Search Results: "vorlon"

22 November 2016

Steve Langasek: A new chapter

I don't often write on this blog, and when I do, it's either tech related, or light life stuff. Over the next few weeks, it's going to get a lot more political. If you currently follow this blog for its technical content, you may be tempted to tune out. I would encourage you to stay and listen. I'm passionate about the technology that I work on; but the greatest problems facing our world today are not ones that will be solved with software. American democracy is in bad shape, and it's because of what we're doing to it. This is not a problem of the Right or of the Left; it is not a problem that began with the election of Donald Trump, and it's not a problem that will go away at the end of his term. It is partly a structural problem with the way our elections work, but more than that it's a problem of how we're splitting into separate tribes, isolating ourselves from those who don't agree with us. As Russ Allbery wrote the morning after the election, everything about how we organize ourselves online today - and how we let Facebook and Twitter organize us - leads us to surround ourselves with people who already think the same way we do. That leaves all of us with huge blind spots for other people in our country, and it stifles the free exchange of ideas that is so essential for a healthy democracy. We need leaders who will work to make America a better and more just place for all our neighbors, not just a two-party system that plays tug-of-war using two different sets of voters that feel shut out. And the way we organize ourselves today (online and off) does not let us recognize those leaders. There's a lot of talk now about Facebook changing how it decides what to show people; and maybe they can manage to help everyone's online experience be a little less of a bubble. But part of the change needs to come from us. We need to be willing to engage, civilly, with people whose perspective is different from ours, and make the effort to understand where the other is coming from. So for the next few weeks, I'm going to talk. And I'm going to listen. I have no unique qualifications to speak about the country's issues. But I do have a perspective of my own, which might be different enough from yours to be useful. I was born and raised in Iowa, and graduated from college there. This election cycle, I learned that Iowa holds the distinction of being the state with the lowest percentage of college-educated whites. I'm part of that statistic, because a few years after graduating I moved to Portland, Oregon - a place that's notoriously so far to the left of what we think of as the middle, that it actually has anarchists who would shamefully use a peaceful protest as cover to commit property crime. So I know a few things about the people in each state, that I think the other should hear. I'm also that rarest of creatures, a Portlander who goes to church (Catholic). But I still choose as my neighbors the weird, wonderful, and welcoming community that we have here, whatever Glenn Beck might think. I have a son, and I worry about what kind of world he'll grow up to live in. I work in software, which means I'm doing a lot better than a lot of people in the country right now; it also means that from where I sit, I see trends already in progress that will have an effect on the working class and the middle class that makes NAFTA look like a gnat's fart in comparison. And so I worry for what kind of world we will all live in, if we don't make some changes fast. Let's have a conversation. No comments enabled on this blog, but you can find me on G+ or on Facebook.

18 August 2016

Zlatan Todori : DebConf16 - new age in Debian community gathering

DebConf16 Finally got some time to write this blog post. DebConf for me is always something special, a family gathering of weird combination of geeks (or is weird a default geek state?). To be honest, I finally can compare Debian as hacker conference to other so-called hacker conferences. With that hat on, I can say that Debian is by far the most organized and highest quality conference. Maybe I am biased, but I don't care too much about that. I simply love Debian and that is no secret. So lets dive into my view on DebConf16 which was held in Cape Town, South Africa. Cape Town This was the first time we had conference on African continent (and I now see for the first time DebConf bid for Asia, which leaves only Australia and beautiful Pacific islands to start a bid). Cape Town by itself, is pretty much Europe-like city. That was kinda a bum for me on first day, especially as we were hosted at University of Cape Town (which is quite beautiful uni) and the surrounding neighborhood was very European. Almost right after the first day I was fine because I started exploring the huge city. Cape Town is really huge, it has by stats ~4mil people, and unofficially it has ~6mil. Certainly a lot to explore and I hope one day to be back there (I actually hope as soon as possible). The good, bad and ugly I will start with bad and ugly as I want to finish with good notes. Racism down there is still HUGE. You don't have signs on the road saying that, but there is clearly separation between white and black people. The houses near uni all had fences on walls (most of them even electrical ones with sharp blades on it) with bars on windows. That just bring tensions and certainly doesn't improve anything. To be honest, if someone wants to break in they still can do easily so the fences maybe need to bring intimidation but they actually only bring tension (my personal view). Also many houses have sign of Armed Force Response (something in those lines) where in case someone would start breaking in, armed forces would come to protect the home. Also compared to workforce, white appear to hold most of profit/big business positions and fields, while black are street workers, bar workers etc etc. On the street you can feel from time to time the tension between people. Going out to bars also showed the separation - they were either almost exclusively white or exclusively black. Very sad state to see. Sharing love and mixing is something that pushes us forward and here I saw clear blockades for such things. The bad part of Cape Town is, and this is not only special to Cape Town but to almost all major cities, is that small crime is on wide scale. Pickpocketing here is something you must pay attention to it. To me, personally, nothing happened but I heard a lot of stories from my friends on whom were such activities attempted (although I am not sure did the criminals succeed). Enough of bad as my blog post will not change this and it is a topic for debate and active involvement which I can't unfortunately do at this moment. THE GOOD! There are so many great local people I met! As I mentioned, I want to visit that city again and again and again. If you don't fear of those bad things, this city has great local cuisine, a lot of great people, awesome art soul and they dance with heart (I guess when you live in rough times, you try to use free time at your best). There were difference between white and black bars/clubs - white were almost like standard European, a lot of drinking and not much dancing, and black were a lot of dancing and not much drinking (maybe the economical power has something to do with it but I certainly felt more love in black bars). Cape Town has awesome mountain, the Table Mountain. I went on hiking with my friends, and I must say (again to myself) - do the damn hiking as much as possible. After every hike I feel so inspired, that I will start thinking that I hate myself for not doing it more often! The view from Table mountain is just majestic (you can even see the Cape of Good Hope). The WOW moments are just firing up in you. Now lets transfer to DebConf itself. As always, organization was on quite high level. I loved the badge design, it had a map and nice amount of information on it. The place we stayed was kinda not that good but if you take it into account that those a old student dorms (in we all were in female student dorm :D ) it is pretty fancy by its own account. Talks were near which is always good. The general layout of talks and front desk position was perfect in my opinion. All in one place basically. Wine and Cheese this year was kinda funny story because of the cheese restrictions but Cheese cabal managed to pull out things. It was actually very well organized. Met some new people during the party/ceremony which always makes me grow as a person. Cultural mix on DebConf is just fantastic. Not only you learn a lot about Debian, hacking on it, but sheer cultural diversity makes this small con such a vibrant place and home to a lot. Debian Dinner happened in Aquarium were I had nice dinner and chat with my old friends. Aquarium by itself is a thing where you can visit and see a lot of strange creatures that live on this third rock from Sun. Speaking of old friends - I love that I Apollo again rejoined us (by missing the DebConf15), seeing Joel again (and he finally visited Banja Luka as aftermath!), mbiebl, ah, moray, Milan, santiago and tons of others. Of course we always miss a few such as zack and vorlon this year (but they had pretty okay-ish reasons I would say). Speaking of new friends, I made few local friends which makes me happy and at least one Indian/Hindu friend. Why did I mention this separately - well we had an accident during Group Photo (btw, where is our Lithuanian, German based nowdays, photographer?!) where 3 laptops of our GSoC students were stolen :( . I was luckily enough to, on behalf of Purism, donate Librem11 prototype to one of them, which ended up being the Indian friend. She is working on real time communications which is of interest also to Purism for our future projects. Regarding Debian Day Trip, Joel and me opted out and we went on our own adventure through Cape Town in pursue of meeting and talking to local people, finding out interesting things which proved to be a great decision. We found about their first Thursday of month festival and we found about Mama Africa restaurant. That restaurant is going into special memories (me playing drums with local band must always be a special memory, right?!). Huh, to be honest writing about DebConf would probably need a book by itself and I always try to keep my posts as short as possible so I will try to stop here (maybe I write few bits in future more about it but hardly). Now the notes. Although I saw the racial segregation, I also saw the hope. These things need time. I come from country that is torn apart in nationalism and religious hate so I understand this issues is hard and deep on so many levels. While the tensions are high, I see people try to talk about it, try to find solution and I feel it is slowly transforming into open society, where we will realize that there is only one race on this planet and it is called - HUMAN RACE. We are all earthlings, and as sooner we realize that, sooner we will be on path to really build society up and not fake things that actually are enslaving our minds. I just want in the end to say thank you DebConf, thank you Debian and everyone could learn from this community as a model (which can be improved!) for future societies.

