Half way through the day:
A morning of technical talks:
Vock - Instrumenting, kernel coverage and process tracing
Rebuilding the archive on your desktop
An overview of Secure Boot
An excellent lunch - with thanks to Liv and her Arm catering staff
Three lightning talks - two without slides :)
Excellent day so far :)
Another interesting morning so far. Lots of interesting side conversations (and, of course, people using IRC to talk to the person next to them as is traditional).
It's nice to hear somebody ask a question and be told, effectively "Oh, you need to talk to XX - they're sitting over there" or " I need to talk to someone about X, Y and Z - and they all resolve to you".
Especially noticeable in this room, perhaps, but it does point to the fact that many things in Debian ultimately resolve to one or two people. There are a lot of people each with multiple areas of expertise which overlap - and then a few individuals who are essential as points of reference for *everyone* else.
Thanks again to Arm for hosting us, for excellent food, coffee and facilities which make this _so much easier_ as a working environment for these days.
At Arm in Cambridge for two hackathon-type days before the main mini-Debconf on Saturday and Sunday. A roomful of people, mostly very quiet this morning but with people gradually arriving and greeting each other.
Just had an excellent lunch. Arm are excelling themselves, as ever. With particular thanks to Charlie Dixon who has arranged excellent facilities for us all and to Liv for the catering provision. Other old friends here have also helped as ever.
This sort of thing is ideal for cross-fertilization of experience, ideas - the side conversations where you realise that three people are converging to a consensus of discussion from three different starting points. It's fun and intensely interesting and it's the sort of thing that keeps me running Debian - and trusting the colleagues behind it because I've seen them here.
Face and name recognition is sometimes at least as valuable as rockstar coding and the social element and shared history keeps us pulling together.
Lots of posts in the debian-user mailing list complaining about updates with Debian 11.11 suddenly failing.
See Debian 11 Long Term Support reaches end-of-life
August 31st, 2026
The Debian Long Term Support (LTS) Team hereby announces that Debian 11
bullseye
support has reached its end-of-life today, 31 August 2026,
five years after its initial release on 14 August 2021.
Starting in September, Debian will not provide further security updates for
Debian 11. A subset of bullseye
packages will be supported by external
parties. Detailed information can be found at
Extended LTS.
The Debian LTS Team is currently providing security support for Debian 12
bookworm
, the current oldstable release. Thanks to the combined efforts
of different teams including the Security Team, the Release Team, and the LTS
Team, the Debian 12 life cycle encompasses five years.
Debian 12 will receive Long Term Support until 30 June 2028. The supported
architectures in Debian 12 LTS are amd64, i386, arm64, armhf and ppc64el.
For further information about using bookworm
LTS and upgrading from
bullseye
LTS, please refer to
LTS/Using.
Debian and its LTS Team would like to thank all contributing users, developers, sponsors and other Debian teams who are making it possible to extend the life of previous stable releases, and who have made Bullseye LTS a success.
If you rely on Debian LTS, please consider joining the team, providing patches, testing or funding the efforts.
*Busy* day in Cambridge. A roomful of people, large numbers of laptops and a lot of parallel installations.
Joined here by Emyr, Chris, Helen and Simon with Isy doing speech installs from her university accommodation. Two Andy's always makes it interesting. Steve providing breakfast, as ever.
We're almost there: the last test install is being repeated to flush out a possible bug. Other release processes are being done in the background.
Thanks again to Steve for hosting and all the hard work that goes into this from everybody.
All finished and wrapping up. The bug I thought was fixed has been identified on two distinct sets of hardware. There are workarounds: the most sensible is *not* to use i386 without a modeset parameter but to just use amd64 instead. amd64 works on the identical problematic hardware in question - just use 64 bit.
Almost finished the testing we're going to do at 15:29 UTC. It's all been good - we've found that at least one of the major bug reports from 12.10 is not reproducible now. All good - and many thanks to all testers: Sledge, rattusrattus, egw, smcv (and me).
