December 02, 2022

hackergotchi for Junichi Uekawa

Junichi Uekawa

Already December.

Already December. Things changed a lot. Six months ago I was at home most of the time. I hope I can keep on going out for a while.

02 December, 2022 10:13AM by Junichi Uekawa

Paul Wise

FLOSS Activities November 2022

Focus

This month I didn't have any particular focus. I just worked on issues in my info bubble.

Changes

Issues

Review

Administration

  • Debian IRC: setup topic/entrymsg to redirect OFTC #debian-jp to the Debian Japan IRC server, cleaned up #debianppc ChanServ metadata
  • Debian wiki: unblock IP addresses, approve domains, approve accounts

Communication

Sponsors

The libemail-outlook-message-perl, purple-discord, sptag, celery work was sponsored. All other work was done on a volunteer basis.

02 December, 2022 02:13AM

Reproducible Builds (diffoscope)

diffoscope 228 released

The diffoscope maintainers are pleased to announce the release of diffoscope version 228. This version includes the following changes:

[ FC Stegerman ]
* As an optimisation, don't run apktool if no differences are detected before
  the signing block. (Closes: reproducible-builds/diffoscope!105)

[ Chris Lamb ]
* Support both the python3-progressbar and python3-progressbar2 Debian
  packages, two modules providing the "progressbar" Python module.
  (Closes: reproducible-builds/diffoscope#323)
* Ensure we recommend apksigcopier. (Re: reproducible-builds/diffoscope!105)
* Make the code clearer around generating the Debian substvars and tidy
  generation of os_list.
* Update copyright years.

You find out more by visiting the project homepage.

02 December, 2022 12:00AM

November 30, 2022

Enrico Zini

Things I learnt in November 2022

Debian:

  • You can Build-Depend on debhelper-compat (=version) and get rid of debhelper as a build-dependency, and of debian/compat (details)
  • You can Build-Depend on dh-sequence-foo and get rid of the corresponding dh-foo build-dependency, and of the need to add --with foo in debian/rules (details)
  • You can (and should) get rid of dh-buildinfo, which is now handled automatically
  • In salsa.debian.org there is a default CI pipeline for Debian packages that works beautifully without needing to add any .gitlab-ci.yml to a repository
  • Add Testsuite: autopkgtest-pkg-python to debian/control, and you get a free autopkgtest that verifies that your packaged Python module can be imported. The default CI pipeline in salsa will automatically run the tests. (specification, details)

Python:

  • From Python 3.8, you can use = in format strings to make it easier to debug variables and expressions (details):
>>> name="test"
>>> print(f"{name=}")
name='test'
>>> print(f"{3*8=}")
3*8=24

Leaflet:

  • [abc].tile.openstreetmap.org links need to be replaced with tile.openstreetmap.org (details)

30 November, 2022 11:00PM

hackergotchi for Matthew Garrett

Matthew Garrett

Making unphishable 2FA phishable

One of the huge benefits of WebAuthn is that it makes traditional phishing attacks impossible. An attacker sends you a link to a site that looks legitimate but isn't, and you type in your credentials. With SMS or TOTP-based 2FA, you type in your second factor as well, and the attacker now has both your credentials and a legitimate (if time-limited) second factor token to log in with. WebAuthn prevents this by verifying that the site it's sending the secret to is the one that issued it in the first place - visit an attacker-controlled site and said attacker may get your username and password, but they won't be able to obtain a valid WebAuthn response.

But what if there was a mechanism for an attacker to direct a user to a legitimate login page, resulting in a happy WebAuthn flow, and obtain valid credentials for that user anyway? This seems like the lead-in to someone saying "The Aristocrats", but unfortunately it's (a) real, (b) RFC-defined, and (c) implemented in a whole bunch of places that handle sensitive credentials. The villain of this piece is RFC 8628, and while it exists for good reasons it can be used in a whole bunch of ways that have unfortunate security consequences.

What is the RFC 8628-defined Device Authorization Grant, and why does it exist? Imagine a device that you don't want to type a password into - either it has no input devices at all (eg, some IoT thing) or it's awkward to type a complicated password (eg, a TV with an on-screen keyboard). You want that device to be able to access resources on behalf of a user, so you want to ensure that that user authenticates the device. RFC 8628 describes an approach where the device requests the credentials, and then presents a code to the user (either on screen or over Bluetooth or something), and starts polling an endpoint for a result. The user visits a URL and types in that code (or is given a URL that has the code pre-populated) and is then guided through a standard auth process. The key distinction is that if the user authenticates correctly, the issued credentials are passed back to the device rather than the user - on successful auth, the endpoint the device is polling will return an oauth token.

But what happens if it's not a device that requests the credentials, but an attacker? What if said attacker obfuscates the URL in some way and tricks a user into clicking it? The user will be presented with their legitimate ID provider login screen, and if they're using a WebAuthn token for second factor it'll work correctly (because it's genuinely talking to the real ID provider!). The user will then typically be prompted to approve the request, but in every example I've seen the language used here is very generic and doesn't describe what's going on or ask the user. AWS simply says "An application or device requested authorization using your AWS sign-in" and has a big "Allow" button, giving the user no indication at all that hitting "Allow" may give a third party their credentials.

This isn't novel! Christoph Tafani-Dereeper has an excellent writeup on this topic from last year, which builds on Nestori Syynimaa's earlier work. But whenever I've talked about this, people seem surprised at the consequences. WebAuthn is supposed to protect against phishing attacks, but this approach subverts that protection by presenting the user with a legitimate login page and then handing their credentials to someone else.

RFC 8628 actually recognises this vector and presents a set of mitigations. Unfortunately nobody actually seems to implement these, and most of the mitigations are based around the idea that this flow will only be used for physical devices. Sadly, AWS uses this for initial authentication for the aws-cli tool, so there's no device in that scenario. Another mitigation is that there's a relatively short window where the code is valid, and so sending a link via email is likely to result in it expiring before the user clicks it. An attacker could avoid this by directing the user to a domain under their control that triggers the flow and then redirects the user to the login page, ensuring that the code is only generated after the user has clicked the link.

Can this be avoided? The best way to do so is to ensure that you don't support this token issuance flow anywhere, or if you do then ensure that any tokens issued that way are extremely narrowly scoped. Unfortunately if you're an AWS user, that's probably not viable - this flow is required for the cli tool to perform SSO login, and users are going to end up with broadly scoped tokens as a result. The logs are also not terribly useful.

The infuriating thing is that this isn't necessary for CLI tooling. The reason this approach is taken is that you need a way to get the token to a local process even if the user is doing authentication in a browser. This can be avoided by having the process listen on localhost, and then have the login flow redirect to localhost (including the token) on successful completion. In this scenario the attacker can't get access to the token without having access to the user's machine, and if they have that they probably have access to the token anyway.

There's no real moral here other than "Security is hard". Sorry.

comment count unavailable comments

30 November, 2022 09:53PM

hackergotchi for Bits from Debian

Bits from Debian

New Debian Developers and Maintainers (September and October 2022)

The following contributors got their Debian Developer accounts in the last two months:

  • Abraham Raji (abraham)
  • Phil Morrell (emorrp1)
  • Anupa Ann Joseph (anupa)
  • Mathias Gibbens (gibmat)
  • Arun Kumar Pariyar (arun)
  • Tino Didriksen (tinodidriksen)

The following contributors were added as Debian Maintainers in the last two months:

  • Gavin Lai
  • Martin Dosch
  • Taavi Väänänen
  • Daichi Fukui
  • Daniel Gröber
  • Vivek K J
  • William Wilson
  • Ruben Pollan

Congratulations!

30 November, 2022 03:00PM by Jean-Pierre Giraud

Russell Coker

Russ Allbery

Review: The Fed Unbound

Review: The Fed Unbound, by Lev Menand

Publisher: Columbia Global Reports
Copyright: 2022
ISBN: 1-7359137-1-5
Format: Kindle
Pages: 156

The Fed Unbound is a short non-fiction exploration of US Federal Reserve actions to reducing systemic risk caused by shadow banking. Its particular focus is the role of the Fed from the 2008 financial crisis to the present, including the COVID shock, but it includes a history of what Menand calls the "American Monetary Settlement," the political compromise that gave rise to the Federal Reserve.

In Menand's view, a central cause of instability in the US financial system (and, given the influence of the dollar system, the world financial system as well) is shadow banking: institutions that act as banks without being insured like banks or subject to bank regulations. A bank, in this definition, is an organization that takes deposits. I'm simplifying somewhat, but what distinguishes a deposit from a security or an investment is that deposits can be withdrawn at any time, or at least on very short notice. When you want to spend the money in your checking account, you don't have to wait for a three-month maturity period or pay an early withdrawal penalty. You simply withdraw the money, with immediate effect. This property is what makes deposits "money," rather than something that you can (but possibly cannot) sell for money, such as stocks or bonds.

Most people are familiar with the basic story of how banks work. Essentially no bank simply takes people's money and puts it in a vault until the person wants it again. If that were the case, you would need to pay the bank to store your money. Instead, a bank takes in deposits and then lends some portion of that money out to others. Those loans, for things like cars or houses or credit card spending, come due over time, with interest. The interest rate the bank charges on the loans is much higher than the rate it has to pay on its deposits, and it pockets the difference.

The problem with this model, of course, is that the bank doesn't have your money, so if all the depositors go to the bank at the same time and ask for their money, the bank won't be able to repay them and will collapse. (See, for example, the movie It's a Wonderful Life, or Mary Poppins, or any number of other movies or books.) Retail banks are therefore subject to stringent regulations designed to promote public trust and to ensure that traditional banking is a boring (if still lucrative) business. Banks are also normally insured, which in the US means that if they do experience a run, federal regulators will step in, shut down the bank in an orderly fashion, and ensure every depositor gets their money back (at least up to the insurance limit).

Alas, if you thought people would settle for boring work that makes a comfortable profit, you don't know the financial industry. Highly-regulated insured deposits are less lucrative than acting like a bank without all of those restrictions and rules and deposit insurance payments. As Menand relates in his brief history of US banking, financial institutions constantly invent new forms of deposits with similar properties but without all the pesky rules: eurodollars (which have nothing to do with the European currency), commercial paper, repo, and many others. These forms of deposits are primarily used by large institutions like corporations. The details vary, but they tend to be prone to the same fundamental instability as bank deposits: if there's a run on the market, there may not be enough liquidity for everyone to withdraw their money at once. Unlike bank deposits, though, there is no insurance, no federal regulator to step in and make depositors whole, and much less regulation to ensure that runs are unlikely.

Instead, there's the Federal Reserve, which has increasingly become the bulwark against liquidity crises among shadow banks. This happened in 2008 during the financial crisis (which Menand argues can be seen as a shadow bank run sparked by losses on mortgage securities), and again at a larger scale in 2020 during the initial COVID crisis.

Menand is clear that these interventions from the Federal Reserve were necessary. The alternative would have been an uncontrolled collapse of large sections of the financial system, with unknown consequences. But the Fed was not intended to perform those types of interventions. It has no regulatory authority to reform the underlying financial systems to make them safer, remove executives who failed to maintain sufficient liquidity for a crisis, or (as is standard for all traditional US banks) prohibit combining banking and more speculative investment on the same balance sheet. What the Federal Reserve can do, and did, is function as a buyer of last resort, bailing out shadow banks by purchasing assets with newly-created money. This works, in the sense that it averts the immediate crisis, but it creates other distortions. Most importantly, constant Fed intervention doesn't create an incentive to avoid situations that require that intervention; if anything, it encourages more dangerous risk-taking.

The above, plus an all-too-brief history of the politics of US banking, is the meat of this book. It's a useful summary, as far as it goes, and I learned a few new things. But I think The Fed Unbound is confused about its audience.

This type of high-level summary and capsule history seems most useful for people without an economics background and who haven't been following macroeconomics closely. But Menand doesn't write for that audience. He assumes definitions of words like "deposits" and "money" that are going to be confusing or even incomprehensible to the lay reader.

For example, Menand describes ordinary retail banks as creating money, even saying that a bank loans money by simply incrementing the numbers in a customer's deposit account. This is correct in the technical economic definition of money (fractional reserve banking effectively creates new money), but it's going to sound to someone not well-versed in the terminology as if retail banks can create new dollars out of the ether. That power is, of course, reserved for the Federal Reserve, and indeed is largely the point of its existence. Much of this book relies on a very specific definition of money and money supply that will only be familiar to those with economics training.

Similarly, the history of the Federal Reserve is interesting but slight, and at no point does Menand explain clearly how the record-keeping between it and retail banks works, or what the Fed's "balance sheet" means in practice. I realize this book isn't trying to give a detailed description or history of the Federal Reserve system, but the most obvious audience is likely to flounder at the level of detail Menand provides.

Perhaps, therefore, this book is aimed at an audience already familiar with macroeconomics? But, if so, I'm not sure it says anything new. I follow macroeconomic policy moderately closely and found most of Menand's observations obvious and not very novel. There were tidbits here and there that I hadn't understood, but my time would probably have been better invested in another book. Menand proposes some reforms, but they mostly consist of "Congress should do its job and not create situations where the Federal Reserve has to act without the right infrastructure and political oversight," and, well, yes. It's hard to disagree with that, and it's also hard to see how it will ever happen. It's far too convenient to outsource such problems to central banking, where they are hidden behind financial mechanics that are incomprehensible to the average voter.

This is an important topic, but I don't think this is the book to read about it. If you want a clearer and easier-to-understand role of the Federal Reserve in shadow banking crises, read Crashed instead. If you want to learn more about how retail bank regulation works, and hear a strong case for why the same principles should be applied to shadow banks, see Sheila Bair's Bull by the Horns. I'm still looking for a great history and explainer of the Federal Reserve system as a whole, but that is not this book.

Rating: 5 out of 10

30 November, 2022 05:08AM

November 29, 2022

hackergotchi for Jonathan McDowell

Jonathan McDowell

onak 0.6.2 released

Over the weekend I released a new version of onak, my OpenPGP compatible keyserver. At 2 years since the last release that means I’ve at least managed to speed up a bit, but it’s fair to say its development isn’t a high priority for me at present.

This release is largely driven by a collection of minor fixes that have built up, and the knowledge that a Debian freeze is coming in the new year. The fixes largely revolve around the signature verification that was introduced in 0.6.0, which makes it a bit safer to run a keyserver by only accepting key material that can be validated. All of the major items I wanted to work on post 0.6.0 remain outstanding.

For the next release I’d like to get some basic Stateless OpenPGP Command Line Interface support integrated. That would then allow onak to be tested with the OpenPGP interoperability test suite, which has recently added support for verification only OpenPGP implementations.

I realise most people like to dismiss OpenPGP, and the tooling has been fairly dreadful for as long as I’ve been using it, but I do think it fills a space that no competing system has bothered to try and replicate. And that’s the web of trust, which helps provide some ability to verify keys without relying on (but also without preventing) a central authority to do so.

Anyway. Available locally or via GitHub.

0.6.2 - 27th November 2022

  • Don’t take creation time from unhashed subpackets
  • Fix ECDSA/SHA1 signature check
  • Fix handling of other signature requirement
  • Fix deletion of keys with PostgreSQL backend
  • Add support for verifying v3 signature packets

29 November, 2022 09:41PM

Sam Hartman

Introducing Carthage

For the past four years, I’ve been working on Carthage, a free-software Infrastructure as Code framework. We’ve finally reached a point where it makes sense to talk about Carthage and what it can do. This is the first in a series of blog posts to introduce Carthage, discuss what it can do and show how it works.

Why Another IAC Framework

It seems everywhere you look, there are products designed to support the IAC pattern. On the simple side, you could check a Containerfile into Git. Products like Terraform and Vagrant allow you to template cloud infrastructure and VMs. There are more commercial offerings than I can keep up with.

We were disappointed by what was out there when we started Carthage. Other products have improved, but for many of our applications we’re happy with what Carthage can build. The biggest challenge we ran into is that products wanted us to specify things at the wrong level. For some of our cyber training work we wanted to say things like “We want 3 blue teams, each with a couple defended networks, a red team, and some neutral infrastructure for red to exploit.” Yet the tools we were trying to use wanted to lay things out at the individual machine/container level. We found ourselves contemplating writing a program to generate input for some other IAC tool.

Things were worse for our internal testing. Sometimes we’d be shipping hardware to a customer. But sometimes we’d be virtualizing that build out in a lab. Sometimes we’d be doing a mixture. So we wanted to completely separate the descriptions of machines, networks, and software from any of the information about whether that was realized on hardware, VMs, containers, or a mixture.

Dimensional Breakdown

In discussing Carthage with Enrico Zini, he pointed me at Cognitive Dimensions of notation as a way to think about how Carthage approaches the IAC problem. I’m more interested in the idea of breaking down a design along the idea of dimensions that allow examining the design space than I am particular adherence to Green’s original dimensions.

Low Viscosity, High Abstraction Reuse

One of the guiding principles is that we want to be able to reuse different components at different scales and in different environments. These include being able to do things like:

  • Define an operation like “Update a Debian system” and apply that in several environments including as part of building a base VM or container image, applying to an independently managed machine, or applying to a micro service container that does not run services like ssh or systemd.

  • Defining a role like DNS server that can be applied to a dedicated machine only having that role, to a traditional server with multiple roles, or in a micro service environment.

  • Allowing people to write groups of functionality that can be useful in descriptions of a small number of machines, but can also be reused in large environments like modeling of cyber infrastructure to defend. In the small environments, things are simplified, but in larger environments integration like directories, authentication infrastructure and the like is needed.

  • Allow grouping of functionality at multiple levels. So far I have talked about grouping of software to be installed on a single machine or container. We also want to allow groups of containers (pods or otherwise), groups of machines, groups of networks, or even enclaves (think a model of an entire company or section of a company). Each kind of grouping needs to be parametric and reusable.

Hidden Dependencies

To accomplish these abstraction goals, dependencies need to be non-local. For example, a software role might need to integrate with a directory if a directory is present in the environment. When writing the role, no one is going to know which directory to use, nor whether a directory is present. Taking that as an explicit input into the role is error-prone when the role is combined into large abstract units (bigger roles or collections of machines). Instead it is better to have a non-local dependency, and to find the directory if it is available. We accomplish this using dependency injection.

In addition to being non-local, dependencies are sometimes hidden. It is very easy to overwhelm our cognitive capacity with even a fairly simple IAC description. An effective notation allows us to focus on the parts that matter when working with a particular part of the description. I’ve found hiding dependencies, especially indirect dependencies, to be essential in building complex descriptions.

Obviously, tools are required for examining these dependencies as part of debugging.

First Class Modeling

Clearly one of the goals of IAC descriptions is to actually build and manage infrastructure. It turns out that there are all sorts of things you want to do with the description well before you instantiate the infrastructure. You might want to query the description to build network diagrams, understand interdependencies, or even build inventory/bill of materials. We often find ourselves building Ansible inventory, switch configurations, DNS zones, and all sorts of configuration artifacts. These artifacts may be installed into infrastructure that is instantiated by the description, but they may be consumed in other ways. Allowing the artifacts to be consumed externally means that you can avoid pre-commitment and focus on whatever part of the description you originally want to work on. You may use an existing network at first. Later the IAC description may replace that, or perhaps it never will.

As a result, Carthage separates modeling from instantiation. The model can generally be built and queried without needing to interact with clouds, VMs, or containers. We’ve actually found it useful to build Carthage layouts that cannot ever be fully instantiated, for example because they never specify details like whether a model should be instantiated on a container or VM, or what kind of technology will realize a modeled network. This allows developing roles before the machines that use them or focusing on how machines will interact and how the network will be laid out before the details of installing on specific hardware.

The modeling separation is by far the difference I value most between Carthage and other systems.

A Tool for Experts.

In Neal Stephenson’s essay “In the Beginning… Was the Command Line”, Stephenson points out that the kind of tools experts need are not the same tools that beginners need. The illustration of why a beginner might not be satisfied with a Hole Hog drill caught my attention. Carthage is a tool for experts. Despite what cloud providers will tell you, IAC is not easy. Doubly so when you start making reusable components. Trying to hide that or focus on making things easy to get started can make it harder for experts to efficiently solve the problems they are facing. When we have faced trade offs between making Carthage easy to pick up and making it powerful for expert users, we have chosen to support the experts.

That said, Carthage today is harder to pick up than it needs to be. It’s a relatively new project with few external users as of this time. Our documentation and examples need improvement, just like every project at this level of maturity. Similarly, as the set of things people try to do expand, we will doubtless run into bugs that our current test cases don’t cover. So Carthage absolutely will get easier to learn and use than it is today.

Also, we’ve already had success building beginner-focused applications on top of Carthage. For our cyber training, we built web applications on top of Carthage that made rebuilding and exploring infrastructure easy. We’ve had success using relatively understood tools like Ansible as integration and customization points for Carthage layouts. But in all these cases, when the core layout had significant reusable components and significant complexity in the networking, only an IAC expert was going to be able to maintain and develop that layout.

What Carthage can do.

Carthage has a number of capabilities today. One of Carthage’s strengths is its extensible design. Abstract interfaces make it easy to add new virtualization platforms, cloud services, and support for various ways of managing real hardware. This approach has been validated by incrementally adding support for virtualization architectures and cloud services. As development has progressed, adding new integrations continues to get faster because we are able to reuse existing infrastructure.

Today, Carthage can model:

  • Machines
  • Networks
  • Dynamically compose groupings of the above
  • Generate model level artifacts
    • Ansible inventory
    • Various DNS integrations
    • Various switch configurations

Carthage has excellent facilities for dealing with images on which VMs and Containers can be based, although it does have a bit of a Debian/Ubuntu bias in how it thinks about images:

  • Building base images from a tool like debootstrap
  • Customizing these images
  • Converting into VM images for kvm, VMware, and AWS
  • Building from scratch OCI images for Podman, Docker and k8s
  • Adding layers to existing OCI images

When instantiating infrastructure, Carthage can work with:

  • systemd nspawn containers
  • Podman (Docker would be easy)
  • Libvirt
  • VMware
  • With the AWS plugin, EC2 VMs and networking

We have also looked at Oracle Cloud and I believe Openstack, although that code is not merged.

Future posts will talk about core Carthage concepts and how to use Carthage to build infrastructure.



comment count unavailable comments

29 November, 2022 04:15PM

November 28, 2022

Jelmer Vernooij

Detecting Package Transitions

Larger transitions in Debian are usually announced on e.g. debian-devel, but it’s harder to track the current status of all transitions. Having done a lot of QA uploads recently, I have on occasion uploaded packages involved in a transition. This can be unhelpful for the people handling the transition, but there’s also often not much point in uploading if your uploads are going to get stuck.

Talking to one of the release managers at a recent BSP, it was great to find out that the release team actually publish a data dump with which packages are involved in which transitions.

Here’s the script I use to find out about the transitions the package in my current working directory is involved in:

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#!/usr/bin/python3

from urllib.request import urlopen

import sys

from debian.deb822 import Deb822
import yaml

with open('debian/control', 'r') as f:
    package = Deb822(f)['Source']

with urlopen("https://release.debian.org/transitions/export/packages.yaml") as f:
    data = yaml.safe_load(f)

def find_transitions(data, package):
    for entry in data:
        if entry['name'] != package:
            continue
        return dict(entry['list'])
    return {}


transitions = find_transitions(data, package)
print(transitions)
sys.exit(1 if 'ongoing' in transitions.values() else 0)

In practice, the output looks something like this:

$ debcheckout bctoolbox
git clone https://salsa.debian.org/pkg-voip-team/linphone-stack/bctoolbox.git bctoolbox ...
Cloning into 'bctoolbox'...
...
$ cd bctoolbox
$ in-transition.py
{'auto-upperlimit-libbctoolbox1': 'ongoing'}

28 November, 2022 11:04PM by Jelmer Vernooij

hackergotchi for Steve Kemp

Steve Kemp

I put an LSP in your LISP ..

I recently wrote about yet another lisp I'd been having fun with.

Over the past couple of years I've played with a few toy scripting languages, or random interpreters, and this time I figured I'd do something beyond the minimum, by implementing the Language Server Protocol.

In brief the language server protocol (LSP) is designed to abstract functionality that might be provided by an editor, or IDE, into a small "language server". If the language-server knows how to jump to definitions, provide completion, etc, etc, then the editor doesn't need to implement those things for NN different languages - it just needs to launch and communicate with something that does know how to do the job.

Anyway LSP? LISP? Only one letter different, so that's practically enough reason to have a stab at it.

Thankfully I found a beautiful library that implements a simple framework allowing the easy implementation of a golang-based LSP-serverÖ

Using that I quickly hacked up a server that can provide:

  • Overview of all standard-library functions, on hover.
  • Completion of all standard-library functions.

I've tested this in both GNU Emacs and Neovim, so that means I'm happy I support all editors! (More seriously if it works in two then that probably means that the LSP stuff should work elsewhere too.)

Here's what the "help on hover" looks like, within Emacs:

Vim looks similar but you have to press K to see the wee popup. Still kinda cute, and was a good experiment.

28 November, 2022 04:45PM

John Goerzen

Flying Joy

Wisdom from my 5-year-old: When flying in a small plane, it is important to give your dolls a headset and let them see out the window, too!

Moments like this make me smile at being a pilot dad.

A week ago, I also got to give 8 children and one adult their first ever ride in any kind of airplane, through EAA’s Young Eagles program. I got to hear several say, “Oh wow! It’s SO beautiful!” “Look at all the little houses!”

And my favorite: “How can I be a pilot?”

28 November, 2022 04:04PM by John Goerzen

November 26, 2022

hackergotchi for Benjamin Mako Hill

Benjamin Mako Hill

The Financial Times has been printing an obvious error on its “Market Data” page for 18 months and nobody else seems to have noticed

Market Data section of the Financial Times US Edition print edition from May 5, 2021.

If you’ve flipped through printed broadsheet newspapers, you’ve probably seen pages full of tiny text listing prices and other market information for stocks and commodities. And you’ve almost certainly just turned the page. Anybody interested in this market prices today will turn to the internet where these numbers are available in real time and where you don’t need to squint to find what you need. This is presumably why many newspapers have stopped printing these types of pages or dramatically reduced the space devoted to them. Major financial newspapers however—like the Financial Times (FT)—still print multiple pages of market data daily. But does anybody read them?

The answer appears to be “no.” How do I know? I noticed an error in the FT‘s “Market Data” page that anybody looking in the relevant section of the page would have seen. And I have watched it been reproduced every single day for the last 18 months.

In early May last year, I noticed that the the Japanese telecom giant Nippon Telegraph and Telephon (NTT) was listed twice on the FT‘s list of the 500 largest global companies: once as “Nippon T&T” and also as “Nippon TT.” One right above the other. All the numbers are identical. Clearly a mistake.

Reproduction of the FT Market Data section showing a subset of Japanese companies from the FT 500 list of global companies. The duplicate lines are highlighted in yellow. This page is from today’s paper (November 26, 2022).

Wondering if it was a one-off error, I looked at a copy of the paper from about a week before and saw that the error did not exist then. I looked a copy from one day before and saw that it did. Since the issue was apparently recurring, but new at the time, I figured someone at the paper would notice and fix it quickly. I was wrong. It has been 18 months now and the error has been reproduced every single day.

Looking through the archives, it seems that the first day the error showed up was May 5, 2021. I’ve included a screenshot from the electronic paper version from that day—and from the fifth of every month since then (or the sixth if the paper was not printed on the fifth)—that shows that the error is reproduced every day. A quick look in the archives suggests it not only appears in the US edition but also in the UK, European, Asian, and Middle East editions. All of them.

Why does this matter? The FT prints over 112,000 copies of its paper, six days a week. This duplicate line takes up almost no space, of course, so it’s not a big deal on its own. But devoting two full broadsheet pages to market data that is out date as soon as it is printed—much of which nobody appears to be reading—doesn’t seem like a great use of resources. There’s an argument to made that papers like the FT print these these pages not because they are useful but because doing so is a signal of the publications’ identities as serious financial papers. But that hardly seems like a good enough reason on its own if nobody is looking at them. It seems well past time for newspapers to stop wasting paper and ink on these pages.

I respect that some people think that printing paper newspapers at all is wasteful when one can just read the material online. Plenty of people disagree, of course. But who will disagree with a call to stop printing material that evidence suggests is not being seen by anybody? If an error this obvious can exist for so long, it seems clear that nobody—not even anybody at the FT itself—is reading it.

26 November, 2022 08:37PM by Benjamin Mako Hill

hackergotchi for Matthew Garrett

Matthew Garrett

Poking a mobile hotspot

I've been playing with an Orbic Speed, a relatively outdated device that only speaks LTE Cat 4, but the towers I can see from here are, uh, not well provisioned so throughput really isn't a concern (and refurbs are $18, so). As usual I'm pretty terrible at just buying devices and using them for their intended purpose, and in this case it has the irritating behaviour that if there's a power cut and the battery runs out it doesn't boot again when power returns, so here's what I've learned so far.

First, it's clearly running Linux (nmap indicates that, as do the headers from the built-in webserver). The login page for the web interface has some text reading "Open Source Notice" that highlights when you move the mouse over it, but that's it - there's code to make the text light up, but it's not actually a link. There's no exposed license notices at all, although there is a copy on the filesystem that doesn't seem to be reachable from anywhere. The notice tells you to email them to receive source code, but doesn't actually provide an email address.

Still! Let's see what else we can figure out. There's no open ports other than the web server, but there is an update utility that includes some interesting components. First, there's a copy of adb, the Android Debug Bridge. That doesn't mean the device is running Android, it's common for embedded devices from various vendors to use a bunch of Android infrastructure (including the bootloader) while having a non-Android userland on top. But this is still slightly surprising, because the device isn't exposing an adb interface over USB. There's also drivers for various Qualcomm endpoints that are, again, not exposed. Running the utility under Windows while the modem is connected results in the modem rebooting and Windows talking about new hardware being detected, and watching the device manager shows a bunch of COM ports being detected and bound by Qualcomm drivers. So, what's it doing?

Sticking the utility into Ghidra and looking for strings that correspond to the output that the tool conveniently leaves in the logs subdirectory shows that after finding a device it calls vendor_device_send_cmd(). This is implemented in a copy of libusb-win32 that, again, has no offer for source code. But it's also easy to drop that into Ghidra and discover thatn vendor_device_send_cmd() is just a wrapper for usb_control_msg(dev,0xc0,0xa0,0,0,NULL,0,1000);. Sending that from Linux results in the device rebooting and suddenly exposing some more USB endpoints, including a functional adb interface. Although, annoyingly, the rndis interface that enables USB tethering via the modem is now missing.

Unfortunately the adb user is unprivileged, but most files on the system are world-readable. data/logs/atfwd.log is especially interesting. This modem has an application processor built into the modem chipset itself, and while the modem implements the Hayes Command Set there's also a mechanism for userland to register that certain AT commands should be pushed up to userland. These are handled by the atfwd_daemon that runs as root, and conveniently logs everything it's up to. This includes having logged all the communications executed when the update tool was run earlier, so let's dig into that.

The system sends a bunch of AT+SYSCMD= commands, each of which is in the form of echo (stuff) >>/usrdata/sec/chipid. Once that's all done, it sends AT+CHIPID, receives a response of CHIPID:PASS, and then AT+SER=3,1, at which point the modem reboots back into the normal mode - adb is gone, but rndis is back. But the logs also reveal that between the CHIPID request and the response is a security check that involves RSA. The logs on the client side show that the text being written to the chipid file is a single block of base64 encoded data. Decoding it just gives apparently random binary. Heading back to Ghidra shows that atfwd_daemon is reading the chipid file and then decrypting it with an RSA key. The key is obtained by calling a series of functions, each of which returns a long base64-encoded string. Decoding each of these gives 1028 bytes of high entropy data, which is then passed to another function that decrypts it using AES CBC using a key of 000102030405060708090a0b0c0d0e0f and an initialization vector of all 0s. This is somewhat weird, since there's 1028 bytes of data and 128 bit AES works on blocks of 16 bytes. The behaviour of OpenSSL is apparently to just pad the data out to a multiple of 16 bytes, but that implies that we're going to end up with a block of garbage at the end. It turns out not to matter - despite the fact that we decrypt 1028 bytes of input only the first 200 bytes mean anything, with the rest just being garbage. Concatenating all of that together gives us a PKCS#8 private key blob in PEM format. Which means we have not only the private key, but also the public key.

So, what's in the encrypted data, and where did it come from in the first place? It turns out to be a JSON blob that contains the IMEI and the serial number of the modem. This is information that can be read from the modem in the first place, so it's not secret. The modem decrypts it, compares the values in the blob to its own values, and if they match sets a flag indicating that validation has succeeeded. But what encrypted it in the first place? It turns out that the json blob is just POSTed to http://pro.w.ifelman.com/api/encrypt and an encrypted blob returned. Of course, the fact that it's being encrypted on the server with the public key and sent to the modem that decrypted with the private key means that having access to the modem gives us the public key as well, which means we can just encrypt our own blobs.

What does that buy us? Digging through the code shows the only case that it seems to matter is when parsing the AT+SER command. The first argument to this is the serial mode to transition to, and the second is whether this should be a temporary transition or a permanent one. Once parsed, these arguments are passed to /sbin/usb/compositions/switch_usb which just writes the mode out to /usrdata/mode.cfg (if permanent) or /usrdata/mode_tmp.cfg (if temporary). On boot, /data/usb/boot_hsusb_composition reads the number from this file and chooses which USB profile to apply. This requires no special permissions, except if the number is 3 - if so, the RSA verification has to be performed first. This is somewhat strange, since mode 9 gives the same rndis functionality as mode 3, but also still leaves the debug and diagnostic interfaces enabled.

So what's the point of all of this? I'm honestly not sure! It doesn't seem like any sort of effective enforcement mechanism (even ignoring the fact that you can just create your own blobs, if you change the IMEI on the device somehow, you can just POST the new values to the server and get back a new blob), so the best I've been able to come up with is to ensure that there's some mapping between IMEI and serial number before the device can be transitioned into production mode during manufacturing.

But, uh, we can just ignore all of this anyway. Remember that AT+SYSCMD= stuff that was writing the data to /usrdata/sec/chipid in the first place? Anything that's passed to AT+SYSCMD is just executed as root. Which means we can just write a new value (including 3) to /usrdata/mode.cfg in the first place, without needing to jump through any of these hoops. Which also means we can just adb push a shell onto there and then use the AT interface to make it suid root, which avoids needing to figure out how to exploit any of the bugs that are just sitting there given it's running a 3.18.48 kernel.

Anyway, I've now got a modem that's got working USB tethering and also exposes a working adb interface, and I've got root on it. Which let me dump the bootloader and discover that it implements fastboot and has an oem off-mode-charge command which solves the problem I wanted to solve of having the device boot when it gets power again. Unfortunately I still need to get into fastboot mode. I haven't found a way to do it through software (adb reboot bootloader doesn't do anything), but this post suggests it's just a matter of grounding a test pad, at which point I should just be able to run fastboot oem off-mode-charge and it'll be all set. But that's a job for tomorrow.

Edit: Got into fastboot mode and ran fastboot oem off-mode-charge 0 but sadly it doesn't actually do anything, so I guess next is going to involve patching the bootloader binary. Since it's signed with a cert titled "General Use Test Key (for testing only)" it apparently doesn't have secure boot enabled, so this should be easy enough.

comment count unavailable comments

26 November, 2022 07:09AM

November 25, 2022

Russ Allbery

podlators 5.00

podlators is my collection of POD formatting modules, which generate *roff or text (possibly with escape sequence markup) from the documentation format used by Perl and some other packages.

This is a major release, the biggest since the Pod::Simple rewrite in 2005. The headline news is that after some fairly extensive investigation, this release of Pod::Man finally changes the default output format to Unicode. No more replacement of characters in people's names, or text in non-English languages, with ugly X characters! There is a new encoding option to set the output encoding, and new options groff (which uses the groff extension for Unicode code points and is the default on EBCDIC systmes) and roff (which does the old, broken X substitution).

Since this was a major backward-incompatible change, I also finally removed most of the formatting touch-ups that Pod::Man tried to do for troff output but which would be invisible for the (by far more commonly used) nroff output. These have been an endless source of bugs and are very difficult to maintain, most of them were of marginal utility, and I am dubious many people are using troff to print Perl manual pages these days instead of, say, printing the rendered output from one of the many excellent POD to HTML modules.

