Tag Archives: ubuntu

GitLab Runner with Rootless Privilege-less Capability-less Podman on riscv64

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I host my own GitLab CI/CD runners, and find that having coverage on the riscv64 CPU architecture is useful for testing things. The HiFive Premier P550 seems to be a common hardware choice. The P550 is possible to purchase online. You also need a (mini-)ATX chassi, power supply (~500W is more than sufficient), PCI-to-M2 converter and a NVMe storage device. Total cost per machine was around $8k/€8k for me. Assembly was simple: bolt everything, connect ATX power, connect cables for the front-panel, USB and and Audio. Be sure to toggle the physical power switch on the P550 before you close the box. Front-panel power button will start your machine. There is a P550 user manual available.

Below I will guide you to install the GitLab Runner on the pre-installed Ubuntu 24.04 that ships with the P550, and configure it to use Podman in root-less mode and without the --privileged flag, without any additional capabilities like SYS_ADMIN. Presumably you want to migrate to some other OS instead; hey Trisquel 13 riscv64 I’m waiting for you! I wouldn’t recommend using this machine for anything sensitive, there is an awful lot of non-free and/or vendor-specific software installed, and the hardware itself is young. I am not aware of any riscv64 hardware that can run a libre OS, all of them appear to require non-free blobs and usually a non-mainline kernel.

  • Login on console using username ‘ubuntu‘ and password ‘ubuntu‘. You will be asked to change the password, so do that.
  • Start a terminal, gain root with sudo -i and change the hostname:
    echo jas-p550-01 > /etc/hostname
  • Connect ethernet and run: apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade -u.
  • If your system doesn’t have valid MAC address (they show as MAC ‘8c:00:00:00:00:00 if you run ‘ip a’), you can fix this to avoid collisions if you install multiple P550’s on the same network. Connect the Debug USB-C connector on the back to one of the hosts USB-A slots. Use minicom (use Ctrl-A X to exit) to talk to it.
apt-get install minicom
minicom -o -D /dev/ttyUSB3
#cmd: ifconfig
inet 192.168.0.2  netmask: 255.255.240.0
gatway 192.168.0.1
SOM_Mac0: 8c:00:00:00:00:00
SOM_Mac1: 8c:00:00:00:00:00
MCU_Mac:  8c:00:00:00:00:00
#cmd: setmac 0 CA:FE:42:17:23:00
The MAC setting will be valid after rebooting the carrier board!!!
MAC[0] addr set to CA:FE:42:17:23:00(ca:fe:42:17:23:0)
#cmd: setmac 1 CA:FE:42:17:23:01
The MAC setting will be valid after rebooting the carrier board!!!
MAC[1] addr set to CA:FE:42:17:23:01(ca:fe:42:17:23:1)
#cmd: setmac 2 CA:FE:42:17:23:02
The MAC setting will be valid after rebooting the carrier board!!!
MAC[2] addr set to CA:FE:42:17:23:02(ca:fe:42:17:23:2)
#cmd:
  • For reference, if you wish to interact with the MCU you may do that via OpenOCD and telnet, like the following (as root on the P550). You need to have the Debug USB-C connected to a USB-A host port.
apt-get install openocd
wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/sifiveinc/hifive-premier-p550-tools/refs/heads/master/mcu-firmware/stm32_openocd.cfg
echo 'acc115d283ff8533d6ae5226565478d0128923c8a479a768d806487378c5f6c3  stm32_openocd.cfg' | sha256sum -c
openocd -f stm32_openocd.cfg &
telnet localhost 4444
...
  • Reboot the machine and login remotely from your laptop. Gain root and set up SSH public-key authentication and disable SSH password logins.
echo 'ssh-ed25519 AAA...' > ~/.ssh/authorized_keys
sed -i 's;^#PasswordAuthentication.*;PasswordAuthentication no;' /etc/ssh/sshd_config
service ssh restart
  • With a NVME device in the PCIe slot, create a LVM partition where the GitLab runner will live:
parted /dev/nvme0n1 print
blkdiscard /dev/nvme0n1
parted /dev/nvme0n1 mklabel gpt
parted /dev/nvme0n1 mkpart jas-p550-nvm-02 ext2 1MiB 100% align-check optimal 1
parted /dev/nvme0n1 set 1 lvm on
partprobe /dev/nvme0n1
pvcreate /dev/nvme0n1p1
vgcreate vg0 /dev/nvme0n1p1
lvcreate -L 400G -n glr vg0
mkfs.ext4 -L glr /dev/mapper/vg0-glr

Now with a reasonable setup ready, let’s install the GitLab Runner. The following is adapted from gitlab-runner’s official installation instructions documentation. The normal installation flow doesn’t work because they don’t publish riscv64 apt repositories, so you will have to perform upgrades manually.

