Posts by chasil 243 publicly visible posts • joined 18 Jul 2014
Really, why reinvent the wheel? This is a solved problem.
$ ll /usr/bin/nano
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 159232 Jun 6 2007 /usr/bin/nano
$ file /usr/bin/nano
/usr/bin/nano: ELF 32-bit LSB executable, Intel 80386, version 1 (SYSV), for GNU/Linux 2.6.9, dynamically linked (uses shared libs), stripped
I am typing on a Model M now, part number 1391401, dated 22JUL88. I found this particular Model M underneath a floor tile in our datacenter in the early 2000s. I have two more at home, a bit newer.
There is a clear tactile feel of certainty when you have successfully pressed a key on these IBM designs (and I've used the Datamaster, original PC, the AT, and the PS/2 Model M), where there is tactile ambiguity on common modern membrane keyboards.
I have no problem using my laptop keyboard, but I make more mistakes on it than when it's docked and my Model M is powered up.
Model M keyboards do have some problems, the most common being the loss of plastic rivets that will cause the keys to stick.
https://www.instructables.com/IBM-Model-M-Disassembly-and-Repair/
The parent article briefly mentions the Bliss launcher, but it has more severe problems than is reported.
It does not appear to allow widgets on the home screen; these are confined to a separate widget area.
It does not allow shortcuts to apps, so dragging an incognito Chrome shortcut to the home screen does not appear to be possible.
For these reasons, most users should immediately replace Bliss on /e/os.
I chose Lawnchair 14: https://lawnchair.app/
"While Microsoft is very committed to SQL Server continuing, it's also clear that they are very serious about support for Postgres."
Microsoft also makes extensive use of SQLite.
"Microsoft uses SQLite as a core component of Windows 10, and in other products."
https://www.sqlite.org/famous.html
One of my users has started using the VS Code variant of Oracle SQL Developer. I believe this is Electron JavaScript.
I'm assuming that it has fewer aesthetic challenges than the Java version (which my ex-Toad users despise).
https://www.oracle.com/database/sqldeveloper/
Perhaps bcachefs would be better placed in a different kernel, say NetBSD or Illumos.
Linux has a particularly fragmented filesystem landscape, which is mostly Oracle's fault, but perhaps some is the community itself.
Demoting Linux to the status of a second class citizen would mirror ZFS, and is perhaps the right step.
RHEL aliases rm with a warning as rm -v. It is best to pay careful attention to those prompts.
In this particular case, a cleaning script should have been used which included:
[ -n "$QATOOLS" ] && rm -rf $QATOOLS/bin $QATOOLS/etc $QATOOLS/incl $QATOOLS/var
On many Linux distributions, the "ReaR" application can be used to make a bootable restore USB that will format and rebuild a lost system. Very handy (and surprisingly written entirely in the bash shell).
I can confirm, Chrome was forcibly uninstalled from my corporate laptop when Edge was pushed.
It is interesting how Microsoft embraced, extended, and is now working to extinguish Chrome on Windows (with enthusiasm!). Old habits die hard.
I actually use LineageOS on my main (Google) Android phone, and I don't have Chrome there either (I use Brave, which has some problems).
I guess that I'm the rare user that Chrome really doesn't touch anymore.
Oracle has much greater control over SPARC than Ampere has over ARM, so likely not.
Fujitsu has already replaced their SPARC implementation with ARM A64FX (as used in the Fugaku, which was the highest-performance supercomputer for a time). Oracle has no control over A64FX.
I have read elsewhere that 28nm is the last realm of "planar transistors," and the smaller nodes just implement the FINs (of FINFET) on top of (essentially) this node.
I've also read that planar transistors are more reliable than FINFET (or GAA), and they are obviously more able to dissipate heat into the substrate.
For automobile electronics, where the temperature will be high, FINFET sounds like a bad idea.
My Dell R710 server is running an X5675, released Q1'11. RHEL9 applies a microcode update:
# dmesg | head -1
[ 0.000000] microcode: microcode updated early to revision 0x1f, date = 2018-05-08
The spectre-meltdown-checker.sh script reports:
CPU microcode is the latest known available version: YES
(latest version is 0x1f dated 2018/05/08 according to builtin firmwares DB v296+i20240514+988c)
It seems as if Intel is more indulgent with these updates than is AMD.
An alternative to the UEK is the El Repo Mainline, currently offering Linux kernel version 6.9.8 for RHEL-compatible v8 and v9 platforms.
