Project Fedora - Sustainibility and Ecology

Project Discussion
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creator: Andi (hebrew name Eliab) Artz

Hi Fedora Community, I wanted to share an idea for consideration

How can Fedora be a good contributor in our fight against climate change? Which measures and methods do we have?
How can Fedora as a community work together to put strength on this important topic?

Thesis:
Climate change is a big topic in our daily life. Nevertheless, many of us don’t know how much we can do on our own to save the planet. It needn’t be a big effort because we all have different living standards and our income may be different as well as we may have personal challenges in our life.

The best way is to educate and to talk about climate change which is a key point in Linux world and its distros. Whereas, others may not see such impact. We as Fedorians have to reflect critically on how big data, cloud et cetera, have an impact on CO2 and our planet.

Project:

KDE Eco is an awesome project which needs to be promoted more. Barriers should be fallen as well as narrow minded thinking because this is causing a fallback or even toxic atmosphere. We need to work together. It doesn’t mind, if you prefer GNOME, KDE, XFCE or i3. As one Fedora community let us inspire from KDE Eco. They have good tools to implement in our Fedora community. Maybe Red Hat can help us or be involved in it?

Another aspect is that we may create a Fedora awareness day on Climate change to talk about it and to have a kind of event? Participating in other climate events? Let us talk in every Fedora Release or other conferences to put it as an urgent topic.

Whom to contact?

Matthew, Ben, Marie?

Future perspective:
Creating a pop up after installing Fedora - how to save power/energy - kind of reflections for users.

Let us discuss together :slight_smile:

v/r
Andi

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I think this is an interesting idea. As a user, I would like to know more about how to measure my footprint with energy and power usage. Are their tools already in the Linux ecosystem to do this in a simple way? And if yes, for a workstation or a server environment, or both?

If we could get more information about these kinds of things, it would be neat to have a “Climate & Ecology” theme for Ambassadors to review when speaking about Fedora out in the world. I see a possibility for us to inspire more people to participate in the community by empowering them to speak about issues that are important to them, and climate change and energy conservation seem like good places to start.

Edit: @ngompa, I know you do a lot in the KDE Community. Do you know any KDE developers or folks who might be interested in helping us explore this in Fedora?

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Hi @andilinux, hi @jflory7, and hi Fedora Community! Thank you for posting this to your community :slight_smile:

My name is Joseph De Veaugh-Geiss. I am the Project and Community Manager of the “Blauer Engel For FOSS” (BE4FOSS) project, one of the projects under the KDE Eco initiative. BE4FOSS has the goal of collecting and spreading information related to Blue Angel eco-certification, the official eco-label of the German government, as well as energy and resource consumption of software in general.

Our sister project “FOSS Energy Efficiency Project” (FEEP) aims to build tools to measure the energy consumption of software.

It doesn’t mind, if you prefer GNOME, KDE, XFCE or i3.

Exactly! The initiative has the goal of supporting all FOSS communities in making FOSS the most efficient and sustainable software.

If you would like to learn more about our objectives and what we are currently working on, I gave a talk at the Linux App Summit in April which might interest you:

Linux App Summit 2022 - Day 2 - Invidious

I am also happy to answer any questions here or we can arrange a video call to discuss more in person. I would be very interested in discussing with the Fedora community ways we can support each other towards the common goal of a more sustainable use of energy as one of the shared resources of our planet.

Finally, all are invited to join any one of many channels to discuss with the community. KDE Eco has a monthly online meetup on the 2nd Wednesday of the month (19h CET/CEST), where community members and researchers present the work they are doing. We also have a mailing list and Matrix room. More information can be found here:

Get Involved - KDE Eco

Cheers!

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Hi @josephdg Welcome to our Fedora Community! :slight_smile:

Thx for replying here and introducing yourself and the project goals.
I am going to watch your talk first and I would suggest that a video call would be great.

The next monthly meeting would on 13th July?
Will join the mailing list and the Matrix room.

Cheers!

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@jflory7 @mattdm

I am interesting to dive into this work and take the lead. But I hope and invite all users to join this new project to work all as one community.

v/r

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If it’s of any help, the new version of GNOME in F36 has a power management feature that doesn’t charge your battery up to 100% all the time but cycles it to increase the battery longevity and it works quite nicely. Longer lifetime of batteries means less electronic waste hopefully.

I think we can also (and have been making efforts) to be more eco conscious with our swag choices. Marie was able to get shirt stock from our vendors that are made from recycled fabric for our new official shirts. I am always down for talking about how we can reduce swag waste, it’s a long-time pet peeve of mine.

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Hey @duffy

Yea, I really enjoy the power management feature of GNOME. Hopefully battery life last longer and we can drease electronic waste. Nevertheless, we should also talk about the “having the latest and greatest stuff-syndrome” aka the need to have always the best hw.

It’s good to know that Fedora does have effort on more eco on swag stuff. Maybe we should consider this project as whole Fedora community project to look which SIGs can do more on sustainibility and eco-awareness.

v/r

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Not to deviate from this cool discussion going on, but where is that setting found or do you know of docs I could follow? I’ve been looking for something like that since my Surface basically stays plugged in all the time.

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@joseph Are u using Gnome on your Surface?

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Any hint where this is documented?

As far as I can tell, this is wishful thinking, see

TLP offers this functionality but tlp is not installed by default…

Looks like Pop!os have implemented battery thresholds:

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Yes, I’m using default Gnome on Fedora Workstation 36.

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Hi @andilinux Thank you for the warm welcome! Great, let’s plan a video call next week or the week after. Would that work for you? Wednesday afternoon (UTC+2) both weeks are good for me. Contact me on Matrix to arrange the details!?