We're now well under way: Been joined by a Simon McVittie (smcv) and we're almost through testing most of the standard images. Live image testing is being worked through. All good so far without identifying problems other than mistyping :)
In Cottenham with Andy and the usual suspects. The point release update files are already on the servers - anyone can do an "apt-get update ; apt-get dist-upgrade" and update any running machine. This machine has just been upgraded and "just worked".
Here to do release testing for the images that we will end up publishing later in the day.
Expecting one more of us to turn up a bit later. Team will be working on IRC on #debian-cd
We're part way through the testing of release media. RattusRattus, Isy, Sledge, smcv and Helen in Cambridge, a new tester Blew in Manchester, another new tester MerCury[m] and also highvoltage in South Africa.
Everything is going well so far and we're chasing through the test schedule.
Sorry not to be there in Cambridgeshire with friends - but the room is fairly small and busy :)
[UPDATE/EDIT - at 20250111 1701 - we're pretty much complete on the testing]
LATE NEWS
I haven't blogged until now: I should have done from Thursday onwards.
It's
a joy to be here in Cambridge at ARM HQ. Lots of people I recognise
from last year here: lots *not* here because this mini-conference is a
month before the next one in Toulouse and many people can't attend both.
Two
days worth of chatting, working on bits and pieces, chatting and
informal meetings was a very good and useful way to build relationships
and let teams find some space for themselves.
Lots of quiet hacking going on - a few loud conversations. A new ARM machine in mini-ITX format - see Steve McIntyre's blog on planet.debian.org about Rock 5 ITX.
Two
days worth of talks for Saturday and Sunday. For some people, this is a
first time. Lightning talks are particularly good to break down
barriers - three slides and five minutes (and the chance for a bit of
gamesmanship to break the rules creatively).
Longer talks: a
couple from Steve Capper of ARM were particularly helpful to those
interested in upcoming development. A couple of the talks in the
schedule are traditional: if the release team are here, they tell us
what they are doing, for example.
ARM are main sponsors and have
been very generous in giving us conference and facilities space. Fast
network, coffee and interested people - what's not to like :)
[EDIT/UPDATE - And my talk is finished and went fairly well: slides have now been uploaded and the talk is linked from the Mini-DebConf pages]
We're doing fairly well: Debian release team have been working
really hard on a double point release today. Final release for Bullseye
as 11.11 as it moves to LTS.
12.7 Bookworm install media finishing tests - it's been quite a long day so far.
For 11.11 we're part way through media tests.
We've
been joined by a lot of enthusiastic folk from Cape Town who've been a
great help. Always nice to see old friends and new people join us on IRC
- and they've just joined us for a short video call.
This has gone well: two release day media checking and bug-squashing groups on two continents is excellent.
Dear
Cape Town - feel free to join us for the next time and we'll hold the
video call open for longer. If we don't see any of you here in Cambridge
for mini-Debconf, we'll meet up in Brest for Debconf 25.
A double length Debian release
means the Release Team don't get much peace
What with last minute breaks
And the time that it takes
Treat them with respect today, please
The media teams on the hook
As we follow our normal play book
With laptops all primed
The images are timed
Once we're told we'll start taking our look
This is the last time for 11
And for Bookworm, it's just 12.7
Give us time for each test
As we all do our best
With our ThinkPads - I see at least seven :)
I have had excellent colleagues both at my day job and, especially, in Debian over the last thirty-odd years. Several have attempted to give me good advice - others have been exemplars. People retire: sadly, people die. What impression do you want to leave behind when you leave here?
Belatedly, I've come to realise that obduracy, sheer bloody mindedness, force of will and obstinacy will only get you so far. The following began very much as a tongue in cheek private memo to myself a good few years ago. I showed it to a colleague who suggested at the time that I should share it to a wider audience.
[Worked out for Andy Cater for himself after many years of fighting the system as a misguided missile - though he will freely admit that he doesn't always follow them as often as he should :) ]
It's been a LONG day: two point releases in a day takes of the order of twelve or thirteen hours of fairly solid work on behalf of those doing the releases and testing.
Thanks firstly to the main Debian release team for all the initial work.