The ML kernel is "a kernel of last resort" for hardware problems and driver development. It will never, ever become a production kernel for the release in question.
At several points in the past, btrfs support was better in ML than the UEK. The bcachefs filesystem itself is better than btrfs, and ML will likely be the first place to get it on RHEL.
https://elrepo.org/wiki/doku.php?id=kernel-ml
Microsoft has already thought of this question. Pick one of these. Confirm it on your own Windows host, if you want.
C:\Temp>wsl.exe -l -o
The following is a list of valid distributions that can be installed.
The default distribution is denoted by '*'.
Install using 'wsl --install -d <Distro>'.
NAME FRIENDLY NAME
* Ubuntu Ubuntu
Debian Debian GNU/Linux
kali-linux Kali Linux Rolling
Ubuntu-18.04 Ubuntu 18.04 LTS
Ubuntu-20.04 Ubuntu 20.04 LTS
Ubuntu-22.04 Ubuntu 22.04 LTS
Ubuntu-24.04 Ubuntu 24.04 LTS
OracleLinux_7_9 Oracle Linux 7.9
OracleLinux_8_7 Oracle Linux 8.7
OracleLinux_9_1 Oracle Linux 9.1
openSUSE-Leap-15.5 openSUSE Leap 15.5
SUSE-Linux-Enterprise-Server-15-SP4 SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 15 SP4
SUSE-Linux-Enterprise-15-SP5 SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 SP5
openSUSE-Tumbleweed openSUSE Tumbleweed
RHEL 9, and its variants, are supported until March of 2021. This doesn't quite get us to the 50th anniversary.
I understand that RHEL 9 will quietly install Wayland on compatible hardware, but that didn't happen on my old box.
$ pps X
PID TTY STAT TIME COMMAND
2069 tty1 Sl+ 0:03 /usr/libexec/Xorg vt1 -displayfd 3 -auth /run/user/42/gdm/Xauthority -nolisten tcp -background none -noreset -keeptty -novtswitch -verbose 3
$ cat /etc/oracle-release /etc/redhat-release
Oracle Linux Server release 9.4
Red Hat Enterprise Linux release 9.4 (Plow)
$ dmesg | grep DMI:
[ 0.000000] DMI: Dell Inc. PowerEdge R710/00NH4P, BIOS 6.3.0 09/20/2012
Oracle does a lot for specific open-source projects, that are of great benefit to the industry as a whole. Yes, there are a lot of people who have negative experiences with Oracle as a company, but that doesn't diminish the good that is done.
Oracle employs an XFS maintainer. People use XFS because it's fast, and Oracle's improvements have addressed problems and are bringing extensive new functionality. As a rising tide lifts all ships, a rising filesystem lifts all databases.
https://blogs.oracle.com/authors/darrick-wong
Oracle really holds the Linux filesystem landscape in its hands, via their influence on XFS, btrfs, and ZFS. I don't agree on their direction with this (and a lot of people have a problem with it), but IBM certainly didn't do this.
"Chris Mason, an engineer working on ReiserFS for SUSE at the time, joined Oracle later that year and began work on a new file system based on these B-trees."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Btrfs
Oracle has done a lot with NFS over ONC RPC, one result being RFC-9289.
https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc9289.txt
In summary, there is a lot going on with Oracle contributions (and their lack). It's not as simple as some might assert.
Why the heck does North Carolina supply the purest quartz in the world, from which high-purity silicon ingots can be drawn?
Why the heck did Ukraine previously supply half of the world's neon gas, a critical resource for semiconductor manufacturing?
It takes a globe to make a 5nm chip.
The industry has grown familiar with RHEL-compatible LTS kernels, the source of which is now controlled by IBM, who would very much like to monetize it more strongly.
The question is if CIQ/SUSE/Oracle (as members of OpenELA) are willing to provide an alternative.
Oracle already distributes their own custom kernel (the UEK), but it does not occupy the same niche and it has a much smaller development team.
With the proviso "Expect no new version/functionality upgrades, only critical and security related fixes," Oracle will provide another six months of critical RPMs.
https://www.oracle.com/a/ocom/docs/elsp-lifetime-069338.pdf
Oracle's UEK has much of the the hardware support that is removed from RHEL kernels, plus btrfs.
Login required for this link:
https://community.oracle.com/mosc/discussion/4546696/announcement-oracle-linux-7-premier-support-extended-from-jul-2024-to-dec-2024
I have Oracle Linux 9 installed on a Dell PowerEdge R710.