There is some remaining somewhat-Perl-specific guesswork applied to the formatting, which is much simpler, but even that can now be turned off with the new guesswork option. This will allow people using POD to generate manual pages for things other than Perl modules to disable the Perl-specific markup logic.

Pod::Text also now supports encoding and gets some major encoding cleanups, including using Encode instead of PerlIO encoding layers for its output.

There are also numerous other fixes and improvements: a new language option to Pod::Man to configure (in an unfortunately groff-specific way) the line-breaking rules for languages like Chinese and Japanese, conversion of zero-width spaces to the *roff \: equivalent, a fix for wrapping L<> inside S<>, and various other bug fixes.

Perhaps the most interesting is a fix to a long-standing problem with the Pod::Man output where bold and italic text would extend too far if used in combination with C<> fixed-width text. This bug has been around forever without being noticed, and then two different people noticed it while I was preparing this release.

You can get the latest release from CPAN or from the podlators distribution page. These changes should be incorporated into Perl core in due course, although given the substantial changes, that may require a baking period.

25 November, 2022 10:39PM

November 24, 2022

Review: Servant Mage

Review: Servant Mage, by Kate Elliott

Publisher: Tordotcom
Copyright: 2022
ISBN: 1-250-76904-3
Format: Kindle
Pages: 165

Servant Mage is a (so far at least) standalone fantasy novella.

Fellian is a servant mage, which means that she makes Lamps for the customers of the inn, cleans the privies, and watches her effective owners find ways to put her deeper into indentured servitude. That's the only life permitted by the August Protector to those found to carry the taint of magical talent, caused by (it is said) demons who have bound themselves to their souls. Fellian's effective resistance is limited to giving covert reading lessons. Or was, before she is hired by a handsome man who needs a Lamplighter. A man who has been looking for her specifically, is a magical Adept, and looks suspiciously like a soldier for the despised and overthrown monarchists.

A difficulty with writing a story that reverses cliches is that you have to establish the cliches in order to reverse them, which runs the risk that a lot of the story may feel cliched. I fear some of that happened here.

Magic, in this world, is divided into elemental spheres, each of which has been restricted to limited and practical tasks by the Liberationists. The new regime searches the population for the mage-gifted and forces them into public service for the good of all (or at least that's how they describe it), with as little education as possible. Fellian was taught to light Lamps, but what she has is fire magic, and she's worked out some additional techniques on her own. The Adept is air, and one of the soldiers with him is earth. If you're guessing that two more elements turn up shortly and something important happens if you get all five of them together, you're perhaps sensing a bit of unoriginality in the magic system.

That's not the cliche that's the primary target of this story, though. The current rulers of this country, led by the austere August Protector, are dictatorial anti-monarchists who are happy to force mages into indenture and deny people schooling. Fellian has indeed fallen in with the monarchists, who unsurprisingly are attempting to reverse the revolution. They, unlike the Liberationists, respect mages and are willing to train them, and they would like to recruit Fellian.

I won't spoil the details of where Elliott is going with the plot, but it does eventually go somewhere refreshingly different. The path to get there, though, is familiar from any number of fantasy epics that start with a slave with special powers. Servant Mage is more aware of this than most, and Fellian is sharp-tongued and suspicious rather than innocent and trainable, but there are a lot of familiar character tropes and generic fantasy politics.

This is the second story (along with the Spiritwalker trilogy) of Elliott's I've read that uses the French Revolution as a political model but fails to provide satisfying political depth. This one is a novella and can therefore be forgiven for not having the time to dive into revolutionary politics, but I wish Elliott would do more with this idea. Here, the anti-monarchists are straight-up villains, and while that's partly setup for more nuance than you might be expecting, it still felt like a waste of the setting. I want the book that tackles the hard social problem of reconciling the chaos and hopefulness of political revolution with magical powers that can be dangerous and oppressive without the structure of tradition. It feels like Elliott keeps edging towards that book but hasn't found the right hook to write it.

Instead, we get a solid main character in Fellian, a bunch of supporting characters who mostly register as "okay," some magical set pieces that have all the right elements and yet didn't grab my sense of wonder, and a story that seemed heavily signposted. The conclusion was the best part of the story, but by the time we got there it wasn't as much of a surprise as I wanted it to be. I had this feeling with the Spiritwalker series as well: the pieces making up the story are of good quality, and Elliott's writing is solid, but the narrative magic never quite coheres for me. It's the sort of novella where I finished reading, went "huh," and then was excited to start a new book.

I have no idea if there are plans for more stories in this universe, but Servant Mage felt like a prelude to a longer series. If that series does materialize, there are some signs that it could be more satisfying. At the end of the story, Fellian is finally in a place to do something original and different, and I am mildly curious what she might do. Maybe enough to read the next book, if one turns up.

Mostly, though, I'm waiting for the sequel to Unconquerable Sun. Next April!

Rating: 6 out of 10

24 November, 2022 04:39AM

November 23, 2022

hackergotchi for Jonathan Dowland

Jonathan Dowland

eventual consistency

Reading some documentation about using hledger, a particular passage jumped out at me:

It should be easy to work towards eventual consistency. …I should be able to do them bit by little bit, leaving things half-done, and picking them up later with little (mental) effort. Eventually my records would be perfect and consistent.

This has been an approach I've used for many things in my life for a long time. It has something in common with eat the elephant one mouthful at a time. I think there are some categories of problems that you can't solve this way: perhaps because with this approach you are always stuck in a local minima/maxima. On the other hand I often feel that there's no way I can address some problems at all without doing so in the smallest of steps.

Personal finance is definitely one of those.

23 November, 2022 11:25AM

François Marier

Name resolution errors in Ubuntu repositories while building a docker container

I ran into what seemed to be a DNS problem when building a Docker container:

Err http://archive.ubuntu.com jammy Release.gpg
  Could not resolve 'archive.ubuntu.com'

W: Failed to fetch http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/jammy/Release.gpg  Could not resolve 'archive.ubuntu.com'

W: Some index files failed to download. They have been ignored, or old ones used instead.

I found that many solutions talked about setting the default DNS server explicitly in /etc/docker/daemon.json:

{
    "dns": ["1.1.1.1"]
}

but that didn't work for me.

I noticed however that I was having these problems whenever I connected to my VPN. So what did work for me was restarting the docker daemon whenever there is a change in networking (e.g. enabling/disabling VPN) by putting the following in /etc/NetworkManager/dispatcher.d/docker-local:

#!/bin/sh

LOGFILE=/var/log/docker-restarts.log

if [ -z "$1" ]; then
    echo "$0: called with no interface" >> $LOGFILE
    exit 1;
fi

if [ "$1" = lo ]; then
    # Ignoring the loopback interface
    exit 0;
fi

case "$2" in
    up|vpn-up|down|vpn-down)
        echo "$0: restarting docker due to action \`$2' on interface \`$1'" >> $LOGFILE
        /bin/systemctl restart docker.service
        ;;
    *)
        echo "$0: ignoring action \`$2' on interface \`$1'" >> $LOGFILE
        ;;
esac

and then making that new file executable:

chmod +x /etc/NetworkManager/dispatcher.d/docker-local

You can confirm that it's working as intended by watching the logs:

tail -f /var/log/docker-restarts.log

while enabling/disable your VPN or your network connection. If you don't see any output, then something is wrong and the Docker restart isn't happening.

23 November, 2022 08:10AM

November 22, 2022

hackergotchi for Dirk Eddelbuettel

Dirk Eddelbuettel

spdl 0.0.1 on CRAN: New Package!

A new package made it to CRAN today: spdl. It provides a very simple interface to spdlog with the key focus being that provides the same interface from both R and C++. I had brought spdlog to R a little while ago via RcppSpdlog, but its use was generally limited to C++ code where we would write something like (taken from one of the examples included in the package)

spdlog::info("Welcome to spdlog!");

I then provided C-level exports from the package accessible in other package but with that the signature only became longer as it also included the package name, here RcppSpdlog. So I experimented a little with that and added another ‘more compactly named’ namespace spdl around it. So then it becomes

spdl::info("Info message with values {} and {}", 42, 1.23);  // C++ code

which now also shows the power of the included fmt library. And I got quite used to that … and now wanted to same from R! But to create a new namespace, we need a new package. So … we made one. Now from R too:

spdl::info("Info message with values {} and {}", 42L, 1.23)  # R code

We layered a very simple wrapper for fmt over this. All R argument are passed to format() and we simply send a vector of strings over the C interface to the RcppSpdlog package where the templated formatter of fmt is invoked – but for character values. You can equally well format the string locally first. Everything works: from paste() to sprintf() to any of the existing string interpolators all of which are nice. But none works just like fmt and I wanted to have the same formatter in both languages, and like how fmt works.

By tradition, the NEWS entry for this release follows.

Changes in spld version 0.0.1 (2022-11-21)

  • Initial release of R and C++ loggers using spdl::* namespace

More detailed information is on the spdl page.

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

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

22 November, 2022 10:39PM

November 21, 2022

RcppClassic 0.9.13 on CRAN: Minor Update

A maintenance release 0.9.14 of the RcppClassic package arrived earlier today on CRAN. This package provides a maintained version of the otherwise deprecated initial Rcpp API which no new projects should use as the normal Rcpp API is so much better.

The changes is. CRAN was reporting (for all four macOS builds, and only there) that an absolute path was embedded, so we updated the (old …) call to install_name_tool use on that (and only that) OS. No other changes were made.

CRANberries also reports the changes relative to the previous release from nearly three years ago.

Questions, comments etc should go to the rcpp-devel mailing list off the R-Forge page.

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

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

21 November, 2022 10:36PM

November 19, 2022

Joerg Jaspert

From QNAP QTS to TrueNAS Scale

History, Setup

So for quite some time I have a QNAP TS-873x here, equipped with 8 Western Digital Red 10 TB disks, plus 2 WD Blue 500G M2 SSDs. The QNAP itself has an “AMD Embedded R-Series RX-421MD” with 4 cores and was equipped with 48G RAM.

Initially I had been quite happy, the system is nice. It was fast, it was easy to get to run and the setup of things I wanted was simple enough. All in a web interface that tries to imitate a kind of workstation feeling and also tries to hide that it is actually a webinterface.

Natually with that amount of disks I had a RAID6 for the disks, plus RAID1 for the SSDs. And then configured as a big storage pool with the RAID1 as cache. Below the hood QNAP uses MDADM Raid and LVM (if you want, with thin provisioning), in some form of emdedded linux. The interface allows for regular snapshots of your storage with flexible enough schedules to create them, so it all appears pretty good.

QNAP slow

Fast forward some time and it gets annoying. First off you really should have regular raid resyncs scheduled, and while you can set priorities on them and have them low priority, they make the whole system feel very sluggish, quite annoying. And sure, power failure (rare, but can happen) means another full resync run. Also, it appears all of the snapshots are always mounted to some /mnt/snapshot/something place (df on the system gets quite unusable).

Second, the reboot times. QNAP seems to be affected by the “more features, fuck performance” virus, and bloat their OS with more and more features while completly ignoring the performance. Everytime they do an “upgrade” it feels worse. Lately reboot times went up to 10 to 15 minutes - and then it still hadn’t started the virtual machines / docker containers one might run on. Another 5 to 10 minutes for those. Opening the file explorer - ages on calculating what to show. Trying to get the storage setup shown? Go get a coffee, but please fetch the beans directly from the plantation, or you are too fast.

Annoying it was. And no, no broken disks or fan or anything, it all checks out fine.

Replace QNAPs QTS system

So I started looking around what to do. More RAM may help a little bit, but I already had 48G, the system itself appears to only do 64G maximum, so not much chance of it helping enough. Hardware is all fine and working, so software needs to be changed. Sounds hard, but turns out, it is not.

TrueNAS

And I found that multiple people replaced the QNAPs own system with a TrueNAS installation and generally had been happy. Looking further I found that TrueNAS has a variant called Scale - which is based on Debian. Doubly good, that, so I went off checking what I may need for it.

Requirements

Heck, that was a step back. To install TrueNAS you need an HDMI out and a disk to put it on. The one that QTS uses is too small, so no option.

QNAPs internal USB disk QNAPs original internal USB drive, DOM

So either use one of the SSDs that played cache (and should do so again in TrueNAS, or get the QNAP original replaced.

HDMI out is simple, get a cheap card and put it into one of the two PCIe-4x slots, done. The disk thing looked more complicated, as QNAP uses some “internal usb stick thing”. Turns out it is “just” a USB stick that has an 8+1pin connector. Couldn’t find anything nice as replacement, but hey, there are 9-pin to USB-A adapters.

9PIN to USB A a 9pin to USB A adapter

With that adapter, one can take some random M2 SSD and an M2-to-USB case, plus some cabling, and voila, we have a nice system disk.

USB 9pin to USB-A cable connected to Motherboard and some more cable 9pin adapter to USB-A connected with some more cable

Obviously there isn’t a good place to put this SSD case and cable, but the QNAP case is large enough to find space and use some cable ties to store it safely. Space enough to get the cable from the side, where the mainboard is to the place I mounted it, so all fine.

Mounted SSD in external case, also shows the video card Mounted SSD in its external case

The next best M2 SSD was a Western Digital Red with 500G - and while this is WAY too much for TrueNAS, it works. And hey, only using a tiny fraction? Oh so much more cells available internally to use when others break. Or something…

Together with the Asus card mounted I was able to install TrueNAS. Which is simple, their installer is easy enough to follow, just make sure to select the right disk to put it on.

Preserving data during the move

Switching from QNAP QTS to TrueNAS Scale means changing from MDADM Raid with LVM and ext4 on top to ZFS and as such all data on it gets erased. So a backup first is helpful, and I got myself two external Seagate USB Disks of 6TB each - enough for the data I wanted to keep.

Copying things all over took ages, especially as the QNAP backup thingie sucks, it was breaking quite often. Also, for some reason I did not investigate, the performance of it was real bad. It started at a maximum of 50MB/s, but the last terabyte of data was copied at MUCH less than that, and so it took much longer than I anticipated.

Copying back was slow too, but much less so. Of course reading things usually is faster than writing, with it going around 100MB/s most of the time, which is quite a bit more - still not what USB3 can actually do, but I guess the AMD chip doesn’t want to go that fast.

TrueNAS experience

The installation went mostly smooth, the only real trouble had been on my side. Turns out that a bad network cable does NOT help the network setup, who would have thought. Other than that it is the usual set of questions you would expect, a reboot, and then some webinterface.

And here the differences start. The whole system boots up much faster. Not even a third of the time compared to QTS.

One important thing: As TrueNAS scale is Debian based, and hence a linux kernel, it automatically detects and assembles the old RAID arrays that QTS put on. Which TrueNAS can do nothing with, so it helps to manually stop them and wipe the disks.

Afterwards I put ZFS on the disks, with a similar setup to what I had before. The spinning rust are the data disks in a RAIDZ2 setup, the two SSDs are added as cache devices. Unlike MDADM, ZFS does not have a long sync process. Also unlike the MDADM/LVM/EXT4 setup from before, ZFS works different. It manages the raid thing but it also does the volume and filesystem parts. Quite different handling, and I’m still getting used to it, so no, I won’t write some ZFS introduction now.

Features

The two systems can not be compared completly, they are having a pretty different target audience. QNAP is more for the user that wants some network storage that offers a ton of extra features easily available via a clickable interface. While TrueNAS appears more oriented to people that want a fast but reliable storage system. TrueNAS does not offer all the extra bloat the QNAP delivers. Still, you have the ability to run virtual machines and it seems it comes with Rancher, so some kubernetes/container ability is there. It lacks essential features like assigning PCI devices to virtual machines, so is not useful right now, but I assume that will come in a future version.

I am still exploring it all, but I like what I have right now. Still rebuilding my setup to have all shares exported and used again, but the most important are working already.

19 November, 2022 12:20PM

November 18, 2022

hackergotchi for Patryk Cisek

Patryk Cisek

Don't store TOTP in Bitwarden for your online accounts!

Since I’ve started working in Information Security space, I’ve been talking to a lot of people about the topics related to protecting ones identity online. Basically, trying to answer the question: What does it take to sufficiently secure my online accounts? Of course the meaning of sufficiently is very subjective here, but I’ve always kept it vague to gauge what it means to them specifically. I did make sure to talk people of various backgrounds – from deeply technical all the way to not technical at all.

18 November, 2022 11:45PM by l (Patryk Cisek (patryk@cisek.emai)

Craig Small

Hello world!

Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start writing!

18 November, 2022 11:13PM by dropbear

hackergotchi for Jonathan Dowland

Jonathan Dowland

bandcamp

I buy a lot of music from Bandcamp, but I rarely if ever download it: I rely on streaming it from the Bandcamp website, or mobile App. The prepper/archivist/hoarder in me is a little uncomfortable about that.

During the Pandemic, Bandcamp started a scheme called Bandcamp Fridays: days on which they waive their revenue share for music purchases, meaning musicians get a larger proportion of the proceeds. It proved an enormous success, and they've kept them going: you can check when the next one is scheduled via https://isitbandcampfriday.com/.

Bandcamp appear to offer a really good deal to artists (in comparison to other platforms) so I'm not too concerned about their percentage on other days of the year. But it occurred to me that if I wanted to maintain a habit of taking a local copy of the music I buy, perhaps I should schedule doing so on Bandcamp Fridays.

18 November, 2022 11:42AM

hackergotchi for Dirk Eddelbuettel

Dirk Eddelbuettel

RcppSpdlog 0.0.10 on CRAN: New Features

A version 0.0.10 of RcppSpdlog is now on CRAN and in Debian. RcppSpdlog bundles spdlog, a wonderful header-only C++ logging library with all the bells and whistles you would want that was written by Gabi Melman, and also includes fmt by Victor Zverovich.

This release continues on the path started less than two weeks ago with the RcppSpdlog 0.0.9 release. We continue to support both R and C++ access by adding a (simple) variadic template formatter exposing fmt::format() (by focusing on just string arguments). This can be accessed from R via the exact same formatting strings that fmt uses, and which we have come to like for its simplicity. Of course if one prefers a different string interpolation method, or plain sprintf(), or even paste: they all work as all that matters is that a character variable gets passed on. We also added a little bit of new documentation in the vignette.

The NEWS entry for this release follows.

Changes in RcppSpdlog version 0.0.10 (2022-11-17)

  • Support variadic templates with fmt::format

  • Add R formatting helper which converts arguments to character taking advantage of variadic template logger: fmt logging from R

  • Expand vignette

Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is also a diffstat report. More detailed information is on the RcppSpdlog page, or the package documention site.

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

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

18 November, 2022 02:15AM

Reproducible Builds (diffoscope)

diffoscope 227 released

The diffoscope maintainers are pleased to announce the release of diffoscope version 227. This version includes the following changes:

[ Chris Lamb ]
* Don't attempt to attach text-only differences notice if there are no
  differences to begin with. (Closes: #1024171, #1024349)
* Don't run Python decompiling tests on Python bytecode that both file(1)
  cannot yet detect and Python 3.11 cannot demarshall. (Closes: #1024335)

You find out more by visiting the project homepage.

18 November, 2022 12:00AM

November 17, 2022

hackergotchi for Steinar H. Gunderson

Steinar H. Gunderson

Nageru 2.2.0 released

I've released version 2.2.0 of Nageru, my live video mixer. The “big ticket” item this time is AV1 support (through SVT-AV1), but it's still too experimental for production—in particular, as I've written about before, the client ecosystem isn't quite there yet.

But there's also a few cleanups, in particular a dependency removal. Every dependency is a long-term burden, and in retrospect, I shouldn't have taken on so many. (I am aware that this is ironic given the previous paragraph.) I'm wondering maybe if I should try to control my own fate a bit more and get rid of some.

Anyway, here's the changelog as usual:

Nageru and Futatabi 2.2.0, November 15th, 2022

  - Support AV1 output, via SVT-AV1. Note that this is still somewhat
    experimental, not the least because SVT-AV1's streaming support
    is not as mature as x264.

  - Remove the dependency on QCustomPlot.

  - Expose BlurEffect and UnsharpMaskEffect to the theme.

  - Clean up several rarely-unused command-line flags:
    - All the 10-bit flags are now collapsed to --10-bit.
    - Remove --http-uncompressed-video.
    - Remove the x264 VBV flags.
    - Hide --x264-speedcontrol-verbose.
    - Hide --no-flush-pbos.

  - Make a workaround for audio monitoring output under PipeWire.

  - Update CEF compatibility (tested with CEF 107).

Downloads as always on nageru.sesse.net.

17 November, 2022 11:21PM

November 16, 2022

Ian Jackson

Stop writing Rust linked list libraries!

tl;dr:

Don’t write a Rust linked list library: they are hard to do well, and usually useless.

Use VecDeque, which is great. If you actually need more than VecDeque can do, use one of the handful of libraries that actually offer a significantly more useful API.

If you are writing your own data structure, check if someone has done it already, and consider slotmap or generation_arena, (or maybe Rc/Arc).

Contents

Survey of Rust linked list libraries

I have updated my Survey of Rust linked list libraries.

Background

In 2019 I was writing plag-mangler, a tool for planar graph layout.

I needed a data structure. Naturally I looked for a library to help. I didn’t find what I needed, so I wrote rc-dlist-deque. However, on the way I noticed an inordinate number of linked list libraries written in Rust. Most all of these had no real reason for existing. Even the one in the Rust standard library is useless.

Results

Now I have redone the survey. The results are depressing. In 2019 there were 5 libraries which, in my opinion, were largely useless. In late 2022 there are now thirteen linked list libraries that ought probably not ever to be used. And, a further eight libraries for which there are strictly superior alternatives. Many of these have the signs of projects whose authors are otherwise competent: proper documentation, extensive APIs, and so on.

There is one new library which is better for some applications than those available in 2019. (I’m referring to generational_token_list, which makes a plausible alternative to dlv-list which I already recommended in 2019.)

Why are there so many poor Rust linked list libraries ?

Linked lists and Rust do not go well together. But (and I’m guessing here) I presume many people are taught in programming school that a linked list is a fundamental data structure; people are often even asked to write one as a teaching exercise. This is a bad idea in Rust. Or maybe they’ve heard that writing linked lists in Rust is hard and want to prove they can do it.

Double-ended queues

One of the main applications for a linked list in a language like C, is a queue, where you put items in at one end, and take them out at the other. The Rust standard library has a data structure for that, VecDeque.

Five of the available libraries:

  • Have an API which is a subset of that of VecDeque: basically, pushing and popping elements at the front and back.
  • Have worse performance for most applications than VecDeque,
  • Are less mature, less available, less well tested, etc., than VecDeque, simply because VecDeque is in the Rust Standard Library.

For these you could, and should, just use VecDeque instead.

The Cursor concept

A proper linked list lets you identify and hold onto an element in the middle of the list, and cheaply insert and remove elements there.

Rust’s ownership and borrowing rules make this awkward. One idea that people have many times reinvented and reimplemented, is to have a Cursor type, derived from the list, which is a reference to an element, and permits insertion and removal there.

Eight libraries have implemented this in the obvious way. However, there is a serious API limitation:

To prevent a cursor being invalidated (e.g. by deletion of the entry it points to) you can’t modify the list while the cursor exists. You can only have one cursor (that can be used for modification) at a time.

The practical effect of this is that you cannot retain cursors. You can make and use such a cursor for a particular operation, but you must dispose of it soon. Attempts to do otherwise will see you losing a battle with the borrow checker.

If that’s good enough, then you could just use a VecDeque and use array indices instead of the cursors. It’s true that deleting or adding elements in the middle involves a lot of copying, but your algorithm is O(n) even with the single-cursor list libraries, because it must first walk the cursor to the desired element.

Formally, I believe any algorithm using these exclusive cursors can be rewritten, in an obvious way, to simply iterate and/or copy from the start or end (as one can do with VecDeque) without changing the headline O() performance characteristics.

IMO the savings available from avoiding extra copies etc. are not worth the additional dependency, unsafe code, and so on, especially as there are other ways of helping with that (e.g. boxing the individual elements).

Even if you don’t find that convincing, generational_token_list and dlv_list are strictly superior since they offer a more flexible and convenient API and better performance, and rely on much less unsafe code.

Rustic approaches to pointers-to-and-between-nodes data structures

Most of the time a VecDeque is great. But if you actually want to hold onto (perhaps many) references to the middle of the list, and later modify it through those references, you do need something more. This is a specific case of a general class of problems where the naive approach (use Rust references to the data structure nodes) doesn’t work well.

But there is a good solution:

Keep all the nodes in an array (a Vec<Option<T>> or similar) and use the index in the array as your node reference. This is fast, and quite ergonomic, and neatly solves most of the problems. If you are concerned that bare indices might cause confusion, as newly inserted elements would reuse indices, add a per-index generation count.

These approaches have been neatly packaged up in libraries like slab, slotmap, generational-arena and thunderdome. And they have been nicely applied to linked lists by the authors of generational_token_list. and dlv-list.

The alternative for nodey data structures in safe Rust: Rc/Arc

Of course, you can just use Rust’s “interior mutability” and reference counting smart pointers, to directly implement the data structure of your choice.

In many applications, a single-threaded data structure is fine, in which case Rc and Cell/RefCell will let you write safe code, with cheap refcount updates and runtime checks inserted to defend against unexpected aliasing, use-after-free, etc.

I took this approach in rc-dlist-deque, because I wanted each node to be able to be on multiple lists.

Rust’s package ecosystem demonstrating software’s NIH problem

The Rust ecosystem is full of NIH libraries of all kinds. In my survey, there are: five good options; seven libraries which are plausible, but just not as good as the alternatives; and fourteen others.

There is a whole rant I could have about how the whole software and computing community is pathologically neophilic. Often we seem to actively resist reusing ideas, let alone code; and are ignorant and dismissive of what has gone before. As a result, we keep solving the same problems, badly - making the same mistakes over and over again. In some subfields, working software, or nearly working software, is frequently replaced with something worse, maybe more than once.

One aspect of this is a massive cultural bias towards rewriting rather than reusing, let alone fixing and using.

Many people can come out of a degree, trained to be a programmer, and have no formal training in selecting and evaluating software; this is even though working effectively with computers requires making good use of everyone else’s work.

If one isn’t taught these skills (when and how to search for prior art, how to choose between dependencies, and so on) one must learn it on the job. The result is usually an ad-hoc and unsystematic approach, often dominated by fashion rather than engineering.

The package naming paradox

The more experienced and competent programmer is aware of all the other options that exist - after all they have evaluated other choices before writing their own library.

So they will call their library something like generational_token_list or vecdeque-stableix.

Whereas the novice straight out of a pre-Rust programming course just thinks what they are doing is the one and only obvious thing (even though it’s a poor idea) and hasn’t even searched for a previous implementation. So they call their package something obvious like “linked list”.

As a result, the most obvious names seem to refer to the least useful libraries.

Edited 2022-11-16 23:55 UTC to update numbers of libraries in various categories following updates to the survey (including updates prompted by feedback received after this post first published).


comment count unavailable comments

16 November, 2022 11:55PM

Antoine Beaupré

Wayland: i3 to Sway migration

I started migrating my graphical workstations to Wayland, specifically migrating from i3 to Sway. This is mostly to address serious graphics bugs in the latest Framwork laptop, but also something I felt was inevitable.

The current status is that I've been able to convert my i3 configuration to Sway, and adapt my systemd startup sequence to the new environment. Screen sharing only works with Pipewire, so I also did that migration, which basically requires an upgrade to Debian bookworm to get a nice enough Pipewire release.

I'm testing Wayland on my laptop, but I'm not using it as a daily driver because I first need to upgrade to Debian bookworm on my main workstation.

Most irritants have been solved one way or the other. My main problem with Wayland right now is that I spent a frigging week doing the conversion: it's exciting and new, but it basically sucked the life out of all my other projects and it's distracting, and I want it to stop.

The rest of this page documents why I made the switch, how it happened, and what's left to do. Hopefully it will keep you from spending as much time as I did in fixing this.

TL;DR: Wayland is mostly ready. Main blockers you might find are that you need to do manual configurations, DisplayLink (multiple monitors on a single cable) doesn't work in Sway, HDR and color management are still in development.

I had to install the following packages:

apt install \
    brightnessctl \
    foot \
    gammastep \
    gdm3 \
    grim slurp \
    pipewire-pulse \
    sway \
    swayidle \
    swaylock \
    wdisplays \
    wev \
    wireplumber \
    wlr-randr \
    xdg-desktop-portal-wlr

And did some of tweaks in my $HOME, mostly dealing with my esoteric systemd startup sequence, which you won't have to deal with if you are not a fan.

Why switch?

I originally held back from migrating to Wayland: it seemed like a complicated endeavor hardly worth the cost. It also didn't seem actually ready.

But after reading this blurb on LWN, I decided to at least document the situation here. The actual quote that convinced me it might be worth it was:

It’s amazing. I have never experienced gaming on Linux that looked this smooth in my life.

... I'm not a gamer, but I do care about latency. The longer version is worth a read as well.

The point here is not to bash one side or the other, or even do a thorough comparison. I start with the premise that Xorg is likely going away in the future and that I will need to adapt some day. In fact, the last major Xorg release (21.1, October 2021) is rumored to be the last ("just like the previous release...", that said, minor releases are still coming out, e.g. 21.1.4). Indeed, it seems even core Xorg people have moved on to developing Wayland, or at least Xwayland, which was spun off it its own source tree.

X, or at least Xorg, in in maintenance mode and has been for years. Granted, the X Window System is getting close to forty years old at this point: it got us amazingly far for something that was designed around the time the first graphical interface. Since Mac and (especially?) Windows released theirs, they have rebuilt their graphical backends numerous times, but UNIX derivatives have stuck on Xorg this entire time, which is a testament to the design and reliability of X. (Or our incapacity at developing meaningful architectural change across the entire ecosystem, take your pick I guess.)

What pushed me over the edge is that I had some pretty bad driver crashes with Xorg while screen sharing under Firefox, in Debian bookworm (around November 2022). The symptom would be that the UI would completely crash, reverting to a text-only console, while Firefox would keep running, audio and everything still working. People could still see my screen, but I couldn't, of course, let alone interact with it. All processes still running, including Xorg.

(And no, sorry, I haven't reported that bug, maybe I should have, and it's actually possible it comes up again in Wayland, of course. But at first, screen sharing didn't work of course, so it's coming a much further way. After making screen sharing work, though, the bug didn't occur again, so I consider this a Xorg-specific problem until further notice.)

There were also frustrating glitches in the UI, in general. I actually had to setup a compositor alongside i3 to make things bearable at all. Video playback in a window was laggy, sluggish, and out of sync.

Wayland fixed all of this.

Wayland equivalents

This section documents each tool I have picked as an alternative to the current Xorg tool I am using for the task at hand. It also touches on other alternatives and how the tool was configured.

Note that this list is based on the series of tools I use in desktop.

TODO: update desktop with the following when done, possibly moving old configs to a ?xorg archive.

Window manager: i3 → sway

This seems like kind of a no-brainer. Sway is around, it's feature-complete, and it's in Debian.

I'm a bit worried about the "Drew DeVault community", to be honest. There's a certain aggressiveness in the community I don't like so much; at least an open hostility towards more modern UNIX tools like containers and systemd that make it hard to do my work while interacting with that community.

I'm also concern about the lack of unit tests and user manual for Sway. The i3 window manager has been designed by a fellow (ex-)Debian developer I have a lot of respect for (Michael Stapelberg), partly because of i3 itself, but also working with him on other projects. Beyond the characters, i3 has a user guide, a code of conduct, and lots more documentation. It has a test suite.

Sway has... manual pages, with the homepage just telling users to use man -k sway to find what they need. I don't think we need that kind of elitism in our communities, to put this bluntly.

But let's put that aside: Sway is still a no-brainer. It's the easiest thing to migrate to, because it's mostly compatible with i3. I had to immediately fix those resources to get a minimal session going:

i3 Sway note
set_from_resources set no support for X resources, naturally
new_window pixel 1 default_border pixel 1 actually supported in i3 as well

That's it. All of the other changes I had to do (and there were actually a lot) were all Wayland-specific changes, not Sway-specific changes. For example, use brightnessctl instead of xbacklight to change the backlight levels.

See a copy of my full sway/config for details.

Other options include:

  • dwl: tiling, minimalist, dwm for Wayland, not in Debian
  • Hyprland: tiling, fancy animations, not in Debian
  • Qtile: tiling, extensible, in Python, not in Debian (1015267)
  • river: Zig, stackable, tagging, not in Debian (1006593)
  • velox: inspired by xmonad and dwm, not in Debian
  • vivarium: inspired by xmonad, not in Debian

Status bar: py3status → waybar

I have invested quite a bit of effort in setting up my status bar with py3status. It supports Sway directly, and did not actually require any change when migrating to Wayland.

Unfortunately, I had trouble making nm-applet work. Based on this nm-applet.service, I found that you need to pass --indicator for it to show up at all.

In theory, tray icon support was merged in 1.5, but in practice there are still several limitations, like icons not clickable. Also, on startup, nm-applet --indicator triggers this error in the Sway logs:

nov 11 22:34:12 angela sway[298938]: 00:49:42.325 [INFO] [swaybar/tray/host.c:24] Registering Status Notifier Item ':1.47/org/ayatana/NotificationItem/nm_applet'
nov 11 22:34:12 angela sway[298938]: 00:49:42.327 [ERROR] [swaybar/tray/item.c:127] :1.47/org/ayatana/NotificationItem/nm_applet IconPixmap: No such property “IconPixmap”
nov 11 22:34:12 angela sway[298938]: 00:49:42.327 [ERROR] [swaybar/tray/item.c:127] :1.47/org/ayatana/NotificationItem/nm_applet AttentionIconPixmap: No such property “AttentionIconPixmap”
nov 11 22:34:12 angela sway[298938]: 00:49:42.327 [ERROR] [swaybar/tray/item.c:127] :1.47/org/ayatana/NotificationItem/nm_applet ItemIsMenu: No such property “ItemIsMenu”
nov 11 22:36:10 angela sway[313419]: info: fcft.c:838: /usr/share/fonts/truetype/dejavu/DejaVuSans.ttf: size=24.00pt/32px, dpi=96.00

... but that seems innocuous. The tray icon displays but is not clickable.

Note that there is currently (November 2022) a pull request to hook up a "Tray D-Bus Menu" which, according to Reddit might fix this, or at least be somewhat relevant.

If you don't see the icon, check the bar.tray_output property in the Sway config, try: tray_output *.

The non-working tray was the biggest irritant in my migration. I have used nmtui to connect to new Wifi hotspots or change connection settings, but that doesn't support actions like "turn off WiFi".

I eventually fixed this by switching from py3status to waybar, which was another yak horde shaving session, but ultimately, it worked.

Web browser: Firefox

Firefox has had support for Wayland for a while now, with the team enabling it by default in nightlies around January 2022. It's actually not easy to figure out the state of the port, the meta bug report is still open and it's huge: it currently (Sept 2022) depends on 76 open bugs, it was opened twelve (2010) years ago, and it's still getting daily updates (mostly linking to other tickets).

Firefox 106 presumably shipped with "Better screen sharing for Windows and Linux Wayland users", but I couldn't quite figure out what those were.

TL;DR: echo MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1 >> ~/.config/environment.d/firefox.conf && apt install xdg-desktop-portal-wlr

How to enable it

Firefox depends on this silly variable to start correctly under Wayland (otherwise it starts inside Xwayland and looks fuzzy and fails to screen share):

MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1 firefox

To make the change permanent, many recipes recommend adding this to an environment startup script:

if [ "$XDG_SESSION_TYPE" == "wayland" ]; then
    export MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1
fi

At least that's the theory. In practice, Sway doesn't actually run any startup shell script, so that can't possibly work. Furthermore, XDG_SESSION_TYPE is not actually set when starting Sway from gdm3 which I find really confusing, and I'm not the only one. So the above trick doesn't actually work, even if the environment (XDG_SESSION_TYPE) is set correctly, because we don't have conditionals in environment.d(5).

(Note that systemd.environment-generator(7) do support running arbitrary commands to generate environment, but for some some do not support user-specific configuration files... Even then it may be a solution to have a conditional MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND environment, but I'm not sure it would work because ordering between those two isn't clear: maybe the XDG_SESSION_TYPE wouldn't be set just yet...)

At first, I made this ridiculous script to workaround those issues. Really, it seems to me Firefox should just parse the XDG_SESSION_TYPE variable here... but then I realized that Firefox works fine in Xorg when the MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND is set.

