Posts by sw guy 86 publicly visible posts • joined 9 May 2018
In fact, every sensible OS takes care of clearing any page upon allocation to a process.
Otherwise, fighting against spectre and al. would be useless, because randomly reading old data from RAM by running a bunch of processes massively allocating stack and/or heap would be enough to get all sorts of /interesting/ informations.
Sorry for misunderstanding
From the post I answered to, I assumed you meant Sun participated in designing the chip(s).
Anyway, Sun was not alone to have a compiler and an OS port for Itanium (hint: company I worked for had, too). But CPU not able to reach announced performances, or too late, had a big influence to bad reception by potential customer. Plus price. Plus abysmal performance on legacy binaries. Plus need to recompile when CPU version changed if you wanted maximum performance...
Trying to replace history by fantasy does not help Intel, you know.
Sun, as a competitor was not involved in Itanium.
Some others competitors believed the Itanium tide would sweep their own CPUs and gave up even before fight. In the end, they no longer had their own CPU, and not a good enough one as a replacement.
BTW, amongst these competitors, there was Alpha, whose demise was a big boost for AMD as some design team went there after there boot was sunk by management.
Running a PC is not the sole purpose CPUs, you know it.
I have participated in setting specifications of several SoC with various CPUs on they, and then writing firmware while other engineers actually created the chip. In every case, the development platform was a x86 PC either on Windows or Linux.
You know, there is low power and low power.
Or, so-called low-power and really low power.
Thus, it all depends what kind of energy source is available the thing (as in IoT).
If juice come from a battery nobody will change during the life span of captor, you need really low power (for which Sigfox is not the only existing option, but it is one, while LTE is not then).
You are lucky if your user have no idea.
For what I saw, there are indeed such users. But among others, one can find:
- Those who assume it is magic ("Oh, you need time to think before acting ?")
- Those who believe they know. <= ALERT Call for troubles
Note this is not specific to computer science, BTW
Maybe you just gave hints to secret plan at Samsung:
1. Have developers assume plenty-full RAM is available on phones
2. People start complaining other phone vendors are too slow
Either 3A More Samsung phones sold
Or 3B Phone vendor buy lots of (Samsung) RAM
In both cases: 3. Win!
;-)
Under my understanding, updates of Linux *kernel* made for Android (mostly in the IPC area) are now available in mainstream kernel. Anyway, sources already were available because GPL applies.
Even important part of Android user-level stuff is available as sources, hence AOSP
(I once compiled an AOSP, possibly augmented with hardware-specific drivers and was able to flash some Samsung phone and give a call).
Not that important chunks of Android stay beside closed doors, though, and more and more chunks, BTW: the (in)famous Google apps are just that: Google. And I reckon one of them is the PlayStore. But we are far from *kernel* there
When at work, using workstation set by IT team, I have a user-name and a home-directory, but no grep command on well known files will be able to link both, because IT team knows its job. Thus, while I remember that yellow pages were invented years ago, I do not even bother to know whether it is still in use or something newer is in use.
Of course, when network is not reachable, I cannot connect. But it does not matter as I cannot work either.
I may add some details regarding ttys:
As physical CR takes some times, some (most?) of them needed some padding characters to be inserted in flow to create a delay (usual padding character was NULL, ASCII 0).
As soon OS decides to take action of padding insertion for itself (with description set somewhere in a printer database), there was no longer a need for end-of-line sequence to be more than one "well-known" character.
Here you are.
Usual confusion regarding Android world: OS upgrades and security updates are decorrelated.
I still get the latter for my current, old, androphone, with Android 5, which, BTW, never encountered an application failing to install due to too old system version (though this may be because, for instance, so called social networks are not my things, except WhatsApp).
You can safely say Android world has an issue with security updates, but it all depends on vendors policy for that matter.
I did not remember the multiple entry in a subroutine, by I remember there was a feature allowing multiple return points *outside* subroutine:
- Define a parameter as a label using ad'hoc syntax
- Use a variant of return to say combine return + goto Nth label within parameter list
Linux code copied from Windows ?
Non-GPL copied from Linux code ?
I wonder which one is the less probable.
However, OS developers sharing a common way of thinking, and reading the same (obfuscated) manual, this is something already seen elsewhere.
In the past, an experiment was done by providing the same high level specification of a radar system to several teams, and they made comparable errors in same areas, that is where specifications where not clear enough.
For people talking of CR/LF sequence on a TTY, just take note that even that sequence may need transformation for actual device working properly. In fact, physical carriage return takes time, and it happen this is not managed internally by device, forcing driver to create a delay with a limited count of NUL characters.
And as soon as a driver has to inspect and slightly transform characters stream, there is no longer need for EOL character to be tied to TTY.
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