Chaosradio 100: Energy consumption of the IT industry

Today we again had our monthly chaosradio live show. The subject that we picked from the list of suggested topics, and it definitely was worth doing a 3 hour show on it.

Computers always get faster. The downside of this is that they always consume more energy. From 1W of a 80386 to 15W of a Pentium I, we've now arrived at more than 100W for the latest PC CPU generations. The PowerPC architecture was quite promising for some time, but at least since the G5, power consumption is almost equal with the Intel world. About the only promising figures come from ARM based CPU designs at the moment - something that you will find in PDA's and embedded devices, but not in desktop machines.

Apart from the power consumption we're also talking a bit about the ecology in general, like the amount of energy and raw materials required to build a new PC. It is quite considerable, especially taking into account that most PC's are not used for more than two to three years.

In case you're now interested (and understand German): A recording of the live is available for download.

My workstation is now liquid cooled

Actually I bought the machine including a liquid cooling system, since I've become very sensitive towards noise over the years. However, I also wanted to have a very specific (small) case, probably the smallest EATX case that exists.

Oh yes, btw, the workstation is a very decent dual Opteron 246 Machine, with 2GB of DDR400 RAM on a Tyan S2885 mainboard and three SATA drives (of which usually one one is actualy spun up). The system was actually provided by Astaro, since I've complained about their previous way-too-loud Sun v20z test machines that I used to have in my kitchen for some time ;)

Then something unexpected happened: The producer of the cooling system went out of business, and I had to get another one from Alphacool. That system is different to the previous one in that it uses a radiator with two 120mm low-rpm papst fans. The intended original system would have had a totally passive system, no fans at all.

So in the end the system was shipped standard, with air-cooling, large zalman CPU fans, etc. The Alphacool cooling system was DIY and would have never fitted in the case that I chose.

Now, a few months later, I've finally managed to install the liquid cooling system. It required quite some amount of 'case modding', since both the radiator and the compensating reservoir had to be installed externally,requiring some four 12mm holes to be drilled for the tubes, plus an additional number of 20 mounting holes.

I'm very satisfied with the results. The only thing you can still hear is the little noise emitted by the pump. The CPU's are running at 28 to 32 centigrade under full load.

Source for Bollywood movies at least temporarily down :(

Some months ago, when I first discovered bwtorrents, but that's "full" with 40k users... seems like a strange idea to me, since the torrent distribution mechanism works better the more users you have.

Omnikey AG and their ridiculous driver policy

Since I'm doing some work with cryptographic smart cards, I wanted to get some PCMCIA/PC-Card smartcard adapter. This would save me from carrying the somewhat large USB-based devices that I have.

So I found reasonably priced Omnikey CardMan Mobile 4000 and Omnikey CardMan Mobile 4040 devices.

The vendor claims in the download section of his homepage to have "Linux Drivers, Source Code". That was enough for me to actually buy the device.

I should have read the "source code" first, since what they actually ship is a BSD/GPL licensed kernel module together with a binary-only i386 ELF library. So now the device is totally useless to me, since the only machines with PC-Card or PCMCIA slot that I own are non-i386 (ARM, MIPS, PPC, x86_64) - including my Notebook, for which I actually bought the device.

So I contacted their support, but all they told me is that they wouldn't release the source code to their library, since it contains "valuable driver know-how". I explained in deep detail how that actually harms their users, tow which they just responded with "we know that we cannot make all users happy". Then I explained to them that EU copyright explicitly allows reverse engineering for the purpose of interoperability.

And that's what I actually did. So their "valuable driver know-how" came down to the implementation of the ISO/IEC 7816-3 T=0 and T=1 protocols, of which there are plenty closed and open source implementations, for example in the REINER SCT CyberJack driver that I happen to maintain, or in the OpenCT package.

A couple of hours later I wrote an OpenCT backend for the CardMan 4000. It works, at least I've successfully managed to issue basic commands with both T=0 and T=1.

So what does this tell us about Omnikey AG? That they are a bunch of corporate suits who'd rather trick their users with wrong advertising statements ("source code driver") than to release a shared library that has been replaced by something like four to six hours of work.

I'm likely to add OpenCT support for the Omnikey 4040 and 5121 devices, too. They're a bit more tricky to interface, but apparently they're somewhat designed with the CCID spec in mind, although not fully compatible.

Hopefully within short time, the users will be freed from Omnikey's Intel lock-in policy., and nobody will have to use their non-free software anymore.

Overwhelming Response to CeBIT

Since the CeBIT letter action, I've received a surprisingly big press coverage, ranging from heise.de over zdnet.co.uk, zdnet.com to news.com.

That press coverage, together with the slashdotting on Tuesday last week have triggered an enormous amount of feedback, mostly from individual users reporting a myriad more of alleged gpl violations.

I'm sad that the number really grows that fast, but on the other hand happy that we now have the chance to collect all this information.

