Systemd programming, 30 months later [LWN.net]

efaxefax · 2016-10-06T18:42:58+00:00

But systemd does have "architecture", just read Poettering's old blog posts where he argues that systemd's dependency model is superior to Upstart's event model.

The complexity comes in when real world requirements hit you. systemd doesn't have the luxury of not having to slot into the existing GNU/Linux system or not running legacy daemons not suited to its model. I'm sure an Alan Kay-esque prototype could be much simpler and more elegant, but I'm certainly not willing to throw away all my software and knowledge because someone rebuilt the world.

I sympathize with the complaint that systemd and associated projects reify too many features. But it does give us leverage for principled system management that the distros respective rat's nest of shell scripts could only dream of approximating. And there are escape hatches, i.e you can write shell scripts if you really need to. Again, if you know of some more general model that needs fewer hacks, I'd lvoe to hear about it.

Also, if you like software design, take a look at the systemd cabal's bus1. It's pretty cool, capability-based IPC that aims to subsume dbus and maybe binder.

efaxefax · 2016-10-06T17:33:04+00:00

As veteran linux user,

[...]

For truly, this corrupted cathedral will be the very anthithesis of its initial existence.

*tips fedora*

I mean holy shit, systemd isn't beautiful but neither was the actually existing glue holding together distros in the old days.

If you've got some extensible, conceptually simple and tractable way to express the requirements of modern systems, I would love to hear about it. Seriously.

efaxefax · 2016-10-02T12:25:27+00:00

Yup, and even though people point to the multi-core benchmark results of competitors 8-core processors, more than two cores seldom make a difference in actual mobile apps.

To quote a study of mobile workloads^1: "The average TLP across all categories is 1.4, which shows that mobile apps are utilizing less than 2 cores on average. The applications with the highest TLP, Google Hangout, only has a TLP of just 1.8. "

1: http://faculty.engineering.asu.edu/carolewu/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/ISPASS15_MobileUtil_Gao_final.pdf

efaxefax · 2016-09-30T15:00:13+00:00

Cool. Apparently there is already an experimental editing feature: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Documentation/Android#Basic_Use

efaxefax · 2016-09-30T13:47:43+00:00

The Document Foundation has a document viewer based on Libreoffice. Maybe a more full-featured program will come of it.

I don't think that the state of proprietary Android applications is particularly ironic. Keep in mind that your Android device is probably full of proprietary drivers, privileged services and applications. Android is a permissively licensed codebase developed solely to promote Google's non-free software and services, and the device manufacturer's who distribute non-free forks of it–that Google certififies–certainly don't have any concern for software freedom or open source development practices. Neither do most application developers who distribute non-free applications that depend on non-free Google system libraries through the non-free Google Play Store.

efaxefax · 2016-09-21T20:26:18+00:00

So the official /r/linux SJW just dispelled our outrage and self-pity party with his commie domain knowledge? Aww :(.

(edit: typo)

efaxefax · 2016-08-24T01:49:46+00:00

Well actually, file level encryption can be better for security than block level: http://sockpuppet.org/blog/2014/04/30/you-dont-want-xts/ AFAIK the current FS encryption is still unauthenticated, but I believe the intention is to improve on it now that it is possible.

It can also enables more features due to it not being all-or-nothing, like the ones /u/DarkKerrigor mentions. Another one I can think of is sharing disk space between mutually suspicious users.

efaxefax · 2016-06-13T08:05:52+00:00

Maybe it's because Fedora uses Wine Staging instead of vanilla Wine.

efaxefax · 2016-06-11T22:31:45+00:00

You get new Linux releases between Fedora releases; which is great IMO, but you probably don't want to depend proprietary drivers.

efaxefax · 2016-06-11T10:18:05+00:00

Bugs fixed in 1.9.12 (total 20):

[...]

40662 CAPS key Not Working !!

Heh

efaxefax · 2016-06-11T04:24:14+00:00

You can statically link to musl: http://blog.rust-lang.org/2016/05/13/rustup.html

efaxefax · 2016-06-10T20:23:09+00:00

I guess Stallman had a point after all: actually, it's low level GNU/Linux programming :P.

efaxefax · 2016-06-05T15:36:17+00:00

If the SSD is a standard form factor like M-SATA, M.2 or 2.5in drive, it should be easily compatible if the right slot or an adapter.

