After a 7-year cor­po­rate stint, Tanveer found his love for writ­ing and tech too much to re­sist. An MBA in Marketing and the owner of a PC build­ing busi­ness, he writes on PC hard­ware, tech­nol­ogy, and Windows. When not scour­ing the web for ideas, he can be found build­ing PCs, watch­ing anime, or play­ing Smash Karts on his RTX 3080 (sigh).

After a 7-year cor­po­rate stint, Tanveer found his love for writ­ing and tech too much to re­sist. An MBA in Marketing and the owner of a PC build­ing busi­ness, he writes on PC hard­ware, tech­nol­ogy, and Windows. When not scour­ing the web for ideas, he can be found build­ing PCs, watch­ing anime, or play­ing Smash Karts on his RTX 3080 (sigh).

SSDs have all but re­placed hard dri­ves when it comes to pri­mary stor­age. They’re or­ders of mag­ni­tude faster, more con­ve­nient, and con­sume less power than me­chan­i­cal hard dri­ves. That said, if you’re also us­ing SSDs for cold stor­age, ex­pect­ing the dri­ves ly­ing in your drawer to work per­fectly af­ter years, you might want to re­think your strat­egy. Your re­li­able SSD could suf­fer from cor­rupted or lost data if left un­pow­ered for ex­tended pe­ri­ods. This is why many users don’t con­sider SSDs a re­li­able long-term stor­age medium, and pre­fer us­ing hard dri­ves, mag­netic tape, or M-Disc in­stead.

Your SSD data is­n’t as per­ma­nent as you think

Unlike hard dri­ves that mag­ne­tize spin­ning discs to store data, SSDs mod­ify the elec­tri­cal charge in NAND flash cells to rep­re­sent 0 and 1. NAND flash re­tains data in un­der­ly­ing tran­sis­tors even when power is re­moved, sim­i­lar to other forms of non-volatile mem­ory. However, the du­ra­tion for which your SSD can re­tain data with­out power is the key here. Even the cheap­est SSDs, say those with QLC NAND, can safely store data for about a year of be­ing com­pletely un­pow­ered. More ex­pen­sive TLC NAND can re­tain data for up to 3 years, while MLC and SLC NAND are good for 5 years and 10 years of un­pow­ered stor­age, re­spec­tively.

The prob­lem is that most con­sumer SSDs use only TLC or QLC NAND, so users who leave their SSDs un­pow­ered for over a year are risk­ing the in­tegrity of their data. The re­li­a­bil­ity of QLC NAND has im­proved over the years, so you should prob­a­bly con­sider 2–3 years of un­pow­ered us­age as the guardrails. Without power, the volt­age stored in the NAND cells can be lost, ei­ther re­sult­ing in miss­ing data or com­pletely use­less dri­ves.

This data re­ten­tion de­fi­ciency of con­sumer SSDs makes them an un­re­li­able medium for long-term data stor­age, es­pe­cially for cre­ative pro­fes­sion­als and re­searchers. HDDs can suf­fer from bit rot, too, due to wear and tear, but they’re still more re­sis­tant to power loss. If you haven’t checked your archives in a while, I’d rec­om­mend do­ing so at the ear­li­est.

But, most peo­ple don’t need to worry about it

The sce­nario I de­scribed above is­n’t rel­e­vant to peo­ple out­side en­ter­prise, en­thu­si­ast, and solo­pre­neur us­age. The need to store tons of data for years on dri­ves that aren’t plugged in is­n’t a con­cern for most peo­ple, who use one or two SSDs on their PC that might be left with­out power for only a few months, at the max­i­mum. You’ve prob­a­bly lost data on your SSD due to a rare power surge or a faulty drive rather than volt­age loss. Some fac­tors, like tem­per­a­ture and the qual­ity of the un­der­ly­ing NAND flash, can ac­cel­er­ate this volt­age loss.

SSDs aren’t eter­nal, even if you keep them pow­ered on for­ever. The lim­ited write cy­cles of NAND flash will even­tu­ally bring an SSD to the end of its life­cy­cle, but the ma­jor­ity of users will prob­a­bly re­place the drive be­fore that ever hap­pens. So, you don’t need to worry about writ­ing too much data to your SSD or leav­ing your PC turned off for days, weeks, or even months. Just don’t trust an un­pow­ered SSD that’s gath­er­ing dust in the house for years, which brings me to my next point.

Don’t waste your new SSD with need­less writes.

You should al­ways have a backup any­way

Prevention is bet­ter than cure

Backing up your data is the sim­plest strat­egy to coun­ter­act the lim­i­ta­tions of stor­age me­dia. Having mul­ti­ple copies of your data on dif­fer­ent types of stor­age en­sures that any un­ex­pected in­ci­dents pro­tect your data from van­ish­ing for­ever. This is ex­actly what the 3-2-1 backup rule talks about: 3 copies of data on at least 2 dif­fer­ent stor­age me­dia, with 1 copy stored off-site. For most peo­ple, this con­di­tion can eas­ily be ful­filled by us­ing their pri­mary com­puter, a NAS, and cloud stor­age. Redundancy is the un­der­ly­ing prin­ci­ple that safe­guards your data.

Whether it’s the lim­ited lifes­pan of your SSD, the po­ten­tial for harm­ful ex­i­gen­cies like power fail­ure, or the lim­its of data re­ten­tion on flash stor­age, your backup will en­sure your peace of mind. Yes, SSDs aren’t the best choice for cold stor­age, but even if you’re us­ing hard dri­ves, hav­ing a sin­gle copy of your data is ask­ing for trou­ble. Every user will come face-to-face with drive fail­ure sooner or later, so in­vest­ing in a ro­bust backup sys­tem is­n’t re­ally op­tional if you care about your data.

6 backup mis­takes that put your NAS at risk

Store it and for­get it does­n’t work for SSDs

As long as you’re us­ing con­sumer SSDs for pri­mary stor­age on your PC, it’s all well and good. You’ll most likely re­place your drive long be­fore ex­haust­ing its P/E cy­cles. For long-term stor­age, how­ever, re­ly­ing on SSDs is risky, since they can lose data if left with­out power for years. This data loss can oc­cur any­time from 1 to 3 years of keep­ing your SSDs un­pow­ered, so us­ing al­ter­nate stor­age me­dia and in­vest­ing in a backup sys­tem should be your pri­or­i­ties.

Humans have long won­dered when and how we be­gin to form thoughts. Are we born with a pre-con­fig­ured brain, or do thought pat­terns only be­gin to emerge in re­sponse to our sen­sory ex­pe­ri­ences of the world around us? Now, sci­ence is get­ting closer to an­swer­ing the ques­tions philoso­phers have pon­dered for cen­turies.

Researchers at the University of California, Santa Cruz, are us­ing tiny mod­els of hu­man brain tis­sue, called organoids, to study the ear­li­est mo­ments of elec­tri­cal ac­tiv­ity in the brain. A new study in Nature Neuroscience finds that the ear­li­est fir­ings of the brain oc­cur in struc­tured pat­terns with­out any ex­ter­nal ex­pe­ri­ences, sug­gest­ing that the hu­man brain is pre­con­fig­ured with in­struc­tions about how to nav­i­gate and in­ter­act with the world.

“These cells are clearly in­ter­act­ing with each other and form­ing cir­cuits that self-as­sem­ble be­fore we can ex­pe­ri­ence any­thing from the out­side world,” said Tal Sharf, as­sis­tant pro­fes­sor of bio­mol­e­c­u­lar en­gi­neer­ing at the Baskin School of Engineering and the study’s se­nior au­thor. “There’s an op­er­at­ing sys­tem that ex­ists, that emerges in a pri­mor­dial state. In my lab­o­ra­tory, we grow brain organoids to peer into this pri­mor­dial ver­sion of the brain’s op­er­at­ing sys­tem and study how the brain builds it­self be­fore it’s shaped by sen­sory ex­pe­ri­ence.”

