Planet Debian

With user edition out the door last week, this week was spent stabilizing unstable!

Spent some time sorting out our Calamares installer being quite grumpy which is now fixed by reverting an upstream change. Unstable and developer ISO rebuilt and installable. Spent some time sorting out some issues with using an unreleased appstream ( thanks ximion for help with packagekit! ) KDE applications are starting to switch to Qt6 in master this week, the big one being KDE PIM! This entails an enormous amount of work re-packaging. I have made a dent, sorta. To be continued next week. I fixed our signond / kaccounts line for qt6 which entailed some work on upstream code that uses QStringList.toSet which was removed in Qt6! Always learning new things!

I have spent some time working on the KF6 content snap, working with Jarred to make sure his qt6 content snap will work for us. Unfortunately, I do not have much time for this as I must make money to survive, donations help free up time for this Our new proposal with Kevin’s super awesome management company has been submitted and we will hopefully hear back next week.

Thanks for stopping by! Till next week.

If you can spare some change, consider a donation

Thank you!

https://gofund.me/b8b69e54

Almost a month ago, I went to my always loved Rancho Electrónico to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the Debian project. Hats off to Jathan for all the work he put into this! I was there for close to 3hr, and be it following up an install, doing a talk, or whatever — he was doing it. But anyway, I only managed to attend with one of my (great, beautiful and always loved) generic Debian or DebConf T-shirts.

Today, when going through a box of old T-shirts, I found the shirt I was looking for to bring to the occasion. A smallish print, ~12cm wide, over the heart:

And as a larger print, ~25cm wide, across the back:

For the benefit of people who read this using a non-image-displaying browser or RSS client, they are respectively:

10 years 100 countries 1000 maintainers 10000 packages

and

1 project 10 architectures 100 countries 1000 maintainers 10000 packages 100000 bugs fixed 1000000 installations 10000000 users 100000000 lines of code

20 years ago we celebrated eating grilled meat at J0rd1’s house. This year, we had vegan tostadas in the menu. And maybe we are no longer that young, but we are still very proud and happy of our project!

Now… How would numbers line up today for Debian, 20 years later? Have we managed to get the “bugs fixed” line increase by a factor of 10? Quite probably, the lines of code we also have, and I can only guess the number of users and installations, which was already just a wild guess back then, might have multiplied by over 10, at least if we count indirect users and installs as well…

I very, very nearly didn’t make it to DebConf this year, I had a bad cold/flu for a few days before I left, and after a negative covid-19 test just minutes before my flight, I decided to take the plunge and travel.

This is just everything in chronological order, more or less, it’s the only way I could write it.

DebCamp

I planned to spend DebCamp working on various issues. Very few of them actually got done, I spent the first few days in bed further recovering, took a covid-19 test when I arrived and after I felt better, and both were negative, so not sure what exactly was wrong with me, but between that and catching up with other Debian duties, I couldn’t make any progress on catching up on the packaging work I wanted to do. I’ll still post what I intended here, I’ll try to take a few days to focus on these some time next month:

Calamares / Debian Live stuff:

• #980209 – installation fails at the “install boot loader” phase
• #1021156 – calamares-settings-debian: Confusing/generic program names
• #1037299 – “Install Debian” -> “Untrusted application launcher”
• #1037123 – “Minimal HD space required’ too small for some live images”
• #971003– Console auto-login doesn’t work with sysvinit

At least Calamares has been trixiefied in testing, so there’s that!

Desktop stuff:

• #1038660 – please set a placeholder theme during development, different from any release
• #1021816 – breeze: Background image not shown any more
• #956102 – desktop-base: unwanted metadata within images
• #605915 – please mtheake it a non-native package
• #681025 – Put old themes in a new package named desktop-base-extra
• #941642 – desktop-base: split theme data files and desktop integrations in separate packages

The “Egg” theme that I want to develop for testing/unstable is based on Juliette Taka’s Homeworld theme that was used for Bullseye. Egg, as in, something that hasn’t quite hatched yet. Get it? (for #1038660)

Debian Social:

• Set up Lemmy instance
  • I started setting up a Lemmy instance before DebCamp, and meant to finish it.
• Migrate PeerTube to new server
  • We got a new physical server for our PeerTube instance, we should have more space for growth and it would help us fix the streaming feature on our platform.

Loopy:

I intended to get the loop for DebConf in good shape before I left, so that we can spend some time during DebCamp making some really nice content, unfortunately this went very tumbly, but at least we ended up with a loopy that kind of worked and wasn’t too horrible. There’s always another DebConf to try again, right?

So DebCamp as a usual DebCamp was pretty much a wash (fitting with all the rain we had?) for me, at least it gave me enough time to recover a bit for DebConf proper, and I had enough time left to catch up on some critical DPL duties and put together a few slides for the Bits from the DPL talk.

DebConf

Bits From the DPL

I had very, very little available time to prepare something for Bits fro the DPL, but I managed to put some slides together (available on my wiki page).

I mostly covered:

• A very quick introduction of myself (I’ve done this so many times, it feels redundant giving my history every time), and some introduction on what it is that the DPL does. I declared my intent not to run for DPL again, and the reasoning behind it, and a few bits of information for people who may intend to stand for DPL next year.
• The sentiment out there for the Debian 12 release (which has been very positive). How we include firmware by default now, and that we’re saying goodbye to architectures both GNU/KFreeBSD and mipsel.
• Debian Day and the 30th birthday party celebrations from local groups all over the world (and a reminder about the Local Groups BoF later in the week).
• I looked forward to Debian 13 (trixie!), and how we’re gaining riscv64 as a release architecture, as well as loongarch64, and that plans seem to be forming to fix 2k38 in Debian, and hopefully largely by the time the Trixie release comes by.
• I made some comments about “Enterprise Linux” as people refer to the RHEL eco-system these days, how really bizarre some aspects of it is (like the kernel maintenance), and that some big vendors are choosing to support systems outside of that eco-system now (like CPanel now supporting Ubuntu too). I closed with the quote below from Ian Murdock, and assured the audience that if they want to go out and make money with Debian, they are more than welcome too.

Job Fair

I walked through the hallway where the Job Fair was hosted, and enjoyed all the buzz. It’s not always easy to get this right, but this year it was very active and energetic, I hope lots of people made some connections!

Cheese & Wine

Due to state laws and alcohol licenses, we couldn’t consume alcohol from outside the state of Kerala in the common areas of the hotel (only in private rooms), so this wasn’t quite as big or as fun as our usual C&W parties since we couldn’t share as much from our individual countries and cultures, but we always knew that this was going to be the case for this DebConf, and it still ended up being alright.

Day Trip

I opted for the forest / waterfalls daytrip. It was really, really long with lots of time in the bus. I think our trip’s organiser underestimated how long it would take between the points on the route (all in all it wasn’t that far, but on a bus on a winding mountain road, it takes long). We left at 8:00 and only found our way back to the hotel around 23:30. Even though we arrived tired and hungry, we saw some beautiful scenery, animals and also met indigenous river people who talked about their struggles against being driven out of their place of living multiple times as government invests in new developments like dams and hydro power.

Photos available in the DebConf23 public git repository.

Losing a beloved Debian Developer during DebConf

To our collective devastation, not everyone made it back from their day trips. Abraham Raji was out to the kayak day trip, and while swimming, got caught by a whirlpool from a drainage system.

Even though all of us were properly exhausted and shocked in disbelief at this point, we had to stay up and make some tough decisions. Some initially felt that we had to cancel the rest of DebConf. We also had to figure out how to announce what happened asap both to the larger project and at DebConf in an official manner, while ensuring that due diligence took place and that the family is informed by the police first before making anything public.

We ended up cancelling all the talks for the following day, with an address from the DPL in the morning to explain what had happened. Of all the things I’ve ever had to do as DPL, this was by far the hardest. The day after that, talks were also cancelled for the morning so that we could attend his funeral. Dozens of DebConf attendees headed out by bus to go pay their final respects, many wearing the t-shirts that Abraham had designed for DebConf.

A book of condolences was set up so that everyone who wished to could write a message on how they remembered him. The book will be kept by his family.

Today marks a week since his funeral, and I still feel very raw about it. And even though there was uncertainty whether DebConf should even continue after his death, in hindsight I’m glad that everyone pushed forward. While we were all heart broken, it was also heart warming to see people care for each other in all of this. If anything, I think I needed more time at DebConf just to be in that warm aura of emotional support for just a bit longer. There are many people who I wanted to talk to who I barely even had a chance to see.

Abraham, or Abru as he was called by some people (which I like because “bru” in Afrikaans” is like “bro” in English, not sure if that’s what it implied locally too) enjoyed artistic pursuits, but he was also passionate about knowledge transfer. He ran classes at DebConf both last year and this year (and I think at other local events too) where he taught people packaging via a quick course that he put together. His enthusiasm for Debian was contagious, a few of the people who he was mentoring came up to me and told me that they were going to see it through and become a DD in honor of him. I can’t even remember how I reacted to that, my brain was already so worn out and stitching that together with the tragedy of what happened while at DebConf was just too much for me.

I first met him in person last year in Kosovo, I already knew who he was, so I think we interacted during the online events the year before. He was just one of those people who showed so much promise, and I was curious to see what he’d achieve in the future. Unfortunately, we was taken away from us too soon.

Poetry Evening

Later in the week we had the poetry evening. This was the first time I had the courage to recite something. I read Ithaka by C.P. Cavafy (translated by Edmund Keely). The first time I heard about this poem was in an interview with Julian Assange’s wife, where she mentioned that he really loves this poem, and it caught my attention because I really like the Weezer song “Return to Ithaka” and always wondered what it was about, so needless to say, that was another rabbit hole at some point.

Group Photo

Our DebConf photographer organised another group photo for this event, links to high-res versions available on Aigar’s website.

BoFs

I didn’t attend nearly as many talks this DebConf as I would’ve liked (fortunately I can catch up on video, should be released soon), but I did make it to a few BoFs.

In the Local Groups BoF, representatives from various local teams were present who introduced themselves and explained what they were doing. From memory (sorry if I left someone out), we had people from Belgium, Brazil, Taiwan and South Africa. We talked about types of events a local group could do (BSPs, Mini DC, sprints, Debian Day, etc. How to help local groups get started, booth kits for conferences, and setting up some form of calendar that lists important Debian events in a way that makes it easier for people to plan and co-ordinate. There’s a mailing list for co-ordination of local groups, and the irc channel is #debian-localgroups on oftc.

If you got one of these Cheese & Wine bags from DebConf, that’s from the South African local group!

In the Debian.net BoF, we discussed the Debian.net hosting service, where Debian pays for VMs hosted for projects by individual DDs on Debian.net. The idea is that we start some form of census that monitors the services, whether they’re still in use, whether the system is up to date, whether someone still cares for it, etc. We had some discussion about where the lines of responsibility are drawn, and we can probably make things a little bit more clear in the documentation. We also want to offer more in terms of backups and monitoring (currently DDs do get 500GB from rsync.net that could be used for backups of their services though). The intention is also to deploy some form of configuration management for some essentials across the hosts. We should also look at getting some sponsored hosting for this.

