Category: Linux

Debian on the XPS13 Plus (9320)

TL;DR; Still no sound, but I learned a couple of new things…

So, I finally got around to upgrading my laptop. I decided to go for my fourth XPS13, and this time I opted for a maxed out XPS13 Plus. A really nice machine. However, the driver stack isn’t quite there yet. Yes, I should have read up more before buying, but I didn’t and I know it will be sorted out over time.

As a vim user, the touch Esc key will be a challenge. Perhaps this is where I learn to bind to capslock, but I’ve not come to that point yet.

So, after installing using the netinst image with non-free drivers (and my phone over USB tether for networking since the wifi still didn’t work), I had to move to testing for anything to work. Then I installed firmware-iwlwifi, iwlwifi and firmware-sof-signed from non-free. This got me into a graphical desktop and most things work (I could configure the touch pad for tap-to-click, and so on). I run a KDE desktop, so I installed some Plymouth stuff, breeze for SDDM and such, but that shouldn’t affect the issues described here.

My current issues are the sound, the webcam and hibernation. The two latter items aren’t huge problems, but I do need sound. Both the webcam and sound issues are known. Hibernation is mostly about getting around to configuring it with the encrypted disk setup.

So, let’s start by diving into the audio issue. The early boot process looks like this:

[   20.595666] sof-audio-pci-intel-tgl 0000:00:1f.3: DSP detected with PCI class/subclass/prog-if info 0x040100
[   20.595750] sof-audio-pci-intel-tgl 0000:00:1f.3: SoundWire enabled on CannonLake+ platform, using SOF driver
[   20.595778] sof-audio-pci-intel-tgl 0000:00:1f.3: enabling device (0000 -> 0002)
[   20.596001] sof-audio-pci-intel-tgl 0000:00:1f.3: DSP detected with PCI class/subclass/prog-if 0x040100
[   20.596073] sof-audio-pci-intel-tgl 0000:00:1f.3: bound 0000:00:02.0 (ops i915_audio_component_bind_ops [i915])
[   20.602984] sof-audio-pci-intel-tgl 0000:00:1f.3: use msi interrupt mode
[   20.651283] sof-audio-pci-intel-tgl 0000:00:1f.3: hda codecs found, mask 4
[   20.652476] sof-audio-pci-intel-tgl 0000:00:1f.3: firmware: direct-loading firmware intel/sof/sof-adl.ri
[   20.652482] sof-audio-pci-intel-tgl 0000:00:1f.3: Firmware info: version 2:2:0-57864
[   20.652483] sof-audio-pci-intel-tgl 0000:00:1f.3: Firmware: ABI 3:22:1 Kernel ABI 3:23:0
[   20.652488] sof-audio-pci-intel-tgl 0000:00:1f.3: unknown sof_ext_man header type 3 size 0x30
[   20.747032] sof-audio-pci-intel-tgl 0000:00:1f.3: Firmware info: version 2:2:0-57864
[   20.747036] sof-audio-pci-intel-tgl 0000:00:1f.3: Firmware: ABI 3:22:1 Kernel ABI 3:23:0
[   25.758149] sof_sdw sof_sdw: snd_soc_register_card failed -517
[   25.768995] sof_sdw sof_sdw: snd_soc_register_card failed -517
[   25.799027] sof_sdw sof_sdw: snd_soc_register_card failed -517

If I later force a reload of the module, it all works:

sudo modprobe -r snd-sof-pci-intel-tgl; sudo modprobe snd-sof-pci-intel-tgl

Gives:

