this post was submitted on 07 Jun 2024
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Change Proposal

Short: fwupd users download small but in total too much metadata over the internet. This is a beginning of something important, and the tech can be used for local updates and a lot more.

A solution for local distribution is needed. IPFS is too slow, Bittorrent is immediately suspicious on many Networks.

Passim is a new protocol for this purpose, users can opt out, it is secure and the metadata is hashed, and the hashes still downloaded over the internet for verification.

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[–] boredsquirrel 2 points 4 months ago (1 children)
  1. The energy consumption is changed from big providers to individual company networks etc. And assuming the tech uses roughly similar energy, not needing all the relay servers saves power.
  2. A running CDN server ≠ a server doing stuff, sending data
  3. if p2p says there is no update, there is no update. Unless I didnt see that he mentioned something like that as a fallback, ALL the time. There are 2 connections but the data is sent locally when possible.

There is lots of tech innovation, ARM, low TDP, etc. But I stick with the assumption that local data traffic saves more energy.

[–] jwt@programming.dev 1 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Number 2 is exactly where my hesitancy lies. Is a CDN still chugging along - not serving stuff to a select user group that has passim enabled is actually finding the fw - saving enough energy for it to cancel out a whole p2p network. I don't think so (and again, I'd need some metrics before I will. you can't just waive that away with 'local == fast&less steps == obvious; don't need statistics)

As for number 3: p2p can only say if there are peers. if there are no peers, there still can be an update (what about the first person to download the firmware for example). It would be a security risk for the system to not give you updates if there are no peers, so I highly doubt that's the case.

[–] boredsquirrel 0 points 4 months ago

To 3 I suppose one would disable p2p download and only enable seeding/sending the stuff