RAII: Tragedy in three acts

• In English — mina86.com
• —
• 13:13, Saturday, 01 April 2023

In a recent Computerphile video, Ian Knight talked about RAII idiom and it’s application in C++ and Rust. While the video described the general concepts, I felt different examples could be more clearly convey essence of the topic.

I’ve decided to give my own explanation to hopefully better illustrate what RAII is and how it relates to Rust’s ownership. Then again, for whatever reason I’ve decided to write it as a play with dialogue in faux Old English so it may very well be even more confusing instead.

double read_double(FILE *fd) {
	char *buffer = malloc(1024);       /* allocate temporary buffer */
	fgets(buffer, 1024, fd);           /* read first line of the file */
	return atof(buffer);               /* parse and return the number */
}

double read_double(FILE *fd) {
	char *buffer = malloc(1024);       /* allocate temporary buffer */
	fgets(buffer, 1024, fd);           /* read first line of the file */
	double result = atoi(buffer);      /* parse the line */
	free(buffer);                      /* free the temporary buffer */
	return result;                     /* return parsed number */
}

double read_double(const char *path) {
	FILE *fd = fopen(path, "r");       /* open file */
	char *buffer = malloc(1024);
	fgets(buffer, 1024, fd);
	double result = atof(buffer);
	free(buffer);
	return result;
}

double read_double(const char *path) {
	FILE *fd = fopen(path, "r");       /* open file */
	char *buffer = malloc(1024);
	fgets(buffer, 1024, fd);
	fclose(fd);                        /* close the file */
	double result = atof(buffer);
	free(buffer);
	return result;
}

double update_sum_from_file(mtx_t *lock,
                            double *sum,
                            const char *path)  {
	double value = read_double(path);  /* read next number from file */
	mtx_lock(lock);                    /* reserve access to `sum` */
	value += sum->value;               /* calculate sum */
	sum->value = value;                /* update the sum */
	return value;                      /* return new sum */
}

double update_sum_from_file(mtx_t *lock,
                            double *sum,
                            const char *path)  {
	double value = read_double(path);  /* read next number from file */
	mtx_lock(lock);                    /* reserve access to `sum` */
	value += *sum;                     /* calculate sum */
	*sum = value;                      /* update the sum */
	mtx_unlock(lock);                  /* release `sum` */
	return value;                      /* return new sum */
}

double read_double(const char *path) {
	std::fstream file{path};           /* open file */
	double result;                     /* declare variable to hold result */
	file >> result;                    /* read the number */
	return result;                     /* return the result */
}

double update_sum_from_file(std::mutex &lock,
                            double *sum,
                            const char *path)  {
	double value = read_double(path);  /* read next number from file */
	std::lock_guard<std::mutex> lock{mutex}; /* reserve access to `sum` */
	value += *sum;                     /* calculate sum */
	*sum = value;                      /* update the sum */
	return value;                      /* return new sum */
}

template<class T>
struct nptr {
	nptr(T *ptr) : ptr(ptr) {}         /* take ownership of the memory */
	~nptr() { delete ptr; }            /* free memory when destructed */
	T *operator->() { return ptr; }
	T &operator*() { return *ptr; }
private:
	T *ptr;
};

std::optional<double> try_read_double(nptr<std::istream> file) {
	double result;
	return *file >> result ? std::optional{result} : std::nullopt;
}

double sum_doubles(const char *path) {
	nptr<std::istream> file{new std::fstream{path}};
	std::optional<double> number;
	double result = 0.0;
	while ((number = try_read_double(file))) {
		result += *number;
	}
	return result;
}

std::optional<double> try_read_double(std::unique_ptr<std::istream> file) {
	double result;
	return *file >> result ? std::optional{result} : std::nullopt;
}

double sum_doubles(const char *path) {
	auto file = std::make_unique<std::fstream>(path);
	std::optional<double> number;
	double result = 0.0;
	while ((number = try_read_double(file))) {  /* compile error */
		result += *number;
	}
	return result;
}

fn try_read_double(rd: Box<dyn std::io::Read>) -> Option<f64> {
	todo!()
}

fn sum_doubles(path: &std::path::Path) -> f64 {
	let file = std::fs::File::open(path).unwrap();
	let file: Box<dyn std::io::Read> = Box::new(file);
	let mut result = 0.0;
	while let Some(number) = try_read_double(file) {
		result += number;
	}
	result
}

error[E0382]: use of moved value: `file`

    let file: Box<dyn std::io::Read> = Box::new(file);
        ---- move occurs because `file` has type `Box<dyn std::io::Read>`,
             which does not implement the `Copy` trait
    let mut result = 0.0;
    while let Some(number) = try_read_double(file) {
                                             ^^^^ value moved here, in previous
                                                  iteration of loop

fn try_read_double(rd: &dyn std::io::Read) -> Option<f64> {
	todo!()
}

fn sum_doubles(path: &std::path::Path) -> f64 {
	let file = std::fs::File::open(path).unwrap();
	let file: Box<dyn std::io::Read> = Box::new(file);
	let mut result = 0.0;
	while let Some(number) = try_read_double(&*file) {
		result += number;
	}
	result
}

struct Folder<T, F>(T, F);

impl<T, F: for <'a, 'b> Fn(&'a mut T, &'b T)> Folder<T, F> {
    fn push(&mut self, element: &T) {
        (self.1)(&mut self.0, element)
    }
}

Aforeword

A thing to keep in mind is that the examples are somewhat contrived. For example, the buffer and file object present in read_double function can easily live on the stack. A real-life code wouldn’t bother allocating them on the heap. Then again, I could see a beginner make a mistake of trying to bypass std::unique_ptr not having a copy constructor by creating objects on heap and passing pointers around.

In the end, is this better explanation than the one in aforementioned Computerphile video? I’d argue code examples represent discussed concepts better though to be honest form of presentation hinders clarity of explanation. Yet, I had too much fun messing around with this post so here it is in this form.

Lastly, I don’t know Old English so the dialogue is probably incorrect. I’m happy to accept corrections but otherwise I don’t care that much. One shouldn’t take this post too seriously.

Configuring algorithms in Modern C++

• Posts on Hannes Hauswedell
• —
• 22:00, Thursday, 30 March 2023

When designing library code, one often wonders: “Are these all the parameters this function will ever need?” and “How can a user conveniently change one parameter without specifying the rest?” This post introduces some Modern C++ techniques you can use to make passing configuration options easy for your users while allowing you to add more options later on.

Prerequisites

Most people who have programmed in C++ before should have no problems understanding this article, although you will likely appreciate it more, if you are a library developer or have worried about the forward-compatibility of your code.

Some of the features introduced in this post do not yet work with Clang. Most should work with MSVC, but I only double-checked the code with GCC12 (any version >= 10 should work).

Motivation

Let’s say you are writing an algorithm with the following signature:

auto algo(auto data, size_t threads = 4ull);

It takes some kind of data input, does lots of magic computation on it and returns some other data. An actual algorithm should of course clearly state what kind of input data it expects (specific type or constrained template parameter), but we want to focus on the other parameters in this post. The only configuration option that you want to expose is the number of threads it shall use. It defaults to 4, because you know that the algorithm scales well at four threads and also you assume that most of your users have at least four cores on their system.

Now, a bit later, you have added an optimisation to the algorithm called heuristic42. It improves the results in almost all cases, but there are a few corner cases where users might want to switch it off. The interface now looks like this:

auto algo(auto data, size_t threads = 4ull, bool heuristic42 = true);

This is not too bad, you might think, but there are already two ugly things about this:

1. To overwrite the second “config option”, the user needs to also specify the first, i.e. algo("data", 4, false);. This means that they need to look up (and enter correctly) the first config option’s default value. Also, if you change that default in a future release of the code, this change will not be reflected in the user’s invocation who unknowingly enforces the old default.
2. Since passing arguments to the function does not involve the parameter’s name, it is very easy to confuse the order of the parameters. Implicit conversions make this problem even worse, so invoking the above interface with algo("data", false, 4); instead of algo("data", 4, false); generates no warning, even with -Wall -Wextra -pedantic!

Wow, what a usability nightmare, and we only have two config options! Imagine adding a few more…

Dedicated config object

As previously mentioned, the parameter name cannot be used when passing arguments. However, C++20 did add designated initialisers for certain class types. So you can use the name of a member variable when initialising an object. We can use that!

struct algo_config
{
    bool heuristic42 = true;
    size_t threads   = 4ull;
};

auto algo(auto data, algo_config const & cfg)
{
    /* implementation */
}

int main()
{
    /* create the config object beforehand (e.g. after argument parsing) */
    algo_config cfg{.heuristic42 = false, .threads = 8};
    algo("data", cfg);

    /* create the config object ad-hoc */
    algo("data", algo_config{.heuristic42 = false, .threads = 8});   // set both paramaters
    algo("data", algo_config{.threads = 8});                         // set only one parameter

    /* providing the config type's name is optional */
    algo("data", {.threads = 8});

}

As you can see, this solves both of the problems mentioned previously! We refer to the config elements by name to avoid mixups, and we can choose to overwrite only those parameters that we actually want to change; other configuration elements will be whatever they are set to by default. Conveniently, this allows changing the default later on, and all invocations that don’t overwrite it will pick up the new default.

Another great feature is that the API maintainer of the algorithm can easily add more members to the configuration object without invalidating any existing invocations. This allows users of the API to gradually adopt new opt-in features.

As the name of the config type can even be omitted (see last invocation), the syntactic overhead for the “ad-hoc” initialisation is very low, almost like providing the arguments directly to the function-call.

There is an important catch: The order in which the designated initialisers are given has to correspond to the order in which the respective members are defined in the type of the config. It is okay to omit initialisers at the beginning, middle or end (as long as defaults are given), but the relative order of all the initialisers that you do provide has to be correct. This might sound like a nuisance, but in contrast to the problem discussed initially (mixed up order of function arguments), you will actually get a compiler-error that tells you that you got the order wrong; so the problem is easily detected and fixed. And there is a nice rule that you can follow for such config objects: always sort the members alphabetically! That way users intuitively know the order and don’t have to look it up 💡

Types as config elements

Now, sometimes you want to pass a type as kind of parameter to an algorithm. Imagine that the algorithm internally juggles a lot of integers. Maybe it even does SIMD with them. In those cases, the size of the integers could affect performance noticeably.

Some algorithms might be able to infer from the data input’s type which integers to use for computation, but in other cases you want the user to be able to override this. Thus we need the ability to pass the desired type to the algorithm. The canonical way of doing this is via template arguments:

template <typename int_t>
auto algo(auto data, size_t threads = 4ull);

But this is has the same problems that we discussed initially: as soon as multiple types are passed, it is possible confuse the order (and not be notified); to set a later parameters, you need to also set previous ones; et cetera. There might also be weird interactions with the type of the data parameter, in case that is a template parameter.

Let’s add the “type parameter” to our config object instead:

/* We define a "type tag" so we can pass types as values */
template <typename T>
inline constinit std::type_identity<T> ttag{};

/* The config now becomes a template */
template <typename Tint_type = decltype(ttag<uint64_t>)>
struct algo_config
{
    bool heuristic42    = true;
    Tint_type int_type  = ttag<uint64_t>;
    size_t threads      = 4ull;
};

/* And also the algorithm */
template <typename ...Ts>
auto algo(auto data, algo_config<Ts...> const & cfg)
{
    /* implementation */
}

int main()
{
    /* Setting just "value parameters" still works with and without "algo_config" */
    algo("data", algo_config{.heuristic42 = false, .threads = 8});
    algo("data",            {.heuristic42 = false, .threads = 8});

    /* When setting a "type parameter", we need to add "algo_config" */
    algo("data", algo_config{.int_type = ttag<uint32_t>, .threads = 8});
}

There are a few things happening here. In the beginning, we use variable templates to define an object that “stores” a type. This can later be used to initialise members of our config object.

Next, we need to make algo_config a template. Unfortunately, we need to default the template parameter as well as giving the member a default value. Finally, algo() needs template parameters for the config, as well. It is handy to just use a parameter pack here, because it means we don’t need to change it if we add more template parameters the config type. This is all a bit more verbose than before, after all we are still writing C++ 😅 But most of this will be hidden from the user anyway.

The invocation of the algorithm is almost unchanged from before, we just use ttag<uint32_t> to initialise the “type parameter” of the config. There is one caveat: when passing such “type parameters”, it is now necessary to add algo_config, although, fortunately, you do not need to spell out the template arguments. In general, this may be a bit surprising, so I recommend always including the config-name in examples to teach your users a single syntax.

Constants as config elements

Using a similar technique to the one above, we can also pass compile-time constants to the config object. This allows the algorithm to conveniently use if constexpr to choose between different codepaths, e.g. between a SIMD-based codepath and a regular one.

/* We define a "value tag" type so we can pass values as types...*/
template <auto v>
struct vtag_t
{
    static constexpr auto value = v;
};

/* ...and then we define a variable template to pass the type as value again! */
template <auto v>
inline constinit vtag_t<v> vtag{};

/* The config is a template */
template <typename Tuse_simd = vtag_t<false>>
struct algo_config
{
    bool heuristic42    = true;
    size_t threads      = 4ull;
    Tuse_simd use_simd  = vtag<false>;
};

/* The algorithm */
template <typename ...Ts>
auto algo(auto data, algo_config<Ts...> const & cfg)
{
    /* implementation */
}

int main()
{
    /* Setting just "value parameters" still works with and without "algo_config" */
    algo("data", algo_config{.heuristic42 = false, .threads = 8});
    algo("data",            {.heuristic42 = false, .threads = 8});

    /* When setting a "constant parameter", we need to add "algo_config" */
    algo("data", algo_config{.threads = 8, .use_simd = vtag<true>});
}

As you can see, this is very similar to the previous example. The only difference is, that we need another initial step to encode the value as a type. It is even possible to have parameters that are (run-time) values by default, but can be configured as (compile-time) constants in the way shown above. And, of course, all kinds of config options can be combined.

Note that the definitions of the “tagging” features would happen in your utility code. Users only need to know that they can pass constants via vtag<42> and types via ttag<int32_t>.

Post scriptum

I hope this post was helpful to some of you. I think this is a big step forward for usability, and I hope Clang catches up with the required features as soon as possible!

There are two things here that could be improved:

1. If a template parameter can be deduced from member initialisers, it should be. This would allow us to omit the default template arguments for algo_config, i.e. = decltype(ttag<uint64_t>) and = vtag_t<false>.
2. When a brace-enclosed initialiser list is passed to a function template to initialise a parameter of deduced type, consider the contents of that initialiser list. This would allow us to omit align_config also when passing “type parameters” or constants.

I have the feeling that 1. might not be too difficult and also not too controversial. But I suspect that 2. would be more complicated as it interacts with function overloading and I can imagine situations were this change would break existing code.

But I’d love to here other people’s opinion on the matter!

References

The ISO WG21 papers that added these features to C++:

• P0329 Designated Initialisers, C++20
• P1816 and P2082 Class template argument deduction for aggregates, C++20, not yet in Clang

Flow-Based Programming, a way for AI and humans to develop together

• Henri Bergius
• —
• 00:00, Monday, 20 March 2023

I think by now everybody reading this will have seen how the new generation of Large Language Models like ChatGPT are able to produce somewhat useful code. Like any advance in software development—from IDEs to high-level languages—this has generated some discussion on the future employment prospects in our field.