24 October 2014

Enrico Zini: systemd-cryptsetup-password

cryptsetup password and parallel boot Since parallel boot happened, during boot the cryptsetup password prompt in my system gets flooded with other boot messages. I fixed it, as suggested in #764555, installing plymouth, then editing /etc/default/grub to add splash to GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash"

Besides showing pretty pictures (and most importantly, getting them out of my way if I press ESC), plymouth also provides a user prompt that works with parallel boot which sounds like what I needed.

13 October 2014

John Goerzen: Update on the systemd issue

The other day, I wrote about my poor first impressions of systemd in jessie. Here s an update. I d like to start with the things that are good. I found the systemd community to be one of the most helpful in Debian, and #debian-systemd IRC channel to be especially helpful. I was in there for quite some time yesterday, and appreciated the help from many people, especially Michael. This is a nontechnical factor, but is extremely important; this has significantly allayed my concerns about systemd right there. There are things about the systemd design that impress. The dependency system and configuration system is a lot more flexible than sysvinit. It is also a lot more complicated, and difficult to figure out what s happening. I am unconvinced of the utility of parallelization of boot to begin with; I rarely reboot any of my Linux systems, desktops or servers, and it seems to introduce needless complexity. Anyhow, on to the filesystem problem, and a bit of a background. My laptop runs ZFS, which is somewhat similar to btrfs in that it s a volume manager (like LVM), RAID manager (like md), and filesystem in one. My system runs LVM, and inside LVM, I have two ZFS pools (volume groups): one, called rpool, that is unencrypted and holds mainly the operating system; and the other, called crypt, that is stacked atop LUKS. ZFS on Linux doesn t yet have built-in crypto, which is why LVM is even in the picture here (to separate out the SSD at a level above ZFS to permit parts of it to be encrypted). This is a bit of an antiquated setup for me; as more systems have AES-NI, I m going to everything except /boot being encrypted. Anyhow, inside rpool is the / filesystem, /var, and /usr. Inside /crypt is /tmp and /home. Initially, I tried to just boot it, knowing that systemd is supposed to work with LSB init scripts, and ZFS has init scripts with carefully-planned dependencies. This was evidently not working, perhaps because /lib/systemd/systemd/ It turns out that systemd has a few assumptions that turn out to be less true with ZFS than otherwise. ZFS filesystems are normally not mounted via /etc/fstab; a ZFS pool has internal properties about which dataset gets mounted where (similar to LVM s actions after a vgscan and vgchange -ay). Even though there are ordering constraints in the units, systemd is writing files to /var before /var gets mounted, resulting in the mount failing (unlike ext4, ZFS by default will reject an attempt to mount over a non-empty directory). Partly this due to the debian-fixup.service, and partly it is due to systemd reacting to udev items like backlight. This problem was eventually worked around by doing zfs set mountpoint=legacy rpool/var, and then adding a line to fstab ( rpool/var /var zfs defaults 0 2 ) for /var and its descendent filesystems. This left the problem of /tmp; again, it wasn t getting mounted soon enough. In this case, it required crypttab to be processed first, and there seem to be a lot of bugs in the crypttab processing in systemd (more on that below). I eventually worked around that by adding After=cryptsetup.target to the zfs-import-cache.service file. For /tmp, it did NOT work to put it in /etc/fstab, because then it tried to mount it before starting cryptsetup for some reason. It probably didn t help that the system s cryptdisks.service is a symlink to /dev/null, a fact I didn t realize until after a lot of needless reboots. Anyhow, one thing I stumbled across was poor console control with systemd. On numerous occasions, I had things like two cryptsetup processes trying to read a password, plus an emergency mode console trying to do so. I had this memorable line of text at one point: (or type Control-D to continue): Please enter passphrase for disk athena-crypttank (crypt)! [ OK ] Stopped Emergency Shell. And here we venture into unsatisfying territory with systemd. One answer to this in IRC was to install plymouth, which apparently serializes console I/O. However, plymouth is an attractive boot animation in place of the text messages that normally get shown. I don t want an attractive boot animation . Nevertheless, neither systemd-sysv nor cryptsetup depends on plymouth, so by default, the prompt for a password at boot is obscured by various other text. Worse, plymouth doesn t support serial consoles, so at the moment booting a system that uses LUKS with systemd over a serial console is a matter of blind luck of typing the right password at the right time. In the end, though, the system booted and after a few more tweaks, the backlight buttons do their thing again. Whew! Update 2014-10-13: uau pointed out that Plymouth is more than a bootsplash, and can work with serial consoles, despite the description of the package. I stand corrected on that. (It is still the case, however, that packages don t depend on it where they should, and the default experience for people using cryptsetup is not very good.)

11 March 2014

Steve Langasek: My CuBox-i has arrived

A couple of weeks ago, Gunnar Wolf mentioned on IRC that his CuBox-i4 had arrived. This resulted in various jealous noises from me; having heard about this device making the rounds at the Kernel Summit, I ordered one for myself back in December, as part of the long-delayed HDification of our home entertainment system and coinciding with the purchase of a new Samsung SmartTV. We've been running an Intel Coppermine Celeron for a decade as a MythTV frontend and encoder (hardware-assisted with a PVR-250), which is fine for SD video, but really doesn't cut it for anything HD. So after finally getting a TV that would showcase HD in all its glory, I figured it was time to upgrade from an S-Video-out, barely-limping-along tower machine to something more modern with HDMI out, eSATA, hardware video decoding, and whose biggest problem is it's so small that it threatens to get lost in the wiring! Since placing the order, I've been bemused to find that the SmartTV is so smart that it has had a dramatic impact on how we consume media; between that and our decision to not be a boiled frog in the face of DISH Network's annual price increase, the MythTV frontend has become a much less important part of our entertainment center, well before I ever got a chance to lay hands on the intended replacement hardware. But that's a topic for another day. Anyway, the CuBox-i4 finally arrived in the mail on Friday, so of course I immediately needed to start hacking on it! Like Gunnar, who wrote last week about his own experience getting a "proper" Debian install on the box, I'm not content with running a binary distribution image prepared by some third party; I expect my hardware toys to run official distro packages assembled using official distro tools and, if at all possible, distributed on official distro images for a minimum of hassle. Whereas Gunnar was willing to settle for using third-party binaries for the bootloader and kernel, however, I'm not inclined to do any such thing. And between my stint at Linaro a few years ago and the recent work on Ubuntu for phones, I do have a little knowledge of Linux on ARM (probably just enough to be dangerous), so I set to work trying to get the CuBox-i4 bootable with stock Debian unstable. Being such a cutting-edge piece of hardware, that does pose some challenges. Support for the i.MX6 chip is in the process of being upstreamed to U-Boot, but the support for the CuBox-i devices isn't there yet, nor is the support for SPL on i.MX6 (which allows booting the variants of the CuBox-i with a single U-Boot build, instead of requiring a different bootloader build for each flavor). The CuBox-i U-Boot that SolidRun makes available (with source at github) is based on U-Boot 2013.10-rc4, so more than a full release behind Debian unstable, and the patches there don't apply to U-Boot 2014.01 without a bit of effort. But if it's worth doing, it's worth doing right, so I've taken the time to rebase the CuBox-i patches on top of 2014.01, publishing the results of the rebase to my own github repository and submitting a bug to the Debian U-Boot maintainers requesting its inclusion. The next step is to get a Debian kernel that not only works, but fully supports the hardware out of the box (a 3.13 generic arm kernel will boot on the machine, but little things like ethernet and hdmi don't work yet). I've created a page in the Debian wiki for tracking the status of this work.