Last, but not least, a number of people have volunteered to help the project, e.g. with it's public database interface, as well as homepage XSL corrections for full XHTML validation.

If you have sent me mail regarding GPL violations and didn't receive a response so far, please be patient, I'm just not through all of them yet. Give me another week, thanks.

Microsoft due to invent packet filtering?

According to some reports the worlds most popular series of proprietary systems is suffering from a severe lack of a packet filter. This is also documented at another article plus discussion.

Now apparently Microsoft will invent the idea of having a packet filter integrated into the operating system with their WPF for Longhorn.

It's really amazing how innovative those guys are ;) Did I mention that Linux has an embedded packet filter since more than a decade?

CCCeBIT negative award for Bundesdruckerei

The CCC has presented it's 2005 CCCeBIT negative award to the Bundesdruckerei, the formerly state-owned now-privatized company in charge of printing passports in Germany.

They are one of the strong forces in Germany behind the announced introduction of biometric information in passports. To understand this, you have to know that the law still requires passports being produced by Bundesdruckerei, even though they're now a private company.

The gpl-violations.org homepage has been slashdotted

The news about the CeBIT letter action yesterday has made it to slashdot.

While this is good news (since more people learn about my project), it also has the disadvantage that my SDSL line was fully filled. Now I moved the site to vishnu.netfilter.org, the main web-server of the netfilter.org project.

Also, I really regret that the amount of information at gpl-violations.org is still quite limited, especially the database of documented gpl violations and enforcement cases is still not there :(

The best source of information is probably my blog, and the slides of my various presentations.

Aftermath of CeBIT letter action

So today I've personally handed over some 13 letters at the CeBIT trade fair in Hannover.

My experience varies from case to case. A number of the respective recipients simply received the letter and told me they would forward it to the respective department.

The best experience so far was X-Micro, where I met the Vice President and had some discussion with him about what this all was about. Apparently he was quite happy to hear that it is not about license fees and neither about patent infringement ;) Anyway, we'll have to see what kind of practical results we will see in the upcoming weeks.

CeBIT letter action

Please note the official gpl-violations.org CeBIT letter action press release.

Still learning about DSP algorithms

Really bad timing. The USRP is sitting on my desk for about ten days now, but I still haven't really done anything useful with it. This is because I'm still reading up the theoretical background in digital signal processing.

That DSP book I'm reading is a real revelation, though. At the moment I've finished the discussion of LTI systemes and IIR filters, making my way through the z-Transform. It's really exciting, and I'm sure I need more of that kind of stuff :)

ct_sync now fully modular

ct_sync is now able to run multiple instances on one node, allowing vrrp-like setups! Thanks go to http://svn.netfilter.org/netfilter/branches/netfilter-ha/linux-2.6-actact/

The next couple of weeks will be focusing on testing and real active-active setups with multiple masters. My brain is already smoking from all the synchronization issues ;)

Filling the database with more and more data

The frequent reader will know that I'm internally keeping a SQL database of all gpl violations and related data. Unfortunately I have still not found the time to write some scripts to generate a public web interface.

Anyway, even only entering the data is quite difficult, since there really is a significant lack of database related programs, or even something as SQL rapid application development IDE's, similar to FoxPro (yes, I've used that some six years ago...).

The gnu-enterprise project is heading that way, and at some point I was half through writing a fronted for the gpl-violations.org database. However, something has recently broken the gnue package on Debian, so that's not an option at the moment.

So for now, my data entering tool is 'psql' and hand-typing SQL statements. Gets sort of annoying after you're doing it for the better part of the day :(

Did you know about mutt-ng?

For a number of months, there is now a forked version of mutt called mutt-ng. I just tried it today the first time, and I really like it. It's good to see mutt development is moving again.

I'm not even sure how much time mutt-ng will save me through it's maildir header caching. That saves the ridiculous delays when navigating through my 130+ folders 4GB maildir spool :)

Next item on my personal wish-list would be threading across multiple folders. I'm missing that feature ever since I stopped using CrossPoint (DOS-based mail-reader software for FIDO,Z-Netz,MAUS and UseNet) in 1994.

Picked up working on ct_sync again

I've recently again picked up the work on ct_sync. The final goal ist to support real active-active fail-over setups. Before the real work on that particular issue can start, there are a number of prerequisites, like:

• multiple cluster instances on one node
• new sysfs-based configuration interface

Chemnitzer Linux Tage 2005

this was probably one of my shortest conference visits ever. I took the train to arrive about three hours before my talk, and left two hours after it. It's a pity that I had to skip the social event, but I really don't have any leftover time at the moment.

The presentation went quite fine, though I now remember all the items that I wanted to add, but forgot during the presentation. Too many strange questions interfering throughout the talk.