So now I just set that variable in environment.d and It Just Works™:

MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1

Screen sharing

Out of the box, screen sharing doesn't work until you install xdg-desktop-portal-wlr or similar (e.g. xdg-desktop-portal-gnome on GNOME). I had to reboot for the change to take effect.

Without those tools, it shows the usual permission prompt with "Use operating system settings" as the only choice, but when we accept... nothing happens. After installing the portals, it actualyl works, and works well!

This was tested in Debian bookworm/testing with Firefox ESR 102 and Firefox 106.

Major caveat: we can only share a full screen, we can't currently share just a window. The major upside to that is that, by default, it streams only one output which is actually what I want most of the time! See the screencast compatibility for more information on what is supposed to work.

This is actually a huge improvement over the situation in Xorg, where Firefox can only share a window or all monitors, which led me to use Chromium a lot for video-conferencing. With this change, in other words, I will not need Chromium for anything anymore, whoohoo!

If slurp, wofi, or bemenu are installed, one of them will be used to pick the monitor to share, which effectively acts as some minimal security measure. See xdg-desktop-portal-wlr(1) for how to configure that.

Side note: Chrome fails to share a full screen

I was still using Google Chrome (or, more accurately, Debian's Chromium package) for some videoconferencing. It's mainly because Chromium was the only browser which will allow me to share only one of my two monitors, which is extremely useful.

To start chrome with the Wayland backend, you need to use:

chromium  -enable-features=UseOzonePlatform -ozone-platform=wayland

If it shows an ugly gray border, check the Use system title bar and borders setting.

It can do some screensharing. Sharing a window and a tab seems to work, but sharing a full screen doesn't: it's all black. Maybe not ready for prime time.

And since Firefox can do what I need under Wayland now, I will not need to fight with Chromium to work under Wayland:

apt purge chromium

Note that a similar fix was necessary for Signal Desktop, see this commit. Basically you need to figure out a way to pass those same flags to signal:

--enable-features=WaylandWindowDecorations --ozone-platform-hint=auto

Email: notmuch

See Emacs, below.

File manager: thunar

Unchanged.

News: feed2exec, gnus

See Email, above, or Emacs in Editor, below.

Editor: Emacs okay-ish

Emacs is being actively ported to Wayland. According to this LWN article, the first (partial, to Cairo) port was done in 2014 and a working port (to GTK3) was completed in 2021, but wasn't merged until late 2021. That is: after Emacs 28 was released (April 2022).

So we'll probably need to wait for Emacs 29 to have native Wayland support in Emacs, which, in turn, is unlikely to arrive in time for the Debian bookworm freeze. There are, however, unofficial builds for both Emacs 28 and 29 provided by spwhitton which may provide native Wayland support.

I tested the snapshot packages and they do not quite work well enough. First off, they completely take over the builtin Emacs — they hijack the $PATH in /etc! — and certain things are simply not working in my setup. For example, this hook never gets ran on startup:

(add-hook 'after-init-hook 'server-start t)

Still, like many X11 applications, Emacs mostly works fine under Xwayland. The clipboard works as expected, for example.

Scaling is a bit of an issue: fonts look fuzzy.

I have heard anecdotal evidence of hard lockups with Emacs running under Xwayland as well, but haven't experienced any problem so far. I did experience a Wayland crash with the snapshot version however.

TODO: look again at Wayland in Emacs 29.

Backups: borg

Mostly irrelevant, as I do not use a GUI.

Color theme: srcery, redshift → gammastep

I am keeping Srcery as a color theme, in general.

Redshift is another story: it has no support for Wayland out of the box, but it's apparently possible to apply a hack on the TTY before starting Wayland, with:

redshift -m drm -PO 3000

This tip is from the arch wiki which also has other suggestions for Wayland-based alternatives. Both KDE and GNOME have their own "red shifters", and for wlroots-based compositors, they (currently, Sept. 2022) list the following alternatives:

I configured gammastep with a simple gammastep.service file associated with the sway-session.target.

Display manager: lightdm → gdm3

Switched because lightdm failed to start sway:

nov 16 16:41:43 angela sway[843121]: 00:00:00.002 [ERROR] [wlr] [libseat] [common/terminal.c:162] Could not open target tty: Permission denied

Possible alternatives:

Terminal: xterm → foot

One of the biggest question mark in this transition was what to do about Xterm. After writing two articles about terminal emulators as a professional journalist, decades of working on the terminal, and probably using dozens of different terminal emulators, I'm still not happy with any of them.

This is such a big topic that I actually have an entire blog post specifically about this.

For starters, using xterm under Xwayland works well enough, although the font scaling makes things look a bit too fuzzy.

I have also tried foot: it ... just works!

Fonts are much crisper than Xterm and Emacs. URLs are not clickable but the URL selector (control-shift-u) is just plain awesome (think "vimperator" for the terminal).

There's cool hack to jump between prompts.

Copy-paste works. True colors work. The word-wrapping is excellent: it doesn't lose one byte. Emojis are nicely sized and colored. Font resize works. There's even scroll back search (control-shift-r).

Foot went from a question mark to being a reason to switch to Wayland, just for this little goodie, which says a lot about the quality of that software.

The selection clicks are a not quite what I would expect though. In rxvt and others, you have the following patterns:

  • single click: reset selection, or drag to select
  • double: select word
  • triple: select quotes or line
  • quadruple: select line

I particularly find the "select quotes" bit useful. It seems like foot just supports double and triple clicks, with word and line selected. You can select a rectangle with control,. It correctly extends the selection word-wise with right click if double-click was first used.

One major problem with Foot is that it's a new terminal, with its own termcap entry. Support for foot was added to ncurses in the 20210731 release, which was shipped after the current Debian stable release (Debian bullseye, which ships 6.2+20201114-2). A workaround for this problem is to install the foot-terminfo package on the remote host, which is available in Debian stable.

This should eventually resolve itself, as Debian bookworm has a newer version. Note that some corrections were also shipped in the 20211113 release, but that is also shipped in Debian bookworm.

That said, I am almost certain I will have to revert back to xterm under Xwayland at some point in the future. Back when I was using GNOME Terminal, it would mostly work for everything until I had to use the serial console on a (HP ProCurve) network switch, which have a fancy TUI that was basically unusable there. I fully expect such problems with foot, or any other terminal than xterm, for that matter.

The foot wiki has good troubleshooting instructions as well.

Update: I did find one tiny thing to improve with foot, and it's the default logging level which I found pretty verbose. After discussing it with the maintainer on IRC, I submitted this patch to tweak it, which I described like this on Mastodon:

today's reason why i will go to hell when i die (TRWIWGTHWID?): a 600-word, 63 lines commit log for a one line change: https://codeberg.org/dnkl/foot/pulls/1215

It's Friday.

Launcher: rofi → rofi??

rofi does not support Wayland. There was a rather disgraceful battle in the pull request that led to the creation of a fork (lbonn/rofi), so it's unclear how that will turn out.

Given how relatively trivial problem space is, there is of course a profusion of options:

Tool In Debian Notes
alfred yes general launcher/assistant tool
bemenu yes, bookworm+ inspired by dmenu
cerebro no Javascript ... uh... thing
dmenu-wl no fork of dmenu, straight port to Wayland
Fuzzel ITP 982140 dmenu/drun replacement, app icon overlay
gmenu no drun replacement, with app icons
kickoff no dmenu/run replacement, fuzzy search, "snappy", history, copy-paste, Rust
krunner yes KDE's runner
mauncher no dmenu/drun replacement, math
nwg-launchers no dmenu/drun replacement, JSON config, app icons, nwg-shell project
Onagre no rofi/alfred inspired, multiple plugins, Rust
πmenu no dmenu/drun rewrite
Rofi (lbonn's fork) no see above
sirula no .desktop based app launcher
Ulauncher ITP 949358 generic launcher like Onagre/rofi/alfred, might be overkill
tofi yes, bookworm+ dmenu/drun replacement, C
wmenu no fork of dmenu-wl, but mostly a rewrite
Wofi yes dmenu/drun replacement, not actively maintained
yofi no dmenu/drun replacement, Rust

The above list comes partly from https://arewewaylandyet.com/ and awesome-wayland. It is likely incomplete.

I have read some good things about bemenu, fuzzel, and wofi.

A particularly tricky option is that my rofi password management depends on xdotool for some operations. At first, I thought this was just going to be (thankfully?) impossible, because we actually like the idea that one app cannot send keystrokes to another. But it seems there are actually alternatives to this, like wtype or ydotool, the latter which requires root access. wl-ime-type does that through the input-method-unstable-v2 protocol (sample emoji picker, but is not packaged in Debian.

As it turns out, wtype just works as expected, and fixing this was basically a two-line patch. Another alternative, not in Debian, is wofi-pass.

The other problem is that I actually heavily modified rofi. I use "modis" which are not actually implemented in wofi or tofi, so I'm left with reinventing those wheels from scratch or using the rofi + wayland fork... It's really too bad that fork isn't being reintegrated...

For now, I'm actually still using rofi under Xwayland. The main downside is that fonts are fuzzy, but it otherwise just works.

Note that wlogout could be a partial replacement (just for the "power menu").

Image viewers: geeqie → ?

I'm not very happy with geeqie in the first place, and I suspect the Wayland switch will just make add impossible things on top of the things I already find irritating (Geeqie doesn't support copy-pasting images).

In practice, Geeqie doesn't seem to work so well under Wayland. The fonts are fuzzy and the thumbnail preview just doesn't work anymore (filed as Debian bug 1024092). It seems it also has problems with scaling.

Alternatives:

See also this list and that list for other list of image viewers, not necessarily ported to Wayland.

TODO: pick an alternative to geeqie, nomacs would be gorgeous if it wouldn't be basically abandoned upstream (no release since 2020), has an unpatched CVE-2020-23884 since July 2020, does bad vendoring, and is in bad shape in Debian (4 minor releases behind).

So for now I'm still grumpily using Geeqie.

Media player: mpv, gmpc / sublime

This is basically unchanged. mpv seems to work fine under Wayland, better than Xorg on my new laptop (as mentioned in the introduction), and that before the version which improves Wayland support significantly, by bringing native Pipewire support and DMA-BUF support.

gmpc is more of a problem, mainly because it is abandoned. See 2022-08-22-gmpc-alternatives for the full discussion, one of the alternatives there will likely support Wayland.

Finally, I might just switch to sublime-music instead... In any case, not many changes here, thankfully.

Screensaver: xsecurelock → swaylock

I was previously using xss-lock and xsecurelock as a screensaver, with xscreensaver "hacks" as a backend for xsecurelock.

The basic screensaver in Sway seems to be built with swayidle and swaylock. It's interesting because it's the same "split" design as xss-lock and xsecurelock.

That, unfortunately, does not include the fancy "hacks" provided by xscreensaver, and that is unlikely to be implemented upstream.

Other alternatives include gtklock and waylock (zig), which do not solve that problem either.

It looks like swaylock-plugin, a swaylock fork, which at least attempts to solve this problem, although not directly using the real xscreensaver hacks. swaylock-effects is another attempt at this, but it only adds more effects, it doesn't delegate the image display.

Other than that, maybe it's time to just let go of those funky animations and just let swaylock do it's thing, which is display a static image or just a black screen, which is fine by me.

In the end, I am just using swayidle with a configuration based on the systemd integration wiki page but with additional tweaks from this service, see the resulting swayidle.service file.

Interestingly, damjan also has a service for swaylock itself, although it's not clear to me what its purpose is...

Screenshot: maim → grim, pubpaste

I'm a heavy user of maim (and a package uploader in Debian). It looks like the direct replacement to maim (and slop) is grim (and slurp). There's also swappy which goes on top of grim and allows preview/edit of the resulting image, nice touch (not in Debian though).

See also awesome-wayland screenshots for other alternatives: there are many, including X11 tools like Flameshot that also support Wayland.

One key problem here was that I have my own screenshot / pastebin software which will needed an update for Wayland as well. That, thankfully, meant actually cleaning up a lot of horrible code that involved calling xterm and xmessage for user interaction. Now, pubpaste uses GTK for prompts and looks much better. (And before anyone freaks out, I already had to use GTK for proper clipboard support, so this isn't much of a stretch...)

Screen recorder: simplescreenrecorder → wf-recorder

In Xorg, I have used both peek or simplescreenrecorder for screen recordings. The former will work in Wayland, but has no sound support. The latter has a fork with Wayland support but it is limited and buggy ("doesn't support recording area selection and has issues with multiple screens").

It looks like wf-recorder will just do everything correctly out of the box, including audio support (with --audio, duh). It's also packaged in Debian.

One has to wonder how this works while keeping the "between app security" that Wayland promises, however... Would installing such a program make my system less secure?

Many other options are available, see the awesome Wayland screencasting list.

RSI: workrave → nothing?

Workrave has no support for Wayland. activity watch is a time tracker alternative, but is not a RSI watcher. KDE has rsiwatcher, but that's a bit too much on the heavy side for my taste.

SafeEyes looks like an alternative at first, but it has many issues under Wayland (escape doesn't work, idle doesn't work, it just doesn't work really). timekpr-next could be an alternative as well, and has support for Wayland.

I am also considering just abandoning workrave, even if I stick with Xorg, because it apparently introduces significant latency in the input pipeline.

And besides, I've developed a pretty unhealthy alert fatigue with Workrave. I have used the program for so long that my fingers know exactly where to click to dismiss those warnings very effectively. It makes my work just more irritating, and doesn't fix the fundamental problem I have with computers.

Other apps

This is a constantly changing list, of course. There's a bit of a "death by a thousand cuts" in migrating to Wayland because you realize how many things you were using are tightly bound to X.

  • .Xresources - just say goodbye to that old resource system, it was used, in my case, only for rofi, xterm, and ... Xboard!?

  • keyboard layout switcher: built-in to Sway since 2017 (PR 1505, 1.5rc2+), requires a small configuration change, see this answer as well, looks something like this command:

     swaymsg input 0:0:X11_keyboard xkb_layout de

    or using this config:

     input * {
     xkb_layout "ca,us"
     xkb_options "grp:sclk_toggle"
 }

    That works refreshingly well, even better than in Xorg, I must say.

    swaykbdd is an alternative that supports per-window layouts (in Debian).

  • wallpaper: currently using feh, will need a replacement, TODO: figure out something that does, like feh, a random shuffle. swaybg just loads a single image, duh. oguri might be a solution, but unmaintained, used here, not in Debian. wallutils is another option, also not in Debian. For now I just don't have a wallpaper, the background is a solid gray, which is better than Xorg's default (which is whatever crap was left around a buffer by the previous collection of programs, basically)

  • notifications: currently using dunst in some places, which works well in both Xorg and Wayland, not a blocker, salut a possible alternative (not in Debian), damjan uses mako. TODO: install dunst everywhere

  • notification area: I had trouble making nm-applet work. based on this nm-applet.service, I found that you need to pass --indicator. In theory, tray icon support was merged in 1.5, but in practice there are still several limitations, like icons not clickable. On startup, nm-applet --indicator triggers this error in the Sway logs:

     nov 11 22:34:12 angela sway[298938]: 00:49:42.325 [INFO] [swaybar/tray/host.c:24] Registering Status Notifier Item ':1.47/org/ayatana/NotificationItem/nm_applet'
 nov 11 22:34:12 angela sway[298938]: 00:49:42.327 [ERROR] [swaybar/tray/item.c:127] :1.47/org/ayatana/NotificationItem/nm_applet IconPixmap: No such property “IconPixmap”
 nov 11 22:34:12 angela sway[298938]: 00:49:42.327 [ERROR] [swaybar/tray/item.c:127] :1.47/org/ayatana/NotificationItem/nm_applet AttentionIconPixmap: No such property “AttentionIconPixmap”
 nov 11 22:34:12 angela sway[298938]: 00:49:42.327 [ERROR] [swaybar/tray/item.c:127] :1.47/org/ayatana/NotificationItem/nm_applet ItemIsMenu: No such property “ItemIsMenu”
 nov 11 22:36:10 angela sway[313419]: info: fcft.c:838: /usr/share/fonts/truetype/dejavu/DejaVuSans.ttf: size=24.00pt/32px, dpi=96.00

    ... but it seems innocuous. The tray icon displays but, as stated above, is not clickable. If you don't see the icon, check the bar.tray_output property in the Sway config, try: tray_output *. Note that there is currently (November 2022) a pull request to hook up a "Tray D-Bus Menu" which, according to Reddit might fix this, or at least be somewhat relevant.

    This was the biggest irritant in my migration. I have used nmtui to connect to new Wifi hotspots or change connection settings, but that doesn't support actions like "turn off WiFi".

    I eventually fixed this by switching from py3status to waybar.

  • window switcher: in i3 I was using this bespoke i3-focus script, which doesn't work under Sway, swayr an option, not in Debian. So I put together this other bespoke hack from multiple sources, which works.

  • PDF viewer: currently using atril (which supports Wayland), could also just switch to zatura/mupdf permanently, see also calibre for a discussion on document viewers

See also this list of useful addons and this other list for other app alternatives.

More X11 / Wayland equivalents

For all the tools above, it's not exactly clear what options exist in Wayland, or when they do, which one should be used. But for some basic tools, it seems the options are actually quite clear. If that's the case, they should be listed here:

X11 Wayland In Debian
arandr wdisplays yes
autorandr kanshi yes
xdotool wtype yes
xev wev yes
xlsclients swaymsg -t get_tree yes
xrandr wlr-randr yes

lswt is a more direct replacement for xlsclients but is not packaged in Debian.

See also:

Note that arandr and autorandr are not directly part of X. arewewaylandyet.com refers to a few alternatives. We suggest wdisplays and kanshi above (see also this service file) but wallutils can also do the autorandr stuff, apparently, and nwg-displays can do the arandr part. Neither are packaged in Debian yet.

So I have tried wdisplays and it Just Works, and well. The UI even looks better and more usable than arandr, so another clean win from Wayland here.

TODO: test kanshi as a autorandr replacement

Other issues

systemd integration

I've had trouble getting session startup to work. This is partly because I had a kind of funky system to start my session in the first place. I used to have my whole session started from .xsession like this:

#!/bin/sh

. ~/.shenv

systemctl --user import-environment

exec systemctl --user start --wait xsession.target

But obviously, the xsession.target is not started by the Sway session. It seems to just start a default.target, which is really not what we want because we want to associate the services directly with the graphical-session.target, so that they don't start when logging in over (say) SSH.

damjan on #debian-systemd showed me his sway-setup which features systemd integration. It involves starting a different session in a completely new .desktop file. That work was submitted upstream but refused on the grounds that "I'd rather not give a preference to any particular init system." Another PR was abandoned because "restarting sway does not makes sense: that kills everything".

The work was therefore moved to the wiki.

So. Not a great situation. The upstream wiki systemd integration suggests starting the systemd target from within Sway, which has all sorts of problems:

  • you don't get Sway logs anywhere
  • control groups are all messed up

I have done a lot of work trying to figure this out, but I remember that starting systemd from Sway didn't actually work for me: my previously configured systemd units didn't correctly start, and especially not with the right $PATH and environment.

So I went down that rabbit hole and managed to correctly configure Sway to be started from the systemd --user session. I have partly followed the wiki but also picked ideas from damjan's sway-setup and xdbob's sway-services. Another option is uwsm (not in Debian).

This is the config I have in .config/systemd/user/:

I have also configured those services, but that's somewhat optional:

You will also need at least part of my sway/config, which sends the systemd notification (because, no, Sway doesn't support any sort of readiness notification, that would be too easy). And you might like to see my swayidle-config while you're there.

Finally, you need to hook this up somehow to the login manager. This is typically done with a desktop file, so drop sway-session.desktop in /usr/share/wayland-sessions and sway-user-service somewhere in your $PATH (typically /usr/bin/sway-user-service).

The session then looks something like this:

$ systemd-cgls | head -101
Control group /:
-.slice
├─user.slice (#472)
│ → user.invocation_id: bc405c6341de4e93a545bde6d7abbeec
│ → trusted.invocation_id: bc405c6341de4e93a545bde6d7abbeec
│ └─user-1000.slice (#10072)
│   → user.invocation_id: 08f40f5c4bcd4fd6adfd27bec24e4827
│   → trusted.invocation_id: 08f40f5c4bcd4fd6adfd27bec24e4827
│   ├─user@1000.service … (#10156)
│   │ → user.delegate: 1
│   │ → trusted.delegate: 1
│   │ → user.invocation_id: 76bed72a1ffb41dca9bfda7bb174ef6b
│   │ → trusted.invocation_id: 76bed72a1ffb41dca9bfda7bb174ef6b
│   │ ├─session.slice (#10282)
│   │ │ ├─xdg-document-portal.service (#12248)
│   │ │ │ ├─9533 /usr/libexec/xdg-document-portal
│   │ │ │ └─9542 fusermount3 -o rw,nosuid,nodev,fsname=portal,auto_unmount,subt…
│   │ │ ├─xdg-desktop-portal.service (#12211)
│   │ │ │ └─9529 /usr/libexec/xdg-desktop-portal
│   │ │ ├─pipewire-pulse.service (#10778)
│   │ │ │ └─6002 /usr/bin/pipewire-pulse
│   │ │ ├─wireplumber.service (#10519)
│   │ │ │ └─5944 /usr/bin/wireplumber
│   │ │ ├─gvfs-daemon.service (#10667)
│   │ │ │ └─5960 /usr/libexec/gvfsd
│   │ │ ├─gvfs-udisks2-volume-monitor.service (#10852)
│   │ │ │ └─6021 /usr/libexec/gvfs-udisks2-volume-monitor
│   │ │ ├─at-spi-dbus-bus.service (#11481)
│   │ │ │ ├─6210 /usr/libexec/at-spi-bus-launcher
│   │ │ │ ├─6216 /usr/bin/dbus-daemon --config-file=/usr/share/defaults/at-spi2…
│   │ │ │ └─6450 /usr/libexec/at-spi2-registryd --use-gnome-session
│   │ │ ├─pipewire.service (#10403)
│   │ │ │ └─5940 /usr/bin/pipewire
│   │ │ └─dbus.service (#10593)
│   │ │   └─5946 /usr/bin/dbus-daemon --session --address=systemd: --nofork --n…
│   │ ├─background.slice (#10324)
│   │ │ └─tracker-miner-fs-3.service (#10741)
│   │ │   └─6001 /usr/libexec/tracker-miner-fs-3
│   │ ├─app.slice (#10240)
│   │ │ ├─xdg-permission-store.service (#12285)
│   │ │ │ └─9536 /usr/libexec/xdg-permission-store
│   │ │ ├─gammastep.service (#11370)
│   │ │ │ └─6197 gammastep
│   │ │ ├─dunst.service (#11958)
│   │ │ │ └─7460 /usr/bin/dunst
│   │ │ ├─wterminal.service (#13980)
│   │ │ │ ├─69100 foot --title pop-up
│   │ │ │ ├─69101 /bin/bash
│   │ │ │ ├─77660 sudo systemd-cgls
│   │ │ │ ├─77661 head -101
│   │ │ │ ├─77662 wl-copy
│   │ │ │ ├─77663 sudo systemd-cgls
│   │ │ │ └─77664 systemd-cgls
│   │ │ ├─syncthing.service (#11995)
│   │ │ │ ├─7529 /usr/bin/syncthing -no-browser -no-restart -logflags=0 --verbo…
│   │ │ │ └─7537 /usr/bin/syncthing -no-browser -no-restart -logflags=0 --verbo…
│   │ │ ├─dconf.service (#10704)
│   │ │ │ └─5967 /usr/libexec/dconf-service
│   │ │ ├─gnome-keyring-daemon.service (#10630)
│   │ │ │ └─5951 /usr/bin/gnome-keyring-daemon --foreground --components=pkcs11…
│   │ │ ├─gcr-ssh-agent.service (#10963)
│   │ │ │ └─6035 /usr/libexec/gcr-ssh-agent /run/user/1000/gcr
│   │ │ ├─swayidle.service (#11444)
│   │ │ │ └─6199 /usr/bin/swayidle -w
│   │ │ ├─nm-applet.service (#11407)
│   │ │ │ └─6198 /usr/bin/nm-applet --indicator
│   │ │ ├─wcolortaillog.service (#11518)
│   │ │ │ ├─6226 foot colortaillog
│   │ │ │ ├─6228 /bin/sh /home/anarcat/bin/colortaillog
│   │ │ │ ├─6230 sudo journalctl -f
│   │ │ │ ├─6233 ccze -m ansi
│   │ │ │ ├─6235 sudo journalctl -f
│   │ │ │ └─6236 journalctl -f
│   │ │ ├─afuse.service (#10889)
│   │ │ │ └─6051 /usr/bin/afuse -o mount_template=sshfs -o transform_symlinks -…
│   │ │ ├─gpg-agent.service (#13547)
│   │ │ │ ├─51662 /usr/bin/gpg-agent --supervised
│   │ │ │ └─51719 scdaemon --multi-server
│   │ │ ├─emacs.service (#10926)
│   │ │ │ ├─ 6034 /usr/bin/emacs --fg-daemon
│   │ │ │ └─33203 /usr/bin/aspell -a -m -d en --encoding=utf-8
│   │ │ ├─xdg-desktop-portal-gtk.service (#12322)
│   │ │ │ └─9546 /usr/libexec/xdg-desktop-portal-gtk
│   │ │ ├─xdg-desktop-portal-wlr.service (#12359)
│   │ │ │ └─9555 /usr/libexec/xdg-desktop-portal-wlr
│   │ │ └─sway.service (#11037)
│   │ │   ├─6037 /usr/bin/sway
│   │ │   ├─6181 swaybar -b bar-0
│   │ │   ├─6209 py3status
│   │ │   ├─6309 /usr/bin/i3status -c /tmp/py3status_oy4ntfnq
│   │ │   └─6969 Xwayland :0 -rootless -terminate -core -listen 29 -listen 30 -…
│   │ └─init.scope (#10198)
│   │   ├─5909 /lib/systemd/systemd --user
│   │   └─5911 (sd-pam)
│   └─session-7.scope (#10440)
│     ├─5895 gdm-session-worker [pam/gdm-password]
│     ├─6028 /usr/libexec/gdm-wayland-session --register-session sway-user-serv…
[...]

I think that's pretty neat.

Environment propagation

At first, my terminals and rofi didn't have the right $PATH, which broke a lot of my workflow. It's hard to tell exactly how Wayland gets started or where to inject environment. This discussion suggests a few alternatives and this Debian bug report discusses this issue as well.

I eventually picked environment.d(5) since I already manage my user session with systemd, and it fixes a bunch of other problems. I used to have a .shenv that I had to manually source everywhere. The only problem with that approach is that it doesn't support conditionals, but that's something that's rarely needed.

Pipewire

This is a whole topic onto itself, but migrating to Wayland also involves using Pipewire if you want screen sharing to work. You can actually keep using Pulseaudio for audio, that said, but that migration is actually something I've wanted to do anyways: Pipewire's design seems much better than Pulseaudio, as it folds in JACK features which allows for pretty neat tricks. (Which I should probably show in a separate post, because this one is getting rather long.)

I first tried this migration in Debian bullseye, and it didn't work very well. Ardour would fail to export tracks and I would get into weird situations where streams would just drop mid-way.

A particularly funny incident is when I was in a meeting and I couldn't hear my colleagues speak anymore (but they could) and I went on blabbering on my own for a solid 5 minutes until I realized what was going on. By then, people had tried numerous ways of letting me know that something was off, including (apparently) coughing, saying "hello?", chat messages, IRC, and so on, until they just gave up and left.

I suspect that was also a Pipewire bug, but it could also have been that I muted the tab by error, as I recently learned that clicking on the little tiny speaker icon on a tab mutes that tab. Since the tab itself can get pretty small when you have lots of them, it's actually quite frequently that I mistakenly mute tabs.

Anyways. Point is: I already knew how to make the migration, and I had already documented how to make the change in Puppet. It's basically:

apt install pipewire pipewire-audio-client-libraries pipewire-pulse wireplumber

Then, as a regular user:

systemctl --user daemon-reload
systemctl --user --now disable pulseaudio.service pulseaudio.socket
systemctl --user --now enable pipewire pipewire-pulse
systemctl --user mask pulseaudio

An optional (but key, IMHO) configuration you should also make is to "switch on connect", which will make your Bluetooth or USB headset automatically be the default route for audio, when connected. In ~/.config/pipewire/pipewire-pulse.conf.d/autoconnect.conf:

context.exec = [
    { path = "pactl"        args = "load-module module-always-sink" }
    { path = "pactl"        args = "load-module module-switch-on-connect" }
    #{ path = "/usr/bin/sh"  args = "~/.config/pipewire/default.pw" }
]

See the excellent — as usual — Arch wiki page about Pipewire for that trick and more information about Pipewire. Note that you must not put the file in ~/.config/pipewire/pipewire.conf (or pipewire-pulse.conf, maybe) directly, as that will break your setup. If you want to add to that file, first copy the template from /usr/share/pipewire/pipewire-pulse.conf first.

So far I'm happy with Pipewire in bookworm, but I've heard mixed reports from it. I have high hopes it will become the standard media server for Linux in the coming months or years, which is great because I've been (rather boldly, I admit) on the record saying I don't like PulseAudio.

Rereading this now, I feel it might have been a little unfair, as "over-engineered and tries to do too many things at once" applies probably even more to Pipewire than PulseAudio (since it also handles video dispatching).

That said, I think Pipewire took the right approach by implementing existing interfaces like Pulseaudio and JACK. That way we're not adding a third (or fourth?) way of doing audio in Linux; we're just making the server better.

Improvements over i3

Tiling improvements

There's a lot of improvements Sway could bring over using plain i3. There are pretty neat auto-tilers that could replicate the configurations I used to have in Xmonad or Awesome, see:

Display latency tweaks

TODO: You can tweak the display latency in wlroots compositors with the max_render_time parameter, possibly getting lower latency than X11 in the end.

Sound/brightness changes notifications

TODO: Avizo can display a pop-up to give feedback on volume and brightness changes. Not in Debian. Other alternatives include SwayOSD and sway-nc, also not in Debian.

Debugging tricks

The xeyes (in the x11-apps package) will run in Wayland, and can actually be used to easily see if a given window is also in Wayland. If the "eyes" follow the cursor, the app is actually running in xwayland, so not natively in Wayland.

Another way to see what is using Wayland in Sway is with the command:

swaymsg -t get_tree

Other documentation

Conclusion

In general, this took me a long time, but it mostly works. The tray icon situation is pretty frustrating, but there's a workaround and I have high hopes it will eventually fix itself. I'm also actually worried about the DisplayLink support because I eventually want to be using this, but hopefully that's another thing that will hopefully fix itself before I need it.

A word on the security model

I'm kind of worried about all the hacks that have been added to Wayland just to make things work. Pretty much everywhere we need to, we punched a hole in the security model:

Wikipedia describes the security properties of Wayland as it "isolates the input and output of every window, achieving confidentiality, integrity and availability for both." I'm not sure those are actually realized in the actual implementation, because of all those holes punched in the design, at least in Sway. For example, apparently the GNOME compositor doesn't have the virtual-keyboard protocol, but they do have (another?!) text input protocol.

Wayland does offer a better basis to implement such a system, however. It feels like the Linux applications security model lacks critical decision points in the UI, like the user approving "yes, this application can share my screen now". Applications themselves might have some of those prompts, but it's not mandatory, and that is worrisome.

16 November, 2022 10:04PM

Scarlett Gately Moore

Representing KDE @ Ubuntu Summit in Prague

First, I would like to send a big Thank you! to Canonical for sponsoring my trip to Prague for the Ubuntu Summit! It was a great success. I saw some great talks and valuable workshops. I now know how to snap our applications the have daemons and services thanks to the Snapping Daemons and Services workshop. Prague itself is an amazing city. Wow. Just wow. I got to see old friends and meet many new ones. I will take away some wonderful memories. Did I mention a river cruise? Yes! It was great fun.

I did a lightning talk with Jonathon and a Snapping Desktop Applications workshop with Olivier. The talk was “lightning” fast! But good practice for my speech giving skills ( a challenge for a shy person such as myself!) The workshop was great presentations of different ways snaps are done for different projects. The audience was smaller than I had hoped ( it was the end of the summit and many folks were wrapping up to leave.) I still left with a feeling of accomplishment.

Snapping Desktop Applications Workshop @ Ubuntu SummitSnapping Desktop Applications Workshop @ Ubuntu Summit

This week I will apply my new found knowledge and push out some more snaps!

16 November, 2022 07:09PM by sgmoore

Antoine Beaupré

A ZFS migration

In my tubman setup, I started using ZFS on an old server I had lying around. The machine is really old though (2011!) and it "feels" pretty slow. I want to see how much of that is ZFS and how much is the machine. Synthetic benchmarks show that ZFS may be slower than mdadm in RAID-10 or RAID-6 configuration, so I want to confirm that on a live workload: my workstation. Plus, I want easy, regular, high performance backups (with send/receive snapshots) and there's no way I'm going to use BTRFS because I find it too confusing and unreliable.

So off we go.

Installation

Since this is a conversion (and not a new install), our procedure is slightly different than the official documentation but otherwise it's pretty much in the same spirit: we're going to use ZFS for everything, including the root filesystem.

So, install the required packages, on the current system:

apt install --yes gdisk zfs-dkms zfs zfs-initramfs zfsutils-linux

We also tell DKMS that we need to rebuild the initrd when upgrading:

echo REMAKE_INITRD=yes > /etc/dkms/zfs.conf

Partitioning

This is going to partition /dev/sdc with:

  • 1MB MBR / BIOS legacy boot
  • 512MB EFI boot
  • 1GB bpool, unencrypted pool for /boot

  • rest of the disk for zpool, the rest of the data

     sgdisk --zap-all /dev/sdc
 sgdisk -a1 -n1:24K:+1000K -t1:EF02 /dev/sdc
 sgdisk     -n2:1M:+512M   -t2:EF00 /dev/sdc
 sgdisk     -n3:0:+1G      -t3:BF01 /dev/sdc
 sgdisk     -n4:0:0        -t4:BF00 /dev/sdc

That will look something like this:

    root@curie:/home/anarcat# sgdisk -p /dev/sdc
    Disk /dev/sdc: 1953525168 sectors, 931.5 GiB
    Model: ESD-S1C         
    Sector size (logical/physical): 512/512 bytes
    Disk identifier (GUID): [REDACTED]
    Partition table holds up to 128 entries
    Main partition table begins at sector 2 and ends at sector 33
    First usable sector is 34, last usable sector is 1953525134
    Partitions will be aligned on 16-sector boundaries
    Total free space is 14 sectors (7.0 KiB)

    Number  Start (sector)    End (sector)  Size       Code  Name
       1              48            2047   1000.0 KiB  EF02  
       2            2048         1050623   512.0 MiB   EF00  
       3         1050624         3147775   1024.0 MiB  BF01  
       4         3147776      1953525134   930.0 GiB   BF00

Unfortunately, we can't be sure of the sector size here, because the USB controller is probably lying to us about it. Normally, this smartctl command should tell us the sector size as well:

root@curie:~# smartctl -i /dev/sdb -qnoserial
smartctl 7.2 2020-12-30 r5155 [x86_64-linux-5.10.0-14-amd64] (local build)
Copyright (C) 2002-20, Bruce Allen, Christian Franke, www.smartmontools.org

=== START OF INFORMATION SECTION ===
Model Family:     Western Digital Black Mobile
Device Model:     WDC WD10JPLX-00MBPT0
Firmware Version: 01.01H01
User Capacity:    1 000 204 886 016 bytes [1,00 TB]
Sector Sizes:     512 bytes logical, 4096 bytes physical
Rotation Rate:    7200 rpm
Form Factor:      2.5 inches
Device is:        In smartctl database [for details use: -P show]
ATA Version is:   ATA8-ACS T13/1699-D revision 6
SATA Version is:  SATA 3.0, 6.0 Gb/s (current: 6.0 Gb/s)
Local Time is:    Tue May 17 13:33:04 2022 EDT
SMART support is: Available - device has SMART capability.
SMART support is: Enabled

Above is the example of the builtin HDD drive. But the SSD device enclosed in that USB controller doesn't support SMART commands, so we can't trust that it really has 512 bytes sectors.

This matters because we need to tweak the ashift value correctly. We're going to go ahead the SSD drive has the common 4KB settings, which means ashift=12.