Yes, the next community meetup is 13 July from 19-20h CEST. The project Green Coding Berlin will present their green metrics tool (AGPL v.3) to the community. It is a different approach to the community lab setup we are focused on currently, and the tool looks really promising. From the GitHub repository:

The software can orchestrate Docker containers according to a given specification in a usage-flow.json file.

These containers will be setup on the host system and the testing specification in the usage-flow will be run by sending the commands to the containers accordingly.

During this process the performance metrics of the containers are read through the stream of docker stats.

You can find a short example of what it does at the FEEP repository.

The community meetups have participants with mixed knowledge backgrounds and interests. I am not a software engineer myself. All are welcome to listen in and give feedback or ask questions. The meetup is a place to learn from other initiatives and make plans for the next steps.

@duffy [at]Flo Thank you for the information! [New users can only mention two users in a post.]

I look forward to talking with you and the Fedora community more soon!

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Hi @josephdg Pleasure welcoming here u in our Fedora community.
I have contacted u on Matrix for a video call.

The project Green Coding Berlin is really promissing tbh. That’s really awesome. I have check the GithHub repo and I am impressed!

v/r

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I’m interested in participating in the project and joined the mailing list. Hope that the discussion is happening over there.
I wish the initiative would be expanded beyond KDE, and that Fedora Project (thus Gnome) would get onboard and define objectives, indicators, and measures to reduce the project’s and/or Fedora Linux’ footprint.
Cheers!

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It would be nice @augenauf if you are interested as well joining to work on options how Fedora can participate on it.
The goal is that we as one community should be aware about this urgent topic.

So feel free to add your own ideas or thoughts as well :)!

V/r

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@augenauf I can only reiterate @andilinux’s invitation to join the conversation! I have been in touch with GNOME relatively recently in order to discuss measuring their software in the FOSS community lab. I will follow-up with them soon, and perhaps we should discuss this together as well.

Looking forward to speaking with you soon!

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There is generally a strong correlation between efficiency and sustainability/ecology.

Making a system efficient (e.g., to enable me working 10h on battery instead of 5h), also makes it more contributing to sustainability/ecology.

A big issue is cryptography, which makes today a huge amount of computation power. Therefore, one thing you can do (and what we can enable by default for our users) is choosing the right algorithms. E.g., some machines have hardware acceleration for the AES algorithm, which is the most efficient way of doing symmetric cryptography. However, some machines (mobile phones, raspberry, many tablets and other such devices) do not have AES acceleration (“AES-NI”), and without that, AES is extremely slow and needs a lot of power: therefore, if your device has no AES-NI, choose an algorithm like ChaCha12/20, which is even without hardware acceleration very fast and efficient (needing much less power than AES without AES-NI).

What can Fedora do in this respect?

E.g., we can make our installer determine automatically if your system has AES-NI or not, and then choose the corresponding most efficient algorithm for the disc encryption. I have already put this forward some weeks ago, and it is currently at the Blivet team for further investigation:

2077532 – Hardware without AES-NI: use xchacha12/Adiantum instead of AES-XTS

The focus is increasing battery time, but this obviously also implies less power consumption :wink: So, maybe this will become default in future Fedora versions :slight_smile:

The foundation of my report is Adiantum, which was developed by Google, one related article is: Adiantum: encryption for the low end [LWN.net]

In future, we could go some steps further and ensure such automatic, efficient determination of ciphers also on higher level encryption (e.g., web browser-based encryption). The standards (e.g., TLS 1.3) already support preferences in choosing ciphers for the session. Partly the “negotiation” between server and client about ciphers, which takes place before the encrypted connection can be established, is already determining the cipher based upon the availability of AES-NI. This can be server sided but also client sided. However, that is not yet taking place everywhere we could implement it. We could push this with the goal that AES-NI availability it is considered in all TLS connection negotiations.

Think of how many machines are using the Internet (in an encrypted way) every day (e.g., Wikipedia) :slight_smile: A lot of power can be saved by increasing efficiency, such that of crypto.

Another opportunity is adjusting documentation to help users to also ensure appropriate offline crypto use. We just tackled such an issue at the Borg BackUp documentation:

Changes in docs to facilitate appropriate crypto use · Issue #6666 · borgbackup/borg · GitHub

docs: authentication primitives: improved security and performance infos (master) by py0xc3 · Pull Request #6667 · borgbackup/borg · GitHub

https://github.com/borgbackup/borg/pull/6692

The issue with SHA256 (including HMAC-SHA256) and Blake2 is comparable to that of AES and ChaCha.

But this is not just about crypto algorithms:

Determine CPU architecture & choose appropriate algorithm for BTRFS partitions · Issue #1049 · storaged-project/blivet · GitHub

I stay tuned & remain ready to team up :slight_smile:

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I would say that the best way is to measure and display.

Starting with historical temperature comparison graphics on the live wallpaper. Showing how much oil left. Showing how soon endless growth will deplete the resources.

Might be that DEAL already developed some useful metrics that can be visualized on a daily dashboard.

image
image827×1170 151 KB

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That’s an awesome idea tbh! Creating live wallpapers or wallpapers of awareness would be a big deal bc so we are all in mind about our usage of ressources day by day.

Do u have further ideas on it? @abitrolly

v/r

Andi

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Hey @py0xc3

That’s really great what you have explained here about crypto and which important role it plays in saving ressources! :slight_smile:

I would be very happy if you would join the team bc it’s really important to have u on board:)

Stay tuned!

v/r

Andi