the mines in the North of England.) As bracing as the North Sea air, Sea State spoke to me on multiple levels but I found it additionally interesting to compare and contrast with Julian Barnes' The Man with Red Coat (see below). Women writers are rarely thought to be using fiction for higher purposes: it is assumed that, unlike men, whatever women commit to paper is confessional without any hint of artfulness. Indeed, it seems to me that the reaction against the decades-old genre of autofiction only really took hold when it became the domain of millennial women. (By contrast, as a 75-year-old male writer with a firmly established reputation in the literary establishment, Julian Barnes is allowed wide latitude in what he does with his sources and his writing can be imbued with supremely confident airs as a result.) Furthermore, women are rarely allowed metaphor or exaggeration for dramatic effect, and they certainly aren t permitted to emphasise darker parts in order to explore them... hence some of the transgressive gratification of reading Sea State. Sea State is admittedly not a work of autofiction, but the sense that you are reading about an author writing a book is pleasantly unavoidable throughout. It frequently returns to the topic of oil workers who live multiple lives, and Lasley admits to living two lives herself: she may be in love but she's also on assignment, and a lot of the pleasure in this candid and remarkably accessible book lies in the way these states become slowly inseparable.

Twilight of Democracy (2020) Anne Applebaum For the uninitiated, Anne Applebaum is a staff writer for The Atlantic magazine who won a Pulitzer-prize for her 2004 book on the Soviet Gulag system. Her latest book, however, Twilight of Democracy is part memoir and part political analysis and discusses the democratic decline and the rise of right-wing populism. This, according to Applebaum, displays distinctly authoritarian tendencies, and who am I to disagree? Applebaum does this through three main case studies (Poland, the United Kingdom and the United States), but the book also touches on Hungary as well. The strongest feature of this engaging book is that Appelbaum's analysis focuses on the intellectual classes and how they provide significant justification for a descent into authoritarianism. This is always an important point to be remembered, especially as much of the folk understanding of the rise of authoritarian regimes tends to place exaggerated responsibility on the ordinary and everyday citizen: the blame placed on the working-class in the Weimar Republic or the scorn heaped upon 'white trash' of the contemporary Rust Belt, for example. Applebaum is uniquely poised to discuss these intellectuals because, well, she actually knows a lot of them personally. Or at least, she used to know them. Indeed, the narrative of the book revolves around two parties she hosted, both in the same house in northwest Poland. The first party, on 31 December 1999, was attended by friends from around the Western world, but most of the guests were Poles from the broad anti-communist alliance. They all agreed about democracy, the rule of law and the route to prosperity whilst toasting in the new millennium. (I found it amusing to realise that War and Peace also starts with a party.) But nearly two decades later, many of the attendees have ended up as supporters of the problematic 'Law and Justice' party which currently governs the country. Applebaum would now cross the road to avoid them, and they would do the same to her, let alone behave themselves at a cordial reception. The result of this autobiographical detail is that by personalising the argument, Applebaum avoids the trap of making too much of high-minded abstract argument for 'democracy', and additionally makes her book compellingly spicy too. Yet the strongest part of this book is also its weakest. By individualising the argument, it often feels that Applebaum is settling a number of personal scores. She might be very well justified in doing this, but at times it feels like the reader has walked in halfway through some personal argument and is being asked to judge who is in the right. Furthermore, Applebaum's account of contemporary British politics sometimes deviates into the cartoonish: nothing was egregiously incorrect in any of her summations, but her explanation of the Brexit referendum result didn't read as completely sound. Nevertheless, this lively and entertaining book that can be read with profit, even if you disagree with significant portions of it, and its highly-personal approach makes it a refreshing change from similar contemporary political analysis (eg. David Runciman's How Democracy Ends) which reaches for that more 'objective' line.

The Man in the Red Coat (2019) Julian Barnes As rich as the eponymous red coat that adorns his cover, Julian Barnes quasi-biography of French gynaecologist Samuel-Jean Pozzi (1846 1918) is at once illuminating, perplexing and downright hilarious. Yet even that short description is rather misleading, for this book evades classification all manner number of ways. For instance, it is unclear that, with the biographer's narrative voice so obviously manifest, it is even a biography in the useful sense of the word. After all, doesn't the implied pact between author and reader require the biographer to at least pretend that they are hiding from the reader? Perhaps this is just what happens when an author of very fine fiction turns his hand to non-fiction history, and, if so, it represents a deeper incursion into enemy territory after his 1984 metafictional Flaubert's Parrot. Indeed, upon encountering an intriguing mystery in Pozzi's life crying out for a solution, Barnes baldly turns to the reader, winks and states: These matters could, of course, be solved in a novel. Well, quite. Perhaps Barnes' broader point is that, given that's impossible for the author to completely melt into air, why not simply put down your cards and have a bit of fun whilst you're at it? If there's any biography that makes the case for a rambling and lightly polemical treatment, then it is this one. Speaking of having fun, however, two qualities you do not expect in a typical biography is simply how witty they can be, as well as it having something of the whiff of the thriller about it. A bullet might be mentioned in an early chapter, but given the name and history of Monsieur Pozzi is not widely known, one is unlikely to learn how he lived his final years until the closing chapters. (Or what happened to that turtle.) Humour is primarily incorporated into the book in two main ways: first, by explicitly citing the various wits of the day ( What is a vice? Merely a taste you don t share. etc.), but perhaps more powerful is the gentle ironies, bon mots and observations in Barnes' entirely unflappable prose style, along with the satire implicit in him writing this moreish pseudo-biography to begin with. The opening page, with its steadfast refusal to even choose where to begin, is somewhat characteristic of Barnes' method, so if you don't enjoy the first few pages then you are unlikely to like the rest. (Indeed, the whole enterprise may be something of an acquired taste. Like Campari.) For me, though, I was left wryly grinning and often couldn't wait to turn the page. Indeed, at times it reminded me of a being at a dinner party with an extremely charming guest at the very peak of his form as a wit and raconteur, delighting the party with his rambling yet well-informed discursive on his topic de jour. A significant book, and a book of significance.

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