Note here that we are not creating a separate partition for swap. Swap on ZFS volumes (AKA "swap on ZVOL") can trigger lockups and that issue is still not fixed upstream. Ubuntu recommends using a separate partition for swap instead. But since this is "just" a workstation, we're betting that we will not suffer from this problem, after hearing a report from another Debian developer running this setup on their workstation successfully.

We do not recommend this setup though. In fact, if I were to redo this partition scheme, I would probably use LUKS encryption and setup a dedicated swap partition, as I had problems with ZFS encryption as well.

Creating pools

ZFS pools are somewhat like "volume groups" if you are familiar with LVM, except they obviously also do things like RAID-10. (Even though LVM can technically also do RAID, people typically use mdadm instead.)

In any case, the guide suggests creating two different pools here: one, in cleartext, for boot, and a separate, encrypted one, for the rest. Technically, the boot partition is required because the Grub bootloader only supports readonly ZFS pools, from what I understand. But I'm a little out of my depth here and just following the guide.

Boot pool creation

This creates the boot pool in readonly mode with features that grub supports:

    zpool create \
        -o cachefile=/etc/zfs/zpool.cache \
        -o ashift=12 -d \
        -o feature@async_destroy=enabled \
        -o feature@bookmarks=enabled \
        -o feature@embedded_data=enabled \
        -o feature@empty_bpobj=enabled \
        -o feature@enabled_txg=enabled \
        -o feature@extensible_dataset=enabled \
        -o feature@filesystem_limits=enabled \
        -o feature@hole_birth=enabled \
        -o feature@large_blocks=enabled \
        -o feature@lz4_compress=enabled \
        -o feature@spacemap_histogram=enabled \
        -o feature@zpool_checkpoint=enabled \
        -O acltype=posixacl -O canmount=off \
        -O compression=lz4 \
        -O devices=off -O normalization=formD -O relatime=on -O xattr=sa \
        -O mountpoint=/boot -R /mnt \
        bpool /dev/sdc3

I haven't investigated all those settings and just trust the upstream guide on the above.

Main pool creation

This is a more typical pool creation.

    zpool create \
        -o ashift=12 \
        -O encryption=on -O keylocation=prompt -O keyformat=passphrase \
        -O acltype=posixacl -O xattr=sa -O dnodesize=auto \
        -O compression=zstd \
        -O relatime=on \
        -O canmount=off \
        -O mountpoint=/ -R /mnt \
        rpool /dev/sdc4

Breaking this down:

  • -o ashift=12: mentioned above, 4k sector size
  • -O encryption=on -O keylocation=prompt -O keyformat=passphrase: encryption, prompt for a password, default algorithm is aes-256-gcm, explicit in the guide, made implicit here
  • -O acltype=posixacl -O xattr=sa: enable ACLs, with better performance (not enabled by default)
  • -O dnodesize=auto: related to extended attributes, less compatibility with other implementations
  • -O compression=zstd: enable zstd compression, can be disabled/enabled by dataset to with zfs set compression=off rpool/example
  • -O relatime=on: classic atime optimisation, another that could be used on a busy server is atime=off
  • -O canmount=off: do not make the pool mount automatically with mount -a?
  • -O mountpoint=/ -R /mnt: mount pool on / in the future, but /mnt for now

Those settings are all available in zfsprops(8). Other flags are defined in zpool-create(8). The reasoning behind them is also explained in the upstream guide and some also in [the Debian wiki][]. Those flags were actually not used:

  • -O normalization=formD: normalize file names on comparisons (not storage), implies utf8only=on, which is a bad idea (and effectively meant my first sync failed to copy some files, including this folder from a supysonic checkout). and this cannot be changed after the filesystem is created. bad, bad, bad.

[the Debian wiki]: https://wiki.debian.org/ZFS#Advanced_Topics

Side note about single-disk pools

Also note that we're living dangerously here: single-disk ZFS pools are rumoured to be more dangerous than not running ZFS at all. The choice quote from this article is:

[...] any error can be detected, but cannot be corrected. This sounds like an acceptable compromise, but its actually not. The reason its not is that ZFS' metadata cannot be allowed to be corrupted. If it is it is likely the zpool will be impossible to mount (and will probably crash the system once the corruption is found). So a couple of bad sectors in the right place will mean that all data on the zpool will be lost. Not some, all. Also there's no ZFS recovery tools, so you cannot recover any data on the drives.

Compared with (say) ext4, where a single disk error can recovered, this is pretty bad. But we are ready to live with this with the idea that we'll have hourly offline snapshots that we can easily recover from. It's trade-off. Also, we're running this on a NVMe/M.2 drive which typically just blinks out of existence completely, and doesn't "bit rot" the way a HDD would.

Also, the FreeBSD handbook quick start doesn't have any warnings about their first example, which is with a single disk. So I am reassured at least.

Creating mount points

Next we create the actual filesystems, known as "datasets" which are the things that get mounted on mountpoint and hold the actual files.

  • this creates two containers, for ROOT and BOOT

     zfs create -o canmount=off -o mountpoint=none rpool/ROOT &&
 zfs create -o canmount=off -o mountpoint=none bpool/BOOT

    Note that it's unclear to me why those datasets are necessary, but they seem common practice, also used in this FreeBSD example. The OpenZFS guide mentions the Solaris upgrades and Ubuntu's zsys that use that container for upgrades and rollbacks. This blog post seems to explain a bit the layout behind the installer.

  • this creates the actual boot and root filesystems:

     zfs create -o canmount=noauto -o mountpoint=/ rpool/ROOT/debian &&
 zfs mount rpool/ROOT/debian &&
 zfs create -o mountpoint=/boot bpool/BOOT/debian

    I guess the debian name here is because we could technically have multiple operating systems with the same underlying datasets.

  • then the main datasets:

     zfs create                                 rpool/home &&
 zfs create -o mountpoint=/root             rpool/home/root &&
 chmod 700 /mnt/root &&
 zfs create                                 rpool/var

  • exclude temporary files from snapshots:

     zfs create -o com.sun:auto-snapshot=false  rpool/var/cache &&
 zfs create -o com.sun:auto-snapshot=false  rpool/var/tmp &&
 chmod 1777 /mnt/var/tmp

  • and skip automatic snapshots in Docker:

     zfs create -o canmount=off                 rpool/var/lib &&
 zfs create -o com.sun:auto-snapshot=false  rpool/var/lib/docker

    Notice here a peculiarity: we must create rpool/var/lib to create rpool/var/lib/docker otherwise we get this error:

     cannot create 'rpool/var/lib/docker': parent does not exist

    ... and no, just creating /mnt/var/lib doesn't fix that problem. In fact, it makes things even more confusing because an existing directory shadows a mountpoint, which is the opposite of how things normally work.

    Also note that you will probably need to change storage driver in Docker, see the zfs-driver documentation for details but, basically, I did:

    echo '{ "storage-driver": "zfs" }' > /etc/docker/daemon.json

    Note that podman has the same problem (and similar solution):

    printf '[storage]\ndriver = "zfs"\n' > /etc/containers/storage.conf

  • make a tmpfs for /run:

     mkdir /mnt/run &&
 mount -t tmpfs tmpfs /mnt/run &&
 mkdir /mnt/run/lock

We don't create a /srv, as that's the HDD stuff.

Also mount the EFI partition:

mkfs.fat -F 32 /dev/sdc2 &&
mount /dev/sdc2 /mnt/boot/efi/

At this point, everything should be mounted in /mnt. It should look like this:

root@curie:~# LANG=C df -h -t zfs -t vfat
Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
rpool/ROOT/debian     899G  384K  899G   1% /mnt
bpool/BOOT/debian     832M  123M  709M  15% /mnt/boot
rpool/home            899G  256K  899G   1% /mnt/home
rpool/home/root       899G  256K  899G   1% /mnt/root
rpool/var             899G  384K  899G   1% /mnt/var
rpool/var/cache       899G  256K  899G   1% /mnt/var/cache
rpool/var/tmp         899G  256K  899G   1% /mnt/var/tmp
rpool/var/lib/docker  899G  256K  899G   1% /mnt/var/lib/docker
/dev/sdc2             511M  4.0K  511M   1% /mnt/boot/efi

Now that we have everything setup and mounted, let's copy all files over.

Copying files

This is a list of all the mounted filesystems

for fs in /boot/ /boot/efi/ / /home/; do
    echo "syncing $fs to /mnt$fs..." && 
    rsync -aSHAXx --info=progress2 --delete $fs /mnt$fs
done

You can check that the list is correct with:

mount -l -t ext4,btrfs,vfat | awk '{print $3}'

Note that we skip /srv as it's on a different disk.

On the first run, we had:

root@curie:~# for fs in /boot/ /boot/efi/ / /home/; do
        echo "syncing $fs to /mnt$fs..." && 
        rsync -aSHAXx --info=progress2 $fs /mnt$fs
    done
syncing /boot/ to /mnt/boot/...
              0   0%    0.00kB/s    0:00:00 (xfr#0, to-chk=0/299)  
syncing /boot/efi/ to /mnt/boot/efi/...
     16,831,437 100%  184.14MB/s    0:00:00 (xfr#101, to-chk=0/110)
syncing / to /mnt/...
 28,019,293,280  94%   47.63MB/s    0:09:21 (xfr#703710, ir-chk=6748/839220)rsync: [generator] delete_file: rmdir(var/lib/docker) failed: Device or resource busy (16)
could not make way for new symlink: var/lib/docker
 34,081,267,990  98%   50.71MB/s    0:10:40 (xfr#736577, to-chk=0/867732)    
rsync error: some files/attrs were not transferred (see previous errors) (code 23) at main.c(1333) [sender=3.2.3]
syncing /home/ to /mnt/home/...
rsync: [sender] readlink_stat("/home/anarcat/.fuse") failed: Permission denied (13)
 24,456,268,098  98%   68.03MB/s    0:05:42 (xfr#159867, ir-chk=6875/172377) 
file has vanished: "/home/anarcat/.cache/mozilla/firefox/s2hwvqbu.quantum/cache2/entries/B3AB0CDA9C4454B3C1197E5A22669DF8EE849D90"
199,762,528,125  93%   74.82MB/s    0:42:26 (xfr#1437846, ir-chk=1018/1983979)rsync: [generator] recv_generator: mkdir "/mnt/home/anarcat/dist/supysonic/tests/assets/\#346" failed: Invalid or incomplete multibyte or wide character (84)
*** Skipping any contents from this failed directory ***
315,384,723,978  96%   76.82MB/s    1:05:15 (xfr#2256473, to-chk=0/2993950)    
rsync error: some files/attrs were not transferred (see previous errors) (code 23) at main.c(1333) [sender=3.2.3]

Note the failure to transfer that supysonic file? It turns out they had a weird filename in their source tree, since then removed, but still it showed how the utf8only feature might not be such a bad idea. At this point, the procedure was restarted all the way back to "Creating pools", after unmounting all ZFS filesystems (umount /mnt/run /mnt/boot/efi && umount -t zfs -a) and destroying the pool, which, surprisingly, doesn't require any confirmation (zpool destroy rpool).

The second run was cleaner:

root@curie:~# for fs in /boot/ /boot/efi/ / /home/; do
        echo "syncing $fs to /mnt$fs..." && 
        rsync -aSHAXx --info=progress2 --delete $fs /mnt$fs
    done
syncing /boot/ to /mnt/boot/...
              0   0%    0.00kB/s    0:00:00 (xfr#0, to-chk=0/299)  
syncing /boot/efi/ to /mnt/boot/efi/...
              0   0%    0.00kB/s    0:00:00 (xfr#0, to-chk=0/110)  
syncing / to /mnt/...
 28,019,033,070  97%   42.03MB/s    0:10:35 (xfr#703671, ir-chk=1093/833515)rsync: [generator] delete_file: rmdir(var/lib/docker) failed: Device or resource busy (16)
could not make way for new symlink: var/lib/docker
 34,081,807,102  98%   44.84MB/s    0:12:04 (xfr#736580, to-chk=0/867723)    
rsync error: some files/attrs were not transferred (see previous errors) (code 23) at main.c(1333) [sender=3.2.3]
syncing /home/ to /mnt/home/...
rsync: [sender] readlink_stat("/home/anarcat/.fuse") failed: Permission denied (13)
IO error encountered -- skipping file deletion
 24,043,086,450  96%   62.03MB/s    0:06:09 (xfr#151819, ir-chk=15117/172571)
file has vanished: "/home/anarcat/.cache/mozilla/firefox/s2hwvqbu.quantum/cache2/entries/4C1FDBFEA976FF924D062FB990B24B897A77B84B"
315,423,626,507  96%   67.09MB/s    1:14:43 (xfr#2256845, to-chk=0/2994364)    
rsync error: some files/attrs were not transferred (see previous errors) (code 23) at main.c(1333) [sender=3.2.3]

Also note the transfer speed: we seem capped at 76MB/s, or 608Mbit/s. This is not as fast as I was expecting: the USB connection seems to be at around 5Gbps:

anarcat@curie:~$ lsusb -tv | head -4
/:  Bus 02.Port 1: Dev 1, Class=root_hub, Driver=xhci_hcd/6p, 5000M
    ID 1d6b:0003 Linux Foundation 3.0 root hub
    |__ Port 1: Dev 4, If 0, Class=Mass Storage, Driver=uas, 5000M
        ID 0b05:1932 ASUSTek Computer, Inc.

So it shouldn't cap at that speed. It's possible the USB adapter is failing to give me the full speed though. It's not the M.2 SSD drive either, as that has a ~500MB/s bandwidth, acccording to its spec.

At this point, we're about ready to do the final configuration. We drop to single user mode and do the rest of the procedure. That used to be shutdown now, but it seems like the systemd switch broke that, so now you can reboot into grub and pick the "recovery" option. Alternatively, you might try systemctl rescue, as I found out.

I also wanted to copy the drive over to another new NVMe drive, but that failed: it looks like the USB controller I have doesn't work with older, non-NVME drives.

Boot configuration

Now we need to enter the new system to rebuild the boot loader and initrd and so on.

First, we bind mounts and chroot into the ZFS disk:

mount --rbind /dev  /mnt/dev &&
mount --rbind /proc /mnt/proc &&
mount --rbind /sys  /mnt/sys &&
chroot /mnt /bin/bash

Next we add an extra service that imports the bpool on boot, to make sure it survives a zpool.cache destruction:

cat > /etc/systemd/system/zfs-import-bpool.service <<EOF
[Unit]
DefaultDependencies=no
Before=zfs-import-scan.service
Before=zfs-import-cache.service

[Service]
Type=oneshot
RemainAfterExit=yes
ExecStart=/sbin/zpool import -N -o cachefile=none bpool
# Work-around to preserve zpool cache:
ExecStartPre=-/bin/mv /etc/zfs/zpool.cache /etc/zfs/preboot_zpool.cache
ExecStartPost=-/bin/mv /etc/zfs/preboot_zpool.cache /etc/zfs/zpool.cache

[Install]
WantedBy=zfs-import.target
EOF

Enable the service:

systemctl enable zfs-import-bpool.service

I had to trim down /etc/fstab and /etc/crypttab to only contain references to the legacy filesystems (/srv is still BTRFS!).

If we don't already have a tmpfs defined in /etc/fstab:

ln -s /usr/share/systemd/tmp.mount /etc/systemd/system/ &&
systemctl enable tmp.mount

Rebuild boot loader with support for ZFS, but also to workaround GRUB's missing zpool-features support:

grub-probe /boot | grep -q zfs &&
update-initramfs -c -k all &&
sed -i 's,GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX.*,GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="root=ZFS=rpool/ROOT/debian",' /etc/default/grub &&
update-grub

For good measure, make sure the right disk is configured here, for example you might want to tag both drives in a RAID array:

dpkg-reconfigure grub-pc

Install grub to EFI while you're there:

grub-install --target=x86_64-efi --efi-directory=/boot/efi --bootloader-id=debian --recheck --no-floppy

Filesystem mount ordering. The rationale here in the OpenZFS guide is a little strange, but I don't dare ignore that.

mkdir /etc/zfs/zfs-list.cache
touch /etc/zfs/zfs-list.cache/bpool
touch /etc/zfs/zfs-list.cache/rpool
zed -F &

Verify that zed updated the cache by making sure these are not empty:

cat /etc/zfs/zfs-list.cache/bpool
cat /etc/zfs/zfs-list.cache/rpool

Once the files have data, stop zed:

fg
Press Ctrl-C.

Fix the paths to eliminate /mnt:

sed -Ei "s|/mnt/?|/|" /etc/zfs/zfs-list.cache/*

Snapshot initial install:

zfs snapshot bpool/BOOT/debian@install
zfs snapshot rpool/ROOT/debian@install

Exit chroot:

exit

Finalizing

One last sync was done in rescue mode:

for fs in /boot/ /boot/efi/ / /home/; do
    echo "syncing $fs to /mnt$fs..." && 
    rsync -aSHAXx --info=progress2 --delete $fs /mnt$fs
done

Then we unmount all filesystems:

mount | grep -v zfs | tac | awk '/\/mnt/ {print $3}' | xargs -i{} umount -lf {}
zpool export -a

Reboot, swap the drives, and boot in ZFS. Hurray!

Benchmarks

This is a test that was ran in single-user mode using fio and the Ars Technica recommended tests, which are:

  • Single 4KiB random write process:

     fio --name=randwrite4k1x --ioengine=posixaio --rw=randwrite --bs=4k --size=4g --numjobs=1 --iodepth=1 --runtime=60 --time_based --end_fsync=1

  • 16 parallel 64KiB random write processes:

     fio --name=randwrite64k16x --ioengine=posixaio --rw=randwrite --bs=64k --size=256m --numjobs=16 --iodepth=16 --runtime=60 --time_based --end_fsync=1

  • Single 1MiB random write process:

     fio --name=randwrite1m1x --ioengine=posixaio --rw=randwrite --bs=1m --size=16g --numjobs=1 --iodepth=1 --runtime=60 --time_based --end_fsync=1

Strangely, that's not exactly what the author, Jim Salter, did in his actual test bench used in the ZFS benchmarking article. The first thing is there's no read test at all, which is already pretty strange. But also it doesn't include stuff like dropping caches or repeating results.

So here's my variation, which i called fio-ars-bench.sh for now. It just batches a bunch of fio tests, one by one, 60 seconds each. It should take about 12 minutes to run, as there are 3 pair of tests, read/write, with and without async.

My bias, before building, running and analysing those results is that ZFS should outperform the traditional stack on writes, but possibly not on reads. It's also possible it outperforms it on both, because it's a newer drive. A new test might be possible with a new external USB drive as well, although I doubt I will find the time to do this.

Results

All tests were done on WD blue SN550 drives, which claims to be able to push 2400MB/s read and 1750MB/s write. An extra drive was bought to move the LVM setup from a WDC WDS500G1B0B-00AS40 SSD, a WD blue M.2 2280 SSD that was at least 5 years old, spec'd at 560MB/s read, 530MB/s write. Benchmarks were done on the M.2 SSD drive but discarded so that the drive difference is not a factor in the test.

In practice, I'm going to assume we'll never reach those numbers because we're not actually NVMe (this is an old workstation!) so the bottleneck isn't the disk itself. For our purposes, it might still give us useful results.

Rescue test, LUKS/LVM/ext4

Those tests were performed with everything shutdown, after either entering the system in rescue mode, or by reaching that target with:

systemctl rescue

The network might have been started before or after the test as well:

systemctl start systemd-networkd

So it should be fairly reliable as basically nothing else is running.

Raw numbers, from the ?job-curie-lvm.log, converted to MiB/s and manually merged:

test read I/O read IOPS write I/O write IOPS
rand4k4g1x 39.27 10052 212.15 54310
rand4k4g1x--fsync=1 39.29 10057 2.73 699
rand64k256m16x 1297.00 20751 1068.57 17097
rand64k256m16x--fsync=1 1290.90 20654 353.82 5661
rand1m16g1x 315.15 315 563.77 563
rand1m16g1x--fsync=1 345.88 345 157.01 157

Peaks are at about 20k IOPS and ~1.3GiB/s read, 1GiB/s write in the 64KB blocks with 16 jobs.

Slowest is the random 4k block sync write at an abysmal 3MB/s and 700 IOPS The 1MB read/write tests have lower IOPS, but that is expected.

Rescue test, ZFS

This test was also performed in rescue mode.

Raw numbers, from the ?job-curie-zfs.log, converted to MiB/s and manually merged:

test read I/O read IOPS write I/O write IOPS
rand4k4g1x 77.20 19763 27.13 6944
rand4k4g1x--fsync=1 76.16 19495 6.53 1673
rand64k256m16x 1882.40 30118 70.58 1129
rand64k256m16x--fsync=1 1865.13 29842 71.98 1151
rand1m16g1x 921.62 921 102.21 102
rand1m16g1x--fsync=1 908.37 908 64.30 64

Peaks are at 1.8GiB/s read, also in the 64k job like above, but much faster. The write is, as expected, much slower at 70MiB/s (compared to 1GiB/s!), but it should be noted the sync write doesn't degrade performance compared to async writes (although it's still below the LVM 300MB/s).

Conclusions

Really, ZFS has trouble performing in all write conditions. The random 4k sync write test is the only place where ZFS outperforms LVM in writes, and barely (7MiB/s vs 3MiB/s). Everywhere else, writes are much slower, sometimes by an order of magnitude.

And before some ZFS zealot jumps in talking about the SLOG or some other cache that could be added to improved performance, I'll remind you that those numbers are on a bare bones NVMe drive, pretty much as fast storage as you can find on this machine. Adding another NVMe drive as a cache probably will not improve write performance here.

Still, those are very different results than the tests performed by Salter which shows ZFS beating traditional configurations in all categories but uncached 4k reads (not writes!). That said, those tests are very different from the tests I performed here, where I test writes on a single disk, not a RAID array, which might explain the discrepancy.

Also, note that neither LVM or ZFS manage to reach the 2400MB/s read and 1750MB/s write performance specification. ZFS does manage to reach 82% of the read performance (1973MB/s) and LVM 64% of the write performance (1120MB/s). LVM hits 57% of the read performance and ZFS hits barely 6% of the write performance.

Overall, I'm a bit disappointed in the ZFS write performance here, I must say. Maybe I need to tweak the record size or some other ZFS voodoo, but I'll note that I didn't have to do any such configuration on the other side to kick ZFS in the pants...

Real world experience

This section document not synthetic backups, but actual real world workloads, comparing before and after I switched my workstation to ZFS.

Docker performance

I had the feeling that running some git hook (which was firing a Docker container) was "slower" somehow. It seems that, at runtime, ZFS backends are significant slower than their overlayfs/ext4 equivalent:

May 16 14:42:52 curie systemd[1]: home-docker-overlay2-17e4d24228decc2d2d493efc401dbfb7ac29739da0e46775e122078d9daf3e87\x2dinit-merged.mount: Succeeded.
May 16 14:42:52 curie systemd[5161]: home-docker-overlay2-17e4d24228decc2d2d493efc401dbfb7ac29739da0e46775e122078d9daf3e87\x2dinit-merged.mount: Succeeded.
May 16 14:42:52 curie systemd[1]: home-docker-overlay2-17e4d24228decc2d2d493efc401dbfb7ac29739da0e46775e122078d9daf3e87-merged.mount: Succeeded.
May 16 14:42:53 curie dockerd[1723]: time="2022-05-16T14:42:53.087219426-04:00" level=info msg="starting signal loop" namespace=moby path=/run/docker/containerd/daemon/io.containerd.runtime.v2.task/moby/af22586fba07014a4d10ab19da10cf280db7a43cad804d6c1e9f2682f12b5f10 pid=151170
May 16 14:42:53 curie systemd[1]: Started libcontainer container af22586fba07014a4d10ab19da10cf280db7a43cad804d6c1e9f2682f12b5f10.
May 16 14:42:54 curie systemd[1]: docker-af22586fba07014a4d10ab19da10cf280db7a43cad804d6c1e9f2682f12b5f10.scope: Succeeded.
May 16 14:42:54 curie dockerd[1723]: time="2022-05-16T14:42:54.047297800-04:00" level=info msg="shim disconnected" id=af22586fba07014a4d10ab19da10cf280db7a43cad804d6c1e9f2682f12b5f10
May 16 14:42:54 curie dockerd[998]: time="2022-05-16T14:42:54.051365015-04:00" level=info msg="ignoring event" container=af22586fba07014a4d10ab19da10cf280db7a43cad804d6c1e9f2682f12b5f10 module=libcontainerd namespace=moby topic=/tasks/delete type="*events.TaskDelete"
May 16 14:42:54 curie systemd[2444]: run-docker-netns-f5453c87c879.mount: Succeeded.
May 16 14:42:54 curie systemd[5161]: run-docker-netns-f5453c87c879.mount: Succeeded.
May 16 14:42:54 curie systemd[2444]: home-docker-overlay2-17e4d24228decc2d2d493efc401dbfb7ac29739da0e46775e122078d9daf3e87-merged.mount: Succeeded.
May 16 14:42:54 curie systemd[5161]: home-docker-overlay2-17e4d24228decc2d2d493efc401dbfb7ac29739da0e46775e122078d9daf3e87-merged.mount: Succeeded.
May 16 14:42:54 curie systemd[1]: run-docker-netns-f5453c87c879.mount: Succeeded.
May 16 14:42:54 curie systemd[1]: home-docker-overlay2-17e4d24228decc2d2d493efc401dbfb7ac29739da0e46775e122078d9daf3e87-merged.mount: Succeeded.

Translating this:

  • container setup: ~1 second
  • container runtime: ~1 second
  • container teardown: ~1 second
  • total runtime: 2-3 seconds

Obviously, those timestamps are not quite accurate enough to make precise measurements...

After I switched to ZFS:

mai 30 15:31:39 curie systemd[1]: var-lib-docker-zfs-graph-41ce08fb7a1d3a9c101694b82722f5621c0b4819bd1d9f070933fd1e00543cdf\x2dinit.mount: Succeeded. 
mai 30 15:31:39 curie systemd[5287]: var-lib-docker-zfs-graph-41ce08fb7a1d3a9c101694b82722f5621c0b4819bd1d9f070933fd1e00543cdf\x2dinit.mount: Succeeded. 
mai 30 15:31:40 curie systemd[1]: var-lib-docker-zfs-graph-41ce08fb7a1d3a9c101694b82722f5621c0b4819bd1d9f070933fd1e00543cdf.mount: Succeeded. 
mai 30 15:31:40 curie systemd[5287]: var-lib-docker-zfs-graph-41ce08fb7a1d3a9c101694b82722f5621c0b4819bd1d9f070933fd1e00543cdf.mount: Succeeded. 
mai 30 15:31:41 curie dockerd[3199]: time="2022-05-30T15:31:41.551403693-04:00" level=info msg="starting signal loop" namespace=moby path=/run/docker/containerd/daemon/io.containerd.runtime.v2.task/moby/42a1a1ed5912a7227148e997f442e7ab2e5cc3558aa3471548223c5888c9b142 pid=141080 
mai 30 15:31:41 curie systemd[1]: run-docker-runtime\x2drunc-moby-42a1a1ed5912a7227148e997f442e7ab2e5cc3558aa3471548223c5888c9b142-runc.ZVcjvl.mount: Succeeded. 
mai 30 15:31:41 curie systemd[5287]: run-docker-runtime\x2drunc-moby-42a1a1ed5912a7227148e997f442e7ab2e5cc3558aa3471548223c5888c9b142-runc.ZVcjvl.mount: Succeeded. 
mai 30 15:31:41 curie systemd[1]: Started libcontainer container 42a1a1ed5912a7227148e997f442e7ab2e5cc3558aa3471548223c5888c9b142. 
mai 30 15:31:45 curie systemd[1]: docker-42a1a1ed5912a7227148e997f442e7ab2e5cc3558aa3471548223c5888c9b142.scope: Succeeded. 
mai 30 15:31:45 curie dockerd[3199]: time="2022-05-30T15:31:45.883019128-04:00" level=info msg="shim disconnected" id=42a1a1ed5912a7227148e997f442e7ab2e5cc3558aa3471548223c5888c9b142 
mai 30 15:31:45 curie dockerd[1726]: time="2022-05-30T15:31:45.883064491-04:00" level=info msg="ignoring event" container=42a1a1ed5912a7227148e997f442e7ab2e5cc3558aa3471548223c5888c9b142 module=libcontainerd namespace=moby topic=/tasks/delete type="*events.TaskDelete" 
mai 30 15:31:45 curie systemd[1]: run-docker-netns-e45f5cf5f465.mount: Succeeded. 
mai 30 15:31:45 curie systemd[5287]: run-docker-netns-e45f5cf5f465.mount: Succeeded. 
mai 30 15:31:45 curie systemd[1]: var-lib-docker-zfs-graph-41ce08fb7a1d3a9c101694b82722f5621c0b4819bd1d9f070933fd1e00543cdf.mount: Succeeded. 
mai 30 15:31:45 curie systemd[5287]: var-lib-docker-zfs-graph-41ce08fb7a1d3a9c101694b82722f5621c0b4819bd1d9f070933fd1e00543cdf.mount: Succeeded.

That's double or triple the run time, from 2 seconds to 6 seconds. Most of the time is spent in run time, inside the container. Here's the breakdown:

  • container setup: ~2 seconds
  • container run: ~4 seconds
  • container teardown: ~1 second
  • total run time: about ~6-7 seconds

That's a two- to three-fold increase! Clearly something is going on here that I should tweak. It's possible that code path is less optimized in Docker. I also worry about podman, but apparently it also supports ZFS backends. Possibly it would perform better, but at this stage I wouldn't have a good comparison: maybe it would have performed better on non-ZFS as well...

Interactivity

While doing the offsite backups (below), the system became somewhat "sluggish". I felt everything was slow, and I estimate it introduced ~50ms latency in any input device.

Arguably, those are all USB and the external drive was connected through USB, but I suspect the ZFS drivers are not as well tuned with the scheduler as the regular filesystem drivers...

Recovery procedures

For test purposes, I unmounted all systems during the procedure:

umount /mnt/boot/efi /mnt/boot/run
umount -a -t zfs
zpool export -a

And disconnected the drive, to see how I would recover this system from another Linux system in case of a total motherboard failure.

To import an existing pool, plug the device, then import the pool with an alternate root, so it doesn't mount over your existing filesystems, then you mount the root filesystem and all the others:

zpool import -l -a -R /mnt &&
zfs mount rpool/ROOT/debian &&
zfs mount -a &&
mount /dev/sdc2 /mnt/boot/efi &&
mount -t tmpfs tmpfs /mnt/run &&
mkdir /mnt/run/lock

Offsite backup

Part of the goal of using ZFS is to simplify and harden backups. I wanted to experiment with shorter recovery times — specifically both point in time recovery objective and recovery time objective — and faster incremental backups.

This is, therefore, part of my backup services.

This section documents how an external NVMe enclosure was setup in a pool to mirror the datasets from my workstation.

The final setup should include syncoid copying datasets to the backup server regularly, but I haven't finished that configuration yet.

Partitioning

The above partitioning procedure used sgdisk, but I couldn't figure out how to do this with sgdisk, so this uses sfdisk to dump the partition from the first disk to an external, identical drive:

sfdisk -d /dev/nvme0n1 | sfdisk --no-reread /dev/sda --force

Pool creation

This is similar to the main pool creation, except we tweaked a few bits after changing the upstream procedure:

zpool create \
        -o cachefile=/etc/zfs/zpool.cache \
        -o ashift=12 -d \
        -o feature@async_destroy=enabled \
        -o feature@bookmarks=enabled \
        -o feature@embedded_data=enabled \
        -o feature@empty_bpobj=enabled \
        -o feature@enabled_txg=enabled \
        -o feature@extensible_dataset=enabled \
        -o feature@filesystem_limits=enabled \
        -o feature@hole_birth=enabled \
        -o feature@large_blocks=enabled \
        -o feature@lz4_compress=enabled \
        -o feature@spacemap_histogram=enabled \
        -o feature@zpool_checkpoint=enabled \
        -O acltype=posixacl -O xattr=sa \
        -O compression=lz4 \
        -O devices=off \
        -O relatime=on \
        -O canmount=off \
        -O mountpoint=/boot -R /mnt \
        bpool-tubman /dev/sdb3

The change from the main boot pool are:

Main pool creation is:

zpool create \
        -o ashift=12 \
        -O encryption=on -O keylocation=prompt -O keyformat=passphrase \
        -O acltype=posixacl -O xattr=sa -O dnodesize=auto \
        -O compression=zstd \
        -O relatime=on \
        -O canmount=off \
        -O mountpoint=/ -R /mnt \
        rpool-tubman /dev/sdb4

First sync

I used syncoid to copy all pools over to the external device. syncoid is a thing that's part of the sanoid project which is specifically designed to sync snapshots between pool, typically over SSH links but it can also operate locally.

The sanoid command had a --readonly argument to simulate changes, but syncoid didn't so I tried to fix that with an upstream PR.

It seems it would be better to do this by hand, but this was much easier. The full first sync was:

root@curie:/home/anarcat# ./bin/syncoid -r  bpool bpool-tubman

CRITICAL ERROR: Target bpool-tubman exists but has no snapshots matching with bpool!
                Replication to target would require destroying existing
                target. Cowardly refusing to destroy your existing target.

          NOTE: Target bpool-tubman dataset is < 64MB used - did you mistakenly run
                `zfs create bpool-tubman` on the target? ZFS initial
                replication must be to a NON EXISTENT DATASET, which will
                then be CREATED BY the initial replication process.

INFO: Sending oldest full snapshot bpool/BOOT@test (~ 42 KB) to new target filesystem:
44.2KiB 0:00:00 [4.19MiB/s] [========================================================================================================================] 103%            
INFO: Updating new target filesystem with incremental bpool/BOOT@test ... syncoid_curie_2022-05-30:12:50:39 (~ 4 KB):
2.13KiB 0:00:00 [ 114KiB/s] [===============================================================>                                                         ] 53%            
INFO: Sending oldest full snapshot bpool/BOOT/debian@install (~ 126.0 MB) to new target filesystem:
 126MiB 0:00:00 [ 308MiB/s] [=======================================================================================================================>] 100%            
INFO: Updating new target filesystem with incremental bpool/BOOT/debian@install ... syncoid_curie_2022-05-30:12:50:39 (~ 113.4 MB):
 113MiB 0:00:00 [ 315MiB/s] [=======================================================================================================================>] 100%

root@curie:/home/anarcat# ./bin/syncoid -r  rpool rpool-tubman

CRITICAL ERROR: Target rpool-tubman exists but has no snapshots matching with rpool!
                Replication to target would require destroying existing
                target. Cowardly refusing to destroy your existing target.

          NOTE: Target rpool-tubman dataset is < 64MB used - did you mistakenly run
                `zfs create rpool-tubman` on the target? ZFS initial
                replication must be to a NON EXISTENT DATASET, which will
                then be CREATED BY the initial replication process.