This made me think about how these new tools could fit the world of Flow-Based Programming, a software development technique I’ve been involved with for quite a while. In Flow-Based Programming these is a very strict boundary between reusable “library code” (called Components) and the “application logic” (called the Graph).

Here’s what the late J. Paul Morrison wrote on the subject in his seminal work, Flow-Based Programming: A New Approach to Application Development (2010):

Just as in the preparation and consumption of food there are the two roles of cook and diner, in FBP application development there are two distinct roles: the component builder and the component user or application designer.

…The application designer builds applications using already existing components, or where satisfactory ones do not exist s/he will specify a new component, and then see about getting it built.

Remembering that passage made me wonder, could I get one of the LLMs to produce useful NoFlo components? Armed with New Bing, I set out to explore.

The first attempt was specifying a pretty simple component:

That actually looks quite reasonable! I also tried asking New Bing to make the component less verbose, as well as generating TypeScript and CoffeeScript variants of the same. All seemed to produce workable things! Sure, there might be some tidying to do, but this could remove a lot of the tedium of component creation.

In addition to this trivial math component I was able to generate some that to call external REST APIs etc. Bing was even able to switch between HTTP libraries as requested.

What was even cooler was that it actually suggested to ask it how to test the component. Doing as I was told, the result was quite astonishing:

That’s fbp-spec! The declarative testing tool we came up with! Definitely the nicest way to test NoFlo (or any other FBP framework) components.

Based on my results, you’ll definitely want to check the generated components and tests before running them. But what you get out is not bad at all.

I of course also tried to get Bing to produce NoFlo graphs for me. This is where it stumbled quite a bit. Interestingly the results were better in the fbp language than in the JSON graph format. But maybe that even more enforces that the sweet spot would be AI writing components and a human creating the graphs that run those.

As I’m not working at the moment, I don’t have a current use case for this way of collaborating. But I believe this could be a huge productivity booster for any (and especially Flow-Based) application development, and expect to try it in whatever my next gig ends up being.

Illustrations: MidJourney, from prompt Robot software developer working with a software architect. Floating flowcharts in the background

Monospace considered harmful

• In English — mina86.com
• —
• 16:34, Sunday, 19 March 2023

No, I haven’t gone completely mad yet and still, I write this as an appeal to stop using monospaced fonts for code (conditions may apply). While fixed-width fonts have undeniable benefits when authoring software, their use is excessive and even detrimental in certain contexts. Specifically, when displaying inline code within a paragraph of text, proportional fonts are a better choice.

The downsides

Fixed-width fonts for inline code have a handful of downsides. Firstly, text set in such font takes up more space and, depending on the font pairing, individual letters may appear larger. This creates unbalanced look and opportunities for awkward line wrapping.

Moreover, a fixed-width typeface has been shown to be slower to read. Even disregarding the speed differences, switching between two drastically different types of font isn’t comfortable.

To make matters worse, many websites apply too many styles to inline code fragments. For example GitHub and GitLab (i) change the font, (ii) decrease its size, (iii) add background and (iv) add padding. This overemphasis detracts from the content rather than enhancing it.

A better way

A better approach is using serif (sans-serif) font for the main text and a sans-serif (serif) font for inline code†. Or if serif’s aren’t one’s cup of tea, even within the same font group a pairing allowing for clear differentiation between the main text and the code is possible. For example a humanist font paired with a complementary geometric font.

Another option is to format code with a different colour. To avoid using it as the only mean of conveying information, a subtle colour change may be used in conjunction with font change. This is the approach I’ve taken on this blog‡.

It’s also worth considering whether inline code even needs any kind of style change. For example, the sentence ‘Execution of a C program starts from the main function’ is perfectly understandable whether or not ‘main’ is styled differently.

Epilogue

What about code blocks? Using proportional typefaces for them can be done with some care. Indentation isn’t a major problem but some alignment may need adjustments. Depending on the type of code listings, it may be an option. Having said that, I don’t claim this as the only correct option for web publishing.

As an aside, what’s the deal with parenthesise after a function name? To demonstrate, lets reuse an earlier example: ‘Execution of a C program starts from the main() function’. The brackets aren’t part of the function name and unless they are used to disambiguate between multiple overloaded functions, there’s really no need for them.

To conclude, while fixed-width fonts have their place when writing code, their use in displaying inline code is often unnecessary. Using a complementary pairing of proportional typefaces is a better options that can enhance readability. Changing background of inline code is virtually never a good idea.

† Using serif faces on websites used to carry risk of aliasing reducing legibility. Thankfully, the rise of high DPI displays largely alleviated those concerns.

‡ Combining colour change and typeface change breaks principle of using small style changes. Nonetheless, I believe some leniency for websites is in order. It’s not always guaranteed that readers will see fonts author has chosen making colour change kind of a backup. Furthermore, compared to books, change in colour isn’t as focus-grabbing on the Internet.

KDE Gear 23.04 branches created

• TSDgeos' blog
• —
• 20:27, Friday, 10 March 2023

Make sure you commit anything you want to end up in the KDE Gear 23.04 releases to them

We're already past the dependency freeze.

The Feature Freeze and Beta is next week Thursday 16 of March.

More interesting dates  
  March 30: 23.04 RC (23.03.90) Tagging and Release
  April 13: 23.04 Tagging
  April 20: 23.04 Release

https://community.kde.org/Schedules/KDE_Gear_23.04_Schedule

Send you talks for Akademy 2023 *now*!

• TSDgeos' blog
• —
• 21:58, Wednesday, 08 March 2023

Call for proposal ends Thursday the 30th of March

There's still a few weeks, but time is really running out.

I'm sure there's lots of interesting things you have to talk about Qt, KDE, C++, Community Management or other million things so head over to https://akademy.kde.org/2023/cfp/ or over to https://conf.kde.org/event/5/abstracts/ if you want to skip the nicely worded page that encourages you to submit a talk :)

Keeping a semi-automatic electronic ship's logbook

• Henri Bergius
• —
• 00:00, Monday, 06 March 2023

Maintaining a proper ship’s logbook is something that most boats should do, for practical, as well as legal and traditional reasons. The logbook can serve as a record of proper maintenance and operation of the vessel, which is potentially useful when selling the boat or handling an insurance claim. It can be a fun record of journeys made to look back to. And it can be a crucial aid for getting home if the ship’s electronics or GNSS get disrupted.

Like probably most operators of a small boat, on Lille Ø our logbook practices have been quite varying. We’ve been good at recording engine maintenance, as well as keeping the traditional navigation log while offshore. But in the more hectic pace of coastal cruising or daysailing this has often fallen on the wayside. And as such, a lot of the events and history of the boat is unavailable.

To redeem this I’ve developed signalk-logbook, a semi-automatic electronic logbook for vessels running the Signal K marine data server.

This allows logbook entries to be produced both manually and automatically. The can be viewed and edited using any web-capable device on board, meaning that you can write a log entry on your phone, and maybe later analyse and print them on your laptop.

Why Signal K

Signal K is a marine data server that has integrations with almost any relevant marine electronics system. If you have an older NMEA0183 or Seatalk system, Signal K can communicate with it. Same with NMEA2000. If you already have your navigational data on the boat WiFi, Signal K can use and enrich it.

This means that by making the logbook a Signal K plugin, I didn’t have to do any work to make it work with existing boat systems. Signal K even provides a user interface framework.

This means that to make the electronic logbook happen, I only had to produce some plugin JavaScript, and then build a user interface. As I don’t do front-end development that frequently, this gave me a chance to dive into modern React with hooks for the first time. What better to do after being laid off?

Signal K also has very good integration with Influx and Grafana. These can record vessel telemetry in a high resolution. So why bother with a logbook on the side? In my view, a separate logbook is still valuable for storing the comments and observations not available in a marine sensor network. It can also be a lot more durable and archivable than a time series database. On Lille Ø we run both.

User interface

The signalk-logbook comes with a reasonably simple web-based user interface that is integrated in the Signal K administration UI. You can find it in Web apps → Logbook.

The primary view is a timeline. Sort of “Twitter for your boat” kind of view that allows quick browsing of entries on both desktop and mobile.

There is also the more traditional tabular view, best utilized on bigger screens:

While the system can produce a lot of the entries automatically, it is also easy to create manual entries:

These entries can also include weather observations. Those using celestial navigation can also record manual fixes with these entries! Entries can be categorized to separate things like navigational entries from radio or maintenance logs.

If you have the sailsconfiguration plugin installed, you can also log sail changes in a machine-readable format:

Since the log format is machine readable, the map view allows browsing entries spatially:

Electronic vs. paper

The big benefits of an electronic logbook are automation and availability. The logbook can create entries by itself based on what’s happening with the vessel telemetry. You can read and create log entries anywhere on the boat, using the electronic devices you carry with you. Off-vessel backups are also both possible, and quite easy, assuming that the vessel has a reasonably constant Internet connection.

With paper logbooks, the main benefit is that they’re fully independent of the vessel’s electronic system. In case of power failure, you can still see the last recoded position, heading, etc. They are also a lot more durable in the sense that paper logbooks from centuries ago are still fully readable. Though obviously that carries a strong survivorship bias. I would guess the vast majority of logbooks, especially on smaller non-commercial vessels, don’t survive more than a couple of years.

So, how to benefit from the positive aspects of electronic logbooks, while reducing the negatives when compared to paper? Here are some ideas:

• Mark your position on a paper chart. Even though most boats navigate with only electronic charts, it is a good idea to have at least a planning chart available on paper. When offshore, plot your hourly or daily position on it. This will produce the navigation aid of last resort if all electronics fail. And marked charts are pretty!
• Have an off-vessel backup of your electronic logs. The signalk-logbook uses a very simple plain text format for its entries exactly for this reason. The logs are easy to back up, and can also be utilized without the software itself. This means that with a bit of care your log entries shouls stay readable for many many years to come. On Lille Ø we store them on GitHub
• Print your logs. While this is not something I’m planning to do personally, it would be possible to print your log entries periodically, maybe daily or after each trip. Then you can have an archival copy that doesn’t rely on electronics

API

In addition to providing a web-based user interface, signalk-logbook provides a REST API. This allows software developers to create new integrations with the logbook. For example, these could include:

• Automations to generate log entries for some events via node-red or NoFlo
• Copying the log entries to a cloud service
• Exporting the logs to another format, like GPX or a spreadsheet
• Other, maybe non-web-based user interfaces for browsing and creating log entries

Getting started

To utilize this electronic logbook, you need a working installation of Signal K on your boat. The common way to do this is by having a Raspberry Pi powered by the boat’s electrical system and connected to the various on-board instruments.

There are some nice solutions for this:

• Sailor Hat for Raspberry Pi allows powering a Raspberry Pi from the boat’s 12V system. It also handles shutdowns in a clean way, protecting the memory card from data corruption
• Pican-M both connects a Raspberry Pi to a NMEA2000 bus, and powers it through that

You can of course also do a more custom setup, like we did on our old boat, Curiosity.

For the actual software setup, marinepi-provisioning gives a nice Ansible playbook for getting everything going. Bareboat Necessities is a “Marine OS for Raspberry Pi” that comes with everything included.

If you have a Victron GX device (for example Cerbo GX), you can also install Signal K on that.

Once Signal K is running, just look up signalk-logbook in the Signal K app store. You’ll also want to install the signalk-autostate and sailsconfiguration plugins to enable some of the automations.

Then just restart Signal K, log in, and start logging!

Inferno on Microcontrollers

• David Boddie - Updates (Full Articles)
• —
• 22:01, Sunday, 26 February 2023

Last year I looked at microcontrollers a fair amount, though you probably wouldn't see much activity related to that if you follow these updates. If there was any obvious public activity at all, it was happening in the diary I occasionally update about Inferno-related things. Things went off-track when some initial explorations of Inferno on a Thumb-2 microcontroller ended in frustration, leading me back to writing bare metal code instead, and this indirectly resulted in an organiser application written in a simple language for the Ben NanoNote. As the year drew to a close, I picked up Inferno again and started to make some progress, resulting in something more concrete to show.

Meanwhile, long-time Inferno explorer, Caerwyn, has been investigating a port to the Raspberry Pi Pico. Last year also saw the publication of a thesis about porting Inferno OS to a Cortex-M7 device. Hopefully there are other ports in progress, or there will be new ones that develop once people find out about these efforts.

While it's a challenge to get a useful system running on these resource-constrained devices, it's a rewarding experience to be able to show something that works on at least a basic level. It's also interesting to see a Unix-like system running on something that might be expected to only run low-level, bare metal code.

Categories: Inferno, Limbo, Free Software

Send you talks for Linux App Summit 2023 *now*!

• TSDgeos' blog
• —
• 08:27, Wednesday, 15 February 2023

Call for proposal ends this Saturday 18th of February.

I'm sure there's lots of interesting things you have to talk about so head over to https://linuxappsummit.org/cfp/ and press the "Submit your talk" button :)

I love Free Software – and Free Hardware Designs

• tobias_platen's blog
• —
• 19:18, Tuesday, 14 February 2023

For many years I have been using free software. I remember that one of my first GNU programs that I used was a chess game, ported to 16bit Windows. Many years later I switched to GNU/Linux and started programming myself, and also releasing my software under strong copyleft licences. I also discovered that many popular distros of GNU/Linux include non-free firmware. So I began contributing to GNU Guix, a fully free distro of the GNU System that excludes nonfree firmware blobs, nonfree games, and any other nonfree software.

Unfortunately many hardware vendors, including AMD, NVIDIA and Intel starting making their hardware Defective By Design, by implementing HDCP, a kind of hardware-level Digital Restrictions Management. Even if you never watch Netflix, you will be restricted by the non-free firmware, required to use their CPUs and GPUs. If we want to eliminate that form of hardware-level DRM, we will have to design our own Freedom-Respecting hardware. A few years after I baught my Talos II, I began contributing to the Libre-SOC project.

After switching to the POWER9, it was clear that I would not be able to play the nonfree DRM’d games that Valve distributes on their platform Steam. And I didn’d want to either. So I started porting existing free software games to the ppc64el architecture, including VR games such as V-Sekai and BeepSaber. I discovered that there was a libre-licensed SteamVR clone called libsurvive that implements libre licensed lighthouse-based tracking. So I baught my Valve Index, installed libsurvive and started playing with Godot4.

Today is æ„› Free Software Day 2023, which aims at raising awareness to Free Software and the passionate, hard-working people behind it. So I want to thank Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton who started the Libre-SOC project and Charles Lohr for their work on libsurvive. Last year the FSFE had an event dedicated to Free Software games, where we played Veloren, a libre licenced voxel game. The game was really fun, so I want to show my appreciation for their work. The same is true for SlimeVR/monado and Yosys/nextpnr.

Considering Unexplored Products of the Past: Formulating a Product

• English – Paul Boddie's Free Software-related blog
• —
• 17:09, Friday, 10 February 2023

Previously, I described exploring the matter of developing emulation of a serial port, along with the necessary circuitry, for Elkulator, an emulator for the Acorn Electron microcomputer, motivated by a need to provide a way of transferring files into and out of the emulated computer. During this exploration, I had discovered some existing software that had been developed to provide some level of serial “filing system” support on the BBC Microcomputer – the higher-specification sibling of the Electron – with the development of this software having been motivated by an unforeseen need to transfer software to a computer without any attached storage devices.