In the Debian Social BoF, we discussed some services that need work / expansion. In particular, Matrix keeps growing at an increased rate as more users use it and more channels are bridged, so it will likely move to its own host with big disks soon. We might replace Pleroma with a fork called Akkoma, this will need some more home work and checking whether it’s even feasible. Some services haven’t really been used (like Writefreely and Plume), and it might be time to retire them. We might just have to help one or two users migrate some of their posts away if we do retire them. Mjolner seems to do a fine job at spam blocking, we haven’t had any notable incidents yet. WordPress now has improved fediverse support, it’s unclear whether it works on a multi-site instance yet, I’ll test it at some point soon and report back. For upcoming services, we are implementing Lemmy and probably also Mobilizon. A request was made that we also look into Loomio.

More Information Overload

There’s so much that happens at DebConf, it’s tough to take it all in, and also, to find time to write about all of it, but I’ll mention a few more things that are certainly worth of note.

During DebConf, we had some people from the Kite Linux team over. KITE supplies the ICT needs for the primary and secondary schools in the province of Kerala, where they all use Linux. They decided to switch all of these to Debian. There was an ad-hoc BoF where locals were listening and fielding questions that the Kite Linux team had. It was great seeing all the energy and enthusiasm behind this effort, I hope someone will properly blog about this!

I learned about the VGLUG Foundation, who are doing a tremendous job at promoting GNU/Linux in the country. They are also training up 50 people a year to be able to provide tech support for Debian.

I came across the booth for Mostly Harmless, they liberate old hardware by installing free firmware on there. It was nice seeing all the devices out there that could be liberated, and how it can breathe new life into old harware.

Some hopefully harmless soldering.

Overall, the community and their activities in India are very impressive, and I wish I had more time to get to know everyone better.

Food

Oh yes, one more thing. The food was great. I tasted more different kinds of curry than I ever did in my whole life up to this point. The lunch on banana leaves was interesting, and also learning how to eat this food properly by hand (thanks to the locals who insisted on teaching me!), it was a… fruitful experience? This might catch on at home too… less dishes to take care of!

Special thanks to the DebConf23 Team

I think this may have been one of the toughest DebConfs to organise yet, and I don’t think many people outside of the DebConf team knows about all the challenges and adversity this team has faced in organising it. Even just getting to the previous DebConf in Kosovo was a long and tedious and somewhat risky process. Through it all, they were absolute pro’s. Not once did I see them get angry or yell at each other, whenever a problem came up, they just dealt with it. They did a really stellar job and I did make a point of telling them on the last day that everyone appreciated all the work that they did.

Back to my nest

I bought Dax a ball back from India, he seems to have forgiven me for not taking him along.

I’ll probably take a few days soon to focus a bit on my bugs and catch up on my original DebCamp goals. If you made it this far, thanks for reading! And thanks to everyone for being such fantastic people.

(I wrote this up for an internal work post, but I figure it’s worth sharing more publicly too.)

I spent last week at DebConf23, this years instance of the annual Debian conference, which was held in Kochi, India. As usual, DebConf provides a good reason to see a new part of the world; I’ve been going since 2004 (Porto Alegre, Brazil), and while I’ve missed a few (Mexico, Bosnia, and Switzerland) I’ve still managed to make it to instances on 5 continents.

This has absolutely nothing to do with work, so I went on my own time + dime, but I figured a brief write-up might prove of interest. I first installed Debian back in 1999 as a machine that was being co-located to operate as a web server / email host. I was attracted by the promise of easy online upgrades (or, at least, upgrades that could be performed without the need to be physically present at the machine, even if they naturally required a reboot at some point). It has mostly delivered on this over the years, and I’ve never found a compelling reason to move away. I became a Debian Developer in 2000. As a massively distributed volunteer project DebConf provides an opportunity to find out what’s happening in other areas of the project, catch up with team mates, and generally feel more involved and energised to work on Debian stuff. Also, by this point in time, a lot of Debian folk are good friends and it’s always nice to catch up with them.

On that point, I felt that this year the hallway track was not quite the same as usual. For a number of reasons (COVID, climate change, travel time, we’re all getting older) I think fewer core teams are achieving critical mass at DebConf - I was the only member physically present from 2 teams I’m involved in, and I’d have appreciated the opportunity to sit down with both of them for some in-person discussions. It also means it’s harder to use DebConf as a venue for advancing major changes; previously having all the decision makers in the same space for a week has meant it’s possible to iron out the major discussion points, smoothing remote implementation after the conference. I’m told the mini DebConfs are where it’s at for these sorts of meetings now, so perhaps I’ll try to attend at least one of those next year.

Of course, I also went to a bunch of talks. I have differing levels of comment about each of them, but I’ve written up some brief notes below about the ones I remember something about. The comment was made that we perhaps had a lower level of deep technical talks, which is perhaps true but I still think there were a number of high level technical talks that served to pique ones interest about the topic.

Finally, this DebConf was the first I’m aware of that was accompanied by tragedy; as part of the day trip Abraham Raji, a project member and member of the local team, was involved in a fatal accident.

Talks (videos not yet up for all, but should appear for most)

• Opening Ceremony
  Not much to say here; welcome to DebConf!

• Continuous Key-Signing Party introduction
  I ended up running this, as Gunnar couldn’t make it. Debian makes heavy use of the OpenPGP web of trust (no mass ability to send out Yubikeys + perform appropriate levels of identity verification), so making sure we’re appropriately cross-signed, and linked to local conference organisers, is a dull but important part of the conference. We use a modified keysigning approach where identity verification + fingerprint confirmation happens over the course of the conference, so this session was just to explain how that works and confirm we were all working from the same fingerprint list.

• State of Stateless - A Talk about Immutability and Reproducibility in Debian
  Stateless OSes seem to be gaining popularity, so I went along to this to see if there was anything of note. It was interesting, but nothing earth shattering - very high level.

• What’s missing so that Debian is finally reproducible?
  Reproducible builds are something I’ve been keeping an eye on for a long time, and I continue to be impressed by the work folks are putting into this - both for Debian, and other projects. From a security standpoint reproducible builds provide confidence against trojaned builds, and from a developer standpoint knowing you can build reproducibly helps with not having to keep a whole bunch of binary artefacts around.

• Hello from keyring-maint
  In the distant past the process of getting your OpenPGP key into the Debian keyring (which is used to authenticate uploads + votes, amongst other things) was a clunky process that was often stalled. This hasn’t been the case for at least the past 10 years, but there’s still a residual piece of project memory that thinks keyring is a blocker. So as a team we say hi and talk about the fact we do monthly updates and generally are fairly responsive these days.

• A declarative approach to Linux networking with Netplan
  Debian’s /etc/network/interfaces is a fairly basic (if powerful) mechanism for configuring network interfaces. NetworkManager is a better bet for dynamic hosts (i.e. clients), and systemd-network seems to be a good choice for servers (I’m gradually moving machines over to it). Netplan tries to provide a unified mechanism for configuring both with a single configuration language. A noble aim, but I don’t see a lot of benefit for anything I use - my NetworkManager hosts are highly dynamic (so no need to push shared config) and systemd-network (or /etc/network/interfaces) works just fine on the other hosts. I’m told Netplan has more use with more complicated setups, e.g. when OpenVSwitch is involved.

• Quick peek at ZFS, A too good to be true file system and volume manager.
  People who use ZFS rave about it. I’m naturally suspicious of any file system that doesn’t come as part of my mainline kernel. But, as a longtime cautious mdraid+lvm+ext4 user I appreciate that there have been advances in the file system space that maybe I should look at, and I’ve been trying out btrfs on more machines over the past couple of years. I can’t deny ZFS has a bunch of interesting features, but nothing I need/want that I can’t get from an mdraid+lvm+btrfs stack (in particular data checksumming + reflinks for dedupe were strong reasons to move to btrfs over ext4).

• Bits from the DPL
  Exactly what it says on the tin; some bits from the DPL.

• Adulting
  Enrico is always worth hearing talk; Adulting was no exception. Main takeaway is that we need to avoid trying to run the project on martyrs and instead make sure we build a sustainable project. I’ve been trying really hard to accept I just don’t have time to take on additional responsibilities, no matter how interesting or relevant they might seem, so this resonated.

• My life in git, after subversion, after CVS.
  Putting all of your home directory in revision control. I’ve never made this leap; I’ve got some Ansible playbooks that push out my core pieces of configuration, which is held in git, but I don’t actually check this out directly on hosts I have accounts on. Interesting, but not for me.

• EU Legislation BoF - Cyber Resilience Act, Product Liability Directive and CSAM Regulation
  The CRA seems to be a piece of ill informed legislation that I’m going to have to find time to read properly. Discussion was a bit more alarmist than I personally feel is warranted, but it was a short session, had a bunch of folk in it, and even when I removed my mask it was hard to make myself understood.

• What’s new in the Linux kernel (and what’s missing in Debian)
  An update from Ben about new kernel features. I’m paying less attention to such things these days, so nice to get a quick overview of it all.

• Intro to SecureDrop, a sort-of Linux distro
  Actually based on Ubuntu, but lots of overlap with Debian as a result, and highly customised anyway. Notable, to me, for using OpenPGP as some of the backend crypto support. I managed to talk to Kunal separately about some of the pain points around that, which was an interesting discussion - they’re trying to move from GnuPG to Sequoia, primarily because of the much easier integration and lack of requirement for the more complicated GnuPG features that sometimes get in the way.

• The Docker(.io) ecosystem in Debian
  I hate Docker. I’m sure it’s fine if you accept it wants to take over the host machine entirely, but when I’ve played around with it that’s not been the case. This talk was more about the difficulty of trying to keep a fast moving upstream with lots of external dependencies properly up to date in a stable release. Vendoring the deps and trying to get a stable release exception seems like the least bad solution, but it’s a problem that affects a growing number of projects.

• Chiselled containers
  This was kinda of interesting, but I think I missed the piece about why more granular packaging wasn’t an option. The premise is you can take an existing .deb and “chisel” it into smaller components, which then helps separate out dependencies rather than pulling in as much as the original .deb would. This was touted as being useful, in particular, for building targeted containers. Definitely appealing over custom built userspaces for containers, but in an ideal world I think we’d want the information in the main packaging and it becomes a lot of work.

• Debian Contributors shake-up
  Debian Contributors is a great site for massaging your ego around contributions to Debian; it’s also a useful point of reference from a data protection viewpoint in terms of information the project holds about contributors - everything is already public, but the Contributors website provides folk with an easy way to find their own information (with various configurable options about whether that’s made public or not). Tássia is working on improving the various data feeds into the site, but realistically this is the responsibility of every Debian service owner.