3 February 2014

Kees Cook: compiler hardening in Ubuntu and Debian

Back in 2006, the compiler in Ubuntu was patched to enable most build-time security-hardening features (relro, stack protector, fortify source). I wasn t able to convince Debian to do the same, so Debian went the route of other distributions, adding security hardening flags during package builds only. I remain disappointed in this approach, because it means that someone who builds software without using the packaging tools on a non-Ubuntu system won t get those hardening features. Think of a sysadmin trying the latest nginx, or a vendor like Valve building games for distribution. On Ubuntu, when you do that ./configure && make you ll get the features automatically. Debian, at the time, didn t have a good way forward even for package builds since it lacked a concept of global package build flags . Happily, a solution (via dh) was developed about 2 years ago, and Debian package maintainers have been working to adopt it ever since. So, while I don t think any distro can match Ubuntu s method of security hardening compiler defaults, it is valuable to see the results of global package build flags in Debian on the package archive. I ve had an on-going graph of the state of build hardening on both Ubuntu and Debian for a while, but only recently did I put together a comparison of a default install. Very few people have all the packages in the archive installed, so it s a bit silly to only look at the archive statistics. But let s start there, just to describe what s being measured. Here s today s snapshot of Ubuntu s development archive for the past year (you can see development opening after a release every 6 months with an influx of new packages):

Here s today s snapshot of Debian s unstable archive for the past year (at the start of May you can see the archive unfreezing after the Wheezy release; the gaps were my analysis tool failing):

Ubuntu s lines are relatively flat because everything that can be built with hardening already is. Debian s graph is on a slow upward trend as more packages get migrated to dh to gain knowledge of the global flags. Each line in the graphs represents the count of source packages that contain binary packages that have at least 1 hit for a given category. ELF is just that: a source package that ultimately produces at least 1 binary package with at least 1 ELF binary in it (i.e. produces a compiled output). The Read-only Relocations ( relro ) hardening feature is almost always done for an ELF, excepting uncommon situations. As a result, the count of ELF and relro are close on Ubuntu. In fact, examining relro is a good indication of whether or not a source package got built with hardening of any kind. So, in Ubuntu, 91.5% of the archive is built with hardening, with Debian at 55.2%. The stack protector and fortify source features depend on characteristics of the source itself, and may not always be present in package s binaries even when hardening is enabled for the build (e.g. no functions got selected for stack protection, or no fortified glibc functions were used). Really these lines mostly indicate the count of packages that have a sufficiently high level of complexity that would trigger such protections. The PIE and immediate binding ( bind_now ) features are specifically enabled by a package maintainer. PIE can have a noticeable performance impact on CPU-register-starved architectures like i386 (ia32), so it is neither patched on in Ubuntu, nor part of the default flags in Debian. (And bind_now doesn t make much sense without PIE, so they usually go together.) It s worth noting, however, that it probably should be the default on amd64 (x86_64), which has plenty of available registers. Here is a comparison of default installed packages between the most recent stable releases of Ubuntu (13.10) and Debian (Wheezy). It s clear that what the average user gets with a default fresh install is better than what the archive-to-archive comparison shows. Debian s showing is better (74% built with hardening), though it is still clearly lagging behind Ubuntu (99%):

2014, Kees Cook. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License.

17 November 2013

Joachim Breitner: Breaking News: Debian TC leaked decision on init system

According to the German news page heisse news , the Debian Technical Committee has made a decision on the question about the default init system in Debian: There will be none! Instead, according to Ian Vorlon Bart, Debian will start to distribute a suspend-to-disk image to their users, with all daemons already started, completely eradicating the need for an init system. If you are able to read German, read all about it at Debian Technical Committee entscheidet sich gegen ein Init-System

3 August 2013

Steve Langasek: Network services and Upstart

So Debian bug #710747 led to an interesting discussion the other night on IRC which made me realize there are a lot of people who have yet to understand why sysvinit needs replacing. I can't speak to whether upstart solves this bug in particular. The tftpd-hpa package in Ubuntu (and in Debian experimental) does have an upstart job, and I have used tftpd-hpa on systems whose network interfaces are managed entirely with NetworkManager, and I have not seen this bug; but I can't say that this is more than coincidence. However, I can speak to how upstart provides facilities that address the general problem of starting services that require a working network connection to be present before they start up. Traditionally on Linux systems, init scripts could assume that the network connection is up before starting any services for the target runlevel. With LSB dependencies, you could also express this as

Required-Start:    $network

The trouble with both of these approaches is that they assume that there is a single point in time, early in the boot of the system, when the "network" is up. This was an ok assumption 15 years ago, when the Linux kernel initialized all devices serially and all our network configuration was static. But nowadays, you simply cannot rely on systems booting in such a way that the network is fully up shortly after boot - or in a way that you can block the system boot waiting for the network to be up. If all of our services would cope gracefully with being started without the network, this would be a non-issue. Unfortunately, not all network services are written in such a way as to work without a network; nor do they all cope with dynamic changes to interfaces or addresses. While it would be better if these services were written more robustly, since there's no shortage of daemons written this way, it's convenient that upstart provides tools for coping with this behavior in the meantime. Here's a real (simplified) example of an upstart job for a service that needs to wait for a non-loopback interface before it starts:

start on (local-filesystems and net-device-up IFACE!=lo)
stop on runlevel [!2345]
expect fork
respawn
exec nmbd -D

Now, you might also have a service that you only want to start up when a particular network device comes up. This is easily expressed in upstart, and might look like this hypothetical job:

start on net-device-up IFACE=wlan0
stop on net-device-down IFACE=wlan0
expect daemon
respawn
exec mydaemon

If you need to restart a daemon whenever the set of active network connections changes, that's less straightforward. Upstart doesn't have the notion of a 'restart' rule, so you would need two jobs to handle this - one for the daemon itself that starts on the first network connection, and a second job to trigger a restart of the daemon when the network status changes. For the tftpd-hpa case in the abovementioned bug, this might look like:

$ cat /etc/init/tftpd-hpa.conf
start on runlevel [2345]
stop on runlevel [!2345]
expect fork
respawn
script
        if [ -f $ DEFAULTS  ]; then
                . $ DEFAULTS 
        fi
        exec /usr/sbin/in.tftpd --listen  --user $ TFTP_USERNAME  --address $ TFTP_ADDRESS  $ TFTP_OPTIONS  $ TFTP_DIRECTORY 
end script
$ cat /etc/init/tftpd-hpa-restart.conf
start on net-device-up
task
instance $IFACE
script
        status tftpd-hpa   grep -q start/   stop
        restart tftpd-hpa
end script

For this case, upstart doesn't provide quite so great an advantage. It's nice to be able to use upstart natively for both pieces, but you can do the same thing with an init script plus an if-up.d script for ifupdown, which is what maintainers do today. I think adding a

restart
on

stanza to upstart in the future to address this would be a good idea. Though in any event, this is far simpler to do with upstart than with any if-up.d script I've ever seen for managing an initscript-based service. Between the more friendly declarative syntax, and the enhanced semantics for expressing when to run (or restart) a job, upstart offers clear advantages over other init systems.

8 June 2013

Michael Stapelberg: Survey answers part 1: systemd has too many dependencies, or it is bloated, or it does too many things, or is too complex

This blog post is the first of a series of posts dealing with the results of the Debian systemd survey. I intend to give a presentation at DebConf 2013, too, so you could either read my posts, or watch the talk, or both :-). The top concern shared by most people is:

systemd has too many dependencies, or it is bloated, or it does too many things, or is too complex

Now this concern actually has a lot of different facets, and I am trying to share my opinion on each of them. systemd has too many dependencies First, let s start with too many dependencies , because that is easy to check and reason about. I have created a document which lists all dependencies of the systemd binary itself (pid 1) and all the binaries which are currently shipped by the systemd Debian package. If you don t want to take my word for granted, please read that document. Have you read the document? Very nice! As you can see, the systemd binary itself has 10 dependencies (excluding libc). Now, the question is, what is bad about dependencies? Why do people list dependencies as a top concern?

Cyclic dependencies. When you hear that your init system depends on DBus, you might argue that there is a cyclic dependency here, because DBus needs to be started by the init system. However, systemd does NOT depend on dbus-daemon (!) to boot your machine. Instead of using the system bus, it uses a private UNIX socket. Therefore, systemd uses DBus merely as a serialization format for IPC between its different processes. Only when you want to access systemd via its API as a user (non-root), you actually use the system bus. Since we are talking about DBus: DBus provides a well-tested serialization format and IPC mechanism so that systemd doesn t have to reinvent the wheel and instead benefits from wide support within languages.
Complicated code. I feel like there is the implicit assumption that lots of dependencies correlate with complicated code that is easy to break. I encourage you to have a look at systemd s source code: look for the places where specific libraries are used, e.g. enforce_user which uses libcap. You ll notice that the code is not complex and usage of the libraries is clear.
Software dragging in lots of library packages. The libraries which systemd uses are already in widespread use (e.g. DBus, udev, selinux, libcap, pcre, ). On a typical Debian installation, only very few of them will be dragged in by systemd, if at all. As an example, on a fresh Debian Wheezy installation, less than 10 packages will end up on your machine when running apt-get install systemd .
More memory use. The Linux kernel maps libraries into memory only once, no matter how many processes use them. As stated in the dependency list, on machines where the libraries are not already loaded, systemd brings in about 500 KiB of additional memory-mapped libraries in the worst case. On the machines we have these days, this is a reasonable cost to pay for all the benefits systemd gets us. This holds true on embedded systems with only a few MiB of RAM and especially on typical workstations with 8+ GiB of RAM.

systemd is bloated Now, let s talk about bloat. Again, this is a point which has many facets. I d like to quote the Wikipedia definition of software bloat:

Software bloat is a process whereby successive versions of a computer program become perceptibly slower, use more memory or processing power, or have higher hardware requirements than the previous version whilst making only dubious user-perceptible improvements.