# wget https://s3.dualstack.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/gitlab-runner-downloads/latest/deb/gitlab-runner_riscv64.deb
# wget https://s3.dualstack.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/gitlab-runner-downloads/latest/deb/gitlab-runner-helper-images.deb
wget https://gitlab-runner-downloads.s3.amazonaws.com/v17.11.0/deb/gitlab-runner_riscv64.deb
wget https://gitlab-runner-downloads.s3.amazonaws.com/v17.11.0/deb/gitlab-runner-helper-images.deb
echo '68a4c2a4b5988a5a5bae019c8b82b6e340376c1b2190228df657164c534bc3c3  gitlab-runner-helper-images.deb' | sha256sum -c
echo 'ee37dc76d3c5b52e4ba35cf8703813f54f536f75cfc208387f5aa1686add7a8c  gitlab-runner_riscv64.deb' | sha256sum -c
dpkg -i gitlab-runner-helper-images.deb gitlab-runner_riscv64.deb

Remember the NVMe device? Let’s not forget to use it, to avoid wear and tear of the internal MMC root disk. Do this now before any files in /home/gitlab-runner appears, or you have to move them manually.

gitlab-runner stop
echo 'LABEL=glr /home/gitlab-runner ext4 defaults,noatime 0 1' >> /etc/fstab
systemctl daemon-reload
mount /home/gitlab-runner

Next install gitlab-runner and configure it. Replace token glrt-REPLACEME below with the registration token you get from your GitLab project’s Settings -> CI/CD -> Runners -> New project runner. I used the tags ‘riscv64‘ and a runner description of the hostname.

gitlab-runner register --non-interactive --url https://gitlab.com --token glrt-REPLACEME --name $(hostname) --executor docker --docker-image debian:stable

We install and configure gitlab-runner to use podman, and to use non-root user.

apt-get install podman
gitlab-runner stop
usermod --add-subuids 100000-165535 --add-subgids 100000-165535 gitlab-runner

You need to run some commands as the gitlab-runner user, but unfortunately some interaction between sudo/su and pam_systemd makes this harder than it should be. So you have to setup SSH for the user and login via SSH to run the commands. Does anyone know of a better way to do this?

# on the p550:
cp -a /root/.ssh/ /home/gitlab-runner/
chown -R gitlab-runner:gitlab-runner /home/gitlab-runner/.ssh/
# on your laptop:
ssh gitlab-runner@jas-p550-01
systemctl --user --now enable podman.socket
systemctl --user --now start podman.socket
loginctl enable-linger gitlab-runner gitlab-runner
systemctl status --user podman.socket

We modify /etc/gitlab-runner/config.toml as follows, replace 997 with the user id shown by systemctl status above. See feature flags documentation for more documentation.

...
[[runners]]
  environment = ["FF_NETWORK_PER_BUILD=1", "FF_USE_FASTZIP=1"]
...
  [runners.docker]
        host = "unix:///run/user/997/podman/podman.sock"

Note that unlike the documentation I do not add the ‘privileged = true‘ parameter here. I will come back to this later.

Restart the system to confirm that pushing a .gitlab-ci.yml with a job that uses the riscv64 tag like the following works properly.

dump-env-details-riscv64:
  stage: build
  image: riscv64/debian:testing
  tags: [ riscv64 ]
  script:
    - set

Your gitlab-runner should now be receiving jobs and running them in rootless podman. You may view the log using journalctl as follows:

journalctl --follow _SYSTEMD_UNIT=gitlab-runner.service

To stop the graphical environment and disable some unnecessary services, you can use:

systemctl set-default multi-user.target
systemctl disable openvpn cups cups-browsed sssd colord

At this point, things were working fine and I was running many successful builds. Now starts the fun part with operational aspects!