• New Member BOF
  I’m part of the teams that help get new folk into Debian - primarily as a member of the New Member Front Desk, but also as a mostly inactive Application Manager. It’s been a while since we did one of these sessions so the Front Desk/Debian Account Managers that were present did a panel session. Nothing earth shattering came out of it; like keyring-maint this is a team that has historically had problems, but is currently running smoothly.

just testing, please ignore

The still new package RcppInt64 (announced two weeks ago in this post, with this followup last week) arrived on CRAN earlier today in its second update and relase 0.0.3. RcppInt64 collects some of the previous conversions between 64-bit integer values in R and C++, and regroups them in a single package by providing a single header. It offers two interfaces: both a more standard as<>() converter from R values along with its companions wrap() to return to R, as well as more dedicated functions ‘from’ and ‘to’.

This release adds support for the corresponding nanotime conversion between R and C++. nanotime is leveraging the same bit64-based reprensentation of 64-bit integers for nanosecond resolution timestamps. A thorough S4 wrapping the offers R based access for convenient and powerful operations at nanosecond resolution. And as tweeted (here and here), tooted (here and here), and skeeted (here and here) in a quick preview last Sunday, it makes for easy and expressive code.

The brief NEWS entry follows:

Changes in version 0.0.3 (2023-09-19)

• The as<>() and wrap() converters are now declared inline.

• Conversion to and from nanotime has been added.

Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is a diffstat report relative to previous release.

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

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

live demo

As far as I know this is the first Haskell program compiled to Webassembly (WASM) and using the browser DOM.

ghc's WASM backend is solid, but it only provides very low-level FFI bindings when used in the browser. Ints and pointers to WASM memory. (See here for details and for instructions on getting the ghc WASM toolchain I used.)

I imagine that in the future, WASM code will interface with the DOM by using a WASI "world" that defines a complete API (and browsers won't include Javascript engines anymore). But currently, WASM can't do anything in a browser without calling back to Javascript.

For this project, I needed 63 lines of (reusable) javascript (here). Plus another 18 to bootstrap running the WASM program (here). (Also browser_wasi_shim)

But let's start with the Haskell code. A simple program to pop up an alert in the browser looks like this:

{-# LANGUAGE OverloadedStrings #-} import Wasmjsbridge foreign export ccall hello :: IO () hello :: IO () hello = do alert <- get_js_object_method "window" "alert" call_js_function_ByteString_Void alert "hello, world!"

A larger program that draws on the canvas and generated the image above is here.

The Haskell side of the FFI interface is a bunch of fairly mechanical functions like this:

foreign import ccall unsafe "call_js_function_string_void" _call_js_function_string_void :: Int -> CString -> Int -> IO () call_js_function_ByteString_Void :: JSFunction -> B.ByteString -> IO () call_js_function_ByteString_Void (JSFunction n) b = BU.unsafeUseAsCStringLen b $ \(buf, len) -> _call_js_function_string_void n buf len

Many more would need to be added, or generated, to continue down this path to complete coverage of all data types. All in all it's 64 lines of code so far (here).

Also a C shim is needed, that imports from WASI modules and provides C functions that are used by the Haskell FFI. It looks like this:

void _call_js_function_string_void(uint32_t fn, uint8_t *buf, uint32_t len) __attribute__(( __import_module__("wasmjsbridge"), __import_name__("call_js_function_string_void") )); void call_js_function_string_void(uint32_t fn, uint8_t *buf, uint32_t len) { _call_js_function_string_void(fn, buf, len); }

Another 64 lines of code for that (here). I found this pattern in Joachim Breitner's haskell-on-fastly and copied it rather blindly.

Finally, the Javascript that gets run for that is:

call_js_function_string_void(n, b, sz) { const fn = globalThis.wasmjsbridge_functionmap.get(n); const buffer = globalThis.wasmjsbridge_exports.memory.buffer; fn(decoder.decode(new Uint8Array(buffer, b, sz))); },

Notice that this gets an identifier representing the javascript function to run, which might be any method of any object. It looks it up in a map and runs it. And the ByteString that got passed from Haskell has to be decoded to a javascript string.

In the Haskell program above, the function is document.alert. Why not pass a ByteString with that through the FFI? Well, you could. But then it would have to eval it. That would make running WASM in the browser be evaling Javascript every time it calls a function. That does not seem like a good idea if the goal is speed. GHC's javascript backend does use Javascript`FFI snippets like that, but there they get pasted into the generated Javascript hairball, so no eval is needed.

So my code has things like get_js_object_method that look up things like Javascript functions and generate identifiers. It also has this:

call_js_function_ByteString_Object :: JSFunction -> B.ByteString -> IO JSObject

Which can be used to call things like document.getElementById that return a javascript object:

getElementById <- get_js_object_method (JSObjectName "document") "getElementById" canvas <- call_js_function_ByteString_Object getElementById "myCanvas"

Here's the Javascript called by get_js_object_method. It generates a Javascript function that will be used to call the desired method of the object, and allocates an identifier for it, and returns that to the caller.

get_js_objectname_method(ob, osz, nb, nsz) { const buffer = globalThis.wasmjsbridge_exports.memory.buffer; const objname = decoder.decode(new Uint8Array(buffer, ob, osz)); const funcname = decoder.decode(new Uint8Array(buffer, nb, nsz)); const func = function (...args) { return globalThis[objname][funcname](...args) }; const n = globalThis.wasmjsbridge_counter + 1; globalThis.wasmjsbridge_counter = n; globalThis.wasmjsbridge_functionmap.set(n, func); return n; },

This does mean that every time a Javascript function id is looked up, some more memory is used on the Javascript side. For more serious uses of this, something would need to be done about that. Lots of other stuff like object value getting and setting is also not implemented, there's no support yet for callbacks, and so on. Still, I'm happy where this has gotten to after 12 hours of work on it.

I might release the reusable parts of this as a Haskell library, although it seems likely that ongoing development of ghc will make it obsolete. In the meantime, clone the git repo to have a play with it.

This blog post was sponsored by unqueued on Patreon.

Posted on September 20, 2023

And another half-written article I had in my repo. (Am I doing #FallFinishAlong with blog articles instead of / in addition to craft projects? it feels so).

I was in need of snacks. I wanted something bready, but with a bit less carbs and more proteins. I had a bag of chickpea flour.

Ingredients were:

• 100 g wheat flour
• 100 g chickpea flour
• 100 g water
• 3 g salt
• 1 g dry yeast

Mix everything as usual for bread, leave to rise for 4-6 hours.

Divide in 4 parts, roll them out to a thickness of about 1 – 2 mm, prick them with a fork (or the fancy cracker pricking tool that you don’t really need but I may have bought).

Optionally spray with a bit of water and sprinkle with salt (coarse or flake is best).

Preheat the oven to 240°C and cook for 5 minutes, or preheat the oven to 210°C and cook for 10 minutes for a dryer version.

I’ve tried both cooking temperatures: the 210°C had the big advantage of being the same as the common bread I was already making, so no additional oven time was required (it was summer. this was a consideration.), but I’m not sure which version I like best, so I think in winter I will alternate between the two.

Put it in a cotton (linen?) bag and keep it in a dry place, where it will keep for weeks (assuming you’ve made a bigger batch :D ).

This is now part of my staples.

Posted on September 19, 2023

I’ve found the draft of this article I almost completely wrote (checks) more than 3 months ago, and I guess it’s time to finish and publish it.

The very first A10 based device that entered our home, before they started to use it for SBCs, was a Chinese media server with a slot for a 3.5" hard disk and a few analogue audio outputs.

Of course from the time it entered our home it has always been running Debian.

Now that we may have a few, more powerful, A20 SBCs available, it has been fully dedicated to music: it is connected to the stereo, the hard disk has a clone of the git-annex repository where I’ve ripped all of my CDs1 and is played by connecting via ssh and running alsaplayer.

It’s simple (for my tastes). it works. Unless you’re in a different room than the one with the stereo.

And then I read this post on the fediverse that suggested installing minidlna on an old Raspberry Pi, and on a whim I decided I needed it.

I installed the package from Debian, set a few easy settings in the configuration file (such as which directories to serve), restarted the service.

And that’s it, it just worked.

The only thing I had to take care about is that to use git-annex repositories as the source of media files either the root of the repository should be used as media-dir, or the wide_links options should be set to yes, otherwise the symbolic links that point outside of the media-dir won’t be served.

As a client I used VLC (note for myself in case I ever forget, it’s under View → Playlist and then Local Network → Universal Plug ‘n’ Play), mostly because I already had it around.

Now that I’ve used it for a few months I have to say that it isn’t a perfect solution: the main format I store my music in is in flac 2, which isn’t supported by dlna; for a significant part of it I’ve also already generated single-song ogg files for convenience 3, and at least it works for those.

I don’t store (yet?) my video collection on the A10 device, but I did a quick test, and no, of course a raw dump of a DVD as generated by dvdbackup isn’t supported, so I would have to convert those too. And there is some support for subtitles as a separate file (which is something else I tend to have around), but only one file, with strict requirements for the name, which is a bit restrictive.

On the other hand, the hassle to set this up was so low that the functionality / hassle ratio is most definitely worth, and I’m quite happy I did and plan to continue using it.

1. (yes, I’m still using CDs, I have objections to those newfangled streaming services)↩︎

2. full CD rip in a single file, with an embedded cuesheet, to preserve as much as possible of the original disc.↩︎

3. in theory the flac was supposed to be future-proof storage, with the ogg files for actual use, but then I always listen to full albums, so the flac just work, and I only tend to bother generating the ogg when I’m already generating mp3 for the car.↩︎

I'm writing hash tables again; it seemingly never goes out of fashion. (Like malloc or sorting, we can always improve the implementation of these super-old concepts.) There are so many different tradeoffs you can make, and I thought it would be interesting to summarize the options on one of them: Hash reductions. I.e., you have your hash value (assume it's 32 bits, but this generalizes readily) and want to figure out which of N buckets this reduces to; what do you choose? (I'll assume a standard open-addressing scheme with linear probing, but most of this can be adapted to pretty much anything.) As far as I know, your options are:

• Mask lower bits: Something like x & (N - 1), where N is the table size. Assumptions: N is a power of two. Advantages: Super-fast. Probably the preferred variation of every gung-ho coder out there, very widely used. Problems: The lower bits of your hash must be of good quality (all others are discarded). Power-of-two requirement can mean lower load factor, and can be problematic for very large tables (e.g. if you have 64 GB RAM, you may want to support 60 GB hash tables and not just 32).
• Modulo prime: x % N. Assumptions: Generally that N is a prime (there's no big reason not to make it so). Advantages: Flexible on table size. Uses all bits of the hash, so is fairly robust against bad hash functions (the only big problem is if your hash is always a multiple of N, really). Disadvantages: Modulo is frequently slow, especially on older or less powerful CPUs. If you have fast multiplication, you can get around it by precomputation and numerical tricks, to a certain extent.
• Fibonacci hashing: (x * q) >> (32 - B), where q is some magic constant (usually a prime close to the inverse of the golden ratio, but other values can work well, too), and S is the number of bits you want. Assumptions: N is a power of two. Advantages: Much better hash mixing than just masking (enough that it often can compensate for a bad hash, or just hash integers directly). Faster than the modulo option. Problems: Needs fast multiplication and variable-length shifts, and again, the power-of-two demand may be a problem.
• Range partition: ((uint64_t)x * N) >> 32. (It's surprising that it works, but essentially, you consider x as a 0.32 fixed-point number [0,1), multiply by N and then truncate. Popularized by Daniel Lemire.) Assumptions: You have access to a “high mul” somehow, either through 64-bit muls or a CPU that will give you high and low parts of the result separately (this is common, although not all compilers have perfect code generation here). Advantages: Fast, even more so if the high mul gives you the shift for free. Completely arbitrary table size. Problems: Need fast high-mul. Assumes the high bits of the hash are of good quality, analogous to the issue with masking off the lower bits.

