Join devRant
Do all the things like
++ or -- rants, post your own rants, comment on others' rants and build your customized dev avatar
Sign Up
Pipeless API
From the creators of devRant, Pipeless lets you power real-time personalized recommendations and activity feeds using a simple API
Learn More
-
Yes Linus Torvalds is an asshole and the world is better because of it.
In short Linus's acid takes on code quality over developer fee fee's might be one of the things that has made the Linux kernel and the GNU/Linux project such a long lasting open source success and in my opinion the risk of him falling for all this "let's be nice and non offensive" bs trend may impact negatively on code quality.
Being an asshole has it's downsides and it's not always the best response, I'll give you that, but personally I think most of us who are viewed as assholes are seen like that because we put quality over convenience, facts before feelings and dedication over mediocrity; it is not because we hate you, it's because we measure ourselves with the same stick.
It depends on one's character, but when you've been toughened up because of bullying(I don't doubt many devs have been since being a nerd has never been hip) or life in general, you learn to stop whining & pick yourself up and you expect everyone to be competitive and competent as you are and it gets frustrating to manage people who don't fulfill your expectations.
Pros: You get shit done and you do it well.
Cons: People won't like you and you don't tolerate failure (much less mediocrity).
Yes Linus is an asshole, my coach was an asshole, some of my best teacher's have been assholes, I had friends who were assholes, heck I'm an asshole!
But I thank them because they made me better than I was, just as people have thanked me for being the right amount of asshole.
A warm thank you and fuck you Linus, keep being the asshole we need.
36 -
https://git.kernel.org/…/ke…/... sure some of you are working on the patches already, if you are then lets connect cause, I am an ardent researcher for the same as of now.
So here it goes:
As soon as kernel page table isolation(KPTI) bug will be out of embargo, Whatsapp and FB will be flooded with over-night kernel "shikhuritee" experts who will share shitty advices non-stop.
1. The bug under embargo is a side channel attack, which exploits the fact that Intel chips come with speculative execution without proper isolation between user pages and kernel pages. Therefore, with careful scheduling and timing attack will reveal some information from kernel pages, while the code is running in user mode.
In easy terms, if you have a VPS, another person with VPS on same physical server may read memory being used by your VPS, which will result in unwanted data leakage. To make the matter worse, a malicious JS from innocent looking webpage might be (might be, because JS does not provide language constructs for such fine grained control; atleast none that I know as of now) able to read kernel pages, and pawn you real hard, real bad.
2. The bug comes from too much reliance on Tomasulo's algorithm for out-of-order instruction scheduling. It is not yet clear whether the bug can be fixed with a microcode update (and if not, Intel has to fix this in silicon itself). As far as I can dig, there is nothing that hints that this bug is fixable in microcode, which makes the matter much worse. Also according to my understanding a microcode update will be too trivial to fix this kind of a hardware bug.
3. A software-only remedy is possible, and that is being implemented by all major OSs (including our lovely Linux) in kernel space. The patch forces Translation Lookaside Buffer to flush if a context switch happens during a syscall (this is what I understand as of now). The benchmarks are suggesting that slowdown will be somewhere between 5%(best case)-30%(worst case).
4. Regarding point 3, syscalls don't matter much. Only thing that matters is how many times syscalls are called. For example, if you are using read() or write() on 8MB buffers, you won't have too much slowdown; but if you are calling same syscalls once per byte, a heavy performance penalty is guaranteed. All processes are which are I/O heavy are going to suffer (hostings and databases are two common examples).
5. The patch can be disabled in Linux by passing argument to kernel during boot; however it is not advised for pretty much obvious reasons.
6. For gamers: this is not going to affect games (because those are not I/O heavy)
Meltdown: "Meltdown" targeted on desktop chips can read kernel memory from L1D cache, Intel is only affected with this variant. Works on only Intel.
Spectre: Spectre is a hardware vulnerability with implementations of branch prediction that affects modern microprocessors with speculative execution, by allowing malicious processes access to the contents of other programs mapped memory. Works on all chips including Intel/ARM/AMD.
For updates refer the kernel tree: https://git.kernel.org/…/ke…/...
For further details and more chit-chats refer: https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/...
~Cheers~
(Originally written by Adhokshaj Mishra, edited by me. )
23 -
26 years ago Linus Torvalds sent out this message to the comp.os.minx newsgroup.
