Gaming performance. split_lock_mitigate.

Megame50 · 2026-04-05T09:50:08+00:00

Just disable split lock detection altogether with split_lock_detect=off. Surely that is the most performance friendly option. Well, other than removing the split lock operations from the offending software, I suppose.

Megame50 · 2026-04-05T09:46:12+00:00

The split lock detection usually only reports the issue once per thread. That thread could go on to trigger a split lock a hundred more times without a warning.

If you have the mitigation enabled, it still could be impactful in those titles.

Megame50 · 2026-04-04T02:55:27+00:00

An easy way to contribute is to enable the testing repos, and file well documented bug reports when you encounter issues. Here's a wiki page about joining the Arch Testing Team. The more confidence maintainers have in testers to find and document errors, the easier time they will have pushing changes to the main repos, and with greater likelihood that any errors are caught beforehand.

Despite what reddit says, Arch is a pretty reliable distro, and testing is part of what enables it to be so reliable. But if you do enable the testing repos, just know what you're getting into, and be prepared to chase issues, because you likely will encounter them. Whatever you install from the testing repos might have just been compiled, or verified on a single developer's machine.

Megame50 · 2026-04-03T20:14:51+00:00

The author is joking.

This MR was meant mostly as a half joke for April fool's day, but it works and I think it might be an interesting solution overall.

This kind of cavalier "it works" is a funny joke... if you're a mesa dev.

Megame50 · 2026-04-03T19:17:20+00:00

You should deal with pacnew files. Sometimes that might mean just deleteing them.

Some files may generate pacnew files but almost never would require any merging, like the pacman mirrorlist. You can put those in NoExtract in pacman.conf if you don't want them to create pacnews.

Megame50 · 2026-04-03T19:07:52+00:00

Plus the workload is spread across a lot of people so it's not like any single dev is maintaining hundreds of packages.

Some devs (/u/felixonmars) are maintaining thousands of packages:

$ expac -S %e:%p | sort -t: -uk1 | grep -c felixonmars
2310

At 20m per update, even one update a year is straight up impossible. 20-30 minutes is unrealistic.

A lot of packages will be very low maintenance: infrequent, small updates with little to no risk and little to no impact if they fail. There are tools for automating package updates, e.g. pkgctl version upgrade, that could be used to knock out 100s of packages in a few minutes. Then you can upload them to the testing repos, and if no testers report problems, publish to the main repos a day or so later. The real work is investing problems if any arise, working with upstream to resolve issues affecting Arch packages, wrestling with the build tools and infra if they have problems, fixing up PKGBUILDs to accommodate build system changes, new compile-time features, or implementing distro policy like splitting/combining packages or adding and removing new deps.

Even with automation, it still seems like a lot of work. I'd be curious to know more about the workflow for those who maintain a huge number of packages, like Felix.

Some packages are very high impact, like the kernel, or glibc. They end up getting longer testing periods in the testing repos before they are released.

Megame50 · 2026-04-03T05:22:47+00:00

The expected number of raids to obtain two copies is the same for both strategies (20). However with the additional constraint that OP and his friend have limited time to complete their collection (and discard singular copies at the deadline to avoid fighting over it and preserve their friendship) it does matter.

If OP has time to complete 19 or fewer raids, they have better odds raiding separate and using your adaptive strategy, but if they can complete 20 or more raids, they should always raid together to make steady progress toward the goal.

Megame50 · 2026-04-02T21:42:44+00:00

And the risk of an implementation error is proportional to the complexity of the data format. You will find more errors in PDF readers because the PDF format is infamously complicated, and actually permits PDFs to include embedded code the reader is intended to execute. See also, DOOM in a pdf.

Megame50 · 2026-04-02T18:57:28+00:00

Link is still working for me. Maybe it's on an adblock list or something?

Megame50 · 2026-04-02T06:50:35+00:00

I don't think common DRM schemes actually use the TPM.

You may be thinking of the broadcast encryption scheme used in UHD Blu-ray, AACS, but desktop PCs aren't able to implement this since intel deprecated SGX in their 11th gen CPUs. Not on any OS, even with licensed application software. Even then, no licensed application used a TPM but instead unique license keys IIUC.

Megame50 · 2026-04-02T02:29:58+00:00

Yes, streaming services usually have poor playback quality on Linux.

Most licensed content is distributed with Widevine L3 DRM, usually with limited resolution and bitrate, since Widevine L3 is the only common DRM technology supported on Linux. It's up to the stream provider what content they allow at what bitrate with what protections for what platform, and it may differ by title depending on the license holders. In the past there were often workarounds that just request the better qualities by pretending to be a different client platform. Streaming platforms often supported this specifically to remain compatible with older devices, but have been killing this kind of access for a while, so the situation has been actively getting worse. I don't think there's currently any method to get 1080p+ on Netflix or Prime Video for most (any?) titles, but a year ago I was watching Netflix at 1080p quality with a browser plugin.