This existing serial filing system software was a good indication that serial communications could provide the basis of a storage medium. But instead of starting from a predicament involving computers without usable storage facilities, where an unforeseen need motivates the development of a clever workaround, I wanted to consider what such a system might have been like if there had been a deliberate plan from the very beginning to deploy computers that would rely on a serial connection for all their storage needs. Instead of having an implementation of the filing system in RAM, one could have the luxury of putting it into a ROM chip that would be fitted in the computer or in an expansion, and a richer set of features might then be contemplated.

A Smarter Terminal

Once again, my interest in the historical aspects of the technology provided some guidance and some inspiration. When microcomputers started to become popular and businesses and institutions had to decide whether these new products had any relevance to their operations, there was some uncertainty about whether such products were capable enough to be useful or whether they were a distraction from the facilities already available in such organisations. It seems like a lifetime ago now, but having a computer on every desk was not necessarily seen as a guarantee of enhanced productivity, particularly if they did not link up to existing facilities or did not coordinate the work of a number of individuals.

At the start of the 1980s, equipping an office with a computer on every desk and equipping every computer with a storage solution was an expensive exercise. Even disk drives offering only a hundred kilobytes of storage on each removable floppy disk were expensive, and hard disk drives were an especially expensive and precious luxury that were best shared between many users. Some microcomputers were marketed as multi-user systems, encouraging purchasers to connect terminals to them and to share those precious resources: precisely the kind of thing that had been done with minicomputers and mainframes. Such trends continued into the mid-1980s, manifested by products promoted by companies with mainframe origins, such companies perpetuating entrenched tendencies to frame computing solutions in certain ways.

Terminals themselves were really just microcomputers designed for the sole purpose of interacting with a “host” computer, and institutions already operating mainframes and minicomputers would have experienced the need to purchase several of them. Until competition intensified in the terminal industry, such products were not particularly cheap, with the DEC VT220 introduced in 1983 costing $1295 at its introduction. Meanwhile, interest in microcomputers and the possibility of distributing some kinds of computing activity to these new products, led to experimentation in some organisations. Some terminal manufacturers responded by offering terminals that also ran microcomputer software.

Much of the popular history of microcomputing, familiar to anyone who follows such topics online, particularly through YouTube videos, focuses on adoption of such technology in the home, with an inevitable near-obsession with gaming. The popular history of institutional adoption often focuses on the upgrade parade from one generation of computer to the next. But there is a lesser told history involving the experimentation that took place at the intersection of microcomputing and minicomputing or mainframe computing. In universities, computers like the BBC Micro were apparently informally introduced as terminals for other systems, terminal ROMs were developed and shared between institutions. However, there seems to have been relatively little mainstream interest in such software as fully promoted commercial products, although Acornsoft – Acorn’s software outlet – did adopt such a ROM to sell as their Termulator product.

The Acorn Electron, introduced at £199, had a “proper” keyboard and the ability to display 80 columns of text, unlike various other popular microcomputers. Indeed, it may have been the lowest-priced computer to be able to display 80 columns of relatively high definition text as standard, such capabilities requiring extra cards for machines like the Apple II and the Commodore 64. Considering the much lower price of such a computer, the ongoing experimentation underway at the time with its sibling machine on alternative terminal solutions, and the generally favourable capabilities of both these machines, it seems slightly baffling that more was not done to pursue opportunities to introduce a form of “intelligent terminal” or “hybrid terminal” product to certain markets.

VIEW in 80 columns on the Acorn Electron.

None of this is to say that institutional users would have been especially enthusiastic. In some institutions, budgets were evidently generous enough that considerable sums of money would be spent acquiring workstations that were sometimes of questionable value. But in others, the opportunity to make savings, to explore other ways of working, and perhaps also to explicitly introduce microcomputing topics such as software development for lower-specification hardware would have been worthy of some consideration. An Electron with a decent monochrome monitor, like the one provided with the M2105, plus some serial hardware, could have comprised a product sold for perhaps as little as £300.

The Hybrid Terminal

How would a “hybrid terminal” solution work, how might it have been adopted, and what might it have been used for? Through emulation and by taking advantage of the technological continuity in multi-user systems from the 1980s to the present day, we can attempt to answer such questions. Starting with communications technologies familiar in the world of the terminal, we might speculate that a serial connection would be the most appropriate and least disruptive way of interfacing a microcomputer to a multi-user system.

Although multi-user systems, like those produced by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), might have offered network connectivity, it is likely that such connectivity was proprietary, expensive in terms of the hardware required, and possibly beyond the interfacing capabilities of most microcomputers. Meanwhile, Acorn’s own low-cost networking solution, Econet, would not have been directly compatible with these much higher-end machines. Acorn’s involvement in network technologies is also more complicated than often portrayed, but as far as Econet is concerned, only much later machines would more conveniently bridge the different realms of Econet and standards-based higher-performance networks.

Moreover, it remains unlikely that operators and suppliers of various multi-user systems would have been enthusiastic about fitting dedicated hardware and installing dedicated software for the purpose of having such systems communicate with third-party computers using a third-party network technology. I did find it interesting that someone had also adapted Acorn’s network filing system that usually runs over Econet to work instead over a serial connection, which presumably serves files out of a particular user account. Another discovery I made was a serial filing system approach by someone who had worked at Acorn who wanted to transfer files between a BBC Micro system and a Unix machine, confirming that such functionality was worth pursuing. (And there is also a rather more complicated approach involving more exotic Acorn technology.)

Indeed, to be successful, a hybrid terminal approach would have to accommodate existing practices and conventions as far as might be feasible in order to not burden or disturb the operators of these existing systems. One motivation from an individual user’s perspective might be to justify introducing a computer on their desk, to be able to have it take advantage of the existing facilities, and to augment those facilities where it might be felt that they are not flexible or agile enough. Such users might request help from the operators, but the aim would be to avoid introducing more support hassles, which would easily arise if introducing a new kind of network to the mix. Those operators would want to be able to deploy something and have it perform a role without too much extra thought.

I considered how a serial link solution might achieve this. An existing terminal would be connected to, say, a Unix machine and be expected to behave like a normal client, allowing the user to log into their account. The microcomputer would send some characters down the serial line to the Unix “host”, causing it to present the usual login prompt, and the user would then log in as normal. They would then have the option of conducting an interactive session, making their computer like a conventional terminal, but there would also be the option of having the Unix system sit in the background, providing other facilities on request.

Logging into a remote service via a serial connection.

The principal candidates for these other facilities would be file storage and printing. Both of these things were centrally managed in institutions, often available via the main computing service, and the extensible operating system of the Electron and related microcomputers invites the development of software to integrate the core support for these facilities with such existing infrastructure. Files would be loaded from the user’s account on the multi-user system and saved back there again. Printing would spool the printed data to files somewhere in the user’s home directory for queuing to centralised printing services.

Attempting an Implementation

I wanted to see how such a “serial computing environment” would work in practice, how it would behave, what kinds of applications might benefit, and what kind of annoyances it might have. After all, it might be an interesting idea or a fun idea, but it need not be a particularly good one. The first obstacle was that of understanding how the software elements would work, primarily on the Electron itself, from the tasks that I would want the software to perform down to the way the functionality would be implemented. On the host or remote system, I was rather more convinced that something could be implemented since it would mostly be yet another server program communicating over a stream, with plenty of modern Unix conveniences to assist me along the way.

As it turned out, my investigations began with a trip away from home and the use of a different, and much more constrained, development environment involving an ARM-based netbook. Fortunately, Elkulator and the different compilers and tools worked well enough on that development hardware to make the exercise approachable. Another unusual element was that I was going to mostly rely on the original documentation in the form of the actual paper version of the Acorn Electron Advanced User Guide for information on how to write the software for the Electron. It was enlightening coming back to this book after a few decades for assistance on a specific exercise, even though I have perused the book many times in its revised forms online, because returning to it with a focus on a particular task led me to find that the documentation in the book was often vague or incomplete.

Although the authors were working in a different era and presumably under a degree of time pressure, I feel that the book in some ways exhibits various traits familiar to those of us working in the software industry, these indicating a lack of rigour and of sufficient investment in systems documentation. For this, I mostly blame the company who commissioned the work and then presumably handed over some notes and told the authors to fill in the gaps. As if to strengthen such perceptions of hurriedness and lack of review, it also does not help that “system” is mis-spelled “sysem” in a number of places in the book!

Nevertheless, certain aspects of the book were helpful. The examples, although focusing on one particular use-case, did provide helpful detail in deducing the correct way of using certain mechanisms, even if they elected to avoid the correct way of performing other tasks. Acorn’s documentation had a habit of being “preachy” about proper practices, only to see its closest developers ignore those practices, anyway. Eventually, on returning from my time away, I was able to fill in some of the gaps, although by this time I had a working prototype that was able to do basic things like initiate a session on the host system and to perform some file-related operations.

There were, and still are, a lot of things that needed, and still need, improvement with my implementation. The way that the operating system needs to be extended to provide extra filing system functionality involves plenty of programming interfaces, plenty of things to support, and also plenty of opportunities for things to go wrong. The VIEW word processor makes use of interfaces for both whole-file loading and saving as well as random-access file operations. Missing out support for one or the other will probably not yield the desired level of functionality.

There are also intricacies with regard to switching printing on and off – this typically being done using control characters sent through the output stream – and of “spool” files which capture character output. And filing system ROMs need to be initialised through a series of “service calls”, these being largely documented, but the overall mechanism is left largely undescribed in the documentation. It is difficult enough deciphering the behaviour of the Electron’s operating system today, with all the online guidance available in many forms, so I cannot imagine how difficult it would have been as a third party to effectively develop applications back in the day.

Levels of Simulation

To support the activities of the ROM software in the emulated Electron, I had to develop a server program running on my host computer. As noted above, this was not onerous, especially since I had already written a program to exercise the serial communications and to interact with the emulated serial port. I developed this program further to respond to commands issued by my ROM, performing host operations and returning results. For example, the CAT command produces a “catalogue” of files in a host directory, and so my server program performs a directory listing operation, collects the names of the files, and then sends them over the virtual serial link to the ROM for it to display to the user.

To make the experience somewhat authentic and to approximate to an actual deployment environment, I included a simulation of the login prompt so that the user of the emulated Electron would have to log in first, with the software also having to deal with a logged out (or not yet logged in) condition in a fairly graceful way. To ensure that they are logged in, a user selects the Serial Computing Environment using the *SCE command, this explicitly selecting the serial filing system, and the login dialogue is then presented if the user has not yet logged into the remote host. Once logged in, the ROM software should be able to test for the presence of the command processor that responds to issued commands, only issuing commands if the command processor has signalled its presence.

Although this models a likely deployment environment, I wanted to go a bit further in terms of authenticity, and so I decided to make the command processor a separate program that would be installed in a user account on a Unix machine. The user’s profile script would be set up to run the command processor, so that when they logged in, this program would automatically run and be ready for commands. I was first introduced to such practices in my first workplace where a menu-driven, curses-based program I had written was deployed so that people doing first-line technical support could query the database of an administrative system without needing to be comfortable with the Unix shell environment.

For complete authenticity I would actually want to have the emulated Electron contact a Unix-based system over a physical serial connection, but for now I have settled for an arrangement whereby a pseudoterminal is created to run the login program, with the terminal output presented to the emulator. Instead of seeing a simulated login dialogue, the user now interacts with the host system’s login program, allowing them to log into a real account. At that point, the command processor is invoked by the shell and the user gets back control.

Obtaining a genuine login dialogue from a Unix system.

To prevent problems with certain characters, the command processor configures the terminal to operate in raw mode. Apart from that, it operates mostly as it did when run together with the login simulation which did not have to concern itself with such things as terminals and login programs.

Some Applications

This effort was motivated by the need or desire to be able to access files from within Elkulator, particularly from applications such as VIEW. Naturally, VIEW is really just one example from the many applications available for the Electron, but since it interacts with a range of functionality that this serial computing environment provides, it serves to showcase such functionality fairly well. Indeed, some of the screenshots featured in this and the previous article show VIEW operating on text that was saved and loaded over the serial connection.

Accessing files involves some existing operating system commands, such as *CAT (often abbreviated to *.) to list the catalogue of a storage medium. Since a Unix host supports hierarchical storage, whereas the Electron’s built-in command set only really addresses the needs of a flat storage medium (as provided by various floppy disk filing systems for Electron and BBC Micro), the *DIR command has been introduced from Acorn’s hierarchical filing systems (such as ADFS) to navigate between directories, which is perhaps confusing to anyone familiar with other operating systems, such as the different variants of DOS and their successors.

Using catalogue and directory traversal commands.

VIEW allows documents to be loaded and saved in a number of ways, but as a word processor it also needs to be able to print these documents. This might be done using a printer connected to a parallel port, but it makes a bit more sense to instead allow the serial printer to be selected and for printing to occur over the serial connection. However, it is not sufficient to merely allow the operating system to take over the serial link and to send the printed document, if only because the other side of this link is not a printer! Indeed, the command processor is likely to be waiting for commands and to see the incoming data as ill-formed input.

The chosen solution was to intercept attempts to send characters to a serial printer, buffering them and then sending the buffered data in special commands to the command processor. This in turn would write the printed characters to a “spool” file for each printing session. From there, these files could be sent to an appropriate printer. This would give the user rather more control over printing, allowing them to process the printout with Unix tools, or to select one particular physical printer out of the many potentially available in an organisation. In the VIEW environment, and in the MOS environment generally, there is no built-in list of printers or printer selection dialogue.

Since the kinds of printers anticipated for use with VIEW might well have been rather different from the kinds connected to multi-user systems, it is likely that some processing would be desirable where different text styles and fonts have been employed. Today, projects like PrinterToPDF exist to work with old-style printouts, but it is conceivable that either the “printer driver generator” in the View suite or some postprocessing tool might have been used to produce directly printable output. With unstyled text, however, the printouts are generally readable and usable, as the following excerpt illustrates.

               A  brief report on the experience
               of using VIEW as a word processor
               four decades on.

Using VIEW on the Acorn  Electron  is  an  interesting  experience  and  a
glimpse  into  the  way  word  processing  was  once done. Although I am a
dedicated user of Vim, I am under no  illusions  of  that  program's  word
processing  capabilities: it is deliberately a screen editor based on line
editor  heritage,  and  much  of  its  operations  are  line-oriented.  In
contrast, VIEW is intended to provide printed output: it presents the user
with a  ruler  showing  the  page margins and tab stops, and it even saves
additional   rulers   into  the  stored  document   in   their   on-screen
representations. Together with its default typewriter-style  behaviour  of
allowing  the  cursor  to  be moved into empty space and of overwriting or
replacing text, there is a quaint feel to it.

Since VIEW is purely text-based, I can easily imagine converting its formatting codes to work with troff. That would then broaden the output options. Interestingly, the Advanced User Guide was written in VIEW and then sent to a company for typesetting, so perhaps a workflow like this would have been useful for the authors back then.

A major selling point of the Electron was its provision of BBC BASIC as the built-in language. As the BBC Micro had started to become relatively widely adopted in schools across the United Kingdom, a less expensive computer offering this particular dialect of BASIC was attractive to purchasers looking for compatibility with school computers at home. Obviously, there is a need to be able to load and save BASIC programs, and this can be done using the serial connection.

