Posts by Proton_badger

Strap in, get ready for more Rust drivers in Linux kernel

Re: It's like very pedantic C

Yeah, it should be manageable. Changes to interfaces mean people need to be able to communicate and collaborate, which is already the case without Rust.

Aside: In Microsoft they now work with Rust in everything from the NT kernel, to Windows middleware libraries and for new stuff over in Azure. They did a survey and the general consensus was that Rust was considered annoying for the first few months but at some point it "clicked" and the devs began really enjoying it and writing code that compiled easily and they then spent much less time debugging because a whole class of issues were not there.

It's interesting because this is a real world large scale use case. Google had similar experiences, a survey given to 1000 of their Rust developers in 2023 showed that most felt confident within 1-2 months. Google also found, like you, that it was easy to review the code.

We call this kernel saunters: How Apple rearranged its XNU core with exclaves

That’s actually very cool. Sure, it’s for business/marketing reasons, their current angle is security, but they spend a lot of effort on hardening the OS, including things the average consumer will never understand making it difficult brag about.

GNOME 48 beta is another nail in X11's coffin

GNOME works fine for me when I try it, I'm flexible with UI's after all these years of using many things (started with TWM and FVWM) but overall I've always preferred the flexibility of KDE.

These days I'm using COSMIC though, it's a nice middle ground, providing a decent amount of customizeability. Also writing apps with libcosmic is a delight, with the ELM model.

Mixing Rust and C in Linux likened to cancer by kernel maintainer

Re: Language wars so last century...

> I am encouraged by Rust specific projects like RedoxOS putting early runs on the board. As they say nothing succeeds like success.

Indeed. The AGx Linux graphics driver is a resounding success. It's a big driver with complex thread and memory management but was written in record time and has never had any memory errors in production, this is unprecedented in several ways. It is Vulkan 1.3 conformant.

If nothing else it has proven beyond any doubt that not only are Rust drivers viable, they bring good things to the table.

Is Rust hard to understand/read? I don't know, I've C++ for decades and I find Rust prettier than modern C++, though more syntax and concepts to learn than C. But no matter the language, kernel development is hard, a benefit of Rust could also be that with the compiler doing more the developers has fewer balls to keep in the air. I certainly enjoy it, I've spent too much of my career hunting obscure memory issues in people's code.

Re: Not magical thinking

unsafe doesn’t turn off the borrow checker: if you use a reference in unsafe code, it will still be checked. The unsafe keyword only gives you access to these five features that are then not checked by the compiler for memory safety:

* Dereference a raw pointer

* Call an unsafe function or method

* Access or modify a mutable static variable

* Implement an unsafe trait

* Access fields of a union

You’ll still get some degree of safety inside of an unsafe block.

Fedora Asahi Remix 41 for Apple Macs is out

Re: Locked out

The ram is soldered onto the same package as the SoC, or rather on top of it. Given that electrical signal travels at between 15 to 30 cm in 1ns the close proximity to the SoC is not all that important for performance, it might help slightly lower the power usage though. Methinks it's mainly to get a compact design that's convenient across their product line.

Apple is rumored to be investigating moving the RAM off the package to the motherboard as it may allow for more signal lines and thus higher bandwidth. That's just rumors though.

Re: Mmmmmm

The team says M3 and M4 is twinned like M1 and M2 was, so the major work being a driver for the updated GPU will benefit both.

Jury trial kicks off Arm's wrestling match with Qualcomm

Popcorn

It's fun watching this spat, doubly so because QC has always been very predatory itself and now they're just tasting their own medicine from a partner. They completely fail to see this ofcourse, they probably feel very righteous.

I don't really care who's right, just enjoying the show.

Intel execs discuss the possibility of spinning off foundry

When giants starts fully spinning off divisions like that it's often sign of a death spiral. AMD survived the days when they had to spin off GloFo though.