INFO: Sending oldest full snapshot rpool/ROOT@syncoid_curie_2022-05-30:12:50:51 (~ 69 KB) to new target filesystem:
44.2KiB 0:00:00 [2.44MiB/s] [===========================================================================>                                             ] 63%            
INFO: Sending oldest full snapshot rpool/ROOT/debian@install (~ 25.9 GB) to new target filesystem:
25.9GiB 0:03:33 [ 124MiB/s] [=======================================================================================================================>] 100%            
INFO: Updating new target filesystem with incremental rpool/ROOT/debian@install ... syncoid_curie_2022-05-30:12:50:52 (~ 3.9 GB):
3.92GiB 0:00:33 [ 119MiB/s] [======================================================================================================================>  ] 99%            
INFO: Sending oldest full snapshot rpool/home@syncoid_curie_2022-05-30:12:55:04 (~ 276.8 GB) to new target filesystem:
 277GiB 0:27:13 [ 174MiB/s] [=======================================================================================================================>] 100%            
INFO: Sending oldest full snapshot rpool/home/root@syncoid_curie_2022-05-30:13:22:19 (~ 2.2 GB) to new target filesystem:
2.22GiB 0:00:25 [90.2MiB/s] [=======================================================================================================================>] 100%            
INFO: Sending oldest full snapshot rpool/var@syncoid_curie_2022-05-30:13:22:47 (~ 5.6 GB) to new target filesystem:
5.56GiB 0:00:32 [ 176MiB/s] [=======================================================================================================================>] 100%            
INFO: Sending oldest full snapshot rpool/var/cache@syncoid_curie_2022-05-30:13:23:22 (~ 627.3 MB) to new target filesystem:
 627MiB 0:00:03 [ 169MiB/s] [=======================================================================================================================>] 100%            
INFO: Sending oldest full snapshot rpool/var/lib@syncoid_curie_2022-05-30:13:23:28 (~ 69 KB) to new target filesystem:
44.2KiB 0:00:00 [1.40MiB/s] [===========================================================================>                                             ] 63%            
INFO: Sending oldest full snapshot rpool/var/lib/docker@syncoid_curie_2022-05-30:13:23:28 (~ 442.6 MB) to new target filesystem:
 443MiB 0:00:04 [ 103MiB/s] [=======================================================================================================================>] 100%            
INFO: Sending oldest full snapshot rpool/var/lib/docker/05c0de7fabbea60500eaa495d0d82038249f6faa63b12914737c4d71520e62c5@266253254 (~ 6.3 MB) to new target filesystem:
6.49MiB 0:00:00 [12.9MiB/s] [========================================================================================================================] 102%            
INFO: Updating new target filesystem with incremental rpool/var/lib/docker/05c0de7fabbea60500eaa495d0d82038249f6faa63b12914737c4d71520e62c5@266253254 ... syncoid_curie_2022-05-30:13:23:34 (~ 4 KB):
1.52KiB 0:00:00 [27.6KiB/s] [============================================>                                                                            ] 38%            
INFO: Sending oldest full snapshot rpool/var/lib/flatpak@syncoid_curie_2022-05-30:13:23:36 (~ 2.0 GB) to new target filesystem:
2.00GiB 0:00:17 [ 115MiB/s] [=======================================================================================================================>] 100%            
INFO: Sending oldest full snapshot rpool/var/tmp@syncoid_curie_2022-05-30:13:23:55 (~ 57.0 MB) to new target filesystem:
61.8MiB 0:00:01 [45.0MiB/s] [========================================================================================================================] 108%            
INFO: Clone is recreated on target rpool-tubman/var/lib/docker/ed71ddd563a779ba6fb37b3b1d0cc2c11eca9b594e77b4b234867ebcb162b205 based on rpool/var/lib/docker/05c0de7fabbea60500eaa495d0d82038249f6faa63b12914737c4d71520e62c5@266253254
INFO: Sending oldest full snapshot rpool/var/lib/docker/ed71ddd563a779ba6fb37b3b1d0cc2c11eca9b594e77b4b234867ebcb162b205@syncoid_curie_2022-05-30:13:23:58 (~ 218.6 MB) to new target filesystem:
 219MiB 0:00:01 [ 151MiB/s] [=======================================================================================================================>] 100%

Funny how the CRITICAL ERROR doesn't actually stop syncoid and it just carries on merrily doing when it's telling you it's "cowardly refusing to destroy your existing target"... Maybe that's because my pull request broke something though...

During the transfer, the computer was very sluggish: everything feels like it has ~30-50ms latency extra:

anarcat@curie:sanoid$ LANG=C top -b  -n 1 | head -20
top - 13:07:05 up 6 days,  4:01,  1 user,  load average: 16.13, 16.55, 11.83
Tasks: 606 total,   6 running, 598 sleeping,   0 stopped,   2 zombie
%Cpu(s): 18.8 us, 72.5 sy,  1.2 ni,  5.0 id,  1.2 wa,  0.0 hi,  1.2 si,  0.0 st
MiB Mem :  15898.4 total,   1387.6 free,  13170.0 used,   1340.8 buff/cache
MiB Swap:      0.0 total,      0.0 free,      0.0 used.   1319.8 avail Mem 

    PID USER      PR  NI    VIRT    RES    SHR S  %CPU  %MEM     TIME+ COMMAND
     70 root      20   0       0      0      0 S  83.3   0.0   6:12.67 kswapd0
4024878 root      20   0  282644  96432  10288 S  44.4   0.6   0:11.43 puppet
3896136 root      20   0   35328  16528     48 S  22.2   0.1   2:08.04 mbuffer
3896135 root      20   0   10328    776    168 R  16.7   0.0   1:22.93 zfs
3896138 root      20   0   10588    788    156 R  16.7   0.0   1:49.30 zfs
    350 root       0 -20       0      0      0 R  11.1   0.0   1:03.53 z_rd_int
    351 root       0 -20       0      0      0 S  11.1   0.0   1:04.15 z_rd_int
3896137 root      20   0    4384    352    244 R  11.1   0.0   0:44.73 pv
4034094 anarcat   30  10   20028  13960   2428 S  11.1   0.1   0:00.70 mbsync
4036539 anarcat   20   0    9604   3464   2408 R  11.1   0.0   0:00.04 top
    352 root       0 -20       0      0      0 S   5.6   0.0   1:03.64 z_rd_int
    353 root       0 -20       0      0      0 S   5.6   0.0   1:03.64 z_rd_int
    354 root       0 -20       0      0      0 S   5.6   0.0   1:04.01 z_rd_int

I wonder how much of that is due to syncoid, particularly because I often saw mbuffer and pv in there which are not strictly necessary to do those kind of operations, as far as I understand.

Once that's done, export the pools to disconnect the drive:

zpool export bpool-tubman
zpool export rpool-tubman

Raw disk benchmark

Copied the 512GB SSD/M.2 device to another 1024GB NVMe/M.2 device:

anarcat@curie:~$ sudo dd if=/dev/sdb of=/dev/sdc bs=4M status=progress conv=fdatasync
499944259584 octets (500 GB, 466 GiB) copiés, 1713 s, 292 MB/s
119235+1 enregistrements lus
119235+1 enregistrements écrits
500107862016 octets (500 GB, 466 GiB) copiés, 1719,93 s, 291 MB/s

... while both over USB, whoohoo 300MB/s!

Monitoring

ZFS should be monitoring your pools regularly. Normally, the [[!debman zed]] daemon monitors all ZFS events. It is the thing that will report when a scrub failed, for example. See this configuration guide.

Scrubs should be regularly scheduled to ensure consistency of the pool. This can be done in newer zfsutils-linux versions (bullseye-backports or bookworm) with one of those, depending on the desired frequency:

systemctl enable zfs-scrub-weekly@rpool.timer --now

systemctl enable zfs-scrub-monthly@rpool.timer --now

When the scrub runs, if it finds anything it will send an event which will get picked up by the zed daemon which will then send a notification, see below for an example.

TODO: deploy on curie, if possible (probably not because no RAID) TODO: this should be in Puppet

Scrub warning example

So what happens when problems are found? Here's an example of how I dealt with an error I received.

After setting up another server (tubman) with ZFS, I eventually ended up getting a warning from the ZFS toolchain.

Date: Sun, 09 Oct 2022 00:58:08 -0400
From: root <root@anarc.at>
To: root@anarc.at
Subject: ZFS scrub_finish event for rpool on tubman

ZFS has finished a scrub:

   eid: 39536
 class: scrub_finish
  host: tubman
  time: 2022-10-09 00:58:07-0400
  pool: rpool
 state: ONLINE
status: One or more devices has experienced an unrecoverable error.  An
        attempt was made to correct the error.  Applications are unaffected.
action: Determine if the device needs to be replaced, and clear the errors
        using 'zpool clear' or replace the device with 'zpool replace'.
   see: https://openzfs.github.io/openzfs-docs/msg/ZFS-8000-9P
  scan: scrub repaired 0B in 00:33:57 with 0 errors on Sun Oct  9 00:58:07 2022
config:

        NAME        STATE     READ WRITE CKSUM
        rpool       ONLINE       0     0     0
          mirror-0  ONLINE       0     0     0
            sdb4    ONLINE       0     1     0
            sdc4    ONLINE       0     0     0
        cache
          sda3      ONLINE       0     0     0

errors: No known data errors

This, in itself, is a little worrisome. But it helpfully links to this more detailed documentation (and props up there: the link still works) which explains this is a "minor" problem (something that could be included in the report).

In this case, this happened on a server setup on 2021-04-28, but the disks and server hardware are much older. The server itself (marcos v1) was built around 2011, over 10 years ago now. The hard drive in question is:

root@tubman:~# smartctl -i -qnoserial /dev/sdb
smartctl 7.2 2020-12-30 r5155 [x86_64-linux-5.10.0-15-amd64] (local build)
Copyright (C) 2002-20, Bruce Allen, Christian Franke, www.smartmontools.org

=== START OF INFORMATION SECTION ===
Model Family:     Seagate BarraCuda 3.5
Device Model:     ST4000DM004-2CV104
Firmware Version: 0001
User Capacity:    4,000,787,030,016 bytes [4.00 TB]
Sector Sizes:     512 bytes logical, 4096 bytes physical
Rotation Rate:    5425 rpm
Form Factor:      3.5 inches
Device is:        In smartctl database [for details use: -P show]
ATA Version is:   ACS-3 T13/2161-D revision 5
SATA Version is:  SATA 3.1, 6.0 Gb/s (current: 3.0 Gb/s)
Local Time is:    Tue Oct 11 11:02:32 2022 EDT
SMART support is: Available - device has SMART capability.
SMART support is: Enabled

Some more SMART stats:

root@tubman:~# smartctl -a -qnoserial /dev/sdb | grep -e  Head_Flying_Hours -e Power_On_Hours -e Total_LBA -e 'Sector Sizes'
Sector Sizes:     512 bytes logical, 4096 bytes physical
  9 Power_On_Hours          0x0032   086   086   000    Old_age   Always       -       12464 (206 202 0)
240 Head_Flying_Hours       0x0000   100   253   000    Old_age   Offline      -       10966h+55m+23.757s
241 Total_LBAs_Written      0x0000   100   253   000    Old_age   Offline      -       21107792664
242 Total_LBAs_Read         0x0000   100   253   000    Old_age   Offline      -       3201579750

That's over a year of power on, which shouldn't be so bad. It has written about 10TB of data (21107792664 LBAs * 512 byte/LBA), which is about two full writes. According to its specification, this device is supposed to support 55 TB/year of writes, so we're far below spec. Note that are still far from the "non-recoverable read error per bits" spec (1 per 10E15), as we've basically read 13E12 bits (3201579750 LBAs * 512 byte/LBA = 13E12 bits).

It's likely this disk was made in 2018, so it is in its fourth year.

Interestingly, /dev/sdc is also a Seagate drive, but of a different series:

root@tubman:~# smartctl -qnoserial  -i /dev/sdb
smartctl 7.2 2020-12-30 r5155 [x86_64-linux-5.10.0-15-amd64] (local build)
Copyright (C) 2002-20, Bruce Allen, Christian Franke, www.smartmontools.org

=== START OF INFORMATION SECTION ===
Model Family:     Seagate BarraCuda 3.5
Device Model:     ST4000DM004-2CV104
Firmware Version: 0001
User Capacity:    4,000,787,030,016 bytes [4.00 TB]
Sector Sizes:     512 bytes logical, 4096 bytes physical
Rotation Rate:    5425 rpm
Form Factor:      3.5 inches
Device is:        In smartctl database [for details use: -P show]
ATA Version is:   ACS-3 T13/2161-D revision 5
SATA Version is:  SATA 3.1, 6.0 Gb/s (current: 3.0 Gb/s)
Local Time is:    Tue Oct 11 11:21:35 2022 EDT
SMART support is: Available - device has SMART capability.
SMART support is: Enabled

It has seen much more reads than the other disk which is also interesting:

root@tubman:~# smartctl -a -qnoserial /dev/sdc | grep -e  Head_Flying_Hours -e Power_On_Hours -e Total_LBA -e 'Sector Sizes'
Sector Sizes:     512 bytes logical, 4096 bytes physical
  9 Power_On_Hours          0x0032   059   059   000    Old_age   Always       -       36240
240 Head_Flying_Hours       0x0000   100   253   000    Old_age   Offline      -       33994h+10m+52.118s
241 Total_LBAs_Written      0x0000   100   253   000    Old_age   Offline      -       30730174438
242 Total_LBAs_Read         0x0000   100   253   000    Old_age   Offline      -       51894566538

That's 4 years of Head_Flying_Hours, and over 4 years (4 years and 48 days) of Power_On_Hours. The copyright date on that drive's specs goes back to 2016, so it's a much older drive.

SMART self-test succeeded.

Remaining issues

  • TODO: move send/receive backups to offsite host, see also zfs for alternatives to syncoid/sanoid there
  • TODO: setup backup cron job (or timer?)
  • TODO: swap still not setup on curie, see zfs
  • TODO: document this somewhere: bpool and rpool are both pools and datasets. that's pretty confusing, but also very useful because it allows for pool-wide recursive snapshots, which are used for the backup system

fio improvements

I really want to improve my experience with fio. Right now, I'm just cargo-culting stuff from other folks and I don't really like it. stressant is a good example of my struggles, in the sense that it doesn't really work that well for disk tests.

I would love to have just a single .fio job file that lists multiple jobs to run serially. For example, this file describes the above workload pretty well:

[global]
# cargo-culting Salter
fallocate=none
ioengine=posixaio
runtime=60
time_based=1
end_fsync=1
stonewall=1
group_reporting=1
# no need to drop caches, done by default
# invalidate=1

# Single 4KiB random read/write process
[randread-4k-4g-1x]
rw=randread
bs=4k
size=4g
numjobs=1
iodepth=1

[randwrite-4k-4g-1x]
rw=randwrite
bs=4k
size=4g
numjobs=1
iodepth=1

# 16 parallel 64KiB random read/write processes:
[randread-64k-256m-16x]
rw=randread
bs=64k
size=256m
numjobs=16
iodepth=16

[randwrite-64k-256m-16x]
rw=randwrite
bs=64k
size=256m
numjobs=16
iodepth=16

# Single 1MiB random read/write process
[randread-1m-16g-1x]
rw=randread
bs=1m
size=16g
numjobs=1
iodepth=1

[randwrite-1m-16g-1x]
rw=randwrite
bs=1m
size=16g
numjobs=1
iodepth=1

... except the jobs are actually started in parallel, even though they are stonewall'd, as far as I can tell by the reports. I sent a mail to the fio mailing list for clarification.

It looks like the jobs are started in parallel, but actual (correctly) run serially. It seems like this might just be a matter of reporting the right timestamps in the end, although it does feel like starting all the processes (even if not doing any work yet) could skew the results.

Hangs during procedure

During the procedure, it happened a few times where any ZFS command would completely hang. It seems that using an external USB drive to sync stuff didn't work so well: sometimes it would reconnect under a different device (from sdc to sdd, for example), and this would greatly confuse ZFS.

Here, for example, is sdd reappearing out of the blue:

May 19 11:22:53 curie kernel: [  699.820301] scsi host4: uas
May 19 11:22:53 curie kernel: [  699.820544] usb 2-1: authorized to connect
May 19 11:22:53 curie kernel: [  699.922433] scsi 4:0:0:0: Direct-Access     ROG      ESD-S1C          0    PQ: 0 ANSI: 6
May 19 11:22:53 curie kernel: [  699.923235] sd 4:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg2 type 0
May 19 11:22:53 curie kernel: [  699.923676] sd 4:0:0:0: [sdd] 1953525168 512-byte logical blocks: (1.00 TB/932 GiB)
May 19 11:22:53 curie kernel: [  699.923788] sd 4:0:0:0: [sdd] Write Protect is off
May 19 11:22:53 curie kernel: [  699.923949] sd 4:0:0:0: [sdd] Write cache: enabled, read cache: enabled, doesn't support DPO or FUA
May 19 11:22:53 curie kernel: [  699.924149] sd 4:0:0:0: [sdd] Optimal transfer size 33553920 bytes
May 19 11:22:53 curie kernel: [  699.961602]  sdd: sdd1 sdd2 sdd3 sdd4
May 19 11:22:53 curie kernel: [  699.996083] sd 4:0:0:0: [sdd] Attached SCSI disk

Next time I run a ZFS command (say zpool list), the command completely hangs (D state) and this comes up in the logs:

May 19 11:34:21 curie kernel: [ 1387.914843] zio pool=bpool vdev=/dev/sdc3 error=5 type=2 offset=71344128 size=4096 flags=184880
May 19 11:34:21 curie kernel: [ 1387.914859] zio pool=bpool vdev=/dev/sdc3 error=5 type=2 offset=205565952 size=4096 flags=184880
May 19 11:34:21 curie kernel: [ 1387.914874] zio pool=bpool vdev=/dev/sdc3 error=5 type=2 offset=272789504 size=4096 flags=184880
May 19 11:34:21 curie kernel: [ 1387.914906] zio pool=bpool vdev=/dev/sdc3 error=5 type=1 offset=270336 size=8192 flags=b08c1
May 19 11:34:21 curie kernel: [ 1387.914932] zio pool=bpool vdev=/dev/sdc3 error=5 type=1 offset=1073225728 size=8192 flags=b08c1
May 19 11:34:21 curie kernel: [ 1387.914948] zio pool=bpool vdev=/dev/sdc3 error=5 type=1 offset=1073487872 size=8192 flags=b08c1
May 19 11:34:21 curie kernel: [ 1387.915165] zio pool=bpool vdev=/dev/sdc3 error=5 type=2 offset=272793600 size=4096 flags=184880
May 19 11:34:21 curie kernel: [ 1387.915183] zio pool=bpool vdev=/dev/sdc3 error=5 type=2 offset=339853312 size=4096 flags=184880
May 19 11:34:21 curie kernel: [ 1387.915648] WARNING: Pool 'bpool' has encountered an uncorrectable I/O failure and has been suspended.
May 19 11:34:21 curie kernel: [ 1387.915648] 
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.558614] task:txg_sync        state:D stack:    0 pid:  997 ppid:     2 flags:0x00004000
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.558623] Call Trace:
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.558640]  __schedule+0x282/0x870
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.558650]  schedule+0x46/0xb0
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.558670]  schedule_timeout+0x8b/0x140
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.558675]  ? __next_timer_interrupt+0x110/0x110
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.558678]  io_schedule_timeout+0x4c/0x80
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.558689]  __cv_timedwait_common+0x12b/0x160 [spl]
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.558694]  ? add_wait_queue_exclusive+0x70/0x70
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.558702]  __cv_timedwait_io+0x15/0x20 [spl]
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.558816]  zio_wait+0x129/0x2b0 [zfs]
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.558929]  dsl_pool_sync+0x461/0x4f0 [zfs]
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.559032]  spa_sync+0x575/0xfa0 [zfs]
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.559138]  ? spa_txg_history_init_io+0x101/0x110 [zfs]
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.559245]  txg_sync_thread+0x2e0/0x4a0 [zfs]
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.559354]  ? txg_fini+0x240/0x240 [zfs]
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.559366]  thread_generic_wrapper+0x6f/0x80 [spl]
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.559376]  ? __thread_exit+0x20/0x20 [spl]
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.559379]  kthread+0x11b/0x140
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.559382]  ? __kthread_bind_mask+0x60/0x60
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.559386]  ret_from_fork+0x22/0x30
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.559401] task:zed             state:D stack:    0 pid: 1564 ppid:     1 flags:0x00000000
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.559404] Call Trace:
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.559409]  __schedule+0x282/0x870
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.559412]  ? __kmalloc_node+0x141/0x2b0
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.559417]  schedule+0x46/0xb0
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.559420]  schedule_preempt_disabled+0xa/0x10
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.559424]  __mutex_lock.constprop.0+0x133/0x460
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.559435]  ? nvlist_xalloc.part.0+0x68/0xc0 [znvpair]
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.559537]  spa_all_configs+0x41/0x120 [zfs]
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.559644]  zfs_ioc_pool_configs+0x17/0x70 [zfs]
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.559752]  zfsdev_ioctl_common+0x697/0x870 [zfs]
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.559758]  ? _copy_from_user+0x28/0x60
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.559860]  zfsdev_ioctl+0x53/0xe0 [zfs]
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.559866]  __x64_sys_ioctl+0x83/0xb0
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.559869]  do_syscall_64+0x33/0x80
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.559873]  entry_SYSCALL_64_after_hwframe+0x44/0xa9
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.559876] RIP: 0033:0x7fcf0ef32cc7
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.559878] RSP: 002b:00007fcf0e181618 EFLAGS: 00000246 ORIG_RAX: 0000000000000010
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.559881] RAX: ffffffffffffffda RBX: 000055b212f972a0 RCX: 00007fcf0ef32cc7
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.559883] RDX: 00007fcf0e181640 RSI: 0000000000005a04 RDI: 000000000000000b
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.559885] RBP: 00007fcf0e184c30 R08: 00007fcf08016810 R09: 00007fcf08000080
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.559886] R10: 0000000000080000 R11: 0000000000000246 R12: 000055b212f972a0
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.559888] R13: 0000000000000000 R14: 00007fcf0e181640 R15: 0000000000000000
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.559980] task:zpool           state:D stack:    0 pid:11815 ppid:  3816 flags:0x00004000
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.559983] Call Trace:
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.559988]  __schedule+0x282/0x870
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.559992]  schedule+0x46/0xb0
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.559995]  io_schedule+0x42/0x70
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.560004]  cv_wait_common+0xac/0x130 [spl]
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.560008]  ? add_wait_queue_exclusive+0x70/0x70
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.560118]  txg_wait_synced_impl+0xc9/0x110 [zfs]
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.560223]  txg_wait_synced+0xc/0x40 [zfs]
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.560325]  spa_export_common+0x4cd/0x590 [zfs]
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.560430]  ? zfs_log_history+0x9c/0xf0 [zfs]
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.560537]  zfsdev_ioctl_common+0x697/0x870 [zfs]
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.560543]  ? _copy_from_user+0x28/0x60
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.560644]  zfsdev_ioctl+0x53/0xe0 [zfs]
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.560649]  __x64_sys_ioctl+0x83/0xb0
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.560653]  do_syscall_64+0x33/0x80
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.560656]  entry_SYSCALL_64_after_hwframe+0x44/0xa9
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.560659] RIP: 0033:0x7fdc23be2cc7
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.560661] RSP: 002b:00007ffc8c792478 EFLAGS: 00000246 ORIG_RAX: 0000000000000010
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.560664] RAX: ffffffffffffffda RBX: 000055942ca49e20 RCX: 00007fdc23be2cc7
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.560666] RDX: 00007ffc8c792490 RSI: 0000000000005a03 RDI: 0000000000000003
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.560667] RBP: 00007ffc8c795e80 R08: 00000000ffffffff R09: 00007ffc8c792310
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.560669] R10: 000055942ca49e30 R11: 0000000000000246 R12: 00007ffc8c792490
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.560671] R13: 000055942ca49e30 R14: 000055942aed2c20 R15: 00007ffc8c795a40

Here's another example, where you see the USB controller bleeping out and back into existence:

mai 19 11:38:39 curie kernel: usb 2-1: USB disconnect, device number 2
mai 19 11:38:39 curie kernel: sd 4:0:0:0: [sdd] Synchronizing SCSI cache
mai 19 11:38:39 curie kernel: sd 4:0:0:0: [sdd] Synchronize Cache(10) failed: Result: hostbyte=DID_ERROR driverbyte=DRIVER_OK
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel: INFO: task zed:1564 blocked for more than 241 seconds.
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel:       Tainted: P          IOE     5.10.0-14-amd64 #1 Debian 5.10.113-1
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel: "echo 0 > /proc/sys/kernel/hung_task_timeout_secs" disables this message.
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel: task:zed             state:D stack:    0 pid: 1564 ppid:     1 flags:0x00000000
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel: Call Trace:
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel:  __schedule+0x282/0x870
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel:  ? __kmalloc_node+0x141/0x2b0
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel:  schedule+0x46/0xb0
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel:  schedule_preempt_disabled+0xa/0x10
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel:  __mutex_lock.constprop.0+0x133/0x460
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel:  ? nvlist_xalloc.part.0+0x68/0xc0 [znvpair]
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel:  spa_all_configs+0x41/0x120 [zfs]
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel:  zfs_ioc_pool_configs+0x17/0x70 [zfs]
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel:  zfsdev_ioctl_common+0x697/0x870 [zfs]
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel:  ? _copy_from_user+0x28/0x60
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel:  zfsdev_ioctl+0x53/0xe0 [zfs]
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel:  __x64_sys_ioctl+0x83/0xb0
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel:  do_syscall_64+0x33/0x80
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel:  entry_SYSCALL_64_after_hwframe+0x44/0xa9
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel: RIP: 0033:0x7fcf0ef32cc7
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel: RSP: 002b:00007fcf0e181618 EFLAGS: 00000246 ORIG_RAX: 0000000000000010
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel: RAX: ffffffffffffffda RBX: 000055b212f972a0 RCX: 00007fcf0ef32cc7
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel: RDX: 00007fcf0e181640 RSI: 0000000000005a04 RDI: 000000000000000b
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel: RBP: 00007fcf0e184c30 R08: 00007fcf08016810 R09: 00007fcf08000080
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel: R10: 0000000000080000 R11: 0000000000000246 R12: 000055b212f972a0
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel: R13: 0000000000000000 R14: 00007fcf0e181640 R15: 0000000000000000
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel: INFO: task zpool:11815 blocked for more than 241 seconds.
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel:       Tainted: P          IOE     5.10.0-14-amd64 #1 Debian 5.10.113-1
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel: "echo 0 > /proc/sys/kernel/hung_task_timeout_secs" disables this message.
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel: task:zpool           state:D stack:    0 pid:11815 ppid:  2621 flags:0x00004004
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel: Call Trace:
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel:  __schedule+0x282/0x870
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel:  schedule+0x46/0xb0
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel:  io_schedule+0x42/0x70
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel:  cv_wait_common+0xac/0x130 [spl]
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel:  ? add_wait_queue_exclusive+0x70/0x70
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel:  txg_wait_synced_impl+0xc9/0x110 [zfs]
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel:  txg_wait_synced+0xc/0x40 [zfs]
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel:  spa_export_common+0x4cd/0x590 [zfs]
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel:  ? zfs_log_history+0x9c/0xf0 [zfs]
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel:  zfsdev_ioctl_common+0x697/0x870 [zfs]
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel:  ? _copy_from_user+0x28/0x60
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel:  zfsdev_ioctl+0x53/0xe0 [zfs]
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel:  __x64_sys_ioctl+0x83/0xb0
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel:  do_syscall_64+0x33/0x80
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel:  entry_SYSCALL_64_after_hwframe+0x44/0xa9
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel: RIP: 0033:0x7fdc23be2cc7
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel: RSP: 002b:00007ffc8c792478 EFLAGS: 00000246 ORIG_RAX: 0000000000000010
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel: RAX: ffffffffffffffda RBX: 000055942ca49e20 RCX: 00007fdc23be2cc7
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel: RDX: 00007ffc8c792490 RSI: 0000000000005a03 RDI: 0000000000000003
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel: RBP: 00007ffc8c795e80 R08: 00000000ffffffff R09: 00007ffc8c792310
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel: R10: 000055942ca49e30 R11: 0000000000000246 R12: 00007ffc8c792490
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel: R13: 000055942ca49e30 R14: 000055942aed2c20 R15: 00007ffc8c795a40

I understand those are rather extreme conditions: I would fully expect the pool to stop working if the underlying drives disappear. What doesn't seem acceptable is that a command would completely hang like this.

References

See the zfs documentation for more information about ZFS, and tubman for another installation and migration procedure.

16 November, 2022 05:40PM

November 13, 2022

hackergotchi for Patryk Cisek

Patryk Cisek

Unattended Upgrades Debian

Unattended Upgrades in Debian Feels like since forever have I been using unattended-upgrades package to automate the Security upgrades on my various Debian Stable based machines. Default Settings By default unattended-upgrades will install only Security updates. It also will not send any email reports. That is not surprising – well, you have to have email delivery configured and unattended-upgrades needs to know, what email address to send those reports to.

13 November, 2022 02:40PM by l (Patryk Cisek (patryk@cisek.emai)

November 12, 2022

hackergotchi for Debian Brasil

Debian Brasil

About Debian Brasil at Latinoware 2022

From November 2nd to 4th, 2022, the 19th edition of Latinoware - Latin American Congress of Free Software and Open Technologies took place in Foz do Iguaçu. After 2 years happening online due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the event was back in person and we felt Debian Brasil community should be there. Out last time at Latinoware was in 2016

The Latinoware organization provided the Debian Brazil community with a booth so that we could have contact with people visiting the open exhibition area and thus publicize the Debian project. During the 3 days of the event, the booth was organized by me (Paulo Henrique Santana) as Debian Developer, and by Leonardo Rodrigues as Debian contributor. Unfortunately Daniel Lenharo had an issue and could not travel to Foz do Iguaçu (we miss you there!).

Latinoware 2022 booth 1

A huge number of people visited the booth, and the beginners (mainly students) who didn't know Debian, asked what our group was about and we explained various concepts such as what Free Software is, GNU/Linux distribution and Debian itself. We also received people from the Brazilian Free Software community and from other Latin American countries who were already using a GNU/Linux distribution and, of course, many people who were already using Debian. We had some special visitors as Jon maddog Hall, Debian Developer Emeritus Otávio Salvador, Debian Developer Eriberto Mota, and Debian Maintainers Guilherme de Paula Segundo and Paulo Kretcheu.

Latinoware 2022 booth 4

Photo from left to right: Leonardo, Paulo, Eriberto and Otávio.

Latinoware 2022 estande 5

Photo from left to right: Paulo, Fabian (Argentina) and Leonardo.

In addition to talking a lot, we distributed Debian stickers that were produced a few months ago with Debian's sponsorship to be distributed at DebConf22 (and that were left over), and we sold several Debian t-shirts) produced by Curitiba Livre community).

Latinoware 2022 booth 2

Latinoware 2022 booth 3

We also had 3 talks included in Latinoware official schedule. I) talked about: "how to become a Debian contributor by doing translations" and "how the SysAdmins of a global company use Debian". And Leonardo) talked about: "advantages of Open Source telephony in companies".

Latinoware 2022 booth 6

Photo Paulo in his talk.

Many thanks to Latinoware organization for once again welcoming the Debian community and kindly providing spaces for our participation, and we congratulate all the people involved in the organization for the success of this important event for our community. We hope to be present again in 2023.

We also thank Jonathan Carter for approving financial support from Debian for our participation at Latinoware.

Portuguese version

12 November, 2022 07:00PM

Participação da comunidade Debian no Latinoware 2022

De 2 a 4 de novembro de 2022 aconteceu a 19º edição do Latinoware - Congresso Latino-americano de Software Livre e Tecnologias Abertas, em Foz do Iguaçu. Após 2 anos acontecendo de forma online devido a pandemia do COVID-19, o evento voltou a ser presencial e sentimos que a comunidade Debian Brasil deveria estar presente. Nossa última participação no Latinoware foi em 2016

A organização do Latinoware cedeu para a comunidade Debian Brasil um estande para que pudéssemos ter contato com as pessoas que visitavam a área aberta de exposições e assim divulgarmos o projeto Debian. Durante os 3 dias do evento, o estande foi organizado por mim (Paulo Henrique Santana) como Desenvolvedor Debian, e pelo Leonardo Rodrigues como contribuidor Debian. Infelizmente o Daniel Lenharo teve um imprevisto de última hora e não pode ir para Foz do Iguaçu (sentimos sua falta lá!).

Latinoware 2022 estande 1

Várias pessoas visitaram o estande e aquelas mais iniciantes (principalmente estudantes) que não conheciam o Debian, perguntavam do que se tratava o nosso grupo e a gente explicava vários conceitos como o que é Software Livre, distribuição GNU/Linux e o Debian propriamente dito. Também recebemos pessoas da comunidade de Software Livre brasileira e de outros países da América Latina que já utilizavam uma distribuição GNU/Linux e claro, muitas pessoas que já utilizavam Debian. Tivemos algumas visitas especiais como do Jon maddog Hall, do Desenvolvedor Debian Emeritus Otávio Salvador, do Desenvolvedor Debian Eriberto Mota, e dos Mantenedores Debian Guilherme de Paula Segundo e Paulo Kretcheu.

Latinoware 2022 estande 4

Foto da esquerda pra direita: Leonardo, Paulo, Eriberto e Otávio.

Latinoware 2022 estande 5

Foto da esquerda pra direita: Paulo, Fabian (Argentina) e Leonardo.

Além de conversarmos bastante, distribuímos adesivos do Debian que foram produzidos alguns meses atrás com o patrocínio do Debian para serem distribuídos na DebConf22(e que haviam sobrado), e vendemos várias camisetas do Debian produzidas pela comunidade Curitiba Livre.

Latinoware 2022 estande 2

Latinoware 2022 estande 3

Também tivemos 3 palestras inseridas na programação oficial do Latinoware. Eu fiz as palestras: “como tornar um(a) contribuidor(a) do Debian fazendo traduções” e “como os SysAdmins de uma empresa global usam Debian”. E o Leonardo fez a palestra: “vantagens da telefonia Open Source nas empresas”.

Latinoware 2022 estande 6

Foto Paulo na palestra.

Agradecemos a organização do Latinoware por receber mais uma vez a comunidade Debian e gentilmente ceder os espaços para a nossa participação, e parabenizamos a todas as pessoas envolvidas na organização pelo sucesso desse importante evento para a nossa comunidade. Esperamos estar presentes novamente em 2023.

Agracemos também ao Jonathan Carter por aprovar o suporte financeiro do Debian para a nossa participação no Latinoware.

Versão em inglês

12 November, 2022 06:00PM

hackergotchi for Bastian Venthur

Bastian Venthur

Mastodon

Due to recent events around Twitter, I finally decided to give Mastodon a try. Naturally, I find the idea of an open and decentralized platform much more appealing than the privately owned walled gardens that became so hugely popular in the past two decades. I’m curious whether Mastodon can keep up the momentum of the last two weeks and eventually establish itself as an alternative to Twitter. On that note, I think it will be interesting to see how well moderation of hate speech etc. works- and scales on Mastodon. I believe that Twitter, Facebook and the likes, spend a significant amount of resources on content moderation, so this may become a huge headache for Mastodon instance admins when it gets more popular.

Choosing an Instance

For no particular reason, I went with the mastodon.social instance, so my handle is @venthur@mastodon.social. After my first steps, I realized that choosing the instance does have an impact, particularly if you follow the local timeline. mastodon.social is currently one of the biggest instances and therefore the local timeline is very busy and the topics naturally very random. Maybe I’ll try out a more specialized instance such as fosstodon at some point – one of the awesome features of Mastodon is that it actually supports the migration of accounts between instances!

I wonder if there are plans to have an official Debian instance?

First Impressions

So far I’m quite happy with Mastodon. There’s good quality content and I already found a few people that I was following on Twitter here on Mastodon too. Interestingly, some of them actually are more active on Mastodon than on Twitter. But truth to be told: many of them do cross-post on both mediums, and most of the people I follow on Twitter are not on Mastodon yet.

I do like the concepts of the local- and federated timelines, although they are quite busy.

I like that you can set the language of your (individual) toots which allows users to filter their timelines for languages. In practice, this does not work so well yet, and I still see a lot of different languages in my local and federated timelines. I assume the problem is that people just forget to set the language of their toots so the default language is used. This problem should be easily solvable in the frontend by “guessing” the language once a few words have been typed.

I also like the idea that you can follow hashtags, although for me the results were mixed. I tried to follow #debian and #python and got a lot of toots that were not really relevant for me in the case of #python I got quite spammed with job ads so I had to unfollow it again.

Unfollwing a hashtag is not very intuitive, as the tags are not in your list of people you follow, so you have to find the page of the hashtag itself (e.g. #debian) and unfollow from there.

You see, there are some rough edges here and there, but I find the overall experience much more enjoyable than Twitter.

Debian Folks in the Fediverse?

Which brings me to: are there any Debian Developers or -Maintainers out there to follow in the fediverse? I found most of the ones I’m following on Twitter, but I’m sure there’s more hiding out there.

12 November, 2022 04:00PM by Bastian Venthur

hackergotchi for Wouter Verhelst

Wouter Verhelst

Day 3 of the Debian Videoteam Sprint in Cape Town

The Debian Videoteam has been sprinting in Cape Town, South Africa -- mostly because with Stefano here for a few months, four of us (Jonathan, Kyle, Stefano, and myself) actually are in the country on a regular basis. In addition to that, two more members of the team (Nicolas and Louis-Philippe) are joining the sprint remotely (from Paris and Montreal).

Videoteam sprint

(Kyle and Stefano working on things, with me behind the camera and Jonathan busy elsewhere.)