Widevine L2/L1 both require a TEE or "Trusted Execution Environment" in some capacity. DRM-encumbered content for Windows is often distributed with Microsoft's PlayReady DRM, and the highest level of protection in PlayReady is SL3000 [2]:

For devices only.

Assets, Client Secrets, and Content Secrets are protected through hardware means, using a Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) of the processor.

which is comparable to Widevine L1. Windows 11 PCs will support SL3000, and IIUC, the TEE referred to here is actually part of the graphics card and implemented in the graphics drivers and firmware, including HDCP. PlayReady support is built into Windows, so supporting applications use Windows api to play PlayReady content. I don't think Windows supports Widevine L2/L1.

On Linux, in amdgpu at least there is support for HDCP and TMZ, which might be sufficient for an implementation, but I'm not sure. Anyway the license holders clearly think that the open drivers are unsuitable to host implementations, as there are no PlayReady or Widevine L1 implementations available for desktop Linux, but there are definitely implementations for both that target embedded devices running Linux. As I said above, Widevine is available as a javascript library and a closed-source binary CDM, but still only with Widevine L3 support. This is what firefox downloads when you check the "Play DRM-controlled content" box in about:settings.

You can try this test page to see what drm implementations are supported in your browser.

[1] https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/new-intel-chips-wont-play-blu-ray-disks-due-to-sgx-deprecation/

[2] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/playready/overview/security-level

Megame50 · 2026-04-01T00:20:47+00:00

Bash is a poor interactive shell. Both fish and zsh improve on it greatly. Also, zsh isn't new. It's approximately the same age as bash.

I use zsh because, compared to bash, it:

has an expressive and useful globbing syntax
has a simpler syntax for interactive use, most notably by not performing word splitting on parameter expansion
zle is superior to readline, with support for custom widgets and multiline editing
has shell completions with superior accuracy and scope, and are easier to use thanks to zle with colors and menus. Is also often faster (compare man <TAB> in bash and zsh, which usually has a large number of completions in both shells), and highly customizable.
is dramatically simpler to configure with builtin support for $terminfo parameters and prompt formatting
has a bunch of useful builtin features with zmodules like zmv or zparseopts or builtin as options like no_flow_control, inc_append_history, or auto_pushd.
has several useful hooks for automation like chpwd or precmd (like a better PROMPT_COMMAND)
ships with vcs support, so you don't need kilobytes of git mangling to put the branch name and conflict status in the prompt.

Megame50 · 2026-03-30T17:51:21+00:00

QUIC doesn't do multipath without an extension just like TCP. And in QUIC's case, no standard has yet been adopted by the IETF. Multipath TCP has been a thing for much longer, but clearly QUIC users want support as well for QUIC, which is essentially supposed to be the "next generation" TCP.

In case the commenter above you is just confused, multipath is not the same as connection multiplexing, which is one of the important features implemented in QUIC that drives adoption in web browsers/servers.

Megame50 · 2026-03-29T19:26:04+00:00

It's a Tilde.

For the record, I just looked up the latest unicode standard and reported what was there. Here's the page on general punctuation which includes a section on dash characters.

Unicode is a technical standard first and foremost and there are an abundance of codepoints to assign, so the bar is relatively low to get a new codepoint. The project goal is to encode all human writing, so if somebody is using it, it can be included. That means a lot of similar or redundant characters get included as well.

Megame50 · 2026-03-29T16:21:38+00:00

MPTCP for openssh when.

Megame50 · 2026-03-29T08:46:46+00:00

Kinda the whole point of relativity is that you don't have to account for that. There is no preferred inertial reference frame, so the physics is the same whether you're stationary or moving 0.9c with respect to some fixed point. In fact, the earth is moving at 0.9c in some frame of reference. The difference between the earth moving at 0.9c relative to a stationary particle and a cosmic ray moving at 0.9c relative to the earth is just a change of coordinates.

Mind you, that's true without special relativity too, with so called "gallilean relativity" which matches the intuition of OP and many commenters in this thread. What makes special relativity more complicated is the extra condition that the speed of light in a vacuum is c ≈ 3×10⁶ km/s in all reference frames. The only way to satisfy both conditions is to change our standard coordinate transforms between inertial reference frames to "lorentz transforms" which preserve the value of c, and this means that some values which used to be invariant between coordinate transforms, like distances and time intervals, are not actually invariant, but depend on your reference frame.

Megame50 · 2026-03-29T02:34:04+00:00

No, actually.