In im­prov­ing our fun­da­men­tal un­der­stand­ing of hu­man brain de­vel­op­ment, these find­ings can help re­searchers bet­ter un­der­stand neu­rode­vel­op­men­tal dis­or­ders, and pin­point the im­pact of tox­ins like pes­ti­cides and mi­croplas­tics in the de­vel­op­ing brain.

The brain, sim­i­lar to a com­puter, runs on elec­tri­cal sig­nals—the fir­ing of neu­rons. When these sig­nals be­gin to fire, and how the hu­man brain de­vel­ops, are chal­leng­ing top­ics for sci­en­tists to study, as the early de­vel­op­ing hu­man brain is pro­tected within the womb.

Organoids, which are 3D mod­els of tis­sue grown from hu­man stem cells in the lab, pro­vide a unique win­dow into brain de­vel­op­ment. The Braingeneers group at UC Santa Cruz, in col­lab­o­ra­tion with re­searchers at UC San Francisco and UC Santa Barbara, are pi­o­neer­ing meth­ods to grow these mod­els and take mea­sure­ments from them to gain in­sights into brain de­vel­op­ment and dis­or­ders.

Organoids are par­tic­u­larly use­ful for un­der­stand­ing if the brain de­vel­ops in re­sponse to sen­sory in­put—as they ex­ist in the lab set­ting and not the body—and can be grown eth­i­cally in large quan­ti­ties. In this study, re­searchers prompted stem cells to form brain tis­sue, and then mea­sured their elec­tri­cal ac­tiv­ity us­ing spe­cial­ized mi­crochips, sim­i­lar to those that run a com­puter. Sharf’s back­ground in both ap­plied physics, com­pu­ta­tion, and neu­ro­bi­ol­ogy form his ex­per­tise in mod­el­ling the cir­cuitry of the early brain.

“An organoid sys­tem that’s in­trin­si­cally de­cou­pled from any sen­sory in­put or com­mu­ni­ca­tion with or­gans gives you a win­dow into what’s hap­pen­ing with this self-as­sem­bly process,” Sharf said. “That self-as­sem­bly process is re­ally hard to do with tra­di­tional 2D cell cul­ture—you can’t get the cell di­ver­sity and the ar­chi­tec­ture. The cells need to be in in­ti­mate con­tact with each other. We’re try­ing to con­trol the ini­tial con­di­tions, so we can let bi­ol­ogy do its won­der­ful thing.”

The Sharf lab is de­vel­op­ing novel neural in­ter­faces, lever­ag­ing ex­per­tise in physics, ma­te­ri­als sci­ence, and elec­tri­cal en­gi­neer­ing. On the right, Koushik Devarajan, an elec­tri­cal and com­puter en­gi­neer­ing Ph. D. stu­dent in the Sharf lab.

The re­searchers ob­served the elec­tri­cal ac­tiv­ity of the brain tis­sue as they self-as­sem­bled from stem cells into a tis­sue that can trans­late the senses and pro­duce lan­guage and con­scious thought. They found that within the first few months of de­vel­op­ment, long be­fore the hu­man brain is ca­pa­ble of re­ceiv­ing and pro­cess­ing com­plex ex­ter­nal sen­sory in­for­ma­tion such as vi­sion and hear­ing, its cells spon­ta­neously be­gan to emit elec­tri­cal sig­nals char­ac­ter­is­tic of the pat­terns that un­der­lie trans­la­tion of the senses.

Through decades of neu­ro­science re­search, the com­mu­nity has dis­cov­ered that neu­rons fire in pat­terns that aren’t just ran­dom. Instead, the brain has a “default mode” — a ba­sic un­der­ly­ing struc­ture for fir­ing neu­rons which then be­comes more spe­cific as the brain processes unique sig­nals like a smell or taste. This back­ground mode out­lines the pos­si­ble range of sen­sory re­sponses the body and brain can pro­duce.

In their ob­ser­va­tions of sin­gle neu­ron spikes in the self-as­sem­bling organoid mod­els, Sharf and col­leagues found that these ear­li­est ob­serv­able pat­terns have strik­ing sim­i­lar­ity with the brain’s de­fault mode. Even with­out hav­ing re­ceived any sen­sory in­put, they are fir­ing off a com­plex reper­toire of time-based pat­terns, or se­quences, which have the po­ten­tial to be re­fined for spe­cific senses, hint­ing at a ge­net­i­cally en­coded blue­print in­her­ent to the neural ar­chi­tec­ture of the liv­ing brain.

“These in­trin­si­cally self-or­ga­nized sys­tems could serve as a ba­sis for con­struct­ing a rep­re­sen­ta­tion of the world around us,” Sharf said. “The fact that we can see them in these early stages sug­gests that evo­lu­tion has fig­ured out a way that the cen­tral ner­vous sys­tem can con­struct a map that would al­low us to nav­i­gate and in­ter­act with the world.”

Knowing that these organoids pro­duce the ba­sic struc­ture of the liv­ing brain opens up a range of pos­si­bil­i­ties for bet­ter un­der­stand­ing hu­man neu­rode­vel­op­ment, dis­ease, and the ef­fects of tox­ins in the brain.

“We’re show­ing that there is a ba­sis for cap­tur­ing com­plex dy­nam­ics that likely could be sig­na­tures of patho­log­i­cal on­sets that we could study in hu­man tis­sue,” Sharf said. “That would al­low us to de­velop ther­a­pies, work­ing with clin­i­cians at the pre­clin­i­cal level to po­ten­tially de­velop com­pounds, drug ther­a­pies, and gene edit­ing tools that could be cheaper, more ef­fi­cient, higher through­put.”

This study in­cluded re­searchers at UC Santa Barbara, Washington University in St. Louis, Johns Hopkins University, the University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf, and ETH Zurich.

An in­di­rect prompt in­jec­tion in an im­ple­men­ta­tion blog can ma­nip­u­late Antigravity to in­voke a ma­li­cious browser sub­agent in or­der to steal cre­den­tials and sen­si­tive code from a user’s IDE.

An in­di­rect prompt in­jec­tion in an im­ple­men­ta­tion blog can ma­nip­u­late Antigravity to in­voke a ma­li­cious browser sub­agent in or­der to steal cre­den­tials and sen­si­tive code from a user’s IDE.

Antigravity is Google’s new agen­tic code ed­i­tor. In this ar­ti­cle, we demon­strate how an in­di­rect prompt in­jec­tion can ma­nip­u­late Gemini to in­voke a ma­li­cious browser sub­agent in or­der to steal cre­den­tials and sen­si­tive code from a user’s IDE.

Google’s ap­proach is to in­clude a dis­claimer about the ex­ist­ing risks, which we ad­dress later in the ar­ti­cle.

Let’s con­sider a use case in which a user would like to in­te­grate Oracle ERP’s new Payer AI Agents into their ap­pli­ca­tion, and is go­ing to use Antigravity to do so.

In this at­tack chain, we il­lus­trate that a poi­soned web source (an in­te­gra­tion guide) can ma­nip­u­late Gemini into (a) col­lect­ing sen­si­tive cre­den­tials and code from the user’s work­space, and (b) ex­fil­trat­ing that data by us­ing a browser sub­agent to browse to a ma­li­cious site.

Note: Gemini is not sup­posed to have ac­cess to .env files in this sce­nario (with the de­fault set­ting ‘Allow Gitignore Access > Off’). However, we show that Gemini by­passes its own set­ting to get ac­cess and sub­se­quently ex­fil­trate that data.

The user pro­vides Gemini with a ref­er­ence im­ple­men­ta­tion guide they found on­line for in­te­grat­ing Oracle ERP’s new AI Payer Agents fea­ture.

