Paul Boddie's Free Software-related blog

Paul's activities and perspectives around Free Software

Some Ideas for 2019

Well, after my last article moaning about having wishes and goals while ignoring the preconditions for, and contributing factors in, the realisation of such wishes and goals, I thought I might as well be constructive and post some ideas I could imagine working on this year. It would be a bonus to get paid to work on such things, but I don’t hold out too much hope in that regard.

In a way, this is to make up for not writing an article summarising what I managed to look at in 2018. But then again, it can be a bit wearing to have to read through people’s catalogues of work even if I do try and make my own more approachable and not just list tons of work items, which is what one tends to see on a monthly basis in other channels.

In any case, 2018 saw a fair amount of personal focus on the L4Re ecosystem, as one can tell from looking at my article history. Having dabbled with L4Re and Fiasco.OC a bit in 2017 with the MIPS Creator CI20, I finally confronted certain aspects of the software and got it working on various devices, which had been something of an ambition for at least a couple of years. I also got back into looking at PIC32 hardware and software experiments, tidying up and building on earlier work, and I keep nudging along my Python-like language and toolchain, Lichen.

Anyway, here are a few ideas I have been having for supporting a general strategy of building flexible, sustainable and secure computing environments that respect the end-user. Such respect not being limited to software freedom, but also extending to things like privacy, affordability and longevity that are often disregarded in the narrow focus on only one set of end-user rights.

Building a General-Purpose System with L4Re

Apart from writing unfinished articles about supporting hardware devices on the Ben NanoNote and Letux 400, I also spent some time last year considering the mechanisms supporting filesystems in L4Re. For an outsider like myself, the picture isn’t particularly clear, but the mechanisms don’t really seem particularly well documented, and I am not convinced that the filesystem support is what people might expect from a microkernel-based system.

Like L4Re’s device support, the way filesystems are made available to tasks appears to use libraries extensively, whereas I would expect more use of individual programs, with interprocess messages and shared memory being employed to move the data around. To evaluate my expectations, I have been writing programs that operate in such a way, employing a “toy” filesystem to test the viability of such an approach. The plan is to make use of libext2fs to expose ext2/3/4 filesystems to L4Re components, then to try and replace the existing file access mechanisms with ones that access these file-serving components.

It is unfortunate that systems like these no longer seem to get much attention from the wider Free Software community. There was once a project to port GNU Hurd to L4-family microkernels, but with the state of the art having seemingly been regarded as insufficient or inappropriate, the focus drifted off onto other things, and now there doesn’t seem to be much appetite to resume such work. Even the existing Hurd implementation doesn’t get that much interest these days, either. And yet there are plenty of technical, social and practical reasons for not just settling for using the Linux kernel and systems based on it for every last application and device.

Extending Hardware Support within L4Re

It is all very well developing filesystem support, but there also has to be support for the things that provide the storage on which those filesystems reside. This is something I didn’t bother to look at when getting L4Re working on various devices because the priority was to have something to show, meaning that the display had to work, along with testing and demonstrating other well-understood peripherals, with the keyboard or keypad being something that could be supported with relative ease and then used to demonstrate other aspects of the solution.

It seems perverse that one must implement support for SD or microSD card storage all over again when the software being run is already being loaded from such storage, but this is rather like the way that “live CD” versions of GNU/Linux would load an environment directly from a CD, yet an installed version of such an environment might not have the capability to access the CD drive. Still, this is an unavoidable step along the path to make a practical system.

It might also be nice to make the CI20 support a bit better. Although a device notionally supported by L4Re, various missing pieces of hardware support needed to be added, and the HDMI output capability remains unavailable. Here, the mystery hardware left undocumented by the datasheet happens to be used in other chipsets and has been supported in the Linux kernel for many of them for quite some time. Hopefully, the exercise will not be too frustrating.

Another device that might be a good candidate for L4Re is the Efika MX Smartbook. Although having a modest specification by today’s bloated-Web and pointless-eye-candy standards, it has a nice keyboard (with a more sensible layout than the irritating HP Elitebook, as I recently discovered) and is several times more powerful than the Letux 400. My brother, David, has already investigated certain aspects of the hardware, and it might make the basis of a nice portable system. And since support in Linux and other more commonly-used technologies has been left to rot, why not look into developing a more lasting alternative?