We've made loads of progress! Some highlights:

  • We did a lot of triaging of outstanding bugs and merge requests against our ansible repository. Stale issues were closed, merge requests have been merged (or closed when they weren't relevant anymore), and new issues that we found while working on them were fixed. We also improved our test coverage for some of our ansible roles, and modernized as well as improved the way our documentation is built. (Louis-Philippe, Stefano, Kyle, Wouter, Nicolas)
  • Some work was done on SReview, our video review and transcode tool: I fixed up the metadata export code and did some other backend work, while Stefano worked a bit on the frontend, bringing it up to date to use bootstrap 4, and adding client-side filtering using vue. Future work on this will allow editing various things from the webinterface -- currently that requires issuing SQL commands directly. (Wouter and Stefano)
  • Jonathan explored new features in OBS. We've been using OBS for our "loopy" setup since DebConf20, which is used for the slightly more interactive sponsor loop that is shown in between talks. The result is that we'll be able to simplify and improve that setup in future (mini)DebConf instances. (Jonathan)
  • Kyle had a look at options for capturing hardware. We currently use Opsis boards, but they are not an ideal solution, and we are exploring alternatives. (Kyle)
  • Some package uploads happened! libmedia-convert-perl will now (hopefully) migrate to testing; and if all goes well, a new version of SReview will be available in unstable soon.

The sprint isn't over yet (we're continuing until Sunday), but loads of things have already happened. Stay tuned!

12 November, 2022 09:06AM

Craig Small

WordPress 6.1

Debian will soon have WordPress version 6.1 I’m not really sure of the improvements, but there is a new 2023 theme as part of the update.

They really weren’t mucking around when they said the 6.0.3 security release would be short-lived.

The updates seem to be focused on content creation and making the formatting do what content creators want it to do. For me, I need headings 1 and 2 , paragraphs and preformatted text.

12 November, 2022 07:00AM by dropbear

November 11, 2022

Reproducible Builds

Reproducible Builds in October 2022

Welcome to the Reproducible Builds report for October 2022! In these reports we attempt to outline the most important things that we have been up to over the past month.

As ever, if you are interested in contributing to the project, please visit our Contribute page on our website.


Our in-person summit this year was held in the past few days in Venice, Italy. Activity and news from the summit will therefore be covered in next month’s report!

A new article related to reproducible builds was recently published in the 2023 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy. Titled Taxonomy of Attacks on Open-Source Software Supply Chains and authored by Piergiorgio Ladisa, Henrik Plate, Matias Martinez and Olivier Barais, their paper:

[…] proposes a general taxonomy for attacks on opensource supply chains, independent of specific programming languages or ecosystems, and covering all supply chain stages from code contributions to package distribution.

Taking the form of an attack tree, the paper covers 107 unique vectors linked to 94 real world supply-chain incidents which is then mapped to 33 mitigating safeguards including, of course, reproducible builds:

Reproducible Builds received a very high utility rating (5) from 10 participants (58.8%), but also a high-cost rating (4 or 5) from 12 (70.6%). One expert commented that a ”reproducible build like used by Solarwinds now, is a good measure against tampering with a single build system” and another claimed this ”is going to be the single, biggest barrier”.

It was noticed this month that Solarwinds published a whitepaper back in December 2021 in order to:

[…] illustrate a concerning new reality for the software industry and illuminates the increasingly sophisticated threats made by outside nation-states to the supply chains and infrastructure on which we all rely.

The 12-month anniversary of the 2020 “Solarwinds attack” (which SolarWinds Worldwide LLC itself calls the “SUNBURST” attack) was, of course, the likely impetus for publication.

Whilst collaborating on making the Cyrus IMAP server reproducible, Ellie Timoney asked why the Reproducible Builds testing framework uses two remarkably distinctive build paths when attempting to flush out builds that vary on the absolute system path in which they were built. In the case of the Cyrus IMAP server, these happened to be:

  • /build/1st/cyrus-imapd-3.6.0~beta3/
  • /build/2/cyrus-imapd-3.6.0~beta3/2nd/

Asked why they vary in three different ways, Chris Lamb listed in detail the motivation behind to each difference.

On our mailing list this month:

The Reproducible Builds project is delighted to welcome openEuler to the Involved projects page […]. openEuler is Linux distribution developed by Huawei, a counterpart to it’s more commercially-oriented EulerOS.

Debian

Colin Watson wrote about his experience towards making the databases generated by the man-db UNIX manual page indexing tool:

One of the people working on [reproducible builds] noticed that man-db’s database files were an obstacle to [reproducibility]: in particular, the exact contents of the database seemed to depend on the order in which files were scanned when building it. The reporter proposed solving this by processing files in sorted order, but I wasn’t keen on that approach: firstly because it would mean we could no longer process files in an order that makes it more efficient to read them all from disk (still valuable on rotational disks), but mostly because the differences seemed to point to other bugs.

Colin goes on to describe his approach to solving the problem, including fixing various fits of internal caching, and he ends his post with “None of this is particularly glamorous work, but it paid off”.

Vagrant Cascadian announced on our mailing list another online sprint to help “clear the huge backlog of reproducible builds patches submitted” by performing NMUs (Non-Maintainer Uploads). The first such sprint took place on September 22nd, but another was held on October 6th, and another small one on October 20th. This resulted in the following progress:

41 reviews of Debian packages were added, 62 were updated and 12 were removed this month adding to our knowledge about identified issues. A number of issue types were updated too. [1][…]

Lastly, Luca Boccassi submitted a patch to debhelper, a set of tools used in the packaging of the majority of Debian packages. The patch addressed an issue in the dh_installsysusers utility so that the postinst post-installation script that debhelper generates the same data regardless of the underlying filesystem ordering.

Other distributions

F-Droid is a community-run app store that provides free software applications for Android phones. This month, F-Droid changed their documentation and guidance to now explicitly encourage RB for new apps […][…], and FC Stegerman created an extremely in-depth issue on GitLab concerning the APK signing block. You can read more about F-Droid’s approach to reproducibility in our July 2022 interview with Hans-Christoph Steiner of the F-Droid Project.

In openSUSE, Bernhard M. Wiedemann published his usual openSUSE monthly report.

Upstream patches

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

diffoscope

diffoscope is our in-depth and content-aware diff utility. Not only can it locate and diagnose reproducibility issues, it can provide human-readable diffs from many kinds of binary formats. This month, Chris Lamb prepared and uploaded versions 224 and 225 to Debian:

  • Add support for comparing the text content of HTML files using html2text. […]
  • Add support for detecting ordering-only differences in XML files. […]
  • Fix an issue with detecting ordering differences. […]
  • Use the capitalised version of “Ordering” consistently everywhere in output. […]
  • Add support for displaying font metadata using ttx(1) from the fonttools suite. […]

  • Testsuite improvements:

    • Temporarily allow the stable-po pipeline to fail in the CI. […]
    • Rename the order1.diff test fixture to json_expected_ordering_diff. […]
    • Tidy the JSON tests. […]
    • Use assert_diff over get_data and an manual assert within the XML tests. […]
    • Drop the ALLOWED_TEST_FILES test; it was mostly just annoying. […]
    • Tidy the tests/test_source.py file. […]

Chris Lamb also added a link to diffoscope’s OpenBSD packaging on the diffoscope.org homepage […] and Mattia Rizzolo fix an test failure that was occurring under with LLVM 15 […].

Testing framework

The Reproducible Builds project operates a comprehensive testing framework at tests.reproducible-builds.org in order to check packages and other artifacts for reproducibility. In October, the following changes were made by Holger Levsen:

  • Run the logparse tool to analyse results on the Debian Edu build logs. […]
  • Install btop(1) on all nodes running Debian. […]
  • Switch Arch Linux from using SHA1 to SHA256. […]
  • When checking Debian debstrap jobs, correctly log the tool usage. […]
  • Cleanup more task-related temporary directory names when testing Debian packages. […][…]
  • Use the cdebootstrap-static binary for the 2nd runs of the cdebootstrap tests. […]
  • Drop a workaround when testing OpenWrt and coreboot as the issue in diffoscope has now been fixed. […]
  • Turn on an rm(1) warning into an “info”-level message. […]
  • Special case the osuosl168 node for running Debian bookworm already. […][…]
  • Use the new non-free-firmware suite on the o168 node. […]

In addition, Mattia Rizzolo made the following changes:

  • Ensure that 2nd build has a merged /usr. […]
  • Only reconfigure the usrmerge package on Debian bookworm and above. […]
  • Fix bc(1) syntax in the computation of the percentage of unreproducible packages in the dashboard. […][…][…]
  • In the index_suite_ pages, order the package status to be the same order of the menu. […]
  • Pass the --distribution parameter to the pbuilder utility. […]

Finally, Roland Clobus continued his work on testing Live Debian images. In particular, he extended the maintenance script to warn when workspace directories cannot be deleted. […]


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

11 November, 2022 03:56PM

Enrico Zini

Sharing argparse arguments with subcommands

argparse subcommands are great, but they have a quirk in which options are only available right after the subcommand that define them.

So, if you for example add the --verbose / -v argument to your main parser, and you have subcommands, you need to give the -v option before the subcommand name. For example, given this script:

#!/usr/bin/python3
import argparse

parser = argparse.ArgumentParser(description="test")
parser.add_argument("-v", "--verbose", action="store_true")
subparsers = parser.add_subparsers(dest="handler", required=True)
subparsers.add_parser("test")

args = parser.parse_args()
print(args.verbose)

You get this behaviour:

$ ./mycmd test
False
$ ./mycmd -v test
True
$ ./mycmd test -v
usage: mycmd [-h] [-v] {test} ...
mycmd: error: unrecognized arguments: -v

This sometimes makes sense, and many other times it's really annoying, since the user has to remember at which level an option was defined.

Last night some pieces clicked in my head, and I created a not-too-dirty ArgumentParser subclass that adds a shared option to arguments, that propagates them to subparsers:

#!/usr/bin/python3
from hacks import argparse

parser = argparse.ArgumentParser(description="test")
parser.add_argument("-v", "--verbose", action="store_true", shared=True)
subparsers = parser.add_subparsers(dest="handler", required=True)
subparsers.add_parser("test")

args = parser.parse_args()
print(args.verbose)

And finally, -v can be given at all levels:

$ ./mycmd test
False
$ ./mycmd -v test
True
$ ./mycmd test -v
True

It even works recursively, forwarding arguments to sub-subparsers, but at the moment it can only do it for store_true and store kind of arguments.

11 November, 2022 12:51PM

November 10, 2022

Melissa Wen

V3D enablement in mainline kernel

Hey,

If you enjoy using upstream Linux kernel in your Raspberry Pi system or just want to give a try in the freshest kernel graphics drivers there, the good news is that now you can compile and boot the V3D driver from the mainline in your Raspberry Pi 4. Thanks to the work of Stefan, Peter and Nicolas [1] [2], the V3D enablement reached the Linux kernel mainline. That means hacking and using new features available in the upstream V3D driver directly from the source.

However, even for those used to compiling and installing a custom kernel in the Raspberry Pi, there are some quirks to getting the mainline v3d module available in 32-bit and 64-bit systems. I’ve quickly summarized how to compile and install upstream kernel versions (>=6.0) in this short blog post.

Note: V3D driver is not present in Raspberry Pi models 0-3.

First, I’m taking into account that you already know how to cross-compile a custom kernel to your system. If it is not your case, a good tutorial is already available in the Raspberry Pi documentation, but it targets the kernel in the rpi-linux repository (downstream kernel).

From this documentation, the main differences in the upstream kernel are presented below:

Raspberry Pi 4 64-bit (arm64)

Diff short summary:

  1. instead of getting the .config file from bcm2711_defconfig, get it by running make ARCH=arm64 defconfig
  2. compile and install the kernel image and modules as usual, but just copy the dtb file arch/arm64/boot/dts/broadcom/bcm2711-rpi-4-b.dtb to the /boot of your target machine (no /overlays directory to copy)
  3. change /boot/config.txt:
    • comment/remove the dt_overlay=vc4-kms-v3d entry
    • add a device_tree=bcm2711-rpi-4-b.dtb entry

Raspberry Pi 4 32-bits (arm)

Diff short summary:

  1. get the .config file by running make ARCH=arm multi_v7_defconfig
  2. using make ARCH=arm menuconfig or a similar tool, enable CONFIG_ARM_LPAE=y
  3. compile and install the kernel image and modules as usual, but just copy the dtb file arch/arm/boot/dts/bcm2711-rpi-4-b.dtb to the /boot of your target machine (no /overlays directory to copy)
  4. change /boot/config.txt:
    • comment/remove the dt_overlay=vc4-kms-v3d entry
    • add a device_tree=bcm2711-rpi-4-b.dtb entry

Step-by-step for remote deployment:

Set variables

Raspberry Pi 4 64-bit (arm64)

cd <path-to-upstream-linux-directory>
KERNEL=`make kernelrelease`
ARCH="arm64"
CROSS_COMPILE="aarch64-linux-gnu-"
DEFCONFIG=defconfig
IMAGE=Image
DTB_PATH="broadcom/bcm2711-rpi-4-b.dtb"
RPI4=<ip>
TMP=`mktemp -d`

Raspberry Pi 4 32-bits (arm)

cd <path-to-upstream-linux-directory>
KERNEL=`make kernelrelease`
ARCH="arm"
CROSS_COMPILE="arm-linux-gnueabihf-"
DEFCONFIG=multi_v7_defconfig
IMAGE=zImage
DTB_PATH="bcm2711-rpi-4-b.dtb"
RPI4=<ip>
TMP=`mktemp -d`

Get default .config file

make ARCH=$ARCH CROSS_COMPILE=$CROSS_COMPILE $DEFCONFIG

Raspberry Pi 4 32-bit (arm)

Additional step for 32-bit system. Enable CONFIG_ARM_LPAE=y using make ARCH=arm menuconfig

Cross-compile the mainline kernel

make ARCH=$ARCH CROSS_COMPILE=$CROSS_COMPILE $IMAGE modules dtbs

Install modules to send

make ARCH=$ARCH CROSS_COMPILE=$CROSS_COMPILE INSTALL_MOD_PATH=$TMP modules_install

Copy kernel image, modules and the dtb to your remote system

ssh $RPI4 mkdir -p /tmp/new_modules /tmp/new_kernel
rsync -av $TMP/ $RPI4:/tmp/new_modules/
scp arch/$ARCH/boot/$IMAGE $RPI4:/tmp/new_kernel/$KERNEL
scp arch/$ARCH/boot/dts/$DTB_PATH $RPI4:/tmp/new_kernel
ssh $RPI4 sudo rsync -av /tmp/new_modules/lib/modules/ /lib/modules/
ssh $RPI4 sudo rsync -av /tmp/new_kernel/ /boot/
rm -rf $TMP

Set config.txt of you RPi 4

In your Raspberry Pi 4, open the config file /boot/config.txt

  • comment/remove the dt_overlay=vc4-kms-v3d entry
  • add a device_tree=bcm2711-rpi-4-b.dtb entry
  • add a kernel=<image-name> entry

Why not Kworkflow?

You can safely use the steps above, but if you are hacking the kernel and need to repeat this compiling and installing steps repeatedly, why don’t try the Kworkflow?

Kworkflow is a set of scripts to synthesize all steps to have a custom kernel compiled and installed in local and remote machines and it supports kernel building and deployment to Raspberry Pi machines for Raspbian 32 bit and 64 bit.

After learning the kernel compilation and installation step by step, you can simply use kw bd command and have a custom kernel installed in your Raspberry Pi 4.

Note: the userspace 3D acceleration (glx/mesa) is working as expected on arm64, but the driver is not loaded yet for arm. Besides that, a bunch of pte invalid errors may appear when using 3D acceleration, it’s a known issue that are still under investigation.

10 November, 2022 02:40PM

hackergotchi for Shirish Agarwal

Shirish Agarwal

The Road to Gandolfo, Webforms, Hearing Loss info & Mum’s Birthday.

The Road to Gandolfo

I think I had read this book almost 10-12 years back and somehow ended up reading it up again. Apparently, he had put this fiction, story, book under some other pen name earlier. It is possible that I might have read it under that name and hence forgotten all about it. This book/story is full of innuendo, irony, sarcasm and basically the thrill of life. There are two main characters in the book, the first is General Mackenzie who has spent almost 3 to 4 decades being a spy/a counterintelligence expert in the Queen’s service. And while he outclasses them all even at the ripe age of 50, he is thrown out under the pretext of conduct unbecoming of an officer.

The other main character is Sam Devereaux. This gentleman is an army lawyer and is basically counting the days when he completes his tour of duty as a military lawyer and start his corporate civil law with somebody he knows. It is much to his dismay that while under a week is left for his tour of duty to be left over he is summoned to try and extradite General MacKenzie who has been put on house arrest. Apparently, in China there was a sculpture of a great Chinese gentleman in the nude. For reasons unknown or rather not being shared herein, he basically breaks part of the sculpture. This of course, enrages the Chinese and they call it a diplomatic accident and try to put the General into house arrest. Unfortunately for both the General and his captors, he decides to escape/go for it. While he does succeed entering the American embassy, he finds himself to be person non-grata and is thrown back outside where the Chinese recapture him.

This is where the Embassy & the Govt. decide it would be better if somehow the General could be removed from China permanently so he doesn’t cause any further diplomatic accidents. In order to do that Sam’s services are bought.

Now in order to understand the General, Sam learns that he has 4 ex-wives. He promptly goes and meet them to understand why the general behaved as he did. He apparently also peed on the American flag. To his surprise, all the four ex-wives are still very much in with the general. During the course of interviewing the ladies he is seduced by them and also gives names to their chests in order to differentiate between each one of them. Later he is seduced by the eldest of the four wives and they spend the evening together.

Next day Sam meets and is promptly manhandled by the general and the diplomatic papers are seen by the general. After meeting the general and the Chinese counterpart, they quickly agree to extradite him as they do not know how to keep the general control. During his stay of house arrest, the General reads one of the ‘communist rags’ as he puts it and gets the idea to kidnap the pope and that forms the basis of the story.

Castel Gandolfo seems to be a real place which is in Italy and is apparently is the papal residence where s/he goes to reside every winter. The book is written in 1976 hence in the book, the General decides to form a corporation for which he would raise funds in order to make the kidnapping. The amount in 1976 was 40 million dollars and it was a big sum, to be with times, let’s think of say 40 billion dollars so gets the scale of things.

Now while a part of me wants to tell the rest of the story, the story isn’t really mine to tell. Read The Road to Gandolfo for the rest. While I can’t guarantee you much, I can say you might find yourself constantly amused by the antics of both the General, Sam and the General’s ex-wives. There are also a few minute characters that you will meet on the way, hope you discover them and enjoy it immensely as I have.

One thing I have to say, while I was reading it, I very much got vibes of ‘Not a penny more, not a penny less’ by Jeffrey Archer. As shared before, lots of twists and turns, enjoy the ride 🙂

Webforms

Webforms are nothing but a form you fill on the web or www. Webforms are and were a thing from early 90s to today. I was supposed to register for https://www.swavlambancard.gov.in/ almost a month back but procrastinated till few couple of days back and with good reason. I was hoping one of my good friends would help me but they had their own thing. So finally, I tried to fill the form few days back. It took me almost 30 odd attempts to finally fill the form and was given an enrollment number. Why it took me 30 odd attempts and with what should tell you the reason –

  1. I felt like I was filling the form from 1990’s rather than today because –
  2. The form doesn’t know either its state or saves data during a session – This lesson has been learned a long time back by almost all service providers except Govt. of India. Both the browsers on a mobile as well as desktop can save data during session. If you don’t know what I mean by that go to about:preferences#privacy in Firefox and look at Manage Data. There you will find most sites do put some data along with cookies arguably to help make your web experience better. Chrome or Chromium has the same thing perhaps shared under a different name but its the same thing. But that is not all.
  3. None of the fields have any verification. The form is of 3 pages. The verification at the end of the document doesn’t tell you what is wrong and what needs to be corrected. Really think on this, I am on a 24″ LED monitor and I’m filling the form and I had to do it at least 20-30 times before it was accepted. And guess what, I have no clue even about why it was selected. The same data, the same everything and after the nth time it accepted. Now if I am facing such a problem when I have some idea how technology works somewhat how are people who are trying to fill this form on 6″ mobiles supposed to do? And many of them not at all clued in technology as I am.

I could go on outlining many of the issues that I faced but they are all similar in many ways the problems faced while filling the ‘NEW’ Income Tax forms. Of course the New Income Tax portal is a whole ball-game in itself as it gives new errors every time instead of solving them. Most C.A.’s have turned to third-party xml tools that enable you to upload xml compliant data to the ‘New’ Income tax portal but this is for businesses and those who can afford it. Again, even that is in a sort of messy state but that is a whole another tale altogether.

One of the reasons to my mind why the forms are designed the way they are so that people go to specific cybercafes or get individual people to fill and upload it and make more money. I was told to go to a specific cybercafe and meet a certain individual and he asked for INR 500/- to do the work. While I don’t have financial problems, I was more worried about my data going into the wrong hands. But I can see a very steady way to make money without doing much hard work.

Hearing Loss info.

Now because I had been both to Kamla Nehru Hospital as well as Sasoon and especially the deaf department, I saw many kids with half-formed ears. I had asked the doctors and they had shared this is due to malnutrition. We do know that women during pregnancies need more calories, more everything as they are eating for two bodies, not one. And this is large-scale, apparently more than 5 percent of population have children like this. And this number was of 2014, what is it today nobody knows. I also came to know that at least for some people like me, due to Covid they became deaf. I had asked the doctors if they knew of people who had become deaf due to Covid. They basically replied in the negative as they don’t have the resources to monitor the same. The Govt. has an idea of health ID but just like Aadhar has to many serious sinister implications. Somebody had shared with me a long time back that in India systems work inspite of Govt. machinery rather than because of it. Meaning that the Government itself ties itself into several knots and then people have to be creative to try and figure a way out to help people. I found another issue while dealing with them.

Apparently, even though I have 60% hearing loss I would be given a certificate of 40% hearing loss and they call it Temporary Progressive Loss. I saw almost all the people who had come, many of them having far severe defencies than me getting the same/similar certificate. All of them got Temporary Progressive. Some of the cases were real puzzling. For e.g. I met another Agarwal who had a severe accident few months ago and there is some kind of paralysis & bone issue. The doctors have given up but even that gentleman was given Temporary Progressive. From what little I could understand, the idea is that over period if there is possibility of things becoming better then it should be given. Another gentleman suffered a case of dwarfism. Even he was given the same certificate. Think there have been orders from above so that people even having difficulties are not helped. Another point if you look in a macro sense, it presents a somewhat rosy picture. If someone were to debunk the Govt. data either from India or abroad then from GOI perspective they have an ‘agenda’ even though the people who are suffering are our brothers and sisters 😦 And all of this is because I can read, write, articulate. Perhaps many of them may not even have a voice or a platform.

Even to get this temporary progressive disability certificate there is more than 4 months of running from one place to the other, 4 months of culmination of work. This I can share and tell from my experience, who knows how much else others might have suffered for the same. In my case a review will happen after 5 years, in most other cases they have given only 1 year. Of course, this does justify people’s jobs and perhaps partly it may be due to that. Such are times where I really miss that I am unable to hear otherwise could have fleshed out lot more other people’s sufferings.

And just so people know/understand this is happening in the heart of the city whose population easily exceeds 6 million plus and is supposed to be a progressive city. I do appreciate and understand the difficulties that the doctors are placed under.

Mum’s Birthday & Social Engineering.

While I don’t want to get into details, in the last couple of weeks mum’s birthday was there and that had totally escaped me. I have been trying to disassociate myself from her and at times it’s hard and then you don’t remember and somebody makes you remember. So, on one hand guilty, and the other do not know what to do. If she were alive I would have bought a piece of cake or something. Didn’t feel like it, hence donated some money to the local aged home. This way at least I hope they have some semblance of peace. All of them are of her similar age group.

The other thing that I began to observe in the earnest, fake identities have become the norm. Many people took elon musk’s potrait using their own names in the handles, but even then Elon “Free Speech” Musk banned them. So much for free speech. Then I saw quite a few handles that have cute women as their profile picture but they are good at social engineering. This has started only a couple of weeks back and have seen quite a few handles leaving Twitter and joining Mastodon. Also, have been hearing that many admins of Mastodon pods are unable to get on top of this. Also, lot of people complaining as it isn’t user-friendly UI as twitter is. Do they not realize that Twitter has its own IP and any competing network can’t copy or infringe on their product. Otherwise, they will be sued like how Ford was & potentially win. I am not really gonna talk much about it as the blog post has become quite long and that needs its own post to do any sort of justice to it. Till later people 🙂

10 November, 2022 01:45PM by shirishag75

Alastair McKinstry

Government approves T&Cs for first offshore wind auction under the ...

Government approves T&Cs for first offshore wind auction under the Renewable Electricity Support Scheme

ORESS 1 expected to secure 2.5GW of electricity generating capacity

#GreensInGovernment

The Government has today approved the Terms and Conditions of ORESS 1, the first auction for offshore wind under the Renewable Electricity Support Scheme.

This is a seminal moment in the delivery of offshore wind in Ireland. The offshore auction, the first in Ireland's history, is expected to provide a route to market for up to 2.5GW of offshore renewable energy to the Irish grid, enough to power 2.5 million Irish homes with clean electricity. Coming during the weeks of COP27, publishing details of the auction sends a strong international signal that Ireland is serious about offshore energy and our national climate targets and obligations.

Recognising the critical role of local hosting communities in the development of this critical infrastructure, all offshore wind projects developed via ORESS will be required to make Community Benefit Fund contributions, from construction phase and continuing for the duration of the support period, typically for a total period of 25 years. This will result in lasting, tangible benefits for these communities.

Speaking about this development, Minister Ryan said: “The publication of these ORESS 1 Terms and Conditions is another massive step forward – for offshore wind, for Irish climate leadership and towards Ireland’s future as an international green energy hub. The first stage of this transformative auction will start before Christmas and it sets us on a path to powering many more of our homes and businesses from our own green energy resources over the coming years. It follows the enactment of the Maritime Area Planning Act last year, and the announcement regarding the awarding of Maritime Area Consents to Phase One projects last month.”

A final ORESS 1 auction calendar will be published by EirGrid shortly. The pre-qualification stage will launch next month (December). The qualification stage and the auction process will take place in the first half of 2023. Final auction results will be published by June 2023.

Eligible projects

Any project that has been awarded a Maritime Area Consent is eligible to partake in the ORESS 1 auction. Seven projects – known as ‘Relevant Projects’ – were deemed ready to apply for Maritime Area Consents in Spring 2022. Once Maritime Area Consents are granted, these projects can not only compete for State support via the ORESS, but can also apply for planning permission from An Bord Pleanála.

Delivering on our broader targets

ORESS 1 is expected to procure approximately 2.5GW of electricity generating capacity.

Further auctions will be required to meet our renewable energy and climate ambitions. At least three offshore energy auctions are currently planned for this decade. The aim is to progress enough viable offshore projects through the consenting system to have competitive auctions. This will ultimately drive down cost for electricity consumers.

10 November, 2022 08:16AM by Alastair McKinstry

hackergotchi for Dirk Eddelbuettel

Dirk Eddelbuettel

RcppArmadillo 0.11.4.2.1 on CRAN: Updates

armadillo image

Armadillo is a powerful and expressive C++ template library for linear algebra and scientific computing. It aims towards a good balance between speed and ease of use, has a syntax deliberately close to Matlab, and is useful for algorithm development directly in C++, or quick conversion of research code into production environments. RcppArmadillo integrates this library with the R environment and language–and is widely used by (currently) 1027 packages other packages on CRAN, downloaded 26.9 million times (per the partial logs from the cloud mirrors of CRAN), and the CSDA paper (preprint / vignette) by Conrad and myself has been cited 503 times according to Google Scholar.

This release reflect as new upstream bugfix release 11.4.2 made recently by Conrad. To accomodate CRAN and their preference for at most a release per month, we held it back since the 11.4.0 release early October. As we usually do, we generally update once upstream Armadillo releases are made. When we do not immediately release to CRAN (in order to lower the release cadence), we make those “interim” releases available via GitHub source and the Rcpp drat repo.

This release also brings a rearranged, and as we think, simplified layout of the header files. All existing locations are still supported but we will be starting a (very patient and slow) transition at some point.

The full set of changes (since the last CRAN release 0.11.4.0.1) follows.

Changes in RcppArmadillo version 0.11.4.2.1 (2022-11-08)

  • Upgraded to Armadillo release 11.4.2 (Ship of Theseus)

    • more robust handling of corner cases in multi-threaded contexts

  • Internal header organisation with new sub-directories while providing full compatibility via existing paths (#395 #396)

Changes in RcppArmadillo version 0.11.4.1.0 (2022-10-10) (GitHub Only)

  • Upgraded to Armadillo release 11.4.1 (Ship of Theseus)

    • fix data race in Cube::slice()

    • workarounds for false warnings emitted by GCC 12 when compiling with FORTIFY_SOURCE enabled (already in RcppArmadillo 0.11.4.0.1 too)

Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is a diffstat report relative to previous release. More detailed information is on the RcppArmadillo page. Questions, comments etc should go to the rcpp-devel mailing list off the R-Forge page.

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

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

10 November, 2022 01:15AM

November 09, 2022

hackergotchi for Steinar H. Gunderson

Steinar H. Gunderson

Bidirectional Dijkstra

While I'm waiting for pull requests to be processed, enjoy some visualizations of bidirectional Dijkstra (1, 2).

09 November, 2022 11:00PM

hackergotchi for Debian Brasil

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 inglês Debian Developer) e Mantenedores(as) Debian (DM - do inglês 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

  • DDPO
  • Desde agosto de 2022
  • Cidade de residência: Curitiba - PR

Fabio Augusto De Muzio Tobich

  • DDPO
  • Desde maio de 2021
  • Cidade de residência: Curitiba - PR

Gabriel F. T. Gomes

  • DDPO
  • Desde maio de 2020
  • Cidade de residência: Campinas - SP

Thiago Andrade Marques

  • DDPO
  • Desde maio de 2020
  • Cidade de residência: Campinas - SP

Márcio de Souza Oliveira

  • DDPO
  • Desde fevereiro de 2019
  • Cidade de residência: Brasília - DF

Paulo Henrique de Lima Santana

  • DDPO
  • Desde janeiro de 2019
  • Cidade de residência: Curitiba - PR

Samuel Henrique

  • DDPO
  • Desde abril de 2018
  • Cidade de residência: Curitiba - PR

Sérgio Durigan Júnior

  • DDPO
  • Desde março de 2018
  • Cidade de residência: Toronto - Canadá

Daniel Lenharo de Souza

  • DDPO
  • Desde maio de 2017
  • Cidade de residência: Curitiba - PR

Giovani Augusto Ferreira

  • DDPO
  • Desde dezembro de 2016
  • Cidade de residência: Poço Fundo - MG

Adriano Rafael Gomes

  • Desde agosto de 2016
  • Cidade de residência: Novo Hamburgo - RS

Breno Leitão

  • DDPO
  • Desde agosto de 2016
  • Cidade de residência: Campinas - SP

Lucas Kanashiro

  • DDPO
  • Desde junho de 2016
  • Cidade de residência: Brasília - DF

Herbert Parentes Fortes Neto

  • DDPO
  • Desde junho de 2016
  • Cidade de residência: Rio de Janeiro – RJ

Mantenedores(as) Debian / Debian Maintainers / DMs:

Guilherme de Paula Xavier Segundo

  • DDPO
  • Desde abril de 2022
  • Cidade de residência: Campo Mourão - PR

David da Silva Polverari

  • DDPO
  • Desde janeiro de 2022
  • Cidade de residência: Brasília - DF

Paulo Roberto Alves de Oliveira

  • DDPO
  • Desde novembro de 2021
  • Cidade de residência: São Vicente - SP

Sergio Almeida Cipriano Junior

  • DDPO
  • Desde novembro de 2021
  • Cidade de residência: Brasília - DF

Francisco Vilmar Cardoso Ruviaro

  • DDPO
  • Desde agosto de 2020
  • Cidade de residência: Santa Maria - RS

William Grzybowski

  • DDPO
  • Desde dezembro de 2019
  • Cidade de residência: Curitiba - PR

Tiago Ilieve

  • DDPO
  • Desde maio de 2016
  • Cidade de residência: Belo Horizonte - MG

Observações:

  1. Esta lista será 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

09 November, 2022 12:01AM

November 08, 2022

hackergotchi for Aurelien Jarno

Aurelien Jarno

riscv64 porterbox

For quite some time, many people asked for a riscv64 porterbox. Now we've got one called debian-riscv64-porterbox-01.debian.net.

A big thanks to SiFive for providing the HiFive Unmatched board and OSUOSL for assembling the hardware and hosting it.

08 November, 2022 10:52PM by aurel32

hackergotchi for Daniel Lange

Daniel Lange

Your software stores are a bad idea

There is significant effort involved to get your apt or dnf commands always have a consistent set of servers to talk to.

That's why running separate "software stores" is a bad idea:

Snap software store down

That way more admins need to learn how to run high availability services for dubious business opportunities to "later" monetize services. Services that nobody cares to pay for and thus opportunities that never materialize. But every company wants to find that out again. Because if Apple could do it, why shouldn't Canonical be able to do it? $$$!1!!

So, can't update Firefox on Ubuntu 22.04 right now.

At least there is https://status.snapcraft.io/:

Snap incodent / monitoring status page

So I can check back tomorrow if I can update my web browser ...

Update

09.11.2022 12:15 CET

The Snapcraft distribution system seems quite flaky, this is the downtime log:

Log of (frequent) Snapcraft outages

Bonus points for the bad client side implementation:


dl@laptop:~$ sudo snap refresh
All snaps up to date.

# ^this is a lie, just close Firefox and ...

dl@laptop:~$ sudo snap refresh
firefox 106.0.5-1 from Mozilla** refreshed
 

08 November, 2022 08:30PM by Daniel Lange

Antoine Beaupré

Using the bell as modern notification

Computer terminals have traditionally had an actual bell that would ring when a certain control character (the bell character, typically control-g or \a in an C escape sequence) would come in the input stream.

That feature actually predates computers altogether, and was present in Baudot code, "an early character encoding for telegraphy invented by Émile Baudot in the 1870s", itself superseding Morse code.

Modern terminal emulators have, of course, kept that feature: if you run this command in a terminal right now:

printf '\a'

... you may hear some annoying beep. Or not. It actually depends on a lot of factors, including which terminal emulator you're using, how it's configured, whether you have headphones on, or speakers connected, or, if you're really old school, a PC speaker, even.

Typically, I have this theory that it does the exact opposite of what you want, regardless of whether you have configured it or not. That is, if you want it to make noises, it won't, and if you want it to stay silent, it will make brutal, annoying noises in moments you would the least expect. I suspect this is a law in computer science, but I'm too lazy to come up with a formal definition.

Yet something can be done with this.

Making the bell useful and silent

Many terminal emulators have this feature where they can silence the bell somehow. It can be turned into a "visual bell" which basically flashes the screen when a bell arrives. Or that can also be disabled and the bell is just completely ignored.

What I did instead is turn the bell into a "urgency hint" (part of the ICCCM standard. In xterm, this is done with this X resource entry (typically in ~/.Xresources):

XTerm*bellIsUrgent:  true
XTerm*visualBell: false

Interestingly, this doesn't clearly say "bell is muted", but it's effectively what it does. Or maybe it works because I have muted "System Sounds" in Pulseaudio. Who knows. I do have this in my startup scripts though:

xset b off

... which, according to the xset(1) manpage, means

If the dash or 'off' are given, the bell will be turned off.

Interestingly, you have the option of setting the bell "volume", "pitch, in hertz, and [...] duration in milliseconds. Note that not all hardware can vary the bell characteristics." In any case, I think that's the magic trick to turn the darn thing off.

Now this should send urgency hints to your window manager:

sleep 3 ; printf '\a'

Try it: run the command, switch to another desktop, then wait 3 seconds. You should see the previous desktop show up in red or something.

In the i3 window manager I am currently using, this is the default, although I did set the colors (client.urgent and urgent_workspace in bar.colors).

Other window managers or desktop environments may require different configurations.

Sending a bell...

Now that, on itself, will only be useful when something sets a bell. One place I had found a trick like this, long ago, is this post (dead link, archived) which has various instructions for different tools. I'll recopy some of them here since the original site is dead, but credit goes to the Netbuz blog.