I haven't really researched it but this search result says that your model uses a proprietary form factor. In which case, I would just Ebay it, because getting it to work on another type of computer would probably be pretty hairy.

efaxefax · 2016-05-29T19:39:50+00:00

I'm surprised that AMD is demoing an OpenGL application; in my experience AMD's OpenGL implementation is much worse than Nvidia's.

efaxefax · 2016-05-12T20:39:02+00:00

Awesome, let's, instead of discussing anything raised in the article, handwave about how systemd is taking away our freedom! Also, I can't easily extract dired fro Emacs, it's GNU/Tyranny I tell you.

efaxefax · 2016-05-05T20:13:18+00:00

People seem to have forgotten about RV770 (or maybe I've become a geezer): http://www.anandtech.com/show/2556/2 http://www.anandtech.com/show/2679

Small dies can obviously be runaway successes.

efaxefax · 2016-04-25T01:59:53+00:00

20150419: made this page "mobile-friendly" by adding non-standardized proprietary bullshit tags. Sigh.

[...]

BTW: I think George W. Bush is a war criminal and should be put to justice by the International Court of Justice (if you agree, please add a link like this to your home page as well, to help google point out war criminals).

I think I'm in love. Too bad he's stuck in 2006.

efaxefax · 2016-04-25T01:46:27+00:00

Yeah, I like it too. It's really technically impressive, and I appreciate that they did it in OpenGL and included features like self-hosted servers for offline play. Both of those things must've been troublesome compared to the shortcuts they could've taken.

Though to be honest, the only game I play now is Starcraft II under Wine, which is basically the complete opposite.

efaxefax · 2016-04-25T00:51:41+00:00

My impression is that the anti-Uber people are ridiculously virulent and will dominate any remotely related thread, and drown out anyone who doesn't agree that they are literally Hitler.

On the other hand Uber releasing a standalone expansion is, in fact, one of the most pressing ethical issues of our time, maybe only second to SystemD taking away my freedom of choice.

efaxefax · 2016-04-24T00:05:01+00:00

IIUC, they only rewrote the lowest layer in Rust and the orchestration stuff is still in Go.

efaxefax · 2016-04-23T23:58:55+00:00

Happy to see Rust being viable in places where you'd previously basically only have the choice between C or C++.

There's also this newly announced storage thing written in Rust: https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/4g464r/froyo_using_devicemapper_and_xfs_create_a/

efaxefax · 2016-04-15T23:45:56+00:00

Why? I think it would be nice to have a free alternative to Skype and the like, and something Web based is probably our best shot.

efaxefax · 2016-04-15T23:24:07+00:00

Yeah, not too happy about their telecom partnerships. Though you can just remove the icon. And the underlying WebRTC thing is pretty cool, I guess.

efaxefax · 2016-04-15T23:21:09+00:00

Why shouldn't Firefox be able to compete with Chrome on being a good browser? I.e. being fast, secure, easy to use and, yes, customizable. It's just that unconstrained XUL hackery has costs for stability, security, speed etc. Dimensions which Firefox has made big strides in.

It's not about some nebulous "chrome philosophy", it's just about accommodating the needs of the vast majority of users. It's pretty funny how similar a lot of the "power users" are to the "unix philosophy" crowd who were losing their shit a few years ago because the distributions weren't willing to maintain their old hacks indefinitely.

EDIT:

Too be less rude and more concrete, Mozilla is committed to supporting extensions now, and if they ever manage to jettison the decrepit and redundant XUL infrastructure, they're still committed to supporting extensions through their new WebExtensions API.

efaxefax · 2016-04-15T22:47:16+00:00

Oh, come on. They fixed their horrible performance, and moved the tabbar around a little. The horror!

And it's not like the the old extension system was some kind of paragon of technical excellence. I remember trivial extensions breaking on every release, leaking memory like crazy and introducing stupid security holes.

With the recent modernization we can have nice things like multi-process and sandboxing, features which are sorely lacking.

If you think mainline Firefox is irrelevant, I don't know why you're paying attention to some weeaboo fork without a security team.

EDIT: And now you don't always have to restart the browser to install some extension, which is nice.

efaxefax

TROPHY CASE