[  169.407671] sof-audio-pci-intel-tgl 0000:00:1f.3: DSP detected with PCI class/subclass/prog-if info 0x040100
[  169.407784] sof-audio-pci-intel-tgl 0000:00:1f.3: SoundWire enabled on CannonLake+ platform, using SOF driver
[  169.408027] sof-audio-pci-intel-tgl 0000:00:1f.3: DSP detected with PCI class/subclass/prog-if 0x040100
[  169.408133] sof-audio-pci-intel-tgl 0000:00:1f.3: bound 0000:00:02.0 (ops i915_audio_component_bind_ops [i915])
[  169.414240] sof-audio-pci-intel-tgl 0000:00:1f.3: use msi interrupt mode
[  169.428614] sof-audio-pci-intel-tgl 0000:00:1f.3: hda codecs found, mask 4
[  169.428802] sof-audio-pci-intel-tgl 0000:00:1f.3: firmware: direct-loading firmware intel/sof/sof-adl.ri
[  169.428809] sof-audio-pci-intel-tgl 0000:00:1f.3: Firmware info: version 2:2:0-57864
[  169.428810] sof-audio-pci-intel-tgl 0000:00:1f.3: Firmware: ABI 3:22:1 Kernel ABI 3:23:0
[  169.428814] sof-audio-pci-intel-tgl 0000:00:1f.3: unknown sof_ext_man header type 3 size 0x30
[  169.547087] sof-audio-pci-intel-tgl 0000:00:1f.3: Firmware info: version 2:2:0-57864
[  169.547115] sof-audio-pci-intel-tgl 0000:00:1f.3: Firmware: ABI 3:22:1 Kernel ABI 3:23:0
[  169.563645] sof-audio-pci-intel-tgl 0000:00:1f.3: firmware: direct-loading firmware intel/sof-tplg/sof-adl-rt1316-l12-rt714-l0.tplg
[  169.563665] sof-audio-pci-intel-tgl 0000:00:1f.3: Topology: ABI 3:22:1 Kernel ABI 3:23:0
[  169.564019] sof_sdw sof_sdw: ASoC: Parent card not yet available, widget card binding deferred
[  169.605390] sof_sdw sof_sdw: hda_dsp_hdmi_build_controls: no PCM in topology for HDMI converter 3
[  169.627693] input: sof-soundwire HDMI/DP,pcm=5 as /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1f.3/sof_sdw/sound/card0/input26
[  169.627738] input: sof-soundwire HDMI/DP,pcm=6 as /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1f.3/sof_sdw/sound/card0/input27
[  169.631375] input: sof-soundwire HDMI/DP,pcm=7 as /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1f.3/sof_sdw/sound/card0/input28

So, something happens after sof-adl.ri is loaded. This causes the driver to just stop before loading the sof-adl-rtl316-l12-rt714-l0.tplg firmware, causing the snd_soc_register_card to fail. Let’t have a look at the reasons.

First up, the excellent Arch Linux Wiki says to include the two firmware files and a bunch of modules in the initramfs. However, Arch and Debian uses different tools to build the initramfs, so let’s confirm the issue first:

lsinitramfs -l /boot/initrd.img-6.0.0-5-amd64  | grep 'intel/sof'

This call results in a list of nothing. Just to confirm, grepping for firmware or intel returns long lists of files. So, the firmware is not in the early initramfs image. How do I get the firmware files into the initramfs? Apparently I have to write what is known as an initramfs-tools hook script.

There lives a bunch of them over at /usr/share/initramfs-tools/hooks, so I started a very brute force one called intel-sof-firmware and tried to learn from the surrounding scripts and the manpage linked above. The result can be found in a gist here.

Notice that this is happy code. There is way too few sanity checks in there to make this useful to the general public. Your milage may vary.