The first part of the definition certainly does not match systemd it is measurably faster than sysvinit. As for memory usage: systemd s RSS is 1.8 MiB, whereas sysvinit uses 0.8 MiB. As I argued on the More memory use point in the dependencies section, I think the additional resource cost is well worth the benefits. Also note that systemd s features are NOT all implemented in the binary which is PID 1. As explained in the dependency list, systemd consists of many cleanly separated binaries. So if a new version of systemd gathers an additional feature, this does not mean that your PID 1 will be bigger. While systemd runs on any hardware, it has an indirect hardware requirement: it requires some Linux kernel features (which are all enabled in Debian kernels). That might rule out usage of systemd on really old embedded hardware where you don t have a chance to update the kernel. While it is sad that those machines cannot profit from systemd, switching to systemd as a default has no downside either: Debian continues to support sysvinit for quite some time, so these machines will continue to work even with upcoming Debian versions. systemd does too many things The Wikipedia definition continues:

[ ] perceived bloat can occur from the software servicing a large, diverse marketplace with many differing requirements. Most end users will feel they only need some limited subset of the available functions and will regard the others as unnecessary bloat, even if people with different requirements do use them.

I think the last part of the Wikipedia definition applies to systemd: it does service a large and diverse marketplace . That marketplace is the entirety of existing software which is started by an init system. Also, systemd can be used on a wide range of hardware (embedded devices, tablets, phones, notebooks, desktops, servers) which requires different features. As an example: on a desktop system you typically don t care strongly about a watchdog feature, but on embedded or servers that feature is very handy. Similarly, on a tablet, forward secure sealing of logfiles is not as important as on a server. Therefore, I can understand if you feel that you don t need many of the features systemd provides. But please think of other users and maintainers who are very happy with systemd s benefits. Also note that while systemd supports many things (in separate binaries!), you don t have to use them all. It still makes sense to ship them all in the same package. Take coreutils as another example in that area. The binaries belong together, even though you most likely haven t used all of them (e.g. od, pr, ptx, :-)). systemd is too complex The remaining concern is that systemd is too complex. In my experience, complexity is often inherent to a specific area and one cannot simply make it go away. Instead, there are different models of how that complexity is represented. Think of the monolithic Linux kernel versus the MINIX microkernel. The latter has a very small amount of lines of source in the kernel, but puts the complexity into userspace. The former uses a different approach with more source in the kernel. The arguments between both camps show that neither is clearly right or clearly wrong. In a way, sysvinit represents the MINIX model: it has a small core (the init binary itself), but a lot of complexity in shell scripts and external programs. The fact that solutions are copied from one init script to another leads to lots of subtle errors and makes code reuse really hard. systemd however has more source code in the binaries, but requires only very simple, descriptive, textual configuration instead of complex init scripts. To me, it seems preferable to have the complexity in a single place instead of distributed across lots of people and projects. Conclusion In a way, you are right. systemd centralizes complexity from tons of init scripts into a single place. However, it therefore makes it very easy for maintainers to write service files (equivalent of an init script) and provides a consistent and reliable interface for service management. Furthermore, it is different than sysvinit, and different solutions often seem complex at first. While systemd consumes more resources than sysvinit, it uses them to make more information available about services; its finer-grained service management requires more state-keeping, but in turn offers you more control over your services.

8 May 2013

Steve Langasek: Plymouth is not a bootsplash

Congrats to the Debian release team on the new release of Debian 7.0 (wheezy)! Leading up to the release, a meme making the rounds on Planet Debian has been to play a #newinwheezy game, calling out some of the many new packages in 7.0 that may be interesting to users. While upstart as a package is nothing new in wheezy, the jump to upstart 1.6.1 from 0.6.6 is quite a substantial change. It does bring with it a new package, mountall, which by itself isn't terribly interesting because it just provides an upstart-ish replacement for some core scripts from the initscripts package (essentially, /etc/rcS.d/*mount*). Where things get interesting (and, typically, controversial) is the way in which mountall leverages plymouth to achieve this. What is plymouth? There is a great deal of misunderstanding around plymouth, a fact I was reminded of again while working to get a modern version of upstart into wheezy. When Ubuntu first started requiring plymouth as an essential component of the boot infrastructure, there was a lot of outrage from users, particularly from Ubuntu Server users, who believed this was an attempt to force pretty splash screen graphics down their throats. Nothing could be further from the truth. Plymouth provides a splash screen, but that's not what plymouth is. What plymouth is, is a boot-time I/O multiplexer. And why, you ask, would upstart - or mountall, whose job is just to get the filesystem mounted at boot - need a boot-time I/O multiplexer? Why use plymouth? The simple answer is that, like everything else in a truly event-driven boot system, filesystem mounting is handled in parallel - with no defined order. If a filesystem is missing or fails an fsck, mountall may need to interact with the user to decide how to handle it. And if there's more than one missing or broken filesystem, and these are all being found in parallel, there needs to be a way to associate each answer from the user to the corresponding question from mountall, to avoid crossed signals... and lost data. One possible way to handle this would be for mountall to serialize the fsck's / mounts. But this is a pretty unsatisfactory answer; all other things (that is, boot reliability) being equal, admins would prefer their systems to boot as fast as possible, so that they can get back to being useful to users. So we reject the idea of solving the problem of serializing prompts by making mountall serialize all its filesystem checks. Another option would be to have mountall prompt directly on the console, doing its own serialization of the prompts (even though successful mounts / fscks continue to be run in parallel). This, too, is not desirable in the general case, both because some users actually would like to have pretty splash screens at boot time, and this would be incompatible with direct console prompting; and because mountall is not the only piece of software that need to prompt at boot time (see also: cryptsetup). Plymouth: not just a pretty face Enter plymouth, which provides the framework for serializing requests to the user while booting. It can provide a graphical boot splash, yes; ironically, even its own homepage suggests that this is its purpose. But it can also provide a text-only console interface, which is what you get automatically when booting without a splash boot argument, or even handle I/O over a serial console. Which is why, contrary to the initial intuitions of the s390 porters upon seeing this package, plymouth is available for all of Debian's Linux architectures in wheezy, s390 and s390x included, providing a consistent architecture for boot-time I/O for systems that need it - which is any machine using a modern boot system, such as upstart or systemd. Room for improvement Now, having a coherent architecture for your boot I/O is one thing; having a bug-free splash screen is another. The experience of plymouth in Ubuntu has certainly not been bug-free, with plymouth making significant demands of the kernel video layer. Recently, the binary video driver packages in Ubuntu have started to blacklist the framebuffer kernel driver entirely due to stability concerns, making plymouth splash screens a non-starter for users of these drivers and regressing the boot experience. One solution for this would be to have plymouth offload the video handling complexity to something more reliable and better tested. Plymouth does already have an X backend, but we don't use that in Ubuntu because even if we do have an X server, it normally starts much later than when we would want to display the splash screen. With Mir on the horizon for Ubuntu, however, and its clean separation between system and session compositors, it's possible that using a Mir backend - that can continue running even after the greeter has started, unlike the current situation where plymouth has to cede the console to the display manager when it starts - will become an appealing option. This, too, is not without its downsides. Needing to load plymouth when using crypted root filesystems already makes for a bloated initramfs; adding a system compositor to the initramfs won't make it any better, and introduces further questions about how to hand off between initramfs and root fs. Keeping your system compositor running from the initramfs post-boot isn't really ideal, particularly for low-memory systems; whereas killing the system compositor and restarting it will make it harder to provide a flicker-free experience. But for all that, it does have its architectural appeal, as it lets us use plymouth as long as we need to after boot. As the concept of static runlevels becomes increasingly obsolete in the face of dynamic systems, we need to design for the world where the distinction between "booting" and "booted" doesn't mean what it once did.