The SAS controller on this machine was explicitly removed by RedHat.
And because I can run OL9 on my older machine, I run it on my newer machines, too.
An extensively-tested kernel that will not run on my hardware does me little good.
I have a Oneplus 5, and only T-Mobile will allow it on their network (AT&T needs the final Oneplus 6 model, even though this supports VoLTE).
I was already running Lineage on it, but I wiped back to stock because I needed a phone for Cisco Duo (remote access . So I ran on Android 10 for 3 years or so until Duo ended support for this OS release. I mailed the corporate security people about putting Lineage back on with MindTheGapps Google support, and they said that they did not explicitly forbid it, so I brought it back to Lineage's release, currently on Android 14 after the upgrade this month.
Suprisingly, even Wells Fargo's app runs.
Many Android people say an unlocked bootloader is an insecure phone because it is vulnerable to the "evil maid" attack. However, an OEM-abandoned phone running the latest LineageOS release will have updated network security patches that might be more valuable in trade. Note that any firmware vulnerabilities with your WiFi, Bluetooth, LTE/5g modem might present an attack surface that cannot be patched, but a 3rd-party ROM allows you to keep at least *some* of the device up to date.
The Pixel is an even better device, so by all means try a custom ROM.
My mother needed a new device, so I got her a used iPhone XS off eBay for $180 or so for Christmas.
It was in reasonable shape, but one of the "Finish setting up your iPhone" items was "unsupported(/non-Apple) battery."
For some reason, Apple thinks I should care.
I really don't care, since I don't buy Apple products. I don't know if she cares either.
On the other hand, if you have purchased an older Android phone with an unlocked bootloader and a large enthusiast community, you can choose from a number of updated 3rd-party ROMS that offer many features that you simply cannot obtain on any stock rom.
You will have the ability to remove Google almost entirely from your device. An enthusiast ROM will not bring OEM bloatware, which will make your device more responsive. You can add the ability to run apps with the UNIX root user (uid zero). The Magisk rooting tool enables a large library of extensions for customization. One extension will prevent your battery from charging above 80%, which will vastly extend its life. Another extension will enable you to change the custom font.
OEMs can see all of this activity, and they commonly make decisions that this functionality should not be available to their user community.
Don't buy phones from those OEMs.
RedHat aggressively removes kernel code for hardware that they (somewhat arbitrarily) have decided that they will not support.
There are a few kernels that return this support, including ElRepo Mainline and the Oracle Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel.
It is also possible to load Fedora's kernel into RHEL, but that does have a larger blast radius.
With the proviso "Expect no new version/functionality upgrades, only critical and security related fixes," Oracle will provide another six months of critical RPMs.
https://www.oracle.com/a/ocom/docs/elsp-lifetime-069338.pdf
Adapting this might be as simple as adding additional yum repositories.
Login required for this link:
https://community.oracle.com/mosc/discussion/4546696/announcement-oracle-linux-7-premier-support-extended-from-jul-2024-to-dec-2024
I found this interview to be quite interesting.
https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/2022/07/102792671-05-01-acc.pdf
'We use a three generation older technologies and it worked very well... That was the first generation. Xilinx worked with TSMC on CoWoS. Their codename was CoWoS. It’s a funny name for TSMC’s silicon interposer. That was a first-generation advanced package technology.
'Qualcomm was our biggest customer... I talked to one of their VP. I talked to them many, many times, until one time, I had dinner with one of their VP, and he just very casually told me, he said, you know, “If you want to sell that to me, I would only pay one cent per millimeter square.” One cent per millimeter square. He said, “That’s the only cost I will pay for it.” I said, “How come you didn't tell me earlier?” He said, “You should know that. Why I should tell you? You should know that.” But, I didn’t know that.
"I said, “Please go to figure out how much that CoWoS costs us.” Seven cents per millimeter square. So that's why we couldn't sell it. I said, “Let’s develop something that costs one cent, and you can relax the performance, and you sacrifice performance.” Our second generation called InFO meet that criteria and it was sell like a hotcake. So that one word saved my life and the InFO was why Apple was hooked by TSMC. Earlier, why TSMC couldn't get Apple business, early stage, because Samsung offer them a package solution by wire bond DRAM on top of CPU, on top of the AP, and TSMC couldn’t do that.'
Microsoft should be forbidden from ever removing a previous UI that they have introduced for the good of the product.