Thanks to Isy, RattusRattus, Sledge and egw in Cottenham, smcv and Helen closer to the centre of Cambridge, cacin and others who have dropped in and out of IRC and helped testing.
I've been at home but active on IRC - missing the team (and the food) and drinking far too much coffee/eating too many biscuits.
We've found relatively few bugs that we haven't previously noted: it's been a good day. Back again, at some point a couple of months from now to do this all over again.
With luck, I can embed a picture of the Cottenham folk below: it's fun to know _exactly_ where people are because you've been there yourself.
Sadly, nothing too much to report.
I delivered a very quick three slides lightning talk on Accessibility, WCAG [Web Content Accessibility Guidelines] version 2.2 and a request for Debian to do better
WCAG 2.2: WCAG 2.2 Abstract
Debian-accessibility mailing list link: debian-accessibility
I watched the other lightning talks but then left at 1500 - missing three good talks - to drive home at least partly in daylight.
A great four days - the chance to put some names to faces and to recharge in Debian spaces.
Thanks to Cambridge Debian folk for helping arrange evening meals, lifts and so on and especially to those who also happen be ARM employees who were badging us in and out through the four days
Thanks to those who staffed Front Desk on both days and, especially, also to the ARM security guards who let us into site at 0745 on all four days and to Mark who did the weekend shift inside the building for Saturday and Sunday.
Thanks to ARM for excellent facilities, food, coffee, hosting us and coffee, to Codethink for sponsoring - and a lecture from Sudip and some interesting hardware - and Pexip for Pexip sponsorship (and employee attendance).
Here's to the next opportunity, whenever that may be.
Quick recap of slides and safety information for the day from Steve McIntyre
Now into the Release Team questions following a release team overview.
A roomful of people all asking questions which are focused and provoke more questions - how unlike a Debian session :)
May just have talked myself into giving a lightning talk this afternoon :)
Now about to have a talk about from Sudip about OpenQA, kernel testing and automation
A great talk on SteamOS progress to effective boot loaders for atomic OS updates.
How to produce something that will allow instant updates and instant fallbacks when updating a whole OS image - lots of explanation - and it's good when three or four people who are directly interested in problems and solutions round, for example, Secure Boot are in the room.
Jessica Clarke on CHERI, Morello and security protections in hardware, software and programming hardware which has verifiable pointers and routines. A couple of flourishes which had the room breaking out in applause.
Roberto Sanchez and Santiago Rincon on suggestions for LTS and ways forward. The presentation very clearly set out what LTS is, is not, and maybe should be.
Last presentation of the day was from Ian Jackson on a potential change to git based working and tagging.
Then lots of chasing around to get people out of the building. Thanks very much to the Arm personnel, especially the security staff who have been helpful throughout the day with getting us all in and out
Thanks to all involved with Arm, Codethink and Pexip for hosting and sponsorship without which this would not have been possible.
A quick one slide presentation from Helmut on how to use Debian without sudo - Sudo Apt Purge Sudo
A presentation on upcoming Ph.D research on Digital Obsolescence - from Eda
Antarctic and Arctic research from Carlos Pina i Estany
* Amazing * what you can get into three well chosen slides.
Ten minutes until the afternoon's talks
So following Emanuele's talk on a Lenovo X13s, we're now at the Debian on Mobile BoF (Birds of a feather) discussion session from Arnaud Ferraris
Discussion and questions on how best to support many variants of mobile phones: the short answer seems to be "it's still *hard* - too many devices around to add individual tweaks for every phone and manufacturer.
One thing that may not have been audible in the video soundtrack - lots of laughter in the room prompted as someone's device said, audibly "You are not allowed to do that without unlocking your device"
Upstream and downstream packages for hardware enablement are also hard: basic support is sometimes easy but that might even include non-support for charging, for example.
Much discussion around the numbers of kernels and kernel image proliferation there could be. Debian tends to prefer *one* way of doing things with kernels.
Abstracting hardware is the hardest thing but leads to huge kernels - there's no easy trade-off. Simple/feasible in multiple end user devices/supportable - pick one ☺