So, I added the modules to /etc/initramfs/modules, and then updated the early initramfs images with this command:

sudo update-initramfs -k all -u

And then verified that the files made it to the image (I also had a look at the file listing in general to ensure that the image is ok):

lsinitramfs -l /boot/initrd.img-6.0.0-5-amd64  | grep 'intel/sof'

drwxr-xr-x   2 root     root            0 Dec 11 15:51 usr/lib/firmware/intel/sof
drwxr-xr-x   2 root     root            0 Dec 11 15:51 usr/lib/firmware/intel/sof-tplg
-rw-r--r--   1 root     root        28907 Dec 11 15:51 usr/lib/firmware/intel/sof-tplg/sof-adl-rt1316-l12-rt714-l0.tplg
-rw-r--r--   1 root     root       525056 Dec 11 15:51 usr/lib/firmware/intel/sof/sof-adl.ri

It all seems to work, so let’s reboot and see what comes out the other side. Notice – this can brick your computer if you make a mistake. And if something to do with a computer can brick your computer, you know that it will brick your computer. Don’t say I did not tell you.

Side note: I run an encrypted lvm setup, and if you try to fix this problem by removing all modules (go from many to netbook in the initramfs.conf) you will enjoy re-installing your machine. I’m sure you can unbrick it by booting from a USB stick and fixing stuff, but since I’ve not really installed anything, I don’t really care.

Guess what – after a couple of hours digging at this – I still have no sound…

sudo dmesg | grep sof

Results in this (yay, a new error code – that must mean that I’m doing something):

[    1.760559] sof-audio-pci-intel-tgl 0000:00:1f.3: DSP detected with PCI class/subclass/prog-if info 0x040100
[    1.760629] sof-audio-pci-intel-tgl 0000:00:1f.3: SoundWire enabled on CannonLake+ platform, using SOF driver
[    1.760643] sof-audio-pci-intel-tgl 0000:00:1f.3: enabling device (0000 -> 0002)
[    1.760785] sof-audio-pci-intel-tgl 0000:00:1f.3: DSP detected with PCI class/subclass/prog-if 0x040100
[    3.491343] sof-audio-pci-intel-tgl 0000:00:1f.3: bound 0000:00:02.0 (ops i915_audio_component_bind_ops [i915])
[    3.569000] sof-audio-pci-intel-tgl 0000:00:1f.3: use msi interrupt mode
[    3.585475] sof-audio-pci-intel-tgl 0000:00:1f.3: codec #2 probe error, ret: -2
[    3.585859] sof-audio-pci-intel-tgl 0000:00:1f.3: no hda codecs found!
[    3.585990] sof-audio-pci-intel-tgl 0000:00:1f.3: firmware: direct-loading firmware intel/sof/sof-adl.ri
[    3.585996] sof-audio-pci-intel-tgl 0000:00:1f.3: Firmware info: version 2:2:0-57864
[    3.585998] sof-audio-pci-intel-tgl 0000:00:1f.3: Firmware: ABI 3:22:1 Kernel ABI 3:23:0
[    3.586007] sof-audio-pci-intel-tgl 0000:00:1f.3: unknown sof_ext_man header type 3 size 0x30
[    3.702740] sof-audio-pci-intel-tgl 0000:00:1f.3: Firmware info: version 2:2:0-57864
[    3.702756] sof-audio-pci-intel-tgl 0000:00:1f.3: Firmware: ABI 3:22:1 Kernel ABI 3:23:0
[    3.709727] sof-audio-pci-intel-tgl 0000:00:1f.3: firmware: direct-loading firmware intel/sof-tplg/sof-adl-rt1316-l12-rt714-l0.tplg
[    3.709742] sof-audio-pci-intel-tgl 0000:00:1f.3: Topology: ABI 3:22:1 Kernel ABI 3:23:0
[    3.709825] sof-audio-pci-intel-tgl 0000:00:1f.3: error: can't connect DAI HDA0.OUT stream iDisp1
[    3.709920] sof-audio-pci-intel-tgl 0000:00:1f.3: error: failed to add widget id 0 type 27 name : HDA0.OUT stream iDisp1
[    3.710026] sof_sdw sof_sdw: ASoC: failed to load widget HDA0.OUT
[    3.710086] sof_sdw sof_sdw: ASoC: topology: could not load header: -22
[    3.710162] sof-audio-pci-intel-tgl 0000:00:1f.3: error: tplg component load failed -22
[    3.710247] sof-audio-pci-intel-tgl 0000:00:1f.3: error: failed to load DSP topology -22
[    3.710326] sof-audio-pci-intel-tgl 0000:00:1f.3: ASoC: error at snd_soc_component_probe on 0000:00:1f.3: -22
[    3.710447] sof_sdw sof_sdw: ASoC: failed to instantiate card -22
[    3.710692] sof_sdw sof_sdw: snd_soc_register_card failed -22
[    3.710758] sof_sdw: probe of sof_sdw failed with error -22