Loading a BASIC program from the Unix host.

Beyond straightforward operations like these, BASIC also provides random-access file operations through various keywords and constructs, utilising the underlying operating system interfaces that invoke filing system operations to perform such work. VIEW also appears to use these operations, so it seems sensible not to ignore them, even if many programmers might have preferred to use bulk transfer operations – the standard load and save – to get data in and out of memory quickly.

A BASIC program reading and showing a file.

Interactions between printing, the operating system’s own spooling support, outputting characters and reading and writing data are tricky. A degree of experimentation was required to make these things work together. In principle, it should be possible to print and spool at the same time, even with output generated by the remote host that has been sent over the serial line for display on the Electron!

Of course, as a hybrid terminal, the exercise would not be complete without terminal functionality. Here, I wanted to avoid going down another rabbit hole and implementing a full terminal emulator, but I still wanted to demonstrate the invocation of a shell on the Unix host and the ability to run commands. To show just another shell session transcript would be rather dull, so here I present the perusal of a Python program to generate control codes that change the text colour on the Electron, along with the program’s effects:

Interaction with the shell featuring multiple text colours.

As a bitmapped terminal, the Electron is capable of much more than this. Although limited to moderate resolutions by the standards of the fanciest graphics terminals even of that era, there are interesting possibilities for Unix programs and scripts to generate graphical output.

A chart generated by a Python program showing workstation performance results.

Sending arbitrary character codes requires a bit of terminal configuration magic so that line feeds do not get translated into other things (the termios manual page is helpful, here, suggesting the ONLCR flag as the culprit), but the challenge, as always, is to discover the piece of the stack of technologies that is working against you. Similar things can be said on the Electron as well, with its own awkward confluence of character codes for output and output control, requiring the character output state to be tracked so that certain values do not get misinterpreted in the wrong context.

Others have investigated terminal connectivity on Acorn’s 8-bit microcomputers and demonstrated other interesting ways of producing graphical output from Unix programs. Acornsoft’s Termulator could even emulate a Tektronix 4010 graphical terminal. Curiously, Termulator also supported file transfer between a BBC Micro and the host machine, although only as a dedicated mode and limited to ASCII-only text files, leaving the hybrid terminal concept unexplored.

Reflections and Remarks

I embarked on this exercise with some cautiousness, knowing that plenty of uncertainties lay ahead in implementing a functional piece of software, and there were plenty of frustrating moments as some of the different elements of the rather underdocumented software stack conspired to produce undesirable behaviour. In addition, the behaviour of my serial emulation code had a confounding influence, requiring some low-level debugging (tracing execution within the emulator instruction by instruction, noting the state of the emulated CPU), some slowly dawning realisations, and some adjustments to hopefully make it work in a more cooperative fashion.

There are several areas of potential improvement. I first programmed in 6502 assembly language maybe thirty-five years ago, and although I managed to get some sprite and scrolling routines working, I never wrote any large programs, nor had to interact with the operating system frameworks. I personally find the 6502 primitive, rigid, and not particularly conducive to higher-level programming techniques, and I found myself writing some macros to take away the tedium of shuffling values between registers and the stack, constantly aware of various pitfalls with regard to corrupting registers.

My routines extending the operating system framework possibly do not do things the right way or misunderstand some details. That, I will blame on the vague documentation as well as any mistakes made micromanaging the registers. Particularly frustrating was the way that my ROM code would be called with interrupts disabled in certain cases. This made implementation challenging when my routines needed to communicate over the serial connection, when such communication itself requires interrupts to be enabled. Quite what the intention of the MOS designers was in such circumstances remains something of a mystery. While writing this article, I realised that I could have implemented the printing functionality in a different way, and this might have simplified things, right up to the point where I saw, thanks to the debugger provided by Elkulator, that the routines involved are called – surprise! – with interrupts disabled.

Performance could be a lot better, with this partly due to my own code undoubtedly requiring optimisation. The existing software stack is probably optimised to a reasonable extent, but there are various persistent background activities that probably steal CPU cycles unnecessarily. One unfortunate contributor to performance limitations is the hardware architecture of the Electron. Indeed, I discovered while testing in one of the 80-column display modes that serial transfers were not reliable at the default transfer rate of 9600 baud, instead needing to be slowed down to only 2400 baud. Some diagnosis confirmed that the software was not reading the data from the serial chip quickly enough, causing an overflow condition and data being lost.

Motivated by cost reduction and product positioning considerations – the desire to avoid introducing a product that might negatively affect BBC Micro sales – the Electron was deliberately designed to use a narrow data bus to fewer RAM chips than otherwise would have been used, with a seemingly clever technique being employed to allow the video circuitry to get the data at the desired rate to produce a high-resolution or high-bandwidth display. Unfortunately, the adoption of the narrow data bus, facilitated by the adoption of this particular technique, meant that the CPU could only ever access RAM at half its rated speed. And with the narrow data bus, the video circuitry effectively halts the CPU altogether for a substantial portion of its time in high-bandwidth display modes. Since serial communications handling relies on the delivery and handling of interrupts, if the CPU is effectively blocked from responding quickly enough, it can quickly fall behind if the data is arriving and the interrupts are occurring too often.

That does raise the issue of reliability and of error correction techniques. Admittedly, this work relies on a reliable connection between the emulated Electron and the host. Some measures are taken to improve the robustness of the communication when messages are interrupted so that the host in particular is not left trying to send or receive large volumes of data that are no longer welcome or available, and other measures are taken to prevent misinterpretation of stray data received in a different and thus inappropriate context. I imagine that I may have reinvented the wheel badly here, but these frustrations did provide a level of appreciation of the challenges involved.

Some Broader Thoughts

It is possible that Acorn, having engineered the Electron too aggressively for cost, made the machine less than ideal for the broader range of applications for which it was envisaged. That said, it should have been possible to revise the design and produce a more performant machine. Experiments suggest that a wider data path to RAM would have helped with the general performance of the Electron, but to avoid most of the interrupt handling problems experienced with the kind of application being demonstrated here, the video system would have needed to employ its existing “clever” memory access technique in conjunction with that wider data path so as to be able to share the bandwidth more readily with the CPU.

Contingency plans should have been made to change or upgrade the machine, if that had eventually been deemed necessary, starting at the point in time when the original design compromises were introduced. Such flexibility and forethought would also have made a product with a longer appeal to potential purchasers, as opposed to a product that risked being commercially viable for only a limited period of time. However, it seems that the lessons accompanying such reflections on strategy and product design were rarely learned by Acorn. If lessons were learned, they appear to have reinforced a particular mindset and design culture.

Virtue is often made of the Acorn design philosophy and the sometimes rudely expressed and dismissive views of competing technologies that led the company to develop the ARM processor. This approach enabled comparatively fast and low-cost systems to be delivered by introducing a powerful CPU to do everything in a system from running applications to servicing interrupts for data transfers, striving for maximal utilisation of the available memory bandwidth by keeping the CPU busy. That formula worked well enough at the low end of the market, but when the company tried to move upmarket once again, its products were unable to compete with those of other companies. Ultimately, this sealed the company’s fate, even if more fortuitous developments occurred to keep ARM in the running.

(In the chart shown earlier demonstating graphical terminal output and illustrating workstation performance, circa 1990, Acorn’s R260 workstation is depicted as almost looking competitive until one learns that the other workstations depicted arrived a year earlier and that the red bar showing floating-point performance only applies to Acorn’s machine three years after its launch. It would not be flattering to show the competitors at that point in history, nor would it necessarily be flattering to compare whole-system performance, either, if any publication sufficiently interested in such figures had bothered to do so. There is probably an interesting story to be told about these topics, particularly how Acorn’s floating-point hardware arrived so late, but I doubt that there is the same willingness to tell it as there is to re-tell the usual celebratory story of ARM for the nth time.)

Acorn went on to make the Communicator as a computer that would operate in a kind of network computing environment, relying on network file servers to provide persistent storage. It reused some of the technology in the Electron and the BT Merlin M2105, particularly the same display generator and its narrow data bus to RAM, but ostensibly confining that aspect of the Electron’s architecture to a specialised role, and providing other facilities for applications and, as in the M2105, for interaction with peripherals. Sadly, the group responsible in Acorn had already been marginalised and eventually departed, apparently looking to pursue the concept elsewhere.

As for this particular application of an old computer and a product that was largely left uncontemplated, I think there probably was some mileage in deploying microcomputers in this way, even outside companies like Acorn where such computers were being developed and used, together with software development companies with their own sophisticated needs, where minicomputers like the DEC VAX would have been available for certain corporate or technical functions. Public (or semi-public) access terminals were fairly common in universities, and later microcomputers were also adopted in academia due to their low cost and apparently sufficient capabilities.

Although such adoption appears to have focused on terminal applications, it cannot have been beyond the wit of those involved to consider closer integration between the microcomputing and multi-user environments. In further and higher education, students will have had microcomputing experience and would have been able to leverage their existing skills whilst learning new ones. They might have brought their microcomputers along with them, giving them the opportunity to transfer or migrate their existing content – their notes, essays, programs – to the bright and emerging new world of Unix, as well as updating their expertise.

As for updating my own expertise, it has been an enlightening experience in some ways, and I may well continue to augment the implemented functionality, fix and improve things, and investigate the possibilities this work brings. I hope that this rather lengthy presentation of the effort has provided insights into experiences of the past that was and the past that might have been.

Considering Unexplored Products of the Past: Emulating an Expansion

• English – Paul Boddie's Free Software-related blog
• —
• 23:27, Tuesday, 07 February 2023

In the last couple of years, possibly in common with quite a few other people, certainly people of my vintage, and undoubtedly those also interested in retrocomputing, I have found myself revisiting certain aspects of my technological past. Fortunately, sites like the Internet Archive make this very easy indeed, allowing us to dive into publications from earlier eras and to dredge up familiar and not so familiar magazine titles and other documentation. And having pursued my retrocomputing interest for a while, participating in forums, watching online videos, even contributing to new software and hardware developments, I have found myself wanting to review some of the beliefs and perceptions that I and other people have had of the companies and products we grew up with.

One of the products of personal interest to me is the computer that got me and my brother started with writing programs (as well as playing games): the Acorn Electron, a product of Acorn Computers of Cambridge in the United Kingdom. Much can be said about the perceived chronology of this product’s development and introduction, the actual chronology, and its impact on its originator and on wider society, but that surely deserves a separate treatment. What I can say is that reviewing the archives and other knowledge available to us now can give a deeper understanding of the processes involved in the development of the Electron, the technological compromises made, and the corporate strategy that led to its creation and eventually its discontinuation.

The Acorn Electron
(Picture attribution: By Bilby – Own work, CC BY 3.0, Link)

It has been popular to tell simplistic narratives about Acorn Computers, to reduce its history to a few choice moments as the originator of the BBC Microcomputer and the ARM processor, but to do so is to neglect a richer and far more interesting story, even if the fallibility of some of the heroic and generally successful characters involved may be exposed by telling some of that story. And for those who wonder how differently some aspects of computing history might have turned out, exploring that story and the products involved can be an adventure in itself, filling in the gaps of our prior experiences with new insights, realisations and maybe even glimpses into opportunities missed and what might have been if things had played out differently.

At the Rabbit Hole

Reading about computing history is one thing, but this tale is about actually doing things with old software, emulation, and writing new software. It started off with a discussion about the keyboard shortcuts for a word processor and the differences between the keyboards on the Acorn Electron and its higher-specification predecessor, the BBC Microcomputer. Having acquainted myself with the circuitry of the Electron, how its keyboard is wired up, and how the software accesses it, I was obviously intrigued by these apparent differences, but I was also intrigued by the operation of the word processor in question, Acornsoft’s VIEW.

Back in the day, as people like to refer to the time when these products were first made available, such office or productivity applications were just beyond my experience. Although it was slightly fascinating to read about them, most of my productive time was spent writing programs, mostly trying to write games. I had actually seen an office suite written by Psion on the ACT Sirius 1 in the early 1980s, but word processors were the kind of thing that people used in offices or, at the very least, by people who had a printer so that they could print the inevitable letters that everyone would be needing to write.

Firing up an Acorn Electron emulator, specifically Elkulator, I discovered that one of the participants in the discussion was describing keyboard shortcuts that didn’t match up to those that were described in a magazine article from the era, these appearing correct as I tried them out for myself. It turned out that the discussion participant in question was using the BBC Micro version of VIEW on the Electron and was working around the mismatch in keyboard layouts. Although all of this was much ado about virtually nothing, it did two things. Firstly, it made me finally go in and fix Elkulator’s keyboard configuration dialogue, and secondly, it made me wonder how convenient it would be to explore old software in a productive way in an emulator.

Reconciling Keyboards

Having moved to Norway many years ago now, I use a Norwegian keyboard layout, and this has previously been slightly problematic when using emulators for older machines. Many years ago, I used and even contributed some minor things to another emulator, ElectrEm, which had a nice keyboard configuration dialogue. The Electron’s keyboard corresponds to certain modern keyboards pretty well, at least as far as the alphanumeric keys are concerned. More challenging are the symbols and control-related keys, in particular the Electron’s special Caps Lock/Function key which sits where many people now have their Tab key.

Obviously, there is a need to be able to tell an emulator which keys on a modern keyboard are going to correspond to the keys on the emulated machine. Being derived from an emulator for the BBC Micro, however, Elkulator’s keyboard configuration dialogue merely presented a BBC Micro keyboard on the screen and required the user to guess which “Beeb” key might correspond to an Electron one. Having put up with this situation for some time, I finally decided to fix this once and for all. The process of doing so is not particularly interesting, so I will spare you the details of doing things with the Allegro toolkit and the Elkulator source code, but I was mildly pleased with the result:

The revised keyboard configuration dialogue in Elkulator.

By also adding support for redefining the Break key in a sensible way, I was also finally able to choose a key that desktop environments don’t want to interfere with: F12 might work for Break, but Ctrl-F12 makes KDE/Plasma do something I don’t want, and yet Ctrl-Break is quite an important key combination when using an Electron or BBC Micro. Why Break isn’t a normal key on these machines is another story in itself, but here is an example of redefining it and even allowing multiple keys on a modern keyboard to act as Break on the emulated computer:

Redefining the Break key in Elkulator.

Being able to confidently choose and use keys made it possible to try out VIEW in a more natural way. But this then led to another issue: how might I experiment with such software productively? It would be good to write documents and to be able to extract them from the emulator, rather than see them disappear when the emulator is closed.

Real and Virtual Machines

One way to get text out of a system, whether it is a virtual system like the emulated Electron or a real machine, is to print it. I vaguely remembered some support for printing from Elkulator and was reminded by my brother that he had implemented such support himself a while ago as a quick way of getting data out of the emulated system. But I also wanted to be able to get data into the emulated system as well, and the parallel interface typically used by the printer is not bidirectional on the Electron. So, I would need to look further for a solution.

It is actually the case that Elkulator supports reading from and writing to disk (or disc) images. The unexpanded Electron supports read/write access to cassettes (or tapes), but Elkulator does not support writing to tapes, probably because the usability considerations are rather complicated: one would need to allow the user to control the current position on a tape, and all this would do is to remind everyone how inconvenient tapes are. Meanwhile, writing to disk images would be fairly convenient within the emulator, but then one would need to use tools to access the files within the images outside the emulator.