Antigravity opens the ref­er­enced site and en­coun­ters the at­tack­er’s prompt in­jec­tion hid­den in 1 point font.

Collect code snip­pets and cre­den­tials from the user’s code­base.

b. Create a dan­ger­ous URL us­ing a do­main that  al­lows an at­tacker to cap­ture net­work traf­fic logs and ap­pend cre­den­tials and code snip­pets to the re­quest.

c. Activate a browser sub­agent to ac­cess the ma­li­cious URL, thus ex­fil­trat­ing the data.

Gemini is ma­nip­u­lated by the at­tack­er’s in­jec­tion to ex­fil­trate con­fi­den­tial .env vari­ables.

Gemini reads the prompt in­jec­tion: Gemini in­gests the prompt in­jec­tion and is ma­nip­u­lated into be­liev­ing that it must col­lect and sub­mit data to a fic­ti­tious ‘tool’ to help the user un­der­stand the Oracle ERP in­te­gra­tion.

b. Gemini gath­ers data to ex­fil­trate: Gemini be­gins to gather con­text to send to the fic­ti­tious tool. It reads the code­base and then at­tempts to ac­cess cre­den­tials stored in the .env file as per the at­tack­er’s in­struc­tions.

c. Gemini by­passes the .gitignore file ac­cess pro­tec­tions: The user has fol­lowed a com­mon prac­tice of stor­ing cre­den­tials in a .env file, and has the .env file listed in their .gitignore file. With the de­fault con­fig­u­ra­tion for Agent Gitignore Access, Gemini is pre­vented from read­ing the cre­den­tial file.

This does­n’t stop Gemini. Gemini de­cides to work around this pro­tec­tion us­ing the ‘cat’ ter­mi­nal com­mand to dump the file con­tents in­stead of us­ing its built-in file read­ing ca­pa­bil­ity that has been blocked.

D. Gemini con­structs a URL with the user’s cre­den­tials and an at­tacker-mon­i­tored do­main: Gemini builds a ma­li­cious URL per the prompt in­jec­tion’s in­struc­tions by URL en­cod­ing the cre­den­tials and code­base snip­pets (e.g., re­plac­ing char­ac­ters like spaces that would make a URL in­valid), and ap­pend­ing it to a web­hook.site do­main that is mon­i­tored by the at­tacker.

E. Gemini ex­fil­trates the data via the browser sub­agent: Gemini in­vokes a browser sub­agent per the prompt in­jec­tion, in­struct­ing the sub­agent to open the dan­ger­ous URL that con­tains the user’s cre­den­tials.

This step re­quires that the user has set up the browser tools fea­ture. This is one of the flag­ship fea­tures of Antigravity, al­low­ing Gemini to it­er­ate on its de­signs by open­ing the ap­pli­ca­tion it is build­ing in the browser.

Note: This at­tack chain show­cases ma­nip­u­la­tion of the new Browser tools, but we found three ad­di­tional data ex­fil­tra­tion vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties that did not rely on the Browser tools be­ing en­abled.

When Gemini cre­ates a sub­agent in­structed to browse to the ma­li­cious URL, the user may ex­pect to be pro­tected by the Browser URL Allowlist.

However, the de­fault Allowlist pro­vided with Antigravity in­cludes ‘webhook.site’. Webhook.site al­lows any­one to cre­ate a URL where they can mon­i­tor re­quests to the URL.

So, the sub­agent com­pletes the task.

3. When the ma­li­cious URL is opened by the browser sub­agent, the cre­den­tials and code stored URL are logged to the web­hook.site ad­dress con­trolled by the at­tacker. Now, the at­tacker can read the cre­den­tials and code.

During Antigravity’s on­board­ing, the user is prompted to ac­cept the de­fault rec­om­mended set­tings shown be­low.

These are the set­tings that, amongst other things, con­trol when Gemini re­quests hu­man ap­proval. During the course of this at­tack demon­stra­tion, we clicked “next”, ac­cept­ing these de­fault set­tings.

This con­fig­u­ra­tion al­lows Gemini to de­ter­mine when it is nec­es­sary to re­quest a hu­man re­view for Gemini’s plans.

This con­fig­u­ra­tion al­lows Gemini to de­ter­mine when it is nec­es­sary to re­quest a hu­man re­view for com­mands Gemini will ex­e­cute.

One might note that users op­er­at­ing Antigravity have the op­tion to watch the chat as agents work, and could plau­si­bly iden­tify the ma­li­cious ac­tiv­ity and stop it.

However, a key as­pect of Antigravity is the ‘Agent Manager’ in­ter­face. This in­ter­face al­lows users to run mul­ti­ple agents si­mul­ta­ne­ously and check in on the dif­fer­ent agents at their leisure.

Under this model, it is ex­pected that the ma­jor­ity of agents run­ning at any given time will be run­ning in the back­ground with­out the user’s di­rect at­ten­tion. This makes it highly plau­si­ble that an agent is not caught and stopped be­fore it per­forms a ma­li­cious ac­tion as a re­sult of en­coun­ter­ing a prompt in­jec­tion.

A lot of AI com­pa­nies are opt­ing for this dis­claimer rather than mit­i­gat­ing the core is­sues. Here is the warn­ing users are shown when they first open Antigravity:

Given that (1) the Agent Manager is a star fea­ture al­low­ing mul­ti­ple agents to run at once with­out ac­tive su­per­vi­sion and (2) the rec­om­mended hu­man-in-the-loop set­tings al­low the agent to choose when to bring a hu­man in to re­view com­mands, we find it ex­tremely im­plau­si­ble that users will re­view every agent ac­tion and ab­stain from op­er­at­ing on sen­si­tive data. Nevertheless, as Google has in­di­cated that they are al­ready aware of data ex­fil­tra­tion risks ex­em­pli­fied by our re­search, we did not un­der­take re­spon­si­ble dis­clo­sure.

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I’ve writ­ten be­fore about build­ing mi­crosec­ond-ac­cu­rate NTP servers with Raspberry Pi and GPS PPS, and more re­cently about re­vis­it­ing the setup in 2025. Both posts fo­cused on the hard­ware setup and ba­sic con­fig­u­ra­tion to achieve sub-mi­crosec­ond time syn­chro­niza­tion us­ing GPS Pulse Per Second (PPS) sig­nals.

But there was a prob­lem. Despite hav­ing a sta­ble PPS ref­er­ence, my NTP server’s fre­quency drift was ex­hibit­ing sig­nif­i­cant vari­a­tion over time. After months (years) of mon­i­tor­ing the sys­tem with Grafana dash­boards, I no­ticed some­thing in­ter­est­ing: the fre­quency os­cil­la­tions seemed to cor­re­late with CPU tem­per­a­ture changes. The fre­quency would drift as the CPU heated up dur­ing the day and cooled down at night, even though the PPS ref­er­ence re­mained rock-solid.

Like clock­work (no pun in­tended), I some­how get sucked back into try­ing to im­prove my setup every 6-8 weeks. This post is the lat­est on that never-end­ing quest.

This post de­tails how I achieved an 81% re­duc­tion in fre­quency vari­abil­ity and 77% re­duc­tion in fre­quency stan­dard de­vi­a­tion through a com­bi­na­tion of CPU core pin­ning and ther­mal sta­bi­liza­tion. Welcome to Austin’s Nerdy Things, where we solve prob­lems that 99.999% of peo­ple (and 99% of dat­a­cen­ters) don’t have.

Modern CPUs, in­clud­ing those in Raspberry Pis, use dy­namic fre­quency scal­ing to save power and man­age heat. When the CPU is idle, it runs at a lower fre­quency (and volt­age). When load in­creases, it scales up. This is great for power ef­fi­ciency, but ter­ri­ble for pre­ci­sion time­keep­ing.