I had a problem when running buildah to build a new container from within a job, and noticed that aardvark-dns was crashing. You can use the Debian ‘aardvark-dns‘ binary instead.

wget http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian/pool/main/a/aardvark-dns/aardvark-dns_1.14.0-3_riscv64.deb
echo 'df33117b6069ac84d3e97dba2c59ba53775207dbaa1b123c3f87b3f312d2f87a  aardvark-dns_1.14.0-3_riscv64.deb' | sha256sum -c
mkdir t
cd t
dpkg -x ../aardvark-dns_1.14.0-3_riscv64.deb .
mv /usr/lib/podman/aardvark-dns /usr/lib/podman/aardvark-dns.ubuntu
mv usr/lib/podman/aardvark-dns /usr/lib/podman/aardvark-dns.debian

My setup uses podman in rootless mode without passing the –privileged parameter or any –add-cap parameters to add non-default capabilities. This is sufficient for most builds. However if you try to create container using buildah from within a job, you may see errors like this:

Writing manifest to image destination
Error: mounting new container: mounting build container "8bf1ec03d967eae87095906d8544f51309363ddf28c60462d16d73a0a7279ce1": creating overlay mount to /var/lib/containers/storage/overlay/23785e20a8bac468dbf028bf524274c91fbd70dae195a6cdb10241c345346e6f/merged, mount_data="lowerdir=/var/lib/containers/storage/overlay/l/I3TWYVYTRZ4KVYCT6FJKHR3WHW,upperdir=/var/lib/containers/storage/overlay/23785e20a8bac468dbf028bf524274c91fbd70dae195a6cdb10241c345346e6f/diff,workdir=/var/lib/containers/storage/overlay/23785e20a8bac468dbf028bf524274c91fbd70dae195a6cdb10241c345346e6f/work,volatile": using mount program /usr/bin/fuse-overlayfs: unknown argument ignored: lazytime
fuse: device not found, try 'modprobe fuse' first
fuse-overlayfs: cannot mount: No such file or directory
: exit status 1

According to GitLab runner security considerations, you should not enable the ‘privileged = true’ parameter, and the alternative appears to run Podman as root with privileged=false. Indeed setting privileged=true as in the following example solves the problem, and I suppose running podman as root would too.

[[runners]]
    [runners.docker]
        privileged = true

Can we do better? After some experimentation, and reading open issues with suggested capabilities and configuration snippets, I ended up with the following configuration. It runs podman in rootless mode (as the gitlab-runner user) without --privileged, but add the CAP_SYS_ADMIN capability and exposes the /dev/fuse device. Still, this is running as non-root user on the machine, so I think it is an improvement compared to using --privileged and also compared to running podman as root.

[[runners]]
  [runners.docker]
    privileged = false
    cap_add = ["SYS_ADMIN"]
    devices = ["/dev/fuse"]

Still I worry about the security properties of such a setup, so I only enable these settings for a separately configured runner instance that I use when I need this docker-in-docker (oh, I meant buildah-in-podman) functionality. I found one article discussing Rootless Podman without the privileged flag that suggest –isolation=chroot but I have yet to make this work. Suggestions for improvement are welcome.

Happy Riscv64 Building!

Update 2025-05-05: I was able to make it work without the SYS_ADMIN capability too, with a GitLab /etc/gitlab-runner/config.toml like the following:

[[runners]]
  [runners.docker]
    privileged = false
    devices = ["/dev/fuse"]

And passing --isolation chroot to Buildah like this:

buildah build --isolation chroot -t $CI_REGISTRY_IMAGE:name image/

I’ve updated the blog title to add the word “capability-less” as well. I’ve confirmed that the same recipe works on podman on a ppc64el platform too. Remaining loop-holes are escaping from the chroot into the non-root gitlab-runner user, and escalating that privilege to root. The /dev/fuse and sub-uid/gid may be privilege escalation vectors here, otherwise I believe you’ve found a serious software security issue rather than a configuration mistake.

Towards Idempotent Rebuilds?

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After rebuilding all added/modified packages in Trisquel, I have been circling around the elephant in the room: 99% of the binary packages in Trisquel comes from Ubuntu, which to a large extent are built from Debian source packages. Is it possible to rebuild the official binary packages identically? Does anyone make an effort to do so? Does anyone care about going through the differences between the official package and a rebuilt version? Reproducible-build.org‘s effort to track reproducibility bugs in Debian (and other systems) is amazing. However as far as I know, they do not confirm or deny that their rebuilds match the official packages. In fact, typically their rebuilds do not match the official packages, even when they say the package is reproducible, which had me surprised at first. To understand why that happens, compare the buildinfo file for the official coreutils 9.1-1 from Debian bookworm with the buildinfo file for reproducible-build.org’s build and you will see that the SHA256 checksum does not match, but still they declare it as a reproducible package. As far as I can tell of the situation, the purpose of their rebuilds are not to say anything about the official binary build, instead the purpose is to offer a QA service to maintainers by performing two builds of a package and declaring success if both builds match.