I suspect I’m missing another driver in the initramfs. Still, the modprobe trick shown above still fixes sound, so I guess I’ll leave it for today…

foss-north 2021 – Speakers and Call for Papers

TL;DR; Call for Papers closes on Sunday. Join foss-north 2021 and be a part of a great speaker line-up!

When planning foss-north, we always pre-announce some speakers early on. This helps set the tone of the conference, show sponsors that we have contents, and – interestingly – also increase the number of submissions to our call for papers.

This year is a bit special due to COVID-19 and the conference will be our third virtual installment, but we are still hoping to bring together great people and contents.

This year we have four pre-announced speakers who I’m very excited about. We have everything from stories from how the Internet is kept safe, how to use open source methods in your organization, how industry verticals collaborate around open source, all the way to how to write a Linux kernel driver.

So, in no particular order, I give you…

… Anne-Marie Eklund Löwinder who will talk about signing the Internet root zone.

This will be the story from when Anne-Marie worked as Crypto Officer and attended the cermonies around DNSSEC. How do we protect the secrets that are used to protect the Internet itself.

… Isabel Drost-Fromm who will talk about how to use the open source way beyond open source. By applying inner source principles, the magic that makes open source work can be used inside an organization too.

These are aspects such as sense of ownership, independence, and so on. If developers are willing to work for fun on open source, how do we create the same joy at work.

… Leslie Hawthorn who will talk about strategic open source engagements for vertical markets. This is about how to work openly within an industry vertical and not a single component or project.

This is interesting from a foss-north perspective, as this is a conference about everything and nothing. I guess that makes it a horizontal event. How can vertical organizations meet to identify shared cross-cutting aspects.

… Marta Rybczynska will give a talk appropriately titled Into the Jungle, about writing Linux kernel drivers.

In this talk we will look at writing a Linux network driver from scratch, diving into the deep end and learning how to swim.

The Call for Paper is still open until Sunday, so if you have a topic that you want to discuss, make sure to get your contribution in!

Akademy 2020

I had the pleasure of speaking at Akademy 2020 this weekend. This year Akademy is virtual, but I still got the feeling of a very interactive event. Interesting questions, greenroom for the speakers, and generally a nice experience. Big thank you to the organizers!

The video below should start roughly when I go on stage.

For the interested listener, you can find the slides here: https://e8johan.se/presentations/2020-09%20akademy%20v1.1.pdf.

Adventures in (Dyn)DNS

So, I made the silly move to rely on my hardware supplier to provide me with a dynamic DNS service. Naturally, this offer expired, and I could no longer reach my home server. Because of Murphy, this naturally took place when I was away from home with no access to anything.

So – how does one find the way back home?

Luckily, I have a VPS that I log in to now and then. After a quick duck-ing (duckduckgo is my friend), I found the last command which was the first piece of the puzzle. Now I had a list of potential IPs.

Did I mention that I travel a lot?

There were quite a few IPs there. Pre-COVID-19, it would have been worse. Still, I found a few likely candidates based on frequency of use. Then I found this handy list of IP blocks in Sweden. Now I could tell my mobile data provider (Telenor) from my fibre data provider (Bahnhof).

Quickly adding my home domain and the suspected IP to /etc/hosts on my laptop allowed me to confirm my suspicions. Once in, I could setup duckdns for dynamic DNS, change the CNAME record of my domain, and now all is operational again.