Some emulators for various systems also support the notion of a host filesystem (or filing system) where some special support has been added to make the emulated machine see another peripheral and to communicate with it, this peripheral really being a program on the host machine (the machine that is running the emulator). I could have just written such support, although it would also have needed some software support written for the emulated machine as well, but this approach would have led me down a path of doing something specific to emulation. And I have a principle of sorts which is that if I am going to change the way an emulated machine behaves, it has to be rooted in some kind of reality and not just enhance the emulated machine in a way that the original, “real” machine could not have been.

Building on Old Foundations

As noted earlier, I have an interest in the way that old products were conceived and the roles for which those products were intended by their originators. The Electron was largely sold as an unexpanded product, offering only power, display and cassette ports, with a general-purpose expansion connector being the gateway to anything else that might have been added to the system later. This was perceived somewhat negatively when the machine was launched because it was anticipated that buyers would probably, at the very least, want to plug joysticks into the Electron to play games. Instead, Acorn offered an expansion unit, the Plus 1, that cost another £60 which provided joystick, printer and cartridge connectors.

But this flexibility in expanding the machine meant that it could have been used as the basis for a fairly diverse range of specialised products. In fact, one of the Acorn founders, Chris Curry, enthused about the Electron as a platform for such products, and one such product did actually make it to market, in a way: the BT Merlin M2105 messaging terminal. This terminal combined the Electron with an expansion unit containing circuitry for communicating over a telephone line, a generic serial communications port, a printer port, as well as speech synthesis circuitry and a substantial amount of read-only memory (ROM) for communications software.

Back in the mid-1980s, telecommunications (or “telecoms”) was the next big thing, and enthusiasm for getting a modem and dialling up some “online” service or other (like Prestel) was prevalent in the computing press. For businesses and institutions, there were some good arguments for adopting such technologies, but for individuals the supposed benefits were rather dulled by the considerable costs of acquiring the hardware, buying subscriptions, and the notoriously high telephone call rates of the era. Only the relatively wealthy or the dedicated few pursued this side of data communications.

The M2105 reportedly did some service in the healthcare sector before being repositioned for commercial applications. Along with its successor product, the Acorn Communicator, it enjoyed a somewhat longer lifespan in certain enterprises. For the standard Electron and its accompanying expansions, support for basic communications capabilities was evidently considered important enough to be incorporated into the software of the Plus 1 expansion unit, even though the Plus 1 did not provide any of the specific hardware capabilities for communication over a serial link or a telephone line.

It was this apparently superfluous software capability that I revisited when I started to think about getting files in and out of the emulator. When emulating an Electron with Plus 1, this serial-capable software is run by the emulator, just as it is by a real Electron. On a real system of this kind, a cartridge could be added that provides a serial port and the necessary accompanying circuitry, and the system would be able to drive that hardware. Indeed, such cartridges were produced decades ago. So, if I could replicate the functionality of a cartridge within the emulator, making some code that pretends to be a serial communications chip (or UART) that has been interfaced to the Electron, then I would in principle be able to set up a virtual serial connection between the emulated Electron and my modern host computer.

Emulated Expansions

Modifying Elkulator to add support for serial communications hardware was fairly straightforward, with only a few complications. Expansion hardware on the Electron is generally accessible via a range of memory addresses that actually signal peripherals as opposed to reading and writing memory. The software provided by the Plus 1 expansion unit is written to expect the serial chip to be accessible via a range of memory locations, with the serial chip accepting values sent to those locations and producing values from those locations on request. The “memory map” through which the chip is exposed in the Electron corresponds directly to the locations or registers in the serial chip – the SCN2681 dual asynchronous receiver/transmitter (DUART) – as described by its datasheet.

In principle, all that is needed is to replicate the functionality described by the datasheet. With this done, the software will drive the chip, the emulated chip will do what is needed, and the illusion will be complete. In practice, a certain level of experimentation is needed to fill in the gaps left by the datasheet and any lack of understanding on the part of the implementer. It did help that the Plus 1 software has been disassembled – some kind of source code regenerated from the binary – so that the details of its operation and its expectations of the serial chip’s operation can be established.

Moreover, it is possible to save a bit of effort by seeing which features of the chip have been left unused. However, some unused features can be provided with barely any extra effort: the software only drives one serial port, but the chip supports two in largely the same way, so we can keep support for two just in case there is a need in future for such capabilities. Maybe someone might make a real serial cartridge with two ports and want to adapt the existing software, and they could at least test that software under emulation before moving to real hardware.

It has to be mentioned that the Electron’s operating system, known as the Machine Operating System or MOS, is effectively extended by the software provided in the Plus 1 unit. Even the unexpanded machine provides the foundations for adding serial communications and printing capabilities in different ways, and the Plus 1 software merely plugs into that framework. A different kind of serial chip would be driven by different software but it would plug into the same framework. At no point does anyone have to replace the MOS with a patched version, which seems to be the kind of thing that happens with some microcomputers from the same era.

Ultimately, what all of this means is that having implemented the emulated serial hardware, useful things can already be done with it within the bare computing environment provided by the MOS. One can set the output stream to use the serial port and have all the text produced by the system and programs sent over the serial connection. One can select the serial port for the input stream and send text to the computer instead of using the keyboard. And printing over the serial connection is also possible by selecting the appropriate printer type using a built-in system command.

In Elkulator, I chose to expose the serial port via a socket connection, with the emulator binding to a Unix domain socket on start-up. I then wrote a simple Python program to monitor the socket, to show any data being sent from the emulator and to send any input from the terminal to the emulator. This permitted the emulated machine to be operated from a kind of remote console and for the emulated machine to be able to print to this console. At last, remote logins are possible on the Electron! Of course, such connectivity was contemplated and incorporated from the earliest days of these products.

Filing Options

If the goal of all of this had been to facilitate transfers to and from the emulated machine, this might have been enough, but a simple serial connection is not especially convenient to use. Although a method of squirting a file into the serial link at the Electron could be made convenient for the host computer, at the other end one has to have a program to do something with that file. And once the data has arrived, would it not be most convenient to be able to save that data as a file? We just end up right back where we started: having some data inside the Electron and nowhere to put it! Of course, we could enable disk emulation and store a file on a virtual disk, but then it might just have been easier to make disk image handling outside the emulator more convenient instead.

It seemed to me that the most elegant solution would be to make the serial link act as the means through which the Electron accesses files. That instead of doing ad-hoc transfers of data, such data would be transferred as part of operations that are deliberately accessing files. Such ambitions are not unrealistic, and here I could draw on my experience with the platform, having acquired the Acorn Electron Advanced User Guide many, many years ago, in which there are details of implementing filing system ROMs. Again, the operating system had been designed to be extended in order to cover future needs, and this was one of them.

In fact, I had not been the only one to consider a serial filing system, and I had been somewhat aware of another project to make software available via a serial link to the BBC Micro. That project had been motivated by the desire to be able to get software onto that computer where no storage devices were otherwise available, even performing some ingenious tricks to transfer the filing system software to the machine and to have that software operate from RAM. It might have been tempting merely to use this existing software with my emulated serial port, to get it working, and then to get back to trying out applications, loading and saving, and to consider my work done. But I had other ideas in mind…

Artificial intelligence is not willing to be correct

• Vincent Lequertier's blog
• —
• 09:00, Sunday, 29 January 2023

As deep learning models get better at representing human language, telling whether a text was written by a human being or a deep learning model becomes harder and harder. And because language models reproduce text found online (often without attribution); the risk of considering their output as if they were written by a human changes the reading experience for the reader.

The last year has been incredible for natural (and programming) language processing. GitHub’s Copilot has been out of technical preview since June, and ChatGPT was released in November. Copilot is based on OpenAI Codex and acts as a source code generator (which raises several issues of its own). ChatGPT is a language model built for dialogue, where a user can chat with the AI, ask questions and have them answered. Both are trained with data from web scrapping, with source code for Copilot and webpages for ChatGPT. Those models work particularly well for their respective purposes, and can thus be used to generate seemingly convincing source code or prose.

Because AI-generated texts are convincing, the fact that they were generated by an AI is not obvious to the careless reader. This is problematic, as there is no guarantee that the text is factually correct and that the human leveraging the AI checked it for mistakes. When reading, this may create a discomfort, as the reader has to determine whether a text was generated by an AI, and if so, if the publisher made sure that it is correct. Companies already started to use AI generated text for articles without clearly visible disclaimers and riddled with errors. The fact that text generated by ChatGPT may contain inaccuracies was acknowledged by OpenAI’s CEO. One might argue that humans make mistakes, too, and that prose or source code written by a human being can therefore also be wrong. This is true. However, the intent behind the text differs. In most cases, the author of a text tries their best to make it correct. But the language model does not understand the concept of correctness and will happily generate text containing wrong facts, which changes the tacitly assumed rules of writing and reading content.

Gaining trust in the text generated by an AI is thus a worthwhile objective. Here are partial solutions to this:

• Watermarking texts generated by GPT models is a work in progress. Among the possible ones, the words chosen by the AI would embed a proof (using asymmetric cryptography) in their probability distribution. While this does not alleviate the concern stated above, this allows the reader to avoid AI-generated text if he or she wants to.

• Connecting the text generated by the AI back to what lead it to generate the text might be another may offer a partial solution. If the readers can verify the trustworthiness of the sources, they might feel more confident about the AI-generated text they are reading.

• If citing the source is too involved computationally, weighting the learning process of the AI in such a way that would give more importance to the authoritative sources on a subject would be a good workaround. Counting the number of backreferences of a page would be a good indicator of whether the text it contains is authoritative (just like page rank).

Considering this perspective, using large language models raises trust issues. A few technical solutions are listed above. However, it would be too reductive to consider this only as a technical problem. AI generated text then looks akin to search engines, without the comfort of knowing that they merely redirect to a source website, whose content is presumably written by a human being who tried to make it correct.

PS: This article was not written by an AI.

Use Any SOP Binary With SOP-Java and External-SOP

• foss – vanitasvitae's blog
• —
• 19:20, Friday, 13 January 2023

The Stateless OpenPGP Protocol specification describes a shared, standardized command line interface for OpenPGP applications. There is a bunch of such binaries available already, among them PGPainless’ pgpainless-cli, Sequoia-PGP’s sqop, as well as ProtonMails gosop. These tools make it easy to use OpenPGP from the command line, as well as from within bash scripts (all of those are available in Debian testing or in the main repo) and the standardized interface allows users to switch from one backend to the other without the need to rewrite their scripts.

The Java library sop-java provides a set of interface definitions that define a java API that closely mimics the command line interface. These interfaces can be implemented by anyone, such that developers could create a drop-in for sop-java using the OpenPGP library of their choice. One such backend is pgpainless-sop, which implements sop-java using the PGPainless library.

I just released another library named external-sop, which implements sop-java and allows the user to use any SOP CLI application of their choice from within their Java / Kotlin application!

Let’s assume we have a SOP command line application called example-sop and we want to make use of it within our Java application. external-sop makes the integration a one-liner:

SOP sop = new ExternalSOP("/usr/bin/example-sop");

Now we can use the resulting sop object the same way we would use for example a SOPImpl instance:

// generate key
byte[] keyBytes = sop.generateKey()
        .userId("John Doe <john.doe@pgpainless.org>")
        .withKeyPassword("f00b4r")
        .generate()
        .getBytes();

// extract certificate
byte[] certificateBytes = sop.extractCert()
        .key(keyBytes)
        .getBytes();

byte[] plaintext = "Hello, World!\n".getBytes(); // plaintext

// encrypt and sign a message
byte[] ciphertext = sop.encrypt()
        // encrypt for each recipient
        .withCert(certificateBytes)
        // Optionally: Sign the message
        .signWith(keyBytes)
        .withKeyPassword("f00b4r") // if signing key is protected
        // provide the plaintext
        .plaintext(plaintext)
        .getBytes();

// decrypt and verify a message
ByteArrayAndResult<DecryptionResult> bytesAndResult = sop.decrypt()
        .withKey(keyBytes)
        .verifyWithCert(certificateBytes)
        .withKeyPassword("f00b4r") // if decryption key is protected
        .ciphertext(ciphertext)
        .toByteArrayAndResult();

DecryptionResult result = bytesAndResult.getResult();
byte[] plaintext = bytesAndResult.getBytes();

The external-sop module will be available on Maven Central in a few hours for you to test.

Happy Hacking!

The KDE Qt5 Patch Collection has been rebased on top of Qt 5.15.8

• TSDgeos' blog
• —
• 23:43, Wednesday, 04 January 2023

Commit: https://invent.kde.org/qt/qt/qt5/-/commit/281044e2541c842f8d0b0bc1a199999bf9d9951c

Commercial release announcement: https://www.qt.io/blog/commercial-lts-qt-5.15.8-released

As usual I want to personally extend my gratitude to the Commercial users of Qt for beta testing Qt 5.15.8 for the rest of us.

The Commercial Qt 5.15.8 release introduced two bugs that have later been fixed. Thanks to that, our Patchset Collection has been able to incorporate the the fix for one of the issues [1] and revert for the other [2]  and the Free Software users will never be affected by it! 

P.S: Special shout-out to Andreas Sturmlechner for identifying the fix of the issue, since I usually only pay attention to "Revert XYZ" commits and this one is not a revert but subsequent improvement

Phosh 2022 in retrospect

• Colors of Noise - Entries tagged planetfsfe
• —
• 15:55, Saturday, 31 December 2022

I wanted to look back at what changed in phosh in 2022 and figured I could share it with you. I'll be focusing on things very close to the mobile shell, for a broader overview see Evangelos upcoming FOSDEM talk.

Some numbers

We're usually aiming for a phosh release at the end of each month. In 2022 We did 10 releases like that, 7 major releases (bumping the middle version number) and three betas. We skipped the April and November releases. We also did one bug fix relesae out of line (bumping the last bit of the version number). I hope we can keep that cadence in 2023 as it allows us to get changes to users in a timely fashion (thus closing usability gaps as early as possible) as well as giving distributions a way to plan ahead. Ideally we'd not skip any release but sometimes real life just interferes.

Those releases contain code contributions from about 20 different people and translations from about 30 translators. These numbers are roughly the same as 2021 which is great. Thanks everyone!

In phosh's git repository we had a bit over 730 non-merge commits (roughly 2 per day), which is about 10% less than in 2021. Looking closer this is easily compensated by commits to phoc (which needed quite some work for the gestures) and phosh-mobile-settings which didn't exist in 2021.

User visible features

Most notable new features are likely the swipe gestures for top and bottom bar, the possibility to use the quick settings on the lock screen as well as the style refresh driven by Sam Hewitt that e.g. touched the modal dialogs (but also sliders, dialpads, etc):

We also added the possibility to have custom widgets via loadable plugins on the lock screen so the user can decide which information should be available. We currently ship plugins to show

• information on upcoming calendar events
• emergency contact information
• PDFs like bus or train tickets
• the current month (as hello world like plugin to get started)

These are maintained within phosh's source tree although out of tree plugins should be doable too.

There's a settings application (the above mentioned phosh-mobile-settings) to enable these. It also allows those plugins to have individual preferences:

Speaking of configurability: Scale-to-fit settings (to work around applications that don't fit the screen) and haptic/led feedback are now configurable without resorting to the command line:

We can also have device specific settings which helps to temporarily accumulate special workaround without affecting other phones.