I have felt that something is lacking, and months have passed and I haven’t found any project that address the problem I am interested in. During my earlier work I created a project called debdistreproduce which performs rebuilds of the difference between two distributions in a GitLab pipeline, and display diffoscope output for further analysis. A couple of days ago I had the idea of rewriting it to perform rebuilds of a single distribution. A new project debdistrebuild was born and today I’m happy to bless it as version 1.0 and to announces the project! Debdistrebuild has rebuilt the top-50 popcon packages from Debian bullseye, bookworm and trixie, on amd64 and arm64, as well as Ubuntu jammy and noble on amd64, see the summary status page for links. This is intended as a proof of concept, to allow people experiment with the concept of doing GitLab-based package rebuilds and analysis. Compare how Guix has the guix challenge command.

Or I should say debdistrebuild has attempted to rebuild those distributions. The number of identically built packages are fairly low, so I didn’t want to waste resources building the rest of the archive until I understand if the differences are due to consequences of my build environment (plain apt-get build-dep followed by dpkg-buildpackage in a fresh container), or due to some real difference. Summarizing the results, debdistrebuild is able to rebuild 34% of Debian bullseye on amd64, 36% of bookworm on amd64, 32% of bookworm on arm64. The results for trixie and Ubuntu are disappointing, below 10%.

So what causes my rebuilds to be different from the official rebuilds? Some are trivial like the classical problem of varying build paths, resulting in a different NT_GNU_BUILD_ID causing a mismatch. Some are a bit strange, like a subtle difference in one of perl’s headers file. Some are due to embedded version numbers from a build dependency. Several of the build logs and diffoscope outputs doesn’t make sense, likely due to bugs in my build scripts, especially for Ubuntu which appears to strip translations and do other build variations that I don’t do. In general, the classes of reproducibility problems are the expected. Some are assembler differences for GnuPG’s gpgv-static, likely triggered by upload of a new version of gcc after the original package was built. There are at least two ways to resolve that problem: either use the same version of build dependencies that were used to produce the original build, or demand that all packages that are affected by a change in another package are rebuilt centrally until there are no more differences.

The current design of debdistrebuild uses the latest version of a build dependency that is available in the distribution. We call this a “idempotent rebuild“. This is usually not how the binary packages were built originally, they are often built against earlier versions of their build dependency. That is the situation for most binary distributions.

Instead of using the latest build dependency version, higher reproducability may be achieved by rebuilding using the same version of the build dependencies that were used during the original build. This requires parsing buildinfo files to find the right version of the build dependency to install. We believe doing so will lead to a higher number of reproducibly built packages. However it begs the question: can we rebuild that earlier version of the build dependency? This circles back to really old versions and bootstrappable builds eventually.

While rebuilding old versions would be interesting on its own, we believe that is less helpful for trusting the latest version and improving a binary distribution: it is challenging to publish a new version of some old package that would fix a reproducibility bug in another package when used as a build dependency, and then rebuild the later packages with the modified earlier version. Those earlier packages were already published, and are part of history. It may be that ultimately it will no longer be possible to rebuild some package, because proper source code is missing (for packages using build dependencies that were never part of a release); hardware to build a package could be missing; or that the source code is no longer publicly distributable.

I argue that getting to 100% idempotent rebuilds is an interesting goal on its own, and to reach it we need to start measure idempotent rebuild status.

One could conceivable imagine a way to rebuild modified versions of earlier packages, and then rebuild later packages using the modified earlier packages as build dependencies, for the purpose of achieving higher level of reproducible rebuilds of the last version, and to reach for bootstrappability. However, it may be still be that this is insufficient to achieve idempotent rebuilds of the last versions. Idempotent rebuilds are different from a reproducible build (where we try to reproduce the build using the same inputs), and also to bootstrappable builds (in which all binaries are ultimately built from source code). Consider a cycle where package X influence the content of package Y, which in turn influence the content of package X. These cycles may involve several packages, and it is conceivable that a cycle could be circular and infinite. It may be difficult to identify these chains, and even more difficult to break them up, but this effort help identify where to start looking for them. Rebuilding packages using the same build dependency versions as were used during the original build, or rebuilding packages using a bootsrappable build process, both seem orthogonal to the idempotent rebuild problem.