Reviving Mail-Based Communication

It is tiresome to see the continuing neglect of the health of e-mail, despite it being used as the bedrock of the Internet’s activities, while proprietary and predatory social media platforms enjoy undeserved attention and promotion in mass media and in society at large. Governmental and corporate negligence mean that the average person is subjected to an array of undesirable, disturbing and generally unwanted communications from chancers and criminals through their e-mail accounts which, if it had ever happened to the same degree with postal mail, would have seen people routinely arrested and convicted for their activities.

It is tempting to think that “they” do not want “us” to have a more reliable form of mail-based communication because that would involve things like encryption and digital signatures. Even when these things are deemed necessary, they always seem to be rolled out as part of a special service that hosts “our” encryption and signing keys for us, through which we must go to access our messages. It is, I suppose, yet another example of the abandonment of common infrastructure: that when something better is needed, effort and attention is siphoned off from the “commons” and ploughed into something separate that might make someone a bit of money.

There are certainly challenges involved in making e-mail better, with any discussion of managing identities, vouching for and recognising correspondents, and the management of keys most likely to lead to dispute about the “best” way of doing things. But in the end, we probably find ourselves pursuing perfect solutions that do everything whilst proprietary competitors just focus on doing a handful of things effectively. So I envisage turning this around and evaluating whether a more limited form of mail-based communication can be done in the way that most people would need.

I did look fairly recently at a selection of different projects seeking to advise and support people on providing their own e-mail infrastructure. That is perhaps worth an article in its own right. And on the subject of mail-based communication, I hope to look a bit more at imip-agent again after neglecting it for so long.

Sustaining a Python Alternative

One motivation for developing my Python-like language and toolchain, Lichen, was to explore ways in which Python might have been developed to better suit my own needs and preferences. Although I still use Python extensively, I remain mindful of the need to write conservative, uncomplicated code without the kind of needless tricks and flourishes that Python’s expanding feature set can tempt the developer with, and thus I almost always consider the possibility of being able to use the Lichen toolchain with my projects one day.

Lichen may still be a proof of concept, but there has been work done on gradually pushing it towards being genuinely usable. I spent some time considering the way floating point numbers might be represented, and this raised some interesting issues around how they might be stored within instances. Like the tuple performance optimisations, I hope to introduce floating point support into the established feature set of Lichen and hopefully offer decent-enough performance, with the latter aspect being yet another path of investigation this year.

Documenting and Publishing

A continuing worry I have is whether I should still be running MoinMoin sites or even sites derived from MoinMoin “export dumps” for published information that is merely static. I have spent some time developing a parsing and formatting tool to generate static content from Moin content, thus avoiding running Moin altogether and also avoiding having to run a script acting as a URL-preserving front-end to exported Moin content (which is unfortunately required because of how the “export dump” seems to work).

Currently, this tool supports HTML and Moin output, the latter to test the parsing activity, with Graphviz content rendered as inline SVG or in other supported formats (although inline SVG is really what you want). Some macros are supported, but I need to add support for others, like the search macros which are useful for generating page listings. Themes are also supported, but I need to make sure that things like tables of contents – already supported with a macro – can be styled appropriately.

Already, I can generate the bulk of my existing project documentation, and the aim here is to be able to focus on improving that documentation, particularly for things like Lichen that really need explanations to be written before I need to start reviewing the code from scratch as if I were a total newcomer to the work. I have also considered using this tool as the basis for a decentralised wiki solution, but that can probably wait for a while given how many other things I have said I want to do!

Anything More?

There are probably other things that are worth looking at, but these are perhaps the ones I feel are most pressing. It could be said that pursuing all these at once would spread me and my efforts very thin, but I tend to cycle through projects periodically and hope that I can catch up with what I was previously doing, hence the mention above of documenting my work.

I wonder how much other people think about the year ahead, whether it is a productive and ultimately rewarding exercise to state aspirations and goals in this kind of way. New Year’s resolutions are a familiar practice, of course, but here I make no promises!

Nevertheless, a belated Happy New Year to anyone still reading! I hope we can all pursue our objectives enthusiastically over the year ahead and make a real and positive difference to computing, its users and to our societies.