Linux

I have a number of hints that my internet connection doesn't work right. I see things like can't connect to addresses from docker, pages will be slow in my browser. Before I used ethernet to my router, I would sometimes disconnect from the internet. Aside from disconnecting, none of it was a clear sign something is unusually broken. Is there some linux (Ubuntu) tool I can use to assess the long-term health of my connection?

A nice to have: the tool would tell me whether a fault is in my drivers, settings, adapter, router, connection to the house, or my provider.

For those interested on the question of age verification and GNU/Linux: be aware that Systemd v261-rc1 was recently released. It now implements an optional birth date field in the JSON user database (see second item under "Other changes").

The implementation of this field was prompted by age-verification or -attestation laws.

(Age-verification status of Open Source Operating Systems.)

Writeup by @pglpm@lemmy.ca

looking for non-systemd solutions out there and thought I'd share this, didn't see it posted.

if you haven't seen any of tony's videos, you're in for a treat. enjoy!

cross-posted from: https://feddit.org/post/30198502

System:

Debian 13 KDE (actually MX Linux, but doesn't seem to matter)  
Wayland (xwayland installed as well)  
Docker 29.5.2

Dockerfile:

FROM debian:trixie

ENV DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive
ENV LANG=en_US.UTF-8
ENV LANGUAGE=en_US:en
ENV LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8

# Set locale
RUN apt-get update && apt-get install -y --no-install-recommends \
        locales && \
    apt-get clean && \
    sed -i '/en_US.UTF-8/s/^# //g' /etc/locale.gen && \
    locale-gen

# Install Wayland-specific packages
RUN apt-get update && apt-get install -y --no-install-recommends \
        dbus \
        libwayland-client0 \
        libwayland-egl1 && \
    apt-get clean

# Install X-specific packages
RUN apt-get update && apt-get install -y --no-install-recommends \
        dbus-x11 && \
    apt-get clean

# Add contrib, default is only main
RUN sed -i 's/^Components:.*/Components: main contrib/g' /etc/apt/sources.list.d/debian.sources

# Add 32-bit arch for Steam libraries
RUN dpkg --add-architecture i386

# Install Steam
RUN apt-get update && apt-get install -y --no-install-recommends \
        steam-installer \
        pciutils && \
    apt-get clean

# Additional
# TODO: What is really needed?
RUN apt-get update && apt-get install -y --no-install-recommends \
        vulkan-tools \
        mesa-utils \
        x11-xserver-utils \
        libvulkan1 \
        mesa-vulkan-drivers && \
    apt-get clean

# TODO: Does `-storebeta` even work?
# https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Command_line_options_(Steam)
CMD ["/usr/games/steam", "-storebeta"]

To run the container:

xhost +
sudo docker run -it --name steam \
    -e XDG_RUNTIME_DIR=$XDG_RUNTIME_DIR \
    -e WAYLAND_DISPLAY=$WAYLAND_DISPLAY \
    -v $XDG_RUNTIME_DIR/$WAYLAND_DISPLAY:$XDG_RUNTIME_DIR/$WAYLAND_DISPLAY \
    -e DISPLAY=$DISPLAY \
    -v /tmp/.X11-unix:/tmp/.X11-unix \
    --privileged steam:trixie

(The --privileged part is only temporary until I found out which capabilities are actually needed. Please don't run your containers with --privileged.)

I get the GUI dialogs to download Steam just fine, so at least some display forwarding is working:

The installation works fine, but when starting Steam it seems like it's not able to find Vulkan devices and then doesn't open any Steam window. (The container is not stopping and I'm seeing repeated ./steamwebhelper output after this.)

[...]
Running query: 1 - GpuTopology
CVulkanTopology: failed create vulkan instance: -9
CVulkanTopology: failed to create vulkan instanceFailed to query vulkan gpu topology

Failed to query vulkan gpu topology
Response: 
Exit code: -2
[...]
Vulkan missing requested extension 'VK_KHR_surface'.
Vulkan missing requested extension 'VK_KHR_xlib_surface'.
BInit - Unable to initialize Vulkan!
[...]