Our notion of rebuildability appears thus to be complementary to reproducible-builds.org’s definition and bootstrappable.org’s definition. Each to their own devices, and Happy Hacking!

Addendum about terminology: With “idempotent rebuild” I am talking about a rebuild of the entire operating system, applied to itself. Compare how you build the latest version of the GNU C Compiler: it first builds itself using whatever system compiler is available (often an earlier version of gcc) which we call step 1. Then step 2 is to build a copy of itself using the compiler built in step 1. The final step 3 is to build another copy of itself using the compiler from step 2. Debian, Ubuntu etc are at step 1 in this process right now. The output of step 2 and step 3 ought to be bit-by-bit identical, or something is wrong. The comparison between step 2 and 3 is what I refer to with an idempotent rebuild. Of course, most packages aren’t a compiler that can compile itself. However entire operating systems such as Trisquel, PureOS, Ubuntu or Debian are (hopefully) a self-contained system that ought to be able to rebuild itself to an identical copy. Or something is amiss. The reproducible build and bootstrappable build projects are about improve the quality of step 1. The property I am interested is the identical rebuild and comparison in step 2 and 3. I feel the word “idempotent” describes the property I’m interested in well, but I realize there may be better ways to describe this. Ideas welcome!

Apt archive mirrors in Git-LFS

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My effort to improve transparency and confidence of public apt archives continues. I started to work on this in “Apt Archive Transparency” in which I mention the debdistget project in passing. Debdistget is responsible for mirroring index files for some public apt archives. I’ve realized that having a publicly auditable and preserved mirror of the apt repositories is central to being able to do apt transparency work, so the debdistget project has become more central to my project than I thought. Currently I track Trisquel, PureOS, Gnuinos and their upstreams Ubuntu, Debian and Devuan.

Debdistget download Release/Package/Sources files and store them in a git repository published on GitLab. Due to size constraints, it uses two repositories: one for the Release/InRelease files (which are small) and one that also include the Package/Sources files (which are large). See for example the repository for Trisquel release files and the Trisquel package/sources files. Repositories for all distributions can be found in debdistutils’ archives GitLab sub-group.

The reason for splitting into two repositories was that the git repository for the combined files become large, and that some of my use-cases only needed the release files. Currently the repositories with packages (which contain a couple of months worth of data now) are 9GB for Ubuntu, 2.5GB for Trisquel/Debian/PureOS, 970MB for Devuan and 450MB for Gnuinos. The repository size is correlated to the size of the archive (for the initial import) plus the frequency and size of updates. Ubuntu’s use of Apt Phased Updates (which triggers a higher churn of Packages file modifications) appears to be the primary reason for its larger size.

Working with large Git repositories is inefficient and the GitLab CI/CD jobs generate quite some network traffic downloading the git repository over and over again. The most heavy user is the debdistdiff project that download all distribution package repositories to do diff operations on the package lists between distributions. The daily job takes around 80 minutes to run, with the majority of time is spent on downloading the archives. Yes I know I could look into runner-side caching but I dislike complexity caused by caching.

Fortunately not all use-cases requires the package files. The debdistcanary project only needs the Release/InRelease files, in order to commit signatures to the Sigstore and Sigsum transparency logs. These jobs still run fairly quickly, but watching the repository size growth worries me. Currently these repositories are at Debian 440MB, PureOS 130MB, Ubuntu/Devuan 90MB, Trisquel 12MB, Gnuinos 2MB. Here I believe the main size correlation is update frequency, and Debian is large because I track the volatile unstable.

So I hit a scalability end with my first approach. A couple of months ago I “solved” this by discarding and resetting these archival repositories. The GitLab CI/CD jobs were fast again and all was well. However this meant discarding precious historic information. A couple of days ago I was reaching the limits of practicality again, and started to explore ways to fix this. I like having data stored in git (it allows easy integration with software integrity tools such as GnuPG and Sigstore, and the git log provides a kind of temporal ordering of data), so it felt like giving up on nice properties to use a traditional database with on-disk approach. So I started to learn about Git-LFS and understanding that it was able to handle multi-GB worth of data that looked promising.

Fairly quickly I scripted up a GitLab CI/CD job that incrementally update the Release/Package/Sources files in a git repository that uses Git-LFS to store all the files. The repository size is now at Ubuntu 650kb, Debian 300kb, Trisquel 50kb, Devuan 250kb, PureOS 172kb and Gnuinos 17kb. As can be expected, jobs are quick to clone the git archives: debdistdiff pipelines went from a run-time of 80 minutes down to 10 minutes which more reasonable correlate with the archive size and CPU run-time.