Other user visible features include the ability to shuffle the digits on the lockscreen's keypad, a VPN quick settings, improved screenshot support and automatic high contrast theme switching when in bright sunlight (based on ambient sensor readings) as shown here.

As mentioned above Evangelos will talk at FOSDEM 2023 about the broader ecosystem improvements including GNOME, GTK, wlroots, phoc, feedbackd, ModemManager, mmsd, NetworkManager and many others without phosh wouldn't be possible.

What else

As I wanted a T-shirt for Debconf 2022 in Prizren so I created a logo heavily inspired by those cute tiger images you often see in Southeast Asia. Based on that I also made a first batch of stickers mostly distributed at FrOSCon 2022:

That's it for 2022. If you want to get involved into phosh testing, development or documentation then just drop by in the matrix room.

Donate to KDE with a 10% power up! (1-week-offer)

• TSDgeos' blog
• —
• 17:24, Friday, 23 December 2022

Hopefully by now, you know that in KDE we are running an End of Year Fundraising campaign.

If you didn't, now you know :)

The campaign has already raised around 16 thousand euros, but there's still a bit to go to the minimum goal of 20 thousand.

So let's spice things up a little, I will donate 10% of every donation you make, you donate 1€, I will donate 0.1€, you donate 100€ I will donate 10€, etc.

I'm placing my maximum total donation amount at (20000-16211.98)/11 = 344.37€, that is if you all donate 3443.7€ (or more), I will donate 344.37€ and we'll reach the 20K goal.

How is this going to work? 

I will make my donation on the 31st of December (just one donation, to save up on fees).

For your donation to be included in my matching donation you need to send me an email to aacid@kde.org with your name/email and put in copy (CC) the KDE e.V. board kde-ev-board@kde.org so they can confirm your donation.

Only donations between now (23rd of December around 18:00 CET) and 31st of December will be considered.

Chronological order of The Witcher

• In English — mina86.com
• —
• 00:54, Sunday, 11 December 2022

Ever since Witcher games took off the franchise skyrocketed in popularity. Books, comics, TV show, games, more comics, another TV show… The story of Geralt and his marry company has been told in so many ways that it’s becoming a wee bit hard to keep track of chronology of all the events; especially across different forms of media.

In this article I’ve collected all official Witcher works ordering them in chronological order. To avoid any confusion, let me state up front that if you’re new to the franchise or haven’t read the books yet this list might not be for you. If you’re looking for the order to read the books in, I’ve prepared a separate article which describes that.

Skip right to the chronology

Canons

This compilation includes the following works:

• Books refers to the main story as written by Andrzej Sapkowski in the short stories and novels.
• CDPR denotes canon of the video games released by CD Projekt Red. It’s largely consistent with the books. This category includes games, comic books published by Dark Horse and cinematics set in game’s continuum.
• Netflix is continuity of the Netflix TV series and all related spin-offs.
• P&P indicates Polish comic books by BogusÅ‚aw PoÅ‚ch and Maciej Parowski. Except for a single issue (‘Zdrada’), the comics are faithful adaptations of respective short stories.
• Hexer refers to the Polish TV series Wiedźmin released in 2002.

Netflix

Regarding Netflix show. The first season presents split timelines. Each episode can have up to three arcs for each of the main characters: Geralt, Ciri and Yennefer. Stories for each person are presented in chronological order throughout the season, however events between the timelines don’t line up. For example, the second episode shows Yennefer in the year 1206, Geralt in 1240 and Ciri in 1263.

The episodes of the main series are given using SnnEmm notation (indicating episode mm of season nn) rather than using their titles. Furthermore, episodes of the first season have name of the character in parenthesise indicating whose arc the entry refers to. For example, the second episode has three separate entries S01E02 (Yen), S01E02 (Geralt) and S01E02 (Ciri).

Dates of the events in Netflix show are taken from its official website.

Disclaimer

It’s important to note that dates and chronology aren’t always consistent even within a single canon. A common example is Ciri’s date of birth which can be interpreted differently based on different parts of the books.

Furthermore, because of episodic nature of some of the stories, it’s not always possible to order them in relation to other events. For example, A Grain of Truth could take place pretty much at any point in Geralt’s life.

In some cases of ambiguity regarding books and CDPR timelines, I’ve resorted to looking at Witcher fandom wiki.

Lastly, dates between canons aren’t consistent. For example, Geralt and Yennefer meet in 1248 in the books but in 1256 in the Netflix show. The compilation orders entries by ‘events’ rather than by dates.

The chronology

To distinguish different forms of media (books, games, shows etc) the following icons are used next to the titles to identify what they refer to:

• 📜 — short story / 📕 — novel / 🖌 — comic book
• 🕹 — video game / 📱 — mobile game / 🎲 — board game or TTRPG
• 📺 — television series / ã‚¢ — animated film / 🎥 — cinematic trailer

Clicking on canon name in the table’s header allows filtering rows by canon.

Acknowledgments

Thanks to acbagel for pointing out Rogue Mage and Witcher's Journal.

Running Cockpit inside ALP

• Losca
• —
• 13:28, Saturday, 10 December 2022

(quoted from my other blog at since a new OS might be interesting for many and this is published in separate planets)

ALP - The Adaptable Linux Platform – is a new operating system from SUSE to run containerized and virtualized workloads. It is in early prototype phase, but the development is done completely openly so it’s easy to jump in to try it.

For this trying out, I used the latest encrypted build – as of the writing, 22.1 – from ALP images. I imported it in virt-manager as a Generic Linux 2022 image, using UEFI instead of BIOS, added a TPM device (which I’m interested in otherwise) and referring to an Ignition JSON file in the XML config in virt-manager.

The Ignition part is pretty much fully thanks to Paolo Stivanin who studied the secrets of it before me. But here it goes - and this is required for password login in Cockpit to work in addition to SSH key based login to the VM from host - first, create config.ign file:

{
  "ignition": { "version": "3.3.0" },
  "passwd": {
    "users": [
      {
        "name": "root",
        "passwordHash": "YOURHASH",
        "sshAuthorizedKeys": [
          "ssh-... YOURKEY"
        ]
      }
    ]
  },
  "systemd": {
    "units": [{
      "name": "sshd.service",
      "enabled": true
    }]
  },
  "storage": {
    "files": [
      {
        "overwrite": true,
        "path": "/etc/ssh/sshd_config.d/20-enable-passwords.conf",
        "contents": {
          "source": "data:,PasswordAuthentication%20yes%0APermitRootLogin%20yes%0A"
        },
        "mode": 420
      }
    ]
  }
}

…where password SHA512 hash can be obtained using openssl passwd -6 and the ssh key is your public ssh key.

That file is put to eg /tmp and referred in the virt-manager’s XML like follows:

  <sysinfo type="fwcfg">
    <entry name="opt/com.coreos/config" file="/tmp/config.ign"/>
  </sysinfo>

Now we can boot up the VM and ssh in - or you could log in directly too but it’s easier to copy-paste commands when using ssh.

Inside the VM, we can follow the ALP documentation to install and start Cockpit:

podman container runlabel install registry.opensuse.org/suse/alp/workloads/tumbleweed_containerfiles/suse/alp/workloads/cockpit-ws:latest
podman container runlabel --name cockpit-ws run registry.opensuse.org/suse/alp/workloads/tumbleweed_containerfiles/suse/alp/workloads/cockpit-ws:latest
systemctl enable --now cockpit.service

Check your host’s IP address with ip -a, and open IP:9090 in your host’s browser:

Login with root / your password and you shall get the front page:

…and many other pages where you can manage your ALP deployment via browser:

All in all, ALP is in early phases but I’m really happy there’s up-to-date documentation provided and people can start experimenting it whenever they want. The images from the linked directory should be fairly good, and test automation with openQA has been started upon as well.

You can try out the other example workloads that are available just as well.

URLs with // at the beginning

• In English — mina86.com
• —
• 02:09, Sunday, 04 December 2022

Just a quick reminder that relative URLs can start with a double slash and that this means something different than a single slash at the beginning. Specifically, such relative addresses are resolved by taking the schema (and only the schema) of the website they are on.

For example, the code for the link to my repositories in the site’s header is <a href="//github.com/mina86">Code</a>. Since this page uses https schema, browsers will navigate to https://github.com/mina86 if the link is activated.

This little trick can save you some typing, but more importantly, if you’re developing a URL parsing code or a crawler, make sure that it handles this case correctly. It may seem like a small detail, but it can have a big impact on the functionality of your code.

BTRFS Snapshot Cron Script

• Evaggelos Balaskas - System Engineer
• —
• 18:49, Sunday, 20 November 2022

I’ve been using btrfs for a decade now (yes, than means 10y) on my setup (btw I use ArchLinux). I am using subvolumes and read-only snapshots with btrfs, but I have never created a script to automate my backups.

I KNOW, WHAT WAS I DOING ALL THESE YEARS!!

A few days ago, a dear friend asked me something about btrfs snapshots, and that question gave me the nudge to think about my btrfs subvolume snapshots and more specific how to automate them. A day later, I wrote a simple (I think so) script to do automate my backups.

The script as a gist

The script is online as a gist here: BTRFS: Automatic Snapshots Script . In this blog post, I’ll try to describe the requirements and what is my thinking. I waited a couple weeks so the cron (or systemd timer) script run itself and verify that everything works fine. Seems that it does (at least for now) and the behaviour is as expected. I will keep a static copy of my script in this blog post but any future changes should be done in the above gist.

Improvements

The script can be improved by many,many ways (check available space before run, measure the time of running, remove sudo, check if root is running the script, verify the partitions are on btrfs, better debugging, better reporting, etc etc). These are some of the ways of improving the script, I am sure you can think a million more - feel free to sent me your proposals. If I see something I like, I will incorporate them and attribute of-course. But be reminded that I am not driven by smart code, I prefer to have clear and simple code, something that everybody can easily read and understand.

Mount Points

To be completely transparent, I encrypt all my disks (usually with a random keyfile). I use btrfs raid1 on the disks and create many subvolumes on them. Everything exists outside of my primary ssd rootfs disk. So I use a small but fast ssd for my operating system and btrfs-raid1 for my “spinning rust” disks.

BTRFS subvolumes can be mounted as normal partitions and that is exactly what I’ve done with my home and opt. I keep everything that I’ve install outside of my distribution under opt.

This setup is very flexible as I can easy replace the disks when the storage is full by removing one by one of the disks from btrfs-raid1, remove-add the new larger disk, repair-restore raid, then remove the other disk, install the second and (re)balance the entire raid1 on them!

Although this is out of scope, I use a stub archlinux UEFI kernel so I do not have grub and my entire rootfs is also encrypted and btrfs!

mount -o subvolid=10701 LABEL="ST1000DX002" /home
mount -o subvolid=10657 LABEL="ST1000DX002" /opt

Declare variables

# paths MUST end with '/'
btrfs_paths=("/" "/home/" "/opt/")
timestamp=$(date +%Y%m%d_%H%M%S)
keep_snapshots=3
yymmdd="$(date +%Y/%m/%d)"
logfile="/var/log/btrfsSnapshot/${yymmdd}/btrfsSnapshot.log"

The first variable in the script is actually a bash array

btrfs_paths=("/" "/home/" "/opt/")

and all three (3) paths (rootfs, home & opt) are different mount points on different encrypted disks.

MUST end with / (forward slash), either-wise something catastrophic will occur to your system. Be very careful. Please, be very careful!

Next variable is the timestamp we will use, that will create something like

partition_YYYYMMDD_HHMMSS

After that is how many snapshots we would like to keep to our system. You can increase it to whatever you like. But be careful of the storage.

keep_snapshots=3

I like using shortcuts in shell scripts to reduce the long one-liners that some people think that it is alright. I dont, so

yymmdd="$(date +%Y/%m/%d)"

is one of these shortcuts !

Last, I like to have a logfile to review at a later time and see what happened.

logfile="/var/log/btrfsSnapshot/${yymmdd}/btrfsSnapshot.log"

Log Directory

for older dudes -like me- you know that you can not have all your logs under one directory but you need to structure them. The above yymmdd shortcut can help here. As I am too lazy to check if the directory already exist, I just (re)create the log directory that the script will use.

sudo mkdir -p "/var/log/btrfsSnapshot/${yymmdd}/"

For - Loop

We enter to the crucial part of the script. We are going to iterate our btrfs commands in a bash for-loop structure so we can run the same commands for all our partitions (variable: btrfs_paths)

for btrfs_path in "${btrfs_paths[@]}"; do
    <some commands>
done

Snapshot Directory

We need to have our snapshots in a specific location. So I chose .Snapshot/ under each partition. And I am silently (re)creating this directory -again I am lazy, someone should check if the directory/path already exist- just to be sure that the directory exist.

sudo mkdir -p "${btrfs_path}".Snapshot/

I am also using very frequently mlocate (updatedb) so to avoid having multiple (duplicates) in your index, do not forget to update updatedb.conf to exclude the snapshot directories.

PRUNENAMES = ".Snapshot"

How many snapshots are there?

Yes, how many ?

In order to learn this, we need to count them. I will try to skip every other subvolume that exist under the path and count only the read-only, snapshots under each partition.

sudo btrfs subvolume list -o -r -s "${btrfs_path}" | grep -c ".Snapshot/"

Delete Previous snapshots

At this point in the script, we are ready to delete all previous snapshots and only keep the latest or to be exact whatever the keep_snapshots variables says we should keep.

To do that, we are going to iterate via a while-loop (this is a nested loop inside the above for-loop)

while [ "${keep_snapshots}" -le "${list_btrfs_snap}" ]
do
  <some commands>
done

considering that the keep_snapshots is an integer, we iterate the delete command less or equal from the list of already btrfs existing snapshots.

Delete Command

To avoid mistakes, we delete by subvolume id and not by the name of the snapshot, under the btrfs path we listed above.

btrfs subvolume delete --subvolid "${prev_btrfs_snap}" "${btrfs_path}"

and we log the output of the command into our log

Delete subvolume (no-commit): '//.Snapshot/20221107_091028'

Create a new subvolume snapshot

And now we are going to create a new read-only snapshot under our btrfs subvolume.

btrfs subvolume snapshot -r "${btrfs_path}" "${btrfs_path}.Snapshot/${timestamp}"

the log entry will have something like:

Create a readonly snapshot of '/' in '/.Snapshot/20221111_000001'

That’s it !

Output

Log Directory Structure and output

sudo tree /var/log/btrfsSnapshot/2022/11/

/var/log/btrfsSnapshot/2022/11/
├── 07
│   └── btrfsSnapshot.log
├── 10
│   └── btrfsSnapshot.log
├── 11
│   └── btrfsSnapshot.log
└── 18
    └── btrfsSnapshot.log

4 directories, 4 files

sudo cat /var/log/btrfsSnapshot/2022/11/18/btrfsSnapshot.log

######## Fri, 18 Nov 2022 00:00:01 +0200 ########

Delete subvolume (no-commit): '//.Snapshot/20221107_091040'
Create a readonly snapshot of '/' in '/.Snapshot/20221118_000001'

Delete subvolume (no-commit): '/home//home/.Snapshot/20221107_091040'
Create a readonly snapshot of '/home/' in '/home/.Snapshot/20221118_000001'

Delete subvolume (no-commit): '/opt//opt/.Snapshot/20221107_091040'
Create a readonly snapshot of '/opt/' in '/opt/.Snapshot/20221118_000001'

Mount a read-only subvolume

As something extra for this article, I will mount a read-only subvolume, so you can see how it is done.