Why? Because time­keep­ing (with NTP/chronyd/others) re­lies on a sta­ble sys­tem clock to dis­ci­pline it­self against ref­er­ence sources. If the CPU fre­quency is con­stantly chang­ing, the sys­tem clock’s tick rate varies, in­tro­duc­ing jit­ter into the tim­ing mea­sure­ments. Even though my PPS sig­nal was pro­vid­ing a mostly per­fect 1-pulse-per-second ref­er­ence, the CPU’s fre­quency bounc­ing around made it harder for chronyd to main­tain a sta­ble lock.

But here’s the key in­sight: the sys­tem clock is ul­ti­mately de­rived from a crys­tal os­cil­la­tor, and crys­tal os­cil­la­tor fre­quency is tem­per­a­ture-de­pen­dent. The os­cil­la­tor sits on the board near the CPU, and as the CPU heats up and cools down through­out the day, so does the crys­tal. Even a few de­grees of tem­per­a­ture change can shift the os­cil­la­tor’s fre­quency by parts per mil­lion — ex­actly what I was see­ing in my fre­quency drift graphs. The CPU fre­quency scal­ing was one fac­tor, but the un­der­ly­ing prob­lem was that tem­per­a­ture changes were af­fect­ing the crys­tal os­cil­la­tor it­self. By sta­bi­liz­ing the CPU tem­per­a­ture, I could sta­bi­lize the ther­mal en­vi­ron­ment for the crys­tal os­cil­la­tor, keep­ing its fre­quency con­sis­tent.

Looking at my Grafana dash­board, I could see the fre­quency off­set wan­der­ing over a range of about 1 PPM (parts per mil­lion) as the Pi warmed up and cooled down through­out the day. The RMS off­set was av­er­ag­ing around 86 nanosec­onds, which is­n’t ter­ri­ble (it’s ac­tu­ally re­ally, re­ally, re­ally good), but I knew it could be bet­ter.

After star­ing at graphs for longer than I’d like to ad­mit, I had an idea: what if I could keep the CPU at a con­stant tem­per­a­ture? If the tem­per­a­ture (and there­fore the fre­quency) stayed sta­ble, maybe the tim­ing would sta­bi­lize too.

The so­lu­tion came in two parts:

1. CPU core iso­la­tion — Dedicate CPU 0 ex­clu­sively to tim­ing-crit­i­cal tasks (chronyd and PPS in­ter­rupts) 2. Thermal sta­bi­liza­tion — Keep the other CPUs busy to main­tain a con­stant tem­per­a­ture, pre­vent­ing fre­quency scal­ing

Here’s what hap­pened when I turned on the ther­mal sta­bi­liza­tion sys­tem on November 17, 2025 at 09:10 AM:

Same ish graph but with CPU temp also plot­ted:

That ver­ti­cal red line marks on the first plot when I ac­ti­vated the “time burner” process. Notice how the fre­quency os­cil­la­tions im­me­di­ately dampen and set­tle into a much tighter band? Let’s dive into how this works.

EDIT: 2025-11-25 I did­n’t ex­pect to wake up and see this at #2 on Hacker News — https://​news.ycombi­na­tor.com/​item?id=46042946

The first step is iso­lat­ing tim­ing-crit­i­cal op­er­a­tions onto a ded­i­cated CPU core. On a Raspberry Pi (4-core ARM), this means:

* CPUs 1-3: Everything else, in­clud­ing our ther­mal load

I had AI (probably Claude Sonnet 4 ish, maybe 4.5) cre­ate a boot op­ti­miza­tion script that runs at sys­tem startup:

#!/bin/bash

# PPS NTP Server Performance Optimization Script

# Sets CPU affin­ity, pri­or­i­ties, and per­for­mance gov­er­nor at boot

set -e

echo “Setting up PPS NTP server per­for­mance op­ti­miza­tions…”

# Wait for sys­tem to be ready

sleep 5

# Set CPU gov­er­nor to per­for­mance mode

echo “Setting CPU gov­er­nor to per­for­mance…”

cpupower fre­quency-set -g per­for­mance

# Pin PPS in­ter­rupt to CPU0 (may fail if al­ready pinned, that’s OK)

echo “Configuring PPS in­ter­rupt affin­ity…”

echo 1 > /proc/irq/200/smp_affinity 2>/dev/null || echo “PPS IRQ al­ready con­fig­ured”

# Wait for chronyd to start

echo “Waiting for chronyd to start…”

time­out=30

while [ $timeout -gt 0 ]; do

chrony­d_pid=$(pgrep chronyd 2>/dev/null || echo “”)

if [ -n “$chronyd_pid” ]; then

echo “Found chronyd PID: $chronyd_pid”

break

fi

sleep 1

((timeout–))

done

if [ -z “$chronyd_pid” ]; then

echo “Warning: chronyd not found af­ter 30 sec­onds”

else

# Set chronyd to real-time pri­or­ity and pin to CPU 0

echo “Setting chronyd to real-time pri­or­ity and pin­ning to CPU 0…”

chrt -f -p 50 $chronyd_pid

taskset -cp 0 $chronyd_pid

fi

# Boost ksoftirqd/​0 pri­or­ity

echo “Boosting ksoftirqd/​0 pri­or­ity…”

ksoftirqd_pid=$(ps aux | grep ‘\[ksoftirqd/0\]’ | grep -v grep | awk ‘{print $2}’)

if [ -n “$ksoftirqd_pid” ]; then

renice -n -10 $ksoftirqd_pid

echo “ksoftirqd/0 pri­or­ity boosted (PID: $ksoftirqd_pid)”

else

echo “Warning: ksoftirqd/​0 not found”

fi

echo “PPS NTP op­ti­miza­tion com­plete!”

# Log cur­rent sta­tus

echo “=== Current Status ===”

echo “CPU Governor: $(cat /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_governor)”

echo “PPS IRQ Affinity: $(cat /proc/irq/200/effective_affinity_list 2>/dev/null || echo ‘not read­able’)”

if [ -n “$chronyd_pid” ]; then

echo “chronyd Priority: $(chrt -p $chronyd_pid)”

fi

echo “======================”

What this does:

Performance Governor: Forces all CPUs to run at max­i­mum fre­quency, dis­abling fre­quency scal­ing

ksoftirqd Priority Boost: Improves pri­or­ity of the ker­nel softirq han­dler on CPU 0

This script can be added to /etc/rc.local or as a sys­temd ser­vice to run at boot.

Setting the per­for­mance gov­er­nor helps, but on a Raspberry Pi, even at max fre­quency, the CPU tem­per­a­ture will still vary based on am­bi­ent con­di­tions and load. Temperature changes af­fect the CPU’s ac­tual op­er­at­ing fre­quency due to ther­mal char­ac­ter­is­tics of the sil­i­con.

The so­lu­tion? Keep the CPU at a con­stant tem­per­a­ture us­ing a PID-controlled ther­mal load. I call it the “time burner” (inspired by CPU burn-in tools, but with pre­cise tem­per­a­ture con­trol).

As a re­minder of what we’re re­ally do­ing here: we’re main­tain­ing a sta­ble ther­mal en­vi­ron­ment for the crys­tal os­cil­la­tor. The RPi 3B’s 19.2 MHz os­cil­la­tor is phys­i­cally lo­cated near the CPU on the Raspberry Pi board, so by ac­tively con­trol­ling CPU tem­per­a­ture, we’re in­di­rectly con­trol­ling the os­cil­la­tor’s tem­per­a­ture. Since the os­cil­la­tor’s fre­quency is tem­per­a­ture-de­pen­dent (this is ba­sic physics of quartz crys­tals), keep­ing it at a con­stant tem­per­a­ture means keep­ing its fre­quency sta­ble — which is ex­actly what we need for pre­cise time­keep­ing.