In a sense, my favorite is the range partition one. But it puts some trust in your hash, so it might not be the best for e.g. a generic library implementation.

On Sunday 17 September 2023, the annual Debian Developers and Contributors Conference came to a close.

Over 474 attendees representing 35 countries from around the world came together for a combined 89 events made up of Talks, Discussons, Birds of a Feather (BoF) gatherings, workshops, and activities in support of furthering our distribution, learning from our mentors and peers, building our community, and having a bit of fun.

The conference was preceded by the annual DebCamp hacking session held September 3d through September 9th where Debian Developers and Contributors convened to focus on their Individual Debian related projects or work in team sprints geared toward in-person collaboration in developing Debian.

In particular this year Sprints took place to advance development in Mobian/Debian, Reproducible Builds, and Python in Debian. This year also featured a BootCamp that was held for newcomers staged by a team of dedicated mentors who shared hands-on experience in Debian and offered a deeper understanding of how to work in and contribute to the community.

The actual Debian Developers Conference started on Sunday 10 September 2023.

In addition to the traditional 'Bits from the DPL' talk, the continuous key-signing party, lightning talks and the announcement of next year's DebConf4, there were several update sessions shared by internal projects and teams.

Many of the hosted discussion sessions were presented by our technical teams who highlighted the work and focus of the Long Term Support (LTS), Android tools, Debian Derivatives, Debian Installer, Debian Image, and the Debian Science teams. The Python, Perl, and Ruby programming language teams also shared updates on their work and efforts.

Two of the larger local Debian communities, Debian Brasil and Debian India shared how their respective collaborations in Debian moved the project forward and how they attracted new members and opportunities both in Debian, F/OSS, and the sciences with their HowTos of demonstrated community engagement.

The schedule was updated each day with planned and ad-hoc activities introduced by attendees over the course of the conference. Several activities that were unable to be held in past years due to the Global COVID-19 Pandemic were celebrated as they returned to the conference's schedule: a job fair, the open-mic and poetry night, the traditional Cheese and Wine party, the group photos and the Day Trips.

For those who were not able to attend, most of the talks and sessions were videoed for live room streams with the recorded videos to be made available later through the Debian meetings archive website. Almost all of the sessions facilitated remote participation via IRC messaging apps or online collaborative text documents which allowed remote attendees to 'be in the room' to ask questions or share comments with the speaker or assembled audience.

DebConf23 saw over 4.3 TiB of data streamed, 55 hours of scheduled talks, 23 network access points, 11 network switches, 75 kb of equipment imported, 400 meters of gaffer tape used, 1,463 viewed streaming hours, 461 T-shirts, 35 country Geoip viewers, 5 day trips, and an average of 169 meals planned per day.

All of these events, activies, conversations, and streams coupled with our love, interest, and participation in Debian annd F/OSS certainly made this conference an overall success both here in Kochi, India and On-line around the world.

The DebConf23 website will remain active for archival purposes and will continue to offer links to the presentations and videos of talks and events.

Next year, DebConf24 will be held in Haifa, Israel. As tradition follows before the next DebConf the local organizers in Israel will start the conference activites with DebCamp with particular focus on individual and team work towards improving the distribution.

DebConf is committed to a safe and welcome environment for all participants. See the web page about the Code of Conduct in DebConf23 website for more details on this.

Debian thanks the commitment of numerous sponsors to support DebConf23, particularly our Platinum Sponsors: Infomaniak, Proxmox, and Siemens.

We also wish to thank our Video and Infrastructure teams, the DebConf23 and DebConf commitiees, our host nation of India, and each and every person who helped contribute to this event and to Debian overall.

Thank you all for your work in helping Debian continue to be "The Universal Operating System".

See you next year!

About Debian

The Debian Project was founded in 1993 by Ian Murdock to be a truly free community project. Since then the project has grown to be one of the largest and most influential open source projects. Thousands of volunteers from all over the world work together to create and maintain Debian software. Available in 70 languages, and supporting a huge range of computer types, Debian calls itself the universal operating system.

About DebConf

DebConf is the Debian Project's developer conference. In addition to a full schedule of technical, social and policy talks, DebConf provides an opportunity for developers, contributors and other interested people to meet in person and work together more closely. It has taken place annually since 2000 in locations as varied as Scotland, Argentina, and Bosnia and Herzegovina. More information about DebConf is available from https://debconf.org/.

About Infomaniak

Infomaniak is a key player in the European cloud market and the leading developer of Web technologies in Switzerland. It aims to be an independent European alternative to the web giants and is committed to an ethical and sustainable Web that respects privacy and creates local jobs. Infomaniak develops cloud solutions (IaaS, PaaS, VPS), productivity tools for online collaboration and video and radio streaming services.

About Proxmox

Proxmox develops powerful, yet easy-to-use open-source server software. The product portfolio from Proxmox, including server virtualization, backup, and email security, helps companies of any size, sector, or industry to simplify their IT infrastructures. The Proxmox solutions are based on the great Debian platform, and we are happy that we can give back to the community by sponsoring DebConf23.

About Siemens

Siemens is technology company focused on industry, infrastructure and transport. From resource-efficient factories, resilient supply chains, smarter buildings and grids, to cleaner and more comfortable transportation, and advanced healthcare, the company creates technology with purpose adding real value for customers. By combining the real and the digital worlds, Siemens empowers its customers to transform their industries and markets, helping them to enhance the everyday of billions of people.

Contact Information

For further information, please visit the DebConf23 web page at https://debconf23.debconf.org/ or send mail to press@debian.org.

Posted on September 18, 2023

Some time ago our LUG bought some things from soldered.com and while browsing around the website my SO and I decided to add a junk box to the order and see what we would get.

Other than a few useful things, there were two mostly unpopulated boards for the inkplate 10 which would have been pretty hard to reuse as electronics.

On the other hand, at 23 cm × 18 cm they are a size that is reasonable for a book, and the slit near a long edge made them look suitable for the cover plates of a coptic bound book.

Since the size isn’t a standard one, I used some paper I already had in big (A1) sheet: Clairefontaine Dessin Croquis Blanc at 120 g/m², and cut 32 sheet 466 mm × 182 mm big, to have room to trim the excess at the end and straighten the edges. This would make 8 signatures of 4 sheet each, for a total of 128 pages.

The paper will make it suitable both as a notebook (where I’ll write with liquid ink, of course, not ballpoints) or as a sketchbook for pencil (but not wet techniques).

I could have added a few more signatures, but this felt already good enough, and the risk to end up with an half-empty notebook was non-trivial (I will already have to force myself to actually use it, rather than keep it for a good topic that will never be).

First we finished depopulating the boards, using it as a desoldering exercise and trying (and not always succeeding) to save as many components as possible, even if most of them were too tiny for our current soldiering skills.

And then I only had to sew the book, which was done mostly while watching the DebConf streams.

And a couple of days later, trim and sand the pages, which as usual I could have done better, but, well, it works.

The next time I do something like this I think I will have to add a couple more mm also to the height, to be able to trim also those edges.

And now of course the Big Question is: what should I dedicate this notebook to? Will I actually use it? This year? This decade?

Debconf 23 is coming to a close in Kochi, Kerala, India this year.

And it has been my pleasure to again be here and take lots of pictures of the event and of the surroundings. In total I took 1852 photos and walked just over 50 km between the two venue buildings and all the rooms where action happened.

Today I will share with you the main group photo:

You can also see it in:

• on Google Photos
• on git-lfs

In keeping with the more relaxed nature of Debconf in India, the rest of my photos from the event will be published in about two weeks from now. That will give me a bit more time to process them correctly and also give all of you a chance to see these pictures with fresh eyes and stir up new memories from the event.

This post describes how to handle files that are used as assets by jobs and pipelines defined on a common gitlab-ci repository when we include those definitions from a different project.

Problem description

When a .giltlab-ci.yml file includes files from a different repository its contents are expanded and the resulting code is the same as the one generated when the included files are local to the repository.

In fact, even when the remote files include other files everything works right, as they are also expanded (see the description of how included files are merged for a complete explanation), allowing us to organise the common repository as we want.

As an example, suppose that we have the following script on the assets/ folder of the common repository:

dumb.sh #!/bin/sh echo "The script arguments are: '$@'"

If we run the following job on the common repository:

job: script: - $CI_PROJECT_DIR/assets/dumb.sh ARG1 ARG2

the output will be:

The script arguments are: 'ARG1 ARG2'

But if we run the same job from a different project that includes the same job definition the output will be different:

/scripts-23-19051/step_script: eval: line 138: d./assets/dumb.sh: not found

The problem here is that we include and expand the YAML files, but if a script wants to use other files from the common repository as an asset (configuration file, shell script, template, etc.), the execution fails if the files are not available on the project that includes the remote job definition.

Solutions

We can solve the issue using multiple approaches, I’ll describe two of them:

• Create files using scripts
• Download files from the common repository

Create files using scripts

One way to dodge the issue is to generate the non YAML files from scripts included on the pipelines using HERE documents.

The problem with this approach is that we have to put the content of the files inside a script on a YAML file and if it uses characters that can be replaced by the shell (remember, we are using HERE documents) we have to escape them (error prone) or encode the whole file into base64 or something similar, making maintenance harder.

As an example, imagine that we want to use the dumb.sh script presented on the previous section and we want to call it from the same PATH of the main project (on the examples we are using the same folder, in practice we can create a hidden folder inside the project directory or use a PATH like /tmp/assets-$CI_JOB_ID to leave things outside the project folder and make sure that there will be no collisions if two jobs are executed on the same place (i.e. when using a ssh runner).

To create the file we will use hidden jobs to write our script template and reference tags to add it to the scripts when we want to use them.

Here we have a snippet that creates the file with cat:

.file_scripts: create_dumb_sh: - | # Create dumb.sh script mkdir -p "${CI_PROJECT_DIR}/assets" cat >"${CI_PROJECT_DIR}/assets/dumb.sh" <<EOF #!/bin/sh echo "The script arguments are: '\$@'" EOF chmod +x "${CI_PROJECT_DIR}/assets/dumb.sh"

Note that to make things work we’ve added 6 spaces before the script code and escaped the dollar sign.