Arch Linux installer now slightly less masochistic

Re: Dumbing down

Arch install have had various problems and bugs in the past, and its track record for reliability is certainly not better than some of the better GUI installers. The problem is often the scripts/tools running in the background and interfacing with them, the rest is just pixels, whether text based or more graphically appealing.

After almost 30 years of Linux, while there's always stuff to learn I do consider myself fairly confident but still prefer a nice GUI installer, nothing wrong in making the experience pleasant and information is often presented better IMHO. While a text based installer can be a useful option to have, any Desktop distro would be well served by defaulting to GUI.

Anyway, whenever someone use the words "dumbing down" a little "elitism alarm" goes off in my head, something for which I harbour a certain disdain.

Airbus A380 flew for 300 hours with metre-long tool left inside engine

Re: Multi-Fail

10mm sockets don't count, they behave in undeterministic ways, like quantum particles that spontaneously appear and disappear. If you listen very carefully in the darkness of night in your garage you can sometimes hear 10mm sockets pop in or out of existence in random places.

Qualcomm's Windows on Arm push would be great – if only it ran all your software

Re: Microsoft remains its own worst enemy

Apple have transitioned three times and they're very good at getting all the software right for a new architecture. I remember replacing my G5 iMac with a 1st gen Intel Core2Duo MacBook Pro and having no issues. I wouldn't underestimate the value of that. The software side of it is very complex and they know how to make a slick transition. But it's also much more important for Apple to make it happen as quickly and completely as possible, whereas Microsoft aren't as motivated. For Microsoft ARM is a small niche, for Apple it's their entire platform.

To kill memory safety bugs in C code, try the TrapC fork

Re: I've taken out union and some other things that I rarely use

> RUST is not gaining popularity with the C & C++ devs because it requires some effort to learn and even bigger effort to then translate C code to RUST.

I don't know, most Rust devs I know have decades of C and/or C++ under their belt. It's a minority that are loudly sceptical, most enjoy the vastly reduced attack surface of memory issues But this is anecdotal, I'm not sure any real stats on this exists. Ofcourse from a businesses perspective, if a large code base is based on C or C++ they will be reluctant to change due to the cost. Though some places I know keep their C code, maybe rewrite indentified risky core libraries (e.g. Microsoft and Google take this approach), and write select new code in Rust because Rust’s FFI is based on the C Application Binary Interface so it's trivial to mix.

I've got some 25 years and I'm fed up with hunting these bugs as well as the increasingly messy look of C++, I enjoy Rust.

The US government wants developers to stop using C and C++

Re: Why?

Bah, you'll see that for any language/library/etc. People are people and there are some like that but there are also lots of friendly devs who do their best to help.

Arm reportedly warns Qualcomm it will cancel its licenses

Yeah, ARM is doing to QC what QC is famous for doing with their modems. Pressuring them to an expensive settlement or else..

Re: I can guess where this is leading

The RISC-V RVA profile standardizes the set of ISA extensions for general-purpose cores. For example, RVA23 mandates the RISC-V vector extension and the hypervisor extension. In this way it's similar to Aarch64 versions (the latest being ARMv9.6-A) which also has mandatory ISA's for general-purpose cores and optional extensions. I'd say ARM is working hard on becoming almost as huge and complex as AMD64, it's inevitable.

Three and Vodafone: We need to merge because our networks are rubbish

Re: But that's my point

Supposedly it'll improve the overall situation/coverage where one but not the other is present (or poorly present), but obviously it can't suddenly give 100% coverage everywhere.

Whether they're actually going to increase spending to better cover places where neither have good service today, or they'll enjoy it as a cost-cutting exercise will be interest to see.

Torvalds weighs in on 'nasty' Rust vs C for Linux debate

People tends to get tribal about everything frome editors to favourite/hated cell phone brand (not seeing how most for-profit companies are similar), it's pathetic.

I learned long ago to use both vi and emacs, they're just tools, sometimes I use what's available, sometimes my employer required I use a specific IDE/tooling. I've done C and C++ for decades and now enjoy Rust, it has revived a joy of creating and programming I thought I had lost and it shows that even old dogs can learn new tricks. I take pride in being flexible and giving new ideas a chance.