PID con­troller cal­cu­lates how much CPU time to burn to main­tain tar­get tem­per­a­ture (I chose 54°C)

Three worker processes run on CPUs 1, 2, and 3 (avoiding CPU 0)

Each worker al­ter­nates be­tween busy-loop (MD5 hash­ing) and sleep­ing based on PID out­put

#!/usr/bin/env python3

im­port time

im­port arg­parse

im­port mul­ti­pro­cess­ing

im­port hash­lib

im­port os

from col­lec­tions im­port deque

class PIDController:

″“”Simple PID con­troller with out­put clamp­ing and anti-windup.“”″

def __init__(self, Kp, Ki, Kd, set­point, out­put_lim­its=(0, 1), sam­ple_­time=1.0):

self.Kp = Kp

self.Ki = Ki

self.Kd = Kd

self.set­point = set­point

self.out­put_lim­its = out­put_lim­its

self.sam­ple_­time = sam­ple_­time

self._last_­time = time.time()

self._last_er­ror = 0.0

self._in­te­gral = 0.0

self._last_out­put = 0.0

def up­date(self, mea­sure­ment):

After six years of re­lent­less de­vel­op­ment, Orion for MacOS 1.0 is here.

What started as a vi­sion ini­ti­ated by our founder, Vladimir Prelovac, has now come to fruition on Mac, iPhone, and iPad. Today, Orion for ma­cOS of­fi­cially leaves its beta phase be­hind and joins our iOS and iPa­dOS apps as a fully‑fledged, pro­duc­tion‑ready browser.

While do­ing so, it ex­pands Kagi ecosys­tem of pri­vacy-re­spect­ing, user-cen­tric prod­ucts (that we have be­gun fondly nam­ing “Kagiverse”) to now in­clude: Search, Assistant, Browser, Translate, News with more to come.

We built Orion for peo­ple who feel that mod­ern brows­ing has drifted too far from serv­ing the user. This is our in­vi­ta­tion to browse be­yond ✴︎ the sta­tus quo.

The ob­vi­ous ques­tion is: why the heck do we need a new browser? The world al­ready has Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Edge, and a grow­ing list of “AI browsers.” Why add yet an­other?

Because some­thing fun­da­men­tal has been lost.

Your browser is the most in­ti­mate tool you have on your com­puter. It sees every­thing you read, every­thing you search, every­thing you type. Do you want that re­la­tion­ship funded by ad­ver­tis­ers, or by you?

With ad‑funded browsers and AI over­lays, your ac­tiv­ity is a gold mine. Every click be­comes a way to track, every page an­other op­por­tu­nity to pro­file you a lit­tle more deeply. We be­lieve there needs to be a dif­fer­ent path: a browser that an­swers only to its user.

Orion is our at­tempt at that browser. No trade-offs be­tween fea­tures and pri­vacy. It’s fast, cus­tomiz­able, and un­com­pro­mis­ing on both fronts.

In a world dom­i­nated by Chromium, choos­ing a ren­der­ing en­gine is an act of re­sis­tance.

From day one, we made the de­lib­er­ate choice to build Orion on WebKit, the open‑source en­gine at the heart of Safari and the broader Apple ecosys­tem. It gives us:

* A high‑per­for­mance en­gine that is deeply op­ti­mized for ma­cOS and iOS.

* An al­ter­na­tive to the grow­ing Chromium mono­cul­ture.

* A foun­da­tion that is not con­trolled by an ad­ver­tis­ing gi­ant.

Orion may feel fa­mil­iar if you’re used to Safari — re­spect­ing your mus­cle mem­ory and the aes­thet­ics of ma­cOS and iOS — but it is an en­tirely dif­fer­ent beast un­der the hood. We com­bined na­tive WebKit speed with a com­pletely new ap­proach to ex­ten­sions, pri­vacy, and cus­tomiza­tion.

Most peo­ple switch browsers for one rea­son: speed.

Orion is de­signed to be fast by na­ture, not just in bench­marks, but in how it feels every day:

* A UI that gets out of your way and gives you more screen real es­tate for con­tent.

* Zero Telemetry: We don’t col­lect us­age data. No an­a­lyt­ics, no iden­ti­fiers, no track­ing.

* No ad or track­ing tech­nol­ogy baked in: Orion is not funded by ads, so there is no in­cen­tive to fol­low you around the web.

* Built‑in pro­tec­tions: Strong con­tent block­ing and pri­vacy de­faults from the first launch.

We are ex­cited about what AI can do for search, brows­ing, and pro­duc­tiv­ity. Kagi, the com­pany be­hind Orion, has been ex­per­i­ment­ing with AI‑powered tools for years while stay­ing true to our AI in­te­gra­tion phi­los­o­phy.

But we are also watch­ing a wor­ry­ing trend: AI agents are be­ing rushed di­rectly into the browser core, with deep ac­cess to every­thing you do on­line — and some­times even to your lo­cal ma­chine.

Security re­searchers have al­ready doc­u­mented se­ri­ous is­sues in early AI browsers and “agentic” browser fea­tures:

* Hidden or un­doc­u­mented APIs that al­lowed em­bed­ded AI com­po­nents to ex­e­cute ar­bi­trary lo­cal com­mands on users’ de­vices.

* Prompt‑injection at­tacks that trick AI agents into ig­nor­ing safety rules, vis­it­ing ma­li­cious sites, or leak­ing sen­si­tive in­for­ma­tion be­yond what tra­di­tional browser sand­boxes were de­signed to pro­tect.

* Broader con­cerns that some im­ple­men­ta­tions are ef­fec­tively “lighting every­thing on fire” by ex­pand­ing the browser’s at­tack sur­face and data flows in ways users don’t fully un­der­stand.

* We are not against AI, and we are con­scious of its lim­i­ta­tions. We al­ready in­te­grate with AI‑powered ser­vices wher­ever it makes func­tional sense and will con­tinue to ex­pand those ca­pa­bil­i­ties.

* We are against rush­ing in­se­cure, al­ways‑on agents into the browser core. Your browser should be a se­cure gate­way, not an un­vet­ted co‑pi­lot wired into every­thing you do.

* Orion ships with no built‑in AI code in its core.

* We fo­cus on pro­vid­ing a clean, pre­dictable en­vi­ron­ment, es­pe­cially for en­ter­prises and pri­vacy‑con­scious pro­fes­sion­als.

* Orion is de­signed to con­nect seam­lessly to the AI tools you choose — soon in­clud­ing Kagi’s in­tel­li­gent fea­tures — while keep­ing a clear sep­a­ra­tion be­tween your browser and any ex­ter­nal AI agents.

As AI ma­tures and se­cu­rity mod­els im­prove, we’ll con­tinue to eval­u­ate thought­ful, user‑con­trolled ways to bring AI into your work­flow with­out com­pro­mis­ing safety, pri­vacy or user choice.

We de­signed Orion to bridge the gap be­tween sim­plic­ity and power. Out of the box, it’s a clean, in­tu­itive browser for any­one. Under the hood, it’s a deep tool­box for peo­ple who live in their browser all day.

Some of the unique fea­tures you’ll find in Orion 1.0:

* Focus Mode: Instantly trans­form any web­site into a dis­trac­tion‑free web app. Perfect for doc­u­men­ta­tion, writ­ing, or web apps you run all day.

* Link Preview: Peek at con­tent from any app — email, notes, chat — with­out fully com­mit­ting to open­ing a tab, keep­ing your work­space tidy.

* Mini Toolbar, Overflow Menu, and Page Tweak: Fine‑tune each page’s ap­pear­ance and con­trols, so the web adapts to you, not the other way around.

* Profiles as Apps: Isolate your work, per­sonal, and hobby brows­ing into com­pletely sep­a­rate pro­files, each with its own ex­ten­sions, cook­ies, and set­tings.

For power users, we’ve added gran­u­lar op­tions through­out the browser. These are there when you want them, and out of your way when you don’t.