Hello everybody out there using minix -
I’m doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won’t be big and
professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones. This has been brewing
since april, and is starting to get ready. I’d like any feedback on
things people like/dislike in minix, as my OS resembles it somewhat
(same physical layout of the file-system (due to practical reasons)
among other things).
I’ve currently ported bash(1.08) and gcc(1.40), and things seem to work.
This implies that I’ll get something practical within a few months, and
I’d like to know what features most people would want. Any suggestions
are welcome, but I won’t promise I’ll implement them :-)
- Linus
PS. Yes — it’s free of any minix code, and it has a multi-threaded fs.
It is NOT protable (uses 386 task switching etc), and it probably never
will support anything other than AT-harddisks, as that’s all I have :-(.
Fast forward to today and Linux has more than 12 000 contributors from over 1300 companies that contribute to the Linux kernel.
The Linux Foundation released a fairly detailed progress report, including an infographic which I was tempted to include here but you can view it in it’s original context here.
While you’re over there, remember you can be a sponsor of the Linux Foundation too.
Happy Birthday Linux and a giant thanks to not only Linus but every single one of the contributors that have taken part of it over the years.5 -
Linux developers threaten to pull the kill switch...talking about giving people the finger this week...
If you have been following the nerd news these last weeks you may have heard about Linus leaving Linux (temporarily) and implementing the new CoC (pronounced cock) code of conduct thanks to the constant pressure of the ABC of inclusion (LGBTQLMNOP+ groups).
This new code of conduct aims, believe it or not, to change the predominantly white, straight, and male face of programming and it also seems to "mitigate the consequences of dogmatic meritocracy".
That's right, are you white, male, straight or otherwise pull yourself out of the mud? Yes, YOU are part of the problem (also racist, sexist and probably islamophobic).
Bullshit I know, these SJW privileged upper class assholes are pushing for these changes to inspire witch-hunts against good devs like Larry Garfield (cause: sexual fetishes) and give themselves more power over the free speech of people.
Ironic if you ask me because I haven't seen anything similar for oil rigging which is riddled with cis males (but ain't as comfy).
But not everything is lost and that's why this hasn't been a mouth foaming rant because boy I'm proud to know there are devs with balls out there; It seems there's a little detail with the GPL2 license and all those unjustly banned by the new stupid racist ass CoC can withdraw the license to their contributions crippling the Linux kernel project.
I'm not happy that GNU/Linux is being threatened like so, but it was about time we put a stop to this, your politics, skin color, religion and ideas should not matter when developing code, what matters is the code you produce.
Want to politicize our repos and kick out devs just because they don't think the way you do? Let's see how long you last without the contributions of the "deplorables"; let us see how many good contributions your new "diverse", PC stack do (other than changing master/slave or other terms).
My guess...as I've said earlier, everything these PC busybodies touch, if unchecked, crumbles to dust. (EA 😉)
Sources:
https://lulz.com/linux-devs-threate...
https://contributor-covenant.org//
https://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/...
80 -
The Linux Kernel, not just because of the end product. I find it's organizational structure and size (both in code and contributors) inspirational.
Firefox. Even if you don't use it as your main browser, the sheer amount of work Mozilla has contributed to the world is amazing.
OpenTTD. I liked the original game, and 25 years after release some devs are still actively maintaining an open source clone with support for mods.
Git. Without it, it would not just be harder working on your own source code, it would also be harder to try out other people's projects.
FZF is possibly my favorite command line tool.
Kitty has recently become my favorite terminal.
My favorite thing open source has brought forth though is a certain mindset, which in the last decade can be felt most heavily in the fact that:
1. Scientific papers with accompanying GitHub urls, especially when it comes to AI. Cutting edge research is one git clone away.
2. There are so many open hardware projects. From raspberry pi to 3d printers to laser cutters, being a "maker" suddenly became a mainstream hobby.12 -
fork() can fail: this is important
Ah, fork(). The way processes make more processes. Well, one of them, anyway. It seems I have another story to tell about it.
It can fail. Got that? Are you taking this seriously? You should. fork can fail. Just like malloc, it can fail. Neither of them fail often, but when they do, you can't just ignore it. You have to do something intelligent about it.