As for the Linux kernel, the Rust people have stated many times that if anyone needs to make changes to interfaces impacting Rust bits they're happy to be involved and help everywhere they can. And the AGx driver have shown the benefits and suitability of Rust for modules in spectacular fashion - how often does anyone write a huge complex driver in record time that has NO memory faults in prodution for thousands of users..

Pop!_OS 24.04 and new COSMIC desktop reach alpha

System76 have a decent number of support articles.

Yeah, you're right; disable Dock, move Panel to bottom, add app tray/minimized icons to panel, perhaps make it a bit bigger.

Re: Using it

Nice, mine is an Asus also. There's a bug open on their github for the battery limit as it isn't always persisted over boots.

If you play around with COSMIC my applet might be useful to you.

Using it

I had some time last month before my kid went back to school, so I installed it on my laptop. I also installed gnome-session so I can switch DE in case COSMIC had trouble. But due to fixes trickeling in I am now using COSMIC DE full time. To try it out I threw together applet for the panel, the Elm UI model is very pleasant to work with and the COSMIC/Iced API is a lot prettier than Gtk.

They also do nice extra stuff like the custom system76-scheduler which handles power management and process priorities for the desktop. My laptop behaves very well with it both for work and gaming.

They still have a long list of things to implement on the Alpha 2 to-do list though.

Crypto scams rake in $5.6B a year for cyberscum lowlifes, FBI says

Age groups

I was looking it up because people always says "It's the old people that get scammed" and I realized noone have numbers to back it but just assume. I also remember a friend telling me she came home to her millennial son looking for the credit card to pay the Microsoft representative on the phone for cleaning his PC - she managed to terminate the call in time.

According to Experian: "Although 35- to 44-year-olds were most likely to lose money from a scam overall, people in different age groups may be more likely to fall for different types of scams. For example, it was found that investment or cryptocurrency scams are the riskiest for people who are 45 and older. But employment scams were the riskiest for 18- to 44-year-olds."

So it's not just old people, there are several vulnerable age groups. I think it's not always about age but about tech literacy. A lot of people really have a lot of other things and concerns in life than "computer stuff" and can be caught unawares.

But old people tend to lose the most.

Google says replacing C/C++ in firmware with Rust is easy

Re: Embedded? Don't think so

They’re not proposing rewriting code where there’s no benefit. Both Microsoft and Google are specifically rewriting OS components where there has been a lot of security vulnerabilities. As mentioned in the article.

Re: Let's look at the guy's title

Yes, Rust is delightful, as a grey(or worse)beard I’ve spent too much time over the decades hunting memory issues triggered by rare race conditions, etc. in C and C++ code. “A few users report a crash, in this code that’s in 100.000 devices”, great…

Not only does it eliminate a whole category of errors that are very common and can be hard to find but as you say: once it compiles there’s much less time spent debugging, I have rediscovered a joy in programming and creating I thought I had lost with age.

Linux updates with an undo function? Some distros have that

Btrfs

I think a lot of people are propagating outdated information about Btrfs. When Btrfs is full it doesn't corrupt, it goes read-only. That includes if it's only the metadata that's full because it uses a two-stage chunk allocator. Distros using Btrfs always have a regularly scheduled btrfs balance to prevent metadata going full though. Synology NASs which use Btrfs also do automatic balancing.

Btrfs does detect data corruption due to for example HW issues, where some file systems doesn't detect the corruption. If it runs RAID1/10 it will repair the corrupt data, otherwise it will log the error. If metadata is corrupted it will go read-only.

To repair there are btrfs check, btrfs scrub and btrfs check --repair (worst case).

About RAID5/6 - these are implemented but not ready for use. A solution for the Raid5/6 issue is implemented and being tested so they might eventually stabilize these features.

Fresh programmer's editor on Linux lies Zed ahead

Re: Where are we?

