KDE – Life of a Developer

Revisiting the PinePhone

I’m cleaning up my office. Like properly. Going to the city dump multiple times. That sort of cleaning. In the process I encountered my old PinePhone that somehow got lost in the lack of free time back when I bought it (KDE still got some money out of it, so the purchase still made sense).

I was happy to see that after a short charge, it actually booted. The installation was ancient, so I tried for an update of the system which failed miserably. Something in the session management failed – I’ve seen this error before on desktop machines when doing funky stuff to the GUI stack.

This resulted in me booting it from an SD card with the latest Plasma / Manjaro image. This process worked really well – but the phone runs really slow from my cheap SD card. A short download, unzip (took ages again, extracting 1.1GB to 6+GB on an already slow SD card takes patience) and some dd action, and the phone boots a fresh install from the internal eMMC again. Much snappier.

After this I did a quick system update and this time it worked like a charm – nice!

Recalling why I wanted a Linux phone (and not an Android) – I got nostalgic about the convergence story. Tangent – I’ve run the N900, N9 and the first Sailfish phone – all as daily drivers.

Let me put it like this: the whole convergence story sort of works, but doesn’t work. I’m not sure if the screen is too big, the phone is too old, or something else, but the whole thing just turns unstable. It does find its feet again when I unplug the USB-C connector, though.

So where does this leave me? I still have a great looking Plasma based phone. I’ll try to tinker with it and follow the development cycle along, but I’m unfortunately too dependent on a working phone experience to use it as my daily driver today.

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…

Book Review: Cross-Platform Development with Qt 6 and Modern C++

I recently received a review copy of the Cross-Platform Development with Qt 6 and Modern C++ by Nibedit Dey available from Packt. I find it interesting to read books on Qt in the midst of a major version shift, as many of the underpinnings of Qt are revisited and updated by the development teams.

In his book, Nibedit balances between the newer technologies used, e.g. CMake, function reference based signals and slots, etc while referring back to Qt 5 (and even Qt 4) practices such as QMake, the SIGNAL and SLOT macros, and more. This gives a good context to the reader, which is good for the reader, as older practices still are used in older Qt-based codebases.

The book is divided into blocks with increasing depth and complexity. This makes it a good read for the beginner, as well as the more experienced used of Qt. Either you start from the beginning and get introduced to both widgets and QML, or you can dive straight into the more advanced topics such as the model-view concepts.

What I particularly like about the book is the focus on the cross-platform capabilities of Qt. This is how Qt was started, and something that is often lost these days. Qt is more than a UI toolkit and the real strength is the ability to use a single code base to build native applications for the major desktop (and some not so major) as well as the major mobile platforms. This is a reoccuring theme throughout the book where it starts by installing the Qt development environment on all major platforms, discusses how to setup Qt for mobile development, as well as for how to deploy Qt applications in all these scenarios.

There are other highlights too such as the chapter on testing, discussions on profiling and optimizations, and other topics not commonly found in this type of book.

What could be said to be missing is any content on embedded device development, 3D tooling and classes, the design focused tooling, and more. But Qt is such a broad topic these days that it would be impossible to cover it all in a single book.

All in all, this is a recommended read!

XmlListModels in Qt 6

I had a look at a small XmlListModel based project of mine and started migrating the code from Qt 5.12 to Qt 6.2. The code ports pretty cleanly, but there are some caveats to be aware of.

As I’m lazy, I started by changing the imports from 2.12 to 6.2 and tried running the code. The first changes I had to make was to change the import from QtQuick.XmlListModel to QtQml.XmlListModel. I also learned that the import statement no longer requires a specific version to be specified – I’m not sure if I’m a fan of that quite yet.

The second change was that XmlRole has been renamed to XmlListModelRole, and that it no longer has a query property, but an elementName and attributeName property. I guess that saves Qt from having to implement support for XPath queries, and in my use-case (and most others), this should still be enough.

The last change I had to made was to silence a warning. It is no longer encouraged to connect objects directly to signals in QML. In my case, it was animations triggered by the onAdd and onRemove signals in a model. The trick is to declare the animation (in my case, a pair of SequentialAnimation instances, separately. Provide an id for them, and then call start on that id in the signal handler.

All in all, a quite pleasant migration experience with only superficial API changes to handle. All logic could be used as is. Nice!

The PinePhone has Arrived

So DHL rang the door bell to hand me a nice device. This is a pretty little phone! Will come back with more updates as I have more time to poke around.

QmlBook: Felgo Service Integration

Felgo has kindly sponsored the QmlBook, which has resulted in a new chapter. The topic this time around is the Felgo Qt extensions for
integrating various services that are commonly used by app developers, the Felgo cloud builds, as well as their live reloading technology.

When building modern apps there are many things that you might want to integrate – in-app purchases, ads, analytics, user accounts, user settings, real-time sharing of data between devices. Felgo provides integrations of common solutions for this which let’s you focus on developing your app. In the Felgo Plugins chapter, we look at some of them.