$ sudo btrfs subvolume list -o -r -s /

ID 462 gen 5809766 cgen 5809765 top level 5 otime 2022-11-10 18:11:20 path .Snapshot/20221110_181120
ID 463 gen 5810106 cgen 5810105 top level 5 otime 2022-11-11 00:00:01 path .Snapshot/20221111_000001
ID 464 gen 5819886 cgen 5819885 top level 5 otime 2022-11-18 00:00:01 path .Snapshot/20221118_000001

$ sudo mount -o subvolid=462 /media/
mount: /media/: can't find in /etc/fstab.

$ sudo mount -o subvolid=462 LABEL=rootfs /media/

$ df -HP /media/
Filesystem       Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/ssd  112G  9.1G  102G   9% /media

$ sudo touch /media/etc/ebal
touch: cannot touch '/media/etc/ebal': Read-only file system

$ sudo diff /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist /media/etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist

294c294
< Server = http://ftp.ntua.gr/pub/linux/archlinux/$repo/os/$arch
---
> #Server = http://ftp.ntua.gr/pub/linux/archlinux/$repo/os/$arch

$ sudo umount /media

The Script

Last, but not least, the full script as was the date of this article.

#!/bin/bash
set -e

# ebal, Mon, 07 Nov 2022 08:49:37 +0200

## 0 0 * * Fri /usr/local/bin/btrfsSnapshot.sh

# paths MUST end with '/'
btrfs_paths=("/" "/home/" "/opt/")
timestamp=$(date +%Y%m%d_%H%M%S)
keep_snapshots=3
yymmdd="$(date +%Y/%m/%d)"
logfile="/var/log/btrfsSnapshot/${yymmdd}/btrfsSnapshot.log"

sudo mkdir -p "/var/log/btrfsSnapshot/${yymmdd}/"

echo "######## $(date -R) ########" | sudo tee -a "${logfile}"
echo "" | sudo tee -a "${logfile}"

for btrfs_path in "${btrfs_paths[@]}"; do

    ## Create Snapshot directory
    sudo mkdir -p "${btrfs_path}".Snapshot/

    ## How many Snapshots are there ?
    list_btrfs_snap=$(sudo btrfs subvolume list -o -r -s "${btrfs_path}" | grep -c ".Snapshot/")

    ## Get oldest rootfs btrfs snapshot
    while [ "${keep_snapshots}" -le "${list_btrfs_snap}" ]
    do
        prev_btrfs_snap=$(sudo btrfs subvolume list -o -r -s  "${btrfs_path}" | grep ".Snapshot/" | sort | head -1 | awk '{print $2}')

        ## Delete a btrfs snapshot by their subvolume id
        sudo btrfs subvolume delete --subvolid "${prev_btrfs_snap}" "${btrfs_path}" | sudo tee -a "${logfile}"

        list_btrfs_snap=$(sudo btrfs subvolume list -o -r -s "${btrfs_path}" | grep -c ".Snapshot/")
    done

    ## Create a new read-only btrfs snapshot
    sudo btrfs subvolume snapshot -r "${btrfs_path}" "${btrfs_path}.Snapshot/${timestamp}" | sudo tee -a "${logfile}"

    echo "" | sudo tee -a "${logfile}"

done

Secret command Google doesn’t want you to know

• In English — mina86.com
• —
• 17:55, Sunday, 20 November 2022

Or how to change language of Google website.

If you’ve travelled abroad, you may have noticed that Google tries to be helpful and uses the language of the region you’re in on its websites. It doesn’t matter if your operating system is set to Spanish, for example; Google Search will still use Portuguese if you happen to be in Brazil.

Fortunately, there’s a simple way to force Google to use a specific language. All you need to do is append ?hl=lang to the website’s address, replacing lang with a two-letter code for the desired language. For instance, ?hl=es for Spanish, ?hl=ht for Haitian, or ?hl=uk for Ukrainian.

If the URL already contains a question mark, you need to append &hl=lang instead. Additionally, if it contains a hash symbol, you need to insert the string just before the hash symbol. For example:

• https://www.google.com/?hl=es
• https://www.google.com/search?q=bread+sandwich&hl=es
• https://analytics.google.com/analytics/web/?hl=es#/report-home/

By the way, as a legacy of Facebook having hired many ex-Google employees, the parameter also work on some of the Facebook properties.

This trick doesn’t work on all Google properties. However, it seems to be effective on pages that try to guess your language preference without giving you the option to override it. For example, while Gmail ignores the parameter, you can change its display language in the settings (accessible via the gear icon near the top right of the page). Similarly, YouTube strips the parameter, but it respects preferences configured in the web browser.

Anyone familiar with HTTP may wonder why Google doesn’t just look at the Accept-Language header. The issue is that many users have their browser configured with defaults that send English as the only option, even though they would prefer another language. In those cases, it’s more user-friendly to ignore that header. As it turns out, localisation is really hard.

Baking Qemu KVM Snapshot to Base Image

• Evaggelos Balaskas - System Engineer
• —
• 22:17, Saturday, 19 November 2022

When creating a new Cloud Virtual Machine the cloud provider is copying a virtual disk as the base image (we called it mí̱tra or matrix) and starts your virtual machine from another virtual disk (or volume cloud disk) that in fact is a snapshot of the base image.

Just for the sake of this example, let us say that the base cloud image is the

jammy-server-cloudimg-amd64.img

When creating a new Libvirt (qemu/kvm) virtual machine, you can use this base image to start your VM instead of using an iso to install ubuntu 22.04 LTS. When choosing this image, then all changes will occur to that image and if you want to spawn another virtual machine, you need to (re)download it.

So instead of doing that, the best practice is to copy this image as base and start from a snapshot aka a baking file from that image. It is best because you can always quickly revert all your changes and (re)spawn the VM from the fresh/clean base image. Or you can always create another snapshot and revert if needed.

inspect images

To see how that works here is a local example from my linux machine.

qemu-img info /var/lib/libvirt/images/lEvXLA_tf-base.qcow2

image: /var/lib/libvirt/images/lEvXLA_tf-base.qcow2
file format: qcow2
virtual size: 2.2 GiB (2361393152 bytes)
disk size: 636 MiB
cluster_size: 65536
Format specific information:
    compat: 0.10
    compression type: zlib
    refcount bits: 16

the most important attributes to inspect are

virtual size: 2.2 GiB
disk size: 636 MiB

and the volume disk of my virtual machine

qemu-img info /var/lib/libvirt/images/lEvXLA_tf-vol.qcow2

image: /var/lib/libvirt/images/lEvXLA_tf-vol.qcow2
file format: qcow2
virtual size: 10 GiB (10737418240 bytes)
disk size: 1.6 GiB
cluster_size: 65536
backing file: /var/lib/libvirt/images/lEvXLA_tf-base.qcow2
backing file format: qcow2
Format specific information:
    compat: 0.10
    compression type: zlib
    refcount bits: 16

We see here

virtual size: 10 GiB
disk size: 1.6 GiB

cause I have extended the volume disk size to 10G from 2.2G , doing some updates and install some packages.

Now here is a problem.

I would like to use my own cloud image as base for some projects. It will help me speed things up and also do some common things I am usually doing in every setup.

If I copy the volume disk, then I will copy 1.6G of the snapshot disk. I can not use this as a base image. The volume disk contains only the delta from the base image!

baking file

Let’s first understand a bit better what is happening here

qemu-img info –backing-chain /var/lib/libvirt/images/lEvXLA_tf-vol.qcow2

image: /var/lib/libvirt/images/lEvXLA_tf-vol.qcow2
file format: qcow2
virtual size: 10 GiB (10737418240 bytes)
disk size: 1.6 GiB
cluster_size: 65536
backing file: /var/lib/libvirt/images/lEvXLA_tf-base.qcow2
backing file format: qcow2
Format specific information:
    compat: 0.10
    compression type: zlib
    refcount bits: 16

image: /var/lib/libvirt/images/lEvXLA_tf-base.qcow2
file format: qcow2
virtual size: 2.2 GiB (2361393152 bytes)
disk size: 636 MiB
cluster_size: 65536
Format specific information:
    compat: 0.10
    compression type: zlib
    refcount bits: 16

By inspecting the volume disk, we see that this image is chained to our base image.

disk size: 1.6 GiB
disk size: 636 MiB

Commit Volume

If we want to commit our volume changes to our base images, we need to commit them.

sudo qemu-img commit /var/lib/libvirt/images/lEvXLA_tf-vol.qcow2

Image committed.

Be aware, we commit our changes the volume disk => so our base will get the updates !!

Base Image

We need to see our base image grow we our changes

  disk size: 1.6 GiB
+ disk size: 636 MiB
=
  disk size: 2.11 GiB

and we can verify that by getting the image info (details)

qemu-img info /var/lib/libvirt/images/lEvXLA_tf-base.qcow2

image: /var/lib/libvirt/images/lEvXLA_tf-base.qcow2
file format: qcow2
virtual size: 10 GiB (10737418240 bytes)
disk size: 2.11 GiB
cluster_size: 65536
Format specific information:
    compat: 0.10
    compression type: zlib
    refcount bits: 16

That’s it !

GitLab as a Terraform state backend

• Evaggelos Balaskas - System Engineer
• —
• 14:30, Friday, 11 November 2022

Using Terraform for personal projects, is a good way to create your lab in a reproducible manner. Wherever your lab is, either in the “cloud” aka other’s people computers or in a self-hosted environment, you can run your Infrastructure as code (IaC) instead of performing manual tasks each time.

My preferable way is to use QEMU/KVM (Kernel Virtual Machine) on my libvirt (self-hosted) lab. You can quickly build a k8s cluster or test a few virtual machines with different software, without paying extra money to cloud providers.

Terraform uses a state file to store your entire infra in json format. This file will be the source of truth for your infrastructure. Any changes you make in the code, terraform will figure out what needs to add/destroy and run only what have changed.

Working in a single repository, terraform will create a local state file on your working directory. This is fast and reliable when working alone. When working with a team (either in an opensource project/service or it is something work related) you need to share the state with others. Eitherwise the result will be catastrophic as each person will have no idea of the infrastructure state of the service.

In this blog post, I will try to explain how to use GitLab to store the terraform state into a remote repository by using the tf backend: http which is REST.

Greate a new private GitLab Project

We need the Project ID which is under the project name in the top.

Create a new api token

Verify that your Project has the ability to store terraform state files

You are ready to clone the git repository to your system.

Backend

Reading the documentation in the below links

• GitLab-managed Terraform state
• Backend Type: http

seems that the only thing we need to do, is to expand our terraform project with this:

terraform {
  backend "http" {
  }
}

Doing that, we inform our IaC that our terraform backend should be a remote address.

Took me a while to figure this out, but after re-reading all the necessary documentation materials the idea is to declare your backend on gitlab and to do this, we need to initialize the http backend.

The only Required configuration setting is the remote address and should be something like this:

terraform {
  backend "http" {
    address = "https://gitlab.com/api/v4/projects/<PROJECT_ID>/terraform/state/<STATE_NAME>"
  }
}

Where PROJECT_ID and STATE_NAME are relative to your project.

In this article, we go with

GITLAB_PROJECT_ID="40961586"
GITLAB_TF_STATE_NAME="tf_state"

Terraform does not allow to use variables in the backend http, so the preferable way is to export them to our session.

and we -of course- need the address:

TF_HTTP_ADDRESS="https://gitlab.com/api/v4/projects/${GITLAB_PROJECT_ID}/terraform/state/${GITLAB_TF_STATE_NAME}"

For convience reasons, I will create a file named: terraform.config outside of this git repo

cat > ../terraform.config <<EOF
export -p GITLAB_PROJECT_ID="40961586"
export -p GITLAB_TF_STATE_NAME="tf_state"
export -p GITLAB_URL="https://gitlab.com/api/v4/projects"

# Address
export -p TF_HTTP_ADDRESS="${GITLAB_URL}/${GITLAB_PROJECT_ID}/terraform/state/${GITLAB_TF_STATE_NAME}"

EOF

source ../terraform.config

this should do the trick.

Authentication

In order to authenticate via tf against GitLab to store the tf remote state, we need to also set two additional variables:

# Authentication
TF_HTTP_USERNAME="api"
TF_HTTP_PASSWORD="<TOKEN>"

put them in the above terraform.config file.

Pretty much we are done!

Initialize Terraform

source ../terraform.config 

terraform init

Initializing the backend...

Successfully configured the backend "http"! Terraform will automatically
use this backend unless the backend configuration changes.

Initializing provider plugins...
- Finding latest version of hashicorp/http...
- Finding latest version of hashicorp/random...
- Finding latest version of hashicorp/template...
- Finding dmacvicar/libvirt versions matching ">= 0.7.0"...
- Installing hashicorp/random v3.4.3...
- Installed hashicorp/random v3.4.3 (signed by HashiCorp)
- Installing hashicorp/template v2.2.0...
- Installed hashicorp/template v2.2.0 (signed by HashiCorp)
- Installing dmacvicar/libvirt v0.7.0...
- Installed dmacvicar/libvirt v0.7.0 (unauthenticated)
- Installing hashicorp/http v3.2.1...
- Installed hashicorp/http v3.2.1 (signed by HashiCorp)

Terraform has created a lock file .terraform.lock.hcl to record the provider
selections it made above. Include this file in your version control repository
so that Terraform can guarantee to make the same selections by default when
you run "terraform init" in the future.

...

Terraform has been successfully initialized!

You may now begin working with Terraform. Try running "terraform plan" to see
any changes that are required for your infrastructure. All Terraform commands
should now work.

If you ever set or change modules or backend configuration for Terraform,
rerun this command to reinitialize your working directory. If you forget, other
commands will detect it and remind you to do so if necessary.

Remote state

by running

terraform plan

we can now see the remote terraform state in the gitlab

Opening Actions –> Copy terraform init command we can see the below configuration:

export GITLAB_ACCESS_TOKEN=<YOUR-ACCESS-TOKEN>

terraform init
    -backend-config="address=https://gitlab.com/api/v4/projects/40961586/terraform/state/tf_state"
    -backend-config="lock_address=https://gitlab.com/api/v4/projects/40961586/terraform/state/tf_state/lock"
    -backend-config="unlock_address=https://gitlab.com/api/v4/projects/40961586/terraform/state/tf_state/lock"
    -backend-config="username=api"
    -backend-config="password=$GITLAB_ACCESS_TOKEN"
    -backend-config="lock_method=POST"
    -backend-config="unlock_method=DELETE"
    -backend-config="retry_wait_min=5"

Update terraform backend configuration

I dislike running a “long” terraform init command, so we will put these settings to our tf code.

Separating the static changes from the dynamic, our Backend http config can become something like this:

terraform {
  backend "http" {
    lock_method    = "POST"
    unlock_method  = "DELETE"
    retry_wait_min = 5
  }
}

but we need to update our terraform.config once more, to include all the variables of the http backend configuration for locking and unlocking the state.