I see it as different - your productivity is your own and at least for me it is about how I design and think about the code, less the editor. Maybe about what coffee I drink. However, it's always a boon to have good tools and while I spent a lot of time using Emacs and vim in terminals - these days I rather enjoy "GUI editors" and if using one of those GPU acceleration is always a given.

I always found Electron based editors to be pus covered bloated laggy whales, I for one am glad to see people finally returning to "old-fashioned" close to the machine C/C++/Rust based editors and applications in general that takes advantage of the available modern hardware, like Zed and Lapce (still pre-alpha). I'm looking forward to having more choice, with less bloat.

Devs claim Apple is banning VPNs in Russia 'more effectively' than Putin

Re: Doing Business

Yes, would be nice though it they allowed other apps or app stores to be sideloaded (no, not only like their restricted malicious compliance in the EU). Then it wouldn't be their fault when Russians installed VPNs. But that would set a precedence for their other markets.

A tale of two missions: Starliner and Starship both achieve milestones

Re: Boeing's software woes.

Well it was discovered during the Boeing max investigations that much of their software is outsourced to cheap contractors, Boeing just handed over work packages with some specifications. I'd assume the Starliner SW is in-house but obviously it's dangerous to make assumptions and even so - who knows how the in-house SW dev is managed. Does NASA mandate something about best practices, quality and testing?

Rust developers at Google are twice as productive as C++ teams

Re: How much of the improvement in the conversion to Rust is because it's a re-implementation

He addresses this, his statement is not just a quick shot off the hip he has put some though and analysis into it. For once it is also compared to rewrites in C++, the speech was quite interesting.

Fedora 41's GNOME to go Wayland-only, says goodbye to X.org

Re: Oh, have they finally finished it yet?

> "It will improve your performance. Next year. Or the year after that. Or maybe the year after that. If you have the right hardware. And the right desktop. On certain tasks with certain apps. Maybe. Depends on the alignment of the stars and the moon, and if Jupiter is in the 2nd house"."

Well Wayland's objective is not improved performance, it is to show perfect frames at the right time, some confused users might claim otherwise but that's on them. X developers were also fed up with maintaining all the cruft in X. For example very few apps apart from the much loved xbiff use X fonts and all those drawing primitives, most apps does their own direct drawing with their chosen toolkit. But the X code is still available if anyone cares to dig in and show us how easy it is and show the former X (now Wayland) developers a thing or two..

Anyway. yeah Wayland lacks a few things, for example they're still working on a protocol for windows placement and another for explicit sync with modern GFx cards. Design by committee is unfortunately often very very slow, it's unfortunate but one understands their worry of getting it wrong. The main mistake of Wayland was probably that the initial protocol was too minimal.

Dutch government in panic mode over keeping ASML in the country

Re: Hmm

I don't really think it's possible totally to avoid these kinds of situations. The country wants to avoid businesses just getting workers in at will (because business WILL abuse a carte blanche situation, every time), so citizens still have a chance of finding jobs. At the same time legislation meant to protect sometimes end up impacting legitimate concerns and things have to be reassessed. Running a country is very complex and we tend to forget this with our simple knee jerk reactions to things.

It's like how the word bureaucracy is almost a swear word, but without it nothing would work, at all. It's the cog-wheels that makes everything happen.

HDMI Forum 'blocks AMD open sourcing its 2.1 drivers'

Re: DisplayPort works

Let's not forget Betamax, which Sony only licensed out for absurdly high fees, while JVC gave away the VHS standard to everyone. It's wasn't porn that killed Betamax, it was Sony itself.

KDE Plasma 6.0 brings the same old charm and confusion

The article mostly presents KDE Plasma as a confounding complex mess but then Liam very frequently mentions he finds KDE confusing. I always found KDE to be simple and straightforward, maybe except for Settings but they're not too bad with a bit of poking around and I don't go there daily. I never even noticed those mentioned inconsistencies, I guess I don't pay attention or they don't matter much for me.