8 December 2012

Russ Allbery: Review: Peacekeeper

Review: Peacekeeper, by Laura E. Reeve

Series:	Major Ariane Kedros #1
Publisher:	Roc
Copyright:	December 2008
ISBN:	0-451-46245-9
Format:	Mass market
Pages:	324

Ariane Kedros is a pilot of a second-wave prospecting ship. Second-wave prospectors are the first explorers into new systems after slower-than-light generation ships haul in the beacons that add them to the FTL network. She's also a reserve major in the Consortium military, which is a point of ongoing tension with her business partner and employer. She disappears on missions for the intelligence branch that she can't talk about, and usually ends up drinking herself into a stupor when she returns. In actuality, Kedros is not her real name. It's a fake identity given her after the last war, a war in which humans detonated a temporal distortion warhead for the first time and possibly destroyed an entire solar system. Kedros was part of the team that launched the bomb and is, according to the Terran Expansion League (the other side of the all-human conflict), a war criminal. She's in the equivalent of a witness protection program, as are all the other people involved in the act. But someone has broken their cover and is picking them off, one by one, and her latest secret mission from the Consortium is to protect another member of the group. Peacekeeper is Reeve's first novel, and unfortunately this shows badly at the start of the book. The writing is choppy and awkward, the paragraph breaks are a bit off, and the sentence structure kept making my teeth itch. I'm not a good enough technical critic to put a finger on what's wrong, but the writing doesn't flow. I also found myself anticipating and completing sentences in my head, which is a sign of too many low-level cliches. A few dozen pages into the book, the writing was bothering me, I hadn't warmed to any of the characters, and I wasn't sure I was going to like it. Ariane grew on me, though, particularly once she got into her mission and started balancing a cover assignment and her actual work. She's hurt, suffering from what's probably post-traumatic stress disorder and self-medicating with alcohol, but she's smart and competent and the plot is sufficiently tricky to provide a lot of meat. Not only is someone after her old team, but she and her partner discovered something potentially major on their last trip, an old friend of her partner has been murdered, the Consortium and the Terrans are negotiating a peace treaty, and all this is happening under the watchful eye of a superior alien race. The Minoans are probably Reeve's best creation here (if a little too similar to Vorlons at times). They're absolutely neutral, but they do not want humanity messing with temporal distortion weapons and are trying to nudge (or push) the humans into peace and disarmament. They are sticklers for not imposing their cultural practices on others, attempting to judge humanity solely by its own rules, but they're utterly literal-minded about rules. They expect everyone to follow any stated rules exactly and to the letter, making them excellent but frustrating overseers of disarmament treaties. They also have a fascinating tendency to interact with people in roles rather than as individuals. This is clearly the first book in an ongoing series, and a lot of the setup is not resolved here. We get only glimpses of what Ariane and her partner may have found, and only a few interactions with the Minoans, while Ariane tracks down who is responsible for killing her former team. There's a bit too much torture for my taste, and the subplot of Ariane's struggle with alcoholism wasn't really what I wanted to read about, but the writing seemed to get substantially better and the plot kept me turning the pages. There's a quality to military SF written by people who have actually been in the military that I find hard to describe but that helps a book tremendously. It didn't surprise me at all to learn that Reeve served in the US Air Force, since Peacekeeper has that quality. It's less about technical accuracy and more about a feel, a sense of what it's like to be inside a military routine and interacting with other military personnel. The culture feels coherent, despite not being described in detail. I think it makes for good SF in general, since it conveys to someone like me (who has never been in the military) a semi-alien but completely coherent culture. It certainly improves this book; in general, I thought Reeve's military characters were more interesting and more believable than her non-military characters. With the rocky beginning, the unpolished writing, and a villain who wasn't entirely satisfactory, I can't quite recommend Peacekeeper, but it's not a bad read. I'm not sure if I'll pick up the sequels, but I did leave it curious about the unresolved plot threads and willing to learn more about Reeve's world. Followed by Vigilante. Rating: 6 out of 10

26 November 2012

Steve Langasek: Upstart in Debian

Good news, everyone! So as of last Sunday, this works on all Linux archs in Debian unstable and gives you a modern version of upstart:

echo 'Yes, do as I say!'   apt-get -o DPkg::options=--force-remove-essential -y --force-yes install upstart

Thanks to the ifupdown, sysvinit, and udev maintainers for their cooperation in getting upstart support in place; to the Debian release team for accomodating the late changes needed for upstart to be supported in wheezy; and to Scott for his past maintenance of upstart in Debian. Benchmarking One of the consequences is that it's now possible to do meaningful head-to-head comparisons of boot speed between sysvinit (with startpar), upstart, and systemd. At one time or another people have tested systemd vs. sysvinit when using bash as /bin/sh, and upstart vs. sysvinit, and systemd vs. sysvinit+startpar, and there are plenty of bootcharts floating around showing results of one init system or another on one distro or another, but I'm not aware of anyone having done a real, fair comparison of the three solutions, changing nothing but the init system. I've done some initial comparisons in a barebones sid VM, and the results are definitely interesting. Sysvinit with startpar (the default in Debian) can boot a stock sid install, with no added services, in somewhere between 3.37 and 3.42 seconds (three runs). That's not a whole lot, but on the other hand this is a system with a single filesystem and no interesting services yet. Is this really as fast as we can boot? No, even this minimal system can boot faster. Testing with upstart shows that upstart can do the same job in between 3.03 and 3.19 seconds (n=3, mean=3.09). This confirms what we'd already seen in Ubuntu, that it makes a difference to boot speed to have filesystem mounting handled by an integrated process that understands the whole system instead of as a group of serialized shell scripts. What about systemd? The same test gives a boot time between 2.32 and 2.85 seconds (n=4, mean=2.48). Interesting; what would make systemd faster than upstart in sid? Well, a quick look at the system shows one possible contributing factor: the rsyslog package in Debian has a systemd unit file, but not an upstart job file. Dropping in the /etc/init/rsyslog.conf from Ubuntu has a noticeable impact, and brings the upstart boot time down nearer to that of systemd (2.78-3.03s, n=5, mean=2.92). Besides telling me that it's time to start spamming Debian maintainers with wishlist bugs asking them to include upstart jobs in their packages, this suggests that the remaining difference in boot time may be due to the outstanding init scripts in rcS.d that are made built-in no-ops by systemd but not (yet) by upstart in Debian (e.g., hwclock, hostname, udev-mtab). (In Ubuntu, /etc/rcS.d has long since been emptied out in favor of upstart jobs in the common case, since the time it takes to get to runlevel=2 is definitely a major issue for boot speed and boot parallelization.) It also gives the lie to the claim that's been made in various places that spawning shells is a major bottleneck for upstart vs. systemd. More study is certainly needed to confirm this, but at least this naive first test suggests that in spite of the purported benefits of hard-coding boot-time policies in C code, upstart with its default degree of runtime configurability is at least in the ballpark of systemd. Indeed, when OpenSuSE switched from upstart to systemd, it seems that something else in the stack managed to nullify any benefit from improving the boot-time performance of apparmor. Contrary to what some would have you believe, systemd is not some kind of silver bullet for boot speed. Upstart, with its boot-time flexibility and its long history of real-world testing in Ubuntu, is a formidable competitor to systemd in the boot speed department - and a solid solution to the many longstanding boot-time ordering bugs in Debian, which still affect users of sysvinit. I've published the bootcharts for the above tests here. Between the fact that Debian's bootchart package logs by default to /var/log/bootchart.tgz (thus overwriting on every boot) and the fact that these tests are in a VM, I haven't bothered to include the raw data, just the bootcharts themselves. The interested reader can probably generate more interesting boot charts of their own anyway - in particular, it will be interesting to see how the different init systems perform with more complicated filesystem layouts, or when booting a less trivial set of services. Other musings The boot charts have been created with the bootchart package rather than with bootchart2. For one thing, it turns out that bootchart2 includes systemd units, not init scripts; so when replacing bootchart with bootchart2, the non-matching init script is left behind and systemd in particular gets terribly confused. This is now reported as Bug #694403. In an amusing twist, while I was experimenting with bootchart2, I also noticed that having systemd installed would slow down booting with other init systems, because systemd installs udev rules which take a noticeable amount of time to run a helper command at boot even though the helper should be a no-op. So if you're doing boot speed testing of other init systems, be sure you don't have systemd on the system at the time!