Anyway, I almost forgot how nice CLT was. Apart from their very professional organization (they even send you paper printed city maps via snail mail!), their speaker care-taking is extraordinarily. I haven't been to any other event that provides free food for speakers throughout the day - ranging from freshly prepared sandwiches (no dull catering service)to pastries... at any given time in the speakers lounge.

So now I'm sitting in the train back from Chemnitz and am working on the Aftermath of Rusty's 'newnat2', hopefully the last rework of the conntrack/nat helper infrastructure.

Getting conntrack+nat helpers to work with 2.6.11

2.6.11 is out for a number of days, and we still don't have the conntrack/nat helpers from patch-o-matic ported to Rusty's latest conntrack/nat helper infrastructure changes.

It turns out that there are more changes necessary than I though initially. It's strange that nat helpers now don't have a separate expectfn() anymore, only the expectation has one. So I guess at least for talk, we'll have to call back into ip_conntrack_talk.c from ip_nat_talk.c.

With some luck I'll be finished by tomorrow and can again concentrate on the fun stuff like active-active support for ct_sync.

gpl-violations.org meets CeBIT

A number of companies who don't fully oblige the GPL license conditions are going to be present at CeBIT. This provides the unique opportunity to personally hand them a letter about their licensing problems, and in some cases probably even enforce the license with vendors whose products are otherwise not sold in Germany, but who're present at the trade show.

For strategic reasons I cannot really say more at this time. Stay tuned.

Returned from FOSDEM

FOSDEM was a huge success, met lots of interesting developers working in various different areas. The conference facilities seemed more crowded than at any other conference - probably due to small hallways and really cold weather outside, combined with the lack for space where people could just sit and chill out.

One dinner with Alan Cox, one with the gnomemeeting crew and another one I ended up sitting next to the author of squashfs :)

I was a bit disappointed that Richard Stallman (although present at the event, delivering two speeches himself) did not attend my closing talk on GPL enforcement. Maybe he was already travelling home at that point, or he's really not that much interested in my first-hand experience on enforcing 'his' license.

Also, I got rid of the last batch of netfilter t-shirts, saving me from finding further excuses why I am not shipping them anymore ;) Also, this means we can now head for a new logo (stating Linux 2.6 instead of 2.4) and probably even black shirts, since I don't wear white shirts anyway ;)

USRP has finally arrived - what next?

The regular reader of this blog already knows what the USRP is. The infrequent reader is referred to this blog entry.

So it has finally arrived, although I really don't have too much time of playing with it at the moment. I guess I'll do some basic functionality tests and then have to put it aside for some time.

One of the important issues remains the lack of readily available RF frontends. With the BasicRX frontend, you can basically sample amplified signals of up to 32MHz bandwidth below 200MHz.

I've investigated a lot of options with regard to RF frontends, and none of them is really promising:

• A commercially available 20-3000Mhz tuner/down-converter WiNRADIO WR-G526e. That's what we all want. Unfortunately horribly expensive, I've read USD6k somewhere :(
• Using a commercially available radio scanner with 10.7MHz IF output. This sounds like a good idea. The problem is that most of them seem to have ridiculously small IF bandwidths:
  • Yaesu VR-5000 (+- 100kHz IF bandwidth): ~ 500-600 EUR
  • AOR AR3000A (IF bandwith unknown): 780 EUR
  • AOR AR8600MK2 (IF bandwith +- 2 MHz): 710 EUR
  • AOR AR5000A (IF bandwith +- 5MHz): 1600EUR
  So if you want to go for high-bandwith signals such as DVB or 802.11, only the AR5000A would be usable... again quite pricey.
• Using a DVB-{T,S,C} tuner to build your own USRP RF frontend. That sounds reasonably priced, but requires quite some amount of work. Issues include
  • Obtaining tuner samples from vendors like Sharp or Microtune
  • Designing the support circuitry (voltages, matching)
  • Writing software for tuning (mostly i2c bit banging)
  Possible Tuner Modules I've found so far
  • Sharp BS2S7HZ1204 (950 to 2150MHz, 10 to 30MHz IF bandwidth (I/Q))
  • Sharp BS2S7VZ1302 (950 to 2150MHz, 10 to 30MHz IF bandwidth)
  • Sharp VA1S1ED5056 (143 to 862MHz, 7 or 8 MHz IF bandwidth)

ctapi-CyberJack Version 2.0.8 has been released

I've made a new release of the ctapi-cyberjack driver for REINER-SCT. Until they put it up on their homepage, interested parties can always grab the latest source and rpms.

Our Agilest 54622D mixed signal oscilloscope arrived

Due to the generous donation of TomTom, we were finally able to purchase a second hand digital oscilloscope.

The 54622D has two analog channels with 100MHz bandwidth (200Ms/s) and 16 digital channels with 200/400MS/s. The really nice features include stuff like CAN-, I2C-, USB- and SPI trigger modes :)

Let's see how this new toy is getting used to explore yet more technology...