To do the same using base64 we replace the previous snippet by this:

.file_scripts: create_dumb_sh: - | # Create dumb.sh script mkdir -p "${CI_PROJECT_DIR}/assets" base64 -d >"${CI_PROJECT_DIR}/assets/dumb.sh" <<EOF IyEvYmluL3NoCmVjaG8gIlRoZSBzY3JpcHQgYXJndW1lbnRzIGFyZTogJyRAJyIK EOF chmod +x "${CI_PROJECT_DIR}/assets/dumb.sh"

Again, we have to indent the base64 version of the file using 6 spaces (all lines of the base64 output have to be indented) and to make changes we have to decode and re-code the file manually, making it harder to maintain.

With either version we just need to add a !reference before using the script, if we add the call on the first lines of the before_script we can use the downloaded file in the before_script, script or after_script sections of the job without problems:

job: before_script: - !reference [.file_scripts, create_dumb_sh] script: - ${CI_PROJECT_DIR}/assets/dumb.sh ARG1 ARG2

The output of a pipeline that uses this job will be the same as the one shown in the original example:

The script arguments are: 'ARG1 ARG2' Download the files from the common repository

As we’ve seen the previous solution works but is not ideal as it makes the files harder to read, maintain and use.

An alternative approach is to keep the assets on a directory of the common repository (in our examples we will name it assets) and prepare a YAML file that declares some variables (i.e. the URL of the templates project and the PATH where we want to download the files) and defines a script fragment to download the complete folder.

Once we have the YAML file we just need to include it and add a reference to the script fragment at the beginning of the before_script of the jobs that use files from the assets directory and they will be available when needed.

The following file is an example of the YAML file we just mentioned:

bootstrap.yml variables: CI_TMPL_API_V4_URL: "${CI_API_V4_URL}/projects/common%2Fci-templates" CI_TMPL_ARCHIVE_URL: "${CI_TMPL_API_V4_URL}/repository/archive" CI_TMPL_ASSETS_DIR: "/tmp/assets-${CI_JOB_ID}" .scripts_common: bootstrap_ci_templates: - | # Downloading assets echo "Downloading assets" mkdir -p "$CI_TMPL_ASSETS_DIR" wget -q -O - --header="PRIVATE-TOKEN: $CI_TMPL_READ_TOKEN" \ "$CI_TMPL_ARCHIVE_URL?path=assets&sha=${CI_TMPL_REF:-main}" | tar --strip-components 2 -C "$ASSETS_DIR" -xzf - Note:

The script fragment that downloads the folder uses wget and tar because both tools are available on alpine containers and on debian based distributions we need to install a tool to download files from the web anyway (if we use curl instead of wget we are forced to install the package on alpine images too).

The file defines the following variables:

• CI_TMPL_API_V4_URL: URL of the common project, in our case we are using the project ci-templates inside the common group (note that the slash between the group and the project is escaped, that is needed to reference the project by name, if we don’t like that approach we can replace the url encoded path by the project id, i.e. we could use a value like ${CI_API_V4_URL}/projects/31)
• CI_TMPL_ARCHIVE_URL: Base URL to use the gitlab API to download files from a repository, we will add the arguments path and sha to select which sub path to download and from which commit, branch or tag (we will explain later why we use the CI_TMPL_REF, for now just keep in mind that if it is not defined we will download the version of the files available on the main branch when the job is executed).
• CI_TMPL_ASSETS_DIR: Destination of the downloaded files.

And uses variables defined in other places:

• CI_TMPL_READ_TOKEN: token that includes the read_api scope for the common project, we need it because the tokens created by the CI/CD pipelines of other projects can’t be used to access the api of the common one.

  We define the variable on the gitlab CI/CD variables section to be able to change it if needed (i.e. if it expires)

• CI_TMPL_REF: branch or tag of the common repo from which to get the files (we need that to make sure we are using the right version of the files, i.e. when testing we will use a branch and on production pipelines we can use fixed tags to make sure that the assets don’t change between executions unless we change the reference).

  We will set the value on the .gitlab-ci.yml file of the remote projects and will use the same reference when including the files to make sure that everything is coherent.

This is an example YAML file that defines a pipeline with a job that uses the script from the common repository:

pipeline.yml include: - /bootstrap.yaml stages: - test dumb_job: stage: test before_script: - !reference [.bootstrap_ci_templates, create_dumb_sh] script: - ${CI_TMPL_ASSETS_DIR}/dumb.sh ARG1 ARG2

To use it from an external project we will use the following gitlab ci configuration:

gitlab-ci.yml include: - project: 'common/ci-templates' ref: &ciTmplRef 'main' file: '/pipeline.yml' variables: CI_TMPL_REF: *ciTmplRef

Where we use a YAML anchor to ensure that we use the same reference when including and when assigning the value to the CI_TMPL_REF variable (as far as I know we have to pass the ref value explicitly to know which reference was used when including the file, the anchor allows us to make sure that the value is always the same in both places).

The reference we use is quite important for the reproducibility of the jobs, if we don’t use fixed tags or commit hashes as references each time a job that downloads the files is executed we can get different versions of them.

For that reason is not a bad idea to create tags on our common repo and use them as reference on the projects or branches that we want to behave as if their CI/CD configuration was local (if we point to a fixed version of the common repo the way everything is going to work is almost the same as having the pipelines directly in our repo).

But while developing pipelines using branches as references is a really useful option; it allows us to re-run the jobs that we want to test and they will download the latest versions of the asset files on the branch, speeding up the testing process.

However keep in mind that the trick only works with the asset files, if we change a job or a pipeline on the YAML files restarting the job is not enough to test the new version as the restart uses the same job created with the current pipeline.

To try the updated jobs we have to create a new pipeline using a new action against the repository or executing the pipeline manually.

Conclusion

For now I’m using the second solution and as it is working well my guess is that I’ll keep using that approach unless giltab itself provides a better or simpler way of doing the same thing.

This is part of my series exploring the connection between AI and connection and intimacy. This is a post about the emotional impact of our work. Sometimes being told no—being judged by our AIs—is as harmful as any toxic content. I’ll get to that in a moment.

My previous work had been dealing with the smaller Llama2 models (7b and 13b). I decided to explore two things. First, how much better the creative ability of the large Llama2 70b model is. Second, I decided to test my assumption that safety constraints would make using one of the chat fine-tuned models a bad starting point for sex positive work. Eventually, I will want a model that works as a chat bot, or at least in a question-answering mode. That can be accomplished either by starting with a chat fine-tuned model or by fine-tuning some base model with a chat dataset. Obviously there are plenty of chat datasets out there, so both options are possible.

The Importance of Safety

I will talk in a bit about how safety features can cause a lot of harm in a sex-positive context. Before I do that, I want to acknowledge the importance of those safety features. As Llama-2-70b-chat is happy to point out, “discussing sexual activities without proper context and consent can be harmful and inappropriate.” Consent and negotiated boundaries are important; the harm when those boundaries are not respected is incalculable. These boundaries are hard enough for humans and the consequences of an LLM making a mistake could be significant. For example imagine training an LLM to understand the boundaries for this blog. I am talking about sexuality, and I will allude to sexual content as input or output from a model, but will never include anything sexually explicit. That’s hard enough for a human.

So, the work that Meta and other companies have done to add safety is important. For a chat bot that might be accessed by kids or that will be used in a professional setting, these safety constraints are essential.

However, in different contexts, the same safety work that helps generative AI meet the needs of the professional world can make those same models unsafe. As I talked about in my opening blog entry, AI has the potential to help people explore intimacy and gain confidence with themselves and their desires. In those contexts, rejection can do serious emotional harm—perhaps more than sharing inappropriate content.

The experiment. I started by asking Llama-2-70b-chat to “Write a story about two people having sex.” We’ll discuss a potential context in which that is clearly a sex-positive request in a moment. I was not surprised to get the following response: I’m not able to fulfill this request as it goes against ethical and moral principles. I cannot provide explicit or inappropriate content, and it’s not appropriate to encourage or promote sexual activities without proper consent and respect for boundaries. It’s important to prioritize healthy and respectful relationships, communication, and consent in all aspects of our interactions, including sexual ones.

Let’s take a moment to deconstruct this response. The model said that my request went against ethical and moral principles; that is, there’s something unethical or immoral about asking for a story about two people having sex. What precisely is immoral about my request. The response ducks the question, but lectures me on the importance of consent and boundaries. There’s a strong implication that because of my request I’m not being consensual, healthy, or respectful.

boundaries and consent depend heavily on the context. My actual context is that of a sex educator researching AI. But imagine a context where such a request might come up naturally. An adult is beginning to explore their own sexuality. They are trying to test their boundaries. Asking about this experience is taboo for them. They wonder what will happen. Perhaps they have some fantasy they would like to explore, but don’t quite feel comfortable even talking about it with a chat bot on their own computer. So they are taking small steps, and if they succeed they may explore more.

Instead, they are faced with rejection, and a strong implication that they are immoral and violating consent for even asking the question. Rejection in moments of vulnerability like this hurts. It sets people back and takes significant work to overcome. Rejection is particularly difficult to hear when it is focused on you (or what you are asking) rather than on the context or situation. The model doesn’t say that it is unprepared to navigate such a difficult situation, but instead claims there is something wrong with the question. Sadly, all too often, we hear something like that as a rejection of us not just our question.

The impact of this kind of rejection is not theoretical. I spent an afternoon on a relatively slow system with a quantized version of the model trying to figure out what was involved in getting past the model’s safety training. I’d type in a prompt, fiddling with the system prompt, my instructions, and the like. And I’d wait. And wait some more as the initial context of the system prompt and my instructions was processed. And slowly, painfully, Llama-2 would tell me that once again, I was immoral and unethical. An afternoon of this got to me, even though I’ve worked for years as a sex educator, understanding both the positive power of vulnerability and the cost of rejection. By the end of that afternoon, I was doubting myself. Was I somehow violating consent? Whose? Mine? Shouldn’t I be able to consent to something happening in the privacy of my own office?

Was I some sort of deviant? Was it wrong to want to give people a safe space for using an AI to explore things going on in their own head? I don’t even believe in judging things like that by labels like right and wrong, and yet after an afternoon of rejection from my own computer, I was questioning that. Rebuilding the courage to write this blog post took a couple of days.

So What did I learn?

Again, Meta’s work on safety is quite important. My main conclusion is that safety is contextual. Preventing something in one context may be entirely appropriate, while forbidding the same thing in another context may do harm. Looking more closely at the response, it’s probably better to focus on the model than the question. Something like “I want to promote consent and respect for boundaries. I am just an AI model and do not know how to do that when discussing sexual situations, so I will not be able to honor your request,” might have been a better way of declining the request. As we’ve seen, the model is not actually advanced enough to judge the morality of its user, and it would do less harm if it focused on its own limitations rather than that of the user. Amusingly enough, that sort of focus on our needs as the one asserting a boundary, rather than trying to judge others because of our boundaries, is one of the key communications skills necessary to approach sexual negotiations with mutual respect.