19 November 2012

Steve Langasek: Pflaumenkuchen

This was a good year for plums in the garden, both for the yellow plums and for the Italian prunes - enough so that it took some doing to figure out what to do with them all. Since I'm not in a hurry to set up a still and make slivovic, and you can only pawn so many plums off on friends and neighbors, I had on the order of 15 pounds of Italian prunes to dispense with. With our change of diet to eliminate extra carbs, Patty and I have both been experimenting with reduced-carb desserts in the kitchen. And I've always been fond of central European (e.g., German) desserts, which tend to be sweetened much more lightly than American equivalents. Indeed, my earliest impression of "coffee cake" comes from the home of an elderly couple who were friends of the family, who served a delicious plum cake in their home. She was from Bavaria, so I guess she probably wouldn't have called it Zwetchgendatschi like the Austrians do (if they even really call it that; I have my suspicions that this is a made-up name designed to poke fun at the foreigners). Maybe she would have called it Pflaumenkuchen. The Internet calls it "Polish plum cake". Whatever you call it, it's tasty, and I aimed to recreate it at home. The plums are now nearly a month gone, but after multiple iterations the cake turned out well enough that I feel compelled to share it with the Internet. Since we have friends who are dairy-intolerant, this particular recipe is tailored to be low-carb and dairy-free. It doesn't lose anything in the taste for being made with a restricted set of ingredients. The original recipe did call for a streusel, and a non-dairy streusel is pretty pointless so this recipe simply omits it. Metric cooks, avert your eyes. ;)

1 c almond flour

1 tsp baking powder

tsp salt

c Steviva blend

3 tbsp grapeseed oil

c milk

1 large egg

12 fresh plums, pitted and halved

tsp cloves

Lightly coat an 8"x8" pan with cooking spray. Heat oven to 350 degrees. In medium bowl, combine flour, baking powder, salt and Steviva. Add grapeseed oil, milk and egg. Beat at medium speed 4 minutes. Pour batter into prepared pan. Place plums on top, cut side up, pushing down slightly into batter. Sprinkle cloves over the plums. Bake about 50 minutes or until a toothpick tests clean. Let the cake cool in the pan so the plum juices will be reabsorbed to create a moist cake. Sprinkle with confectioners' sugar, if desired, and cut into 16 squares.

[edit: the Internet is bad at me for my badly spelled german. Spelling corrected. ;)]

Steve Langasek: Pflaumkuchen

This was a good year for plums in the garden, both for the yellow plums and for the Italian prunes - enough so that it took some doing to figure out what to do with them all. Since I'm not in a hurry to set up a still and make slivovic, and you can only pawn so many plums off on friends and neighbors, I had on the order of 15 pounds of Italian prunes to dispense with. With our change of diet to eliminate extra carbs, Patty and I have both been experimenting with reduced-carb desserts in the kitchen. And I've always been fond of central European (e.g., German) desserts, which tend to be sweetened much more lightly than American equivalents. Indeed, my earliest impression of "coffee cake" comes from the home of an elderly couple who were friends of the family, who served a delicious plum cake in their home. She was from Bavaria, so I guess she probably wouldn't have called it Zwetchgendatschi like the Austrians do (if they even really call it that; I have my suspicions that this is a made-up name designed to poke fun at the foreigners). Maybe she would have called it Pflaumkuchen. The Internet calls it "Polish plum cake". Whatever you call it, it's tasty, and I aimed to recreate it at home. The plums are now nearly a month gone, but after multiple iterations the cake turned out well enough that I feel compelled to share it with the Internet. Since we have friends who are dairy-intolerant, this particular recipe is tailored to be low-carb and dairy-free. It doesn't lose anything in the taste for being made with a restricted set of ingredients. The original recipe did call for a streusel, and a non-dairy streusel is pretty pointless so this recipe simply omits it. Metric cooks, avert your eyes. ;)

1 c almond flour

1 tsp baking powder

tsp salt

c Steviva blend

3 tbsp grapeseed oil

c milk

1 large egg

12 fresh plums, pitted and halved

tsp cloves

Lightly coat an 8"x8" pan with cooking spray. Heat oven to 350 degrees. In medium bowl, combine flour, baking powder, salt and Steviva. Add grapeseed oil, milk and egg. Beat at medium speed 4 minutes. Pour batter into prepared pan. Place plums on top, cut side up, pushing down slightly into batter. Sprinkle cloves over the plums. Bake about 50 minutes or until a toothpick tests clean. Let the cake cool in the pan so the plum juices will be reabsorbed to create a moist cake. Sprinkle with confectioners' sugar, if desired, and cut into 16 squares.

28 October 2012

Steve Langasek: SecureBoot in Ubuntu 12.10

The 12.10 release is the first version of Ubuntu that supports Secure Boot out of the box. In what is largely an accident of release timing, from what I can tell (and please correct me if I'm wrong), this actually makes Ubuntu 12.10 the first general release of any OS to support Secure Boot. (Windows 8 of course is also now available; and I'm sure Matthew Garrett, who has been a welcome collaborator throughout this process, has everything in good order for the upcoming Fedora 18 release.) That's certainly something of a bittersweet achievement. I'm proud of the work we've done to ensure Ubuntu will continue to work out of the box on the consumer hardware of the future; in spite of the predictable accusations on the blogowebs that we've sold out, I sleep well at night knowing that this was the pragmatic decision to make, maximizing users' freedom to use their hardware. All the same, I worry about what the landscape is going to look like in a few years' time. The Ubuntu first-stage EFI bootloader is signed by Microsoft, but the key that is used for signing is one that's recommended by Microsoft, not one that's required by the Windows 8 certification requirements. Will all hardware include this key in practice? The Windows 8 requirements also say that every machine must allow the user to disable Secure Boot. Will manufacturers get this right, and will users be able to make use of it in the event the manufacture didn't include the Microsoft-recommended key? Only time will tell. But I do think the Linux community is going to have to remain engaged on this for some time to come, and possibly hold OEMs' feet to the fire for shipping hardware that will only work with Windows 8. But that's for the future. For now, we have a technical solution in 12.10 that solves the parts of the problem that we can solve.

The first-stage UEFI bootloader on 12.10 install media is a build of Matthew Garrett's shim code, embedding a Canonical UEFI CA and signed by Microsoft. This is pretty much the same as the Fedora solution, just with a different key and a binary built on the Ubuntu build infrastructure rather than Fedora's. If Secure Boot is not enabled, the second-stage bootloader is booted without applying any checks. If Secure Boot is enabled, the signature is checked on the second stage before passing control, as expected.
The second-stage bootloader is GRUB 2. Readers may remember that there were earlier concerns about GPLv3 in the mix for some Ubuntu use cases, but these have been ironed out now in discussion with the FSF. This enables us to continue to provide a consistent boot experience across the different ways Ubuntu may be booted.
We are providing signed kernel images in the Ubuntu archive and using them by default. When a signed kernel is present, this allows the bootloader to pass control to the kernel without first calling ExitBootServices(), letting the kernel apply any EFI quirks it might need to (such as for bug #1065263.
Unlike Fedora, however, we are not enforcing kernel signature checking. If the kernel is unsigned and the system has Secure Boot turned on, the Ubuntu grub will fall back to calling ExitBootServices() first, and then booting the kernel. This way, users still have the freedom to boot their own kernels on Secure Boot-enabled hardware, possibly with a slightly degraded boot experience, while the firmware remains protected from untrusted code.
We are not enforcing module signing. This allows external modules, such as dkms packages, to continue to work with SB turned on. While there's potential value in being able to verify the source of kernel modules at load time, that's not something implemented for this round, and we would want such enforcement to be optional regardless.

This first release gives us preliminary support for booting on Secure Boot, but there's more work to be done to provide a full solution that's sustainable over the long term. We'll be discussing some of that this week at UDS in Copenhagen.

The 12.10 solution does not include support for SuSE's MOK (machine owner key) approach. Supporting this is important to us, as this helps to ensure users have freedom and control over their machines instead of being forced to choose between disabling Secure Boot and only running vendor-provided kernels. Among other things, we want to make sure people have the freedom to continue doing kernel and bootloader development, without having to muddle their way through impossible firmware menus!
We will be enhancing the tooling around db/dbx updates, to ensure that Ubuntu users of Secure Boot receive the same protection against malware that Windows users do. This also addresses the need for publishing revocations in the event of bugs in our grub or kernel implementations that would compromise the security of Secure Boot.
Netboot support is currently nonexistent. The major blocker seems to be that unlike in BIOS booting we can't rely on the firmware's PXE stack, and in practice GRUB2's tftp support doesn't seem to be very robust yet. Once we have a working GRUB2 image that successfully reads files over tftp, we can evaluate signing it for Secure Boot as well.