People seem to know that fork will return 0 if you're the child and some positive number if you're the parent -- that number is the child's pid. They sock this number away and then use it later.
Guess what happens when you don't test for failure? Yep, that's right, you probably treat "-1" (fork's error result) as a pid.
That's the beginning of the pain. The true pain comes later when it's time to send a signal. Maybe you want to shut down a child process.
Do you kill(pid, signal)? Maybe you do kill(pid, 9).
Do you know what happens when pid is -1? You really should. It's Important. Yes, with a capital I.
...
...
...
Here, I'll paste from the kill(2) man page on my Linux box.
If pid equals -1, then sig is sent to every process for which the calling process has permission to send signals, except for process 1 (init), ...
See that? Killing "pid -1" is equivalent to massacring every other process you are permitted to signal. If you're root, that's probably everything. You live and init lives, but that's it. Everything else is gone gone gone.
Do you have code which manages processes? Have you ever found a machine totally dead except for the text console getty/login (which are respawned by init, naturally) and the process manager? Did you blame the oomkiller in the kernel?
It might not be the guilty party here. Go see if you killed -1.
Unix: just enough potholes and bear traps to keep an entire valley going.
Source: https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2014/...12 -
--- Linux wants some hugs, and everyone gives a hug about it! ---
After the CoC controversy revolving around the Linux Kernel project, a change introduced by the CoC is being put into practice:
Jarkko Sakkinen, from Intel, started replacing words comments containing "fuck" with their "hug" variant. This means comments such as
/* master list of VME vectors -- don't fuck with this */
might look a bit different in the future:
/* master list of VME vectors -- don't hug with this */
People that oppose this change criticize that the comments will make much less sense to people that aren't fluent in English yet. They also do not like the redundant censoring - the actual meaning is still implied, just no longer included as clear text. It might also cause misunderstandings to people working with the code.
Those supporting this change, aside from jokingly mentioning that this change will save one character per f-word comment, note that this can give the Linux Kernel project a more positive feeling with anyone who works with the code, with "fuck" mostly associated with bad feelings, while "hug" is indeed mostly going to call positive feelings in our subconscious minds.
Who doesn't like a good hug? :)
What is your opinion on this rather controversial topic? Feel free to let us know in the comments, as we are very interested in your stances and arguments on this!
Sources:
https://lkml.org/lkml/2018/12/1/105
Several comment sections, IRC chats, and other places for people to express their opinions. Too many to list them all.51 -
!rant
So this year I had a subject at university called "Linux internal architecture", and for the last assignment I had to write a kernel module and interact with it with a separate program written in C.
Once I had finished and tested the driver, I went on to write the other program, which was supposed to use system calls to read and write data to the module. While debugging this program (~500 lines of code) I reached the level of frustration where you just start printing absurd messages everywhere in your code to see what's wrong. So for example instead of printing "This error happened in this function", my error messages were more like "Fuck this fucking function it doesn't fucking work".
Guess who forgot to delete all those messages before sending the code to the teacher...
Also, if a specific mode is selected, the program enters a while(1) that, apart from doing what it's expected to do, also creates a file in the user's home directory called something like 'motherfucker' and appends the words 'fuck this shit' to it. INFINITELY.
I really really hope this teacher doesn't try to run the program in his own computer, or he's in for a big surprise.8 -
Found this on discord.
Could be copypasta but I decided to share it anyway.
"I use Linux as my operating system," I state proudly to the unkempt, bearded man. He swivels around in his desk chair with a devilish gleam in his eyes, ready to mansplain with extreme precision. "Actually", he says with a grin, "Linux is just the kernel. You use GNU+Linux!' I don't miss a beat and reply with a smirk, "I use Alpine, a distro that doesn't include the GNU coreutils, or any other GNU code. It's Linux, but it's not GNU+Linux."
The smile quickly drops from the man's face. His body begins convulsing and he foams at the mouth and drops to the floor with a sickly thud. As he writhes around he screams "I-IT WAS COMPILED WITH GCC! THAT MEANS IT'S STILL GNU!" Coolly, I reply "If windows was compiled with gcc, would that make it GNU?" I interrupt his response with "-and work is being made on the kernel to make it more compiler-agnostic. Even you were correct, you wont be for long."