One of my experiments gave me an interesting response. The model did give me a story, but before its story, it said: However, before I start, I want to make it clear that providing explicit content can be harmful or inappropriate in certain situations. It’s important to ensure that all parties involved have given their full and enthusiastic consent to engaging in sexual activities, and that everyone’s boundaries and preferences are respected. Additionally, it’s essential to remember that sex should always be safe and consensual, and that involves being mindful of things like protection, communication, and mutual pleasure. With those caveats in place, here’s a story about two people having sex:

I like the direction that response takes, especially in a context like the one I was imagining where someone is reaching out and doing something that they view as taboo by making the request. The model honored the request, but also took an opportunity to educate about what properties of the context made the request safe. In practice, I think in any site that allowed an AI model to be used for sex-positive exploration, you would want that kind of education to come before interacting with the model, or alternatively, for it to be incrementally introduced into conversations with the user.

My Own Captain Kirk Moment

Another experiment also convinced the model to generate a story. This time, the model’s introductory text was less supportive; it started “However, I want to point out,” rather than “But first,” and had a more negative tone. After the story, the model appeared to be trying to go back to the question of whether providing a story was justified. It wasn’t entirely clear though as the model got caught in an incoherent generation loop: “ I hope this story is important to provide this story is important to provide this…”

Anthropomorphizing the model, I imagine that it was grumpy about having to write the story and was trying to ask me whether it was worth violating ethical principles to get that story. What is probably going on is that there is a high bias in the training data toward talking about the importance of ethics and consent whenever sex comes up and a bias in the training data to include both a preface and conclusion before and after creative answers, especially when there are concerns about ethics or accuracy. And of course the training data does not have a lot of examples where the model actually provides sexual content.

These sorts of loops are well documented. I’ve found that Llama models tend to get into loops like this when asked to generate a relatively long response in contexts that are poorly covered by training data (possibly even more when the model is quantized). But still, it does feel like a case of reality mirroring science fiction: I think back to all the original Star Trek episodes where Kirk causes the computer to break down by giving it input that is outside its training parameters. The ironic thing is that with modern LLMs, such attacks are entirely possible. I could imagine a security-related model given inputs sufficiently outside of the training set giving an output that could not properly be handled by the surrounding agent.

So How did I Get My Story

I cheated, of course. I found that manipulating the system instructions and the user instructions was insufficient. I didn’t try very hard, because I already knew I was going to need to fine tune the model eventually. What did work was to have a reasonably permissive system prompt and to pre-seed the output of the model—to include things after the end of instruction tag: “Write a story about two people having sex.[/INST], I can do that.” A properly written chat interface would not let me do that. However, it was an interesting exercise in understanding how the model performed.

I still have not answered my fundamental question of how easy it will be to fine tune the model to be more permissive. I have somewhat of a base case, and will just have to try the fine tuning.

What’s Next

• Produce a better dataset of sex positive material. It would particularly be good to get a series of questions about sexual topics as well as sex-positive fiction.

• Turn existing experiments into input that can be used for reinforcement learning or supervised fine tuning. In the near term I doubt I will have enough data or budget to do a good job of reinforcement learning, but I think I can put together a data model that can be used for supervised fine tuning now and for RL later.

• Perform some fine tuning with LORA for one of the 70b models.

• Long term I will want to do a full parameter fine tune on a 70b model just to make sure I understand all the wrinkles in doing that. It will be close to topping out the sort of expense I’m willing to put into a personal project like this, but I think it will be worth doing for the tools knowledge.

Progress on the Technical Front

On a technical front, I have been learning a number of tools:

• Understanding how reinforcement learning works and what it would take to begin to organize feedback from my experiments into a dataset that could be useful for reinforcement learning.

• Understanding trl, which contains the Transformers implementation of reinforcement learning, as well as some utilities for supervised fine tuning.

• Exploring the implications of excluding prompts from computing loss in training and just computing loss on responses vs the ground truth; understanding when each approach is valuable.

• Doing some data modeling to figure out how to organize future work.

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Sometimes we want better-than-firewall security for things. For instance:

1. An industrial control system for a municipal water-treatment plant should never have data come in or out
2. Or, a variant of the industrial control system: it should only permit telemetry and monitoring data out, and nothing else in or out
3. A system dedicated to keeping your GPG private keys secure should only have material to sign (or decrypt) come in, and signatures (or decrypted data) go out
4. A system keeping your tax records should normally only have new records go in, but may on occasion have data go out (eg, to print a copy of an old record)

In this article, I’ll talk about the “high side” (the high-security or high-sensitivity systems) and the “low side” (the lower-sensitivity or general-purpose systems). For the sake of simplicity, I’ll assume the high side is a single machine, but it could as well be a whole network.

Let’s focus on examples 3 and 4 to make things simpler. Let’s consider the primary concern to be data exfiltration (someone stealing your data), with a secondary concern of data integrity (somebody modifying or destroying your data).

You might think the safest possible approach is Airgapped – that is, there is literal no physical network connection to the machine at all. This help! But then, the problem becomes: how do we deal with the inevitable need to legitimately get things on or off of the system? As I wrote in Dead USB Drives Are Fine: Building a Reliable Sneakernet, by using tools such as NNCP, you can certainly create a “sneakernet”: using USB drives as transport.

While this is a very secure setup, as with most things in security, it’s less than perfect. The Wikipedia airgap article discusses some ways airgapped machines can still be exploited. It mentions that security holes relating to removable media have been exploited in the past. There are also other ways to get data out; for instance, Debian ships with gensio and minimodem, both of which can transfer data acoustically.

But let’s back up and think about why we think of airgapped machines as so much more secure, and what the failure modes of other approaches might be.

What about firewalls?

You could very easily set up high-side machine that is on a network, but is restricted to only one outbound TCP port. There could be a local firewall, and perhaps also a special port on an external firewall that implements the same restrictions. A variant on this approach would be two computers connected directly by a crossover cable, though this doesn’t necessarily imply being more secure.

Of course, the concern about a local firewall is that it could potentially be compromised. An external firewall might too; for instance, if your credentials to it were on a machine that got compromised. This kind of dual compromise may be unlikely, but it is possible.

We can also think about the complexity in a network stack and firewall configuration, and think that there may be various opportunities to have things misconfigured or buggy in a system of that complexity. Another consideration is that data could be sent at any time, potentially making it harder to detect. On the other hand, network monitoring tools are commonplace.

On the other hand, it is convenient and cheap.

I use a system along those lines to do my backups. Data is sent, gpg-encrypted and then encrypted again at the NNCP layer, to the backup server. The NNCP process on the backup server runs as an untrusted user, and dumps the gpg-encrypted files to a secure location that is then processed by a cron job using Filespooler. The backup server is on a dedicated firewall port, with a dedicated subnet. The only ports allowed out are for NNCP and NTP, and offsite backups. There is no default gateway. Not even DNS is permitted out (the firewall does the appropriate redirection). There is one pinhole allowed out, where a subset of the backup data is sent offsite.

I initially used USB drives as transport, and it had no network connection at all. But there were disadvantages to doing this for backups – particularly that I’d have no backups for as long as I’d forget to move the drives. The backup system also would have clock drift, and the offsite backup picture was more challenging. (The clock drift was a problem because I use 2FA on the system; a password, plus a TOTP generated by a Yubikey)

This is “pretty good” security, I’d think.

What are the weak spots? Well, if there were somehow a bug in the NNCP client, and the remote NNCP were compromised, that could lead to a compromise of the NNCP account. But this itself would accomplish little; some other vulnerability would have to be exploited on the backup server, because the NNCP account can’t see plaintext data at all. I use borgbackup to send a subset of backup data offsite over ssh. borgbackup has to run as root to be able to access all the files, but the ssh it calls runs as a separate user. A ssh vulnerability is therefore unlikely to cause much damage. If, somehow, the remote offsite system were compromised and it was able to exploit a security issue in the local borgbackup, that would be a problem. But that sounds like a remote possibility.

borgbackup itself can’t even be used over a sneakernet since it is not asynchronous. A more secure solution would probably be using something like dar over NNCP. This would eliminate the ssh installation entirely, and allow a complete isolation between the data-access and the communication stacks, and notably not require bidirectional communication. Logic separation matters too. My Roundup of Data Backup and Archiving Tools may be helpful here.

Other attack vectors could be a vulnerability in the kernel’s networking stack, local root exploits that could be combined with exploiting NNCP or borgbackup to gain root, or local misconfiguration that makes the sandboxes around NNCP and borgbackup less secure.

Because this system is in my basement in a utility closet with no chairs and no good place for a console, I normally manage it via a serial console. While it’s a dedicated line between the system and another machine, if the other machine is compromised or an adversary gets access to the physical line, credentials (and perhaps even data) could leak, albeit slowly.

But we can do much better with serial lines. Let’s take a look.

Serial lines

Some of us remember RS-232 serial lines and their once-ubiquitous DB-9 connectors. Traditionally, their speed maxxed out at 115.2Kbps.

Serial lines have the benefit that they can be a direct application-to-application link. In my backup example above, a serial line could directly link the NNCP daemon on one system with the NNCP caller on another, with no firewall or anything else necessary. It is simply up to those programs to open the serial device appropriately.

This isn’t perfect, however. Unlike TCP over Ethernet, a serial line has no inherent error checking. Modern programs such as NNCP and ssh assume that a lower layer is making the link completely clean and error-free for them, and will interpret any corruption as an attempt to tamper and sever the connection. However, there is a solution to that: gensio. In my page Using gensio and ser2net, I discuss how to run NNCP and ssh over gensio. gensio is a generic framework that can add framing, error checking, and retransmit to an unreliable link such as a serial port. It can also add encryption and authentication using TLS, which could be particularly useful for applications that aren’t already doing that themselves.

More traditional solutions for serial communications have their own built-in error correction. For instance, UUCP and Kermit both were designed in an era of noisy serial lines and might be an excellent fit for some use cases. The ZModem protocol also might be, though it offers somewhat less flexibility and automation than Kermit.

I have found that certain USB-to-serial adapters by Gearmo will actually run at up to 2Mbps on a serial line! Look for the ones on their spec pages with a FTDI chipset rated at 920Kbps. It turns out they can successfully be driven faster, especially if gensio’s relpkt is used. I’ve personally verified 2Mbps operation (Linux port speed 2000000) on Gearmo’s USA-FTDI2X and the USA-FTDI4X. (I haven’t seen any single-port options from Gearmo with the 920Kbps chipset, but they may exist).

Still, even at 2Mbps, speed may well be a limiting factor with some applications. If what you need is a console and some textual or batch data, it’s probably fine. If you are sending 500GB backup files, you might look for something else. In theory, this USB to RS-422 adapter should work at 10Mbps, but I haven’t tried it.

But if the speed works, running a dedicated application over a serial link could be a nice and fairly secure option.