The LFS storage size for those repositories are at Ubuntu 15GB, Debian 8GB, Trisquel 1.7GB, Devuan 1.1GB, PureOS/Gnuinos 420MB. This is for a couple of days worth of data. It seems native Git is better at compressing/deduplicating data than Git-LFS is: the combined size for Ubuntu is already 15GB for a couple of days data compared to 8GB for a couple of months worth of data with pure Git. This may be a sub-optimal implementation of Git-LFS in GitLab but it does worry me that this new approach will be difficult to scale too. At some level the difference is understandable, Git-LFS probably store two different Packages files — around 90MB each for Trisquel — as two 90MB files, but native Git would store it as one compressed version of the 90MB file and one relatively small patch to turn the old files into the next file. So the Git-LFS approach surprisingly scale less well for overall storage-size. Still, the original repository is much smaller, and you usually don’t have to pull all LFS files anyway. So it is net win.

Throughout this work, I kept thinking about how my approach relates to Debian’s snapshot service. Ultimately what I would want is a combination of these two services. To have a good foundation to do transparency work I would want to have a collection of all Release/Packages/Sources files ever published, and ultimately also the source code and binaries. While it makes sense to start on the latest stable releases of distributions, this effort should scale backwards in time as well. For reproducing binaries from source code, I need to be able to securely find earlier versions of binary packages used for rebuilds. So I need to import all the Release/Packages/Sources packages from snapshot into my repositories. The latency to retrieve files from that server is slow so I haven’t been able to find an efficient/parallelized way to download the files. If I’m able to finish this, I would have confidence that my new Git-LFS based approach to store these files will scale over many years to come. This remains to be seen. Perhaps the repository has to be split up per release or per architecture or similar.

Another factor is storage costs. While the git repository size for a Git-LFS based repository with files from several years may be possible to sustain, the Git-LFS storage size surely won’t be. It seems GitLab charges the same for files in repositories and in Git-LFS, and it is around $500 per 100GB per year. It may be possible to setup a separate Git-LFS backend not hosted at GitLab to serve the LFS files. Does anyone know of a suitable server implementation for this? I had a quick look at the Git-LFS implementation list and it seems the closest reasonable approach would be to setup the Gitea-clone Forgejo as a self-hosted server. Perhaps a cloud storage approach a’la S3 is the way to go? The cost to host this on GitLab will be manageable for up to ~1TB ($5000/year) but scaling it to storing say 500TB of data would mean an yearly fee of $2.5M which seems like poor value for the money.

I realized that ultimately I would want a git repository locally with the entire content of all apt archives, including their binary and source packages, ever published. The storage requirements for a service like snapshot (~300TB of data?) is today not prohibitly expensive: 20TB disks are $500 a piece, so a storage enclosure with 36 disks would be around $18.000 for 720TB and using RAID1 means 360TB which is a good start. While I have heard about ~TB-sized Git-LFS repositories, would Git-LFS scale to 1PB? Perhaps the size of a git repository with multi-millions number of Git-LFS pointer files will become unmanageable? To get started on this approach, I decided to import a mirror of Debian’s bookworm for amd64 into a Git-LFS repository. That is around 175GB so reasonable cheap to host even on GitLab ($1000/year for 200GB). Having this repository publicly available will make it possible to write software that uses this approach (e.g., porting debdistreproduce), to find out if this is useful and if it could scale. Distributing the apt repository via Git-LFS would also enable other interesting ideas to protecting the data. Consider configuring apt to use a local file:// URL to this git repository, and verifying the git checkout using some method similar to Guix’s approach to trusting git content or Sigstore’s gitsign.

A naive push of the 175GB archive in a single git commit ran into pack size limitations:

remote: fatal: pack exceeds maximum allowed size (4.88 GiB)

however breaking up the commit into smaller commits for parts of the archive made it possible to push the entire archive. Here are the commands to create this repository:

git init
git lfs install
git lfs track 'dists/**' 'pool/**'
git add .gitattributes
git commit -m"Add Git-LFS track attributes." .gitattributes
time debmirror --method=rsync --host ftp.se.debian.org --root :debian --arch=amd64 --source --dist=bookworm,bookworm-updates --section=main --verbose --diff=none --keyring /usr/share/keyrings/debian-archive-keyring.gpg --ignore .git .
git add dists project
git commit -m"Add." -a
git remote add origin git@gitlab.com:debdistutils/archives/debian/mirror.git
git push --set-upstream origin --all
for d in pool//; do
echo $d;
time git add $d;
git commit -m"Add $d." -a
git push
done

The resulting repository size is around 27MB with Git LFS object storage around 174GB. I think this approach would scale to handle all architectures for one release, but working with a single git repository for all releases for all architectures may lead to a too large git repository (>1GB). So maybe one repository per release? These repositories could also be split up on a subset of pool/ files, or there could be one repository per release per architecture or sources.