# Lock
export -p TF_HTTP_LOCK_ADDRESS="${TF_HTTP_ADDRESS}/lock"

# Unlock
export -p TF_HTTP_UNLOCK_ADDRESS="${TF_HTTP_ADDRESS}/lock"

Terraform Config

So here is our entire terraform config file

# GitLab

export -p GITLAB_URL="https://gitlab.com/api/v4/projects"
export -p GITLAB_PROJECT_ID="<>"
export -p GITLAB_TF_STATE_NAME="tf_state"

# Terraform

# Address
export -p TF_HTTP_ADDRESS="${GITLAB_URL}/${GITLAB_PROJECT_ID}/terraform/state/${GITLAB_TF_STATE_NAME}"

# Lock
export -p TF_HTTP_LOCK_ADDRESS="${TF_HTTP_ADDRESS}/lock"

# Unlock
export -p TF_HTTP_UNLOCK_ADDRESS="${TF_HTTP_ADDRESS}/lock"

# Authentication
export -p TF_HTTP_USERNAME="api"
export -p TF_HTTP_PASSWORD="<>"

And pretty much that’s it!

Other Colleagues

So in order our team mates/colleagues want to make changes to this specific gitlab repo (or even extended to include a pipeline) they need

1. Git clone the repo
2. Edit the terraform.config
3. Initialize terraform (terraform init)

And terraform will use the remote state file.

KDE Gear 22.12 branches created

• TSDgeos' blog
• —
• 20:38, Saturday, 05 November 2022

Make sure you commit anything you want to end up in the KDE Gear 22.12 releases to them

We're already past the dependency freeze.

The Feature Freeze and Beta is next week Thursday 10 of November.

More interesting dates
 November 24, 2022: 22.12 RC (22.11.90) Tagging and Release
 December 1, 2022: 22.12 Tagging
 December 8, 2022: 22.12 Release

https://community.kde.org/Schedules/KDE_Gear_22.12_Schedule

The KDE Qt5 Patch Collection has been rebased on top of Qt 5.15.7

• TSDgeos' blog
• —
• 21:39, Friday, 28 October 2022

 Commit: https://invent.kde.org/qt/qt/qt5/-/commit/17246d90b97ef6ecc05cb225bc576b4fb30ca77a

Commercial release announcement: https://www.qt.io/blog/commercial-lts-qt-5.15.7-released 

As usual I want to personally extend my gratitude to the Commercial users of Qt for beta testing Qt 5.15.7 for the rest of us.

Implementing Packet Sequence Validation using Pushdown Automata

• foss – vanitasvitae's blog
• —
• 16:14, Wednesday, 26 October 2022

This is part 2 of a small series on verifying the validity of packet sequences using tools from theoretical computer science. Read part 1 here.

In the previous blog post I discussed how a formal grammar can be transformed into a pushdown automaton in order to check if a sequence of packets or tokens is part of the language described by the grammar. In this post I will discuss how I implemented said automaton in Java in order to validate OpenPGP messages in PGPainless.

In the meantime, I made some slight changes to the automaton and removed some superfluous states. My current design of the automaton looks as follows:

If you compare this diagram to the previous iteration, you can see that I got rid of the states “Signed Message”, “One-Pass-Signed Message” and “Corresponding Signature”. Those were states which had ε-transitions to another state, so they were not really useful.

For example, the state “One-Pass-Signed Message” would only be entered when the input “OPS” was read and ‘m’ could be popped from the stack. After that, there would only be a single applicable rule which would read no input, pop nothing from the stack and instead push back ‘m’. Therefore, these two rule could be combined into a single rule which reads input “OPS”, pops ‘m’ from the stack and immediately pushes it back onto it. This rule would leave the automaton in state “OpenPGP Message”. Both automata are equivalent.

One more minor detail: Since I am using Bouncy Castle, I have to deal with some of its quirks. One of those being that BC bundles together encrypted session keys (PKESKs/SKESKs) with the actual encrypted data packets (SEIPD/SED). Therefore when implementing, we can further simplify the diagram by removing the SKESK|PKESK parts:

Now, in order to implement this automaton in Java, I decided to define enums for the input and stack alphabets, as well as the states:

public enum InputAlphabet {
    LiteralData,
    Signature,            // Sig
    OnePassSignature,     // OPS
    CompressedData,
    EncryptedData,        // SEIPD|SED
    EndOfSequence         // End of message/nested data
}

public enum StackAlphabet {
    msg,                 // m
    ops,                 // o
    terminus             // #
}

public enum State {
    OpenPgpMessage,
    LiteralMessage,
    CompressedMessage,
    EncryptedMessage,
    Valid
}

Note, that there is no “Start” state, since we will simply initialize the automaton in state OpenPgpMessage, with ‘m#’ already put on the stack.

We also need an exception class that we can throw when OpenPGP packet is read when its not allowed. Therefore I created a MalformedOpenPgpMessageException class.

Now the first design of our automaton itself is pretty straight forward:

public class PDA {
    private State state;
    private final Stack<StackAlphabet> stack = new Stack<>();
    
    public PDA() {
        state = State.OpenPgpMessage;    // initial state
        stack.push(terminus);            // push '#'
        stack.push(msg);                 // push 'm'
    }

    public void next(InputAlphabet input)
            throws MalformedOpenPgpMessageException {
        // TODO: handle the next input packet
    }

    StackAlphabet popStack() {
        if (stack.isEmpty()) {
            return null;
        }
        return stack.pop();
    }

    void pushStack(StackAlphabet item) {
        stack.push(item);
    }

    boolean isEmptyStack() {
        return stack.isEmpty();
    }

    public boolean isValid() {
        return state == State.Valid && isEmptyStack();
    }
}

As you can see, we initialize the automaton with a pre-populated stack and an initial state. The automatons isValid() method only returns true, if the automaton ended up in state “Valid” and the stack is empty.

Whats missing is an implementation of the transition rules. I found it most straight forward to implement those inside the State enum itself by defining a transition() method:

public enum State {

    OpenPgpMessage {
        @Overrides
        public State transition(InputAlphabet input, PDA automaton)
                throws MalformedOpenPgpMessageException {
            StackAlphabet stackItem = automaton.popStack();
            if (stackItem != OpenPgpMessage) {
                throw new MalformedOpenPgpMessageException();
            }
            swith(input) {
                case LiteralData:
                    // Literal Packet,m/ε
                    return LiteralMessage;
                case Signature:
                    // Sig,m/m
                    automaton.pushStack(msg);
                    return OpenPgpMessage;
                case OnePassSignature:
                    // OPS,m/mo
                    automaton.push(ops);
                    automaton.push(msg);
                    return OpenPgpMessage;
                case CompressedData:
                    // Compressed Data,m/ε
                    return CompressedMessage;
                case EncryptedData:
                    // SEIPD|SED,m/ε
                    return EncryptedMessage;
                case EndOfSequence:
                default:
                    // No transition
                    throw new MalformedOpenPgpMessageException();
            }
        }
    },

    LiteralMessage {
        @Overrides
        public State transition(InputAlphabet input, PDA automaton)
                throws MalformedOpenPgpMessageException {
            StackAlphabet stackItem = automaton.popStack();
            switch(input) {
                case Signature:
                    if (stackItem == ops) {
                        // Sig,o/ε
                        return LiteralMessage;
                    } else {
                        throw new MalformedOpenPgpMessageException();
                    }
                case EndOfSequence:
                    if (stackItem == terminus && automaton.isEmptyStack()) {
                        // ε,#/ε
                        return valid;
                    } else {
                        throw new MalformedOpenPgpMessageException();
                    }
                default:
                    throw new MalformedOpenPgpMessageException();
            }
        }
    },

    CompressedMessage {
        @Overrides
        public State transition(InputAlphabet input, PDA automaton)
                throws MalformedOpenPgpMessageException {
            StackAlphabet stackItem = automaton.popStack();
            switch(input) {
                case Signature:
                    if (stackItem == ops) {
                        // Sig,o/ε
                        return CompressedMessage;
                    } else {
                        throw new MalformedOpenPgpMessageException();
                    }
                case EndOfSequence:
                    if (stackItem == terminus && automaton.isEmptyStack()) {
                        // ε,#/ε
                        return valid;
                    } else {
                        throw new MalformedOpenPgpMessageException();
                    }
                default:
                    throw new MalformedOpenPgpMessageException();
            }
        }
    },

    EncryptedMessage {
        @Overrides
        public State transition(InputAlphabet input, PDA automaton)
                throws MalformedOpenPgpMessageException {
            StackAlphabet stackItem = automaton.popStack();
            switch(input) {
                case Signature:
                    if (stackItem == ops) {
                        // Sig,o/ε
                        return EncryptedMessage;
                    } else {
                        throw new MalformedOpenPgpMessageException();
                    }
                case EndOfSequence:
                    if (stackItem == terminus && automaton.isEmptyStack()) {
                        // ε,#/ε
                        return valid;
                    } else {
                        throw new MalformedOpenPgpMessageException();
                    }
                default:
                    throw new MalformedOpenPgpMessageException();
            }
        }
    },

    Valid {
        @Overrides
        public State transition(InputAlphabet input, PDA automaton)
                throws MalformedOpenPgpMessageException {
            // Cannot transition out of Valid state
            throw new MalformedOpenPgpMessageException();
        }
    }
    ;

    abstract State transition(InputAlphabet input, PDA automaton)
            throws MalformedOpenPgpMessageException;
}

It might make sense to define the transitions in an external class to allow for different grammars and to remove the dependency on the PDA class, but I do not care about this for now, so I’m fine with it.

Now every State has a transition() method, which takes an input symbol and the automaton itself (for access to the stack) and either returns the new state, or throws an exception in case of an illegal token.

Next, we need to modify our PDA class, so that the new state is saved:

public class PDA {
    [...]

    public void next(InputAlphabet input)
            throws MalformedOpenPgpMessageException {
        state = state.transition(input, this);
    }
}

Now we are able to verify simple packet sequences by feeding them one-by-one to the automaton:

// LIT EOS
PDA pda = new PDA();
pda.next(LiteralData);
pda.next(EndOfSequence);
assertTrue(pda.isValid());

// OPS LIT SIG EOS
pda = new PDA();
pda.next(OnePassSignature);
pda.next(LiteralData);
pda.next(Signature);
pda.next(EndOfSequence);
assertTrue(pda.isValid());

// COMP EOS
PDA pda = new PDA();
pda.next(CompressedData);
pda.next(EndOfSequence);
assertTrue(pda.isValid());

You might say “Hold up! The last example is a clear violation of the syntax! A compressed data packet alone does not make a valid OpenPGP message!”.

And you are right. A compressed data packet is only a valid OpenPGP message, if its decompressed contents also represent a valid OpenPGP message. Therefore, when using our PDA class, we need to take care of packets with nested streams separately. In my implementation, I created an OpenPgpMessageInputStream, which among consuming the packet stream, handling the actual decryption, decompression etc. also takes care for handling nested PDAs. I will not go into too much details, but the following code should give a good idea of the architecture:

public class OpenPgpMessageInputStream {
    private final PDA pda = new PDA();
    private BCPGInputStream pgpIn = ...; // stream of OpenPGP packets
    private OpenPgpMessageInputStream nestedStream;

    public OpenPgpMessageInputStream(BCPGInputStream pgpIn) {
        this.pgpIn = pgpIn;
        switch(pgpIn.nextPacketTag()) {
            case LIT:
                pda.next(LiteralData);
                ...
                break;
            case COMP:
                pda.next(CompressedData);
                nestedStream = new OpenPgpMessageInputStream(decompress());
                ...
                break;
            case OPS:
                pda.next(OnePassSignature);
                ...
                break;
            case SIG:
                pda.next(Signature);
                ...
                break;
            case SEIPD:
            case SED:
                pda.next(EncryptedData);
                nestedStream = new OpenPgpMessageInputStream(decrypt());
                ...
                break;
            default:
                // Unknown / irrelevant packet
                throw new MalformedOpenPgpMessageException();
    }

    boolean isValid() {
        return pda.isValid() &&
               (nestedStream == null || nestedStream.isValid());

    @Override
    close() {
        if (!isValid()) {
            throw new MalformedOpenPgpMessageException();
        }
        ...
    }
}

The key thing to take away here is, that when we encounter a nesting packet (EncryptedData, CompressedData), we create a nested OpenPgpMessageInputStream on the decrypted / decompressed contents of this packet. Once we are ready to close the stream (because we reached the end), we not only check if our own PDA is in a valid state, but also whether the nestedStream (if there is one) is valid too.

This code is of course only a rough sketch and the actual implementation is far more complex to cover many possible edge cases. Yet, it still should give a good idea of how to use pushdown automata to verify packet sequences Feel free to check out my real-world implementation here and here.

Happy Hacking!

KDE Gear 22.12 release schedule finalized

• TSDgeos' blog
• —
• 18:07, Friday, 21 October 2022

This is the release schedule the release team agreed on

https://community.kde.org/Schedules/KDE_Gear_22.12_Schedule

Dependency freeze is in TWO weeks (November 3) and feature freeze one after that. 

Get your stuff ready!

Automatically delete files in object storage

• Evaggelos Balaskas - System Engineer
• —
• 12:19, Friday, 21 October 2022

In the last few months of this year, a business question exists in all our minds:

-Can we reduce Cost ?
-Are there any legacy cloud resources that we can remove ?

The answer is YES, it is always Yes. It is part of your Technical Debt (remember that?).

In our case we had to check a few cloud resources, but the most impressive were our Object Storage Service that in the past we were using Buckets and Objects as backup volumes … for databases … database clusters!!

So let’s find out what is our Techinical Debt in our OBS … ~ 1.8PB . One petabyte holds 1000 terabytes (TB), One terabyte holds 1000 gigabytes (GB).

We have confirmed with our colleagues and scheduled the decomissions of these legacy buckets/objects. We’ve noticed that a few of them are in TB sizes with million of objects and in some cases with not a hierarchy structure (paths) so there is an issue with command line tools or web UI tools.

The problem is called LISTING and/or PAGING.

That means we can not list in a POSIX way (nerdsssss) all our objects so we can try delete them. We need to PAGE them in 50 or 100 objects and that means we need to batch our scripts. This could be a very long/time based job.

Then after a couple days of reading manuals (remember these ?), I found that we can create a Lifecycle Policy to our Buckets !!!

But before going on to setup the Lifecycle policy, just a quick reminder how the Object Lifecycle works

The objects can be in Warm/Cold or in Expired State as buckets support versioning. This has to do with the retention policy of logs/data.

So in order to automatically delete ALL objects from a bucket, we need to setup up the Expire Time to 1 day.

Then you have to wait for 24h and next day

yehhhhhhhhhhhh !

PS. Caveat Remember BEFORE all that, do disable Logging as the default setting is to log every action to a local log path, inside the Bucket.

Come to Barcelona for Akademy-es 2022!

• TSDgeos' blog
• —
• 09:12, Saturday, 17 September 2022

As previously announced, Akademy 2022 will be happening in Barcelona at the beginning of October.

On top of that, Akademy-es [the Spain spin-off of Akademy] is also happening in Barcelona the days before (29 and 30 of September). So if you're interested in KDE and understand Spanish a bit, please drop by https://www.kde-espana.org/akademy-es-2022 and register yourself at https://www.kde-espana.org/akademy-es2022/registro.php

There's also a quite pretty t-shirt you can order but if you want it, you have to register BEFORE the end of the weekend if you want it!