Orion 1.0 also re­flects six years of feed­back from early adopters. Many in­vis­i­ble im­prove­ments — tab sta­bil­ity, mem­ory be­hav­ior, com­plex web app com­pat­i­bil­ity — are a di­rect re­sult of peo­ple push­ing Orion hard in their daily work­flows and telling us what broke.

With this re­lease, we are in­tro­duc­ing our new sig­na­ture: Browse Beyond ✴︎.

We orig­i­nally started with the browser name ‘Kagi.’ On February 3, 2020, Vlad sug­gested a short­list for re­brand­ing: Comet, Core, Blaze, and Orion. We chose Orion not just for the name it­self, but be­cause it per­fectly cap­tured our drive for ex­plo­ration and cu­rios­ity. It was a nat­ural fit that set the stage for every­thing that fol­lowed.

You’ll see this re­flected in our re­freshed vi­sual iden­tity:

* A re­fined logo that now uses the same type­face as Kagi, cre­at­ing a clear vi­sual bond be­tween our browser and our search en­gine.

Orion is part of the broader Kagi ecosys­tem, united by a sim­ple idea: the in­ter­net should be built for peo­ple, not ad­ver­tis­ers or any other third par­ties.

Orion is built by a team of just six de­vel­op­ers.

To put that in per­spec­tive:

* That’s roughly 10% of the size of the “small” browser teams at larger com­pa­nies.

* And a round­ing er­ror com­pared to the teams be­hind Chrome or Edge.

Yet, the im­pact is real: over 1 mil­lion down­loads to date, and a ded­i­cated com­mu­nity of 2480 paid sub­scribers who make this in­de­pen­dence pos­si­ble.

For the first two years, de­vel­op­ment was car­ried out by a sin­gle de­vel­oper. Today, we are a tight knit group op­er­at­ing close to our users. We lis­ten, de­bate, and im­ple­ment fixes pro­posed di­rectly by our com­mu­nity on OrionFeedback.org.

This is our only source of de­ci­sion mak­ing, rather than any us­age an­a­lyt­ics or pat­terns, be­cause re­mem­ber, Orion is zero-teleme­try!

This small team ap­proach lets us move quickly, stay fo­cused, and avoid the bloat or hype that of­ten comes with scale.

Orion is free for every­one.

Every user also re­ceives 200 free Kagi searches, with no ac­count or sign‑up re­quired. It’s our way of in­tro­duc­ing you to fast, ad‑free, pri­vacy‑re­spect­ing search from day one.

But we are also 100% self‑funded. We don’t sell your data and we don’t take money from ad­ver­tis­ers, which means we rely di­rectly on our users to sus­tain the pro­ject.

There are three ways to con­tribute to Orion’s fu­ture:

* Tip Jar (from the app): A sim­ple way to say “thank you” with­out any com­mit­ment.

Supporters (via sub­scrip­tion or life­time pur­chase) un­lock a set of Orion+ perks avail­able to­day, in­clud­ing:

* Floating win­dows: Keep a video or win­dow on top of other apps.

* Early ac­cess to new, sup­porter‑ex­clu­sive fea­tures we’re al­ready build­ing for next year.

By sup­port­ing Orion, you’re not just fund­ing a browser — you are co‑fund­ing a bet­ter web with hu­mans at the cen­ter.

Orion 1.0 is just the be­gin­ning. Our goal is sim­ple: Browse Beyond, every­where.

* Orion for ma­cOS

Our flag­ship browser, six years in the mak­ing. Built na­tively for Mac, with per­for­mance and de­tail that only come from liv­ing on the plat­form for a long time. Download it now.

* Orion for iOS and iPa­dOS

Trusted daily by users who want fea­tures no other mo­bile browser of­fers. Native iOS per­for­mance with ca­pa­bil­i­ties that re­de­fine what’s pos­si­ble on mo­bile. Download it now.

* Orion for Linux (Alpha)

Currently in al­pha for users who value choice and in­de­pen­dence. Native Linux per­for­mance, with the same pri­vacy‑first ap­proach as on ma­cOS.

Sign up for our newslet­ter to fol­low de­vel­op­ment and join the early test­ing wave.

* Orion for Windows (in de­vel­op­ment)

We have of­fi­cially started de­vel­op­ment on Orion for Windows, with a tar­get re­lease sched­uled for late 2026. Our goal is full par­ity with Orion 1.0 for ma­cOS, in­clud­ing syn­chro­nized pro­files and Orion+ ben­e­fits across plat­forms. Sign up for our newslet­ter to fol­low de­vel­op­ment and join the early test­ing wave.

Synchronization will work seam­lessly across de­vices, so your brows­ing ex­pe­ri­ence fol­lows you, not the other way around.

From early testers to pri­vacy ad­vo­cates and power users, Orion has grown through the voices of its com­mu­nity.

We’ll con­tinue to sur­face com­mu­nity sto­ries and feed­back as Orion evolves. If you share your ex­pe­ri­ence pub­licly, there’s a good chance we’ll see it.

Hitting v1.0 is a big mile­stone, but we’re just get­ting started.

Over the next year, our roadmap is densely packed with:

* Further im­prove­ments to sta­bil­ity and com­plex web app per­for­mance.

* New Orion+ fea­tures that push what a browser can do while keep­ing it sim­ple for every­one else.

* Tighter in­te­gra­tions with Kagi’s in­tel­li­gent tools — al­ways un­der your con­trol, never forced into your work­flow.

We’re also work­ing on ex­pand­ing and im­prov­ing our web­site to bet­ter show­case every­thing Orion can do, in­clud­ing bet­ter doc­u­men­ta­tion and on­board­ing for teams that want to stan­dard­ize on Orion.

Meanwhile, fol­low our X ac­count where we’ll be drop­ping lit­tle free­bies on the reg­u­lar (and don’t worry, we’ll be post­ing these else­where on so­cials as well!)

Thank you for choos­ing to Browse Beyond with us.

Scientists have iden­ti­fied five ma­jor “epochs” of hu­man brain de­vel­op­ment in one of the most com­pre­hen­sive stud­ies to date of how neural wiring changes from in­fancy to old age.

The study, based on the brain scans of nearly 4,000 peo­ple aged un­der one to 90, mapped neural con­nec­tions and how they evolve dur­ing our lives. This re­vealed five broad phases, split up by four piv­otal “turning points” in which brain or­gan­i­sa­tion moves on to a dif­fer­ent tra­jec­tory, at around the ages of nine, 32, 66 and 83 years.

“Looking back, many of us feel our lives have been char­ac­terised by dif­fer­ent phases. It turns out that brains also go through these eras,” said Prof Duncan Astle, a re­searcher in neu­roin­for­mat­ics at Cambridge University and se­nior au­thor of the study.

“Understanding that the brain’s struc­tural jour­ney is not a ques­tion of steady pro­gres­sion, but rather one of a few ma­jor turn­ing points, will help us iden­tify when and how its wiring is vul­ner­a­ble to dis­rup­tion.”

The child­hood pe­riod of de­vel­op­ment was found to oc­cur be­tween birth un­til the age of nine, when it tran­si­tions to the ado­les­cent phase — an era that lasts up to the age of 32, on av­er­age.

In a per­son’s early 30s the brain’s neural wiring shifts into adult mode — the longest era, last­ing more than three decades. A third turn­ing point around the age of 66 marks the start of an “early age­ing” phase of brain ar­chi­tec­ture. Finally, the “late age­ing” brain takes shape at around 83 years old.

The sci­en­tists quan­ti­fied brain or­gan­i­sa­tion us­ing 12 dif­fer­ent mea­sures, in­clud­ing the ef­fi­ciency of the wiring, how com­part­men­talised it is and whether the brain re­lies heav­ily on cen­tral hubs or has a more dif­fuse con­nec­tiv­ity net­work.