I learned two things from this:

  1. Don’t rely on the time limited offers of hardware vendors for even the most trivial service. They are all trying to convert you into a as-a-Service deal and make you pay an annual fee. (i.e. read the fine print).
  2. I was really happy to use a CNAME record to redirect a subdomain of mine to my home server, so even when using a dynamic DNS service, I could switch to another dynamic DNS service. (this was pure luck – no foresight from my side was involved).

Also, while on the the topics of experiences. If you have the possibility, you should use bahnhof as your ISP. They have a track record of opposing surveilance laws and work to protect the privacy of their customers. Also – I’ve had zero issues with them since switching some 15 years ago, so I can recommend them from that perspective as well ;-)

Photoframe Hack

Sometimes you just want to get something done. Something for yourself.

You do not intend it to be reused, or even pretty.

You build a tool.

My tool was a photoframe with some basic overlays. I wanted the family calendar, some weather information (current temperature + forecast), time, and the next bus heading for the train station.

To make this acceptable in a home environment, I built it as a photoframe. You can find the sources in the hassframe-ui repository on my github.

A hidden feature is that if you tap the screen, a home automation control panel slides up. That way you can control all the lights, as well as heat in the garage and an AC in the bedroom. Very convenient.

All this is built using QML. Three somewhat useful models are available:

  • IcalModel, taking a URL and parsing whatever it gets back as ICAL data. It is a very naive parser and does not care about things such as time zones and other details.
  • YrWeatherModel, uses yr.no‘s public APIs to pull out a weather forecast for a given location.
  • ButStopModel, uses the APIs from resrobot to look for departures to the train station from two bus stops close to my home and then merge the results into a model.

I also have a bunch of REST calls to my local home assistant server. Most of these reside in the HassButton class, but I also get the current temperature from there. These are hardcoded for my local network, so needs refactoring to be used outside of my LAN.

All of these interfaces require API keys of one kind or another – be it a proper key, or a secret URL. These are pulled from environment variables in main.cpp and then exposed to QML. That way, you can reuse the components without having to share your secrets.

All in all the code is quite hacky. Especially main.qml. I refactor out parts from there now and then, but the photoframe works, so its not anything that I prioritize.

Currently it runs on a Raspberry Pi on top of Raspbian. I want to build an optimized Yocto image making it less hacky and more pre-packaged. Perhaps there will be a rainy day this summer and I’ll get around to it. Burkhard has prepared the instructions needed over at embedded use.

The Cost of no Architecture

Like many others, I enjoy various reverse engineering and tear-down stories. Personally, I mean things like iFixit tear-downs and Ken Shirriff’s blog, so I started following this tweet thread by foone.

This continues with another tweet sequence about getting software running on the remote control. Having enjoyed these tweets, I started thinking.

The Harmony remotes are quite expensive in my mind. I can’t find any exact numbers for the number of sold devices, but I found this 2018 Q4 earnings report. Looking at the net sales, I guess the remotes are either “Tablets & Other Accessories” or “Smart Home”. They represent sales net sales of ~107 and ~89 MUSD over 12 months. Let’s pick the lower number and just look at magnitudes. The Harmony 900 seems to have retailed for ~350 USD back when it was new. So, if all the Smart Home stuff was harmonies, we’re looking at 250k units over a year. So I’m guessing the magnitude is around 10k – 100k units annually – but the Harmony 900 is from 2013, so I assume that it sold closer to the lower number, if not below. The market was new and so on.

Then we look at the tweets again. What have we got? Let’s put aside security issues, unencrypted communications, and other clear mistakes and just look at how the device is built.

Flash to drive the UI, double web servers on-board, Lua, QNX and what not. A 233 MHz CPU and ~64MB of FLASH – for a remote control. From an engineering perspective, this sounds like a fun system to work on – from an architecture perspective, it looks like a ball of mud.