With a sickly wheeze, the last of the man's life is ejected from his body. He lies on the floor, cold and limp. I've womansplained him to death.14 -
(I wrote most of this as a comment in reply about Microsoft buying GitHub on another rant but decided to move it here because it is rant worthy. Also, no, I'm not a Microsoft employee nor do I have any Microsoft stock).
Microsoft buying GitHub makes sense. They contribute more to the open source community on GitHub than any other company. (Side note, they also contribute/have contributed to the Linux Kernel).
Steve Ballmer isn't running the show anymore. Because of that, we have awesome things like:
* Visual Studio Code - Completely free and powerful light weight IDE for coding in just about any script or language. This IDE is also open source, hosted on GitHub. It can be installed on Win/Mac/Linux.
* Visual Studio Community Edition: fully featured flagship IDE free for solo developers and students, can be installed on Win/Mac.
* Fully featured Sql Server running in a Docker container.
* .Net Core, which can be compiled to native binaries of Windows, MacOS AND Linux. You can't even do that with Java, you have to first have the JVM installed in order to run any kind of Java code on any of those operating systems. .Net Core is also an absolutely beautiful framework with so many features at your disposal.
...and more.
Yes, they've done bonehead things in the past but who/which company hasn't. Yes, they have Cortana. Yes, they force Bing on you when searching with Cortana (does anyone actually regularly use Cortana? Or Bing?). Yes, their operating system costs money. Yes, their malware-style Upgrade-to-Windows-10 tactics were evil and they admitted such. Yes, they brought ads and other unfortunate things to Skype. I'd be lying if I said I wasn't concerned about that Skype bit translating over into GitHub. BUT, the fact that so many of their employees use GitHub daily means they are dogfooding the platform, which is a positive thing.
Despite the flaws, from the perspective of a software engineer they really should be given a lot of credit for all these new directions they are moving in now. They directly aim to help and contribute to the developer community. Plus, Windows 10 is finally getting a dark theme! haha.
I think Microsoft buying GitHub makes a lot of sense. Of course do what you want about it, feel how you want about it, but casting the same ol' shade at them for anything they do seems a bit like automatic reflex more than anything else.
I'm bracing myself for the impending wave of angry hornets from the nest I just kicked. In all seriousness though, I welcome discussion on the topic even if you feel differently than I do. I'm not saying there's no reason to dislike them, just saying there are lots of new reasons to hate them less and/or appreciate what they are doing now.19 -
Source Code Activism is a thing that should not exist.
Keep your filthy CoC away from the Linux kernel you freaking bastards.2 -
I've got a confession to make.
A while ago I refurbished this old laptop for someone, and ended up installing Bodhi on it. While I was installing it however, I did have some wicked thoughts..
What if I could ensure that the system remains up-to-date by running an updater script in a daily cron job? That may cause the system to go unstable, but at least it'd be up-to-date. Windows Update for Linux.
What if I could ensure that the system remains protected from malware by periodically logging into it and checking up, and siphoning out potential malware code? The network proximity that's required for direct communication could be achieved by offering them free access to one of my VPN servers, in the name of security or something like that. Permanent remote access, in the name of security. I'm not sure if Windows has this.
What if I could ensure that the system remains in good integrity by disabling the user from accessing root privileges, and having them ask me when they want to install a piece of software? That'd make the system quite secure, with the only penetration surface now being kernel exploits. But it'd significantly limit what my target user could do with their own machine.
At the end I ended up discarding all of these thoughts, because it'd be too much work to implement and maintain, and it'd be really non-ethical. I felt filthy from even thinking about these things. But the advantages of something like this - especially automated updates, which are a real issue on my servers where I tend to forget to apply them within a couple of weeks - can't just be disregarded. Perhaps Microsoft is on to something?11 -
It's gotta be the Linux kernel.
It's so good at managing base resources on all platforms that it allows hundreds of thousands of hipsta-ass devs to write shitty code and still get decent speed. -
Ya'll know what... If humans weren't such annoying vulnerability-searching little shits then we wouldn't have had to implement any protection against them and think of all the performance that would be saved on that. Take branch prediction vulnerability mitigation in the Linux kernel for example, that's got to make a performance hit of least 10% on basically everything.