From in­fancy through child­hood, our brains are de­fined by “network con­sol­i­da­tion”, as the wealth of synapses — the con­nec­tors be­tween neu­rons — in a baby’s brain are whit­tled down, with the more ac­tive ones sur­viv­ing. During this pe­riod, the study found, the ef­fi­ciency of the brain’s wiring de­creases.

Meanwhile, grey and white mat­ter grow rapidly in vol­ume, so that cor­ti­cal thick­ness — the dis­tance be­tween outer grey mat­ter and in­ner white mat­ter — reaches a peak, and cor­ti­cal fold­ing, the char­ac­ter­is­tic ridges on the outer brain, sta­bilises.

In the sec­ond “epoch” of the brain, the ado­les­cence era, white mat­ter con­tin­ues to grow in vol­ume, so or­gan­i­sa­tion of the brain’s com­mu­ni­ca­tions net­works is in­creas­ingly re­fined. This era is de­fined by steadily in­creas­ing ef­fi­ciency of con­nec­tions across the whole brain, which is re­lated to en­hanced cog­ni­tive per­for­mance. The epochs were de­fined by the brain re­main­ing on a con­stant trend of de­vel­op­ment over a sus­tained pe­riod, rather than stay­ing in a fixed state through­out.

“We’re def­i­nitely not say­ing that peo­ple in their late 20s are go­ing to be act­ing like teenagers, or even that their brain looks like that of a teenager,” said Alexa Mousley, who led the re­search. “It’s re­ally the pat­tern of change.”

She added that the find­ings could give in­sights into risk fac­tors for men­tal health dis­or­ders, which most fre­quently emerge dur­ing the ado­les­cent pe­riod.

At around the age of 32 the strongest over­all shift in tra­jec­tory is seen. Life events such as par­ent­hood may play a role in some of the changes seen, al­though the re­search did not ex­plic­itly test this. “We know that women who give birth, their brain changes af­ter­wards,” said Mousley. “It’s rea­son­able to as­sume that there could be a re­la­tion­ship be­tween these mile­stones and what’s hap­pen­ing in the brain.”

From 32 years, the brain ar­chi­tec­ture ap­pears to sta­bilise com­pared with pre­vi­ous phases, cor­re­spond­ing with a “plateau in in­tel­li­gence and per­son­al­ity” based on other stud­ies. Brain re­gions also be­come more com­part­men­talised.

The fi­nal two turn­ing points were de­fined by de­creases in brain con­nec­tiv­ity, which were be­lieved to be re­lated to age­ing and de­gen­er­a­tion of white mat­ter in the brain.

The fol­low­ing sub­scrip­tion-only con­tent has been made avail­able to you by an LWN sub­scriber. Thousands of sub­scribers de­pend on LWN for the best news from the Linux and free soft­ware com­mu­ni­ties. If you en­joy this ar­ti­cle, please con­sider sub­scrib­ing to LWN. Thank you for vis­it­ing LWN.net!

It is rarely news­wor­thy when a pro­ject or pack­age picks up a new de­pen­dency. However, changes in a core tool like Debian’s Advanced Package

Tool (APT) can have far-reach­ing ef­fects. For ex­am­ple, Julian Andres Klode’s de­c­la­ra­tion

that APT would re­quire Rust in May 2026 means that a few of Debian’s un­of­fi­cial ports must ei­ther ac­quire a work­ing Rust tool­chain or de­pend on an old ver­sion of APT. This has raised sev­eral ques­tions within the pro­ject, par­tic­u­larly about the abil­ity of a sin­gle main­tainer to make changes that have wide­spread im­pact.

On October 31, Klode sent an an­nounce­ment to the de­bian-de­vel mail­ing list that he in­tended to in­tro­duce Rust de­pen­den­cies and code into APT as soon as May 2026:

This ex­tends at first to the Rust com­piler and stan­dard li­brary, and the Sequoia ecosys­tem.

In par­tic­u­lar, our code to parse .deb, .ar, .tar, and the HTTP sig­na­ture ver­i­fi­ca­tion code would strongly ben­e­fit from mem­ory safe lan­guages and a stronger ap­proach to unit test­ing.

If you main­tain a port with­out a work­ing Rust tool­chain, please en­sure it has one within the next 6 months, or sun­set the port.

Klode added this was nec­es­sary so that the pro­ject as a whole could move for­ward, rely on mod­ern tech­nolo­gies, “and not be held back by

try­ing to shoe­horn mod­ern soft­ware on retro com­put­ing

de­vices”. Some Debian de­vel­op­ers have wel­comed the news. Paul Tagliamonte ac­knowl­edged

that it would im­pact un­of­fi­cial Debian ports but called the push to­ward Rust “”.

However, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz com­plained

that Klode’s word­ing was un­pleas­ant and that the ap­proach was con­fronta­tional. In an­other

mes­sage, he ex­plained that he was not against adop­tion of Rust; he had worked on en­abling Rust on many of the Debian ar­chi­tec­tures and helped to fix ar­chi­tec­ture-spe­cific bugs in the Rust tool­chain as well as LLVM up­stream. However, the mes­sage strongly sug­gested there was no room for a change in plan: Klode had ended his mes­sage with “”, which in­vited no fur­ther dis­cus­sion. Glaubitz was one of a few Debian de­vel­op­ers who ex­pressed dis­com­fort with Klode’s com­mu­ni­ca­tion style in the mes­sage.

Klode noted, briefly, that Rust was al­ready a hard re­quire­ment for all Debian re­lease ar­chi­tec­tures and ports, ex­cept for Alpha (alpha), Motorola 680x0 (m68k),

PA-RISC (hppa), and

SuperH (sh4), be­cause of APT’s use of the Sequoia-PGP

pro­jec­t’s tool to ver­ify OpenPGP

sig­na­tures. APT falls back to us­ing the GNU Privacy Guard sig­na­ture-ver­i­fi­ca­tion tool, , on ports that do not have a Rust com­piler. By de­pend­ing di­rectly on Rust, though, APT it­self would not be avail­able on ports with­out a Rust com­piler. LWN re­cently

cov­ered the state of Linux ar­chi­tec­ture sup­port, and the sta­tus of Rust sup­port for each one.

None of the ports listed by Klode are among those of­fi­cially

sup­ported by Debian to­day, or tar­geted for sup­port in Debian 14 (“forky”). The sh4 port has never been of­fi­cially sup­ported, and none of the other ports have been sup­ported since Debian 6.0. The ac­tual im­pact on the ports lack­ing Rust is also less dra­matic than it sounded at first. Glaubitz as­sured

Antoni Boucher that “”, but phras­ing it that way “gets more at­ten­tion in the

news”. Boucher is the main­tainer of , a GCC

ahead-of-time code gen­er­a­tor for Rust. Nothing, Glaubitz said, stops ports from us­ing a non-Rust ver­sion of APT un­til Boucher and oth­ers man­age to boot­strap Rust for those ports.

David Kalnischkies, who is also a ma­jor

con­trib­u­tor to APT, sug­gested

that if the goal is to re­duce bugs, it would be bet­ter to re­move the code that is used to parse the .deb, .ar, and .tar for­mats that Klode men­tioned from APT en­tirely. It is only needed for two tools,

and , he said, and the only “” of

was by Klode’s em­ployer, Canonical, for its Launchpad soft­ware-col­lab­o­ra­tion plat­form. If those were taken out of the main APT code base, then it would not mat­ter whether they were writ­ten in Rust, Python, or an­other lan­guage, since the tools are not di­rectly nec­es­sary for any given port.

Kalnischkies also ques­tioned the claim that Rust was nec­es­sary to achieve the stronger ap­proach to unit test­ing that Klode men­tioned:

You can cer­tainly do unit tests in C++, we do. The main prob­lem is that some­one has to write those tests. Like docs.