Finally, I have concerns about using SHA1 for identifying objects. It seems both Git and Debian’s snapshot service is currently using SHA1. For Git there is SHA-256 transition and it seems GitLab is working on support for SHA256-based repositories. For serious long-term deployment of these concepts, it would be nice to go for SHA256 identifiers directly. Git-LFS already uses SHA256 but Git internally uses SHA1 as does the Debian snapshot service.

What do you think? Happy Hacking!

Sigstore for Apt Archives: apt-cosign

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As suggested in my initial announcement of apt-sigstore my plan was to look into stronger uses of Sigstore than rekor, and I’m now happy to announce that the apt-cosign plugin has been added to apt-sigstore and the operational project debdistcanary is publishing cosign-statements about the InRelease file published by the following distributions: Trisquel GNU/Linux, PureOS, Gnuinos, Ubuntu, Debian and Devuan.

Summarizing the commands that you need to run as root to experience the great new world:

# run everything as root: su / sudo -i / doas -s
apt-get install -y apt gpg bsdutils wget
wget -nv -O/usr/local/bin/apt-verify-gpgv https://gitlab.com/debdistutils/apt-verify/-/raw/main/apt-verify-gpgv
chmod +x /usr/local/bin/apt-verify-gpgv
mkdir -p /etc/apt/verify.d
ln -s /usr/bin/gpgv /etc/apt/verify.d
echo 'APT::Key::gpgvcommand "apt-verify-gpgv";' > /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/75verify
wget -O/usr/local/bin/cosign https://github.com/sigstore/cosign/releases/download/v2.0.1/cosign-linux-amd64
echo 924754b2e62f25683e3e74f90aa5e166944a0f0cf75b4196ee76cb2f487dd980  /usr/local/bin/cosign | sha256sum -c
chmod +x /usr/local/bin/cosign
wget -nv -O/etc/apt/verify.d/apt-cosign https://gitlab.com/debdistutils/apt-sigstore/-/raw/main/apt-cosign
chmod +x /etc/apt/verify.d/apt-cosign
mkdir -p /etc/apt/trusted.cosign.d
dist=$(lsb_release --short --id | tr A-Z a-z)
wget -O/etc/apt/trusted.cosign.d/cosign-public-key-$dist.txt "https://gitlab.com/debdistutils/debdistcanary/-/raw/main/cosign/cosign-public-key-$dist.txt"
echo "Cosign::Base-URL \"https://gitlab.com/debdistutils/canary/$dist/-/raw/main/cosign\";" > /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/77cosign

Then run your usual apt-get update and look in the syslog to debug things.

This is the kind of work that gets done while waiting for the build machines to attempt to reproducibly build PureOS. Unfortunately, the results is that a meager 16% of the 765 added/modifed packages are reproducible by me. There is some infrastructure work to be done to improve things: we should use sbuild for example. The build infrastructure should produce signed statements for each package it builds: One statement saying that it attempted to reproducible build a particular binary package (thus generated some build logs and diffoscope-output for auditing), and one statements saying that it actually was able to reproduce a package. Verifying such claims during apt-get install or possibly dpkg -i is a logical next step.

There is some code cleanups and release work to be done now. Which distribution will be the first apt-based distribution that includes native support for Sigstore? Let’s see.

Sigstore is not the only relevant transparency log around, and I’ve been trying to learn a bit about Sigsum to be able to support it as well. The more improved confidence about system security, the merrier!

Trisquel is 42% Reproducible!

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The absolute number may not be impressive, but what I hope is at least a useful contribution is that there actually is a number on how much of Trisquel is reproducible. Hopefully this will inspire others to help improve the actual metric.

tl;dr: go to reproduce-trisquel.