Witness the nostalgia of a Windows 7 theme for KDE:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38711003
The reason that Aero was removed was because it was not efficient phones and tablets, so Microsoft resorted to insulting it by calling it "cheesy" as an excuse for Windows 8:
https://advyon.com/microsoft-saying-goodbye-to-aero-in-windows-8/
If every previous Windows UI is "dated and cheesy," then there is no reason to grow attached to the current incarnation.
If they are all slated to die, then the faster, the better.
I have heard elsewhere that SuSE maintains its own set of custom backport patches for btrfs, since it is used as the root fileystem within their main distribution.
Oracle at one point actually distributed tools that would format btrfs with advanced hashes (sha256, xxhash, etc.), but their UEK didn't have the driver support for anything but crc32c - I don't think SuSE would have shipped anything so disjoint.
I'm assuming that Rocky doesn't really bring anything to the table from this perspective - they just rpm-rebuild whatever RedHat shipped. If Oracle and SuSE pooled their efforts, then I think the result would offer great advantages over stock rhel.
In the 90s, IBM/DEC/HP used POSIX to seize control of UNIX from AT&T and Sun. OpenELA would be able to do the same to IBM, if the advantages were compelling.
I actually used RedHat for many years, starting with the original RedHat 4.2. My company forced me onto Oracle Linux around 2009, and I haven't seen any need to go back.
I do find the rhel license changes disturbing, but this is an opportunity for OpenELA to make a better rhel than IBM can. The rhel kernel is highly objectionable.
I'm removing one of your downvotes.
I am hoping that OpenELA releases a common kernel that takes the best from all the members.
It would include btrfs, io_uring (for rhel8 variants), all the hardware support that rhel kernels strip, and probably more features that RedHat would otherwise frown upon.
Alma's adoption of such a kernel would be a major blow.
This "pretty insignificant" competitive threat held the position as the top supercomputer in the Fujitsu design, and dominates mobile. The majority of this is fabbed at TSMC, who also dominates Intel.
ARM1 was 25,000 transistors, while the 80386 was 290,000 for a lesser-quality machine.
Does this guy need new glasses?
Many, many people have Android phones and tablets that completely suffice for app collections and computing needs.
Many others have iPhones and iPads in the same situation.
Microsoft has only one consumer environment - the desktop PC. An ocean has rolled both over and under that, which is why the old animosity is gone.
In this case, "personalities" does not refer to the plethora of Linux distributions, but instead to the NT kernel API interfaces.
NT was originally written as a foreign kernel (reimplementing VMS in C), meant to assume Win16/32, OS/2, and POSIX "personalities."
'Broad software compatibility was initially achieved with support for several API "personalities", including Windows API, POSIX, and OS/2 APIs – the latter two were phased out starting with Windows XP. Partial MS-DOS and Windows 16-bit compatibility is achieved on IA-32 via an integrated DOS Virtual Machine – although this feature is not available on other architectures.'
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_NT
I understand that PostgreSQL will run better under Linux emulation because fork() is faster than the native Windows equivalent. I wonder how that was implemented under the "LXSS" service mentioned in the parent article, as opposed to directly interfacing with the NT kernel as the POSIX system did.
Assuming a stable system call interface, (modern) NT is able to run many Linux distributions. My Windows 10 PC at work tells me that the following are available:
C:\>wsl.exe -l -o
The following is a list of valid distributions that can be installed.
The default distribution is denoted by '*'.
Install using 'wsl --install -d <Distro>'.
NAME FRIENDLY NAME
* Ubuntu Ubuntu
Debian Debian GNU/Linux
kali-linux Kali Linux Rolling
Ubuntu-18.04 Ubuntu 18.04 LTS
Ubuntu-20.04 Ubuntu 20.04 LTS
Ubuntu-22.04 Ubuntu 22.04 LTS
OracleLinux_7_9 Oracle Linux 7.9
OracleLinux_8_7 Oracle Linux 8.7
OracleLinux_9_1 Oracle Linux 9.1
openSUSE-Leap-15.5 openSUSE Leap 15.5
SUSE-Linux-Enterprise-Server-15-SP4 SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 15 SP4
SUSE-Linux-Enterprise-15-SP5 SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 SP5
openSUSE-Tumbleweed openSUSE Tumbleweed
SMIC has actually been able to manufacture a 7nm process node for over a year, but it uses deep ultraviolet (DUV) and the yields are low.
Extreme ultraviolet (EUV) is achieved by vaporizing molten tin with a laser in the latest equipment from ASML. This technology remains unavailable.
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