(Note that the blog post also features an Awesome WM configuration for urgency hints.)

Mutt

set beep=yes
set beep_new=yes

Irssi

/set beep_when_window_active ON
/set beep_when_away ON
/set beep_msg_level MSGS DCC DCCMSGS HILIGHT

It was also recommending this setting, but it appears to be deprecated and gives a warning in modern irssi versions:

/set bell_beeps ON

GNU Screen

This is an important piece of the puzzle, because by default, terminal multiplexers have their own opinion of what to do with the bell as well:

# disabled: we want to propagate bell to clients, which should handle
# it in their own terminal settings. this `vbell off` is also the
# upstream and tmux's default
#
# see also: http://netbuz.org/blog/2011/11/x-bells-and-urgency-hints/
vbell off
# propagate bell from other windows up to the terminal emulator as well
bell_msg 'Bell in window %n^G'

The bell_msg bit is an extra from me: it uses the bell message that pops up when screen detects a bell in another window to resend the bell control character up to the running terminal.

This makes it so a bell in any multiplexed window will also propagate to the parent terminal, which is not the default.

Tmux

Untested, but that is apparently how you do it:

# listen to alerts from all windows
set -g bell-action any
# notice bell in windows
set -g monitor-bell on
# only propagate bell, don't warn user, as it hangs tmux for a second
set -g visual-bell off
# send bell *and* notify when activity (if monitor-activity)
set -g visual-activity both

Note that this config goes beyond what we have in GNU screen in that inactivity or activity will trigger a bell as well. This might be useful for cases where you don't have the prompt hack (below) but it could also very well be very noisy. It will only generate noise when monitor-activity is enabled though.

bash and shell prompts

Now the icing on cake is to actually send the bell when a command completes. This is what I use this for the most, actually.

I was previously using undistract-me for this, actually. That was nice: it would send me a nice desktop notification when a command was running more than a certain amount of time, and if the window was unfocused. But configuring this was a nightmare: because it uses a complex PROMPT_COMMAND in bash, it would conflict with my (already existing and way too) complex bash prompt, and lead to odd behaviors. It would also not work for remote commands, of course, as it wouldn't have access to my local D-BUS to send notifications (thankfully!).

So instead, what I do now is systematically print a bell whenever a command terminates, in all my shells. I have this in my /root/.bashrc on all my servers, deployed in Puppet:

PROMPT_COMMAND='printf "\a"'

Or you can just put it directly in the shell prompt, with something like:

PS1='\[\a\]'"$PS1"

(I have the equivalent in my own .bashrc, although that thing is much more complex, featuring multi-command pipeline exit status, colors, terminal title setting, and more, which should probably warrant its own blog post.)

This sounds a little bonkers and really noisy, but remember that I turned off the audible bell. And urgency hints are going to show up only if the window is unfocused. So it's actually really nice and not really distracting.

Or, to reuse the undistract-me concept: it allows me to not lose focus too much when I'm waiting for a long process to complete.

That idea actually came from ahf, so kudos to him on that nice hack.

Caveats

That is not setup on all the machines I administer for work, that said. I'm afraid that would be too disruptive for people who do not have that configuration. This implies that I don't get notifications for commands that run for a long time on remote servers, most of the time. That said, I could simply run a command with a trailing printf '\a' to get a notification.

This might not work in Wayland, your window manager, your desktop environment, your Linux console, or your telegraphy session.

08 November, 2022 04:48PM

November 06, 2022

hackergotchi for Dirk Eddelbuettel

Dirk Eddelbuettel

RcppCCTZ 0.2.12 on CRAN: Maintenance

A new release 0.2.12 of RcppCCTZ is now on CRAN.

RcppCCTZ uses Rcpp to bring CCTZ to R. CCTZ is a C++ library for translating between absolute and civil times using the rules of a time zone. In fact, it is two libraries. One for dealing with civil time: human-readable dates and times, and one for converting between between absolute and civil times via time zones. And while CCTZ is made by Google(rs), it is not an official Google product. The RcppCCTZ page has a few usage examples and details. This package was the first CRAN package to use CCTZ; by now several others packages (four the last time we counted) include its sources too. Not ideal, but beyond our control.

This version adds support for NA values when parsing, and updates GitHub Action.

Changes in version 0.2.12 (2022-11-06)

  • Support NA values in numerical or character input

  • GitHub Actions were updated to checkout version 3.

Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is also a diffstat to the previous version. More details are at the RcppCCTZ page; code, issue tickets etc at the GitHub repository.

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

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

06 November, 2022 10:22PM

hackergotchi for Marco d'Itri

Marco d'Itri

Using a custom domain as the Mastodon identity

I just did again the usual web search, and I have verified that Mastodon still does not support managing multiple domains on the same instance, and that there is still no way to migrate an account to a different instance without losing all posts (and more?).

As much as I like the idea of a federated social network, open standards and so on, I do not think that it would be wise for me to spend time developing a social network identity on somebody else's instance which could disappear at any t ime.

I have managed my own email server since the '90s, but I do not feel that the system administration effort required to maintain a private Mastodon instance would be justified at this point: there is not even a Debian package! Mastodon either needs to become much simpler to maintain or become much more socially important, and so far it is neither. Also, it would be wasteful to use so many computing resources for a single-user instance.

While it is not ideal, for the time being I compromised by redirecting WebFinger requests for md@linux.it using this Apache configuration:

<Location /.well-known/host-meta>
  Header set Access-Control-Allow-Origin: "*"
  Header set Content-Type: "application/xrd+json; charset=utf-8"
  Header set Cache-Control: "max-age=86400"
</Location>

<Location /.well-known/webfinger>
  Header set Access-Control-Allow-Origin: "*"
  Header set Content-Type: "application/jrd+json; charset=utf-8"
  Header set Cache-Control: "max-age=86400"
</Location>

# WebFinger (https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc7033)
RewriteMap lc int:tolower
RewriteMap unescape int:unescape
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/\.well-known/webfinger$
RewriteCond ${lc:${unescape:%{QUERY_STRING}}} (?:^|&)resource=acct:([^&]+)@linux\.it(?:$|&)
RewriteRule .+ /home/soci/%1/public_html/webfinger.json [L,QSD]
# answer 404 to requests for domains != linux.it
RewriteCond ${unescape:%{QUERY_STRING}} (?:^|&)resource=
RewriteRule .+ - [L,R=404]
# answer 400 to requests without the resource parameter
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/\.well-known/webfinger$
RewriteRule .+ - [L,R=400]

06 November, 2022 05:15PM

Arturo Borrero González

Home network refresh: 10G and IPv6

Post header

A few days ago, my home network got a refresh that resulted in the enablement of some next-generation technologies for me and my family. Well, next-generation or current-generation, depending on your point of view. Per the ISP standards in Spain (my country), what I’ll describe next is literally the most and latest you can get.

The post title spoiled it already. I have now 10G internet uplink and native IPv6 since I changed my ISP to https://digimobil.es.

My story began a few months ago when a series of fiber deployments started in my neighborhood by a back-then mostly unknown ISP (digimobil). The workers were deploying the fiber inside the street sewers, and I noticed that they were surrounded by advertisements promoting the fastest FTTH deployment in Spain. Indeed, their website was promoting 1G and 10G fiber, so a few days later I asked the workers when would that be available for subscription. They told me to wait just a couple of months, and the wait ended this week.

I called the ISP, and a marketing person told me a lot of unnecessary information about how good service I was purchasing. I asked about IPv6 availability, but that person had no idea. They called me the next day to confirm that the home router they were installing would support both IPv6 and Wi-Fi 6. I was suspicious about nobody in the marketing department knowing anything about any of the two technologies, but I decided to proceed anyway. Just 24 hours after calling them, a technician came to my house and 45 minutes later the setup was ready.

The new home router was a ZTE ZXHN F8648P unit. By the way, it had Linux inside, but I got no GPL copyright notice or anything. It had 1x10G and 4x1G ethernet LAN ports. The optical speed tests that the technician did were giving between 8 Gbps to 9 Gbps in uplink speed, which seemed fair enough. Upon quick search, there is apparently a community of folks online which already know how to get the most out of this router by unbloking the root account (sorry, in spanish only) and using other tools.

When I plugged the RJ45 in my laptop, the magic happened: the interface got a native, public IPv6 from the router. I ran to run the now-classic IPv6 browser test at https://test-ipv6.com/. And here is the result:

IPv6 test

If you are curious, this was the IPv6 prefix whois information:

route6: 2a0c:5a80::/29
descr: Digi Spain Telecom S.L.U.
origin: AS57269

They were handing my router a prefix like 2a0c:5a80:2218:4a00::/56. I ignored if the prefix was somehow static, dynamic, just for me, or anything else. I’ve been waiting for native IPv6 at home for years. In the past, I’ve had many ideas and projects to host network services at home leveraging IPv6. But when I finally got it, I didn’t know what to do next. I had a 7 months old baby, and honestly I didn’t have the spare time to play a lot with the setup.

Actually, I had no need or use for such fast network either. But my coworker Andrew convinced me: given the price € 30 EUR / month, I didn’t have any reason not to buy it.

In fact, I didn’t have any 10G-enabled NIC at home. I had a few laptops with 2.5G ports, though, and that was enough to experience the new network speeds. Since this write-up was inspired by the now almost-legenday post by Michael Stapelberg My upgrade to 25 Gbit/s Fiber To The Home, I contacted him, and he suggested running a few speed tests using the Ookla suite against his own server. Here are the results:

$ docker run --net host --rm -it docker.io/stapelberg/speedtest:latest -s 50092
[..]
     Server: Michael Stapelberg - Zurich (id = 50092)
        ISP: Digi Spain
    Latency:    34.29 ms   (0.20 ms jitter)
   Download:  2252.42 Mbps (data used: 3.4 GB )
     Upload:  2239.27 Mbps (data used: 2.8 GB )
Packet Loss:     0.0%
 Result URL: https://www.speedtest.net/result/c/cc8d6a78-c6f8-4f71-b554-a79812e10106

$ docker run --net host --rm -it docker.io/stapelberg/speedtest:latest -s 50092
[..]
     Server: Michael Stapelberg - Zurich (id = 50092)
        ISP: Digi Spain
    Latency:    34.05 ms   (0.21 ms jitter)
   Download:  2209.85 Mbps (data used: 3.2 GB )
     Upload:  2223.45 Mbps (data used: 2.9 GB )
Packet Loss:     0.0%
 Result URL: https://www.speedtest.net/result/c/32f9158e-fc1a-47e9-bd33-130e66c25417

This is over IPv6. Very satisfying.

Bonus point: when I called my former ISP to cancel the old subscription the conversation was like:

  • I want to cancel the service.
  • What’s the reason?
  • I got upgraded to 10G by another ISP
  • The speed is measured in MB, not G.
  • Ok, I got upgraded to 10.000 MB
  • That’s not possible.
  • Well …

I didn’t even bother mentioning IPv6.

Cheers!

06 November, 2022 09:40AM

Russ Allbery

Review: Matrix

Review: Matrix, by Lauren Groff

Publisher: Riverhead Books
Copyright: 2021
ISBN: 0-698-40513-7
Format: Kindle
Pages: 260

Marie is a royal bastardess, a product of rape no less, and entirely out of place in the court in Westminster, where she landed after being kicked off her mother's farm. She had run the farm since her mother's untimely death, but there was no way that her relatives would let her inherit. In court, Marie is too tall, too ugly, and too strange, raised by women who were said to carry the blood of the fairy Mélusine. Eleanor of Aquitaine's solution to her unwanted house guest is a Papal commission. Marie is to become the prioress of an abbey.

I am occasionally unpleasantly reminded of why I don't read very much literary fiction. It's immensely frustrating to read a book in which the author cares about entirely different things than the reader, and where the story beats all land wrong.

This is literary historical fiction set in the 12th century. Marie is Marie de France, author of the lais about courtly love that are famous primarily due to their position as early sources for the legends of King Arthur. The lais are written on-screen very early in this book, but they disappear without any meaningful impact on the story. Matrix is, instead, about Shaftesbury Abbey and what it becomes during Marie's time as prioress and then abbess, following the theory that Marie de France was Mary of Shaftesbury.

What I thought I was getting in this book, from numerous reviews and recommendations, was a story of unexpected competence: how a wild, unwanted child of seventeen lands at a dilapidated and starving abbey, entirely against her will, and then over the next sixty years transforms it into one of the richest abbeys in England. This does happen in this book, but Groff doesn't seem to care about the details of that transformation at all.

Instead, Matrix takes the mimetic fiction approach of detailed and precise description of a few characters, with all of their flaws and complexities, and with all of the narrative's attention turned to how they are feeling and what they are seeing. It is also deeply, fully committed to a Great Man (or in this case a Great Woman) view of history.

Marie is singular. The narrative follows her alone, she makes all the significant decisions, and the development of the abbey is determined by her apparently mystical visions. (In typical mimetic fashion, these are presented as real to her, and the novel takes no position on whether that reality is objective.) She builds spy networks, maneuvers through local and church politics, and runs the abbey like her personal kingdom. The tiny amount of this that is necessarily done by other people is attributed to Marie's ability to judge character. Other people's motives are simply steamrolled over and have no effect.

Maddeningly, essentially all of this happens off-screen, and Groff is completely uninterested in the details of how any of it is accomplished. Marie decides to do something, the narrative skips forward a year, and it has happened. She decides to build something, and then it's built. She decides to collect the rents she's due, the novel gestures vaguely at how she's intimidating, and then everyone is happily paying up. She builds spy networks; who cares how? She maneuvers through crises of local and church politics that are vaguely alluded to, through techniques that are apparently too uninteresting to bother the reader with.

Instead, the narrative focuses on two things: her deeply dysfunctional, parasocial relationship with Eleanor, and her tyrannical relationship with the other nuns. I suspect that Groff would strongly disagree with my characterization of both of those narratives, and that's the other half of my problem with this book.

Marie is obsessed with and in love with Eleanor, a completely impossible love to even talk about, and therefore turns to courtly love from afar as a model into which she can fit her feelings. While this is the setup for a tragedy, it's a good idea for a story. But what undermined it for me is that Marie's obsession seems to be largely physical (she constantly dwells on Eleanor's beauty), and Eleanor is absolutely horrible to her in every way: condescending, contemptuous, dismissive, and completely uninterested. This does change a bit over the course of the book, but not enough to justify the crush that Marie maintains for this awful person through her entire life.

And Eleanor is the only person in the book who Marie treats like an equal. Everyone else is a subordinate, a daughter, a charge, a servant, or a worker. The nuns of the abbey prosper under her rule, so Marie has ample reason to justify this to herself, but no one else's opinions or beliefs matter to her in any significant way. The closest anyone can come to friendship is to be reliably obedient, perhaps after some initial objections that Marie overrules. Despite some quite good characterization of the other nuns, none of the other characters get to do anything. There is no delight in teamwork, sense of healthy community, or collaborative problem-solving. It's just all Marie, all the time, imposing her vision on the world both living and non-living through sheer force of will.

This just isn't entertaining, at least for me. The writing might be beautiful, the descriptions detailed and effective, and the research clearly extensive, but I read books primarily for characters, I read characters primarily for their relationships, and these relationships are deeply, horribly unhealthy. They are not, to be clear, unrealistic (although I do think there's way too much chosen one in Marie and way too many problems that disappear off-camera); there are certainly people in the world with dysfunctional obsessive relationships, and there are charismatic people who overwhelm everyone around them. This is just not what I want to read about.

You might think, with all I've said above, that I'm spoiling a lot of the book, but weirdly I don't think I am. Every pattern I mention above is well-established early in the novel. About the only thing that I'm spoiling is the hope that any of it is somehow going to change, a hope that I clung to for rather too long.

This is a great setup for a book, and I wish it were written by a fantasy author instead of a literary author. Perhaps I'm being too harsh on literary fiction here, but I feel like fantasy authors are more likely to write for readers who want to see the growth sequence. If someone is going to change the world, I want to see how they changed the world. The mode of fantasy writing tends to think that what people do (and how they do it) is as interesting or more interesting than what they feel or what they perceive.

If this idea, with the exact same level of (minor) mysticism and historic realism, without added magic, were written by, say, Guy Gavriel Kay or Nicola Griffith, it would be a far different and, in my opinion, a much better book. In fact, Hild is part of this book written by Nicola Griffith, and it is a much better book.

I have seen enough people rave about this book to know that this is a personal reaction that is not going to be shared by everyone, or possibly even most people. My theory is that this is due to the different reading protocols between literary fiction readers and fantasy readers. I put myself in the latter camp; if you prefer literary fiction, you may like this much better (and also I'm not sure you'll find my book reviews useful). I may be wrong, though; maybe there are fantasy readers who would like this. I will say that the sense of place is very strong and the writing has all the expected literary strengths of descriptiveness and rhythm.

But, sadly, this was not at all my thing, and I'm irritated that I wasted time on it.

Rating: 4 out of 10

06 November, 2022 01:51AM

Michael Ablassmeier

virtnbdbackup in unstable/bookworm

Besides several bugfixes, the latest version now supports using higher compression levels and logging to syslog facility. I also finished packaging and official packages are now available,

06 November, 2022 12:00AM

November 05, 2022

Anuradha Weeraman

Getting started with Linkerd

If you’ve done anything in the Kubernetes space in recent years, you’ve most likely come across the words “Service Mesh”. It’s backed by a set of mature technologies that provides cross-cutting networking, security, infrastructure capabilities to be used by workloads running in Kubernetes in a manner that is transparent to the actual workload. This abstraction enables application developers to not worry about building in otherwise sophisticated capabilities for networking, routing, circuit-breaking and security, and simply rely on the services offered by the service mesh.

In this post, I’ll be covering Linkerd, which is an alternative to Istio. It has gone through a significant re-write when it transitioned from the JVM to a Go-based Control Plane and a Rust-based Data Plane a few years back and is now a part of the CNCF and is backed by Buoyant. It has proven itself widely for use in production workloads and has a healthy community and release cadence.

It achieves this with a side-car container that communicates with a Linkerd control plane that allows central management of policy, telemetry, mutual TLS, traffic routing, shaping, retries, load balancing, circuit-breaking and other cross-cutting concerns before the traffic hits the container. This has made the task of implementing the application services much simpler as it is managed by container orchestrator and service mesh. I covered Istio in a prior post a few years back, and much of the content is still applicable for this post, if you’d like to have a look.

Here are the broad architectural components of Linkerd:

The components are separated into the control plane and the data plane.

The control plane components live in its own namespace and consists of a controller that the Linkerd CLI interacts with via the Kubernetes API. The destination service is used for service discovery, TLS identity, policy on access control for inter-service communication and service profile information on routing, retries, timeouts. The identity service acts as the Certificate Authority which responds to Certificate Signing Requests (CSRs) from proxies for initialization and for service-to-service encrypted traffic. The proxy injector is an admission webhook that injects the Linkerd proxy side car and the init container automatically into a pod when the “linkerd.io/inject: enabled” is available on the namespace or workload.

On the data plane side are two components. First, the init container, which is responsible for automatically forwarding incoming and outgoing traffic through the Linkerd proxy via iptables rules. Second, the Linkerd proxy, which is a lightweight micro-proxy written in Rust, is the data plane itself.

I will be walking you through the setup of Linkerd (2.12.2 at the time of writing) on a Kubernetes cluster.

Let’s see what’s running on the cluster currently. This assumes you have a cluster running and kubectl is installed and available on the PATH.

$ kubectl get pods -A
NAMESPACE     NAME                                       READY   STATUS    RESTARTS       AGE
kube-system   calico-kube-controllers-59697b644f-7fsln   1/1     Running   2 (119m ago)   7d
kube-system   calico-node-6ptsh                          1/1     Running   2 (119m ago)   7d
kube-system   calico-node-7x5j8                          1/1     Running   2 (119m ago)   7d
kube-system   calico-node-qlnf6                          1/1     Running   2 (119m ago)   7d
kube-system   coredns-565d847f94-79jlw                   1/1     Running   2 (119m ago)   7d
kube-system   coredns-565d847f94-fqwn4                   1/1     Running   2 (119m ago)   7d
kube-system   etcd-k8s-master                            1/1     Running   2 (119m ago)   7d
kube-system   kube-apiserver-k8s-master                  1/1     Running   2 (119m ago)   7d
kube-system   kube-controller-manager-k8s-master         1/1     Running   2 (119m ago)   7d
kube-system   kube-proxy-4n9b7                           1/1     Running   2 (119m ago)   7d
kube-system   kube-proxy-k4rzv                           1/1     Running   2 (119m ago)   7d
kube-system   kube-proxy-lz2dd                           1/1     Running   2 (119m ago)   7d
kube-system   kube-scheduler-k8s-master                  1/1     Running   2 (119m ago)   7d

The first step would be to setup the Linkerd CLI:

$ curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSfL https://run.linkerd.io/install | sh

On most systems, this should be sufficient to setup the CLI. You may need to restart your terminal to load the updated paths. If you have a non-standard configuration and linkerd is not found after the installation, add the following to your PATH to be able to find the cli:

export PATH=$PATH:~/.linkerd2/bin/

At this point, checking the version would give you the following:

$ linkerd version
Client version: stable-2.12.2
Server version: unavailable

Setting up Linkerd Control Plane

Before installing Linkerd on the cluster, run the following step to check the cluster for pre-requisites:

$ linkerd check --pre
Linkerd core checks
===================
kubernetes-api
--------------
√ can initialize the client
√ can query the Kubernetes API
kubernetes-version
------------------
√ is running the minimum Kubernetes API version
√ is running the minimum kubectl version
pre-kubernetes-setup
--------------------
√ control plane namespace does not already exist
√ can create non-namespaced resources
√ can create ServiceAccounts
√ can create Services
√ can create Deployments
√ can create CronJobs
√ can create ConfigMaps
√ can create Secrets
√ can read Secrets
√ can read extension-apiserver-authentication configmap
√ no clock skew detected
linkerd-version
---------------
√ can determine the latest version
√ cli is up-to-date
Status check results are √

All the pre-requisites appear to be good right now, and so installation can proceed.

The first step of the installation is to setup the Custom Resource Definitions (CRDs) that Linkerd requires. The linkerd cli only prints the resource YAMLs to standard output and does not create them directly in Kubernetes, so you would need to pipe the output to kubectl apply to create the resources in the cluster that you’re working with.

$ linkerd install --crds | kubectl apply -f -
Rendering Linkerd CRDs...
Next, run `linkerd install | kubectl apply -f -` to install the control plane.
customresourcedefinition.apiextensions.k8s.io/authorizationpolicies.policy.linkerd.io created
customresourcedefinition.apiextensions.k8s.io/httproutes.policy.linkerd.io created
customresourcedefinition.apiextensions.k8s.io/meshtlsauthentications.policy.linkerd.io created
customresourcedefinition.apiextensions.k8s.io/networkauthentications.policy.linkerd.io created
customresourcedefinition.apiextensions.k8s.io/serverauthorizations.policy.linkerd.io created
customresourcedefinition.apiextensions.k8s.io/servers.policy.linkerd.io created
customresourcedefinition.apiextensions.k8s.io/serviceprofiles.linkerd.io created

Next, install the Linkerd control plane components in the same manner, this time without the crds switch:

$ linkerd install | kubectl apply -f -       
namespace/linkerd created
clusterrole.rbac.authorization.k8s.io/linkerd-linkerd-identity created
clusterrolebinding.rbac.authorization.k8s.io/linkerd-linkerd-identity created
serviceaccount/linkerd-identity created
clusterrole.rbac.authorization.k8s.io/linkerd-linkerd-destination created
clusterrolebinding.rbac.authorization.k8s.io/linkerd-linkerd-destination created
serviceaccount/linkerd-destination created
secret/linkerd-sp-validator-k8s-tls created
validatingwebhookconfiguration.admissionregistration.k8s.io/linkerd-sp-validator-webhook-config created
secret/linkerd-policy-validator-k8s-tls created
validatingwebhookconfiguration.admissionregistration.k8s.io/linkerd-policy-validator-webhook-config created
clusterrole.rbac.authorization.k8s.io/linkerd-policy created
clusterrolebinding.rbac.authorization.k8s.io/linkerd-destination-policy created
role.rbac.authorization.k8s.io/linkerd-heartbeat created
rolebinding.rbac.authorization.k8s.io/linkerd-heartbeat created
clusterrole.rbac.authorization.k8s.io/linkerd-heartbeat created
clusterrolebinding.rbac.authorization.k8s.io/linkerd-heartbeat created
serviceaccount/linkerd-heartbeat created
clusterrole.rbac.authorization.k8s.io/linkerd-linkerd-proxy-injector created
clusterrolebinding.rbac.authorization.k8s.io/linkerd-linkerd-proxy-injector created
serviceaccount/linkerd-proxy-injector created
secret/linkerd-proxy-injector-k8s-tls created
mutatingwebhookconfiguration.admissionregistration.k8s.io/linkerd-proxy-injector-webhook-config created
configmap/linkerd-config created
secret/linkerd-identity-issuer created
configmap/linkerd-identity-trust-roots created
service/linkerd-identity created
service/linkerd-identity-headless created
deployment.apps/linkerd-identity created
service/linkerd-dst created
service/linkerd-dst-headless created
service/linkerd-sp-validator created
service/linkerd-policy created
service/linkerd-policy-validator created
deployment.apps/linkerd-destination created
cronjob.batch/linkerd-heartbeat created
deployment.apps/linkerd-proxy-injector created
service/linkerd-proxy-injector created
secret/linkerd-config-overrides created

Kubernetes will start spinning up the data plane components and you should see the following when you list the pods:

$ kubectl get pods -A
...
linkerd       linkerd-destination-67b9cc8749-xqcbx       4/4     Running   0              69s
linkerd       linkerd-identity-59b46789cc-ntfcx          2/2     Running   0              69s
linkerd       linkerd-proxy-injector-7fc85556bf-vnvw6    1/2     Running   0              69s

The components are running in the new linkerd namespace.

To verify the setup, run a check:

$ linkerd check
Linkerd core checks
===================
kubernetes-api
--------------
√ can initialize the client
√ can query the Kubernetes API
kubernetes-version
------------------
√ is running the minimum Kubernetes API version
√ is running the minimum kubectl version
linkerd-existence
-----------------
√ 'linkerd-config' config map exists
√ heartbeat ServiceAccount exist
√ control plane replica sets are ready
√ no unschedulable pods
√ control plane pods are ready
√ cluster networks contains all pods
√ cluster networks contains all services
linkerd-config
--------------
√ control plane Namespace exists
√ control plane ClusterRoles exist
√ control plane ClusterRoleBindings exist
√ control plane ServiceAccounts exist
√ control plane CustomResourceDefinitions exist
√ control plane MutatingWebhookConfigurations exist
√ control plane ValidatingWebhookConfigurations exist
√ proxy-init container runs as root user if docker container runtime is used
linkerd-identity
----------------
√ certificate config is valid
√ trust anchors are using supported crypto algorithm
√ trust anchors are within their validity period
√ trust anchors are valid for at least 60 days
√ issuer cert is using supported crypto algorithm
√ issuer cert is within its validity period
√ issuer cert is valid for at least 60 days
√ issuer cert is issued by the trust anchor
linkerd-webhooks-and-apisvc-tls
-------------------------------
√ proxy-injector webhook has valid cert
√ proxy-injector cert is valid for at least 60 days
√ sp-validator webhook has valid cert
√ sp-validator cert is valid for at least 60 days
√ policy-validator webhook has valid cert
√ policy-validator cert is valid for at least 60 days
linkerd-version
---------------
√ can determine the latest version
√ cli is up-to-date
control-plane-version
---------------------
√ can retrieve the control plane version
√ control plane is up-to-date
√ control plane and cli versions match
linkerd-control-plane-proxy
---------------------------
√ control plane proxies are healthy
√ control plane proxies are up-to-date
√ control plane proxies and cli versions match
Status check results are √

Everything looks good.

Setting up the Viz Extension

At this point, the required components for the service mesh are setup, but let’s also install the viz extension, which provides a good visualization capabilities that will come in handy subsequently. Once again, linkerd uses the same pattern for installing the extension.

$ linkerd viz install | kubectl apply -f -
namespace/linkerd-viz created
clusterrole.rbac.authorization.k8s.io/linkerd-linkerd-viz-metrics-api created
clusterrolebinding.rbac.authorization.k8s.io/linkerd-linkerd-viz-metrics-api created
serviceaccount/metrics-api created
clusterrole.rbac.authorization.k8s.io/linkerd-linkerd-viz-prometheus created
clusterrolebinding.rbac.authorization.k8s.io/linkerd-linkerd-viz-prometheus created
serviceaccount/prometheus created
clusterrole.rbac.authorization.k8s.io/linkerd-linkerd-viz-tap created
clusterrole.rbac.authorization.k8s.io/linkerd-linkerd-viz-tap-admin created
clusterrolebinding.rbac.authorization.k8s.io/linkerd-linkerd-viz-tap created
clusterrolebinding.rbac.authorization.k8s.io/linkerd-linkerd-viz-tap-auth-delegator created
serviceaccount/tap created
rolebinding.rbac.authorization.k8s.io/linkerd-linkerd-viz-tap-auth-reader created
secret/tap-k8s-tls created
apiservice.apiregistration.k8s.io/v1alpha1.tap.linkerd.io created
role.rbac.authorization.k8s.io/web created
rolebinding.rbac.authorization.k8s.io/web created
clusterrole.rbac.authorization.k8s.io/linkerd-linkerd-viz-web-check created
clusterrolebinding.rbac.authorization.k8s.io/linkerd-linkerd-viz-web-check created
clusterrolebinding.rbac.authorization.k8s.io/linkerd-linkerd-viz-web-admin created
clusterrole.rbac.authorization.k8s.io/linkerd-linkerd-viz-web-api created
clusterrolebinding.rbac.authorization.k8s.io/linkerd-linkerd-viz-web-api created
serviceaccount/web created
server.policy.linkerd.io/admin created
authorizationpolicy.policy.linkerd.io/admin created
networkauthentication.policy.linkerd.io/kubelet created
server.policy.linkerd.io/proxy-admin created
authorizationpolicy.policy.linkerd.io/proxy-admin created
service/metrics-api created
deployment.apps/metrics-api created
server.policy.linkerd.io/metrics-api created
authorizationpolicy.policy.linkerd.io/metrics-api created
meshtlsauthentication.policy.linkerd.io/metrics-api-web created
configmap/prometheus-config created
service/prometheus created
deployment.apps/prometheus created
service/tap created
deployment.apps/tap created
server.policy.linkerd.io/tap-api created
authorizationpolicy.policy.linkerd.io/tap created
clusterrole.rbac.authorization.k8s.io/linkerd-tap-injector created
clusterrolebinding.rbac.authorization.k8s.io/linkerd-tap-injector created
serviceaccount/tap-injector created
secret/tap-injector-k8s-tls created
mutatingwebhookconfiguration.admissionregistration.k8s.io/linkerd-tap-injector-webhook-config created
service/tap-injector created
deployment.apps/tap-injector created
server.policy.linkerd.io/tap-injector-webhook created
authorizationpolicy.policy.linkerd.io/tap-injector created
networkauthentication.policy.linkerd.io/kube-api-server created
service/web created
deployment.apps/web created
serviceprofile.linkerd.io/metrics-api.linkerd-viz.svc.cluster.local created
serviceprofile.linkerd.io/prometheus.linkerd-viz.svc.cluster.local created

A few seconds later, you should see the following in your pod list:

$ kubectl get pods -A
...
linkerd-viz   prometheus-b5865f776-w5ssf                 1/2     Running   0              35s
linkerd-viz   tap-64f5c8597b-rqgbk                       2/2     Running   0              35s
linkerd-viz   tap-injector-7c75cfff4c-wl9mx              2/2     Running   0              34s
linkerd-viz   web-8c444745-jhzr5                         2/2     Running   0              34s

The viz components live in the linkerd-viz namespace.

You can now checkout the viz dashboard:

$ linkerd viz dashboard
Linkerd dashboard available at:
http://localhost:50750
Grafana dashboard available at:
http://localhost:50750/grafana
Opening Linkerd dashboard in the default browser
Opening in existing browser session.

The “Meshed” column indicates the workload that is currently integrated with the Linkerd control plane. As you can see, there are no application deployments right now that are running.

Injecting the Linkerd Data Plane components

There are two ways to integrate Linkerd to the application containers:

1 — by manually injecting the Linkerd data plane components
2 — by instructing Kubernetes to automatically inject the data plane components

Inject Linkerd data plane manually

Let’s try the first option. Below is a simple nginx-app that I will deploy into the cluster:

$ cat deploy.yaml 
apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: Deployment
metadata:
  name: nginx-deployment
spec:
  selector:
    matchLabels:
      app: nginx
  replicas: 2
  template:
    metadata:
      labels:
        app: nginx
    spec:
      containers:
      - name: nginx
        image: nginx:latest
        ports:
        - containerPort: 80
$ kubectl apply -f deploy.yaml

Back in the viz dashboard, I do see the workload deployed, but it isn’t currently communicating with the Linkerd control plane, and so doesn’t show any metrics, and the “Meshed” count is 0:

Looking at the Pod’s deployment YAML, I can see that it only includes the nginx container:

$ kubectl get pod nginx-deployment-cd55c47f5-cgxw2 -o yaml
apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
metadata:
  annotations:
    cni.projectcalico.org/containerID: aee0295dda906f7935ce5c150ae30360005f5330e98c75a550b7cc0d1532f529
    cni.projectcalico.org/podIP: 172.16.36.89/32
    cni.projectcalico.org/podIPs: 172.16.36.89/32
  creationTimestamp: "2022-11-05T19:35:12Z"
  generateName: nginx-deployment-cd55c47f5-
  labels:
    app: nginx
    pod-template-hash: cd55c47f5
  name: nginx-deployment-cd55c47f5-cgxw2
  namespace: default
  ownerReferences:
  - apiVersion: apps/v1
    blockOwnerDeletion: true
    controller: true
    kind: ReplicaSet
    name: nginx-deployment-cd55c47f5
    uid: b604f5c4-f662-4333-aaa0-bd1a2b8b08c6
  resourceVersion: "22979"
  uid: 8fe30214-491b-4753-9fb2-485b6341376c
spec:
  containers:
  - image: nginx:latest
    imagePullPolicy: Always
    name: nginx
    ports:
    - containerPort: 80
      protocol: TCP
    resources: {}
    terminationMessagePath: /dev/termination-log
    terminationMessagePolicy: File
    volumeMounts:
    - mountPath: /var/run/secrets/kubernetes.io/serviceaccount
      name: kube-api-access-2bt6z
      readOnly: true
  dnsPolicy: ClusterFirst
  enableServiceLinks: true
  nodeName: k8s-node1
  preemptionPolicy: PreemptLowerPriority
  priority: 0
  restartPolicy: Always
  schedulerName: default-scheduler
  securityContext: {}
  serviceAccount: default
  serviceAccountName: default
  terminationGracePeriodSeconds: 30
  tolerations:
  - effect: NoExecute
    key: node.kubernetes.io/not-ready
    operator: Exists
    tolerationSeconds: 300
  - effect: NoExecute
    key: node.kubernetes.io/unreachable
    operator: Exists
    tolerationSeconds: 300
  volumes:
  - name: kube-api-access-2bt6z
    projected:
      defaultMode: 420
      sources:
      - serviceAccountToken:
          expirationSeconds: 3607
          path: token
      - configMap:
          items:
          - key: ca.crt
            path: ca.crt
          name: kube-root-ca.crt
      - downwardAPI:
          items:
          - fieldRef:
              apiVersion: v1
              fieldPath: metadata.namespace
            path: namespace
status:
  conditions:
  - lastProbeTime: null
    lastTransitionTime: "2022-11-05T19:35:12Z"
    status: "True"
    type: Initialized
  - lastProbeTime: null
    lastTransitionTime: "2022-11-05T19:35:16Z"
    status: "True"
    type: Ready
  - lastProbeTime: null
    lastTransitionTime: "2022-11-05T19:35:16Z"
    status: "True"
    type: ContainersReady
  - lastProbeTime: null
    lastTransitionTime: "2022-11-05T19:35:13Z"
    status: "True"
    type: PodScheduled
  containerStatuses:
  - containerID: containerd://f088f200315b44cbeed16499aba9b2d1396f9f81645e53b032d4bfa44166128a
    image: docker.io/library/nginx:latest
    imageID: docker.io/library/nginx@sha256:943c25b4b66b332184d5ba6bb18234273551593016c0e0ae906bab111548239f
    lastState: {}
    name: nginx
    ready: true
    restartCount: 0
    started: true
    state:
      running:
        startedAt: "2022-11-05T19:35:15Z"
  hostIP: 192.168.2.216
  phase: Running
  podIP: 172.16.36.89
  podIPs:
  - ip: 172.16.36.89
  qosClass: BestEffort
  startTime: "2022-11-05T19:35:12Z"

Let’s directly inject the linkerd data plane into this running container. We do this by retrieving the YAML of the deployment, piping it to linkerd cli to inject the necessary components and then piping to kubectl apply the changed resources.