When I set about to understand how Trisquel worked, I identified a number of things that would improve my confidence in it. The lowest hanging fruit for me was to manually audit the package archive, and I wrote a tool called debdistdiff to automate this for me. That led me to think about apt archive transparency more in general. I have made some further work in that area (hint: apt-verify) that deserve its own blog post eventually. Most of apt archive transparency is futile if we don’t trust the intended packages that are in the archive. One way to measurable increase trust in the package are to provide reproducible builds of the packages, which should by now be an established best practice. Code review is still important, but since it will never provide positive guarantees we need other processes that can identify sub-optimal situations automatically. The way reproducible builds easily identify negative results is what I believe has driven much of its success: its results are tangible and measurable. The field of software engineering is in need of more such practices.

The design of my setup to build Trisquel reproducible are as follows.

  • The project debdistget is responsible for downloading Release/Packages files (which are the most relevant files from dists/) from apt archives, and works by commiting them into GitLab-hosted git-repositories. I maintain several such repositories for popular apt-archives, including for Trisquel and its upstream Ubuntu. GitLab invokes a schedule pipeline to do the downloading, and there is some race conditions here.
  • The project debdistdiff is used to produce the list of added and modified packages, which are the input to actually being able to know what packages to reproduce. It publishes human readable summary of difference for several distributions, including Trisquel vs Ubuntu. Early on I decided that rebuilding all of the upstream Ubuntu packages is out of scope for me: my personal trust in the official Debian/Ubuntu apt archives are greater than my trust of the added/modified packages in Trisquel.
  • The final project reproduce-trisquel puts the pieces together briefly as follows, everything being driven from its .gitlab-ci.yml file.
    • There is a (manually triggered) job generate-build-image to create a build image to speed up CI/CD runs, using a simple Dockerfile.
    • There is a (manually triggered) job generate-package-lists that uses debdistdiff to generate and store package lists and puts its output in lists/. The reason this is manually triggered right now is due to a race condition.
    • There is a (scheduled) job that does two things: from the package lists, the script generate-ci-packages.sh builds a GitLab CI/CD instruction file ci-packages.yml that describes jobs for each package to build. The second part is generate-readme.sh that re-generate the project’s README.md based on the build logs and diffoscope outputs that stored in the git repository.
    • Through the ci-packages.yml file, there is a large number of jobs that are dynamically defined, which currently are manually triggered to not overload the build servers. The script build-package.sh is invoked and attempts to rebuild a package, and stores build log and diffoscope output in the git project itself.

I did not expect to be able to use the GitLab shared runners to do the building, however they turned out to work quite well and I postponed setting up my own runner. There is a manually curated lists/disabled-aramo.txt with some packages that all required too much disk space or took over two hours to build. Today I finally took the time to setup a GitLab runner using podman running Trisquel aramo, and I expect to complete builds of the remaining packages soon — one of my Dell R630 server with 256GB RAM and dual 2680v4 CPUs should deliver sufficient performance.

Current limitations and ideas on further work (most are filed as project issues) include:

  • We don’t support *.buildinfo files. As far as I am aware, Trisquel does not publish them for their builds. Improving this would be a first step forward, anyone able to help? Compare buildinfo.debian.net. For example, many packages differ only in their NT_GNU_BUILD_ID symbol inside the ELF binary, see example diffoscope output for libgpg-error. By poking around in jenkins.trisquel.org I managed to discover that Trisquel built initramfs-utils in the randomized path /build/initramfs-tools-bzRLUp and hard-coding that path allowed me to reproduce that package. I expect the same to hold for many other packages. Unfortunately, this failure turned into success with that package moved the needle from 42% reproducibility to 43% however I didn’t let that stand in the way of a good headline.
  • The mechanism to download the Release/Package-files from dists/ is not fool-proof: we may not capture all ever published such files. While this is less of a concern for reproducibility, it is more of a concern for apt transparency. Still, having Trisquel provide a service similar to snapshot.debian.org would help.
  • Having at least one other CPU architecture would be nice.
  • Due to lack of time and mental focus, handling incremental updates of new versions of packages is not yet working. This means we only ever build one version of a package, and never discover any newly published versions of the same package. Now that Trisquel aramo is released, the expected rate of new versions should be low, but still happens due to security or backports.
  • Porting this to test supposedly FSDG-compliant distributions such as PureOS and Gnuinos should be relatively easy. I’m also looking at Devuan because of Gnuinos.
  • The elephant in the room is how reproducible Ubuntu is in the first place.

Happy Easter Hacking!

Update 2023-04-17: The original project “reproduce-trisquel” that was announced here has been archived and replaced with two projects, one generic “debdistreproduce” and one with results for Trisquel: “reproduce/trisquel“.