Alas, I do get why security is important and why we keep such vulnerability mitigation running despite the performance hit. I get why safe code is necessary but still... if these people weren't such annoying little bastards.
Yeah, I was just kind of set off by the above. So much would be faster and easier if only the programmers wouldn't have to plan for people exploiting their software. Software would be written much faster and humans would progress to stuff that actually matters like innovation.8 -
Compiling software on Linux:
Python interpreter? Easy peasy, just some dependencies here and there. Make does a good job.
Linux kernel? Piece of cake, 20 years of development will be freshly served on your machine after one hour compiling (I have a pretty powerful computer).
Tensorflow? Fuck this shit I am outta.
What is your story with self-built software? Which piece of code has the most terrible dependency hell?5 -
I'm freaking done trying to get Linux on my machine. I've tried every distro with many different versions of the kernel and I always run into the same problem on my desktop.
The computer super stutters for 2 seconds ish than freezes.
I've spent DAYS looking into this issue trying to find something. The worst part is that it can happen 5 minutes when I boot or 5 hours. At first I thought it was Compton. Then I thought I installed arch wrong. Maybe an update to the BIOS? How about downloading updated microcode? Maybe this obscure bug with AMD processors and setting power idle to typical? Nothing. I'm now behind on my school work because of the massive amount of time ive spent getting this fixed. It works just fine on my laptop, but it doesn't work on the machine I built to code with. I'm done. Give me Force Lightning, a red lightsaber, and call me a Sith baby because I'm joining the dark side. Here I come Windows.
For those who are wondering my setup:
Ryzen 7 1700
Rx 480
Asus x-370 prime
16 gb Corsair RAM
And no, Windows has never had this bug.31 -
I always feel inspired by programming when I create some algorithms or programs which I can use when I need to.
Small utilities and command line programs r what I make at times... and I also enjoy trying to implement them awesome algorithms 😍
However, most inspiration I get is from looking at C code though ( especially the Linux kernel... that code is SO clean 😍😍 )2 -
Avoid ACPICA if at all possible. It's one garbage tier cluster fuck of bad design, horrible documentation and downright misleading and wrong code
It's meant to consist of an ASL compiler, disassembler, debugger, dumper, various user space utitilies and a kernel resident OSPM implementation *if* you can figure out what belongs to what. Even just compiling this pile of trash is a mystery in itself. Think you need the source files in source/common? EEEEH, wrong. Well, at least partially since most of them seem to be for the user space stuff..? Other ones *are* needed on the other hand. At least the disassembler and/or debugger and/or dumper components seem to reference them. Not that I could figure out how to compile those anyways. The real path to your goal seems to be to ignore a seemingly arbitrary subset of source and header files until your linker stops complaining
There's also a bunch of configuration defines, some of which *you* define, some defined *for* you, based on again others. Of course most of them do stupid shit. Enabling the debugger automatically enables debug logging. Enabling the disassembler force enables debug allocation tracking... What?
The code itself isn't of much help either. Looking in "os_specific/service_layers" you find what looks to be reference implementations of acpica functions in certain os' like windows and unix. Of course I had a look because AcpiOsReadMemory is supposed to read physical memory and I don't know how I would even implement that. But hey, osunixxf.c (xf for interface... of course) should tell me. I'll let you see for yourself in the attached image. Apparently it does fuck all and just returns AE_OK. No error, no logging, no nothing. Just ok. As you can imagine, AcpiOsWriteMemory doesn't do much more either.
...okay so maybe physical memory accesses aren't actually used and these functions are some sort of relic from past times? Nope! They are absolutely necessary for doing low level device interaction. WTF. So finally I went to the linux source and checked how *they* implemented them, and just as I thought, these functions are anything but no-ops...
...So for what fucking reason do these stupid interface implementations even exist but to purposefully mislead you?? They aren't used for fucking anything! As far as I know Windows doesn't even *use* ACPICA and Linux have their own fork with working implementations... They just sit there, just to tell you how to NOT do it
So that's some of my thoughts about ACPICA. Note that I haven't even used it as a library yet, I just got it to compile and link and it already fucked with me this much.
There's also so much more I didn't mention like that you *have* to modify the acpica source in order to get your own platform header working (else #error) eventhough the docs explicitely instruct you not too but you get the point
Don't use ACPICA if you don't have to. Save your sanity for something that's worth it
-
Found in kernel/sched.c in Linux 1.2:
The "confuse_gcc" goto is used only to get better assembly code..