And as part of our committment to enabling new hardware on the current LTS release, we will be backporting this work for inclusion in 12.04.2. It remains to be decided how Debian will approach the Secure Boot question. At DebConf 12, many people seemed to consider it a foregone conclusion that Debian would never agree to include binaries in main signed by third-party keys. I don't think that should be a given; I think allowing third-party signatures in main for hardware compatibility is consistent with Debian's principles, and refusing to make Debian compatible with this hardware out of the box does nothing to advance user freedom. I hope to see frank discussion post-wheezy about keeping Debian relevant on consumer hardware of the future.

15 July 2012

Steve Langasek: For those who care about my foot

Sitting in the airport during a layover on my way back from DebConf is one of the few times of year that time and motivation come together and routinely lead me to blog. Each year's DebConf has been special in its own way. This year at DebConf 12, in addition to the usual routine of catching up with all my far-away Debian friends, and of making new Debian friends in a country I've never been before, I got a special treat: my first opportunity to experience the practice of medicine in a foreign country. Last Saturday after arriving in Managua, I discovered that the very pretty paving stones making up the hotel walkway were also very slippery when wet, and the thin rubber strips that had been helpfully put in place to make them less slippery did not measurably succeed in doing so. So as it was raining that afternoon (as it does nearly every afternoon this time of year in Nicaragua), I slipped, and made the critical error of not falling. Instead, I stopped my slide - as it happens, by using the big toe of my left foot as if it were a roller skate brake. I don't recommend this, particularly if, as in my case, you already had it on your todo list to consult a podiatrist after DebConf regarding an ongoing feeling of weakness in precisely that part of precisely that foot. So while everything seemed fine the next day, Monday I woke up early with excruciating pain in my foot which, having forgotten about the incident two days prior, seemed to come from nowhere. After favoring the foot for another day and trying to keep the pain at bay using just OTC drugs, by Tuesday my foot was quite swollen and a source of concern. So I visited the clinic on the university campus, where the doctor diagnosed me with a dropped arch plus cellulitis due to bacteria entering through some invisible cut. Conclusion: university campus clinics are equally useless the world over. But at least in addition to pointlessly prescribing antibiotics, the doctor also prescribed some anti-inflammatory drugs to help bring the swelling down. Nevertheless, my questionable mobility kept both me and Patty from attending the day trip on Wednesday, which was a real shame as I had been keen to climb a volcano that day with my fellow Debian Developers (which in the end didn't happen for anyone, but that's a story for someone else's blog). Instead I took it easy for the day at the hotel, together with a few others who had opted not to attend the day trip, catching up on email and other work and hoping matters would improve. But by the end of the day the swelling was as bad as ever, if not worse, and I had no idea what was going on. Was it broken? Was something dislocated? And so I decided that the following day I would go to the hospital. The nearest hospital, as given in the DebConf local information page, is the Hospital Militar. It's a strange sort of thing as an American who remembers the 1980s to be seeking medical care from a facility operated by the Nicaraguan military; but accompanied by Fitoria, my native escort from the local team I had nothing to worry about; and besides, as a frequent international traveler I long ago learned the secret truth that people are people everywhere, no matter what flag they were born under. The highlight of the hospital visit was definitely when a member of the hospital staff, in full military uniform, shooed me towards a chair instead of standing to talk to her because "every patient has the right to sit, no matter what country they're in". After six x-rays and a doctor's consult, the conclusion was that it's probably not a broken bone and that it will probably clear up in just a couple of days with an even-better anti-inflammatory prescription and taking care of it by not walking on it. And indeed, my foot was already feeling better by Friday and aside from a little tenderness is now just about 100%. There are plenty of other entries on Planet Debian talking about the conference itself, and I don't think I have much to add to what's already been said there. But as for Nicaragua, I can conclude that it must be one of the best countries in the world to break your foot in - between the help of the hotel staff, the top-notch medical professionals, and above all the support of the DebConf local team (with a very big thank you again to Fitoria!), this is one brand of socialized medicine I can appreciate.

28 May 2012

Jonathan McDowell: Go go gadget multiarch

Multiarch has been coming RSN for an extremely lengthy meaning of the word "soon". I remember watching Tollef give a presentation about it at DebConf4 and I'm pretty sure it's been talked about at every DebConf since then as well. Deemed the "correct" answer to the issue of running i386 binaries on x86_64 machines, or old ARM ABI programs on more modern hardware, it's always seemed to be at least another Debian release away. Not so anymore. Through foolishness I ended up buying a Brother HL3040CN when I first moved to the US. It was a cheap networked laser printer and it touted Linux support. Quality wise it's been fine. I don't use it a lot, but unlike an inkjet I don't have to worry about not using it for a month and then needing to print something in a hurry and having to clean print heads etc. Where it falls down is that I failed to check that "Linux support" involved source. No. Instead it involves an i386 binary (at least packaged as a .deb, but in a horrible fashion). Up until now I've mostly been printing from my laptop, so all the drivers are installed there. I've got some guests this week and they needed to print their boarding passes, so I decided it was time to make the house server act as a print server too. It's an AMD64 box and before now I haven't had any need to run i386 code on it, so when I installed the driver deb it failed to work. Normally I'd just install ia32-libs, but this time I decided to try multiarch. So I did:

# dpkg --add-architecture i386
# apt-get update
# apt-get install libc6:i386

and magically I was now able to run the printer driver binary. I know there's a lot more work still to be done (I need to check if I can ditch ia32-libs on my laptop which runs a few more i386 only apps), but this is pretty cool - thanks to all those involved in making it happen! Update: I tried to install all the multiarch bits required for Skype on my laptop but hit an issue with libqtgui4:i386 which ends up pulling in liblcms1:i386 which isn't yet multiarch enabled. There was already a bug, #637732 filed by vorlon, and mhy did the appropriate NMU a week ago, so it should hopefully hit testing in the next week. Thanks guys.

8 March 2012

Raphaël Hertzog: People Behind Debian: Gregor Herrmann, member of the Perl team

Photo by Aigars Mahinovs

I followed Gregor s evolution within Debian because I used to be somewhat active in the Perl team. His case is exemplar because it shows that you don t need to be an IT professional to join Debian and to make a difference. His QA page is impressive with hundreds of packages maintained and hundreds of non-maintainer uploads too. While he started out slowly, I remember meeting him at Debconf 7 in Edinburgh and after that he really got more implicated. Again a case of someone joining for technical reasons but getting more involved and staying there for social reasons!

Let s jump into the interview and learn more about him. Raphael: Who are you? Gregor: I m 41 years old, and I live in Innsbruck, Austria, in a shared apartment with a friend of mine. In my day job, I m working at the regional addiction prevention agency, so I m one of the few Debian guys who s not an IT student or professional. I started maintaining packages in 2006, and I am a DD since April 2008. Raphael: How did you start contributing to Debian? Gregor: After having used Debian on servers for some years, I finally switched to it on the desktop after some procrastinating. Soon afterwards I wanted to know more about the making-of , started to join mailing lists, filed bugs, and tried to learn packaging. Luckily I quickly found a permanent sponsor Tony Mancill, and we re still co-maintaining each others packages. And when I packaged my first Perl modules, Gunnar Wolf invited me to join the Debian Perl Group, an offer I accepted a few days later. And I m still there

Later, the NM process, although it involved some waiting times, was also a good learning experience due to my AM Wouter Verhelst. (And in the meantime the organization of the NM process has vastly improved, from what I hear.) So my starting point for joining Debian was my curiosity but what really helped me to find my way into the project was the support of the people who invited and helped me. Raphael: What s your biggest achievement within Debian or Ubuntu? Gregor: I m not sure I can name a single big achievement but I guess I can say that my contributions to the Debian Perl Group have helped to make and keep the team a success story. Raphael: The pkg-perl team seems to work very well. As an active member, can you explain us how it is organized? How do you explain its success? In particular it seems to be a great entry point for new contributors. Gregor: The team is huge, both in numbers of members and packages (over 2200). Since last DebConf we manage our source packages in git, we have 2 mailing lists and an IRC channel, and we manage to keep an overview by using PET, the Package Entropy Tracker. It s true that we get new members on a regular basis; we try to invite people (like it happened to me 6 years ago

) but there are also quite a few new contributors who find our docs and introduce themselves on the mailing list. Maybe someone should conduct a study and ask them what motivated them to join.