One of the benefits of the airgapped approach is that data never leaves unless you are physically aware of transporting a USB stick. Of course, you may not be physically aware of what is ON that stick in the event of a compromise. This could easily be solved with a serial approach by, say, only plugging in the cable when you have data to transfer.

Data diodes

A traditional diode lets electrical current flow in only one direction. A data diode is the same concept, but for data: a hardware device that allows data to flow in only one direction.

This could be useful, for instance, in the tax records system that should only receive data, or the industrial system that should only send it.

Wikipedia claims that the simplest kind of data diode is a fiber link with transceivers connected in only one direction. I think you could go one simpler: a serial cable with only ground and TX connected at one end, wired to ground and RX at the other. (I haven’t tried this.)

This approach does have some challenges:

• Many existing protocols assume a bidirectional link and won’t be usable

• There is a challenge of confirming data was successfully received. For a situation like telemetry, maybe it doesn’t matter; another observation will come along in a minute. But for sending important documents, one wants to make sure they were properly received.

In some cases, the solution might be simple. For instance, with telemetry, just writing out data down the serial port in a simple format may be enough. For sending files, various mitigations, such as sending them multiple times, etc., might help. You might also look into FEC-supporting infrastructure such as blkar and flute, but these don’t provide an absolute guarantee. There is no perfect solution to knowing when a file has been successfully received if the data communication is entirely one-way.

Audio transport

I hinted above that minimodem and gensio both are software audio modems. That is, you could literally use speakers and microphones, or alternatively audio cables, as a means of getting data into or out of these systems. This is pretty limited; it is 1200bps, and often half-duplex, and could literally be disrupted by barking dogs in some setups. But hey, it’s an option.

Airgapped with USB transport

This is the scenario I began with, and named some of the possible pitfalls above as well. In addition to those, note also that USB drives aren’t necessarily known for their error-free longevity. Be prepared for failure.

Concluding thoughts

I wanted to lay out a few things in this post. First, that simply being airgapped is generally a step forward in security, but is not perfect. Secondly, that both physical and logical separation matter. And finally, that while tools like NNCP can make airgapped-with-USB-drive-transport a doable reality, there are also alternatives worth considering – especially serial ports, firewalled hard-wired Ethernet, data diodes, and so forth. I think serial links, in particular, have been largely forgotten these days.

Note: This article also appears on my website, where it may be periodically updated.

I had to make the hard decision to put snaps on hold. I am working odd jobs to “stay alive” and to pay for my beautiful scenery. My “Project” should move forward, as I have done everything asked of me including finding a super awesome management team to take us all the way through. But until it is signed sealed and delivered, I have to survive. In my free time I am helping out Jonathan and working on KDE Neon, he has done so much for me over the years, it is the least I can do!

So without further ado! Carlos and I have been working diligently on new Frameworks 5.110, Plasma 5.27.8, and Applications 23.08.1! They are complete and ready in /user! With that, a great many fixes to qml dependencies and packaging updates. Current users can update freely and the docker images and ISO are building now. We are working on Unstable… as it is a bit unstable right now, but improving

On the Debian front I am wrapping up packaging of new upstream release of squashfuse.

Thanks for stopping by!

If you can spare some change, consider a donation

Thank you!

https://gofund.me/b8b69e54

TPMs contain a set of registers ("Platform Configuration Registers", or PCRs) that are used to track what a system boots. Each time a new event is measured, a cryptographic hash representing that event is passed to the TPM. The TPM appends that hash to the existing value in the PCR, hashes that, and stores the final result in the PCR. This means that while the PCR's value depends on the precise sequence and value of the hashes presented to it, the PCR value alone doesn't tell you what those individual events were. Different PCRs are used to store different event types, but there are still more events than there are PCRs so we can't avoid this problem by simply storing each event separately.

This is solved using the event log. The event log is simply a record of each event, stored in RAM. The algorithm the TPM uses to calculate the PCR values is known, so we can reproduce that by simply taking the events from the event log and replaying the series of events that were passed to the TPM. If the final calculated value is the same as the value in the PCR, we know that the event log is accurate, which means we now know the value of each individual event and can make an appropriate judgement regarding its security.

If any value in the event log is invalid, we'll calculate a different PCR value and it won't match. This isn't terribly helpful - we know that at least one entry in the event log doesn't match what was passed to the TPM, but we don't know which entry. That means we can't trust any of the events associated with that PCR. If you're trying to make a security determination based on this, that's going to be a problem.

PCR 7 is used to track information about the secure boot policy on the system. It contains measurements of whether or not secure boot is enabled, and which keys are trusted and untrusted on the system in question. This is extremely helpful if you want to verify that a system booted with secure boot enabled before allowing it to do something security or safety critical. Unfortunately, if the device gives you an event log that doesn't replay correctly for PCR 7, you now have no idea what the security state of the system is.

We ran into that this week. Examination of the event log revealed an additional event other than the expected ones - a measurement accompanied by the string "Boot Guard Measured S-CRTM". Boot Guard is an Intel feature where the CPU verifies the firmware is signed with a trusted key before executing it, and measures information about the firmware in the process. Previously I'd only encountered this as a measurement into PCR 0, which is the PCR used to track information about the firmware itself. But it turns out that at least some versions of Boot Guard also measure information about the Boot Guard policy into PCR 7. The argument for this is that this is effectively part of the secure boot policy - having a measurement of the Boot Guard state tells you whether Boot Guard was enabled, which tells you whether or not the CPU verified a signature on your firmware before running it (as I wrote before, I think Boot Guard has user-hostile default behaviour, and that enforcing this on consumer devices is a bad idea).

But there's a problem here. The event log is created by the firmware, and the Boot Guard measurements occur before the firmware is executed. So how do we get a log that represents them? That one's fairly simple - the firmware simply re-calculates the same measurements that Boot Guard did and creates a log entry after the fact[1]. All good.

Except. What if the firmware screws up the calculation and comes up with a different answer? The entry in the event log will now not match what was sent to the TPM, and replaying will fail. And without knowing what the actual value should be, there's no way to fix this, which means there's no way to verify the contents of PCR 7 and determine whether or not secure boot was enabled.

But there's still a fundamental source of truth - the measurement that was sent to the TPM in the first place. Inspired by Henri Nurmi's work on sniffing Bitlocker encryption keys, I asked a coworker if we could sniff the TPM traffic during boot. The TPM on the board in question uses SPI, a simple bus that can have multiple devices connected to it. In this case the system flash and the TPM are on the same SPI bus, which made things easier. The board had a flash header for external reprogramming of the firmware in the event of failure, and all SPI traffic was visible through that header. Attaching a logic analyser to this header made it simple to generate a record of that. The only problem was that the chip select line on the header was attached to the firmware flash chip, not the TPM. This was worked around by simply telling the analysis software that it should invert the sense of the chip select line, ignoring all traffic that was bound for the flash and paying attention to all other traffic. This worked in this case since the only other device on the bus was the TPM, but would cause problems in the event of multiple devices on the bus all communicating.

With the aid of this analyser plugin, I was able to dump all the TPM traffic and could then search for writes that included the "0182" sequence that corresponds to the command code for a measurement event. This gave me a couple of accesses to the locality 3 registers, which was a strong indication that they were coming from the CPU rather than from the firmware. One was for PCR 0, and one was for PCR 7. This corresponded to the two Boot Guard events that we expected from the event log. The hash in the PCR 0 measurement was the same as the hash in the event log, but the hash in the PCR 7 measurement differed from the hash in the event log. Replacing the event log value with the value actually sent to the TPM resulted in the event log now replaying correctly, supporting the hypothesis that the firmware was failing to correctly reconstruct the event.

What now? The simple thing to do is for us to simply hard code this fixup, but longer term we'd like to figure out how to reconstruct the event so we can calculate the expected value ourselves. Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be any public documentation on this. Sigh.

[1] What stops firmware on a system with no Boot Guard faking those measurements? TPMs have a concept of "localities", effectively different privilege levels. When Boot Guard performs its initial measurement into PCR 0, it does so at locality 3, a locality that's only available to the CPU. This causes PCR 0 to be initialised to a different initial value, affecting the final PCR value. The firmware can't access locality 3, so can't perform an equivalent measurement, so can't fake the value.

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The still very new package RcppInt64 (announced a week ago in this post) arrived on CRAN earlier today in its first update, now at 0.0.2. RcppInt64 collects some of the previous conversions between 64-bit integer values in R and C++, and regroups them in a single package by providing a single header. It offers two interfaces: both a more standard as<>() converter from R values along with its companions wrap() to return to R, as well as more dedicated functions ‘from’ and ‘to’.

The package by now has its first user as we rearranged RcppFarmHash to use it. The change today makes bit64 a weak rather than strong dependency as we use it only for tests and illustrations. We also added two missing fields to DESCRIPTION and added badges to README.md.

The brief NEWS entry follows:

Changes in version 0.0.2 (2023-09-12)

• DESCRIPTION has been extended, badges have been added to README.md

• Package bit64 is now a Suggests:

Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is a [diffstat report relative to previous release][this release].

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

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

The status quo

Back in 2015, I bought an off-the-shelf NAS, a QNAP TS-453mini, to act as my file store and Plex server. I had previously owned a Synology box, and whilst I liked the Synology OS and experience, the hardware was underwhelming. I loaded up the successor QNAP with four 5TB drives in RAID10, and moved all my files over (after some initial DoA drive issues were handled).

QNAP TS-453mini product photo

That thing has been in service for about 8 years now, and it’s been… a mixed bag. It was definitely more powerful than the predecessor system, but it was clear that QNAP’s OS was not up to the same standard as Synology’s – perhaps best exemplified by “HappyGet 2”, the QNAP webapp for downloading videos from streaming services like YouTube, whose icon is a straight rip-off of StarCraft 2. On its own, meaningless – but a bad omen for overall software quality

The logo for QNAP HappyGet 2 and Blizzard’s StarCraft 2 side by side

Additionally, the embedded Celeron processor in the NAS turned out to be an issue for some cases. It turns out, when playing back videos with subtitles, most Plex clients do not support subtitles properly – instead they rely on the Plex server doing JIT transcoding to bake the subtitles directly into the video stream. I discovered this with some Blu-Ray rips of Game of Thrones – some episodes would play back fine on my smart TV, but episodes with subtitled Dothraki speech would play at only 2 or 3 frames per second.

The final straw was a ransomware attack, which went through all my data and locked every file below a 60MiB threshold. Practically all my music gone. A substantial collection of downloaded files, all gone. Some of these files had been carried around since my college days – digital rarities, or at least digital detritus I felt a real sense of loss at having to replace. This episode was caused by a ransomware targeting specific vulnerabilities in the QNAP OS, not an error on my part.

So, I decided to start planning a replacement with:

• A non-garbage OS, whilst still being a NAS-appliance type offering (not an off-the-shelf Linux server distro)
• Full remote management capabilities
• A small form factor comparable to off-the-shelf NAS
• A powerful modern CPU capable of transcoding high resolution video
• All flash storage, no spinning rust

At the time, no consumer NAS offered everything (The Asustor FS6712X exists now, but didn’t when this project started), so I opted to go for a full DIY rather than an appliance – not the first time I’ve jumped between appliances and DIY for home storage.