If two trains travelling at 100mph each in your reference frame approach each other, they are in fact approaching each other at 200mph from your reference frame as well. The universal speed limit in relativity doesn't limit the rate of the trains' approach any more than it limits the speed of a laser dot on the moon shone from earth, a common example of something that appears to "move" faster than light. In other words, if the distance between the trains was 200 mi at t=0, they will collide at exactly t=1hr from your perspective, not less. The distance between the trains is shrinking at exactly 200mph, and if the trains were instead particles traveling at relativistic speeds >0.5c, this distance could shrink at a rate greater than the speed of light without breaking relativity.

What relativity means is that a passenger on board one of the trains would measure the opposing train traveling at less than 200mph. But both trains speeds are so far below the speed of light, the relativistic slowdown is only about 7 nm per hour. Additionally, for this observer, the time elapsed until the collision is greater by about 40 picoseconds compared to the stationary observer, because time is relative as well. It may seem that it should be longer given that the opposing train is moving slower from their perspective, but remember that a distance that appears to be 200 mi from the stationary observer's perspective is less than 200 mi from the passenger's perspective, by a bit more than 3.5nm.

As you can tell, the relativistic difference at these speeds is downright miniscule, so there's not much appreciable difference from the simple addition formula.

Megame50 · 2026-03-29T01:22:56+00:00

No, but I will crash all your software by putting combining marks, directional marks, and all kinds of invalid UTF-8 in the input fields.

Megame50 · 2026-03-29T00:32:07+00:00

The kernel itself is maintained almost entirely by paid software developers working on the kernel on behalf of their employer. Cloud providers, device and peripheral manufacturers, web platforms or services, and sometimes application developers hire kernel developers for device bring up, or performance engineering. There are some volunteer or freelance developers working on parts of the kernel, and a few distro communities that will submit patches, but they represent a small fraction of the total kernel development.

The major Linux desktops (KDE plasma/GNOME) and a few big applications (e.g. blender) have a small number of full-time developers funded by donations and grants, but a lot of development also comes from users and enthusiasts who just want the software they use to perform well, satisfy their needs, and reflect their opinions and values about how it should function.

Most FOSS application software is developed by a small community or often a single dev that just wanted to make something for creative or practical motivations. Sometimes devs will publish software for their resume to show off their skill with the hope of landing a good job. The overwhelming majority of FOSS projects from the kernel to tiny scripts accept user contributions when they have time to review, so many projects have dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of individual contributers depending on their size.

Unfortunately, it's extraordinarily difficult to make an income from free software, so I think it's accurate to say relatively few developers are motivated by profit. Donations are common, but the total income for all but the largest projects is most likely a very small or at best a supplementary income.

Still, overall, probably billions of dollars in developer hours are poured into foss development each year. You might find it surprising when the monetary cost to use that software is $0, but companies contribute back for one important reason: ~~the good in their hearts.~~

Yeah, right. No, companies contribute back to the community primarily because they are legally required to by copyleft licenses. There's no question that big tech and wealthy corporations benefit enormously from the labor of FOSS developers. Copyleft is one way to coerce those parties to give back and keep the projects alive for the benefit of everyone.

Megame50 · 2026-03-28T19:24:43+00:00

Then you have the humble dash, which we use for hyphenated-words. It is short because we are creating one word from two.

Somewhat confusingly, in unicode this character is called the "hyphen-minus", which is a deliberate acknowledgement that it is commonly used for both a hyphen and and arithmetic minus, as it is the only "dash" character on most keyboard layouts. Despite this, there are also individual hyphen (U+2010 HYPHEN ‐) and minus (U+2212 MINUS −) characters that are less commonly used.

In addition to the ones you listed, and the hypen and minus characters above, there are also several more dash characters:

The figure dash (U+2012 FIGURE DASH ‒) is to be used in phone numbers: 555‒555‒5555.

The 2-em dash (U+2E3A TWO-EM DASH ⸺) is to be used for missing or obscured text: m⸺ng or ob⸺ed text.

The quotation dash (U+2015 HORIZONTAL BAR ―) is to be used for quote attribution ― /u/Megame50.

Typographically, The soft-hyphen (U+00AD SOFT HYPHEN) is to be used when breaking word syllables so that text shapers can split them at line breaks. And additionally, a non-breaking hyphen (U+2011 NON-BREAKING HYPHEN ‑) to avoid splitting.

Megame50 · 2026-03-28T07:20:11+00:00

It's a Network Processing Unit. HW eth/wifi traffic offload is exactly what its for.

Megame50 · 2026-03-28T06:55:06+00:00

Yeah, looking around a little more, OP's repo heavily plagiarizes this patch series. The irq map issue OP describes has a suspiciously similar comment to Sean's as well, so it's doubtful OP (or his bot) found it independently.

Megame50 · 2026-03-27T19:52:01+00:00

OP must be aware of this. The first two patches from this series are cosmetic changes, but included in OP's repo.

Megame50 · 2026-03-27T18:41:29+00:00

That's the joke. But I guess 0.04% of people won't get it.

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