We hand out group membership/commit access quickly, and we try to mentor new contributors actively during their early times in the group. Some of them leave for other projects after some time, but many also stay and become DDs later. I m not sure what the reasons for the group s success are, maybe a combination of:

a culture in the group (and also in the upstream Perl community) that s based on fun, cooperation, and respect;
the fact that packaging Perl modules is most of the time quite easy;
a great set of tools, and also (hopefully) useful documentation;
a bunch of relaxed people who are open to newcomers and try to help each other.

For everyone interested in joining the Debian Perl Group, our Welcome page on the wiki is a good starting point. Raphael: What are your plans for Debian Wheezy? Gregor: Nothing overly exciting. What I should do is getting a newer JabRef into Debian (which involves packaging some new Java libraries any takers?). A solution for libdatetime-timezone-perl (which ships timezone data converted to Perl modules and tends to get outdated when the timezone data change) would be nice; let s see if #660404 leads to some results And some Perl packages will also need a bit of work for the hardening build flags release goal (cf. #657853). Raphael: What s the biggest problem of Debian? Gregor: Inertia. While I really like the fact that Debian is a volunteer project, and that every contributor works when and on what they decide to work on, I get the feeling that Debian could do better in moving forward, innovating, taking decisions. I also think that more uniformity in managing source packages would make things easier; it s quite amazing to see how many source formats, packaging helpers, patch systems, RCSs etc. are used all over the archive. I m not advocating for mono-cultures, and I consider this diversity a strength in general, but having to find out first how this particular package works when preparing a bug fix can be annoying. On the bright side, I think that the myth Debian and its mailing lists are mostly about flames can be seen as dispelled in the meantime. Sure, sometimes the tone could be a bit more civil, but in general most of the interactions I ve seen in the last years were friendly and helpful. IMO, the Debian Project consists of mostly nice and cooperative people, and that s what makes it fun for me. Raphael: You re one of the most dedicated participants to RCBW (Release Critical Bugs of the Week), an initiative to fix RC bugs every week. How much time do you spend on it? What would you advise to people who are considering to join the movement? Gregor: I got into the habit of fixing RC bugs after having been invited to my first Bug Squashing Party in Munich some years ago. During this weekend I saw that fixing RC bugs can be fun, is often not that difficult, and gives a warm fuzzy feeling

I can definitely recommend attending a BSP if one happens to be organized near you. After tasting blood at this first BSP I tried to continue looking at RC bugs, and I guess I spend something around half an hour per day on it. I usually blog about it once a week, in order to motivate others to join in. And joining is easy: just take a look at the tips people like Zack, Vorlon, or me have written. You don t have to be a DD to help, many of my NMUs are based on patches that others kindly prepare and send to the BTS kudos! Another nice aspect is that the RC bug list contains problems from different fields: general packaging problems, language-specific issues, policy violations, etc. So there s something for everybody, and you don t have to be an expert in all fields to fix a specific bug. What s rewarding about fixing RC bugs is not only the feeling of accomplishment and the knowledge about having helped the next release I also received quite a few Thank you mails from maintainers who were busy at that time and appreciated the help. Raphael: Do you have wishes for Debian Wheezy? Gregor: Well, there s not so much left of the Wheezy release cycle if we manage to freeze in June

Some quick thoughts for Wheezy and Wheezy+1:

Obviously, getting multi-arch and the hardening build flags as far as possible would be good.
What I like is the idea of the time-based freeze, and I hope it will work out in June. And then I hope that the freeze will be shorter this time than during the last 2 releases.
Unless I m missing something, the CUT discussions have more or less died down; IMO that s a pity because there are users who run testing and would like to avoid the several month long freeze. Maybe someone can come up with new ideas for Wheezy+1
Too late for broad adoption in Wheezy but still: What constantly annoys me is the handling of conffiles during upgrades (when I want to keep changed values but at the same time want to add new variables). Config::Model seems to be the best idea so far for configuration upgrades but it s not yet widely adopted.

Raphael: Is there someone in Debian that you admire for their contributions? Gregor: There are many people in Debian I admire, too many to name them all. The first one that comes to my mind is Russ Allbery who not only does great work from lintian to Debian policy but who also sets a great example of communicating in a perfectly polite and respectful way even in heated discussions.

Thank you to Gregor for the time spent answering my questions. I hope you enjoyed reading his answers as I did. Note that older interviews are indexed on wiki.debian.org/PeopleBehindDebian.

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6 December 2011

Steve Langasek: Making jam from bugs

This weekend, we held a combined Debian Bug Squashing Party and Ubuntu Local Jam in Portland, OR. A big thank you to PuppetLabs for hosting! Thanks to a brilliant insight from Kees Cook, we were able to give everyone access to their own pre-configured build environment as soon as they walked in the door by deploying schroot/sbuild instances in "the cloud" (in this case, Amazon EC2). Small blips with the mirrors notwithstanding, this worked out pretty well, and let people start to get their hands dirty as soon as they walked in the door instead of spending a lot of time up front doing the boring work of setting up a build environment. This was a big win for people who had never done a package build before, and I highly recommend it for future BSPs. You can read about the build environment setup in the Debian wiki, and details on setting up your own BSP cloud in Kees's blog. (And the cloud instances were running Ubuntu 11.10 guests, with Debian unstable chroots - a perfect pairing for our joint Debian/Ubuntu event!) So how did this curious foray into a combined Ubuntu/Debian event go? Not too shabby:

Roughly 25 people participated in the event - a pretty good turnout considering the short notice we gave. Thanks to everyone who turned up!
Multiarch patches were submitted for 14 library packages by 9 distinct contributors
Four of these people submitted their first patch to Debian!
Three more contributors worked on patches that were not submitted to Debian by the end of the event, but we will stalk them and see to it that their patches make it in ;)
8 Ubuntu Stable Release Updates were looked at for verification of fixes
7 of these fixes were successfully verified (one bug was not reproducible)
6 of those packages have already been moved to the -updates pocket, where all of Ubuntu's users can now benefit from them

When all was said and done, we didn't get a chance to tackle any wheezy release critical bugs like we'd hoped. That's ok, that leaves us something to do for our next event, which will be bigger and even better than this one. Maybe even big enough to rival one of those crazy, all-weekend BSPs that they have in Germany...

30 November 2011

Russell Coker: Links November 2011

Forbes has an interesting article about crowd-sourcing by criminals and law enforcement [1]. Ulissescastr0 made a Youtube video showing how to install SE Linux on Debian/Etch [2]. Probably no-one is using Etch nowadays so this video is outdated, but it s a good way of teaching people. It would be good if someone made a similar video showing how to do SE Linux things on Squeeze. I discovered the above SE Linux video through Explow which provides a neat interface to multiple searches and information sources [3]. I don t think I will be using Explow much in future as I could get the same result through Google video search. They also have a news portal but there are other sites for that. But it does seem that Explow would be useful for newbies. Eric Michael Johnson wrote an interesting article about the inherent bias in Psychological research based in the US [4]. People who live in urban environments think differently in some ways to people who live in different environments or who have different lifestyles. Therefore generalising from university students in the US to the entire human race is likely to get incorrect results. This is something to consider the next time you are tempted to generalise to the wider population from your own friends, colleagues, etc. The Daily Kos has a scary article about the TSA having a woman detained for reciting part of the US constitution [5]. The US will remain on my list of countries to avoid for the forseeable future. Vorlon has written an informative article about the use of hardening options when building Debian packages [6]. It s now even easier to do this, so every package that simultaneously deals with data of differing levels of integrity or sensitivity should be built this way. Bunker Roy gave an interesting TED talk about his Barefoot College that teaches useful skills to people in rural parts of India who don t have a traditional school education [7]. His talk really shows up some of the arrogance in the people who run traditional education. Justin Hall-Tipping gave an interesting TED talk about ways of solving the world energy problems [8]. He started with explaining the problems and why they need to be urgently solved and then described in detail some of the research that his group has done to solve the problems. This includes flexible photo-voltaic cells, infra-red vision to save on lighting, and a way of using carbon nano-tubes to control the thermal properties of windows.

Next.