Back in 2013, QNX might have been a good choice compared to Linux. Today, with Yocto and similar tools for developing embedded Linux systems, it feels like an odd choice to add a license cost to such a device. But no biggie. Back in the day this was not an unreasonable choice (and still isn’t for certain applications).

The Flash stuff. There were alternatives back in 2013, but sure, there were plenty of developers at hand and things like Qt QML was still probably a bit clunky (I can’t recall the state of it back then – it required OpenGL ES, which I guess was a big ask back then).

But the mix of techniques and tools. The on-board web servers. The complexity of a small system and the costs it brings to maintenance and testability. If this is the foundation for Harmony remotes and a platform that has been used for the better past of the past decade, I wonder if the added engineering costs for architecture the platform to be more optimized early on would not have paid off in lower maintenance costs, as well as lower hardware costs.

I know how it is when you’re in a project. The deadline is there in big writing on one of the walls. You can get something working by stringing what you have together with duktape and glue. The question I’m asking myself is more along the lines of how do we run embedded systems engineering projects? Where did we go wrong? Why don’t we prioritize the thinking and refactoring over the just-get-this-thing-out-of-the-door?

The answer is time to market and such, but over a decade of building on a ball of mud, the economical numbers start adding up in favour for the better engineered product. For continuous improvement. For spending time thinking about how to improve the system as a whole.

foss-north 2019: Community Day


I don’t dare to count the days until foss-north 2019, but it is very soon. One of the changes to this year is that we expand the conference with an additional community day.

The idea with the community day here is that we arrange for conference rooms all across town and invite open source projects to use them for workshops, install fests, hackathons, dev sprints or whatever else they see fit. It is basically a day of mini-conferences spread out across town.

The community day is on April 7, the day before the conference days, and is free of charge.

This part of the arrangements has actually been one of the most interesting ones, as it involves a lot of coordination. I’d like to start by thanking all our room hosts. Without them, the day would not be possible!

The other half of the puzzle is our projects. I am very happy to see such a large group of projects willing to try this out for the first time, and I hope for lots and lots of visitors so that they will want to come back in the future as well.

The location of each project, as well as the contents of each room can be found on the community day page. Even though the day is free of charge, some of the rooms want you to pre-register as the seats might be limited, or they want to know if they expect five or fifty visitors. I would also love for you to register at our community day meetup, just to give me an indication of the number of participants.

Also – don’t forget to get your tickets for the conference days – and combine this with a training. We’re already past the visitor count of the 2018 event, so we will most likely be sold out this year!

QML Weather

I recently took some time to develop a photo frame style home automation control panel. The idea is to control some common tasks of my home assistant setup from a panel instead of having to rely on the phone. To hide the panel, it currently act as a photo frame until touched.

The build is based on a Raspberry Pi 2 with the official touch screen attached and a USB wifi dongle. Nothing fancy, but still good enough.

One of the features that I wanted was a weather forecast, so I decided to use Yr’s xml weather as a base for this. The result is the YrWeatherModel QML item.

The weather forecast overlay.

The presentation side of things is the fairly straight forward piece of QML shown below, resulting in the overlay shown above.

Row {
    anchors.bottom: dateText.bottom
    anchors.right: parent.right
    anchors.rightMargin: 40

    spacing: 20
    Repeater {
        delegate: Column {
            spacing: 2
            Text {
                anchors.horizontalCenter: parent.horizontalCenter
                color: "white"
                font.pixelSize: 16
                font.bold: true
                text: {
                    switch (period) {
                    case 0:
                        "00 - 06"
                        break;
                    case 1:
                        "06 - 12"
                        break;
                    case 2:
                        "12 - 18"
                        break;
                    case 3:
                    default:
                        "18 - 00"
                        break;
                    }
                }
            }
            Image {
                anchors.horizontalCenter: parent.horizontalCenter
                source: symbolSource
            }
            Text {
                anchors.horizontalCenter: parent.horizontalCenter
                color: "white"
                font.pixelSize: 16
                font.bold: true
                text: precipitation + "mm"
            }
            Text {
                anchors.horizontalCenter: parent.horizontalCenter
                color: "white"
                font.pixelSize: 16
                font.bold: true
                text: temperature + "°C"
            }
        }

        model: weatherModel.model
    }
}

This is followed by the model itself, and a small notice of the data source.