Another hassle when developing apps is that you need a Mac to build for Apple devices – unless you use Felgo cloud builds. Felgo cloud builds is a CI/CD solution for building and deploying Qt apps directly to an app store.

In addition to this, the chapter contains a deep dive into the Felgo live reloading solution. We had a quick look at using this in the first Felgo chapter. In this chapter, we look at how you can integrate it into your own executables, as well as how you can use it to develop on multiple devices simultaneously.

Intense weeks

End of October turns out to be one of the highs when it comes to workload this year. Everything happens at once – there are two public events that I’d like to tell you about.

The first one is running lights. This is an annual running competition organized by AIF Friidrott, the sports club my kids are active in. This year, this means organized by me and postponed due to COVID-19, but the virtual races started this weekend and the arena race will take place on the 24th.

If anyone of you are in the Alingsås area and enjoy I highly recommend you to join. The weather looks nice, and we will light up the arena with live fire, so it will be a great evening.

The second one is the foss-north 2020 take II event. This spring, we decided to try to organize a physical foss-north event this fall, as obviously the pandemic must be over by November. This seems to not be the case. :-)

Instead we are running a single day event on November 1 with six handpicked speakers. The event is virtual and free for all.

I would like to tell you about the speakers one by one, because I’m very excited about each and everyone of them.

In the morning we welcome Bunnie Huang who will talk about the precursor project. Precursor is an open hardware platform for secure, mobile communications and computations. The focus is on security aiming to create a trustable platform.

Next up is Simon Ser. He will talk about how to get pixels onto the screen in a modern Linux stack. This means a deep dive in the Kernel Mode Setting (KMS) interface. How it exposes hardware blocks and how to use it to get images shown on the screen.

The morning session then ends with Ramón Soto Mathiesen taking us into the land of Domain Driven Design (DDD) using Algebraic Data Types (ADT). Ramón has a background in functional programming languages and brings this knowledge into the world of multi-paradigm languages such as C#, Rust, and Swift.

The afternoon session starts with Carol Chen from Red Hat Ansible. She works as a community manager for Ansible. She will be talking about how they move have moved from collections to contributions to conferences.

We then continue with Lars Brinkhoff who will talk about the Incompatible Timesharing System (ITS). Lars works with restoring ITS and recreating the history from these early days of computing. ITS is of particular interest at foss-north at is the platform where tools such as Lisp, Logo, Scheme, Emacs and Zork where developed. This is where the foundations for the free software movement where born – quite literally.

The day then ends with Alexander and Georg who will talk about Tor, the anonymity network. They will discuss why diversity is essential for reaching security and anonymity.

So, the next days will be crazy hectic, but it is all for something good. First a cosy evening of running on an arena lit by live fire, and then a day of talks about various FOSS projects.

I hope to see you there!

Felgo in the QML Book

Over the past year I’ve been bumping into the Felgo crew at various Qt events. They take Qt to the next level. It all started as a game development framework for Qt, but has turned into a powerful app development framework taking a lot of the rough corners of Qt, and extending the tooling with a powerful live reloader at the same time.

To showcase how the Felgo SDK fits into the bigger picture, and how much it actually helps creating apps, we agreed to extend the QML Book with a Felgo chapter. The chapter is built around a messaging app and showcases the whole UI creation from initial skeleton to working app.

https://qmlbook.github.io/_images/messaging-stage-2.png

We also cover a bunch of other things such as how to get started, the QML Live reloader, as well as some more advanced topics such as native dialogs, simplified networking and the JsonListModel.

Big thanks goes out to Felgo for supporting this work and helping to make QML Book better.

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.

It finally arrived

After waiting a bit over a month, followed by an agonizing week when the new gizmo was at my DHL pickup point and I was some 2h by car away in our summer house.

What gizmo? A Pinebook Pro!

The Pinebook comes in many layers. Like, properly many. I guess this means that it is safe during transport. At least mine arrived without any bruising despite a long journey from Hongkong to Alingsås.

After powering the system on it took quite a long time for the system to reach the Manjaro logo, but once up and running, things move along at a decent pace.

Initial impressions are positive. I had to crank up the backlight a bit, but I’m sitting outdoors (it is overcast). Right now I’m installing the initial set of software updates (some 400+MB to download) while I type this. I also set the keyboard layout to Swedish. I have an ISO keyboard model, so all the keys are there and I don’t mind that the keycaps say something else than what they type.

On the topic of the keyboard. I was warned about the keyboard feel. I was also told that the Pro-model is better than the original Pinebook (which I’ve only used for ~5s at fosdem). To be honest, the keyboard is decent, but not on par with my Dell XPS13, nor my Sculpt Egonomic keyboard.

I still have the night time hacking test to perform – will my wife accept this keyboard clicking in the early morning hours? She preferred the MacBook Pro over the XPS13, so let’s see how this fares ;-).

I also have to see if I can adopt to Manjaro Linux, or if I’ll go to Debian, which I run on all my other machines. It has been years since I tried any alternative distro, so I’ll give it a few days at least to see how much I will miss apt-get – at least it runs KDE Plasma ;-)