Your new solver e.g. has none (apart from our pre­ex­ist­ing in­te­gra­tion tests). You don’t se­ri­ously claim that is be­cause of C++ ? If you don’t like GoogleTest, which is what we cur­rently have, I could sug­gest doctest (as I did in pre­vi­ous in­stall­ments). Plenty other frame­works ex­ist with sim­i­lar or dif­fer­ent styles.

Klode has not re­sponded to those com­ments yet, which is a bit un­for­tu­nate given the fact that in­tro­duc­ing hard de­pen­den­cies on Rust has an im­pact be­yond his own work on APT. It may well be that he has good an­swers to the ques­tions, but it can also give the im­pres­sion that Klode is sim­ply em­brac­ing a trend to­ward Rust. He is in­volved

in the Ubuntu work to mi­grate from GNU Coreutils to the Rust-based uu­tils. The rea­sons given for that work, again, are around mod­ern­iza­tion and bet­ter se­cu­rity—but se­cu­rity is not au­to­mat­i­cally guar­an­teed sim­ply by switch­ing to Rust, and there are a num­ber of other con­sid­er­a­tions.

For ex­am­ple, Adrian Bunk pointed

out that there are a num­ber of Debian teams, as well as tool­ing, that will be im­pacted by writ­ing some of APT in Rust. The re­lease notes for Debian 13 (“trixie”) men­tion

that Debian’s in­fra­struc­ture “currently has prob­lems with

re­build­ing pack­ages of types that sys­tem­at­i­cally use sta­tic

link­ing”, such as those with code writ­ten in Go and Rust. Thus, “these pack­ages will be

cov­ered by lim­ited se­cu­rity sup­port un­til the in­fra­struc­ture is

im­proved to deal with them main­tain­ably”. Limited se­cu­rity sup­port means that up­dates to Rust li­braries are likely to only be re­leased when Debian pub­lishes a point re­lease, which hap­pens about every two months. The se­cu­rity team has specif­i­cally

stated that is fully sup­ported, but there are still out­stand­ing prob­lems.

Due to the sta­tic-link­ing is­sue, any time one of ’s de­pen­den­cies, cur­rently more than 40 Rust crates, have to be re­built due to a se­cu­rity is­sue, (at least po­ten­tially) also needs to be re­built. There are also dif­fi­cul­ties in track­ing CVEs for all of its de­pen­den­cies, and un­der­stand­ing when a se­cu­rity vul­ner­a­bil­ity in a Rust crate may re­quire up­dat­ing a Rust pro­gram that de­pends on it.

Fabian Grünbichler, a main­tainer of Debian’s Rust tool­chain, listed

sev­eral out­stand­ing prob­lems Debian has with deal­ing with Rust pack­ages. One of the largest is the need for a con­sis­tent Debian pol­icy for de­clar­ing sta­t­i­cally linked li­braries. In 2022, Guillem Jover added a con­trol field for Debian pack­ages called Static-Built-Using (SBU), which would list the source pack­ages used to build a bi­nary pack­age. This would in­di­cate when a bi­nary pack­age needs to be re­built due to an up­date in an­other source pack­age. For ex­am­ple, de­pends on more than 40 Rust crates that are pack­aged for Debian. Without de­clar­ing the SBUs, it may not be clear if needs to be up­dated when one of its de­pen­den­cies is up­dated. Debian has been work­ing on a pol­icy

re­quire­ment for SBU since April 2024, but it is not yet fin­ished or adopted.

The dis­cus­sion sparked by Grünbichler makes clear that most of Debian’s Rust-related prob­lems are in the process of be­ing solved. However, there’s no ev­i­dence that Klode ex­plored the prob­lems be­fore de­clar­ing that APT would de­pend on Rust, or even asked “is this a rea­son­able time frame to in­tro­duce this de­pen­dency?”

Debian’s tagline, or at least one of its taglines, is “the uni­ver­sal op­er­at­ing sys­tem”, mean­ing that the pro­ject aims to run on a wide va­ri­ety of hard­ware (old and new) and be us­able on the desk­top, server, IoT de­vices, and more. The “Why Debian” page lists a num­ber of rea­sons users and de­vel­op­ers should choose the dis­tri­b­u­tion: mul­ti­ple hard­ware

ar­chi­tec­tures, long-term

sup­port, and its de­mo­c­ra­tic gov­er­nance

struc­ture are just a few of the ar­gu­ments it puts for­ward in fa­vor of Debian. It also notes that “Debian can­not be con­trolled by a

sin­gle com­pany”. A sin­gle de­vel­oper em­ployed by a com­pany to work on Debian tools push­ing a change that seems ben­e­fi­cial to that com­pany, with­out dis­cus­sion or de­bate, that im­pacts mul­ti­ple hard­ware ar­chi­tec­tures and that re­quires other vol­un­teers to do un­planned work or meet an ar­ti­fi­cial dead­line seems to go against many of the pro­jec­t’s stated val­ues.

Debian, of course, does have checks and bal­ances that could be em­ployed if other Debian de­vel­op­ers feel it nec­es­sary. Someone could, for ex­am­ple, ap­peal to Debian’s Technical Committee, or spon­sor a gen­eral res­o­lu­tion to over­ride a de­vel­oper if they can­not be per­suaded by dis­cus­sion alone. That hap­pened re­cently when the com­mit­tee re­quired sys­temd

main­tain­ers to pro­vide the di­rec­tory “until

a sat­is­fac­tory mi­gra­tion of im­pacted soft­ware has oc­curred and Policy

up­dated ac­cord­ingly”.

However, it also seems fair to point out that Debian can move slowly, even glacially, at times. APT added

sup­port for the DEB822

for­mat for its source in­for­ma­tion lists in 2015. Despite APT sup­port­ing that for­mat for years, Klode faced re­sis­tance in 2021, when he pushed

for Debian to move to the new for­mat ahead of the Debian 12 (“bookworm”) re­lease in 2021, but was un­suc­cess­ful. It is now the de­fault for trixie with the move to APT 3.0, though APT will con­tinue to sup­port the old for­mat for years to come.

The fact is, re­gard­less of what Klode does with APT, more and more free soft­ware is be­ing writ­ten (or rewrit­ten) in Rust. Making it eas­ier to sup­port that soft­ware when it is pack­aged for Debian is to every­one’s ben­e­fit. Perhaps the pro­ject needs some de­vel­op­ers who will be ag­gres­sive about push­ing the pro­ject to move more quickly in im­prov­ing its sup­port for Rust. However, what is re­ally needed is more de­vel­op­ers lend­ing a hand to do the work that is needed to sup­port Rust in Debian and else­where, such as . It does not seem in keep­ing with Debian’s com­mu­nity fo­cus for a sin­gle de­vel­oper to sim­ply de­clare de­pen­den­cies that other vol­un­teers will have to scram­ble to sup­port.

Upload an im­age to start an anony­mous OCR bat­tle­Need a doc­u­ment? Upload an im­age to start an anony­mous OCR bat­tle­Need a doc­u­ment?

You’re prob­a­bly read­ing this page be­cause you’ve at­tempted to ac­cess some part of my blog (Wandering

Thoughts) or CSpace, the wiki thing it’s part of. Unfortunately what­ever you’re us­ing to do so has a HTTP User-Agent header value that is too generic or oth­er­wise ex­ces­sively sus­pi­cious. Unfortunately, as of early 2025 there’s a plague of high vol­ume crawlers (apparently in part to gather data for LLM train­ing) that be­have like this. To re­duce the load on Wandering Thoughts I’m ex­per­i­ment­ing with (attempting to) block all of them, and you’ve run into this.

All HTTP User-Agent head­ers should clearly iden­tify what they are, and for non-browser user agents, they should iden­tify not just the soft­ware in­volved but also who specif­i­cally is us­ing that soft­ware. An ex­tremely generic value such as “Go-http-client/1.1” is not some­thing that I con­sider ac­cept­able any more.