But then after decades of having to use so many operating systems, I feel comfortable with almost any GUI, I guess people have different temperaments and tolerances, and that's ok too.

Plasma 6 is very slick on Wayland though and I'm enjoying the experience. I'm following the work done on the Cosmic desktop with great interest and am considering contributing some code, but it'll probably be a while before the good people at System76 get it all together, though they're moving quickly I'm guessing the first release will be quite simple in terms of features.

Rice isn't nice for drying your iPhone, according to Apple

rice

The rice method originated as a joke, but because everybody were getting their smartphones wet it propagated as gospel, and then Lifehacker recommended it. It's worse than nothing because practically the rice absorbs nothing (unless you're planning on boiling it) but also there's no moving air...

I put wet stuff above a radiator, dry heat rising up is very effective. The phone is water resistant now though and I charge it on a Qi pad so those days are over.

Neuralink patient masters mind-mouse maneuvers – if Musk is to be believed

Re: masters mind-mouse maneuvers

Well, that's wouldn't be entirely surprising seeing that mice are in fact hyper-intelligent pan-dimensional creatures whose rodent aspect represents merely a three-dimensional projection of their actual form which is convenient for studying the behavior of humans and the ongoing operation of Deep Thought.

Forgetting the history of Unix is coding us into a corner

Re: Also...

Yes the UNIX philosophy is about write programs that do one thing and do it well and having programs that interface will with each other. It's about Modularity and Composition, the art of dividing a huge software into small parts, which are connected through clean interfaces.

Systemd is a number of separate modules, in separate processes, many of them optional, that interact through well defined interfaces, those of them that needs to interact. Others are simply managed as services doing their own thing. I would argue Systemd follows the UNIX philosophy. I understand some people don't like it (on this forum, nearly everyone) but there must be other and better arguments against it.

Moving to Windows 11 is so easy! You just need to buy a PC that supports it!

Re: Win2k was peak windows

> Although being forced to dump a perfectly functional and fast Ryzen 7 system because MS doesn't appreciate my lack of the right TPM chippery might nudge me to do so.

Ryzen 7 should be ok. My kid has a homebuilt Ryzen 5 3600 (without discrete TPM) with Win 11 and all I had to do was go into BIOS and Enable "AMD CPU fTPM". The best TPM is the CPU one anyway as it can't be "intercepted" on a defect motherboard like a recent exploit showed. You might want to make sure you're running latest BIOS update and AMD chipset drivers as there was a bug a year ago causing stutters with fTPM on and that's been fixed since.

Anyway as for myself I'm just a free Tumbleweed, playing BG3 with with Steam Flatpak. Because of Proton I haven't booted Windows for a year on my own PC (and at this point I'm afraid to).

Windows 11 24H2 is coming so we can all shut up about Windows 12 for another year

I'm just grateful to Valve for Proton. Because of it I have been able to ditch Windows for good and be free and unburdened like a Tumbleweed.

The Land Before Linux: Let's talk about the Unix desktops

Re: Flatpak and Disk Space

Yes the first Flatpak will get the whole base image, but subsequent packages will often depend on some of the same images and utilize deduplication through Ostree. Nvidia packages tend to take a lot of space though as they're "special".

If you mix native and Flatpak it'll still take up some extra space ofcourse, though less than you'd think because of the deduplication. If you use an immutable distro that mainly uses Flatpak the sum total is not too different.

I take a mixed approach on opensuse Tumbleweed but I'm fortunate to have enough space that I don't care. I just enjoy that I don't have to grant root access to install 3rd party apps and they're kept separate from my "OS filsystem". But it's not everyone's cup of tea and that's fine.

Could immutability be a Leap too far for openSUSE users?

Re: re: A read-only root file system makes the OS much more resilient against disk corruption,

Not too different from Suse installing into a new snapshot and making it default, which I think is rather simple and lovely.