YrWeatherModel {
    id: weatherModel
    place: "Sweden/V%C3%A4stra_G%C3%B6taland/Alings%C3%A5s"
}

Text {
    anchors.bottom: parent.bottom
    anchors.right: parent.right
    anchors.bottomMargin: 5
    anchors.rightMargin: 40
    text: weatherModel.dataSourceNotice
    color: "white"
    font.pixelSize: 16
    font.italic: true
}

Diving into the model itself, we hit the interesting parts. The structure looks like this:

Item {
    id: root

    property alias model: weatherModel
    property int refreshHour: 1     // How often is the model refreshed (in hours)
    property int dataPoints: 6      // How many data points (max) are expected (in 6h periods)
    property string place           // Place, URL encoded and according to Yr web site, e.g. Sweden/V%C3%A4stra_G%C3%B6taland/Alings%C3%A5s
    readonly property string dataSourceNotice: "Data from MET Norway"

    ListModel {
        id: weatherModel
    }

    Timer {
        interval: 3600000 * root.refreshHour
        running: true
        repeat: true
        onTriggered: {
            _innerModel.reload();
        }
    }

    XmlListModel {
        id: _innerModel

        query: "/weatherdata/forecast/tabular/time"

        source: (place.length === 0)?"":("https://www.yr.no/place/" + root.place + "/forecast.xml")

        XmlRole { name: "period"; query: "string(@period)" }
        XmlRole { name: "symbol"; query: "symbol/string(@number)"; }
        XmlRole { name: "temperature"; query: "temperature/string(@value)"; }
        XmlRole { name: "precipitation"; query: "precipitation/string(@value)"; }

        onStatusChanged: {
            // ...
        }
    }
}

As you can see, the model consists of an inner model of the type XmlListModel. This model is refreshed by a timer (don’t refresh too often – you will most likely be auto-banned by Yr). At the top, there is also a ListModel that is the actual model used by the user interface.

The reason for the ListModel to exist is that I wanted to be able to limit how many data points I show. Each data point represents a six hour window, and I’d like 6 of them, i.e. one and a half day of forecasting.

The onStatusChanged handler in the XmlListModel takes care of this in the following for loop:

onStatusChanged: {
    if (status === XmlListModel.Ready)
    {
        for(var i = 0; i< root.dataPoints && i < count; ++i)
        {
            var symbol = get(i).symbol;
            var period = parseInt(get(i).period);
            var is_night = 0;

            if (period === 3 || period === 0)
                is_night = 1;

            weatherModel.set(i, {
               "period":period,
               "symbol":symbol,
               "symbolSource":"https://api.met.no/weatherapi/weathericon/1.1/?symbol=" + symbol + "&is_night=" + is_night + "&content_type=image/png",
                "temperature":get(i).temperature,
                "precipitation":get(i).precipitation
                });
        }
    }
    else if (status === XmlListModel.Error)
    {
        console.warn("Weather error")
        console.warn(errorString());
    }
}

As you can tell, this code has *very* limited error handling. It is almost as it has been designed to break, but it works. The code also shows how convenient it is to connect to online services via QML to build simple, reusable, models that can be turned into beautiful user interfaces.

Next time I have some free time, I’ll look at interfacing with the public transport APIs. Then I will have to deal with JSON data and make explicit XmlHttpRequest calls.

D-Link and the GPL

Recently my router died and to get netflix flowing again, I went out and got the cheapest router I could find in the vicinity. I ended up with a D-Link DIR-842 on discount for 499 SEK. In the box, I discovered this:

It tells me to go to D-Link’s page for GPL licensed software to get the source code. It also lets me write a request the source code on physical media for a nominal fee for the media and handling. Something I naturally did (being an engineer on vacation).