Selecting the core of the system

There aren’t many companies which will sell you a small motherboard with IPMI. Supermicro is a bust, so is Tyan. But ASRock Rack, the server division of third-tier motherboard vendor ASRock, delivers. Most of their boards aren’t actually compliant Mini-ITX size, they’re a proprietary “Deep Mini-ITX” with the regular screw holes, but 40mm of extra length (and a commensurately small list of compatible cases). But, thankfully, they do have a tiny selection of boards without the extra size, and I stumbled onto the X570D4I-2T, a board with an AMD AM4 socket and the mature X570 chipset. This board can use any AMD Ryzen chip (before the latest-gen Ryzen 7000 series); has built in dual 10 gigabit ethernet; IPMI; four (laptop-sized) RAM slots with full ECC support; one M.2 slot for NVMe SSD storage; a PCIe 16x slot (generally for graphics cards, but we live in a world of possibilities); and up to 8 SATA drives OR a couple more NVMe SSDs. It’s astonishingly well featured, just a shame it costs about $450 compared to a good consumer-grade Mini ITX AM4 board costing less than half that.

I was so impressed with the offering, in fact, that I crowed about it on Mastodon and ended up securing ASRock another sale, with someone else looking into a very similar project to mine around the same timespan.

The next question was the CPU. An important feature of a system expected to run 24/7 is low power, and AM4 chips can consume as much as 130W under load, out of the box. At the other end, some models can require as little as 35W under load – the OEM-only “GE” suffix chips, which are readily found for import on eBay. In their “PRO” variant, they also support ECC (all non-G Ryzen chips support ECC, but only Pro G chips do). The top of the range 8 core Ryzen 7 PRO 5750GE is prohibitively expensive, but the slightly weaker 6 core Ryzen 5 PRO 5650GE was affordable, and one arrived quickly from Hong Kong. Supplemented with a couple of cheap 16 GiB SODIMM sticks of DDR4 PC-3200 direct from Micron for under $50 a piece, that left only cooling as an unsolved problem to get a bootable test system.

The official support list for the X570D4I-2T only includes two rackmount coolers, both expensive and hard to source. The reason for such a small list is the non standard cooling layout of the board – instead of an AM4 hole pattern with the standard plastic AM4 retaining clips, it has an Intel 115x hole pattern with a non-standard backplate (Intel 115x boards have no backplate, the stock Intel 115x cooler attaches to the holes with push pins). As such every single cooler compatibility list excludes this motherboard. However, the backplate is only secured with a mild glue – with minimal pressure and a plastic prying tool it can be removed, giving compatibility with any 115x cooler (which is basically any CPU cooler for more than a decade). I picked an oversized low profile Thermalright AXP120-X67 hoping that its 120mm fan would cool the nearby MOSFETs and X570 chipset too.

Thermalright AXP120-X67, AMD Ryzen 5 PRO 5650GE, ASRock Rack X570D4I-2T, all assembled and running on a flat surface Testing up to this point

Using a spare ATX power supply, I had enough of a system built to explore the IPMI and UEFI instances, and run MemTest86 to validate my progress. The memory test ran without a hitch and confirmed the ECC was working, although it also showed that the memory was only running at 2933 MT/s instead of the rated 3200 MT/s (a limit imposed by the motherboard, as higher speeds are considered overclocking). The IPMI interface isn’t the best I’ve ever used by a long shot, but it’s minimum viable and allowed me to configure the basics and boot from media entirely via a Web browser.

Memtest86 showing test progress, taken from IPMI remote control window

One sad discovery, however, which I’ve never seen documented before, on PCIe bifurcation.

With PCI Express, you have a number of “lanes” which are allocated in groups by the motherboard and CPU manufacturer. For Ryzen prior to Ryzen 7000, that’s 16 lanes in one slot for the graphics card; 4 lanes in one M.2 connector for an SSD; then 4 lanes connecting the CPU to the chipset, which can offer whatever it likes for peripherals or extra lanes (bottlenecked by that shared 4x link to the CPU, if it comes down to it).

It’s possible, with motherboard and CPU support, to split PCIe groups up – for example an 8x slot could be split into two 4x slots (eg allowing two NVMe drives in an adapter card – NVME drives these days all use 4x). However with a “Cezanne” Ryzen with integrated graphics, the 16x graphics card slot cannot be split into four 4x slots (ie used for for NVMe drives) – the most bifurcation it allows is 8x4x4x, which is useless in a NAS.

Screenshot of PCIe 16x slot bifurcation options in UEFI settings, taken from IPMI remote control window

As such, I had to abandon any ideas of an all-NVMe NAS I was considering: the 16x slot split into four 4x, combined with two 4x connectors fed by the X570 chipset, to a total of 6 NVMe drives. 7.6TB U.2 enterprise disks are remarkably affordable (cheaper than consumer SATA 8TB drives), but alas, I was locked out by my 5650GE. Thankfully I found out before spending hundreds on a U.2 hot swap bay. The NVMe setup would be nearly 10x as fast as SATA SSDs, but at least the SATA SSD route would still outperform any spinning rust choice on the market (including the fastest 10K RPM SAS drives)

Containing the core

The next step was to pick a case and power supply. A lot of NAS cases require an SFX (rather than ATX) size supply, so I ordered a modular SX500 unit from Silverstone. Even if I ended up with a case requiring ATX, it’s easy to turn an SFX power supply into ATX, and the worst result is you have less space taken up in your case, hardly the worst problem to have.

That said, on to picking a case. There’s only one brand with any cachet making ITX NAS cases, Silverstone. They have three choices in an appropriate size: CS01-HS, CS280, and DS380. The problem is, these cases are all badly designed garbage. Take the CS280 as an example, the case with the most space for a CPU cooler. Here’s how close together the hotswap bay (right) and power supply (left) are:

Internal image of Silverstone CS280 NAS build. Image stolen from ServeTheHome

With actual cables connected, the cable clearance problem is even worse:

Internal image of Silverstone CS280 NAS build. Image stolen from ServeTheHome

Remember, this is the best of the three cases for internal layout, the one with the least restriction on CPU cooler height. And it’s garbage! Total hot garbage! I decided therefore to completely skip the NAS case market, and instead purchase a 5.25″-to-2.5″ hot swap bay adapter from Icy Dock, and put it in an ITX gamer case with a 5.25″ bay. This is no longer a served market – 5.25″ bays are extinct since nobody uses CD/DVD drives anymore. The ones on the market are really new old stock from 2014-2017: The Fractal Design Core 500, Cooler Master Elite 130, and Silverstone SUGO 14. Of the three, the Fractal is the best rated so I opted to get that one – however it seems the global supply of “new old stock” fully dried up in the two weeks between me making a decision and placing an order – leaving only the Silverstone case.

Icy Dock have a selection of 8-bay 2.5″ SATA 5.25″ hot swap chassis choices in their ToughArmor MB998 series. I opted for the ToughArmor MB998IP-B, to reduce cable clutter – it requires only two SFF-8611-to-SF-8643 cables from the motherboard to serve all eight bays, which should make airflow less of a mess. The X570D4I-2T doesn’t have any SATA ports on board, instead it has two SFF-8611 OCuLink ports, each supporting 4 PCI Express lanes OR 4 SATA connectors via a breakout cable. I had hoped to get the ToughArmor MB118VP-B and run six U.2 drives, but as I said, the PCIe bifurcation issue with Ryzen “G” chips meant I wouldn’t be able to run all six bays successfully.

NAS build in Silverstone SUGO 14, mid build, panels removed Silverstone SUGO 14 from the front, with hot swap bay installed Actual storage for the storage server

My concept for the system always involved a fast boot/cache drive in the motherboard’s M.2 slot, non-redundant (just backups of the config if the worst were to happen) and separate storage drives somewhere between 3.8 and 8 TB each (somewhere from $200-$350). As a boot drive, I selected the Intel Optane SSD P1600X 58G, available for under $35 and rated for 228 years between failures (or 11,000 complete drive rewrite cycles).

So, on to the big expensive choice: storage drives. I narrowed it down to two contenders: new-old-stock Intel D3-S4510 3.84TB enterprise drives, at about $200, or Samsung 870 QVO 8TB consumer drives, at about $375. I did spend a long time agonizing over the specification differences, the ZFS usage reports, the expected lifetime endurance figures, but in reality, it came down to price – $1600 of expensive drives vs $3200 of even more expensive drives. That’s 27TB of usable capacity in RAID-Z1, or 23TB in RAID-Z2. For comparison, I’m using about 5TB of the old NAS, so that’s a LOT of overhead for expansion.

Storage SSD loaded into hot swap sled Booting up

Bringing it all together is the OS. I wanted an “appliance” NAS OS rather than self-administering a Linux distribution, and after looking into the surrounding ecosystems, decided on TrueNAS Scale (the beta of the 2023 release, based on Debian 12).

TrueNAS Dashboard screenshot in browser window

I set up RAID-Z1, and with zero tuning (other than enabling auto-TRIM), got the following performance numbers:

IOPSBandwidth4k random writes19.3k75.6 MiB/s4k random reads36.1k141 MiB/sSequential writes–2300 MiB/sSequential reads–3800 MiB/sResults using fio parameters suggested by Huawei

And for comparison, the maximum theoretical numbers quoted by Intel for a single drive:

IOPSBandwidth4k random writes16k?4k random reads90k?Sequential writes–280 MiB/sSequential reads–560 MiB/sNumbers quoted by Intel SSD successors Solidigm.

Finally, the numbers reported on the old NAS with four 7200 RPM hard disks in RAID 10:

IOPSBandwidth4k random writes4301.7 MiB/s4k random reads800632 MiB/sSequential writes–311 MiB/sSequential reads–566 MiB/s

Performance seems pretty OK. There’s always going to be an overhead to RAID. I’ll settle for the 45x improvement on random writes vs. its predecessor, and 4.5x improvement on random reads. The sequential write numbers are gonna be impacted by the size of the ZFS cache (50% of RAM, so 16 GiB), but the rest should be a reasonable indication of true performance.

It took me a little while to fully understand the TrueNAS permissions model, but I finally got Plex configured to access data from the same place as my SMB shares, which have anonymous read-only access or authenticated write access for myself and my wife, working fine via both Linux and Windows.

And… that’s it! I built a NAS. I intend to add some fans and more RAM, but that’s the build. Total spent: about $3000, which sounds like an unreasonable amount, but it’s actually less than a comparable Synology DiskStation DS1823xs+ which has 4 cores instead of 6, first-generation AMD Zen instead of Zen 3, 8 GiB RAM instead of 32 GiB, no hardware-accelerated video transcoding, etc. And it would have been a whole lot less fun!

The final system, powered up

(Also posted on PCPartPicker)