$ kubectl get deploy nginx-deployment -o yaml | linkerd inject - | kubectl apply -f -
deployment "nginx-deployment" injected
deployment.apps/nginx-deployment configured

Back in the viz dashboard, the workload now is integrated into Linkerd control plane.

Looking at the updated Pod definition, we see a number of changes that the linkerd has injected that allows it to integrate with the control plane. Let’s have a look:

$ kubectl get pod nginx-deployment-858bdd545b-55jpf -o yaml
apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
metadata:
  annotations:
    cni.projectcalico.org/containerID: 1ec3d345f859be8ead0374a7e880bcfdb9ba74a121b220a6fccbd342ac4b7ea8
    cni.projectcalico.org/podIP: 172.16.36.90/32
    cni.projectcalico.org/podIPs: 172.16.36.90/32
    linkerd.io/created-by: linkerd/proxy-injector stable-2.12.2
    linkerd.io/inject: enabled
    linkerd.io/proxy-version: stable-2.12.2
    linkerd.io/trust-root-sha256: 354fe6f49331e8e03d8fb07808e00a3e145d2661181cbfec7777b41051dc8e22
    viz.linkerd.io/tap-enabled: "true"
  creationTimestamp: "2022-11-05T19:44:15Z"
  generateName: nginx-deployment-858bdd545b-
  labels:
    app: nginx
    linkerd.io/control-plane-ns: linkerd
    linkerd.io/proxy-deployment: nginx-deployment
    linkerd.io/workload-ns: default
    pod-template-hash: 858bdd545b
  name: nginx-deployment-858bdd545b-55jpf
  namespace: default
  ownerReferences:
  - apiVersion: apps/v1
    blockOwnerDeletion: true
    controller: true
    kind: ReplicaSet
    name: nginx-deployment-858bdd545b
    uid: 2e618972-aa10-4e35-a7dd-084853673a80
  resourceVersion: "23820"
  uid: 62f1857a-b701-4a19-8996-b5b605ff8488
spec:
  containers:
  - env:
    - name: _pod_name
      valueFrom:
        fieldRef:
          apiVersion: v1
          fieldPath: metadata.name
    - name: _pod_ns
      valueFrom:
        fieldRef:
          apiVersion: v1
          fieldPath: metadata.namespace
    - name: _pod_nodeName
      valueFrom:
        fieldRef:
          apiVersion: v1
          fieldPath: spec.nodeName
    - name: LINKERD2_PROXY_LOG
      value: warn,linkerd=info
    - name: LINKERD2_PROXY_LOG_FORMAT
      value: plain
    - name: LINKERD2_PROXY_DESTINATION_SVC_ADDR
      value: linkerd-dst-headless.linkerd.svc.cluster.local.:8086
    - name: LINKERD2_PROXY_DESTINATION_PROFILE_NETWORKS
      value: 10.0.0.0/8,100.64.0.0/10,172.16.0.0/12,192.168.0.0/16
    - name: LINKERD2_PROXY_POLICY_SVC_ADDR
      value: linkerd-policy.linkerd.svc.cluster.local.:8090
    - name: LINKERD2_PROXY_POLICY_WORKLOAD
      value: $(_pod_ns):$(_pod_name)
    - name: LINKERD2_PROXY_INBOUND_DEFAULT_POLICY
      value: all-unauthenticated
    - name: LINKERD2_PROXY_POLICY_CLUSTER_NETWORKS
      value: 10.0.0.0/8,100.64.0.0/10,172.16.0.0/12,192.168.0.0/16
    - name: LINKERD2_PROXY_INBOUND_CONNECT_TIMEOUT
      value: 100ms
    - name: LINKERD2_PROXY_OUTBOUND_CONNECT_TIMEOUT
      value: 1000ms
    - name: LINKERD2_PROXY_CONTROL_LISTEN_ADDR
      value: 0.0.0.0:4190
    - name: LINKERD2_PROXY_ADMIN_LISTEN_ADDR
      value: 0.0.0.0:4191
    - name: LINKERD2_PROXY_OUTBOUND_LISTEN_ADDR
      value: 127.0.0.1:4140
    - name: LINKERD2_PROXY_INBOUND_LISTEN_ADDR
      value: 0.0.0.0:4143
    - name: LINKERD2_PROXY_INBOUND_IPS
      valueFrom:
        fieldRef:
          apiVersion: v1
          fieldPath: status.podIPs
    - name: LINKERD2_PROXY_INBOUND_PORTS
      value: "80"
    - name: LINKERD2_PROXY_DESTINATION_PROFILE_SUFFIXES
      value: svc.cluster.local.
    - name: LINKERD2_PROXY_INBOUND_ACCEPT_KEEPALIVE
      value: 10000ms
    - name: LINKERD2_PROXY_OUTBOUND_CONNECT_KEEPALIVE
      value: 10000ms
    - name: LINKERD2_PROXY_INBOUND_PORTS_DISABLE_PROTOCOL_DETECTION
      value: 25,587,3306,4444,5432,6379,9300,11211
    - name: LINKERD2_PROXY_DESTINATION_CONTEXT
      value: |
        {"ns":"$(_pod_ns)", "nodeName":"$(_pod_nodeName)"}
    - name: _pod_sa
      valueFrom:
        fieldRef:
          apiVersion: v1
          fieldPath: spec.serviceAccountName
    - name: _l5d_ns
      value: linkerd
    - name: _l5d_trustdomain
      value: cluster.local
    - name: LINKERD2_PROXY_IDENTITY_DIR
      value: /var/run/linkerd/identity/end-entity
    - name: LINKERD2_PROXY_IDENTITY_TRUST_ANCHORS
      value: |
        -----BEGIN CERTIFICATE-----
        MIIBiDCCAS6gAwIBAgIBATAKBggqhkjOPQQDAjAcMRowGAYDVQQDExFpZGVudGl0
        eS5saW5rZXJkLjAeFw0yMjExMDUxOTIxMDlaFw0yMzExMDUxOTIxMjlaMBwxGjAY
        BgNVBAMTEWlkZW50aXR5LmxpbmtlcmQuMFkwEwYHKoZIzj0CAQYIKoZIzj0DAQcD
        QgAE8AgxbWWa1qgEgN3ykFAOJ3sw9nSugUk1N5Qfvo6jXX/8/TZUW0ddko/N71+H
        EcKc72kK0tlclj8jDi3pzJ4C0KNhMF8wDgYDVR0PAQH/BAQDAgEGMB0GA1UdJQQW
        MBQGCCsGAQUFBwMBBggrBgEFBQcDAjAPBgNVHRMBAf8EBTADAQH/MB0GA1UdDgQW
        BBThSr0yAj5joW7pj/NZPYcfIIepbzAKBggqhkjOPQQDAgNIADBFAiAomg0TVn6N
        UxhOyzZdg848lAvH0Io9Ra/Ef2hxZGN0LgIhAIKjrsgDUqZA8XHiiciYYicxFnKr
        Tw5yj9gBhVAgYCaB
        -----END CERTIFICATE-----
    - name: LINKERD2_PROXY_IDENTITY_TOKEN_FILE
      value: /var/run/secrets/tokens/linkerd-identity-token
    - name: LINKERD2_PROXY_IDENTITY_SVC_ADDR
      value: linkerd-identity-headless.linkerd.svc.cluster.local.:8080
    - name: LINKERD2_PROXY_IDENTITY_LOCAL_NAME
      value: $(_pod_sa).$(_pod_ns).serviceaccount.identity.linkerd.cluster.local
    - name: LINKERD2_PROXY_IDENTITY_SVC_NAME
      value: linkerd-identity.linkerd.serviceaccount.identity.linkerd.cluster.local
    - name: LINKERD2_PROXY_DESTINATION_SVC_NAME
      value: linkerd-destination.linkerd.serviceaccount.identity.linkerd.cluster.local
    - name: LINKERD2_PROXY_POLICY_SVC_NAME
      value: linkerd-destination.linkerd.serviceaccount.identity.linkerd.cluster.local
    - name: LINKERD2_PROXY_TAP_SVC_NAME
      value: tap.linkerd-viz.serviceaccount.identity.linkerd.cluster.local
    image: cr.l5d.io/linkerd/proxy:stable-2.12.2
    imagePullPolicy: IfNotPresent
    lifecycle:
      postStart:
        exec:
          command:
          - /usr/lib/linkerd/linkerd-await
          - --timeout=2m
    livenessProbe:
      failureThreshold: 3
      httpGet:
        path: /live
        port: 4191
        scheme: HTTP
      initialDelaySeconds: 10
      periodSeconds: 10
      successThreshold: 1
      timeoutSeconds: 1
    name: linkerd-proxy
    ports:
    - containerPort: 4143
      name: linkerd-proxy
      protocol: TCP
    - containerPort: 4191
      name: linkerd-admin
      protocol: TCP
    readinessProbe:
      failureThreshold: 3
      httpGet:
        path: /ready
        port: 4191
        scheme: HTTP
      initialDelaySeconds: 2
      periodSeconds: 10
      successThreshold: 1
      timeoutSeconds: 1
    resources: {}
    securityContext:
      allowPrivilegeEscalation: false
      readOnlyRootFilesystem: true
      runAsUser: 2102
    terminationMessagePath: /dev/termination-log
    terminationMessagePolicy: FallbackToLogsOnError
    volumeMounts:
    - mountPath: /var/run/linkerd/identity/end-entity
      name: linkerd-identity-end-entity
    - mountPath: /var/run/secrets/tokens
      name: linkerd-identity-token
    - mountPath: /var/run/secrets/kubernetes.io/serviceaccount
      name: kube-api-access-9zpnn
      readOnly: true
  - image: nginx:latest
    imagePullPolicy: Always
    name: nginx
    ports:
    - containerPort: 80
      protocol: TCP
    resources: {}
    terminationMessagePath: /dev/termination-log
    terminationMessagePolicy: File
    volumeMounts:
    - mountPath: /var/run/secrets/kubernetes.io/serviceaccount
      name: kube-api-access-9zpnn
      readOnly: true
  dnsPolicy: ClusterFirst
  enableServiceLinks: true
  initContainers:
  - args:
    - --incoming-proxy-port
    - "4143"
    - --outgoing-proxy-port
    - "4140"
    - --proxy-uid
    - "2102"
    - --inbound-ports-to-ignore
    - 4190,4191,4567,4568
    - --outbound-ports-to-ignore
    - 4567,4568
    image: cr.l5d.io/linkerd/proxy-init:v2.0.0
    imagePullPolicy: IfNotPresent
    name: linkerd-init
    resources:
      limits:
        cpu: 100m
        memory: 20Mi
      requests:
        cpu: 100m
        memory: 20Mi
    securityContext:
      allowPrivilegeEscalation: false
      capabilities:
        add:
        - NET_ADMIN
        - NET_RAW
      privileged: false
      readOnlyRootFilesystem: true
      runAsNonRoot: true
      runAsUser: 65534
    terminationMessagePath: /dev/termination-log
    terminationMessagePolicy: FallbackToLogsOnError
    volumeMounts:
    - mountPath: /run
      name: linkerd-proxy-init-xtables-lock
    - mountPath: /var/run/secrets/kubernetes.io/serviceaccount
      name: kube-api-access-9zpnn
      readOnly: true
  nodeName: k8s-node1
  preemptionPolicy: PreemptLowerPriority
  priority: 0
  restartPolicy: Always
  schedulerName: default-scheduler
  securityContext: {}
  serviceAccount: default
  serviceAccountName: default
  terminationGracePeriodSeconds: 30
  tolerations:
  - effect: NoExecute
    key: node.kubernetes.io/not-ready
    operator: Exists
    tolerationSeconds: 300
  - effect: NoExecute
    key: node.kubernetes.io/unreachable
    operator: Exists
    tolerationSeconds: 300
  volumes:
  - name: kube-api-access-9zpnn
    projected:
      defaultMode: 420
      sources:
      - serviceAccountToken:
          expirationSeconds: 3607
          path: token
      - configMap:
          items:
          - key: ca.crt
            path: ca.crt
          name: kube-root-ca.crt
      - downwardAPI:
          items:
          - fieldRef:
              apiVersion: v1
              fieldPath: metadata.namespace
            path: namespace
  - emptyDir: {}
    name: linkerd-proxy-init-xtables-lock
  - emptyDir:
      medium: Memory
    name: linkerd-identity-end-entity
  - name: linkerd-identity-token
    projected:
      defaultMode: 420
      sources:
      - serviceAccountToken:
          audience: identity.l5d.io
          expirationSeconds: 86400
          path: linkerd-identity-token
status:
  conditions:
  - lastProbeTime: null
    lastTransitionTime: "2022-11-05T19:44:16Z"
    status: "True"
    type: Initialized
  - lastProbeTime: null
    lastTransitionTime: "2022-11-05T19:44:19Z"
    status: "True"
    type: Ready
  - lastProbeTime: null
    lastTransitionTime: "2022-11-05T19:44:19Z"
    status: "True"
    type: ContainersReady
  - lastProbeTime: null
    lastTransitionTime: "2022-11-05T19:44:15Z"
    status: "True"
    type: PodScheduled
  containerStatuses:
  - containerID: containerd://62028867c48aaa726df48249a27c52cd8820cd33e8e5695ad0d322540924754e
    image: cr.l5d.io/linkerd/proxy:stable-2.12.2
    imageID: cr.l5d.io/linkerd/proxy@sha256:787db5055b2a46a3c4318ef3b632461261f81254c8e47bf4b9b8dab2c42575e4
    lastState: {}
    name: linkerd-proxy
    ready: true
    restartCount: 0
    started: true
    state:
      running:
        startedAt: "2022-11-05T19:44:16Z"
  - containerID: containerd://8f8ce663c19360a7b6868ace68a4a5119f0b18cd57ffebcc2d19331274038381
    image: docker.io/library/nginx:latest
    imageID: docker.io/library/nginx@sha256:943c25b4b66b332184d5ba6bb18234273551593016c0e0ae906bab111548239f
    lastState: {}
    name: nginx
    ready: true
    restartCount: 0
    started: true
    state:
      running:
        startedAt: "2022-11-05T19:44:19Z"
  hostIP: 192.168.2.216
  initContainerStatuses:
  - containerID: containerd://c0417ea9c8418ab296bf86077e81c5d8be06fe9b87390c138d1c5d7b73cc577c
    image: cr.l5d.io/linkerd/proxy-init:v2.0.0
    imageID: cr.l5d.io/linkerd/proxy-init@sha256:7d5e66b9e176b1ebbdd7f40b6385d1885e82c80a06f4c6af868247bb1dffe262
    lastState: {}
    name: linkerd-init
    ready: true
    restartCount: 0
    state:
      terminated:
        containerID: containerd://c0417ea9c8418ab296bf86077e81c5d8be06fe9b87390c138d1c5d7b73cc577c
        exitCode: 0
        finishedAt: "2022-11-05T19:44:16Z"
        reason: Completed
        startedAt: "2022-11-05T19:44:15Z"
  phase: Running
  podIP: 172.16.36.90
  podIPs:
  - ip: 172.16.36.90
  qosClass: Burstable
  startTime: "2022-11-05T19:44:15Z"

At this point, the necessary components are setup for you to explore Linkerd further. You can also try out the jaeger and multicluster extensions, similar to the process of installing and using the viz extension and try out their capabilities.

Inject Linkerd data plane automatically

In this approach, we shall we how to instruct Kubernetes to automatically inject the Linkerd data plane to workloads at deployment time.

We can achieve this by adding the linkerd.io/inject annotation to the deployment descriptor which causes the proxy injector admission hook to execute and inject linkerd data plane components automatically at the time of deployment.

$ cat deploy.yaml 
apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: Deployment
metadata:
  name: nginx-deployment
spec:
  selector:
    matchLabels:
      app: nginx
  replicas: 2
  template:
    metadata:
      labels:
        app: nginx
      annotations:
        linkerd.io/inject: enabled
    spec:
      containers:
      - name: nginx
        image: nginx:latest
        ports:
        - containerPort: 80

This annotation can also be specified at the namespace level to affect all the workloads within the namespace. Note that any resources created before the annotation was added to the namespace will require a rollout restart to trigger the injection of the Linkerd components.

Uninstalling Linkerd

Now that we have walked through the installation and setup process of Linkerd, let’s also cover how to remove it from the infrastructure and go back to the state prior to its installation.

The first step would be to remove extensions, such as viz.

$ linkerd viz uninstall | kubectl delete -f -
clusterrole.rbac.authorization.k8s.io "linkerd-linkerd-viz-metrics-api" deleted
clusterrole.rbac.authorization.k8s.io "linkerd-linkerd-viz-prometheus" deleted
clusterrole.rbac.authorization.k8s.io "linkerd-linkerd-viz-tap" deleted
clusterrole.rbac.authorization.k8s.io "linkerd-linkerd-viz-tap-admin" deleted
clusterrole.rbac.authorization.k8s.io "linkerd-linkerd-viz-web-api" deleted
clusterrole.rbac.authorization.k8s.io "linkerd-linkerd-viz-web-check" deleted
clusterrole.rbac.authorization.k8s.io "linkerd-tap-injector" deleted
clusterrolebinding.rbac.authorization.k8s.io "linkerd-linkerd-viz-metrics-api" deleted
clusterrolebinding.rbac.authorization.k8s.io "linkerd-linkerd-viz-prometheus" deleted
clusterrolebinding.rbac.authorization.k8s.io "linkerd-linkerd-viz-tap" deleted
clusterrolebinding.rbac.authorization.k8s.io "linkerd-linkerd-viz-tap-auth-delegator" deleted
clusterrolebinding.rbac.authorization.k8s.io "linkerd-linkerd-viz-web-admin" deleted
clusterrolebinding.rbac.authorization.k8s.io "linkerd-linkerd-viz-web-api" deleted
clusterrolebinding.rbac.authorization.k8s.io "linkerd-linkerd-viz-web-check" deleted
clusterrolebinding.rbac.authorization.k8s.io "linkerd-tap-injector" deleted
role.rbac.authorization.k8s.io "web" deleted
rolebinding.rbac.authorization.k8s.io "linkerd-linkerd-viz-tap-auth-reader" deleted
rolebinding.rbac.authorization.k8s.io "web" deleted
apiservice.apiregistration.k8s.io "v1alpha1.tap.linkerd.io" deleted
mutatingwebhookconfiguration.admissionregistration.k8s.io "linkerd-tap-injector-webhook-config" deleted
namespace "linkerd-viz" deleted
authorizationpolicy.policy.linkerd.io "admin" deleted
authorizationpolicy.policy.linkerd.io "metrics-api" deleted
authorizationpolicy.policy.linkerd.io "proxy-admin" deleted
authorizationpolicy.policy.linkerd.io "tap" deleted
authorizationpolicy.policy.linkerd.io "tap-injector" deleted
server.policy.linkerd.io "admin" deleted
server.policy.linkerd.io "metrics-api" deleted
server.policy.linkerd.io "proxy-admin" deleted
server.policy.linkerd.io "tap-api" deleted
server.policy.linkerd.io "tap-injector-webhook" deleted

In order to uninstall the control plane, you would need to first “uninject” the Linkerd control plane components from any existing running pods by:

$ kubectl get deployments
NAME               READY   UP-TO-DATE   AVAILABLE   AGE
nginx-deployment   2/2     2            2           10m
$ kubectl get deployment nginx-deployment -o yaml | linkerd uninject - | kubectl apply -f -
deployment "nginx-deployment" uninjected
deployment.apps/nginx-deployment configured

Now you can delete the control plane.

$ linkerd uninstall | kubectl delete -f -
clusterrole.rbac.authorization.k8s.io "linkerd-heartbeat" deleted
clusterrole.rbac.authorization.k8s.io "linkerd-linkerd-destination" deleted
clusterrole.rbac.authorization.k8s.io "linkerd-linkerd-identity" deleted
clusterrole.rbac.authorization.k8s.io "linkerd-linkerd-proxy-injector" deleted
clusterrole.rbac.authorization.k8s.io "linkerd-policy" deleted
clusterrolebinding.rbac.authorization.k8s.io "linkerd-destination-policy" deleted
clusterrolebinding.rbac.authorization.k8s.io "linkerd-heartbeat" deleted
clusterrolebinding.rbac.authorization.k8s.io "linkerd-linkerd-destination" deleted
clusterrolebinding.rbac.authorization.k8s.io "linkerd-linkerd-identity" deleted
clusterrolebinding.rbac.authorization.k8s.io "linkerd-linkerd-proxy-injector" deleted
role.rbac.authorization.k8s.io "linkerd-heartbeat" deleted
rolebinding.rbac.authorization.k8s.io "linkerd-heartbeat" deleted
customresourcedefinition.apiextensions.k8s.io "authorizationpolicies.policy.linkerd.io" deleted
customresourcedefinition.apiextensions.k8s.io "httproutes.policy.linkerd.io" deleted
customresourcedefinition.apiextensions.k8s.io "meshtlsauthentications.policy.linkerd.io" deleted
customresourcedefinition.apiextensions.k8s.io "networkauthentications.policy.linkerd.io" deleted
customresourcedefinition.apiextensions.k8s.io "serverauthorizations.policy.linkerd.io" deleted
customresourcedefinition.apiextensions.k8s.io "servers.policy.linkerd.io" deleted
customresourcedefinition.apiextensions.k8s.io "serviceprofiles.linkerd.io" deleted
mutatingwebhookconfiguration.admissionregistration.k8s.io "linkerd-proxy-injector-webhook-config" deleted
validatingwebhookconfiguration.admissionregistration.k8s.io "linkerd-policy-validator-webhook-config" deleted
validatingwebhookconfiguration.admissionregistration.k8s.io "linkerd-sp-validator-webhook-config" deleted
namespace "linkerd" deleted

At this point we’re back to the original state:

$ kubectl get pods -A
NAMESPACE     NAME                                       READY   STATUS    RESTARTS        AGE
default       nginx-deployment-cd55c47f5-99xf2           1/1     Running   0               82s
default       nginx-deployment-cd55c47f5-tt58t           1/1     Running   0               86s
kube-system   calico-kube-controllers-59697b644f-7fsln   1/1     Running   2 (3h39m ago)   7d1h
kube-system   calico-node-6ptsh                          1/1     Running   2 (3h39m ago)   7d1h
kube-system   calico-node-7x5j8                          1/1     Running   2 (3h39m ago)   7d1h
kube-system   calico-node-qlnf6                          1/1     Running   2 (3h39m ago)   7d1h
kube-system   coredns-565d847f94-79jlw                   1/1     Running   2 (3h39m ago)   7d2h
kube-system   coredns-565d847f94-fqwn4                   1/1     Running   2 (3h39m ago)   7d2h
kube-system   etcd-k8s-master                            1/1     Running   2 (3h39m ago)   7d2h
kube-system   kube-apiserver-k8s-master                  1/1     Running   2 (3h39m ago)   7d2h
kube-system   kube-controller-manager-k8s-master         1/1     Running   2 (3h39m ago)   7d2h
kube-system   kube-proxy-4n9b7                           1/1     Running   2 (3h39m ago)   7d2h
kube-system   kube-proxy-k4rzv                           1/1     Running   2 (3h39m ago)   7d2h
kube-system   kube-proxy-lz2dd                           1/1     Running   2 (3h39m ago)   7d2h
kube-system   kube-scheduler-k8s-master                  1/1     Running   2 (3h39m ago)   7d2h

I hope you find this useful to get you started on your journey with Linkerd. Head on over to the docs for more information, guides and best practices.

05 November, 2022 09:32PM by Anuradha Weeraman

November 04, 2022

Thorsten Alteholz

My Debian Activities in October 2022

FTP master

This month I accepted 484 and rejected 55 packages. The overall number of packages that got accepted was 492.

Debian LTS

This was my hundredth month that I did some work for the Debian LTS initiative, started by Raphael Hertzog at Freexian.  Woohoo, There is a party. (yes I am old). Unfortunately there are already 101 completed month listed in the debian-lts-announce archive, so I seem to have counted wrong once. *sigh*, yes I am old.

This month my all in all workload has been 14h.

During that time I uploaded:

  • [DLA 3168-1] openvswitch security update for one CVE
  • [DLA 3167-1] ncurses security update for one CVE
  • [#1020596] bullseye-pu: mod-wsgi/4.7.1-3+deb11u1 upload
  • [graphicsmagick] debdiff for Bullseye sent to security team (update as DLA or via PU?)
  • [graphicsmagick] prepared upload for Buster
  • [libvncserver] debdiff for Buster and Bullseye sent to maintainer (no upload yet :-()

I also started to work on virglrenderer.

Last but not least I took care of NEW packages on security-master.

Debian ELTS

This month was the fifty first ELTS month.

During my allocated time I uploaded:

  • [ELA-719-1] graphicsmagick security update of Jessie and Stretch for one CVE
  • [ELA-720-1] bluez security update of Jessie and Stretch for three CVEs
  • marked two CVEs of curl as not-affected for Jessie and Stretch
  • checked that all patches for dpdk need to be backported, unfortunately that was beyond my capabilities

I also started to work on snapd.

Last but not least I finally managed to become familiar with the git workflow and imported several packages to the salsa repository.

Debian Astro

This month I uploaded new upstream versions or improved packaging of:

I also uploaded a new package pysqm. This software supports the Sky Quality Meters made by Unihedron. I was kindly given an SQM-LU for USB and SQM-LE with network adapter. I plan to put a working Python3 version of the old PySQM software into Debian, package the UDM (Unihedron Device Manager) and finally check the support within Indi.

Debian IoT

This month I uploaded new upstream versions or improved packaging of:

Debian Mobcom

This month I finished the transition of the Osmocom packages, except
osmo-mgw and osmo-msc seem to have problems. I have no idea how I can solve this, so help is appreciated.

Other stuff

This month I uploaded new packages:

04 November, 2022 03:24PM by alteholz

Alastair McKinstry

€1.3 billion announced for new Forestry Support

€1.3 billion announced for new Forestry Support

Funds to be delivered through new Forestry Programme
Premiums for planting trees to be increased by between 46% and 66% and extended to 20 years for farmers

 #GreensInGovernment

The Taoiseach, Micheál Martin TD, Minister of State with responsibility for Forestry, Senator Pippa Hackett, and Minister for Agriculture, Food and the Marine, Charlie McConalogue T.D today announced a proposed investment by the Government of €1.3 billion in Irish forestry. The funding will be for the next national Forestry Programme and represents the largest ever investment by an Irish Government in tree-planting. The programme will now be the subject of state-aid approval by the European Commission.

The Taoiseach said:

“This commitment by the Government to such a substantial financial package reflects the seriousness with which we view the climate change and biodiversity challenges, which affect all of society. Forestry is at the heart of delivering on our sustainability goals and strong support is needed to encourage engagement from all our stakeholders in reaching our objectives. “

 

Minister Hackett said:

‘I’m delighted to have secured a package of €1.318 billion for forestry. This will support the biggest and best-funded Forestry Programme ever in Ireland. It comes at an appropriate time, given the urgency of taking climate mitigation measures. Planting trees is one of the most effective methods of tackling climate change as well as contributing to improved biodiversity and water quality. One of my main aims is to re-engage farmers in afforestation. I’m delighted therefore to be proposing a new 20-year premium term exclusively for farmers, as well as introducing a new small-scale native woodland scheme which will allow farmers to plant up to 1 hectare of native woodland on farmland and along watercourses outside of the forestry licensing process.”

 

“Minister McConalogue said:

“Today we commit to providing unprecedented incentives to encourage the planting of trees that can provide a valuable addition to farm income and help to meet national climate and biodiversity objectives. This funding guarantees continued payments to those forest owners who planted under the current scheme and who are still in receipt of premiums. It also offers new and improved financial supports to those who undertake planting and sustainable forest management under the new Programme. We intend to increase premiums for planting trees by between 46% and 66% and to extend the premium period from 15 to 20 years for farmers.

 

"We are approaching a new and exciting period for forestry in Ireland. The new Forestry Programme will drive a new and brighter future for forestry, for farmers and for our climate.”

 

The proposed new Forestry Programme is currently out to public consultation as part of the Strategic Environmental Assessment and Appropriate Assessment process. The Programme is the main implementation mechanism for the new Forest Strategy (2023 -2030) which reflects the ambitions contained in the recently published Shared National Vision for Trees, Woods and Forests in Ireland until 2050. The public consultation closes on 29th November, 2022 and any changes which result from this process will be incorporated into the Programme and the Forest Strategy.

Minister Hackett commented: “The draft Forestry Programme and Forest Strategy are the product of extensive stakeholder consultation and feedback, and both documents are open to public consultation for the next number of weeks. I would strongly encourage all interested parties to engage with the consultation in advance of the Strategy and Programme being finalised.”

The new Programme is built around the principle of right trees in the right places for the right reasons with the right management. It aims to deliver more diverse forest which will meet multiple societal objectives, economic, social and environmental. Higher grant rates for forest establishment are also proposed with increases of approximately 20% to reflect rising living costs. The new one hectare native tree area scheme will also make it easier for landowners who wish to plant small areas of trees on their farm.

 

The Taoiseach concluded “I welcome this milestone and I believe that this funding injection will be an important catalyst in delivering on the ambition outlined in the new Forest Strategy. Our environmental challenges are huge but so is our commitment to overcoming them and this Forestry Programme is key to delivering so many of our priorities.

 

The new Programme will be 100% Exchequer funded and is subject to State Aid approval from the EU Commission. The Department is in contact with the Commission in relation to this approval which is a rigorous process.

04 November, 2022 08:45AM by Alastair McKinstry

hackergotchi for Louis-Philippe Véronneau

Louis-Philippe Véronneau

Book Review: Chokepoint Capitalism, by Rebecca Giblin and Cory Doctorow

Two weeks ago, I had the chance to go see Cory Doctorow at my local independent bookstore, in Montréal. He was there to present his latest essay, co-written with Rebecca Giblin1. Titled Chokepoint Capitalism: How Big Tech and Big Content Captured Creative Labor Markets and How We'll Win Them Back, it focuses on the impact of monopolies and monopsonies (more on this later) on creative workers.

The book is divided in two main parts:

  • Part one, Culture has been captured (chapters 1 to 11), is a series of case studies that focus on different examples of market failure. The specific sectors analysed are the book market, the news media, the music industry, Hollywood, the mobile apps industry and the online video platforms.
  • Part two, Braking anticompetitive flywheels (chapters 12 to 19), looks at different solutions to try to fix these failures.

A picture of the book cover

Although Doctorow is known for his strong political stances, I have to say I'm quite surprised by the quality of the research Giblin and he did for this book. They both show a pretty advanced understanding of the market dynamics they look at, and even though most of the solutions they propose aren't new or groundbreaking, they manage to be convincing and clear.

That is to say, you certainly don't need to be an economist to understand or enjoy this book :)

As I have mentioned before, the book heavily criticises monopolies, but also monopsonies — a market structure that has only one buyer (instead of one seller). I find this quite interesting, as whereas people are often familiar with the concept of monopolies, monopsonies are frequently overlooked.

The classic example of a monopsony is a labor market with a single employer: there is a multitude of workers trying to sell their labor power, but in the end, working conditions are dictated by the sole employer, who gets to decide who has a job and who hasn't. Mining towns are good real-world examples of monopsonies.

In the book, the authors argue most of the contemporary work produced by creative workers (especially musicians and writers) is sold to monopsonies and oligopsonies, like Amazon2 or major music labels. This creates a situation where the consumers are less directly affected by the lack of competition in the market (they often get better prices), but where creators have an increasingly hard time making ends meet. Not only this, but natural monopsonies3 are relatively rare, making the case for breaking the existing ones even stronger.

Apart from the evident need to actually start applying (the quite good) antitrust laws in the USA, some of the other solutions put forward are:

  • Transparency Rights — giving creative workers a way to audit the companies that sell their work and make sure they are paid what they are due.
  • Collective Action
  • Time Limits on Copyright Contracts — making sure creators that sell their copyrights to publishers or labels can get them back after a reasonable period of time.
  • Radical Interoperability — forcing tech giants to make their walled-gardens interoperable.
  • Minimum Wages for Creative Work — enforcing minimum legal rates for workers in certain domains, like what is already done for screenplays in the US by members of the Writers Guild of America.
  • Collective Ownership

Overall, I found this book quite enjoying and well written. Since I am not a creative worker myself and don't experience first-hand the hardships presented in the book, it was the occasion for me to delve more deeply in this topic. Chances are I'll reuse some of the exposés in my classes too.

  1. Professor at the Melbourne Law School and Director of the Intellectual Property Research Institute of Australia, amongst other things. More on her here. ↩

  2. Amazon owns more than 50% of the US physical book retail market and has an even higher market share for ebooks and audiobooks (via Audible). Not only this, but with the decline of the physical book market, audiobooks are an increasingly important source of revenue for authors. ↩

  3. Natural monopolies happen when it does not make economic sense for multiple enterprises to compete in a market. Critical infrastructures, like water supply or electricity, make for good examples of natural monopolies. It simply wouldn't be efficient to have 10 separate electrical cables connecting your house to 10 separate electric grids. In my opinion, such monopolies are acceptable (and even desirable), as long as they are collectively owned, either by the State or by local entities (municipalities, non-profits, etc.). ↩

04 November, 2022 04:00AM by Louis-Philippe Véronneau

Reproducible Builds (diffoscope)

diffoscope 226 released

The diffoscope maintainers are pleased to announce the release of diffoscope version 226. This version includes the following changes:

[ Christopher Baines ]
* Add an lzip comparator with tests.

[ Chris Lamb ]
* Add support for comparing the "text" content of HTML files using html2text.
  (Closes: #1022209, reproducible-builds/diffoscope#318)
* Misc/test improvements:
  * Drop the ALLOWED_TEST_FILES test; it's mostly just annoying.
  * Drop other copyright notices from lzip.py and test_lzip.py.
  * Use assert_diff helper in test_lzip.py.
  * Pylint tests/test_source.py.

[ Mattia Rizzolo ]
* Add lzip to debian dependencies.

You find out more by visiting the project homepage.

04 November, 2022 12:00AM

November 03, 2022

hackergotchi for Steve Kemp

Steve Kemp

Alphabetical linting ..

So this week I recycled a talk I'd given in the past, about how even using extremely simple parsers allows a lot of useful static-analysis to be done, for specific niche use-cases.

This included examples of scanning comments above classes to ensure they referred to the appropriate object, ensuring that specific function calls always included a specific (optional) parameter, etc.

Nothing too complex, but I figured I'd give a new example this time, and I remembered I'd recently written a bunch of functions for an interpreter which I'd ordered quite deliberately.

Assume you're writing a BASIC interpreter, you need to implement a bunch of built-in maths functions such as SIN, COS, TAN, then some string-related functions LEFT$, RIGHT$, MID$, etc.

When it comes to ordering there are a couple of approaches:

  • Stick them all in one package:
    • builtins/builtins.go
  • Create a package and group them:
    • builtins/maths.go
    • builtins/string.go
    • .. etc

Personal preference probably dictates the choice you make, but either way I think it would be rational and obvious that you'd put the functions in alphabetical order:

func ABS( args []primitive.Object) (primitive.Object, error) {
..}

func COS( args []primitive.Object) (primitive.Object, error) {
..}

func SIN( args []primitive.Object) (primitive.Object, error) {
..}

func TAN( args []primitive.Object) (primitive.Object, error) {
..}

I did that myself, and I wrote a perl-script to just parse the file using a simple regexp "^func\s+([^(]+)\(" but then I figured this was a good time to write a real static-analysis tool.

The golang environment is full of trivial little linters for various purposes, and the standard "go vet .." driver makes it easy to invoke them. Realizing that I was going to get driven in the same way it was obvious I'd write something called "alphaVet".

So anyway, half written for a talk, half-written because of the name:

03 November, 2022 10:00PM