However, Vulkan is clearly working fine in the container, as this commands displays the cube rendering just fine:

$ sudo docker exec -it steam vkcube
Selected WSI platform: xcb
Selected GPU 0: AMD Radeon RX 550 / 550 Series (RADV POLARIS12), type: DiscreteGpu

(I've also tried it on another (pure) Debian machine with a 2080Ti, but I've got the same issue.)

I've created other GUI containers in the past (Firefox for example) and didn't have these problems.

Does anybody have an idea and can point me in the right direction?

It's probably not your fault.

On a cache miss, there are two things a reverse proxy (which Fastly is to us) can do. It can make the client wait until the proxy itself fetches the requested content and then serve it, with subsequent requests being served from the cache. From a user's perspective, it means staring at "hung" process, and people tend not to be understanding when a program is stuck seemingly doing nothing.

Instead, the proxy can stream the response from the origin, caching it at the end. This makes the client receive the data right away, although it's not without drawbacks.

In a streaming setup like Flathub's, an all-MISS path adds some upstream latency before the first byte, but also limits the download speed to what the slowest link can deliver. As we don't run servers in the same datacenter or on a single backbone network, the hop from Fastly through the caching proxy to the master server incurs a penalty that may affect how quickly the data gets back.

In order to cache files larger than 20MB, Fastly expects customers who use streaming misses to use segmented caching. Anything larger than that gets broken down into smaller chunks. When Fastly wants the data from us, it will add a Range header specifying which bytes we should respond with. Fastly will then serve the request after reconstructing the file from various chunks. Our caching proxies also use the value of the Range header in the caching key to avoid requesting the full file over and over again from the master server as well.

While great for caching, many concurrent range MISSes can turn what would be a sequential file read into scattered, random reads. It wouldn't matter with SSD or NVMe, but as the repository is stored on HDDs, when combined with streaming misses, it can turn cold transfer speed into min(network bottleneck, ZFS random-read bottleneck).

Counterintuitively, you may improve your download speeds by aborting the ongoing Flatpak operation and starting it again. While the initial request was slow, there's a non-zero chance it went through all the caching layers and it will become a cache hit in the meantime. Flatpak

Let's talk Flatpak. When installing or upgrading applications, Flatpak will try to use delta files. A typical delta is an update file that contains only the difference between versions. There are also from-scratch deltas, which effectively are an archive with all files required to install an app from scratch, thus the name.

Flathub generates a single upgrade delta and a from-scratch delta for the latest version. Delta generation is an expensive process in terms of disk reads and writes, but also disk space. Because our ZFS setup isn't exactly the fastest, generating more delta files also affects how quickly we can publish an update. Yes, in theory we could be doing this out of band but we don't. In hindsight, Titanic wasn't unsinkable after all.

What happens if you are not updating often enough? A lot of suffering. Flatpak will download each missing file between the version you are on and the one you want to upgrade to, separately. This is an almost certain cache miss causing even more random seeks on the master server. At this point Flatpak would be better off downloading the from-scratch delta but it can't. The behaviour is controlled by OSTree, which doesn't offer any knobs to affect it. It is the right choice if the goal is to limit the bandwidth used by the client to fetch updates, but an incredibly bad one for anyone on a reliable connection; downloading a single large file is almost always faster than fetching multiple smaller ones.

What do? Some brave soul could fix OSTree to apply a better heuristic on when to use from-scratch deltas for upgrades, or at least make it expose an API that lets Flatpak choose. For the rest of us mere mortals, we can only update regularly or wait patiently for the update to finish

I just updated (I use arch btw) and had to reboot WaterFox. The default search engine got changed to 1.org and StartPage no longer shows up as a default option even. Has this happened to anybody else?