While waiting for a reply, let’s have a look at the online version. When entering the URL provided you have to click through an agreement that I understand what GPL and LGPL means and that the files distributed comes with no warranties (they spend more words saying this – read it if you want the details). Clicking “I Agree” I get a popup (back to the 90’s) asking me to register my product to enjoy all the benefits of doing so. At the same time the main window continues to a list of all D-Link products containing (L)GPL software – very nice.

The list of products is 24 pages long, so I searched for my model name (DIR-842) and clicked the resulting link. This got me to the following table:

I wonder what separates firmware version 2.0CN (China?) from version 3.0. Having 950MB of translation tables seems odd, so something else must be the case. As I have firmware version 2.02 for hardware revision B1 I decided to download that bundle consisting of 590 MB of open source code as a tarball. At least, that was what I expected. Apparently, I don’t only get the sources, I also get a test report – great!

The test report rar file contained a pdf documenting the tests. On November 16, 2016, test engineer Mason Wu carried out the GPL SC tests consisting of the steps Firmware upgrade, Firmware downgrade, Compile the Open Source Software Licenses code, Check list (Before test Open Source Software Licenses), Open Source Software Digital Signature check, and License file check. All tests passed – time for celebrations!

To be completely honest, this report tells me nothing, as I don’t know what has been tested or what the test cases do. The only thing I learn is that I just put a device with almost two years old software on as my interface towards the Internet…

So what is in the source code tarball? You can see the directory structure of the tarball in the picture below (I guess someone named Lisa created the tarball). First of all, there are some licenses, then the source code.

The source code is split into open source and private, where private is a set of prebuilt binaries, while open source comes with the whole source code. The open source software is licensed under the following licenses according to the LICENSE.txt:

  • GNU General Public License Version 2 (GPLv2.0)
  • GNU Lesser General Public License Version 2.1 (LGPLv2.1)
  • BSD 2-clause license
  • BSD 3-clause license
  • Apache License 2.0
  • zlib/libpng License
  • MIT License v2.0

Looking into the realtek SDK (rtl819x-SDK-v3.4.5.1) I found the base Linux system (under rtl819x-SDK-v3.4.5.1/rtl819x). This is open source software found outside the open source directory.

There does not seem to be a license for the proprietary stuff. Not for the realtek related directories (rtk_wifi_patch and rtl819x-SDK-v3.4.5.1), nor the directory named private. I’m not sure what that means from a licensing perspective. I guess it is complicated. The nice thing with this is that I should be able to rebuild a new firmware image from this.

Continuing down the rabbit hole I’m getting really worried. Remember that this is an internet facing device. There are so many things I want to point out, but I’m on vacation so I can’t dig through the whole source code. Here are some snippets:

  • The Makefiles outputs “It’s builded” when done. Kind of cute.
  • Building is supported on CentOS 5.9 (32-bit version) with GCC 4.1.2 20080704 (Red Hat 4.1.2-54). This is a release from 17 January 2013.
  • Building has to be done as root.
  • For the proprietary stuff, there are .c.dep files showing what source files where used and their dependencies. Also, some headers are included without copyright information.
  • The open source versions are really old. Some highlights:
    • Samba 3.0.24 – from 2003. The CVE list for Samba is scary – this is a piece of software that should be updated.
    • Kernel 2.6.30 – from 9 June 2009. End-of-lifed in October 2009).

However, the most critical issue is that code is not included in the release. Looking at the directory rtl819x-SDK-v3.4.5.1/rtl819x/toolchain there are a number of GCC tools (GPLv3 licensed, so the license list is incomplete) as well as binutils delivered only as binaries. These also include realtek confidental documents (see screenshot below).

I’m stopping my dig here, but I will have to follow up my written request for the source code, unless the optical medium contains more. I thought they had learned…