Asahi Linux team issues promising update on efforts to conquer Apple Silicon

I've worked with extremely talented developers for decades, from the UK, US and all over the world. I specialized in operating systems and have tremendous respect for the people I've worked with. The skill and experience of Marcan and his team is very impressive. And they're submitting fixes all over the Linux ecosystem for Aarch64 and sometimes AMD64. Anyone who has a care for Linux should celebrate the work of these incredible engineers.

Arm cooking up powerful Cortex-X CPU to beat iPhone performance, says industry watcher

Re: M

> Don’t bother.

Well, it’s just about the phones. But why not make an Mx competitor? Everyone talks about vertical integration but actually Asahi Linux goes like the clappers on Apple Mx, even ARM Windows in a VM is nippy proving that Apple Mx chips are great general purpose chips and someone else could do the same. In fact Qualcomm/Nuvia are trying to do just that, though it’s obvious that the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite is originally a server chip hastily re-moulded for PCs but it’s a start. ARM do have cores trying to compete closer to this space but they’re not quite “there”.

Well, actually I’m dreaming about RISC-V on the desktop but if it happens it’ll take a bit longer. Companies like Qualcomm and AMD (yes, they’re looking at it again) are working on Aarch64 at this time..

Apple sets new 16,000-foot iPhone drop test after 737 fuselage fail

Nokia

My buddy stupidly dropped a Nokia 3110 out of his pocket while skydiving. Found it in many pieces in a field.

The Register's 2023 in gaming had one final boss: Baldur's Gate 3

Yes, not only is it very clearly a labor of love with so much stuff they didn't *have* to put in there but also they've released extra content that would normally be part of a paid DLC or a more pricey "definitive edition" later but we got it for free, now, as maintenance releases. And it's replayable, not only because it may just be the greatest game ever but also because there are so many paths one can take through the game.

Oh, and lets mention the music: Borislav Slavov is an absolute master and he can play our feelings like an instrument with his spectacular compositions.

Larian stands entirely above the industry at this point and I have nothing but love for them.

BG3 plays well on my laptop with proton. The two games I've been playing last year were BG3 and Valheim which is fun to play with friends.

Is it time for 6G already? Traffic analysis says yep

Re: Doh!

At least where I live 5G is being rolled out on 600MHz (in addition to higher bandwidth sub-6 frequencies), giving it better range, structure penetration and reliability than 4G - so fewer not-spots. 5G also have a number of technologies in the protocol making it more reliant and spectrum efficient. New shorter range higher frequencies will be for for more densely populated areas which makes sense anyway, the point of 5G is not really about the individual getting higher speeds but about more users per cell.

If it seems more flaky to you it'll be because of the gradual rollout where it has very few channels allocated to begin with whereas your local tower still have 3-4 channels on 4G, so better coverage but only for now.

Asahi's Fedora remix dazzles and baffles on Apple Silicon

I was never quite sure why people say KDE is complicated, I assume it's about the settings app which has a lot of stuff? Maybe it's subjective, I rarely need to change settings so perhaps that's why I don't mind. I hear they've tidied Settings a bit for KDE 6 but hopefully not removed too much.

In any case, the Asahi people have not made any commitments or predictions about the availability of M3, OGL 4.x, Vulkan or what will be in Fedora 40. That's entirely on the author.

Google Groups ditches links to Usenet, the OG social network

Re: USENET IS DEAD!

Google search have deteriorated though, their ranking system probably highly influenced by "commercial interests"...

The truth about Dropbox opening up your files to AI – and the loss of trust in tech

I've been enjoying my free 12GB Dropbox for a long time. Everything is accessed through Cryptomator except Joplin Notes which has its own encryption. It doesn't matter who the cloud provider is, one should always consider an extra client side encryption on top.

Microsoft floats bringing a text editor back to the CLI

Re: There are some options...

Oh Micro has a Win version? It's my default terminal editor on Linux, it's convenient and supports global copy/cut/paste with ctrl-c/x/v through wl-clipboard.

In any case, I think MS would probably prefer to make their own.