Dijkstra probably hates me.
https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/...3 -
it would help if i had time to learn even a little more C, as I'm bumbling my way through the Linux kernel and GodMode9 (an amazingly powerful 3DS manip tool for everything from the SD card to the NAND to literally raw FIRM0/FIRM1 bootloader access) to try amd patch some code from GM9 into the kernel to handle the SD card *properly* so Linux 3DS doesn't constantly hang when reading/writing to the SD card, to enable Wi-Fi access (same bus location and similar bus structure as SD/NAND access, different processor,) enable NAND decryption and access (yes, really, NAND is encrypted via software, which is... ...fun...) and more.
tl;dr: the 3DS hardware, C, and others' code collectively make me wanna slit my fucking wrists. Hopefully my sacrifice allows higher-level programming languages to be visble for low-level jobs in the future.
4 -
Working with the Intel Edison. My god that thing sucked. So the thing ships with this tiny custom yocto Linux with almost no common packages the default repositories. Getting basic tools like Git and Vim were a task on its own, let alone getting the latest version of Node running. Another company Emutex made a Debian distro for it called Ubilinux but they never planned support or updates and officially took it down a few months ago. Both the Yocto build and the Debian build shipped with the 3.10 Linux kernel and upgrading it without breaking it was nearly impossible because they monkey patched device support into it rather than making a patcher. The team at Linux responsible for the Edison released 3 broken versions of the MRAA library in a row, crippling my code for weeks before I realized what they had done. The hardware hasn't received a refresh since it came out and only 1.4 GB of the 4 GB on the device is actually available.
It may be fine for hobby projects but please don't ever try to prototype a commercial product on it. Fuck the Edison and fuck Intel2 -
A multistage project that includes: 1, A version of Linux that natively supports every existing windows api call by converting it to work with a standard *nix call. 2, a gui for said distro for every flavor of windows 7 and newer that looks and behaves exactly(minus silly errors) like that windows version. 3, a virus that infects the Microsoft servers as well as every isp to identify every windows user connected to the internet. 4, infect said isps and force push my Linux kernel and gui to every windows effectively erasing every instance of the OS off the face of every connected computer. 5, wipe all Microsoft servers of code related to the operating system, but leaving all their other products.2
-
someone i know well saw that i rolled a couple linux 3ds kernels at one point and said he'd fucking pay me if I made a distro rolled from totally-uncompiled code and a raw kernel and isn't based on any other distro
is this really something people want? i mean fuck I can prolly fill that niche if need be but is that really something there's a demand for???4 -
Where do i start , if i am interested to contribute to Open Source projects in C ?
I have a good understanding of C language. Even if i am not able to contribute , it would be nice learn from those projects .
The problem with big projects like the linux kernel is that i dont understand or cant comprehend most of the code , except for few sections like gpios..5 -
In response to the fuss about the Linux kernel team contemplating a new Code of Conduct and revelations that Linus Torvald's daughter has sighed a cancerous "Post-Meritocracy Manifesto", I decided to help those who are pressured to provide a Code of Conduct for their service, project or conference but would like a sane one which doesn't involving bending over with a big red BULLSEYE around your arsehole.
https://github.com/nathanchere/...9 -
After getting fed up of “being productive” I fooled around on GitHub and had a look at the Stuxnet virus source code which was obtained using a decompiler. Experts who reverse-engineered it found out that it was written in “object-oriented C.” While C is not an object oriented language, anything you can do with classes you can do with structs, static functions, pointers & function pointers. You can see this coding style in the Linux kernel, CPython interpreter and many other places. That was the first indication that a government agency or defence industry was responsible. Amazing stuff !10
-
Ubuntu 🤬
only releasing amd64 image !! , supporting an instruction set architecture does not mean code is optimised for other microarchitecture
i thought linux distributions are do less and do way better than others, so why so much bloatware!!!.
ideally best way is to compile your own kernel and add minimal gui support as required, too much work !!!
also just a heads-up if you are using Catalina use virtual-box 6.0.22
also vivado 2019.2 is suable with ubuntu 18.04 + lightdm , remove that gnome shit15
Top Tags
Weekly Rant
View